Reflections on history
People have no idea how it pains me to discuss current events. Well, OK, sometimes current events can be fun, but speaking generally. Usually I am FAR more interested in Plutarch or Artaxerxes or James Madison than I am in giving a second thought to Trump or Hillary or any other limelighter in today's news. Ask any professional historian; the past is one's passion. The past is never dead, the people in it are still alive, and it all counts greatly. And if you don't get it, you are a dunce, an idiot, a dolt, and what good are you, anyway? For "normal" people if it is more than, say, 3 or 4 years in the past, it may as well be the Age of Dinosaurs. Who cares who won the Civil War? Someone won it and we are alive now and that stuff doesn't matter any more. As I was just saying to Teddy Roosevelt the other day, a lot of people are really stupid. --------------- What has brought all of this on was an interview on C-Span between the questioner, a woman with India background named Aruna Viswanatha, and minor political celebrity (or political knave, take your pick) George Papadopoulous. My eyes rolled to the ceiling. This can't be real, can it? I remembered my youth in Eisenhower-era Chicago. My friends had names like Johnson, Olson, Carter, Ramey, Schrieber, Hintz, Bevin, Cummings, etc., or sometimes Berlowitz or Ostroff or Helen Augenlicht (a terrific girl who shared my sense of humor). "Rojas" was an outlier, nobody in the neighborhood had a Spanish name, nobody. For that matter my family was almost the only Rojas in Chicago. How many are there now? 10,000? 25,000? Some number like that. As a college student I did know one Greek, a friendship that came and went and good riddance, but at the time it was real enough. Anyway, he had the good sense to have a pronounceable name, Kontos, which was easy to remember. These days everything has changed. There was one name, a scholar from Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time) named Malalasekera, whom I heard speak at a forum of religion scholars in the city, but I could always bring that one to mind well enough because it was so poetic. So, I decided to listen in to the interview between Viswanatha and Papadopoulous out of curiosity. Surely neither would understand the other and it would all be a lot of laughs. Both spoke flawless American, like they had lived next door to me in Chicago and also attended Nettlehorst grammar school. Which was almost the case since Papadopoulus is a Chicagoan himself. Viswanatha is from some remote fastness like Ohio or Wisconsin or other exotic land. Papadopoulous has a new book out; sorry, I have no interest in reading it and will content myself with perusing writings of a distant ancestor of his like maybe Plato (which is a lot easier to spell) but the interview had its own interest. I'm rather glad I heard it. I still think that "George" (let me drop the Papadopoulous since it takes me 2 minutes to type it out) is self-serving in much of what he says, but it now is clear that he does have a case to make and that some of what he reported has value of its own. Guess what? The FBI lies to people and does so with impunity. I already knew this, to be sure. I recall a time when I lived in Arizona and was visited by two agents. It seems that the head of my dissertation committee had been murdered. What did I know? Nothing in any way relevant to his death, and, needless to say, I was approximately a million miles distant from the location of his murder and had not seen him in about 10 years at that time, but then came the bombshell. Dan Jordan was killed by homosexuals. What did I think of that? I didn't know what to think. I did know his wife, Nancy, and he had two kids, and from all that I remembered his family life was very good if not excellent. So, the agents left and that episode faded away for the time being. Until 2002 or so, here in Eugene. At that time I visited the local Baha'i Center to talk with the Baha'is about my past membership. I had resigned in 1973 but they wanted to verify this. OK, and I recall thinking that it would be a good time to find out what I could about Dan Jordan's death. Had the case finally been solved? I still remembered Dan fondly as a friend. "What do you mean he was murdered by homosexuals?" I was asked with incredulity. "The FBI told us he was killed by Muslim militants." Either the FBI lied to me or the FBI lied to the Baha'is. So, kindly keep this in mind if the FBI has approached you in any capacity. They just may have (gasp) lied to you, also. George recalled several instances when the FBI lied to him as well, even though at first he could not believe it. At that point, which turned out to be his comprehension that he was being willfully misled, he asked himself, this is a quote from the interview, "why would the FBI lie to me?' Another time the FBI introduced (through a third party) George to a niece of Vladimir Putin. By that time George was co-operating with the Bureau, this was before he discovered a different lie and was trying to help out -partly to seek to escape prison time. The FBI wanted to use any link that young George might make with the niece in order to further their investigation of the Trump campaign and its possible links to Russia. Some time later, George learned that Putin is an only child with no brothers or sisters. Niece? O, yeah? Then there was the gag order that George had to obey despite, by then, knowing all kinds of stuff that the public had every right to know. What would I do if I was under a gag order which, it became clear, was obtained on grossly unethical grounds and which obviously served political interests with no serious stake in the truth? No idea how I would do it, and I sure in Hell would cover myself and be sure to have completely legitimate grounds in the process, but no way would I allow flagrant falsehood to prevail. Which, for the benefit of any lurker who likes to pass along such things, says absolutely nothing but that, I trust, makes my message sufficiently clear: I will never, under any circumstances, allow anyone to lie about the philosophy of Henri Saint-Simon. Thanks, George, for the head's up. Billy Case File # 34789 A8 N5-1 -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
