Franceska Mann

That is the name of the woman in the Borowski story, “The Death of Sergeant Schillenger.” I had wondered if it would be possible to identify her.

From Wikipedia: 

Born	Franciszka Mann 4 February 1917 Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland
Died	23 October 1943 (aged 26) Auschwitz, Gau Upper Silesia, German Reich
Other names	Rosenberg-Manheimer, Man, and Mannówna
Occupation	Actress, dancer

Franciszka Mann was a young dancer residing in Warsaw before the Second World War. She studied dance in the dance school of Irena Prusicka. Her friends at that time included Wiera Gran and Stefania Grodzieńska. In 1939 she was placed 4th during the international dance competition in Brussels among 125 other young ballet dancers.^[1][2] She was considered one of the most beautiful and promising dancers of her generation in Poland^[3][4][5] both in classical and modern repertoire.

F

At the beginning of the Second World War she was a performer at the Melody Palace nightclub in Warsaw. She was a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto. In several publications she is mentioned as a German collaborator.^[6][7][8][9] Her name is associated with the “Hotel Polski affair“.

She is mentioned in Filip Mueller‘s eyewitness account Eyewitness Auschwitz as well as in the account of Jerzey Tabau, a former Birkenau prisoner. Tabau’s report was filed for the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as Document L-022.

On October 23, 1943 a transport of around 1,700 Polish Jews arrived on passenger trains at the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, although they had been told that they were being taken to a transfer camp called Bergau near Dresden, from where they would continue on to Switzerland to be exchanged for German POWs. One of the passengers was Franceska Mann. She had probably obtained her foreign passport from the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side. In July 1943 the Germans arrested the 600 Jewish inhabitants of the hotel and some of them were sent to Bergen-Belsen as exchange Jews. Others were sent to Vittel in France to await transfer to South America.

The following is from 

SS man at Birkenau shot by Franceska Mann with his own gun

https://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/…/BelsenIncident.html

Jan 5, 2010 – Schillinger died on the way to the hospital. … by Martin Gilbert

A full description of the Belsen incident is as follows:

On October 23, 1943, a transport of around 1700 Polish Jews with foreign passports were transported out of the Special Camp at the Bergen-Belsen Exchange camp in Germany; they arrived on passenger trains at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, although they had been told that they were being taken to a transfer camp called Bergau near Dresden, from where they would continue on to Switzerland to be exchanged for German POWs.

One of the passengers was Franceska Mann, a beautiful dancer who was a performer at the Melody Palace nightclub in Warsaw. She had probably obtained her foreign passport from the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side of the Warsaw Ghetto. In July 1943, the Germans arrested the 600 Jewish inhabitants of the hotel and some of them were sent to Bergen-Belsen as exchange Jews. Others were sent to Vittel in France to await transfer to South America.

According to Jerzy Tabau, a prisoner who later escaped from Birkenau and wrote a report on the incident, the new arrivals were not registered at Birkenau. Instead, they were told that they had to be disinfected before crossing the border into Switzerland. They were taken into an undressing room next to one of the gas chambers and ordered to undress. The beautiful Franceska caught the attention of SS Sergeant Major Josef Schillinger, who stared at her and ordered her to undress completely. Suddenly Franceska threw her shoe into Schillinger’s face, and as he opened his gun holster, Franceska grabbed his pistol and fired two shots, wounding him in the stomach. Then she fired a third shot which wounded another SS Sergeant named Emmerich. Schillinger died on the way to the hospital.

According to Tabau, whose report, called “The Polish Major’s Report,” was entered into the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as Document L-022, the shots served as a signal for the other women to attack the SS men; one SS man had his nose torn off, and another was scalped, according to Tabau’s report which was quoted by Martin Gilbert in his book entitled “The Holocaust.”

Reinforcements were summoned and the camp commander, Rudolf Höss, came with other SS men carrying machine guns and grenades. According to another report, called “Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe” written by Ainsztein and quoted by Martin Gilbert, the women were then removed one by one, taken outside and shot to death. However, Eberhard Kolb wrote in his book about the history of Bergen-Belsen that they were all murdered in the gas chamber.

In 1944, two more transports of the Polish Jews at Bergen-Belsen were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, leaving only about 350 prisoners in the Special Camp who had papers for Palestine, the USA or legitimate documents for South American countries, according to Eberhard Kolb.

Auschwitz II – Birkenau  History of a man-made Hell

The Belsen Incident: In a deposition given to the British after he was captured, Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess said the following regarding an incident that happened on October 23, 1943 when a group of prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp was sent to Birkenau to be gassed:Sometimes it happened that prisoners knew what was going to be done. Especially the transports from Belsen knew, as they originated from the East, when the trains reached Upper Silesia, that they were most likely (being) taken to the place of extermination.(These Belsen prisoners were originally from Poland, which was East of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a death camp located in the Greater German Reich.)When transports from Belsen arrived, safety measures were strengthened and the transports were split up into smaller groups which we sent to different crematoriums to prevent riots. SS men formed a strong cordon and forced resisting prisoners into the gas-chamber. That happened very rarely as prisoners were set at ease by the measures we undertook.  I remember one incident especially well.One transport from Belsen arrived, approximately two-thirds, mostly men were in the gas- chamber, the remaining third was in the dressing room. When three or four armed SS Unterfuhrers entered the dressing room to hasten the undressing, mutiny broke out.The light cables were torn down, the SS men were overpowered, one of them stabbed and all of them were robbed of their weapons. As this room was in complete darkness wild shooting started between the guard near the exit door and the prisoners inside.When I arrived I ordered the doors to be shut and I had the process of gassing the first party  finished and then went into the room together with the guard carrying small searchlights, pushing the prisoners into a corner from where they were taken out singly into another room of the crematorium and shot, by my order, with small calibre weapons.  

 

Marx Theoretical: Or, Marx In A Nutshell

   As said in our more practical blogs on Marxism as the left wing of Twentieth Century Totalitarianism, Marxism is no more an economic theory than Nazism or fascism is a biological theory. Both are reductionist, reducing all human things to a much lower, material basis. The theory is very simple, though the “economic” part is only one section. Long ago we collected the basic points of the theory, into these axioms  . We have a different understanding of things as an “intellectual” perversion, or an inversion of the imagination. But as was said, both forms of twentieth century totalitarianism begin in atheism. They then combine to this a strange historicism and an understanding of a necessary march of history, from Hegel, as though what is were not in the beginning. The reason can be described in  terms as a throwing of the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting the medieval assumptions.

   Marx is 1) an inversion of “religion, 2) an inversion of Hegel, 3) an economic determinism setting principles of Locke into historical or dialectical motion, and 4) A strange revolutionary conclusion, since, to be sarcastic, all history is class struggle, and this in the final opposition, that of the bourgeois and Proletariat.” But Marx taught us to see ourselves, our constitution in the broadest sense, as Capitalism,” an utter absurdity if one considers any of the greats of the American Revolution, let alone all of them.

   And for the many who are poor and the few who are rich, Aristotle notices that these are in every human polity. Or, as Jesus says, the poor you will always have with you…” But it is not at all clear, for example, that if there were no rich, simply everyone might be poor, no reason to assume some constant store of natures goods for equal distribution. If income inequality were to increase, it still might be true that the many are twice as rich and the rich four times, etc….

Within each of these four categories or axioms, there is an account with three or four points in each, so that as we say, Marx has only 12 or 16 thoughts.

   In the first, Marx considers the “criticism of religion” to have been completed by Hegel and Freurbach. Religion is now known to have been all along an illusion, an expression of human unhappiness with the world, and flowers on the chains of slavery or the opiate to keep the many pleased with their condition. The truth is that man is the supreme being for man. Knowing this, “religion” can now be resolved into its secular basis, its human core.

   In the second, Hegel was correct that history develops “dialectic-ally,” but was wrong, about the priority of “spirit” to mater. Hence the Marxist dialectic is dialectical materialsm as opposed to the Hegelian dialectic of spirit or “phenomenology of the mind.”The end of history is not in mind but in matter or economic realities, again simply assumed axiomatically to be so, as if by perception acquiring first principles. “Philosophy” is now to “become active, transforming the human material conditions, and here we say that Marxism is a spiritual atheism. Consequently, all history is the dialectical history of class struggle.

Third, All profit or value comes from human activity, or human labor in making or producing value out of the nearly worthless contribution of material nature. Therefore all “capitalist” profits come from the “exploitation” of labor. Marx does not want to hear about Henry Ford meta-making a system that makes the labor of each one more productive of value, nor about the difference in value of our labor in the project of some brainy guy, like labor for a craftsman, compared to the value of our labor in our own back yard, so that we leave home and go to work each morning, if we are able. It is all “exploitation.” Further, as technology increases, and the owners of the “factors” of production become larger, fewer workers are needed, so that an “industrial army of the unemployed” is formed necessarily. Again, Marx does not want to hear of labor unions formed to oppose the owners politically should their use their wealth to compel or tyrannize the workers, nor about the stock ownership that might cultivate a middle class. An impoverished proletariat is a revolutionary proletariat, and Marx just knows this is the last stage of a long history of class conflict.

   And here in the fourth section Marx becomes obviously spiritual, if in a materialistc sense, as there is absolutely no empirical reason to think that because of factories in early eighteenth century London, the last stage of the historical dialectic is soon to arrive. But man, the supreme being for man, produces his own essence, which is then “alienated” when he does not himself own the factors of production, as he would, one imagines, if he chased down rabbits and devoured them for himself alone, without cooking. Indeed, since the present condition is, we just know it, the last and most essential class conflict, the present condition is that of the alienation of the human essence, and hence the proletariat will embody the human essence, and the bourgeois the opposite. Here all ethics is subjected to class, as in fascism, all human ethics becomes a matter of race. But the seizure of the means of production is to be the “return of man to himself, and one of the few things said about the communist utopian condition is that the lack of division of labor allows man to contemplate his own essence in the products of his labor. One imagines that young fellow in the Catskill mountains who burned a hole in the center of a tree large enough to make a house, but Marx does not go this far, because the theory is a delusion, or an inversion of the things said about the coming of the kingdom, or the things imagined from the things said. He talks of each holding every sort of job randomly, which again might make any sensible person consider the value created by expertise and the division of labor.

   But for the sake of this delusion, or as said, perversion of the imagination, a “dictatorship of the proletariat” is to be instituted not by persuasion but by force, through a violence called spiritual, or philosophy become active, a tyranny for the purpose of transforming human nature by eradicating the character of the bourgeois. This condition is universal, occurring everywhere, and involving a magical transformation of the senses. Private property and private families are to no longer exist, as in the Acts of the Apostles or among the few guardians in Socrates’ description of the best regime, though this has nothing to do with many. There is to be no tension between man and the state, nor between man and nature. Nature is to be conquered or subjected by the revolutionary proletariat. And until then, there is to be literally a tyranny with an aristocracy of those who know the march of history, a vanguard elite., in every communist nation. That is Marxism in a nutshell.

   Hence, as it would not be possible to present so concisely the thought of a genuine philosopher, we say that Marx is not a philosopher at all.

Paul Johnson: Modern Times on Marx and Communism

   Paul Johnson was a major part of a realization that occurred in my education, changing me from a regular Jesus hippie to something a bit more serious. At the University of Dallas, we had a class called Marx/Lenin, and here I was able to read deeply into Marx, seeing the philosophic turn that is inseparable from the mass killings in the communist tyrannies of the Twentieth Century. Modern scholars do not get the essential connection between the theory of Marx and the millions of corpses in Russia, China, and Cambodia, let alone its similarity to the Nazi holocaust of the Jews, as Communism and Nazism are extreme opposites of the political left and right. I wrote a 40 page term paper, which was not unusual, and have Marx reduced to some 12 or 16 fundamental points that he keeps repeating, but that do not jump right out at the reader from Das Capital. The hypothesis, regarding how this arose as a development of the bloodshed of the French Revolution, will have to wait for the publication of that paper. But one day, when he was visiting from Great Britain, I had the honor of buying Mr. Johnson a cappuccino at the coffee bar there at UD, and we talked a while, though I could do little more than express my gratitude for his history writing. Later, in my American Government class, I would include excerpts from his work, to try to get the students to awaken to the significance of what is at stake in our study which began with a bit of Aristotle on the 6 kinds of regime and the principles in the Declaration of Independence.

   Johnson teaches:

There is no essential moral difference between class-warfare and race-warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. thus the modern practice of genocide was born.

                                                                Modern Times, p. 71

 Johnson cites Lenin himself:

   The extraordinary commission is neither an investigating commission nor a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home front of a civil war. It does not judge the enemy; it strikes him…We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is- to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red terror.

                                                                       Modern Times, p. 71

Again contrary to the modern scholars, the same diabolical intention is quite present in the thought of Marx:

The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envision it…

   The bloodshed and of the French Revolution is what caused Jefferson to recoil from his until then unlimited assertion of the rights of man against the ancient monarchies. Something never before thought possible appeared here for the first time, and developed into the class-ocide and genocide of the diabolical modern totalitarianisms. And what, after all, did the scholars think the “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie” (Communist Manifesto, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 483) would look like? What is strange, though, is the continuing war against the ineradicable bourgeois nature at the root of private property. The above is from a series of excerpts from the correspondence of Marx and Engels assembled by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn in the Mortal Danger, cited by Thomas G. West in his essay which argues quite persuasively that the core of Marx is this violent Revolution (rather than the theoretical historical-economic determinism.* Lest there is any difficulty convicting Marx in a brief blog,

There is only one way of shortening, simplifying and concentrating the bloodthirsty death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new- revolutionary terror…

We are pitiless and we ask no pity from you. When our time comes we shall not conceal terrorism with hypocritical phrases…

The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envision it…

We shall be constrained to undertake communist experiments and extravagant measures, the untimeliness of which we know better than anyone else…Until the world is able to form a historical judgement of such events, we shall be considered “beasts,” which doesn’t matter…

Finally, West cites Solzhenitsyn,

Marx and Engels reiterated on many occasions, “once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to enact the year 1793.”

The Mortal Danger, pp. 113-114

Johnson also notes that Churchill uniquely was the only one who saw the Marxist regimes for nearly what they were, and are. Then the West was allied with them in defeating Hitler, and of course no one wanted to call them out. Johnson writes:

…with one exception none of the Allied statesmen involved even began to grasp the enormous significance of the establishment of this new type of totalitarian dictatorship, or the long term effect of its implantation in the heart of the greatest land power on earth. The exception was Winston Churchill…Churchill never wavered in his view that it ought to be a prime object of the policy of the peaceful, democratic great powers to crush this new kind of menace while they still could.

                                                                              Modern Times, p. 73-74.

So, it is not so surprising that such a thing could come to be and so few notice. Marxism is not accurately characterized by “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, ” as it is presented, nor is it about holding hands and sharing things.

 But it is not that these things were entirely hidden. It is more that they are beyond the pale of the human imagination, or perhaps what Nietzsche calls our “horizon.” Johnson cites a 1918 Russian army newspaper:

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood…let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie.

Modern Times, p. 70

Communism, of course, preceded fascism in history, just as Marx preceded Nietzsche in German thought. The theoretical division between theory and practice on the right requires quite a bit more explaining, as Nietzsche is not especially anti-Semitic, nor even especially into the restoration of the Roman fasces, as might be thought of Machiavelli. The thought based on the principle of power after the destruction of all ethics is not opposed to using any difference to impose itself upon human beings, considered as matter, or to return to a Marxist phrase, “masses.” Lenin, of course, ignored the Marxist idea of the communist revolution as developing by the necessary march of a determined historical dialectic out of the industrial revolution- as the owners of the means of production- and transferred the theory to the Russian peasantry, a non-industrialized demos, who were then to revolt against the few rich and the owners of land in Czarist Russia. But this little change is not without a Marxist basis.  In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, Marx, just before his death, writes:

   If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a  proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

And so, too, when we see things like the widening difference between the upper and lower classes, the disappearance of the middle class, big measures like deregulation of corporations little measures like the subjection of waitresses tips to the restaurant owners, one must wonder indeed if someone is not trying to cause what is avoided in fact by labor unions and stock ownership by the middle class, to make the creation of a revolutionary proletariat regardless of the theoretical ridiculousness of Marx and the resilience of political liberty.

II. What Marxist Communism Is

   Previously, we have written on the three secrets of the vision of Fatima and on Twentieth Century Ideological tyranny, as well as on the difference between “socialism” and Marxist communism.

   It is not even like the communism of the first Christians in the Acts of the Apostles, nor the community of goods supposed to occur among the priests, who are not supposed to have any concern for things of the body. In Plato’s Republic, there is a community of goods, and even of women and children, but this is among the very few guardians, and not at all among the majority of citizens. Nor is it at all correct to present twentieth century ideological tyranny as an error of expecting to apply some “ideal” of justice to a recalcitrant material world. Marxism is an intellectual perversion, a tyranny regardless of whether a single Stalin or a technically oligarchic politburo happens to hold power. It is much more a diabolic inversion of the imagination of the Christian West that arises out of the void in the imagination left following the fall of the medieval world. That is the true way to connect the modern tyrannies with the classical understanding of what now appears as a garden variety of tyrant. That, at any rate, is what we will try to explain in our theoretical understanding of modern communism, where we gather the 13-15 points called “Marx in a Nutshell.” But, in a word, though it is not comprehensible without acquiring the categories (and a sort of political theory that unified field theory in physics would be like): Twentieth century totalitarianism in an intellectual perversion expressed through the diabolical or inverted political imagination that is based on what in the natural form is baptism, the birth of the nous out of the world. Hence, as Marx says, the violence is “spiritual,” not normal political, violence, as Satanism is in a sense an atheistic religion. It is an inversion of the sacrifice in baptism, projected into the political world.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times, Chapter 2: The first Despotic Utopias.

Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert c. Tucker

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America.

West, Thomas G. “Marx and Lenin.”

#16-1464 to Void the 2016 Russian-U.S. Election

…On our news, we have only heard about how the CIA has Vlad directly ordering cyber attacks on the elections. And they talk about our response. #16-1464 is the Revived Re-vote case, to void the 2016 election due to Ruskies meddling to elect Donney and co.

   Elections are assumed by the constitution, fundamental, and, we say, “think the Supreme Court has nothing to say about it?” They say, “no precedent,” we say it is unprecedented. The case is based on Article IV.4, plus things said in the Classic and Yarbrough cases, which are about the suppression of the black vote. Federalist 68 indicates that the electoral college was to provide a remedy should some foreign power raise some “creature of their own” to the presidency. Mark Small has written up the case, and it is granted mandamus, with a response from the Trump-Russophiles due by July 7. For my Amicus Brief- which is a letter that any citizen is allowed to submit as a friend of the court, Amicus meaning Amigos, friends (in Latin rather than Latin-American). I tried to write only things I could add, without repeating much that is in the case. The truth is that when the Trump-Russians interfere with political association, speech and free political action, violating two clauses of the First and then the Fifth amendment liberty clause-when they do this, they leave a trail, and collusion is demonstrated in the very attempt to silence free opposition. This is a whole un-mined category which coheres with the other categories of evidence to “prove” what is by now so obvious the few doubt it: Russia elected Trump for us, and we do not know their full perfidious purpose even yet, but we do not want to find out! Hence we are asking the court to provide a remedy such as a re-vote. And if some think that this will cause “civil war,” to have a new election, we see who was against elections, we see that fascism rising is what will cause civil war, and we see the fourth clause of the second sentence of the Declaration as well, which means that we are not required to give up on republican or free self-government. My draft is at mmcdonald777Wordpress, with three sevens- my secret site where I tell the truth about my other site, and its more fundamental purposes. I am hoping for criticism and feedback on the draft before I print it, and send it in.

“Thomas Jefferson lives!”

– John Adams, July 4, 1826.

Invention: An Internet of Integrity

   I am astonished that no one starts up an internet of integrity. The Niche is wide open, entrepreneurs! Imagine tech that does not spy on you and use you for their profit. Soon the people will be catching on, so it may well be a bull market. Imagine a Twitter that does not sell fake followers, a WordPress that does not block search term access to one’s site awaiting an extortion fee. Imagine a government obliged to obey the Bill of Rights they swore an oath to uphold, and just not use the camera and audio in every computer to take paternal and tyrannical powers over every citizen. Imagine a nation that cared to secure elections more than short term profits, and a 2016 election that was not hacked by the Russians to run Donney up the flagpole and watch the slavish Republicans salute! Perhaps we would have had Bernie or Hillary v. Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Imagine if thee wee not a Russian hacking of U.S. hospital computers, and no Russian mob induced Oxy epidemic! We may have even had Ben Carson!

   And imagine an FBI that would admit to using the spy-tech and Russian assistance against ISIS and domestic terrorism, but made a terrible mistake in forgetting what it means to have risen through the ranks of the KGB-oops! Imagine a Congress that would regulate the internet and perhaps gun lobbies to boot, and oversee the federal executive agencies like it is supposed to, pursuing questions when these arise, rather than allowing the FBI/etc. to attack the one raising the questions.

   But that is what it means to be a Platonist, to bear the pain of knowing not that the best regime is unachievable- who cares?- but that all these evils are entirely avoidable if we would just stand up with a little integrity, even on the internet.

   So what if we set up such a thing, right alongside the old internet, now we have seen the flaws in that which will surely lead to disaster? And in the meantime, remember, the key to the discontents of modern tech is manual backup. Have they deported Emmanuel Backupez already? Senior Peace?

Mark Small and the Revote Case: Federalist 68: Void the Election

   Supreme Court case #16-1464 asks the Court to void the 2016 election due to Russian Interference. Like the first case, brilliantly and beautifully written by Jeroll Sanders, this case is based on Article IV Section 4 of the constitution, which requires that the federal or national government protect the states from foreign interference. The attack on the election was like a foreign invasion, and these methods continue. We have barely begun to realize what is occurring and put a stop to the illegal and unethical things being done on the internet to control politics. Oh, you are surprised that such things occur, or will be done if not opposed or prevented?

   Attorney Mark Small of Indiana has written the Revived case, and bought in some more comprehensive arguments as to why the Supreme Court is the only recourse likely to be available, and why they have the power and to void an election and the duty to void this one. Between points 47 and 60, he is especially brilliant. Having demonstrated that impeachment is unlikely because the also likely helped the Republicans gain a majority in the Senate, Mr. Small notes the opinion of the Founders, as in Federalist 1, about party, and the “members of the Electoral College are not independently selected as the framers had anticipated, but are chosen by the same process” selected by the political parties. The Electoral College, as discussed in Federalist 68, was to be the last stop to prevent “foreign cabals” from afflicting us with a tyranny or tyrannical executive for their own advantage. The founders set up our voting for slates of electors, people thought most capable, who would then elect the president. Their explicit intention is that the electors not be chosen from pre-existing bodies, such as political parties. The Russian corruption of the Republican Party is all that was required for Putin to select our president for us, for his advantage and not ours, and they did this by effecting the vote in subtle ways throughout the Primaries. They ran Trump up the flagpole, and everyone kept saying, “well, he won the election…,” such is our reverence for the electoral process. They ran Trump up the flagpole, and all the Republicans saluted. The electors were chosen by party, and in 25 States were told that they were legally bound, just because the unconstitutional laws binding them have not been challenged yet. The explicit intention of the founders, as shown in Federalist 68, is that they be able to prevent  a tyrant, and it is obvious from one example that the state laws binding the electors are unconstitutional: say one elected were revealed, between the election and the inauguration, to be an ax murderer. Or say he were simply revealed, whether by ignorance or intention, to be in effect a traitor? Similarly, those who would like to abolish the electoral college, thinking it a vestige like the appendage little toe, have likely not read the Federalist papers.

   It is similarly obvious that the Supreme Court has the power to void this election. The alternative is to say that such a thing could occur and the Supreme Court could have nothing to say about the fundamental constitutional structure of elections. The Court and the constitution assumes that elections are, as said in the Yarbrough decision, free of bribery and corruption. The president derives his legitimacy from the Constitution, of which the Supreme Court is the fundamental interpreter. There is some question as to whether the president must always obey the Court, as raised by Andrew Jackson, but the powers of the president are only to execute laws enacted by Congress, and the Supreme Court determines whether those laws are constitutional. In our last flirtation with tyranny, Jackson simply defied the decision of John Marshall that he could not remove the (Christian, English speaking) Cherokee of Georgia, and enacted a national sin, the Trail of Tears. It is in fact precisely the Supreme Court that has the office of voiding the election, and it is likely that the Congress and the rest of the nation will obey the decision, as the president will no longer have legitimacy.

Leo Strauss on Solitude

…the philosopher cannot possibly desire to rule. His only demand on the political men is that they leave him alone…(p.207)

   That’s why I yell at my cats- even the “gentleman,” Mr. Black, my “best animal,” “Leave me alone!” If I were a true and full philosopher, I would likely never yell (and they would never listen (Republic, opening), though they do not anyway). And that’s why Justice Black (or Frankfurter?) said, “the right to be left alone is the right most prized by civilized man,” and why the U.S. Declaration, setting rights above duties, is so excellent.* It allows for the Holy Spirit: it is the house without a roof, open to the sky. All men (universal sense, which of course includes women, not of course, qua women, but qua men) have the faculty developed in the philosopher: The philosopher embodies and shows the excellence of man, hence, “all men are created equal-” equally endowed with rights, as Lincoln explains in his speech on Dred Scott. So here, Strauss continues,

   …The philosopher cannot lead an absolutely solitary life because legitimate “subjective certainty” and the “subjective certainty” of the lunatic are indistinguishable. Genuine certainty must be “inter-subjective.” The classics were fully aware of the essential weakness of the mind of the individual. Hence, their teaching about friendship: the philosopher is a philosopher in need of friends.

                                                                                      On Tyranny, p. 208

Tyrants, of course, cannot have friends.

  It is irony itself that the tyrant is surrounded by flatterers and bigger and smaller fish. Some he depends upon to mirror his prestige, while others he depends upon for safety. Meanwhile, the philosopher must hide away in the woods like Merlin to keep mankind from tearing themselves to shreds if they encounter him, who is by nature a gadfly.

   The philosopher too is one of the many, a citizen like any other, with the peculiar advantage that he is one of the few who can speak. There are very few substantial letters to congresspersons, amplifying the voice of those among the people that are able to speak of things that mater. Most, of course, cannot.

   Athens killed Socrates the Philosopher, and Plato and Xenophon wrote Apologies of Socrates, arguing of course that this should not have occurred. Xenophon wrote that far from being punished for not believing in the gods of the city and for corrupting the youth, Socrates was deserving of honor. Socrates, required to tell the truth because he is in court, said he deserved free meals in the Prytanium like an Olympic victor.

   Honor, which the philosopher does not seek for its own sake, in the sense of recognition, is needed for his own protection. It is also good for men to look to and esteem things truly honorable (Leo Paul S. de Alvarez).

   Had Athens honored rather than judicially murdered Socrates the philosopher, Greece might have become an autocthonous nation, more than a match for Persia, and avoided the Imperialism of Alexander that destroyed Greek liberty .

   But you see that since the madman and the philosopher are indistinguishable to the folks in the neighborhood, many things follow. The Constitution supersedes the “Michigan Mental Health Code,” which is unconstitutional when it seizes a man for mere speech because others are deluded and self-interested or imagine him a danger, and act upon this delusion rather than allow him to explain. And the case is important enough to pursue to the ends of the earth. They live like slaves because they fear death, and like the Miller in Grimm’s goat story, will do things so base as to destroy the value of their having lived at all. It is no grave dishonor to be considered mad, nor to lose all one’s friends as Odysseus did while having done or said not a single thing wrong. They could not restrain themselves from the cattle of Helios, or, their ignoble self interest proves them incapable of philosophy. But then Odysseus sees, and gets to see Nausikka.

   This leaves open the possibility that there was no outside influence in what caused my family- people I have known for fifty years- to hurt me so badly I will likely never be reconciled. “…But a sin against the Holy Spirit…” And what do you think the context indicates He is talking about?

Note* So long as one does not violate the rights of another, “society” is required by our fundamental law to at least leave him alone.

Leo Strauss on Classical and Modern Tyranny

   Let us begin to get at the distinction between ancient and contemporary tyranny.

Leo Strauss, who saw the days of Hitler, writes (On Tyranny, Introduction, pp. 21-23):

Tyranny is a danger coeval with political life. The analysis of tyranny is therefore as old as political life itself…

..when we were bought face to face with tyranny- with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past- our political science failed to recognize it.

…many of our contemporaries were relieved when they discovered in the pages in which Plato and other classical thinkers seemed to have interpreted for us the horrors of the twentieth century…

Not much observation and reflection is needed to realize that there is an essential difference between the tyranny analyzed by the classics and that of our age. In contradistinction to classical tyranny, present day tyranny has at its disposal “technology” as well as “ideologies; more generally expressed, it presupposes the existence of a particular interpretation, or kind of science….science was not meant to be applied to the conquest of nature or to be popularized and diffused…science,”

…one cannot understand modern tyranny…before one has understood the elementary and in as sense natural form of tyranny which is pre-modern tyranny…

   It is no accident that present-day political science has failed to gasp tyranny as it really is. Our political science is haunted by the belief that “value judgments” are inadmissible in scientific considerations, and to call a regime tyrannical amounts to pronouncing a “value judgment.” The political scientist who accepts this view of science will speak of the “mass state,” of dictatorship, of totalitarianism, of “authoritarianism, and so on… One cannot overcome this limitation without reflecting on the origin of present day political science. Present day political science traces its origin to Machiavelli…Machiavelli’s Prince (as distinguished from his Discourses on Livy) is characterized by the deliberate indifference to the distinction between King and tyrant; The Prince presupposes the tacit rejection of that traditional distinction.

   If the good is most essential, one cannot have scientific knowledge, especially of political things, without the good.

   Prior to Socrates, among the pre-Socratics, three forms of government were distinguished, democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, as in Herodotus. (Demo-cracy is literally the strength or kratos of the people, the demos; aristo-cracy when the best are stronger, and mon-archy the primacy of one.) Then, after natural philosophy became a known explanation of causes, people noticed that the tyrants of days present were different from the ancient kings, the best men different from the oligarchs, and democracy has barely been tried. In order to get the many to aim at the common good, Aristotle provides the “middle class” regime, giving the many and the few a constitution by which they might arrive at the common good by self interest in the assembly, despairing of the ability of the many to aim at the common good, rather than fleece the rich. Aristotle arrives at six forms, three legitimate and three illegitimate, depending upon whether the regime aims at the common good or rather the advantage of the ruling element. It is Socrates and Socratic philosophy that makes explicit the distinction between Kings and tyrants. Even for Sophocles, Oedipus “Rex” is also called “tyrannous.” Aristotle spells out the distinction: The rule of one man or monarchy that aims at the common good is royal, while the one aiming in rule at his own interests is a tyrant.

   In Xenophon’s Hiero, Simonides shows a tyrant, Hiero, how he might exercise his rule so as to become happy, avoiding the defects and occupational hazards of the tyrant’s life- where security and peace cannot be achieved. Gangsters too think they are not free to leave their life of crime, unlike a free man. Simonides gives Hiero a glimpse of the happiness of kingship.

   I am amazed that no movie writer has tried to film the adventures of Dion and Plato in Syracuse. And no drama college has tried to enact the Trial and Death of Socrates. [Maybe I’ll do it, after I write my comedy of the Toledo war- a historical comedy that writes itself.* See Note 1 below.]

   Science and ideology are what makes modern tyranny different from classical tyranny. As we are seeing, the internet has made Orwellian tyranny possible, and the people hardly notice, or pretend from fear not to notice. But the crucial distinction of “twentieth century totalitarianism” is ideology. The two are fascism on the “right,” and communism on the left, responsible for the deaths of some one hundred million of their own citizens when no war was occurring, not to mention the countless deaths caused in wars seeking to impose and prevent the modern horror. What is today being called “nationalism,” in contrast with “globalism,” is fascism, based on the hatred according to race, rather than economic class. The first regime based explicitly on race was the American South, and the KKK emerged to salute its defeated flag.

   Tyrannical characters of the classic sort- in the classic meaning of the word tyranny as an order of soul- are enlisted in support of these ideological tyrannies, but these may have barely a thought, let alone an idea, in their heads. That the forms of regime are based on orders of soul is a principle explained in Plato’s Republic, especially in Books III and VIII. The modern ideologies behind the tyrannies based upon race and class, and now religion, are intellectual perversions. These deny that murder is wrong, striking at the rational essence of man, but their politics is a projection of a diabolical delusion: a perversion of the imagination- a faculty intended for the perception of the best soul and the best regime. The garden variety tyrant, those seeking their own wealth and power at the expense of the city, cannot even imagine that the intellectual perversions exist, and indeed these do not know what they are in for (though it is, we might say, in their “unconscious” mind). The tyrant murders due to fear for his own security. Plato describes this crossing of a boundary or limit between the human and the bestial in the image of the transformation of the werewolf. But, we hold, in order to understand the modern ideological tyrannies, one needs to consider certain things found in Jung and Christianity. These tyrannies would not be possible, arising out of German philosophy, were it not for the Medieval world and the void in the modern imagination, left at the destruction of the medieval world. Modern tyranny, and possibly Machiavellian tyranny, may be essentially anti-Biblical, and prove to be essentially anti-Christian- not that it cannot use the appearance in opinion of Christianity. That is, what these are can only be understood in light of what they reject.

   Another difference between ancient and modern tyranny is that ancient tyranny was held over a city or polis, until those following Alexander and then the Roman emperors. The nation had barely developed out of the ancient polis when Plato and Aristotle were writing.  Justice pertains to human communities, and these are first families, then tribes, then villages, then cities, townships, states and nations. There are also groups of nations, and of course a form of justice that pertains to our fellow humans as such. But modern politics is different from ancient politics in that the modern sovereignties are nations. The Greek word is ethnoi. The U. S. is different as a young nation representing all other ethnoi, but we function like France or Germany or any other grouping according to nationality. Every nationality on earth has American citizens with representation in the U.S. Congress. But modern tyranny is over nations rather than cities, and often involves the imagination of empire, and even world empire. Fascism is ideological tyranny based upon tribe or race, while communism is ideological tyranny based upon class. 

   That we have failed, on occasion to distinguish between modern tyranny and kingship of the sort described in Plato’s Republic- where the regime is over a single rare city, and communism even there is confined to the guardian class- is symptom of the same deficiency that leaves us prey to modern tyranny. For some time now it has been said that the alternatives are democracy and totalitarianism, and Plato is not a democrat. Bloom notes that democracy is the only regime outside the best that tolerates philosophy.

   In contrast with Bloom, we say that it is not utopianism as such, but a particular inversion of the Christian utopia, that is modern totalitarianism. The only thing prior to our century like it, the killing of an identifiable group in the interests of achieving a perverse utopia- is the Western Christian Inquisition. Modernity arises as a rejection of this medieval Christianity, which we say is based upon the error of mistaking the messiah for a legislator, and Christianity for a nomos or law, and it is the same even if this particular one were not the messiah. Jesus is not a legislator, but the savior, prepared for by the man-made legislations as those of Moses and Mohammed. But salvation is not similarly secured by a belief, and is not a thing man-made, but the birth in the soul of the child that is the image of God, and also the highest faculty. Hence, as Justin Martyr teaches, Socrates is quite obviously “saved,” and by the very same logos. Hence, those judged in the last judgement (Revelation 20) are judged according to what they have done. If the soul is immortal, we are stuck with ourselves and what we have become. What we can do is sacrifice in penance and turn toward God, in prayer. But the modern perverse utopias are a projection onto the political of an inversion of this penance, and so it appears that some worthwhile end can be achieved by violating the commandment forbidding murder. Hence, it is not a lack of prudence in achieving justice, but a perverted imagination of the just condition, which characterizes the Twentieth Century utopias. This cannot be understood without understanding Christianity and what has occurred, but its basis is accessible in the Socratic understanding of the intellect and imagination. One thing most needed, then, is a restoration to its proper function of the faculty of the imagination, and one sees the root of the project of Shakespeare. Plato’s Republic too replaces the Homeric poetry of ancient Greece with the study in which the regime of the city is the image through which it is possible to see the soul.

 

1. See, Michigan has this whippersnapper gov’nor, kid like 21, thinks ‘es friggin’ Napoleon, see, but he turns out to be the noblest guy. And it has an Ohio guy named Two Stickney, and actual shooting battle, Ohio prisoners seducing the Michigan Judge’s daughter, everything you need….I’d have Augustus Woodward and Stevens T. Mason discussing education under the “Educational Oak,” and show the founding of our state, and the University of Michigan. And Andrew Jackson, for all hoots, gets to be the hero, firing Mason just before he sent our territory of Michigania against the fine if prudentially challenged State of Ohio in the first ground game between these two rivals. Ken Buns should help the theater guys at Chelsea, in the Purple Rose Theater, again since the comedy writes itself.

 

Why Are the Americans Asleep to the Surveillance of the Internet?

   As usual, the Americans are just not thinking it through. Everyone welcomes this “internet of things,” assuming it is unopposable or something. We just had an election turned by foreign manipulation of the internet, and fascism has been rising in America, while we all just go on about our business. A few literat-ures talk about Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s “the Handmaid’s Tale,” but for the most part, our noses are in the dirt and we walk about in an Oxy induced daze, dumb as a box of rocks. Awake! Your liberty is being destroyed, and indeed we can do something about it! We do not have to let this happen because there are internet billionaires and dark forces over drug gangs flushed with the proceeds of our vices. There are in fact billionaires who can think, and do have hearts and souls. We could install an honest internet TOMORROW. And “they” – who are probably some logarithm by now- still cannot control the American voter completely,

   The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids the destruction of our security in our houses, persons, papers and effects, and this is fundamental law. The internet of things is illegal. “No person shall… is how this amendment begins. Laws can prevent rich companies from supplanting our government and constitution if the Constitution itself is thought to not forbid this. But it only need be argued that if, for example, Duterte is allowed access to my phone calls, this will effect government, and liberty cannot then be secured. Look how they argued that growing one’s own weed and smoking it “effects” interstate commerce (Reich v. Ashcroft). The cell towers are tracking us are they? How bout if we cut them down? These companies are remarkably responsive, though, to public opinion when it effects their bottom line. The bosses want now infinite surveillance of employees, do they- How ’bout we stop working till they back the f off! The people are enough, too, to trample Congress and push cell towers over- how expensive will that be for the corporate panel and shareholder value”? Put that in your logarithm and crunch it!

   And did this not all start when we gave companies the right to make us piss in a cup to see if we smoked any weed? What would be the answer of James Otis in 1774, of Thomas Jefferson and the generation of 1776? Well, let us give them the answer for which they are asking.

Trump’s Method of Lying: Racism Behind the Trumpeting About MS 13

   “We’re going to get tough,” Trump said, and “its not nice now for MS 13,” a Mexican gang infesting arias such as L.A. We want the reader to see the Trump method of lying in this particular instance. He is using the just application of the law as an excuse, a thin veneer to justify the racist policies behind his anti-immigration nationalism. The deportation of non-criminal immigrants is up 157 %, and cell towers are being tricked into identifying undocumented immigrants. If I need to spell it out, your next, because the cell towers are identifying everyone. Trump is a tyrant and needs to be impeached. Our ignorant toleration of the new violations of the Fourth Amendment guarantee of security in our houses, persons, papers and effects is allowing tyranny to walk right in, and we need to reverse course and stop this nonsense.

   First, the last thing one wants to do with MS 13 members is deport them, since they want they will come right back. But second, is it only accidental that Trump targets gangs of the races that are the outgroups of the American fascists, the blacks and the Mexicans, while ignoring the White and the Italian gangs? How much distance is there between the Russian mob and the Russian government- with whom everyone in the Trump administration has questionable ties? Is he not then rather obviously using the un-opposable policy of targeting MS 13 as a cover to enlist police in his racist policies, just as they were about to do in striking the black gangs in Chicago? The fear of deportation in the Latino community, and justified distrust of police, allows the gangs to flourish. For the 34 deported, most of whom will return, have not many times more hydra heads been grown?

   If the argument here is too complicated for the American citizen, that is what Trump counts on. He keeps his method of lying just below the level of obviousness at which the Americans will catch on and do something. Trump Justice retreated from the plan to attack Chicago, and the plan to bring the “hammer down” has retreated in favor of a more long term and more subtle approach. But Trump is a gangster himself, and his allied gangs are- surprise- not being targeted by those big tough ICE heroes deporting Mexican mothers of American citizen children, and sending waves of fear and distrust through Mexican American citizens and their communities. We suspect that the Russian and U.S. mobs are behind the Oxy-heroin scandal in America, a genuine conspiracy the first half of which Trump wants to deregulate. The knee jerk Republicans hear “deregulation,” and for them there is no issue. Our corruption as a nation is allowing the rise of fascist tyranny, and it is past time we rise up and put a stop to it.

   The Trump-Russian methods of lying are repeated, and can be quickly generalized. The blog “Hands Tied : Use Mirror” concerns another aspect of their method, and Putin’s new tactic of labeling those who see the Trump-Russian conspiracy as “insane” and “dangerous” is just another variation on the method of the manipulation of public opinion, which has proven remarkably easy upon the rather thick American public. To paralyze the Americans, one need only spread fake news, then when accused, say it is “fake news.”