-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Today's Lesson From The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends towards which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends. Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed on them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants. If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to. ===== Fin-de-siecle Party Time: World to End Next Week Nostradamus said so According to a prophesy of Nostradamus, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will wreak their destruction in July 1999 - next Sunday, to be precise - and many millennial pessimists believe it. Have we really got five days left to live? asks Nigel Farndale ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NEXT Sunday will be a big day for War, Death, Famine and Plague. After a light breakfast and a flick through the morning papers, the Four Horsemen will saddle up and go about their apocalyptic business like there's no tomorrow. Which, of course, there won't be. This is what Nostradamus, the 16th-century French astrologer and physician, predicted will happen in five days' time. Apart from the bit about the breakfast and the papers. That was just my way of easing you gently into this creepy subject. And, strictly speaking, the apocalypse part is only how his followers interpret his best-known prediction: that a great King of Terror will come from the sky in July 1999. This was one of a thousand predictions Nostradamus wrote - in rhymed quatrains and grouped in hundreds - in a book called Centuries. In full, Century X quatrain 72 reads: "L'an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra un grand Roy d'Effraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bon heur." (In the year nineteen hundred and ninety nine, seven months, from the sky will come a great King of Terror. He will resurrect the great King of Angolmois. Before and afterwards Mars reigns happily.) Whatever the correct interpretation of X.72 is, there are several reasons why we should take the predictions of Nostradamus more seriously than those of, say, Mystic Meg. First, Nostradamus may well have foreseen the Great Fire of London, the French and Russian revolutions, Napoleon, Hitler, the assassination of Kennedy, and the Gulf War - depending on how you decipher his highly ambiguous writings. Second, the legend of Nostradamus is woven into the fabric of history. The Maginot line, for instance, was drawn up in the 1920s and 1930s because Nostradamus had predicted that France would be invaded via Switzerland. And not only do the libraries at the Vatican and Lambeth Palace contain early editions of Centuries - which was first published in 1555 and hasn't been out of print since - but also his devotees have included Catherine de' Medici, Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Goebbels and Churchill. Third, with his flowing grey beard, scholar's gown and brooding countenance, Nostradamus looked the part. Even his name resonates with enigma and gravitas. Not surprisingly then, millennial doomsayers around the world are becoming terribly excited about the arrival of the King of Terror, or anti-Christ, next month. Members of the Aetherius Society - who believe Jesus was an alien - are holding four power circles, or prayer sessions, a week in anticipation of the big day. Although Michel de N�tredame (Nostradamus was his Latinised name) was born in St R�my de Provence in 1503 and practised medicine for a while in Paris, Salon-de-Provence is the town with which he is most closely associated. He lived most of his life in Salon - and died of dropsy there in 1566. Consequently, it has become a magnet for occultists, New Age mystics, pagans and Christian fundamentalists alike. The Nostradamus museum there is always busy, and guided tours of the town are so popular they have to be booked weeks in advance. Do an Internet search on the word Nostradamus and you will come up with thousands of sites. Worldwide, books on Nostradamus are selling in millions. The Japanese especially are in the grip of apocalyptic panic. Most bookshops in Tokyo have a Nostradamus section, some displaying as many as 185 titles devoted to our man. And a recent poll showed that 20 per cent of the population of Japan believe the King of Terror prediction. Death cults have even formed in order to help fulfil the prophecy - that is what Shoko Asahara's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway was all about, albeit prematurely, in 1995. Closer to home, Channel 4 is devoting a whole evening's viewing to the subject. "Nostradamus Night" will be on Saturday, the night before the world is expected to end (Nostradamus enthusiasts believe that July 4, American Independence Day, is the most likely day next month for the Apocalypse because of a reference the seer made to "Al- quilloye", the American eagle). Matthew Dumbrell, a civil servant turned prophet, believes that the total eclipse of the sun on August 11 is a more likely time for the world to end. In fact, he is so certain it will end at 12.50pm on that day, he has planned his final hours. He will return to his birthplace - Lewes in Sussex - check in to the White Hart Hotel, dine alone and go to bed early. Next morning he will settle his bill and head for the Downs where, alone with his Bible and a copy of Centuries, he will wait to meet his maker. He has even placed a �1 bet with William Hill, at odds of a million to one, that the King of Terror will come at that time (though quite how he plans to collect his winnings is unclear). He has also written to various heads of state and placed advertisements in The Daily Telegraph warning of our impending doom. Michael Day, a regular preacher at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, believes that July will see a build up to the events circling the eclipse in August. The planetary alignments at the time will echo the Nostradamus prophecy, he says; and the Four Horsemen are the eagle (Scorpio), the bull (Taurus), the fairman (Uranus) and the lion (Sun in Leo). He thinks the King of Terror will appear as a great war. A couple of months ago, the prospect of a Third World War beginning in July didn't seem so far-fetched. One broadsheet headline especially - "Yeltsin says West risks a World War" - made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Another - "Chinese fury at Nato bombs" - had particular significance for the followers of Nostradamus, because the second part of the King of Terror prediction translates as: "He will resurrect the Great King of Angolmois. Before and afterwards Mars reigns happily." (Angolmois is an anagram of the 16th-century French word Mongolois, or Mongolians, or Chinese. The King of the Mongols was Genghis Khan. Mars is the god of war.) But not everyone believes the great King of Terror will come from the skies in the form of a Russian or Chinese nuclear missile. German devotees have interpreted the King of Terror as being the Cassini space probe, which will come to within 730 miles of Earth in August, bearing its load of 72lbs of plutonium fuel. Others anticipate an asteroidal impact some time this summer. And, although it wouldn't happen until September, another interpretation of the King of Terror is "Infinity Day". Many of the outdated mainframe computers that regulate nuclear reactors in Russia and Eastern Europe are programmed with a language called Cobol which uses a string of nines to mean infinity. When they reach the ninth minute of the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month of 1999 they will think they have reached the end of time, stop working and cause a series of meltdowns. (The Russian Atomic Energy Ministry does not believe there will be a problem and so has declined to bring forward its next scheduled computer check - which will be sometime next year.) All mystics, psychics and clairvoyants like to keep their predictions as vague as possible, to increase their chances of appearing to be right. Nostradamus was no exception. But he had an added incentive for being obscure. Although he converted to Catholicism, he was born Jewish and lived his life in fear of the Inquisition. In order to avoid prosecution as an occultist or magician, he deliberately made his prophesies difficult to interpret. He wrote them in a crabbed hybrid of French, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew, as well as using his own neologisms (constructed from ancient Greek and Latin). He also had a fondness for anagrams, such as Rapis for Paris, which he (sometimes) signalled by writing the word in capital letters. This all means that people can read into his prophesies whatever they want to, almost. Faint parallels are deemed precise descriptions and inconvenient facts are ignored. When Nostradamus referred to the "Master of Time", for instance, his devotees have taken this to mean Einstein - but maybe he meant Dr Who. And "Pau, Nay, Loron" is supposedly an anagram of Napaulon Roy (a 16th-century spelling of the words Emperor Napoleon). But what if Nostradamus was referring to someone who happened to be called Pau Nay Loron? Most dubiously of all, the name "Mabus" is said to refer to Saddam. Why? Because if you hold it up to the mirror and change the b for d... Oh, please. The more famous Nostradamus became in his own lifetime, the more the Inquisition grew suspicious of him. One prediction especially made them think he was in league with the devil. He said the King of France, Henry II, would die in a jousting accident - "The young lion shall overcome the old in single combat, inside a golden cage his eye will be put out in one of the two contests, then he shall die grievously." Four years later, in 1559, Henry, wearing a suit of golden armour, did indeed die when a jousting lance went through his eye. As with his writing style, so Nostradamus's method of prediction was far from straightforward. He combined traditional astrology (using charts and star signs) with the visions he saw when scrying (looking through the flame of a candle into a bowl of water placed on a brass tripod) with a technique called comparative horoscopy (that is, he looked up the position of the planets at the time of great events in the past and then made a prediction that history would repeat itself when similar planetary conjunctions occurred in the future). Some of the results are indeed spooky. In one quatrain he referred to Hister, and this has been taken to mean Hitler. In another, he wrote "the first person of the third [Reich] will do worse than Nero. He will be valiant in shedding human blood and will cause ovens to be built [the gas chambers]". He also seemingly predicted the battle of Trafalgar. "Between two seas stands a promontory," he wrote. "A man will later die by a horse's bridle. Neptune unfurls a black sail for this man." The promontory is Gibraltar (between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean) near where the battle of Trafalgar was fought. The man is believed to be Villeneuve, the admiral of the French fleet who was later strangled to death by a horse's bridle. Neptune's black flag indicates his defeat at sea. Nostradamus had a gloomy disposition, and this was coloured by his own experience. He lived in a time of plagues and through his (then) radical ideas on the importance of hygiene and the stupidity of trying to cure patients by bleeding them he became the best-known - and most effective - plague doctor in France. But he nevertheless lost his first wife and two sons to the plague. And he witnessed terrible famines, when severe weather conditions destroyed crops for several years in a row. He would also have seen the slaughter of Catholics by Protestants, who recruited thousands of mercenary German cavalry to lay waste to swathes of eastern France. So should we feel uneasy as next Sunday approaches, or should we just dismiss Nostradamus as a charlatan whose predictions are fodder for the superstitious, witless and gullible? Richard Dawkins, the internationally renowed Darwinian rationalist - and Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University - favours the latter. "People who believe in coincidence tend to be bad statisticians," he tells me. "They only notice the apparently successful predictions, they don't notice the failures." Dawkins believes astrology is an aesthetic affront. "Its pre-Copernican dabblings demean and cheapen astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles." Strange phenomena, he argues, can nearly always be explained in terms of probability. And our willingness to be impressed by apparently uncanny coincidences is something we inherit from our Stone Age ancestors. Because they lived in small communities, they would all hear about every coincidence that happened to everyone they knew, which would have been only about 50 people. As a consequence, our 20th-century brains are calibrated to detect patterns and to gasp with astonishment at levels of coincidence which, by today's standards, are actually quite modest, given that mass communication means we hear about the experiences of many millions of people, not just 50. Numbers have a totemic power, and 1999 is no exception. But, as Dr Johnson warned, you should always be suspicious of round numbers, because they are too convenient. And, as Isaac Asimov wrote: "Inspect every piece of pseudo-science and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold." The interest that is being shown in Nostradamus at the moment seems to indicate, then, that certain sections of society are feeling insecure - that they want to take comfort in not having to make authentic choices, that is, not having to take responsibility for their own destinies. Shelley von Strunckel, a magazine astrologer, believes we are emotionally insecure because we have become divorced from our spiritual roots. "People need metaphysical reassurance," she tells me, "because life in the Aquarian Age is changing so quickly. People are confused and apprehensive. They are attracted to anxiety magnets like the millennium bug, and Nostradamus and the eclipse. We all have a part of us that likes to be scared. As for me, I'm busy planning what to wear next season. That's how seriously I'm taking the prediction." After speaking to the author and academic Peter Lemesurier, the country's leading authority on Nostradamus, I'm not taking the prophesy seriously at all. In the past, Lemesurier has shown that Nostradamus never actually predicted the end of the world - not least because his predictions continue up to the year 3797, when he appears to have run out of steam. Lemesurier also reveals that, when Nostradamus used the word Hister, he was actually referring to the classical name for the Lower Danube. Understandably, Lemesurier has made himself unpopular with the more fanatical followers of the seer. "Most of the people talking up the panic simply aren't trained linguists," he says with a sigh. "I get around 300 e-mails every day from megalomaniacs and paranoid idiots. Most are trying to read their own agendas into the prophesy. I'm constantly attacked for being a charlatan, fraud and liar. One man calling himself the King of Terror has even made death threats. You're playing with fire with Nostradamus. He inspires incredible ferocity and intolerance." Lemesurier says he is agnostic as to whether Nostradamus was a true prophet or not, but that he nevertheless enjoys solving his linguistic puzzles as an intellectual exercise. To interpret the King of Terror quatrain Lemesurier has gone back to the original text of 1555 and discovered that it actually refers to "roy deffraieur" (an appeaser king). In subsequent corrupt editions, after the death of Nostradamus, the word acquired an apostrophe to become "roy d'effraieur" (king of terror). So there you have it. Thanks to a misplaced apostrophe, the world won't end next Sunday after all. The London Telegraph, June 29, 1999 Signs of the Apocalypse Rare Barbary Lion Discovered Now, if there were only any Christians left to feed to it HOEDSPRUIT, South Africa - When Elsayed Hussein Akef fled Mozambique in 1996, abandoning his bankrupt Akef Egyptian Circus and leaving its lions, tigers, horses, dogs and last sick python to starve to death, he must not have realized what he had left behind. Nor did the Mozambicans and Britons who saved the animals. It was only when three of the lions were safe in pens here at the Hoedspruit Research and Breeding Center for Endangered Species that someone realized that Giepie, the huge male with the rich black mane running the length of his underbody, did not look much like other lions. Veterinarians now say he is one of the few Barbary lions left in the world. The last one in the wild was shot in 1921 in Morocco, and for a few months, there were claims that Giepie was the only Barbary left. But the excitement over finding him led small European zoos and circuses to pipe up, ''Hey - we've got a lion that looks like that.'' One of them even agreed to ship its lioness to South Africa, and now the possibility exists that the subspecies can be bred back into viability. Barbary lions are the stuff of legend. It was Barbaries, captured in Rome's North African colonies, that ate Christians in the Colosseum. Haile Selassie had several in his court when he ruled Ethiopia. The MGM movie lion, some assert, was one. But now the subspecies exists mostly as genetic bits and pieces in other lions, because many were captured for circuses and interbred. Scientists say that the whole idea of a lion ''species'' is rather tricky. Species are usually separated by ability to mate, but a lion and a tiger can produce a cub, just as a donkey and a horse can produce a mule. In Africa, lions are thought of as one species, but there are several types that seem not to interbreed in the wild. Barbaries may be one, but they were wiped out of the wild before they could be studied. ''A Barbary is based on its look, the big thick mane going from its belly to its groin,'' said Peter Rogers, the Hoedspruit center's veterinarian. ''It's sort of like some humans having extra thick beards.'' How Giepie (pronounced HEE-pee, and renamed after a Hoedspruit employee with a wild haircut) got here is a roustabout romance in itself. Between 1993 and 1996, the Akef circus wandered slowly down Africa, from Djibouti to Zimbabwe, stopping to put on its dog-and-pony acts, contortionists and snake charmers for audiences paying pennies. But it often camped for months without performing, and conservationists believe it was really a front for smuggling endangered species. Six chimpanzees, several pythons and some rare gray parrots were seized from it, and documents showed that it was buying chimps from Zairian smugglers. When officials tried to make arrests, Mr. Akef claimed diplomatic immunity and got Egyptian officials to intervene. In Zimbabwe, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals finally cracked down in late 1995, confiscating three dying pythons in a raid. The circus, ordered deported, slipped into Mozambique and camped in a park in the capital, Maputo. In June 1996, Elena Son, manager of a tour business, visited and found Mr. Akef long gone and his workers struggling to feed the animals and themselves. One tiger was dying and the lions and horses were so thin their ribs stuck out. The big cats lay in their own excrement in the small cages where they had spent their lives. Miss Son paid to buy them meat and brought in Animal Defenders, a British animal rights group. It found homes in South African game parks, pushed through the complex paperwork, fended off a Mozambican nightclub owner trying to seize them for bad debts and trucked them to Hoedspruit. Here, released into 11-hectare (28-acre) enclosures, the lions were scared even of rustling leaves. ''They didn't know how to walk in the bush,'' said Lente Roode, the center's owner. ''They didn't know how to drink from the pond.'' News of the rescue reached the ears of other zoos. A bankrupt safari park in Bologna, Italy, offered its two Barbary-looking lions, Arturo and his sister, Sissi, if the center would pay the fare. The price, $16,000, broke Mrs. Roode's budget, but she managed it. Arturo is sterile, but Sissi may be bred with Giepie. Their meeting has been delayed while they get to know each other through the fence. Between lions, a failure in sex appeal means a first date may end in a fatal fight. International Herald Tribune, June 29, 1999 The Sheep Will Believe Anything Wheee! How Will We Spend a Trillion Dollars in Budget Surplus! Clinton wants to put some of the money he took out of Social Security back in. Praise Clinton, Our Saviour! WASHINGTON - Seeking to capitalize on new projections showing that the federal budget surplus over 10 years will be $1 trillion more than anticipated, President Bill Clinton on Monday unveiled sweeping new proposals to allocate the windfall among Social Security, Medicare and other spending and tax-cut proposals. Mr. Clinton's plan is sure to renew and intensify his long-running battle with Republicans in Congress over the nation's priorities as it enters a new era in which the two parties must divide up pots of money far larger than anything they could have imagined even a year or two ago. For the current fiscal year, the White House now expects an overall budget surplus of $99 billion, the biggest ever and $20 billion more than it projected in February. ''Now we have a chance to do even more to use the fruits of our prosperity today to strengthen our prospects for tomorrow - indeed for tomorrows well into the 21st century,'' the president said. So robust is the expected flow of revenue into the Treasury under the new White House proposals that by 2015, the government will have paid off the entire $3 trillion in national debt held by the public, Democrats said. The White House wants to use much of the money on revised approaches to shoring up the two big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, both of which will face serious financial problems in coming decades. Under his new plan, Mr. Clinton said that Social Security can be put on sound footing until 2053, nearly two decades beyond the point it will run into trouble if nothing is done. And he will call for Medicare to get enough new financing to keep it solvent until 2027, an improvement of about a decade beyond current predictions. Democrats said that with so much extra money now on the table - the new projections show about $1 trillion available over the next decade even without including excess Social Security revenues that have swelled surplus figures in recent years - Mr. Clinton will open the door to a sizable tax cut. Until now, Mr. Clinton had insisted that he would agree to a tax cut only after Social Security's finances had been made stable for at least 75 years, the actuarial benchmark for the retirement system's solvency. His new approach implies that he would be willing to consider a tax cut even if Social Security's solvency is not guaranteed for that long. Still, Democrats said Mr. Clinton intended to demand that Republicans accede to his approach to Social Security and Medicare before considering tax cuts or allowing any substantial increase in spending. ''If he means what he says, he's reversing Democratic plans to spend the Social Security trust fund on more Washington programs and following the congressional Republicans' lead in locking away Americans' retirement security,'' said John Czwartacki, spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. Republicans are already calling for a tax cut of $775 billion over the next decade, and the new surplus figures are certain to make them more determined to return more money to taxpayers. But there is considerable pent-up demand for additional spending within both parties, for purposes as varied as the military, transportation and health. Mr. Clinton, however, will not call for a removal of the tight spending limits imposed on Congress by the bipartisan 1997 balanced budget agreement, Democrats said. Mr. Clinton also wants his main tax-cut proposal, to provide incentives for retirement savings to low- and middle-income families, to get priority over Republican calls for tax-rate reductions, reduced capital gains taxes, cuts in the estate tax and other tax cuts at the top of the Republican wish list. Mr. Clinton is scheduled to unveil a separate proposal Tuesday for overhauling Medicare, the health insurance system for the elderly. In putting out a proposal early in the week, Mr. Clinton was trying to get a step ahead of the Republican leadership, which will have a new set of surplus estimates available from the Congressional Budget Office by mid-week . Mr. Clinton's new plan includes a revised version of a proposal that the two parties have been jockeying over for several months: a ''lock box'' to ensure that the excess Social Security revenues are not spent, but used only to reduce the national debt or to ensure the retirement system's long-term viability. In his original budget proposal in January, Clinton proposed reserving 62 percent of the budget surplus over 15 years for Social Security, but in a way that would allow him to spend a portion of the Social Security surplus in the next few years. Both parties have rejected that approach, and although they differ on details, have basically endorsed setting aside every dollar of each year's Social Security surplus. White House officials said their new plan would respond to the congressional criticism, and would also include a provision that would link reducing the national debt to improving Social Security's long-term financial condition. International Herald Tribune, June 29, 1999 Tibet China Chooses a New Holy Man for Tibet Collecting Karma SHIGATSE, China - A Tibetan boy, only 9 years old and at the heart of a political dogfight between the Dalai Lama and China, arrived at a sacred Tibetan temple on Monday, blanketed in tight security as China pressed Tibetans to accept him as the choice for the second holiest post in Tibet. Shielded in a 21-vehicle convoy that included wailing police vans and an ambulance and surrounded by monks with walkie-talkies, the boy roared into the Tashi Lhunpo monastery to officiate over an annual Buddhist ceremony in Tibet's second largest city. After the unraveling of a 30-meter (100-foot) satin depiction of the Buddha of today, the boy returned to his well-guarded compound nearby. Several thousand Tibetan pilgrims, some prostrating themselves in the dirt at the foot of the temple's mud walls, were kept far from the youngster, whom China chose in 1995 as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama - the second most revered figure in Tibet Buddhism. The Dalai Lama picked another boy and that child and his family are believed to be under house arrest. The show of force and the unwillingness of Chinese authorities to allow a group of foreign reporters to actually see the doe-eyed youngster, named Losang Qamba, was an indication of the difficulty Chinese authorities are having in persuading Tibetans to accept the boy as their new ''Ocean of Knowledge,'' or Panchen Lama. In a pre-dawn visit to a temple in Lhasa on June 18, for example, Chinese troops - bearing automatic weapons - took up positions on the roof of the famed Jokhang Monastery, banned traffic from the surrounding Barkhor district in Lhasa and closed the 90-kilometer (55-mile) road from the airport into town to prepare for the boy's arrival. Security was similarly tight for his arrival in Shigatse on June 20, witnesses said. The controversy over the new Panchen Lama, the 11th in a line that stretches back centuries, is more than just a religious tussle. It cuts to the heart of the legitimacy of China's rule over Tibet and illustrates the tenuous support China' s government has in this, China's, most remote province. It also underscores the enduring authority of the Dalai Lama, the exiled temporal and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, who fled China in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese Communist rule. Since that uprising, China's policy toward Tibet has alternated between fierce repression and perfunctory tolerance of its unique culture and Tibetan Buddhism. The 10th Panchen Lama died in the Tashi Lhunpo monastery of an apparent heart attack on Jan. 28, 1989 during a period when anti-Chinese demonstrations raged throughout Tibet. He was beloved by many Tibetans and had been a long-term critic of Chinese Communist rule while working within the Chinese system to better the lives of Tibet's 2.4 million people. Detained eight years for criticizing Communist policy in Tibet, he was banned from traveling to Tibet from 1964 to 1982 and was never allowed to reside permanently in Tashi Lhunpo, the traditional home of Panchen Lamas and the site of the world's biggest bronze Buddha. Ironically, many Western analysts blame the Dalai Lama for sparking the controversy. In May 1995, he announced his choice of a boy from Nagchu Province in Tibet as the Panchen Lama's reincarnation. Monks from Tashi Lhunpo had been in secret contact with the Dalai Lama and had submitted a list of names. The assumption was that China would allow the Dalai Lama to participate in choosing the 11th Panchen Lama as long as he did not publicize it and did not contradict the impression that Beijing ran the procedure. But after the Dalai Lama made the announcement, the abbot from Tashi Lhunpo, Chatral Rinpoche, was arrested and sentenced to jail for illegal contacts with the Tibetan leader. He has not been released. Beijing then went ahead and chose a different boy in a ceremony that involved plucking a ball of dough from a golden urn. The official Chinese press agency, Xinhua, recently dubbed him ''Soul Boy.'' In interviews supervised by Chinese officials, religious figures contended that Tibet's people supported Beijing's choice for the Panchen Lama. Nema Tsering, a deputy governor of Tibet, said a concern about ''separatist terrorist activity'' explained the tight security. ''We can do nothing but increase his security,'' he said. ''No matter what you say, in Tibet there is a separatist struggle.'' Wang Dui, a deputy director of the Jokhang monastery, said the welcome at his monastery for the Panchen Lama had been both ''gracious and warm.'' At Tashi Lhunpo, a 64-year-old monk named Ang Tsering said - with a deadpan expression - that the monks there felt ''unlimited happiness'' at the young boy's arrival. But in surreptitious conversations, monks at both monasteries charged that they had been placed under enormous pressure by China's government to accept the boy. One crimson-robed monk at the Jokhang said no real worshippers came to see the boy and that the monastery's 115 monks were herded into the institution's main hall on June 18 hours before dawn without being told what was happening. ''All of us were very uncomfortable,'' he said. ''They threatened us. They said if we didn't behave we'd be kicked out of the monastery.'' ''The pressure here is very high,'' echoed a monk at Tashi Lhunpo, which has more than 800 monks. ''They told us that if we didn't behave we would be forced out and that the monastery would not be allowed to replace us.'' China already limits the number of monks in monasteries in Tibet. Before the Cultural Revolution, 3,800 monks practiced at Tashi Lhunpo. Many pilgrims who attended the three-day festival at Tashi Lhunpo also said they did not accept China's choice. More than 15,000 flocked to the monastery on Monday, the first day of the three-day festival, to see a depiction of the Buddha of the past. Clutching a hand-held prayer wheel, and mumbling Buddhist prayers, one elderly nomad, his long hair wrapped in crimson cloth and his ears pierced with turquoise studs, said he had walked five days to reach Shigatse. ''I didn't come here for the boy,'' he said in broken Chinese. ''I came here to collect karma.'' International Herald Tribune, June 29, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris 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
