Thursday, July 5, 2007

Feidel Castro Analyzes the CIA's Family Jewels

Fidel Castro analyzes the CIA's Family Jewels
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REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
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THE KILLING MACHINE
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Sunday is a good day to read something that would appear to be science fiction.
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It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of foreign governments. Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one day. No coherent explanation was given. Perhaps someone in the White House looked over the material.
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The first package of declassified documents goes by the name of "The Family Jewels"; it consists of 702 pages on illegal CIA actions between 1959 and 1973. About 100 pages of this part have been deleted. It deals with actions that were not authorized by any law, plots to assassinate other leaders, experiments with drugs on human beings to control their minds, spying on civil activists and journalists, among other similar activities that were expressly prohibited.
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The documents began to be gathered together 14 years after the first of the events took place, when then CIA director, James Schlessinger became alarmed about what the press was writing, especially all the articles by Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein published in The Washington Post, already mentioned in the "Manifesto to the People of Cuba". The agency was being accused of promoting spying in the Watergate Hotel with the participation of its former agents Howard Hunt and James McCord.
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In May 1973, the Director of the CIA was demanding that "all the main operative officials of this agency must immediately inform me on any ongoing or past activity that might be outside of the constituting charter of this agency". Schlessinger, later appointed Head of the Pentagon, had been replaced by William Colby. Colby was referring to the documents as "skeletons hiding in a closet". New press revelations forced Colby to admit the existence of the reports to interim President Gerald Ford in 1975. The New York Times was denouncing agency penetration of antiwar groups. The law that created the CIA prevented it from spying inside the United States.
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That "was just the tip of the iceberg", said then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
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Kissinger himself warned that "blood would flow" if other actions were known, and he immediately added: "For example, that Robert Kennedy personally controlled the operation for the assassination of Fidel Castro". The President's brother was then Attorney General of the United States. He was later murdered as he was running for President in the 1968 elections, which facilitated Nixon's election for lack of a strong candidate. The most dramatic thing about the case is that apparently he had reached the conviction that John Kennedy had been victim of a conspiracy. Thorough investigators, after analyzing the wounds, the caliber of the shots and other circumstances surrounding the death of the President, reached the conclusion that there had been at least three shooters. Solitary Oswald, used as an instrument, could not have been the only shooter. I found that rather striking. Excuse me for saying this but fate turned me into a shooting instructor with a telescopic sight for all the Granma expeditionaries. I spent months practicing and teaching, every day; even though the target is a stationary one it disappears from view with each shot and so you need to look for it all over again in fractions of a second.
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Oswald wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the USSR. He had already been there before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country's embassy in Mexico but nobody knew him there so he wasn't authorized. They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Jack Ruby, --a man openly linked to the Mafia-- unable to deal with so much pain and sadness, as he said, assassinated him, of all places, in a precinct full police agents.
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Subsequently, in international functions or on visits to Cuba, on more than one occasion I met with the aggrieved Kennedy relatives, who would greet me respectfully. The former president's son, who was a very small child when his father was killed, visited Cuba 34 years later. We met and I invited him to dinner.
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The young man, in the prime of his life, and well brought up, tragically died in an airplane accident on a stormy night as he was flying to Martha's Vineyard with his wife. I never touched on the thorny issue with any of those relatives. In contrast, I pointed out that if the president-elect had then been Nixon instead of Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster we would have been attacked by the land and sea forces escorting the mercenary expedition, and both countries would have paid a high toll in human lives. Nixon would not have limited himself to saying that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. For the record, Kennedy was never too enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs adventure; he was led there by Eisenhower's military reputation and the recklessness of his ambitious vice-president.
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I remember that, exactly on the day and minute he was assassinated, I was speaking in a peaceful spot outside of the capital with French journalist Jean Daniel. He told me that he was bringing a message from President Kennedy. He said to me that in essence he had told him: "You are going to see Castro. I would like to know what he thinks about the terrible danger we just experienced of a thermonuclear war. I want to see you again as soon as you get back." "Kennedy was very active; he seemed to be a political machine", he added, and we were not able to continue talking as someone rushed in with the news of what had just happened. We turned on the radio. What Kennedy thought was now pointless.
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Certainly I lived with that danger. Cuba was both the weakest part and the one that would take the first strike, but we did not agree with the concessions that were made to the United States. I have already spoken of this before.
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Kennedy had emerged from the crisis with greater authority. He came to recognize the enormous sacrifices of human lives and material wealth made by the Soviet people in the struggle against fascism. The worst of the relations between the United States and Cuba had not yet occurred by April 1961. When he hadn't resigned himself to the outcome of the Bay of Pigs, along came the Missile Crisis. The blockade, economic asphyxiation, pirate attacks and assassination plots multiplied. But the assassination plots and other bloody occurrences began under the administration of Eisenhower and Nixon.
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After the Missile Crisis we would have not refused to talk with Kennedy, nor would we have ceased being revolutionaries and radical in our struggle for socialism. Cuba would have never severed relations with the USSR as it had been asked to do. Perhaps if the American leaders had been aware of what a war could be using weapons of mass destruction they would have ended the Cold War earlier and differently. At least that's how we felt then, when there was still no talk of global warming, broken imbalances, the enormous consumption of hydrocarbons and the sophisticated weaponry created by technology, as I have already said to the youth of Cuba. We would have had much more time to reach, through science and conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste.
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President Ford decided to appoint a Commission to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency. "We do not want to destroy the CIA but to preserve it", he said.
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As a result of the Commission's investigations that were led by Senator Frank Church, President Ford signed an executive order which expressly prohibited the participation of American officials in the assassinations of foreign leaders.
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The documents published now disclose information about the CIA-Mafia links for my assassination.
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Details are also revealed about Operation Chaos, carrying on from 1969 for at least seven years, for which the CIA created a special squadron with the mission to infiltrate pacifist groups and to investigate "the international activities of radicals and black militants". The Agency compiled more than 300,000 names of American citizens and organizations and extensive files on 7,200 persons.
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According to The New York Times, President Johnson was convinced that the American anti-War movement was controlled and funded by Communist governments and he ordered the CIA to produce evidence.
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The documents recognize, furthermore, that the CIA spied on various journalists like Jack Anderson, performers such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and the student movements at Columbia University. It also searched homes and carried out tests on American citizens to determine the reactions of human beings to certain drugs.
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In a memorandum sent to Colby in 1973, Walter Elder who had been executive assistant to John McCone, CIA Director in the early 1970s, gives information about discussions in the CIA headquarters that were taped and transcribed: "I know that whoever worked in the offices of the director were worried about the fact that these conversations in the office and on the phone were transcribed. During the McCone years there were microphones in his regular offices, the inner office, the dining room, the office in the East building, and in the study of his home on White Haven Street. I don't know if anyone is ready to talk about this, but the information tends to be leaked, and certainly the Agency is vulnerable in this case".
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The secret transcripts of the CIA directors could contain a great number of "jewels". The National Security Archive is already requesting these transcripts.
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A memo clarifies that the CIA had a project called OFTEN which would collect "information about dangerous drugs in American companies", until the program was terminated in the fall of 1972. In another memo there are reports that manufacturers of commercial drugs "had passed" drugs to the CIA which had been "refused due to adverse secondary effects".
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As part of the MKULTRA program, the CIA had given LSD and other psycho-active drugs to people without their knowledge. According to another document in the archive, Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and head of chemistry of the Agency Mind Control Program, is supposedly the person responsible for having made available the poison that was going to be used in the assassination attempt on Patrice Lumumba.
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CIA employees assigned to MHCHAOS –the operation that carried out surveillance on American opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political dissidents –expressed "a high level of resentment" for having been ordered to carry out such missions.
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Nonetheless, there is a series of interesting matters revealed in these documents, such as the high level at which the decisions for actions against our country were taken.
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The technique used today by the CIA to avoid giving any details is not the unpleasant crossed out bits but the blank spaces, coming from the use of computers.
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For The New York Times, large censored sections reveal that the CIA still cannot expose all the skeletons in its closets, and many activities developed in operations abroad, checked over years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a presidential commission, are not in the documents.
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Howard Osborn, then CIA Director of Security, makes a summary of the "jewels" compiled by his office. He lists eight cases –including the recruiting of the gangster Johnny Roselli for the coup against Fidel Castro –but they crossed out the document that is in the number 1 place on Osborn's initial list: two and a half pages.
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"The No. 1 Jewel of the CIA Security Offices must be very good, especially since the second one is the list for the program concerning the assassination of Castro by Roselli," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive who requested the declassification of "The Family Jewels" 15 years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
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It is notable that the administration which has declassified the least information in the history of the United States, and which has even started a process of reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now makes the decision to make these revelations.
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I believe that such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and popularity, and to show that those methods belong to another era and are no longer in use. When he announced the decision, General Hayden, current CIA Director, said: "The documents offer a look at very different times and at a very different Agency."
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Needless to say that everything described here is still being done, only in a more brutal manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of illegal actions within the very United States.
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The New York Times wrote that intelligence experts consulted expressed that the revelation of the documents is an attempt to distract attention from recent controversies and scandals plaguing the CIA and an Administration that is living through some of its worst moments of unpopularity.
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The declassification could also be an attempt at showing, in the early stages of the electoral process that the Democratic administrations were as bad, or worse, than Mr. Bush's.
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In pages 11 to 15 of the Memo for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we can read:
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"In August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards with the objective of determining whether the Security Office had agents who could help in a confidential mission that required gangster-style action. The target of the mission was Fidel Castro.
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"Given the extreme confidentiality of the mission, the project was known only to a small group of people. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was informed and he gave it his approval. Colonel J. C. King, Head of the Western Hemisphere Division, was also informed, but all the details were deliberately concealed from officials of Operation JMWAVE. Even though some officials of Communications (Commo) and the Technical Services Division (TSD) took part in initial planning phases, they were not aware of the mission's purpose.
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"Robert A. Maheu was contacted, he was informed in general terms about the project, and he was asked to evaluate whether he could get access to gangster-type elements as a first step for achieving the desired goal.
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"Mr. Maheu informed that he had met with a certain Johnny Roselli on several occasions while he was visiting Las Vegas. He had only met him informally through clients, but he had been told that he was a member of the upper echelons of the 'syndicate' and that he was controlling all the ice machines on the Strip. In Maheu's opinion, if Roselli was in effect a member of the Clan, he undoubtedly had connections that would lead to the gambling racket in Cuba.
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"Maheu was asked to get close to Roselli, who knew that Maheu was a public relations executive looking after national and foreign accounts, and tell him that recently he had been contracted by a client who represented several international business companies, which were suffering enormous financial losses in Cuba due to Castro. They were convinced that the elimination of Castro would be a solution to their problem and they were ready to pay $ 150,000 for a successful outcome. Roselli had to be made perfectly aware of the fact that the U.S. government knew nothing, nor could it know anything, about this operation.
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"This was presented to Roselli on September 14, 1960 in the Hilton Plaza Hotel of New York City. His initial reaction was to avoid getting involved but after Maheu's persuasive efforts he agreed to present the idea to a friend, Sam Gold, who knew "some Cubans". Roselli made it clear that he didn't want any money for his part in all this, and he believed that Sam would do likewise. Neither of these people was ever paid with Agency money.
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"During the week of September 25, Maheu was introduced to Sam who was living at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was not until several weeks after meeting Sam and Joe –who was introduced as courier operating between Havana and Miami –that he saw photos of these two individuals in the Sunday section of Parade. They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante, respectively. Both were on the Attorney General's list of the ten most wanted. The former was described as the boss of the Cosa Nostra in Chicago and Al Capone's heir, and the latter was the boss of Cuban operations of the Cosa Nostra. Maheu immediately called this office upon learning this information.
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"After analyzing the possible methods to carry out this mission, Sam suggested that they not resort to firearms but that, if they could get hold of some kind of deadly pill, something to be put into Castro's food or drink, this would be a much more effective operation. Sam indicated that he had a possible candidate in the person of Juan Orta, a Cuban official who had been receiving bribery payments in the gambling racket, and who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
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"The TSD (Technical Services Division) was requested to produce 6 highly lethal pills.
"Joe delivered the pills to Orta. After several weeks of attempts, Orta appears to have chickened out and he asked to be taken off the mission. He suggested another candidate who made several unsuccessful."
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Everything that was said in the numerous paragraphs above is in quotes. Observe well, dear readers, the methods that were already being used by the United States to rule the world.
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I remember that during the early years of the Revolution, in the offices of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, there was a man working there with me whose name was Orta, who had been linked to the anti-Batista political forces. He was a respectful and serious man. But, it could only be him. The decades have gone by and I see his name once more in the CIA report. I can't lay my hands on information to immediately prove what happened to him. Accept my apologies if I involuntarily have offended a relative or a descendent, whether the person I have mentioned is guilty or not.
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The empire has created a veritable killing machine that is made up not only of the CIA and its methods. Bush has established powerful and expensive intelligence and security super-structures, and he has transformed all the air, sea and land forces into instruments of world power that take war, injustice, hunger and death to any part of the globe, in order to educate its inhabitants in the exercise of democracy and freedom. The American people are gradually waking up to this reality.
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"You cannot fool all of the people all of the time", said Lincoln.
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Fidel Castro Ruz
June 30, 2007
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Monday, July 2, 2007

"Just War", The Interrelated Predicates and Precedents of Nuremberg and the Iraq War




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‘Just War’, the Predicates and Precedents of Nuremberg and the Iraq War
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-Copyright 2007 by James M. Craven/Blackfoot Name: Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi
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The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated...
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...We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity...
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-Opening address at the first Nuremberg Trial by Justice Robert H. Jackson, Representative and Chief of Counsel for the United States of America
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“Calling a crime or body of crimes a “mistake”, is like calling rape “sex”.
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"If they [the powers that be] can get us to ask the wrong questions, they need not fear the answers"
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-THE INTERRELATED PREDICATES AND PRECEDENTS OF JUST WAR AND NUREMBERG
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In the first Nuremberg Trial, 22 war criminals went on trial of whom 12 were hanged. They were all charged with varying levels of responsibility for five interrelated, concomitant and mutually supporting crimes:
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a) Launching and Waging Aggressive and Illegal War; which implies--and if proved supports a charge of:
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b) Conspiracy to Launch and Wage Aggressive Illegal War (since no parties go to war without planning and giving asserted reasons );
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c) Crimes Against Peace (which all illegal wars, launched and waged on the basis of illegal conspiracy, imply and entail ,per se);
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d) Crimes Against Humanity (which charges a, b, c, imply and entail per se by virtue of the known horrors and effects of war) and:
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e) War Crimes (no such right of "self-defense" or "necessary measures" by those guilty of charges a, b, c, d, ).
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At the time of the Nuremberg Trial, it was recognized that the foundation (sources, precedents and authorities) of "established" international law vis-a-vis the Nuremberg charges, was limited with respect to established principles and their widespread understanding, acceptance and application. This led to the charge by the defense at Nuremberg of the charges themselves representing a case of ex post facto: creating and applying legal principles, and even applicable international law, that did not exist at the time of alleged offenses having been committed. Thus, it was argued by the Defense that, at the time, the alleged offenses were not crimes however odious; and thus further, any prosecution would be an example of ex post facto.
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The prosecution argued that in addition to established international law "(which evolves with customary use/acceptance" of certain principles; e.g. Conventions like the Hague Convention, Geneva Conventions etc) that established that the Nazis knew what they conspired to do and did was illegal, as attempts at cover-up reveal mens rea and consciousness of guilt (no need to cover-up what you believe to be clean only what you know to be dirty), there was also a body of established principles of "Just War" (JW) that the Nazis themselves had recognized. They, themselves, had actually referred to and made use of some of these JW principles in contriving the various phony pretexts that they employed for their own violations of those same principles in the various wars they launched and conducted. This is exactly what the Bush Administration does today.
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Principles of "Just War (JW):
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The principles of JW were primarily established, and were often concomitantly violated, by the Roman Catholic Church via writings and pronouncements ranging from: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.); to Augustine (354-371 A.D.; to Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.); to Francisco de Vitoria (1480 to 1546 A.D.); to Francisco Suarez (1548 to 1617 A.D.); up to various pronouncements by Popes Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. They have had a large impact in informing and shaping the content and evolution of international law and have been repeatedly referred to even--or perhaps especially--by nations invoking them in order to contrive pretexts for violating them; as the Bush Administration has repeatedly done to attempt to justify preemption.
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What Nuremberg established, is that no nation can claim exemption from the very principles it itself benefits from and invokes for its own purposes. This is especially in the case of invoking and using, as instruments of breaking international law and established principles, the very same laws and principles they are conspiring to break. It is somewhat like using free speech in the particular in order to destroy it in general or using the trappings of “democracy” de jure to destroy democracy de facto; it is much more and much more dangerous than mere naked hypocrisy.
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From the common-sense premises of :
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a) "no need to construct a phony event or context to try to justify that which is clearly “legitimate, or, what you believe to be “legitimate”;
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b) “no need to cover-up what is clean only dirty”;
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Then, the Nazi attack against Poland and all other Nazi attacks against other nations were aggresson and illegal per se.
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The initial planning (Conspiracy) to set up a phony attack against a German radio station, using concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers, as a contrived pretext for a JW in "self-defense", made the attack and war in reality preemptive and without the very narrow JW criteria for a "just" preemptive attack.
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Thus the war was aggressive, and thus the launching and waging of it illegal per se.
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Thus the planning for an illegal and aggressive war was "Criminal Conspiracy" per se.
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Thus the waging of the war and its effects constituted "Crimes Against Peace" and "Crimes Against Humanity" per se.
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Thus many of the military actions and actions against civilians became "Crimes" and some "War Crimes" at various levels of culpability: a person, for example, doing or directing a home invasion, has no "right" of "self-defense" as if he shoots the homeowner, it is murder in the commission of a felony, whereas, if the homeowner shoots the home invader, or the one imminently directing him, it is self-defense.
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The basic principles of JW can be broken down into Jus Ad Bellum (having to do with "Just Causes" of going to war) and Jus In Bello (having to do with "Just Conduct" in a Just War)
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Principle I: JUST CAUSE: (AD BELLUM)
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There must be a Gross Injustice. It can be on the part of ONE and ONLY ONE of the contending parties. It must be for self-defense against imminent , present, credible, certain, and capable threats to life and actual survival, and/or imminent and intentional threats to innocent life, and/or imminent and intentional violations of human rights, and/or vindication of justice or avenging intentional wrong doing for purposes of deterrence of future lethal injustices and intentional wrong doing (this does not in any way sanction "Regime Change" as it cannot be selectively, opportunistically, unilaterally or preemptively applied in certain contexts and cases and not others).
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The scenarios in which there might be a “Just Cause” for a peremptory attack are extremely narrow. There must be a clearly manifest and certain intent and capability on the part of the enemy, with no time or alternatives available in terms of possible deliberation or attempts to mitigate an imminent attack through non-military means.
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Take the often cited case of U.S. forces encountering the Japanese force that attacked Pearl Harbor, who might have been able to claim being on a “military exercise”, without the 14-part Purple Code intercepts as to their real intentions. Under Just War (JW) criteria, the most the U.S. would have been able to do is signal Japan, give notice of intent to take out the Japanese force without proof of lack of hostile intent, and given notice of a line beyond which the U.S. was prepared to go to War. But neither JW nor international law at the time, would allow a preemptive attack against Japan on the basis of Japan's potentialities through military “preparations”, the militarization or capabilities of Japan, or even “uncertainty” as to the true intentions of the attack force against Pearl Harbor vis-à-vis what they “might” do against the U.S. Even the Japanese imperialists understood this as they had planned to deliver their notice of War and supposed reasons for it prior to the commencement of the attack on Pearl Harbor but were delayed in delivering it.
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One of the most patently disingenuous post hoc rationales for the present realities of the Iraq War is the “Roach Motel Theory” (“guests check in but do not check out"). This says that the U.S. does not have the forces to fight dispersed forces of terrorism all over the world, so the present Iraq War is acting like a “Roach Motel”: drawing in and concentrating forces of terrorists from many nations in time and space to be killed more “efficiently”; this is especially sick and twisted as a rationale for the Iraq War.
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Principle II: GROSS FORMAL MORAL GUILT ON ONE SIDE (AD BELLUM)
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Material moral wrong is not sufficient. This means that the guilt of the enemy must not only be implicit and even material (objective but perhaps unintended effects), but it must be formal and clearly substantial or extensive and clearly intended even beyond the levels of willful blindness or depraved indifference (consequences clearly predictable by a reasonable and prudent person and thus likely intended).
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Principle III: UNDOUBTED KNOWLEDGE OF GUILT (AD BELLUM)
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The guilt of the enemy must be undoubted and not datable by a reasonable and prudent person free of subjectivity; this is even to the point of being free of a “Gettier problem”. The Gettier concept, having to do with epistemic certainty (how do we really “KNOW” anything and on what basis can we be responsibly “certain” something is true and thus responsibly assert and act on the basis of such something being true?). In his Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? by Edmund L. Getter, (in Knowledge and Belief, A Phillips Griffiths, ed, Oxford; Oxford U Press, 1967, pp 144-146) Gettier notes that even if something is true, and an individual believed it to be true, and sound reasons exist for that person to be justified in believing something to be true, still, nonetheless, there may be an insufficiency of foundation for “knowing”—and thus acting on the basis of—something held to be true. This applies especially to the supposed “solid” basis or epistemological/evidential “foundation”, of “knowing” or believing Saddam Hussein had WMD as a pretext for a preemptive attack.
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And since JW principles also include “right intention” for going to war (no ulterior motives allowed), and mens rea (state of mind and intent) of the decision makers at the time of a decision to go to war is very much at issue, then what intelligence the decision makers actually had available at the time of decision making to go to war is also very much at issue. That means after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it is immaterial what new documents they come up with documenting WMD if those documents were not available at the time of decision making to go to war. One cannot use “Divine Inspiration” or Calvinistic Preordination as "One of the Elect" as a cause for going to war and then look for “evidence” God was right in how He inspired the "Elected" decision maker.
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Principle IV: WAR CAN ONLY BE CONDUCTED BY A COMPETENT, POLITICALLY LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY IN CHARGE OF THE PUBLIC ORDER BEING DISTURBED (AD BELLUM)
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This is the main reason why no one nation has legal “standing” to summarily and unilaterally act in the name of or for another nation or group of people being oppressed. The U.S. has no legal standing to act outside of international and internationally recognized treaties, structures, authorities, organizations and mandates; especially those it invokes for itself selectively. The U.S. may go to war as a last resort because of attacks against U.S. citizens and imminent threats to the U.S. and its own survival and “public order”; but may not unilaterally and preemptively act in the name of victims and “public order” in say Darfur outside of international and internationally-recognized organizations, structures and mandates.
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The reasons for this principle should be obvious: nations could, as they routinely do in the present, pick and choose which “horrors” they wish to stop and which “public orders” they wish to “restore”, and, in the course of things, not only generate new horrors and disturb new “public orders”, but, as in the case of Iraq, make the horrors they are purporting to stop and the public order they are purporting to restore even worse. This, in fact has been the record of preemptive U.S. covert and overt operations all over the world: a long chain of "Blowbacks" (operations producing the exact and very costly opposites of intended effects) from which the world and the U.S. have never escaped or recovered.
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Principle V: RIGHT INTENTIONS FREE OF REVENGE, BLOODLUST, And HIDDEN GEOSTRATEGIC AGENDA AND STRICTLY CONFINED TO THE GOALS CONNECTED WITH THE “JUST CAUSES” FOR WAR. (AD BELLUM)
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This means that the intentions and reasons for war are advanced and vetted at the time of commencing war; and decision makers do not get to make it up as they go along or selectively contrive new rationales as old ones are exposed as unfounded or worse. No nation gets to contrive reasons let alone switch from contrived reason to contrived reason as each previous reason gets exposed as bogus (e.g. from WMD to 9-11 to "Regime Change" to "war abroad to protect the homeland from war here" ). How to know real intentions? Consistency is one way; classified memos like those in the book The Price of Loyalty: The Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind is another way.
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If a nation is purporting to go to war to save victims of oppression in Iraq, and even convinces the UN to go along and authorize it, then it still begs the question why it is not seeking the same in other places where even worse oppression is going on. Having oil on your soil is not sufficient reason why the forms of oppression and disturbances of “public order” you face are more critical than the same conditions faced by countries that have no geostrategic locations and resources.
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Principle VI: WAR SHOULD ONLY BE DECLARED WHEN EVERY MEANS TO PREVENT IT HAVE BEEN EXPLORED, TRIED AND HAVE FAILED. (AD BELLUM)
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There are so many insider accounts from the Bush and other administrations in U.S. history that document thoroughly intention to go to war (Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam and WMD in Iraq) supported by intention to contrive phony intelligence and rationales for going to war. Not only were the means and institutions like the UN and its Charters, designed to prevent war, not recognized, explored and attempted, they were, in fact , as in the case of the Iraq War, used, circumvented, corrupted, cherry-picked and even used as instruments for creating conditions to go to war rather than conditions to mitigate it.
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Indeed the clear body of instruments of Imperial Social Systems Engineering that the U.S. and other nations have developed, is about generating conditions, exacerbating contradictions and even providing supposed JW rationales for going to war. Imperial Social Systems Engineering is about "engineering" what is commonly known as "manufactured consent" or "perception management" in the interests of imperial control and hegemony; it is not about mitigating war as an instrument for handling intern-nation disputes.
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Principle VII: JUSTICE MUST FAVOR THE SIDE OF THE OFFENDED NATION BUT NO NATION HAS ABSOLUTE JUSTICE ON ITS SIDE (AD BELLUM)
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All nations must understand that it is the governments of nations that declare and go to war; it is the citizens who suffer. Further, when considering say historical reasons for why a given nation has a “Just Cause” for War if disputes cannot be resolved through non-violent means, it is important to understand that historical time frames are easily contrived and framed for propaganda and other purposes. For those, for example, who decry the alleged crimes of a Khomeini, would there have been a Khomeini without a Shah?; and would there have been a Shah without the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh regime by the U.S. CIA in 1953? The same question applies with respect to Saddam Hussein once a darling of the U.S. imperial establishment as was Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban who were armed and supported by the U.S., to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan to "give them their own Vietnam" (see Interview with Brezinski).
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Principle VIII: THE INTENDED AND LIKELY “BENEFITS” OF WAR IN TERMS OF WRONGS THAT ARE STOPPED AND “PUBLIC ORDER” RESTORED MUST LIKELY OUTWEIGH THE LIKELY COSTS OF THE WAR IN TERMS OF SUFFERING AND DESTRUCTION. (AD BELLUM)
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This means that before a nation goes to war, it must plan and assess carefully. It must consider ALL information and expertise available, with no cherry-picking and contrived “intelligence” or “framing” allowed by the doctrine of “Right Intention”, the likely costs and benefits (before, during and after the formal cessation of war including reconstruction) on ALL potential parties including those nations in no way parties to the war. What have the true costs of the Iraq War and other imperial adventures really been on the purported victims being “saved” and also on developing nations (e.g. high gas prices, refugee flows, spin-off terrorism etc) that have had no part to the war but have only been victims of it?
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Principle IX: THERE MUST BE A GROUNDED AND REASONABLE PROSPECT OR HOPE FOR SUCCESS (AD BELLUM)
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A nation may have all the elements for the prosecution of a Just War on their side but have no realistic hope of prevailing. This is the case with many Indigenous Nations today. JW Doctrine says that given the likely horrors of any war, and especially the effects on innocents, having “just causes” and even an imperative from the prospect of national survival to go to war, that is still not sufficient. Each nation must consider if it is not only trying to delay the inevitable (this also applies to the issue of continuation of a JW as well as launching and prosecuting one) in facing overwhelming force with the result of only more death and destruction on innocents with no prospects of a JW having anything but an inexorable unfavorable outcome. This means that the so-called "Samson Option" of Israel, to light-off their 200 or so nuclear weapons and take down the whole "temple" (planet earth) if they deem their own national survival to be threatened, is, in addition to being patently illegal and a violation of JW, also just plain monstrous and highly narcissistic and chauvinistic.
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Principle X: THE LIKELY EFFECTS OF THE METHODS AND INSTRUMENTS OF WAR AS MEASURED IN LIKELY DEATH AND SUFFERING MUST NOT BE GREATER THAN THE WRONGS BEING STOPPED AND/OR GOOD BEING ESTABLISHED. (AD BELLUM AND IN BELLO)
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This principle again establishes a burden to make a good-faith attempt to realistically assess and forecast and weigh the likely effects—“positive and negative”—on all potential parties (including global spillover effects). This JW principle and mandate is to ensure that the net result will not likely be greater harm than any good coming from purported evils to be stopped or purported good to be established via a war that meets all other tests of JW.
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Principle XI: CIVILIANS AND NON-COMBATANTS (Those not intentionally, directly and materially engaged in support of combatants) MUST BE DIFFERENTIATED FROM COMBATANTS AND NO INTENTIONAL FORCE IS TO BE DIRECTED AGAINST THEM. (Jus in Bello)
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This principle recognizes that although so-called “collateral damage” is inevitable in war, it must be totally accidental, not predictable by an average and reasonable person, and all attempts to mitigate it must be pursued and built into military operations, tactics, weapons uses and strategy. This principle prohibits embargos of materials for primary use by civilians (even in some potential dual-use cases like critical chlorine to clean water to prevent cholera and typhus as a result of 70 % of Iraqi water treatment plants knowingly and calculatingly bombed), the likes of the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki etc. This means that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children from embargos are not, as Madeline Albright characterized them, "acceptable costs" or "acceptable collateral damage" from the points of view of Just War, International Law and the presedents of Nuremberg.
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Civilians and non-combatants are defined and differentiated from combatants not in terms of whether or not they have tied yellow ribbons, screamed “Banzai” or have attended Nuremberg rallies, but on the basis of whether or not they have given intentional, material and direct support to combatants.
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CONCLUSION:
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The reasons for acceptance and authority of international law and the principles of “Just War” are the same as those for any law. Where there are contradictions, there are contending interests and parties. Where there are contradictions, contending interests and parties, and, where those contending parties are unevenly endowed with weapons and capabilities that, when used, in the particular, can damage or destroy the whole, then each of the parties enjoying the benefits of the whole must abridge/limit some of their supposed “rights” and capabilities in the particular, in the interests of the preservation of the whole that the individual parties gain benefit from being a part of. This also applies in that all individuals, groups or nations must respect for others, the very same rights and protections that they assert for and benefit from themselves. That is why in the U.S. for example, like in most societies, municipal laws are trumped by country laws that are trumped by state laws that are trumped by federal laws: so that potentially destructive contradictions and interactions on the micro level do not spill over to compromise the survival and stability of the macro.
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So it is with international law especially in the age of very sophisticated weapons of mass destruction and other capabilities that may be used as weapons of mass destruction given the possible global spillover effects as we are presently witnessing. The alternative is something like Mad Max Beyond the Thunder Dome—where even in “Barter Town” they had laws and institutions like “Break a deal, face the wheel”—in which the literal survival of the whole planet is threatened by the unchecked lawlessness, ambitions, ruthlessness, destructive capabilities and hubris of predatory and ruthless terrorists---imperial and otherwise.
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Sunday, July 1, 2007

Rapture Time: On the Shifting SSA of Imperialism

There is a joke going around. On the airlines, the captain and co-pilot, and in some cases flight engineer, eat different meals in case of food poisoning--at least one will survive to land the plane. Now, the airlines are allowing only one Christian per flight crew in case of Rapture so that someone will be left that can land the plane.
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There is a plethora of movies like the "Left Alone" series, TV shows like "Jericho" and literally hundreds of books about the supposed impending "End Times" from various perspectives (Book of Revelations, Mayan Calendar etc). These add to the existing climate of fear and paralysis associated with the so-called "War on Terror" in the U.S. and elsewhere. They all have the message that social action and activism is futile; it has all been "prophesied". Don't worry about "Global Warming"--if it actually exists.
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They are all part of the shifting SSA (Social Structures of Accumulation) of Imperialism. SSAs are dynamic complexes of interrelated: institutions, power structures, relations, technologies--politico-legal, socio-cultural and economic. They are about creating and nurturing the "soil" of imperialism without which the system could not survive and reproduce on an expanded scale. SSAs are about engineering "perception management" and "manufactured consent" for the various global adventures and predatory machinations that flow from the defining features and "logic" of imperialism as a system. They are about ideological turning up, cloning and socialization. They are about getting the masses to buy into the dominant values, institutions and power structures of the system. They are about getting the masses to accept the capitalist system as the only possible system consistent with "human nature", "democracy" and the "natural--or God's--order of things".
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Why resist? It is all over. It has been prophesied. Get ready for the big one to drop. Get right with the Creator? Perhaps sex, drugs and rock n roll? Whatever you are in to. But do not bother to rest or question the "order" of things--it is all natural and prophesied.
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That is the real message.
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By BENJAMIN ANASTAS
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Published: July 1, 2007
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Steven from Arizona — a caller on “Coast to Coast AM” late one night in February — had slipped into a future reality and caught a glimpse of the devastation that was coming when the supervolcano under Yellowstone erupted. James in Omaha, on the other hand, was worried about the likelihood of a magnetic pole shift, while Rod from Edmonton had recently spoken to a member of the Canadian Parliament about the global-warming crisis and couldn’t believe what he had heard.
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Skip to next paragraph

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Jill Greenberg
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John Major Jenkins: The approaching end date is in an "amazing opening."
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“We’re coming to an end time beyond anything that anybody has ever imagined,” Rod said with a trembling urgency. “The scientists right now, they’re not even studying the real causes. The Kyoto treaty and CO2 have nothing to do with anything.”
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“Coast to Coast AM” is an overnight radio show devoted to what its weekday host, George Noory, calls “the unusual mysteries of the world and the universe.” Broadcast out of Sherman Oaks, Calif., and carried nationwide on more than 500 stations as well as the XM Radio satellite network, “Coast to Coast AM” is by far the highest-rated radio program in the country once the lights go out. The guest in the wee hours that February morning was Lawrence E. Joseph, the author of “Apocalypse 2012” — billed as “a scientific investigation into civilization’s end” — and he came on the air to tell the story of how the ancient Maya looked into the stars and predicted catastrophic changes to the earth, all pegged to the end date of an historical cycle on one of their calendars, Dec. 21, 2012.
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“My motto tonight,” Noory intoned at the beginning of the program, “is be prepared, not scared.” What followed was a graphic recitation of disaster scenarios for 2012, including hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions caused by solar storms, cracks forming in the earth’s magnetic field and mass extinctions brought on by nuclear winter. The only hopeful note of the night was struck when an unnamed caller asked Joseph what he thought about recent Virgin Mary apparitions in Bosnia.
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“I love it,” the author answered. “That’s positive. You don’t need to be a devout Christian to admire the Virgin Mary. She’s a blessing to us all.”
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When I reached Noory by phone at his program’s studio in California, he told me, “I’m a staunch believer that we are in an earth cycle.” As 2012 approaches, “Coast to Coast” has been devoting more and more programming to prophecies of doom and the signs and wonders that are thought to be harbingers of the coming end time: U.F.O. sightings, crop-circle formations, disappearing honeybees and flocks of migratory birds that fall from the sky. “There’s no question the planet is changing,” Noory said. “And the fact that the Mayans had an end date and their history talks of change, I find that fascinating.”
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But it isn’t just on the lower frequencies, late at night, where people are waiting on the Mayan apocalypse. Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the alternative-culture best seller “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl” — and a guest on “Coast to Coast AM” — has introduced a young and savvy audience to the school of millenarian thinking that has gathered around Mayan calendrics. To do so, he has employed viral marketing and a tireless schedule of public appearances at bookstores, art spaces, yoga studios and electronic-music festivals. When Pinchbeck appeared on “The Colbert Report” last December to promote his book, the host confronted him in front of a life-size manger scene: “You have been called a new Timothy Leary. Why do we need another one of those?”
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Over breakfast at Cafe Gitane in Manhattan, Pinchbeck told me recently that “there’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.” A youthful 41, with long, drooping hair and heavy-framed designer eyewear, Pinchbeck exudes a languid fervency that is equal parts Jesuit and Jim Morrison. His BlackBerry sat face up on the table, the screen dark, beside his bowl of organic fruit, yogurt and granola. “Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing,” Pinchbeck went on, “and I think the process is already under way. We’re on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness that’s more intuitive, mystical and shamanic.”
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Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age.
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Light and darkness — heavenly forces and a corrupted earth — are the twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe — and we are always wrong. Gnostics predicted the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom as early as the first century; Christians in Europe attacked pagan territories in the north to prepare for the end of the world at the first millennium; the Shakers believed the world would end in 1792; there was a “Great Disappointment” among followers of the Baptist preacher William Miller when Jesus did not return to upstate New York on Oct. 22, 1844. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been especially prodigious with prophetic end dates: 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. Any religious movement with an end-time prophecy is certain to attract followers, no matter how maniacal or fringy (witness the Branch Davidians). For those who want to go online and get the latest tally of bad news, there is a nuclear Doomsday Clock and the Rapture Index. If you remember living through Y2K, that was another millenarian moment — except our computer systems were redeemed by the same code writers who corrupted them in the first place.
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Who dreams of the apocalypse? Why do they dream of it? Polls indicate that up to 50 percent of Americans believe that the Book of Revelation is a true, prophetic document, meaning they fully expect the predictions of “Rapture,” “Tribulation” and “Armageddon” to be fulfilled. There is a paradox built into end-time theologies in that imminent catastrophe often brings comfort; according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group — all of whom share secret knowledge — and a world redeemed and delivered from evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.” This is as true in the New Age as much as in any other one. Rumors of global crisis, the distrust of institutional authority, the ready availability of esoteric lore, the existence of individuals drawn to abstruse numerical schemes, the urge to assuage anxieties with dreams of social transformation — wherever these elements exist, apocalyptic thinking is likely to flourish.
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The year 2012 first entered the public consciousness two decades ago this August with the Harmonic Convergence organized by José Arguelles, the author of a number of esoteric books about the Mayan cosmos and his experiences with telepathically received prophecies. With a penchant for promotion going back to the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970, which he organized, Arguelles promoted the convergence as an earth-changing event requiring 144,000 participants — the number echoed Mayan mathematics and the Book of Revelation — to free the planet from the dissonant influence of Western science and synchronize with the “wave harmonic of history” set to culminate in 2012. Mayan civilization, to Arguelles, was not entirely Mayan: It was originally a “terrestrial project” managed by a race of “galactic masters” from “star bases.” He saw the convergence as a stage, ordained by prophecy, in a march to the end foreseen by the ancient calendar makers: “Somewhere in that far and distant time, when armies clashed with metal and chemicals released the fire of the Sun, the wonder of Maya would burst again, releasing the mystery and showing the way that marks return among the patterns of the stars.”
Large crowds, some perhaps oblivious to the apocalyptic undertones of the event, did end up gathering at “focus locations” around the world — Stonehenge, Mount Shasta and Bolinas in California, even Central Park — and extensive media coverage of the meditating and dancing masses lent Arguelles and his project an eccentric authority. The New Age had discovered its own eschatology — with a mysterious, mythical people the controlling intelligence — and 2012 joined the lexicon of “energies,” transcendental meditation and crystals. By 1991 Arguelles was popularizing his own calendric system, which he branded Dreamspell, as a corrective to our mechanized time (dismissed, in mathematical shorthand, as “12:60,” the ratio of solar months to minutes in an hour). Inspired by the tzolk’in, the 260-day prophetic calendar utilized by the ancient Maya and common throughout Mesoamerica, Dreamspell functions as a daily oracle, replacing linear time with a “loom of resonances” that users navigate with a “galactic signature” based on the day of their birth. More than just an astrological sign, this signature is a tool for meditation and, as the latest edition of Arguelles’s calendar promises, “your password in fourth-dimensional time.”
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Arguelles, under the aegis of his fief, the Foundation for the Law of Time, has lobbied tirelessly for the universal adoption of his calendar — now called the 13-Moon 28-day Calendar — by posting communiqués on the Web and arranging audiences with Mayan elders and members of the Vatican. Lately he has been designing large-scale telepathic experiments in conjunction with a Russian laboratory in Novosibirsk and other groups affiliated with his Planet Art Network.
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“The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,” Arguelles wrote me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to prepare for the transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received a new prophecy in Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. “We’ll be literally living in a new time,” Arguelles said, “by a 13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony with everything all the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic communication.” As for the many who “have not evolved spiritually enough to know that there are other dimensions of reality,” Arguelles predicts they will be taken away in “silver ships.”
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With Arguelles drifting into even more occult realms — his last book, “Time and the Technosphere,” spun elaborate new theories around 9/11 — he has been supplanted in the New Age conversation by the next generation of Mayan-calendar mystics with their own theories about the coming transition. This new generation does not typically think that space aliens guided the Maya and prides itself on its reverence for Mayan culture and tradition. Carl Johan Calleman, author of “The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness,” is a former cancer researcher from Sweden whose calculations have led him to a controversial end date of his own devising: Oct. 28, 2011. As Arguelles’s closest spiritual heir in the Mayan-calendar movement, Calleman has been active in promoting a regular mass-meditation event called the Breakthrough Celebration and other more focused projects including the Jerusalem Hug, which gathered 5,000 people around the walls of the Old City on May 21 to harness constructive energies and create a “cascade of peace.”
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While his interest in 2012 is not exclusively focused on the Mayan calendar, Chet Snow — a past-lives regression therapist and author from Sedona, Ariz. — tracks the impending consciousness shift on his Mass Dreams Newsletter, organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site tours and gathers the disparate camps of the 2012 movement together for conferences devoted to ancient mysteries and the paranormal.
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When I asked Snow why he thought people were turning to alternative ideas and explanations like the ones espoused at his conferences, he told me the answer was a simple one. “The pillars of our expectations about the future in the West have started to crumble,” he said. “Religion, politics and economics — none of it is working any more. So when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover in 2012 involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say, ‘Huh, maybe I need to connect with that.’ ”
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If the Mayan calendar seems like an unlikely timing device for our salvation — whether it arrives through global catastrophe or telepathic rainbow around the earth — its animating role in the 2012 phenomenon is entirely consistent with popular notions of the “mysterious” Maya that have persisted for over a century. The Maya were just one of the peoples to thrive in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest of the 16th century, but the civilization’s florescence — spanning the period called the Maya Classic, between 300 and 900 A.D. — was especially bright and spectacular. After growing into a loose confederation of rival city-states that spread across the Yucatan peninsula and extended as far as Chiapas in the west and Honduras in the east, the Mayan civilization fell into a rolling decline that ended with the almost complete abandonment of their cities. The so-called Mayan collapse is a continued source of speculation and a major reason why the Maya have captured the imagination of 19th-century travelers, 20th-century archaeologists and generations of popular fantasists who have connected the Maya to everything from intergalactic colonies to the lost island of Atlantis to Teutonic gods from fire-breathing spaceships. The Mayan sites attract small armies of New Age pilgrims every year, hoping to plug into a stone socket of timeless indigenous wisdom; tens of thousands gather for the spring equinox at Chichén Itzá alone to watch the shadow of a snake slither down the steps of the Temple of Kukulcin.
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In the introduction to his book “Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End Date,” John Major Jenkins describes his first visit to Tikal, the vast ruin in the Guatemalan rain forest that thrived as an urban center at the pinnacle of Mayan civilization. Jenkins, perhaps the most lucid figure in the subculture of 2012 prophets, writes of the “bone-jarring 16-hour bus ride on muddy and dangerous roads” that carried him to a “sprawling former metropolis” of pyramids, palaces, residences, ball-courts and scores of engraved monumental stones, or stelae, decorated with intricate, otherworldly images and hieroglyphs.
“Sitting on the stone steps of the Central Acropolis,” Jenkins recalls, “I looked around me at the towering sentinels of stone, their upper platforms stretching above the jungle canopy like altars to the stars, and I listened carefully to the wind whisper messages of a far-off time, and of another world.”
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Jenkins wasn’t the first 22-year-old traveler with spiritual yearnings to encounter the sublime at a Mayan archaeological site, but he is one of the few who has found a life’s vocation in the process. As harmonically as Jenkins was struck in Guatemala by the larger mysteries of the Maya, however, it was the calendar that really seized him — specifically the fact that there were Maya living in the highlands who still followed the same day count as their distant ancestors. (A common misconception is that the Maya “disappeared” when their cities emptied; there are six million Maya currently living in the states of Central America, a number far larger than population estimates of Mayan civilization during the Classic period.)
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“Here was an unbroken tradition,” Jenkins told me when I went to visit him at his home in Windsor, Colo., one afternoon in late March. We sat in a pair of lawn chairs in the backyard while a neighbor passed back and forth on a noisy tractor. “It’s a lineage going back 2,000 years,” he said, oblivious to the racket. Jenkins, now 43, is difficult to distract when talking about the Mayan calendar and 2012. After years of working as a software engineer to support his research and writing books and papers in his spare time, 2012 is now Jenkins’ full-time job. Influenced by the work of the pioneering psychedelic writer Terence McKenna — whose Timewave Zero system, based on computer analysis of the I Ching, also shows history to be culminating on Dec. 21, 2012 — Jenkins argues that ancient Maya “calendar priests” were able to chart a 26,000-year astronomical cycle called “the precession of the equinoxes” with the naked eye. He fixed the 2012 end date to coincide with a “galactic alignment” of the winter-solstice sun and the axis that modern astonomers draw to bisect the Milky Way, called the galactic equator.
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In the alchemical tradition, Jenkins notes, eclipses signify the “transcending of the opposites.” During the period around 2012, Jenkins says, the galaxy will provide the opportunity for the rebirth of creation and a reconciliation of “infinity and finitude, time and eternity.” The Maya knew it, and just like an alarm clock, they set their calendar to coincide with the occasion.
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Jenkins and his fellow travelers in the 2012 movement have chosen a particularly arcane source of secret knowledge in Mayan calendrics. The Maya calendar keepers are known to have charted the cycles of the moon, the sun, Mars and Venus with an accuracy that wouldn’t be duplicated until the modern era. Like most premodern societies, the Maya conceived of history not as the linear passage of time but as a series of cycles — they called them “world age cycles” — that would repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the Maya employed what scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit computational system extending forward and backward from their mythical creation day, which is calculated to have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. or Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. All the current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact that the current world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug. 3114 B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years later, on a date given in scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 — which falls, not quite exactly, on Dec. 21, 2012. Enter the apocalypse.
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I asked Jenkins how he viewed the passing of one world-age cycle into another in December 2012, and he paused. It was a little bit like asking a seismologist what he thinks about earthquakes. As much as Jenkins has made a place for himself in the 2012 discussion through his independent research on the Maya and precession, he has made an even greater impact by applying academic rigor to the theories of his contemporaries and exposing, in his books and on an extensive Web site, their inconsistencies with established Mayanist scholarship. Jenkins was the first to reveal a major flaw in the synchronization between Arguelles’s Dreamspell and the Mayan day count, and he has been involved in an extensive, long-distance feud with Calleman since 2001 over their differing approaches to interpreting the Maya and over Calleman’s belief that the end time will be in 2011, not 2012. When I first spoke to Jenkins on the phone, he told me, “I think of myself as leading the charge for clarity and discernment.”
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“2012 is such a profound archetype,” Jenkins went on. “Here we are five and a half years before the date, and already there’s so much interest. Personally, I think it’s about transformation and renewal. It’s certainly nothing as simplistic as the end of the world.”
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But what about the connection many people see between the approach of 2012 and environmental crisis? I asked. What about the popular link between the Maya and end-time prophecy?
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“A lot of people are talking about apocalypse right now,” he said, “but there’s a deeper meditation that can and should happen around the end date.” Jenkins — bearded, in a T-shirt and jeans — is originally from Chicago, and traces of a flat Midwestern accent remain in his voice. He looked and sounded beleaguered by the mention of apocalypse. “At any end-beginning nexus — at the dawn of a new religion or a spiritual tradition — you have this amazing opening,” he said. “Revelations come down. There’s a fresh awareness of what it means to be alive in the full light of history.”
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To scholars monitoring the 2012 movement from their posts in academia — and some do — this latter-day apotheosis of the Mayan calendar is a source of frustration and an opportunity for deeper reflection. Or sometimes, just an opportunity. Anthony Aveni, an archeoastronomer and professor at Colgate, has a history with 2012 going back to the Harmonic Convergence, when he was interviewed on CNN to provide some perspective. “I got an offer from a literary agent to represent me the same day,” he told me. “So I’m grateful to José Arguelles for that.”
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Aveni is critical of Jenkins’s approach and his galactic-alignment theory. “I defy anyone to look up into the sky and see the galactic equator,” he said. “You need a radio telescope for that, and they were not known anywhere in the world that I’ve heard of until the 1930s.” The real question, to him, is how an obscure, culturally circumscribed issue like the end date of one Mayan long-count cycle could manage to gain such traction in the wider world.
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“Jenkins and Calleman and Arguelles are the Gnostics of our time,” Aveni said. “They’re seeking higher knowledge. They look for knowledge framed in mystery. And there aren’t many mysteries left, because science has decoded most of them.”
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John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas, is more complimentary of Jenkins’s research, even if he doubts the validity of his major conclusions, including the galactic-alignment theory. “John Jenkins has done his homework on the ancient Maya,” he told me, “and he’s thought about their culture a great deal. Arguelles and Calleman largely disregard what we know the Maya believed.” Still, like most Mayan experts, Hoopes is not convinced that the Maya would have considered the end of a world cycle to be an apocalyptic event; one cycle could be subsumed into the next without a hiccup in the system, let alone a rupture in the count of days.
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In the wider discussion around 2012, Hoopes sees a parallel to the debate going on in Kansas about teaching evolution and intelligent design in the public schools. It is an issue he takes so seriously that he has included the 2012 phenomenon in a course he developed called “Archaeological Myths and Realities,” which explores how science and history are manipulated to serve a religious or political agenda. Other examples include Nazi archaeology and the recently heralded ancient “pyramids” in Bosnia. Referrring to occult interpretations of the Maya, he says: “What’s interesting is how this fosters community in the New Age movement, and elsewhere, the same way that the anti-evolutionists have coalesced around intelligent design. I’ve started using the terms ‘religious right’ and ‘spiritual left.’ ”
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Toward the end of my visit with Jenkins in Colorado, we drove from his home in Windsor to Denver — about 50 miles south — to meet his wife, Ellen, for dinner and a screening of “2012: The Odyssey,” a documentary that Jenkins appears in along with José Arguelles and other authorities on 2012. Jenkins had written me a long, discouraged e-mail message that morning about an item he found on an academic message board, linking to an article about 2012 from USA Today. The article included a description of Jenkins’s galactic-alignment theory without citing him as the source, and to make matters worse, the scholar who posted the link quoted a description of the galactic alignment and asked, “Anyone want to speculate about what this means?”
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To Jenkins, it was further confirmation that his work is generally ignored inside a scholarly community that he has looked to for guidance and cited tirelessly in defense of the “authentic” Mayan tradition. He told me, as we drove past new housing developments going up where pastures had once been, that he had gone to conferences to meet the most important Mayanists and had been sending out papers and links to his Web site to selected scholars for years, but his attempts at making contact were usually ignored.
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“When you fund your own trip to do fieldwork by putting it on MasterCard,” he said, “and then they really don’t want to engage in a discussion with you, it’s kind of like ... wrong universe, I guess.”
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I asked him if he thought this might have something to do with some of his more speculative theories, like his assertion that the Maya had practiced pranayama — yogic deep breathing — based on the posture of Maya kings in certain paintings and carvings, which appears similar to full lotus.
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“It’s the assemblage of evidence that leads to my reading,” he insisted. “It’s not magically projecting something onto the images. But ultimately there is some guesswork involved. How often can you be 100 percent sure of anything?”
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By the time we drove up to the Oriental Theater in the Berkeley Highlands section of Denver, his spirits had lifted again. The Oriental is a handsome, Persian-themed theater from the 1920s that has recently been refurbished after a long decline; it retains elements of both the glamour of its distant past and the seediness left over from its middle age as an adult theater. Now the Oriental is an arts center with a regular schedule of film screenings and live entertainment.
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“Look at that,” Jenkins said with a gesture at the marquee, making sure that I saw the big “2012” in black numerals.
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While Jenkins mingled with the early arrivals inside the lobby, I sat at a cafe table with his wife, a social worker at a hospital in Boulder, and Gina Kissell, director of the Metaphysical Research Society, a local group that offers workshops and programs in comparative religion and spirituality. The society was a sponsor of the screening that night, and Kissell, an ebullient woman in a sequined top, was thrilled about the turnout. I asked her about 2012 and what it meant to her, and she started in without hesitating:
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“To me it’s all about a movement toward enlightenment. We say compassion over competition. This whole shift in consciousness is going to wipe away everything negative. Armageddon isn’t what it used to be, you know?” Kissell told me that she had recently tried spending 21 days without having a negative thought: “It’s really hard! I tried, but I didn’t make it through the second week.”
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Inside the theater, it was a festive scene. The seating sections were all full except for the balcony; a pair of waitresses roamed the aisles taking drink and sandwich orders (the Oriental has a full bar and panini menu); and the crowd presented a mix of the buttoned-down and the Bohemian, trending toward the tattooed and pierced. Ellen flashed me a proud look when Jenkins climbed onstage to give an introduction, and he was met with a lively burst of applause. Dressed in a well-worn jacket over a faded T-shirt, he could have been a professor who never quite recovered from his graduate-school years. Jenkins started by giving a primer of his theory about the galactic alignment and how the ancient Maya had calibrated their long-count calendar to coincide with this rare and transformative astronomical event. He shared his belief, reflected in the mantra “As above, so below,” that our lives are influenced by larger forces in the universe and that the Mayan sky watchers had used their sacred science to read the stars and divine creation’s deepest secrets. These same secrets can be ours, according to Jenkins’s theory, if we cup a hand to one ear, raise it to the sky and listen.
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“A lot of people ask me if the world is going to end in 2012,” he said, “and I’ve come up with the best way to address that. The short answer is yes. The long answer is no.”
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Writing in the forward to Jenkins’s “Maya Cosmogenesis 2012,” Terrence McKenna proffers that “we, by choice or design, actually live in the end time anticipated by the ancient Maya shaman-prophets. Their bones and their civilization have long since gone into the Gaian womb that claims all the children of time. Indeed, their cities were ghostly necropoleis by the time the Spanish conquerors first gazed upon them, 500 years ago. Yet it was our time that fascinated the Maya, and it was toward our time that they cast their ecstatic gaze, though it lay more than two millennia in the future at the time the first long-count dates were recorded.”
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It is a splendid, human-size dream, that an ancient people revered for unearthly wisdom could climb aboard a calendar ship and redeem us from our troubled world and the confines of our vexing natures. Dec. 21, 2012, is already here — long before the date arrives — and perhaps it has always been. End dates are not the stuff of fantasy, after all; each and every one of us has a terminal appointment inscribed in our calendars. And the end might just arrive sooner. Perhaps that is why we need to imagine a supernatural force with one eye on a ticking clock, waiting to make everything new again.
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It is the Maya who bring us apocalypse this time, and when the next one comes — well, we’ll just have to wait and see if the world is still here.
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