-Caveat Lector- <<So: April 19th: Waco - 1993; OK City bombing - 1995; Grand Forks (ND) flood/fire & reported greatest evacuation (over 30,000) since the Civil War. April 20th (1999): Littleton.>> >From http://www.parascope.com/articles/0497/april19.htm April 19, 1997: The fourth anniversary of the incineration of the Mt. Carmel Church near Waco, Texas, resulting in the highest fedkill body count since Wounded Knee; the second anniversary of the murderous bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, America's very own Reichstag fire. These two events have federal officials gritting their teeth with anxiety, as a nationwide string of bombings pockmark America's mental landscape with media-saturated terror. But it seems as if April 19 has always been an unofficial holiday of violence. On April 19, 1775, colonial militia intercepted Redcoats on their way to seize an arms depot, as the shots fired 'round the world ignited a rebellion against the mighty British Empire. Less than a century later, when Civil War threatened to destroy the fledgling Republic of the united States of America, first blood was drawn on April 19, 1861, when a Baltimore mob attempted to stop Massachusetts troops heading for Washington, D.C. (Lincoln also ordered a blockade of Confederate ports on that same day.) The U.S. went off the gold standard on April 19, 1933, which wasn't necessarily a violent event, although they may as well have sliced America's jugular, it's just a slower bleed this way. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto began a counteroffensive against Nazi forces on April 19, 1943 -- a heroic act of rebellion which nonetheless resulted in the incineration of the ghetto soon afterwards. And, as if an eerie echo of the Nazi's final solution to the Warsaw ghetto "problem," the FBI began its final assault on the Mt. Carmel church complex on April 19, 1993, resulting in the deaths of nearly all the Branch Davidians inside. Forward-Looking Infrared camera footage taken by FBI planes flying over Mt. Carmel, included in the new documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement which premiered recently at the Sundance Film Festival, shows evidence of FBI snipers firing into the back of the church as Davidians attempted to escape the burning compound. To mark this occasion, ParaScope presents a roundup of its reports on the Waco Massacre and the Oklahoma City Bombing, two bloody footprints left by an increasingly schizophrenic government and its agents in the field. >From ElectronicTelegraph (UK) ISSUE 1433 Wednesday 28 April 1999 The birthday boys The teenagers responsible for the Columbine High School massacre timed it to coincide with the 110th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth. Nato justifies its bombing of Serbia with veiled references to the Third Reich, and a neo-Nazi group has been linked to the Brixton and Brick Lane nail bombs. Niall Ferguson, the leading historian, shows how a man dead for more than 50 years remains an enduring force in our lives [International] Clinton presses for gun curbs to avoid another massacre TO most Americans, the massacre of 15 schoolchildren and the slaughter of 3,700 Albanians are unconnected events which might as well have happened on different planets. It is not just that (as the cynical saying goes) 15 deaths are a tragedy, especially when they take place in an archetypal small-town high school, while 3,700 deaths are a statistic, especially when they happen in far-off Kosovo. It is also a matter of motivation. Death in Colorado was the outcome of the pathetic fantasies of two sad teenage losers. Death in Kosovo is the work of one evil grown-up dictator. Or so it seemed to me, as I toured the East coast of America this week. Yet there is a connection, which also extends to another recent atrocity closer to home: the shopping-centre bomb in Brixton. Implausible though it seems, the link is Adolf Hitler. >From beyond his unknown grave, Hitler has a hand in all these apparently unrelated events. Take Brixton and Brick Lane. We still know relatively little about who carried out the bombings; but responsibility has been claimed by someone saying he belonged to the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, whose name derives from the numerical equivalents of Hitler's initials (A=1, H=8). The Colorado killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, chose the 110th anniversary of Hitler's birth on April 21, 1889, to slaughter their fellow pupils at Columbine High. According to the testimony of survivors, the two were members of a clique at the school called the Trenchcoat Mafia, who favoured black clothes and combat boots, clothing associated in their minds with the Nazis. They saw themselves as followers of a "Goth" fashion and occasionally could be heard speaking to one another in German. It also appears that they selected one of their victims on racial grounds. "I went bowling with [Klebold]," one pupil told the media last Wednesday, "and when he would do something good he would shout 'Heil Hitler!' and throw up his hand." The Internet "chat room" Harris listed as his favourite on his America On Line website was called Ich bin ein Auslander ("I am a foreigner"). Elsewhere on the site he posted lyrics by the German "industrial rock" band KMFDH, which stands for Kein Mitleid f�r die Mehrheit ("No pity for the majority"). It is hard to take this kind of thing seriously. Klebold and Harris clearly were a couple of pathetic Beavis and Butthead figures, and it is therefore tempting to dismiss the garbled historical content of their puerile fantasies. Nevertheless, it seems to me important for two reasons. The first is that we should never underestimate the power of puerility. Hitler himself, after all, was the quintessential teenage loser, as Ian Kershaw recently demonstrated in his superb biography. A chronic under-achiever at school, who failed to gain admission to art school and spent several years in Vienna doss-houses, Hitler reacted to failure by retreating into a fantasy world. Then, in 1914, the First World War transformed his life by unleashing his previously latent appetite for violence and danger, although even in the trenches he remained a humourless oddball. The obsession with Wagner, the daydreams of being a great artist, the fulfilment he found in violence and the hatred he came to feel for other ethnic groups - all this finds an echo in our own time. Wagner may have been replaced by KMFDH and watercolours by websites, but the gun-toting and the race hatred are constants. Look at the pictures of Hitler in the early 1920s, and you see a fully paid-up member of the Weimar Republic's Trenchcoat Mafia. The difference is that in the United States there is no organised outlet for teenage bloodlust of the sort Hitler and millions of his contemporaries found in the First World War, and afterwards in fascism. In modern America, whose sanitised wars now have to be fought without the loss of a single soldier, violence has been largely privatised, to the extent that you are now safer in the US army than in a US high school. Hand-guns were used to murder 9,390 people in America last year (compared with 30 in the UK). And there is limitless virtual violence, in the form of snuff videos and murderous computer games, such as the Colorado killers' favourite, Doom. All teenagers exposed to pornography are likely to want to try real sex; at least some teenagers exposed to warnography are bound to want to try real violence. The second point is that Hitler appeals not only to Beavis and Butthead types in American high schools. The neo-Nazi movement is an increasingly serious problem in many parts of ex-Communist Eastern Europe, where unemployment is at Great Depression levels. Go to Moscow and you can buy cassettes of Third Reich SS marching songs from hawkers in the street. In Rostock and other East German towns there are frequent attacks on foreigners by gangs of skinheads. More insidious, perhaps, is the phenomenon of Nazi chic in Western Europe. When the editor of GQ, James Brown, nominated the Nazis as the best-dressed men of the century, he intended (I imagine) to make a daring joke. His mistake was to make his joke in public. Such tasteless humour is quite commonplace in certain social circles in England, where a spirited rendition of the Horst Wessel song is more or less guaranteed to raise a laugh, and an invitation to a fancy-dress party is a welcome chance to don an SS officer's uniform. A little further down the social scale, there is a bouyant international market for all kinds of Nazi memorabilia, from cap badges and other military insignia to outright kitsch such as swastika-shaped Christmas tree lights. This kind of stuff is not hard to come by. One mainstream mail-order catalogue I know of openly offers videos with titles such as Death's Head: Crack Waffen-SS Actions of World War II, which patently glorify the most lethal forces of the Third Reich. It is not only nihilistic teenagers who are attracted to Nazi chic. Despite all that we know about the dire realities of the Third Reich, its aesthetic - a mixture of motorised romanticism and classicism on anabolic steroids - continues to seduce. Drive a black Porsche? Dye your hair blond? Get a kick out of jodhpurs and riding boots? Ever wondered why? Levity about Nazism has its counterpart in the overuse by politicians of historical analogies involving the Third Reich. Two of these have been much to the fore in the rhetoric of Nato leaders seeking to justify their air strikes against Serbia. The first concerns the policy of appeasement in the 1930s; the second, the Holocaust itself. In his article in last week's edition of Newsweek, Tony Blair explicitly contrasted Nato policy today with the policy of appeasing Germany in the 1930s. "We have learnt," he wrote, "not to appease dictators." By implication, Slobodan Milosevic is therefore the Adolf Hitler de nos jours. Others, not least the German Defence Minister, Rudolf Scharping, argue that the war is being waged to prevent "another genocide". When politicians say they never wished to "see scenes like these in Europe again", the scenes they refer to can only be scenes from Schindler's List. Only a few, such as the compulsively unsubtle Ken Livingstone, openly refer to Hitler and the Holocaust; but the parallel is almost universally drawn. Now, I am not one of those who rejects out of hand such parallels. Though unique, the Nazi policy of racial extermination was not incomparable: mass murder on a comparable, indeed larger, scale had already been committed by Stalin on no less specious grounds before the "Final Solution" was decided on by Hitler. Nor does it seem to me helpful to say that 2,700 deaths do not compare with 6,000,000: that simply reverses the clich� about tragedies and statistics, as if to suggest that Milosevic won't merit armed intervention until he passes at least the million mark. The Serbian regime is like a fascist dictatorship. The policy of ethnic cleansing - deportations and massacres - is like German policy in Poland in 1939-40. But the analogies being drawn by Blair, Clinton & Co are nevertheless misleading, and tend to trivialise the past as well as muddle the present. It will not do to say that the current air strikes against Serbia are based on the lessons of the past. For one thing, it was not the opponents of Hitler but the appeasers who, like Nato leaders today, exaggerated the power of air power (remember Baldwin's dictum that "The bomber will always get through"?). Secondly, we did not fight the Second World War because Hitler was persecuting the Jews within Germany, but because he invaded Poland, a sovereign state. If one applies Mr Blair's line of reasoning about Serbia, we should have bombed Berlin after the pogrom of November 9, 1938. This is obviously absurd. Incidentally, does anyone out there want to argue that Hitler could have been defeated by a policy of air strikes to "degrade the Nazi military machine" without the deployment of ground forces other than in a "permissive" environment? If anyone in the 1940s had thought the way Nato now thinks, there would have been no D-Day landings and the Nazis would in all probability still have been in power in 1955. In other words, the parallels between Milosevic and Hitler, between Kosovo and Auschwitz, are bad history. Indeed, they are not a great deal more sophisticated than the fantasies of the Trenchcoat Mafia. Sad teenage losers dream about being Hitler. In the same pathetic way, sad middle-aged politicians dream about being Churchill. (Especially erstwhile draft-dodgers and ex-CND members.) And who can be surprised, when the middle-aged politicians don so fraudulently the mantle of Churchill, if teenage rebels respond by donning the trenchcoat of Hitler? Preposterous though the latter may look in their black coats and combat boots, they are no more so than Messrs Clinton and Blair sound when they attempt to strike Churchillian or Rooseveltian chords. All that Bill Clinton has in common with Winston Churchill is a fondness for cigars. A week in America is a sobering experience for anyone from Europe. One suddenly grasps why Clinton is so popular - but also why Americans are so prone to shoot one another and themselves. For this is a country in which, for all the efforts of the multitudinous churches, traditional moral values have been more or less replaced by the value of stocks and shares. The town of Littleton itself, where most Columbine High pupils live, has been transformed by the boom of the 1990s. With its strip malls and fast-food restaurants, its spacious suburbs and gas-guzzling cars, it is a microcosm of Clinton's America. This is the kind of place where the parents track the Dow Jones and trade internet shares via Charles Schwab, while their offspring spend the proceeds in endless, indefatigable consumption. Asked to explain the social divisions within their school that might have given rise to this week's massacre, pupils at Columbine talked almost exclusively in terms of clothing brands. The Trenchcoat Mafia, it turns out, were mainly identified as "outsiders" because they did not wear clothes from The Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch, the stores favoured by the school's hegemonic "jocks" and "preppies". Even in the aftermath of the massacre, there was a disconcerting narcissism about these children. "It's a trip," one Columbine junior was heard to say of the frenzied media attention on his school. "It's unbelievable. None of us had any idea how national this was." One senior television executive said on Wednesday: "We had some kids on last night who could have co-anchored our coverage, they were so media-savvy." Planet Dow Jones in April 1999: where identities have literally become labels and the most intense experiences are instantly converted into prime-time viewing. It is too often forgotten that, at root, national socialism was as much a reaction against capitalism as international socialism. But where the latter rejected the unequal distribution brought about by market forces, the former rejected the moral laxity which appeared to be the accompaniment of materialism. It is also important to recall that the Nazi party was a party of youth, which based its electoral success in 1930-33 in large part on its ability to mobilise young and especially first-time voters. The average age of the party's membership was more than a decade lower than that of any other German party. Among the most successful of all the movement's offshoots after 1933 was the Hitler Youth. Images of a clean-cut, anti-materialistic youth, dedicated to gymnastics and drill, were central to Nazi propaganda. Significantly, the regime imprisoned the minority of "swing youths" who grew their hair, liked jazz and dressed like proto-beatniks. America today combines unparalleled material prosperity with an astonishing moral laxity personified by its philandering, perjuring President. It is not wholly surprising that a few disaffected adolescents find in Hitler an alluring embodiment of a vengeful alternative to all this. How much more appealing national socialism must seem to those East European teenagers, not least those in Serbia, who are only allowed to look at, but not to touch, the cornucopic bounty of Planet Dow Jones. This is not to exaggerate the present significance of neo-Nazi groups such as Combat 18, which will surely always remain on the margins of a society as historically literate (not to say obsessed) as Britain's. Nor is it to predict that groups such as the Trenchcoat Mafia in the United States will ever be more than marginal and ephemeral - so long as Planet Dow Jones does not suddenly become Planet Great Depression. But it is to emphasise the potential for a fascist revival elsewhere, and especially in Eastern Europe, including Russia. We underestimate the disaffection of youth there at our peril. Invoking the memory of the Second World War, Clinton and Blair have picked a fight with one little Hitler. They should not now be surprised if, even in the obscurity of Littleton and Brixton, they have to fight some even littler Hitlers, too. Niall Ferguson is the author of The Pity of War (Allen Lane, �18.99). ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From http://www.kwtv.com/today/archive-1/tod0419.htm Today is Monday, April 19th, the 109th day of 1999. There are 256 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On April 19th, 1995, a truck bomb devastated the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. (Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were later convicted of charges related to the bombing.) On this date: In 1775, the American Revolutionary War began with the battles of Lexington and Concord. In 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run from Ashland, Massachusetts, to Boston. Winner John J. McDermott ran the course in two hours, 55 minutes and ten seconds. In 1898, Congress passed a resolution recognizing Cuban independence and demanding that Spain relinquish its authority over Cuba. In 1933, the United States went off the gold standard. In 1943, during World War Two, tens of thousands of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto began a valiant but futile battle against Nazi forces. In 1945, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel" opened on Broadway. In 1951, General Douglas MacArthur, relieved of his command by President Truman, bid farewell to Congress, quoting a line from a ballad: "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." In 1982, astronauts Sally K. Ride and Guion S. Bluford Junior became the first woman and first African-American to be tapped for US space missions. In 1993, the 51-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, ended as fire destroyed the structure after federal agents began smashing their way in; dozens of people, including David Koresh, were killed. Ten years ago: Forty-seven sailors were killed when a gun turret exploded aboard the USS Iowa. A female jogger in New York's Central Park was brutally beaten and raped (six teenagers were charged in the near-fatal attack; five were convicted, one pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.) Five years ago: A Los Angeles jury awarded $3.8 million to beaten motorist Rodney King. The Supreme Court outlawed the practice of excluding people from juries because of their gender. One year ago: Wang Dan, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, arrived in the United States after being freed by China. It was announced that Linda McCartney, the wife of Paul McCartney, had died two days earlier at age 56. Mexican poet-philosopher Octavio Paz died at age 84. Today's Birthdays: Actor Hugh O'Brian is 74. Actor Don Adams is 73. Actor-comedian Dudley Moore is 64. Actress Elinor Donahue is 62. Actor Tim Curry is 53. Pop singer Mark "Flo" Volman (The Turtles; Flo and Eddie) is 52. Tennis player Sue Barker is 43. Actress Ashley Judd is 31. Pop singer Bekka Bramlett is 31. Actor Courtland Mead ("Kirk") is 12. >From http://www.kwtv.com/today/archive-1/tod0420.htm Today is Tuesday, April 20th, the 110th day of 1999. There are 255 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On April 20th, 1949, scientists at the Mayo Clinic announced they'd succeeded in synthesizing a hormone found to be useful in treating rheumatoi d arthritis; the substance was named "cortisone." On this date: In 1812, the fourth vice president of the United States, George Clinton, died in Washington at age 73, becoming the first vice president to die while in office. In 1836, the Territory of Wisconsin was established by Congress. In 1889, Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria. In 1902, scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the radioactive element radium. In 1940, RCA publicly demonstrated its new and powerful electron microscope. In 1945, during World War Two, allied forces took control of the German cities of Nuremberg and Stuttgart. In 1968, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister of Canada. In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools. In 1972, the manned lunar module from Apollo 16 landed on the moon. In 1978, a Korean Air Lines Boeing 707 crash-landed in northwestern Russia after being fired on by a Soviet interceptor after entering Soviet airspace. Two passengers were killed. Ten years ago: Ramon Salcido (sal-SEE'-doh), a California winery worker later convicted of killing six relatives and a co-worker, was deported from Mexico to the US. The case of Oliver North went to the jury in his Iran-Contra trial. Five years ago: Israeli and PLO negotiators wrapped up an agreement transferring civilian government powers to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Jericho. One year ago: In an unusual ue of a racketeering law designed to fight the mob, a federal jury in Chicago ruled that anti-abortion protest organizers had used threats and violence to shut down clinics. A Boeing 727 leased to Air France crashed in Bogota, Colombia, killing all 53 people aboard. Today's Birthdays: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is 79. Bandleader Tito Puente is 76. Actress Nina Foch is 75. Singer Johnny Tillotson is 60. Actor George Takei is 59. Actor Ryan O'Neal is 58. Rock musician Craig Frost (Grand Funk; Bob Seger's Silver Bullet Band) is 51. Actress Jessica Lange is 50. Singer Luther Vandross is 48. Actor Denis Leary is 41. Actor Clint Howard is 40. Country singer Wade Hayes is 30. Actress Carmen Electra is 27. Actor Joey Lawrence is 23. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller, German Writer (1759-1805) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
