This essay will probably be the last essay on this site to be finished, and I do not know when that will be - probably not for years, if ever. The first draft was written in 1999, and was about the most emotionally draining part of all my writing work.

This site needs some war material, so snippets of my earlier work are herein presented. This site’s American Empire essay is the closest thing to this essay. This introduction will summarize this essay’s intent, and will point interested readers in directions where they can find out more.

In short, warfare is organized murder, although heavy layers of ideology, deception and other tricks have tried raising violence and murder to noble levels. Humanity’s violent ways are directly related to how humanity expanded its range across the planet, leaving its fruit-eating home in the tropical forests millions of years ago. The weaponry used to become super-predators came in handy to prey upon fellow humans. Humanity’s carnivorous ways are directly related to its murderous ways.

Soldiers are nearly always young men whose testosterone overrides their brains and hearts, and societies manipulate their vulnerable condition to turn them into murderers, but murderers for the right team. Probably no war in world history was really fought for the publicly stated reasons, unless somebody was honest enough to state that it was simply murder for gain. Although “defensive” violence might seem “justified,” it is always the least enlightened response to any “threat,” and virtually every murderer plays mind games to transform the crime into no crime at all, but something self-righteously justified.

People seem to need justifications for violence, so all military-oriented societies have huge cultural engines that labor to create seemingly noble rationales. One rule seems to be that the more ornate the pageantry that accompanies militaristic displays (Nuremberg rallies, military parades, air shows, flag-waving holidays and attractive uniforms covered with medals), the less “justified” the violence it ultimately inflicts. Violence is always a violation of somebody’s free will, and until people can develop spiritual perspectives, humanity will probably always conjure rationales to justify violence. Long ago, George Orwell wrote in his Politics and the English Language, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”[1] If anything, the situation has become worse since then.

A major goal of this essay was to challenge the innumerable myths that Americans subscribe to regarding the wars it fights. So, it took aim at America’s “best” war, World War II. This essay was designed to:

Illuminate the entire West’s complicity with the Jewish Holocaust, how few really cared much if the Jews were being wiped out, even in the United States, and no scholar has ever made a convincing case to rebut that notion;
The Holocaust denier camp is delusional, and some in its ranks have dirty agendas, which are largely about rehabilitating fascism and Hitler’s image; however, many Jewish scholars have also abused the Jewish Holocaust by arguing for its historical exclusivity, even denying comparable and larger holocausts, and have turned the Jewish Holocaust into a lucrative industry.
There was precious little justification for dropping atom bombs on Japan, as even admitted by nearly all American military leaders of the day. It was largely a successful tactic to limit Soviet influence in Eastern Asia, with a bit of racist vengeance thrown in.
Wall Street warmly embraced Hitler and his regime, and even when the United States was at war with Germany, prominent American industrial empires, such as Ford’s, Rockefeller’s and even one that George Bush the First’s father worked for, heartily supported the Third Reich.
World War II was a battle of empires, with Germany and Japan coming to the imperial table, as Germany also had before World War I, but the other Great Powers already “owned” the world; the Pacific Theater was nothing more than an intensely racist battle for empire.
The United States is history’s most racist nation, and much of the evil that Hitler wrought was simply copying what the United States did when it built its “great nation.” Hitler is a scapegoat. He was not so much an aberration of the Western mind, but its epitome. The United States hired many of the most of useful Nazis in Operation Paperclip (even if they performed human experiments in the death camps), quickly rehabilitated the most ardent Nazi supporters in Germany to run Germany, and quickly rebuilt the political-economic framework that led to the Third Reich’s rise.
The United States war planners had no illusions; World War II was a battle for global dominance, and the United States largely joined the fray so it could come out on top, which it did. The subsequent Cold War was only because there was a hitch to Western Europe and its political descendants owning the entire planet; World War II was a huge financial windfall for numerous industrialists, and those same interests largely hold the world captive today, while hiding behind the American flag.
The Nazis were beaten by the Soviet Union, not the United States. The Eastern Front was where history’s greatest battles were fought. The Normandy invasion was more of a sideshow and a U.S. attempt to limit Soviet influence in Europe.

This essay will deal with some of those issues, but not nearly in the breadth and depth that they deserve, because I do not have enough time, energy and money to do so. Quite a few works have echoed my themes. On the complicity of the United States in the Jewish holocaust, try David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews. On dropping the atom bomb and the American aftermath, see Gar Alperovitz’ The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and Robert Jay Lifton’s Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. On the intensely racist and take-no-prisoners approach in the Pacific Theater, see Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed and John Dower’s War Without Mercy. On the many myths, fabrications and Disney-fication of World War II, see Paul Fussell’s Wartime, Michael Adams’ The Best War Ever, and Howard Zinn’s The Politics of History and Declarations of Independence. For a recent book that resembles the theme of my war essay regarding World War II, see Michael Zezima’s Saving Private Power, which is an admittedly sarcastically titled attempt to counterbalance the flag-draped cheerleading that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and related works have recently been doing. On the burgeoning holocaust industry and how Jewish scholars have muddied the issue, see Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (which even the redoubtable holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg supports). On the continuity of the Native American and Jewish holocausts, see David Stannard’s American Holocaust. For the U.S. hiring death camp Nazis and quickly “rehabilitating” the most ardent Nazi-supporters in Germany, putting them right back into the positions of power that they had before World War II, see Christopher Simpson’s Blowback and The Splendid Blond Beast.

The Business of War

Smedley Butler, one of America’s greatest war heroes, wrote a slim book titled War is a Racket. Many years ago, I heard a man describe the mentality of 18-year-old men when faced with battle. He said that if a commander spoke to a gathering of one thousand 18-year-old soldiers, telling them that tomorrow they would be in a battle, and only three would survive, those soldiers would all look at each other, thinking to themselves, "Gee, I'm going to miss these guys."

One of the war racket's pillars is exploiting the immortal feeling that 18-year-old men feel. Those immortal feelings are engendered by the fact those men are nearly children, have not quite seen the world's brutal realities, and they are brimming with the power of their 18-year-old bodies. One's physical fitness does not get any better than between eighteen to twenty years old. When that man described how the 18-year-old soldiers would take their commander's news, he also said that if that commander addressed one thousand 40-year-old men with the same speech, nobody would show up for battle the next day. By age forty, men are acquainted with their mortality and have no desire to throw their lives away while attempting to take the life of somebody they never met.

My life is a case in point. America has always been a warrior nation. I do not know about my family tree during the 1800s, but during the 20th century one of my grandfathers fought in World War I and was crippled by his participation. My other grandfather was in World War II in the South Pacific. My father was a Marine in the Korean War, and eventually was a boot camp drill sergeant. My uncles and brothers were all in the military. Going up my family tree, I am the first man in my family I know of that did not serve in the American military, and I nearly did.

My father spent his entire career working for the federal government, usually for the Department of Defense. My father helped instill the notion in me that I would not quite be a man unless I served in the military. He would talk about how one could tell if somebody had been in the military. According to my father, men with military backgrounds were somehow manlier, had few pretensions and had been through the humbling experience of being a soldier. At age 17, I had little idea of my own mortality, and did not really question that I would go through my rite of passage, becoming a soldier. As I look back, I have a difficult time believing that mature men would encourage that perspective, but they did. I was even told by a relative a few weeks ago (summer of 2002) that I should have served in the military,

During my senior year in high school, I applied and was quickly nominated by my Congressman for a slot at the Air Force Academy. The next step was athletics testing.[2] Thinking about who I might be killing, or being killed myself, was the furthest thing from my mind. Part of my motivation was free college. War’s realities are never emphasized in the indoctrination process, and immortal youth rarely thinks about it. I was an indoctrinated cog in the machine.

Thankfully, somebody was looking out for me, and in that instance it was my mother. She realized that her gentle child would not enjoy the military experience, and probably shuddered to think of what it would do to me. People do not come back from war "normal." The experienced traumatized all of my soldier-ancestors

My mother prevailed on my father to talk me out of further pursuit of an Air Force Academy position. One day my father sat me down and took me to task for my motivation in applying to the Air Force Academy. My answers were not convincing, even to myself, and I notified my Congressman that I would no longer pursue a position at the Air Force Academy.

My spiritual studies began in earnest that same year, and by age 19 I was a committed pacifist, but I nearly became an Air Force pilot. It is quite possible that I would have been dropping bombs on Iraq in 1991 if I had gone that route. The clever war planners know what they are doing, and part of their brainwashing strategy is evident in actions such as renaming the War Department the "Defense" Department right after World War II. They lifted a page out of Orwell's 1984.

The "Good War"

Paul Fussell is a great iconoclast of the American military and warfare in general. Fussell was a World War II soldier, and was wounded in France. He recounts his experience in Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic. His Wartime is considered by many to be the best book ever written about World War II.

This essay cannot do justice to Wartime. Wartime does not question the need to fight wars, but explores the psychology of warfare, both on the front and at home. Fussell finishes Wartime with his most biting chapter, titled "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books." In Wartime, Fussell described the evolving psychological condition of soldiers. There are three stages. The first is that immortal perspective that all young soldiers have when joining the military. None of the soldiers think that they will die. It could not happen to them. As they go through training, talk to experienced soldiers and see some of war's realities, it sobers them up a little, but their attitude is still that they are too smart, too fast, too good looking or too lucky to get killed. They don their psychic armor, believing themselves impervious to bullets.

Native Americans often had such delusions. They would go through involved rituals to magically protect themselves in battle, making them impervious to bullets or invisible. European and American soldiers were charmed by the native fantasies as they unceremoniously mowed them down.

When a young soldier finally gets on the battlefield, seeing what really happens when men are committed to killing each other, it is a shock. If they survive battle for long (a few minutes is usually enough), they quickly attain the next stage of their psychological awareness. They think, "Hey, it is dangerous out here! I should be more careful." They think that if they are careful and clever, they will survive. If they survive long enough, they arrive at their final psychological state. They know that they are alive by sheer luck. Those bullets whizzing by and exploding bombs have somebody's name written on them, and it is only a matter of time until their turn comes.

During World War II, and particularly in the Vietnam War, with soldiers engaged in heated battle for months on end, with the industrialized horror that wars of previous centuries did not see, war psychologists saw a new phenomenon. It was discovered that no human being's psyche could survive long in that situation. No matter how brave or heroic, if a human being survives modern battle situations for a long (with intense battle, the time they can hold their sanity together is measured in days), they will begin mentally falling apart. Even America's most heroic soldier, Audie Murphy, whose exploits on the battlefield may never be equaled, suffered from "shell shock" for the rest of his life. "Real men" did not admit to such frailty, but that did not make the condition disappear. War planners devised a concept called a "tour of duty," whereby if a soldier survived a year in the theater of combat, they were relieved of duty. The human wreckage of Vietnam War veterans is a testament to the hazards of extended periods of battlefield conditions. Instead of "shell shock," the medical term is now Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

In Wartime's final chapter, Fussell discussed war's reality. He made the case that the true horror of war is never depicted in the popular media. In today's high-tech wars, where pilots drop bombs and never see the enemy, America's soldiers do not usually see war's reality. Fussell wrote extensively on the "Disneyfication" of war that the popular media presents. He was writing about World War II. The situation is arguably worse today, even in the world of electronic media, supposedly bringing the world to America's living room in an instant. With careful management by the Pentagon and complicity by the media, Americans were not treated to the reality of the devastation of Panama and Iraq a decade ago.

In World War II, it was not quite as Orwellian, but Fussell wrote about how soldiers felt as they came back from the battlefield, with cheery Red Cross girls handing them candy and comic books. The soldiers realized that the folks back home knew nothing about war's reality, and frankly, they did not want to recall it, and nobody at home really wanted to hear it. It made many soldiers cynical and bitter, but they resigned themselves to the fact that the battlefield reality will never be shown to the folks at home.

In a society that brainwashes young men into thinking that glory will be had by killing people in a flag's name, the grim realities are never revealed. The same mentality carefully hides slaughterhouses, factory farms, environmental devastation, and the immense human suffering that our system produces in Latin America, Africa, Asia and America's inner cities. The cultural machine quietly covers up the ugly realities, presenting shrink-wrapped meat in butcher shops, leaving a strip of trees to conceal a clear cut, American reporters refusing to report the "secret war" that America waged against Cambodia and Laos for years, covering up the mass murder at Jonestown, and so on.

Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, came the closest that any American movie ever had to depicting the carnage of modern warfare. I thought that maybe young American men would understand if they saw it. I was in for a surprise. A friend took his fifteen-year-old son to see Saving Private Ryan. I asked him what his son's reaction was. His son is a computer gaming wizard, playing war games with friends on computers.

While my friend watched the landing at Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan, his son reacted to the movie as if it was another computer game. As he watched the carnage, he told his father that those soldiers were doing it wrong, that their attack strategy was flawed, and that he could design a better attack. The lad was playing general, and had no conception that he would have been getting his head blown off, not some general in a strategy room, looking at a map and moving toy soldiers and boats around with a stick.

My friend also had a younger brother in the Marines. His brother's commanding officer gave the whole platoon the afternoon off to go watch Saving Private Ryan. I wondered why a commanding officer would do something like that, showing those soldiers a glimpse of war's reality. My friend's response surprised me again. The commanding officer sent those soldiers to watch Saving Private Ryan to get them "pumped up.” I should have known better. When my friends were in the military, they usually talked about "seeing action" as if it would be the crowning moment of their lives. The Marines came storming out of watching Saving Private Ryan, nearly beating their chests, eagerly looking forward to the day that they would see "action."

Howard Zinn was a World War II soldier himself, and made many ironic observations about his military years. Zinn was highly critical of Saving Private Ryan (the review is available on the Internet). Sure, the carnage of war was depicted as never before, but as Zinn observed, the thrust of the movie was that those men were making a noble sacrifice, and that although war may be bloody, it is ultimately a noble undertaking. I thought about the movie again, and realized that Zinn was right. Almost all war movies are antiwar movies, but Spielberg's masterpiece depicted the affair as noble, although he showed many of its warts. Saving Private Ryan is a pro-war movie, and it barely lost the Academy Award for best picture. Thank you Howard, for helping me see. That theme of Saving Private Ryan is one reason those movie-going Marines came out pumped up.

World War II is always depicted as the last "good war," where the line between good and evil was easily seen, with those depraved Nazis and their death camps. Fussell, as he recounted his experiences in Doing Battle, and as he dissected the entire war experience in Wartime, made the case that the first casualty of war is the truth, as usual. Fussell made it clear that there were very few "heroes" in Europe in World War II. All soldiers were just like him: when they finally saw the battlefield and experienced its reality, they were all afraid of dying, and nobody wanted to be a hero. Military indoctrination is designed to overcome a man's instincts for self-preservation.

Following orders, being manly, demonizing the enemy, conscription, and only putting young, naïve, immortal-feeling men into battle, along with severe regimentation, with rewards and punishments dangled before them, are all tools to overcome a man's instinct for self-preservation, and his disinclination to kill somebody he has never met, and who has done him no harm.

Audie Murphy took on hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near Holtzwihr France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle filled with explosives. It stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war. Gary Wean can vouch for Murphy’s respect for the common man. Yet, for every Audie Murphy, there were thousands of soldiers who quickly decided that their only goal was staying alive, and they did not stick their nose out where it would be shot off. As Fussell related in his own battlefield experiences, there were no Murphy-esque heroes in his platoon, including himself. Fussell wrote,

"Although many in my platoon were killed and wounded, not one was ever captured or ever ran away, and that was true of F Company as a whole. What did we think we were doing, and why would we never flee or give up? Some few may have been following the higher morality and offering their lives and limbs for the Allied cause and the Four Freedoms, but 90 percent of us were engaged in something much less romantic and heroic. We were maintaining our self-respect, protecting our manly image from the contempt of our fellows. By persisting without complaint, we were saving our families from disgrace. We were maintaining our honor by fulfilling an implied contract. We were not letting others down. All of us desperately wanted to be removed from danger, but we now sensed that the war would not end in a few days and that only death or wounds would be likely to grant us our respite."[3]

Audie Murphy’s heroic feats were seldom seen in any battle. Mostly there were two armies facing each other, each terrified of the other, and while their official goal was killing each other, the primary goal of nearly every soldier was staying alive. Only the most fanatical (or heroic) soldier thought any differently. The indoctrination infrastructure and societal systems that put cannon fodder on the front lines were invisible hands pushing each soldier in the back. Few, if any, soldiers rushed into battle willingly. Once they got there, they would rather have been anywhere else. A study of American soldiers during World War II concluded that what kept the men in combat, once they got there, were two factors: not letting down their buddies and the risk of their families losing their pay and benefits if they refused to fight.[4]

In the United States, ever since the Revolutionary War, the sons of the elite never served in the infantry unless they wanted to, which was rarely. In the Revolutionary War, draftees could buy their way out of serving in the military. In all wars, the rich nearly always found a way out, while the poor were coaxed or forced into the military. The rich man's exemptions have always existed in the American military in one form or another, until the present day. During the Vietnam War, middle and upper class boys got college deferments, as their parents paid to keep their sons from battle. Poor boys who could not afford college or were not inclined (college was still a middle to upper class place to be), found themselves going to Vietnam. There is no valid rationale for sending an uneducated boy off to war while the college boy stayed in school. The argument of needing educated soldiers, as if college would magically transform an 18-year-old boy into a battlefield wizard, is ludicrous, but is the only rationale possible to justify the college deferment. The real rationale was that the upper classes could protect their sons that way, while the lower class boys marched off to battle.

Today it is a "voluntary" military in America. Today's voluntary U.S. military works for a few reasons. One is that American soldiers rarely risk their lives anymore. For the past generation, the United States has only fought weak enemies that cannot fight back. That has been a conscious decision by the war planners, as the Vietnam War protests demonstrated that Americans would no longer support having their boys killed in foreign wars of dubious benefit. Although young boys feel they are immortal, it is harder to get them to willingly sign up when the odds of being killed are high. They are not that naïve and ignorant. I probably would have rethought my 1975 application to the Air Force Academy if I had come of age in 1966.

The military recruiters still play on the "be all that you can be," "be a man" mentality. They make appeals to manly and patriotic motives, but the reality is that today's American military, particularly in the army and the infantry, are largely staffed by America's underclass, and the main reason they have joined are the economic incentives waved under their noses. With America's real wages declining since 1973, the military is a viable option for the lower classes, which is why a disproportionate number of American soldiers are black. The American black man was ironically transformed from being not good enough to enjoy the honor of combat, to becoming the preferred infantryman. The underclasses fighting in the infantry is not something unique to America, but in probably every military of every people for all of history.

Fussell was an infantry officer in World War II. Officers usually came from the well-to-do and educated classes. The infantry cannon fodder was mostly populated by America's lower classes. Fussell openly speculated that the strategy of staffing the infantry with the underclass was thinning out their ranks.[5] When men are forced into battlefield situations, the most fiendish behavior comes out. Fussell witnessed his men slaughtering surrendering German soldiers with glee, laughing as they wiped them out. Fussell saw German soldiers being killed by the score, and when he saw them up close, many appeared about 14 years old.

Fussell was injured during a bombing attack in France. While no hero, huddling beneath a hail of bombs going off overhead, shrapnel from a bomb hit him. A sergeant lying next to him was also hit. Fussell was lucky, and was only hit in the back and leg. The sergeant and lieutenant lying next to him died immediately.[6] Fussell went behind the lines to a military hospital while recovering, and developed the standard crush on his nurse. Fussell recovered and returned to his unit after the fighting in Europe was over. His unit was surprised to see him, and surprisingly, his welcome was hostile. Fussell could not understand why he warranted such a reception from his fellow soldiers. It puzzled him for many years. In the 1990s, he obtained a document that made the unfriendly treatment by his fellow soldiers understandable. The sergeant that died next to him, huddled on top of the German bunker as the bombs exploded overhead, was given a posthumous award of the Silver Star. The citation stated that the sergeant nearly pulled an Audie Murphy, heroically taking over command when the platoon's leader was wounded, led his men against heavy enemy fire, engaged the enemy single-handedly, and while mortally wounded sent his commander a message regarding the enemy's location.[7]

The only true parts of that citation were the sergeant's death and that his platoon leader (Fussell) was wounded. Fussell's platoon concocted a fairy tale of heroism. Fussell had been lying next to the sergeant when he died, and his platoon knew that if he discovered their fiction, it might not be pretty. The first casualty of war is the truth, and even "heroic deeds" may seldom truly be. Fussell wrote about when the fighting finally ended in Europe. The folks at home in America cheered wildly, but the feeling on the front was numbness. Eisenhower's mistress summed up the European attitude when Berlin was finally destroyed:

"No one laughed. No one smiled. It was all over. We had won, but victory was not anything like what I had thought it would be. There was a dull bitterness about it. So many deaths. So much destruction. And everybody was very, very tired."[8]

In Europe, there was no euphoria regarding winning the "good war." The American soldiers in Europe were not done. It appeared that the Japanese were going to suicidally fight to the last man. American soldiers in Europe were praying that Japan would surrender before they were shipped across the world to fight another war. A few months later, their prayers were granted when America dropped two atom bombs on Japanese civilians, ending the war.

When Germany fell, the concentration camps were opened. Mountains of bodies were accompanied by mountains of clothing, shoes, glasses, hair, gold fillings, tattooed skin and other items taken from the Jews and other "subhumans" in the death camps. It made for stark realizations.

History’s most intense and bloody warfare was fought between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. The Communist Revolution in Russia quickly degenerated from an attempt to create an egalitarian society into another power play. There are many conspiracy theories and controversies regarding that era. One thing is certain: the "Communists" of the Soviet Union did not govern very wisely. The reign of Stalin was as bloody as there has ever been. Between his Siberian labor camps, starvation policies, purges and outright executions, about twenty million Soviet citizens lost their lives.[9] Some think that number is too conservative. The Soviet system was evil, but was hardly the egalitarian system envisioned by Marx. It became another system where the few benefited at the expense of the majority. Most of those people died before the Germans showed up.

As Noam Chomsky and others have made clear, Western Europe and the U.S. did not hate the Communist regime because of how it treated its citizens, or because the Soviet Union posed a military threat.[10] The real threat of the Soviet Union was its rejection of capitalism, where a few rich capitalists got all the chips. Communism was a major threat to capitalism, especially if it inspired other nations to drop out of the capitalist system. Adam Smith did not invent capitalism; he was the first to systematically describe it. He would not have been rapturous about today’s corporate capitalism. Smith and Marx agreed that the workers should control the capital. Smith would have probably spoken out strongly against the global capitalist system that exists today, which is another form of colonialism. Unfortunately, the Soviet experiment failed in significant ways, and relatively few Communists got the chips while millions were murdered.

Fascism was no better. One of the many minimized chapters in American history was an attempted Fascist coup in 1933.

Brown Shirts in America

Newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who manipulated the Spanish-American War into being with his yellow journalism, was quite taken with Hitler. Hearst spent a month in Germany in 1934 and met with Hitler, and was apparently "charmed" by Der Führer. Hearst's newspapers began running favorable press coverage of the Third Reich in 1934, when Hearst returned from his delightful meetings with the Nazis. One of Hearst's guest columnists wrote an article justifying German rearmament. That guest columnist's name was Hermann Goering. There is evidence that the Nazis were greasing Hearst's palms for his sympathetic coverage.[11]

Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, thought the Third Reich was great. Beginning in 1933 when Hitler came to power, Germany initiated the Aryanization program. The program was a financial plundering of Jews, foreshadowing what happened during World War II. Jewish businessmen wanted out of Germany when Hitler came to power, and the Aryanization program forced Jews into selling out for bottom dollar. Ford Motor Company eagerly sidled up to the Aryanization trough if there was a buck to be made from it.[12] German banks, industrialists and major U.S. trading partners jumped into the Aryanization program. U.S. investment in Germany increased by 48.5% between 1929 and 1940, while it declined sharply everywhere else in mainland Europe. Even in Britain, American investment only increased by 2.6% during the 1930s.[13]

One major financier of the Third Reich’s rise was Union Banking Corporation, of which Prescott Bush, George Bush the First’s father, was a director and shareholder. The Bush family rose to power by being Eastern Establishment sycophants, with Prescott and his father being little more than errand boys for the Harriman and Rockefeller interests. The U.S. government, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized Union Banking Corporation in 1942. The company’s board was composed of Prescott Bush, Roland Harriman and some outright Nazis.[14] Prescott Bush joined Yale’s notorious Skull and Bones Society, due to Rockefeller and Harriman patronage, and both George Bushes also belong to the club. Prescott’s contribution to the Skull and Bones Society apparently was raiding Geronimo’s grave, with Geronimo’s bones now gracing the club’s meeting room (called “The Tomb”), where they sit among the remains of other obstacles to the American Empire, such as Pancho Villa’s and probably Omar Torrijos’ (secured by George Bush the First after he invaded Panama). George Bush the First’s other grandfather was a wheeler-dealer named George Herbert Walker, who was infamous for his corrupt dealings, being a front man for Morgan interests, among others. The Rockefeller Empire got in the same Nazi hot water that Union Banking Corporation did, although it escaped asset seizure.

Aryanization companies were formed in Germany, and bonds of those firms were even sold on the American securities markets, although not advertised as such. The Germans kept a tight grip on repatriation of profits, so the American firms investing in Germany had to keep plowing their profits back into the German economy. One of the most lucrative investments was the Aryanization program, which was where much of the profits were reinvested. Until 1938, the Aryanization program was "voluntary" for the Jews. The Third Reich was not closely involved in the Aryanization programs at first.[15] The people making the early killing in the Aryanization programs were German bankers, industrialists and other elites, with their rich buddies from America and elsewhere also feasting.

The German corporations, clamoring for more cheap slave labor for their factories, encouraged the slave labor situation in the World War II death camps. The corporations made a killing with the cheap subhuman slave labor. The German corporations that eagerly used the slave labor were household names such as Daimler Benz and Siemens. Germany's industrial giants were using concentration camp labor in hundreds of factories.[16]

In the United States, Hitler’s rise was not ominous. It was bad news for the more than four million Jews living in America, the world's largest concentration of Jews, but the United States government, the best friend that Jews had in the West, was silent in the face of what Germany did to its Jews. In 1934 a resolution was introduced in the United States Senate, asking that august body, along with the president, to officially express "surprise and pain" at Germany's treatment of the Jews, and ask for restoration of Jewish rights. The State Department, well stocked with anti-Semites, "caused this resolution to be buried in committee."[17]

When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the United States said it would not sell any more arms to Italy, but allowed U.S. oil companies to continue their sales of oil to Italy, which ran its war machine. When the Fascists overthrew the elected and popular Spanish socialist government, the Roosevelt administration hastily declared itself neutral. Soon after that act, Hitler and Mussolini's governments gave Franco massive assistance in enslaving the Spanish population. That situation of America's active or passive support of Fascist governments in overthrowing egalitarian social movements, as happened in Spain, was something that America had been doing to Latin America for generations. It was also a prelude to the postwar years, where the United States instigated, installed and propped up some of the 20^th century’s bloodiest dictatorships.[18]

Smedley Butler was one of the most beloved military leaders in American history. Teddy Roosevelt called him, "The finest fighting man in America." Butler was known as "the fighting Quaker." Butler was only one of four Americans ever awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. He tried returning one of them because he did not feel it was earned, but was instead ordered to wear it. Rank-and-file American soldiers loved him. Butler helped run the Marines for a generation, carried a pack and was in the trenches with his troops. Butler was known for his honesty and appreciation for the common man. In Butler's case, it was genuine.

Born in 1881, his father and grandfather were U.S. Congressmen, and Butler was born into the upper class of Pennsylvania. His family was Quaker, and traced back its Pennsylvania lineage to the days of William Penn. Although he could have pursued the life of an aristocrat, Butler evidenced a martial spirit from a young age, and in 1898 enlisted in the Marines, swept up into the "Remember the Maine" fervor that began the Spanish-American war. He saw action in Cuba, and his career continued to the Boxer "Rebellion" in China in 1900, where he was twice wounded with bullets. His father was influential in the military establishment, as he chaired the House Naval Affairs Committee and served in Congress for thirty-two years. Butler then saw action in Nicaragua and Haiti, with a spying interlude in Mexico. Some of his most celebrated feats were nonviolent, such as when he disarmed one revolutionary leader and unhorsed another, while he was unarmed.

Butler was a curious mixture; a Quaker pacifistic background combined with the steely-eyed visage of a crusading knight. The élan and esprit de corps of the Marines was his surrogate religion for many years. Partly due to his father's stature, and partly due to his battlefield heroism, Butler rose through the ranks rapidly. Butler was outspoken, unrefined, and had a distaste for the "intellectual" aspect of the military hierarchy. He became a brigadier general before he was forty, and became a major general about ten years younger than was typical. He got into hot water regularly with the "brass." He made many enemies, yet he was an unparalleled leader of the rank-and-file soldier, and regularly broke regulations in order to get the job done.

He was "loaned out" from the Marines to Philadelphia in the mid-1920s as he ran the police and tried enforcing Prohibition. Although Butler drank heavily, as most Marines did, when he took up the Prohibition cause he never drank again. He had his fair store of racist sentiments, which were muted for the times, and he was no pacifist, but he honestly lived by his beliefs.

Near the end of his career, he began questioning the issue of foreign wars. He began calling war a racket, and became adamant about the imperialist aspect of the U.S.' foreign interventions. He was not a pacifist, and came from a long line of republicans. When he had an opinion, however, he made it known. In 1935, after he retired, he published a slim book titled War is a Racket. Butler campaigned on that theme for the rest of his life.

Butler believed that all U.S. foreign interventions were self-serving acts, which lined the pockets of the rich at the expense of the nations it victimized, sending young boys to do the dirty work, wearing American uniforms. People such as Franklin Roosevelt sidled up to the trough, to "invest" in Haiti after it had been secured for American interests.[19] Roosevelt drafted the Haitian constitution that overturned more than a century of Haitian strategy of not allowing foreign land ownership to gain a foothold in Haiti, which would begin undermining its sovereignty. FDR was an integral part of the neocolonial strategy of pillaging Haiti. Butler provided the muscle to pull it off.

Butler's opinions did not come from reading radical literature, but from his experiences. His correspondence early in his career complained loud and long when commercial interests and Machiavellian plotting by his superiors would force him to go back on his word with those he negotiated with, as in Nicaragua, which he helped plunder, another situation that continues to this day.[20] Back then, brute force was yielding to a neocolonial strategy of the Taft administration known as Dollar Diplomacy, where the U.S. sought to control its subject nations through economic manipulation rather than marching in the armed forces, as with Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick Diplomacy. Butler carried out part of its early implementation. The famous Butler quote, where he admitted to being an unwitting “gangster for Capitalism” is vintage Butler.

Although Butler ran for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania as a Republican, when he began his anti-imperialist campaign, he did not care to whom he spoke. He ended up speaking at Communist rallies and at other organizations, which would have given him problems if he had done it during the Joe McCarthy witch-hunt days. He did not care about ideology. He believed in telling the truth as he saw it. Whether his audience was made of communists, veterans groups or the U.S. Congress, his line was the same, with the honest, outspoken style that made him an American icon, and made him many powerful enemies.

In 1931, Butler talked informally after a speech, and discussed how European conquerors became drunk with power and became "mad dogs." He related an apparently true story told him by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. Vanderbilt spent time with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and they were driving in an armored car through the Italian countryside, with Mussolini driving. During their drive, Mussolini hit and killed a child. Mussolini did not even stop the car, telling Vanderbilt as he grabbed his knee, "Never look back, Mr. Vanderbilt, never look back in life."[21] Mussolini passed off his hit and run incident with the observation that one life was insignificant when compared to the affairs of state.

Butler's comments caused an international outcry, and Butler was arrested and court-martialed and ordered to publicly recant. He never apologized to Mussolini, and instead retired. Today, Butler looks like a prophet. The incident was the first time that Mussolini's image was tarnished in America. Back in 1931, Fascism was the up-and-coming form of government.

Stimson court-martialed Butler because he and other high-ranking American officials openly admired Fascism's "great experiment" in Italy. By 1934, the American ambassador to Italy, Breckenridge Long, President Roosevelt, and famous State Department negotiator Norman Davis were gushing over what was happening in Italy, with Roosevelt calling Mussolini an "admirable Italian gentleman" and the State department praising the sham 1934 Italian election where the Fascists took 99% of the vote, stating that the election "demonstrate(d) incontestably the popularity of the Fascist regime."[22]

The July 1934 issue of Fortune magazine praised Fascism and its quick achievements, accomplishing in mere years what Christendom could not achieve in millennia. The article further stated, "The good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, Sacrifice."[23]

A 1937 State Department report stated that "Fascism is becoming the soul of Italy." The Fascist experiment was praised because it "brought order out of chaos, discipline out of license, and solvency out of bankruptcy." The report stated that in order to "accomplish so much in a short time severe measures have been necessary."[24] The State Department in 1937 saw Fascism as compatible with the United States' interests. Just as after World War II, the United States would embrace anybody as long as they were anticommunist.[25] While the Fascists were merely raping their own people and making the country safe for American investment, the U.S. government minimized the suffering of that nation's people, and eagerly participated. With Japan, Germany and Italy, it was only when they began stepping on imperial toes that it became a matter of war.

When Butler retired amid the Mussolini furor, he became an even bigger national hero than before. Although many politicians and industrialists were avid fans of Fascism, not everybody in America was. The veterans groups lionized Butler, and he was a big hit on the talk circuit, giving speeches to veterans groups almost daily. Butler was a paragon to the veterans groups and a populist hero, which made what happened in 1933 seem strange. A Wall Street bond salesman and former commander of the Connecticut American Legion approached Butler. Gerald MacGuire had a proposal. MacGuire said he was acting as a front man for wealthy industrialists and bankers, and J.P. Morgan, du Pont and other names came up in the conversations. The proposal was this: Butler would get elected as the American Legion's national commander. With that office, Butler would have the loyalty of 500,000 veterans. With that private "army" (du Pont would arm them through their controlling interest in Remington Arms Company) and up to $300 million of funding made available by the bankers and industrialists, they would take over the White House.

MacGuire said that the same people with the money also controlled the press, and would concoct a rationale that Roosevelt was ill and needed a strongman to help run the country. The public would easily swallow it, and Butler would be installed in a new cabinet position as Roosevelt's right hand, in a position dubbed the "Secretary of General Affairs." MacGuire had been studying the Italian and German Fascist "miracles," and the plan was closely modeled after Hitler's Brown Shirt coup. They would ease Roosevelt out of office, and Butler would be America’s new Hitler.

They picked the wrong man. Although Butler had been openly critical of Mussolini, they thought that Butler could be controlled. MacGuire mentioned other candidates they would approach if Butler turned them down, such as Douglas MacArthur. MacGuire even told Butler that his superiors doubted that Butler would obediently play the game right, but nobody else in America could gain the ready allegiance of millions of veterans. Butler did not say anything publicly and played along, trying to find out more, such as who was behind it. Butler enlisted Philadelphia Record reporter Paul French to dig deeper into the situation. Butler introduced French to MacGuire, and French gained MacGuire's confidence. MacGuire told French the same story that Butler heard. They tried getting MacGuire to give them more names, but he was too smart for that. Butler met one rich conspirator who said that he would spend half his fortune to save the other half.

When he got all the information he could, Butler went straight to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1934, telling them all he knew. As with many other official "investigations," the HUAC was decidedly timid in pursuing those allegations. They refused to subpoena the names Butler had given them except for MacGuire, who predictably denied everything. The other names given by Butler to the HUAC were former-presidential contenders John Davis and Al Smith (who was a Morgan attorney), and Grayson Murphy, who was a co-founder of the American Legion, a board member of organizations such as Morgan Bank, Goodyear and Bethlehem Steel, and MacGuire's boss. The committee, which went to great lengths to ferret out commies, lost their zeal when confronted with those rich and powerful names, and largely swept the affair under the carpet. However, Butler went public. Nevertheless, without official corroboration, no other investigations were launched, nor did anybody in government appear too concerned. The establishment and media went out of its way to either ignore or slam Butler, with Time magazine openly ridiculing him. The rich conspirator that Butler met threatened to sue Butler for libel, but Butler's stance on Mussolini showed how easily intimidated he was. The conspirator never sued, and Butler never backed down.

While the HUAC's public posture was a quiet folding of its tents, it issued an internal report to Congress which journalist John Spivak obtained. The HUAC internal report told a starkly different story. The report to Congress stated that its investigation confirmed that Butler's story was true in every particular they could verify, and that MacGuire had perjured himself when he denied it.[26] The truth was there, even documented in a report to Congress, but it got swept under the rug, as with most American scandals that involve the rich and powerful. Case closed!

A Brief History of Western Anti-Semitism and the Holy War Mentality

Another minimized chapter in American history is that while Hitler was pursuing his Final Solution, anti-Semitism was reaching its high-water mark in U.S. history. Anti-Semitism in America reached its highest levels during the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, as it did throughout the West. Hitler was merely the most extreme of the bunch. One of America's most prominent historians, the self-taught Barbara Tuchman, described the mood of the West during those years when she said that with few exceptions, "The Gentile world…would fundamentally have welcomed the Final Solution."[27]

No nation has been as intensely racist for as long as the United States has. It is that way today as I write this, with my nation killing off close to a million children in Iraq. If they were white children, it would not be happening. When America was killing off millions of Southeast Asians during the 1960s and 1970s, America invoked the "mere gook rule" to absolve U.S. soldiers of legal accountability for their mass murders of natives that they were supposedly saving.[28] In America during the 1800s, the surest way to garner votes was to run for office as an "Indian fighter," which was often a euphemism for killing native women and children while the men were away on hunting expeditions. When Southern blacks were finally freed and the Reconstruction government left, blacks began hanging from trees in the South like Christmas tree ornaments. Lynching became so popular that late in the 19^th century the murderers would proudly pose next to the dead or burning black man, with women posing too, knowing that they would never be convicted, even when posing for photos to commemorate the occasion.[29] The death squad regimes that the United States has recently supported in places such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Indonesia slaughtered non-whites. The United States will rarely support the slaughter of white people, except in the cancer racket and other hidden holocausts, but nearly all people of color are fair game. There was almost undoubtedly a strong racist motivation regarding the United States' dropping of atom bombs on Japan in 1945.

Here in Washington, my uncle told me about a place in the mountains called "China Cliff." Chinese coolies completed the railroad over the mountains, and when it came time to pay them, the railroad management had them pushed off a cliff into a canyon, killing hundreds of coolies. Killing them instead of paying them was far cheaper, and earned the landmark the name of "China Cliff." If that had happened to white people, there would be a monument erected there. A friend recently told me of a similar coolie landmark in Idaho, where killing them was cheaper than paying them.

The United States is a nation built on the red man’s bones and the sweat and tears of the black man and other "inferior" races. Our hallowed Declaration of Independence grandly stated the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. When the even more hallowed U.S. Constitution was drafted years later, it gave force to those words of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, but qualified the sweeping language a little. All white, land-owning men were created equal. Women, slaves (white and black; white slaves were dubbed with the euphemistic term, "indentured servants"), natives and white men who did not own (recently stolen native) land were specifically excluded from coming to the table and having a hand in their governance. That was a slight improvement over the European monarchies. Founding Father John Jay voiced the day's mentality when he said that the people who own the country should run it. George Washington was reputedly America’s richest man when he became president, increasing his wealth by stealing native land. In 1782, Washington devised a plan to steal the native land by forcing them into signing treaties that the U.S. would never honor, a strategy quickly adopted by the government, as evidenced by the fact that historians cannot find one treaty that the United States honored with Native Americans.

Jews were white people, sort of. Racism in America has become covert in recent years. There are not racist laws on the books anymore. America used to have de jure segregation, now it is de facto. Nobody can publicly spew racist sentiments unchallenged, which is an improvement, but racism is far from dead in America. There are no more colored bathrooms, but other measures show how racist America still is. For instance, when the blacks were freed after the Civil War, their income was about 20% of white income. By 1900, it was clear up to 30%. Then the noted racist Woodrow Wilson came into office and reversed the gains the blacks had made. By 1940, black income was less than it was in 1900, as a ratio to white income. Then the golden era of black improvement occurred. Between 1940 and 1970, black income per capita shot up to sixty percent of white income. It is not coincidental that those economic improvements happened during the Civil Rights era and unprecedented U.S. global hegemony. From Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, until 1990, black family income actually declined as a ratio of white income. Not only did it decline between 1970 and 1992 relative to white income, it also declined in real dollars.[30] The laws are not explicitly racist anymore, but the system still churns out the disparity. The blacks won the legal battle, in a way, but lost the economic one.

In 1940, Jews were a short step above "niggers" in America's hierarchy. There were many jobs that a Jew could not have in America, similar to the restrictions they had lived under in Europe for centuries. Similar to signs in the South that said they did not serve "Negroes," signs on America's East Coast often said "no Jews allowed." I saw one Jewish woman reminisce about her childhood, talking about going to an East Coast beach, and the sign said "No Jews or dogs allowed."[31] As this essay covers American anti-Semitism, bear in mind Leonard Dinnerstein’s words as he concluded in his Anti-Semitism in America, published in 1994,

"Anti-Semitism is unlikely to vanish in the United States. It is too much a part of the Christian culture to disappear. It must also be emphasized, however, that in no Christian country has anti-Semitism been weaker than it has been in the United States."[32]

In August 1999, a member of the neonazi Aryan Nation group shot children at a Jewish school in Los Angeles, killed a Filipino postman, and was proud of his crimes, calling them a "wake up call for America." That shooting incident triggered many anti-Semitic acts across America, including the desecration of synagogues. Fortunately, most Americans were horrified, but that it even happened shows how far we have to go. In the West before World War II, the United States was the haven for Jews. Jews were treated better in America than anyplace else in Europe.

The Jewish people were originally one of many tribal peoples of the Fertile Crescent. In about 2000 BC, there was a great invasion from the steppe regions, and pastoral peoples, with their male, sky-god deities overthrew the settled agricultural peoples, with their female, earth-goddess deities. During that time of tumult, many of the settled peoples of the Fertile Crescent (today’s Iraq and vicinity) migrated toward the Mediterranean, and a man today known as Abraham migrated with them, eventually settling in the vicinity of today’s Israel. Abraham also began something unique, in that he seemed to have a relationship to one god, not the teeming pantheon of gods that dominated the polytheistic religions of the era.

Those days were during that region’s Bronze Age, and they were extremely violent. Abraham’s tribe lived and grew in numbers in their new home, and over the generations they fragmented into distinct tribes. The peoples the Bible records are the ones that eventually migrated to Egypt, which had the ancient world’s most reliable food supply. Through the vagaries of life in Egypt, they eventually became a slave class, and under their great leader Moses they escaped Egyptian slavery, and wandered for about fifty years in the Sinai Peninsula. It was during that time that they developed a definite monotheistic code, as laid down by Moses. It was unique in the ancient world. Their oral histories tell of their God promising them a land, and under Moses’ bodyguard Joshua they invaded Cannae, the slaughter of the citizens of Jericho (perhaps the world’s oldest city) being the most infamous example of how the “Israelites” secured their “Promised Land.” That probably happened around 1200 BC. The Jewish belief system, as practiced through Mosaic Law, created by a law-giving God, established a tribal coherence that was unique, yet it also made them a target. They saw themselves as God's chosen people, and often kept themselves rather apart from other tribes. With their strict dietary laws and rites such as circumcision, they often became outcasts, and even preferred that status at times.

The monotheism of the Israelites was also rather hostile to the notion of secular states, elevating “God’s” laws over the laws of men, which created a tension in the relations of church and state that continues to this day. The Jewish people set about conquering/annihilating the inhabitants of their Promised Land, and their empire-building peaked with David, whose reign ended in about 966 BC. The Jewish state declined after that, beginning with David’s son Solomon, who began turning the conquered peoples into slaves, which was repugnant to church leaders who recalled their people’s days of Egyptian slavery. The church and state dichotomy went through various shades of unity and separation during those days, as the Mosaic code did not mesh well with state imperatives. The Israelites battled their neighbors and went through a long decline. The Assyrian Empire invaded and conquered the Israelites’ northern lands, climaxing with the conquest of Samaria in about 721 BC, and carried away ten tribes of Israelites, with their assimilation into the Assyrian Empire being so complete that those people are lost to history.

The beginning of the Jewish Diaspora really began when the Babylonians rushed into the void created by the Assyrian Empire’s defeat, and conquered Jerusalem, which the Assyrians never accomplished. In 597 BC, the first Jewish elites were forced to migrate to Babylon, which began the Jewish Diaspora. The Babylonian Exile lasted until the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and the Jews were free to go home. Most preferred to stay, however, and Babylon became a center of Jewish culture for more than a millennium. Cyrus was a student of Zoroaster’s teachings, and the dualistic nature (good/evil) of Judeo-Christian thought came from Zoroaster.

In those lands of rising and falling empires, the Greeks made their ascendance after the Persians sacked Athens in 480 BC. The Greek classic period peaked in about 432 BC, just before their Peloponnesian War that began in 431, with a resulting epidemic in 430 that carried off about a third of Athens’ population. Greek culture, although early Greek writers looked up to Moses and other Jewish leaders, was markedly different than Jewish culture, the Greeks becoming the West’s first humanists. Greek culture was very assimilative, and it readily adopted foreign gods into its pantheon, even deifying men who lived exemplary lives. Under the Macedonian Alexander the Great, whose reign conquered lands from Egypt to Persia and peaked in about 326 BC, as he even conquered part of India, Greek (Hellenistic) culture spread far and wide. Jewish culture began assimilating into Greek culture, especially among its far-flung Diaspora. The Jewish homeland, however, was less cosmopolitan and more orthodox in its religious practice, and great division arose within the Jewish people, with those who wanted to “modernize” on one end of the spectrum, and those who tried keeping Judaism “pure” on the other.

The antagonism between Greek and Jewish culture became heated by 150 BC, especially as the Greek culture “conquered” the Roman one, with Rome assimilating Greek culture after it conquered them. Greek eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire, and was the official language in some Roman provinces in Jesus’ day. By the time of Jesus, Greek culture was so dominant that the New Testament was entirely written in Greek, and the names Jesus and Mary are Greek versions of their Hebrew names Joshua and Miriam.

The Roman Empire conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC. The Jews had a prophetic tradition that a messiah would one day appear to deliver them. They believed that their messiah would be a king to lead great armies to destroy their enemies. Well, their messiah probably did appear. Instead of a righteous warrior king, along came a crazy Jew who had a strategy for eradicating the enemy by a method never tried before: loving the enemy. Even today, such an idea is crazy, virtually never even attempted in the intervening two thousand years. Although he gave incredible demonstrations of the power of love, demonstrations that are called miracles today, his message of love was so bizarre that it was largely rejected. He had followers, but the one who became the most famous corrupted his message. The "good news" was the infinite love of God, not Jesus, a distinction that Paul did not appreciate, nor did the religion that he founded in Jesus' name: Christianity. Jesus’ message was love, the greatest message ever told. It did not completely fall on deaf ears, but his message gradually became corrupted, beginning with Paul who altered the good news from Jesus into the good news about Jesus.

Ignoring Jesus' message about loving the enemy, the Jewish revolt in 66 AD brought the Roman fist down on the Jews. Jews had already been dispersed throughout the Roman Empire (about 70% of the world’s estimated eight million Jews of the day lived outside Palestine), but the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD, turning it into an official part of the Roman Empire, dispersed the Jews throughout the Mediterranean periphery and into today’s France and Spain. The Jewish dispersal also dispersed the new cult known as Christianity. In great irony, the "Good Book" of the Christians was a book written by Jews about Jews. The Old Testament is a Jewish history book. Jesus, Paul and John the Baptist were all Jews. The first Christians were Jews, and they spread Christianity. Through a series of tragic events, the people who embraced the teachings of a radical Jew, as taught by his Jewish followers, developed a hatred for the very people who produced such a master and teaching. Christians took to heart the Jewish history book and the teachings of their greatest prophet, but had no use for the people themselves.

Jews were largely scattered throughout the Roman Empire, although a fair number migrated to Arab lands in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. In those early days of Christianity, the Roman Empire was officially pagan, which generally meant that any belief was fine as long as people bent their knees to the emperor. What got the early Christians thrown to the lions was not their faith, per se. They put their faith and God higher in their esteem than the emperor, and their radical politics earned them the empire's enmity. They originally lived communally and austerely, sharing their possessions with each other, something quite out of step with the times.[33] They also condemned paganism as wicked, which won them few friends. Christianity was not very old before it became a ruling class religion. Early Christian figures such as Paul, Augustine, Origen, Ambrose and Jerome were either from the ruling class or catered to them.[34]

Christianity was originally a radical Jewish splinter sect, which became many splinter sects, adopted by non-Jews as well, especially the hated Greeks. The first revolt ended badly, capped off with the mass suicide at Masada in 72 AD. The Roman army crushed a second revolt in 135 AD, which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. The revolts not only scattered the Jews, but also created a lasting rift between radical Jewish Christians and old line Jews, and set in motion dynamics that plague Christian-Jewish relations to this day.

Early Christianity was diverse. By the year 200 AD, there were about forty Christian sects. There were about twenty different versions of the crucifixion drama circulating in those sects: Jesus died on the cross, he survived crucifixion, he was not crucified, the Romans were behind it instead of the Jews, and so forth. Those forty sects were not one big happy family. One Roman observer said that nobody hated Christians more than other Christians. Each sect had its own holy writings that justified its views, and they often thought the other sects were wrong.

Until Constantine organized the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, there was not appreciable unity within Christianity. The likely reason that Constantine chose Christianity as the state religion was to unite the slowly disintegrating empire under one faith, to help hold it together.[35] Christianity had become successful enough that it was a logical candidate, and made an unprecedented rise from an obscure, marginal, radical movement, with more than forty sects, often battling with each other, to becoming the state religion. After the Nicean Council, Christianity became the Roman Empire's state religion. Many suspect that the Nicean Council is where a great deal of editing happened. There had to be one story, not many competing versions. The official story today is that the books of the New Testament were chosen based on how authentic they were, but there is plenty of evidence that political expediency and power issues had much to do with it.[36] A primary thrust of the Nicean Council was condemning a Christian sect called Arianism, which believed that God was the highest power, and Jesus, being a Son of God, was of lesser stature. The Arian belief was largely responsible for the idea of a Holy Trinity (one of many Christian beliefs that are not in the scriptures), and the Nicene Creed was a direct response to Arian belief, as it stated that Jesus was God.[37]

Condemning Arianism, the Christian hierarchy nevertheless attempted to unite the faith. The documentation regarding that first council is sparse, but many suspect that writings not deemed politically acceptable were edited out of the Bible at the first council. Writings may have also been inserted to further the day's political goals. By burning the pagan works (including all the Classical Greek ones), Cathar writings, ancient libraries, the Aztec and Mayan books and so on, the Church was effective at completely eradicating what it did not approve, leaving historians scratching their heads, wondering how much was lost in the Catholic bonfires. It is argued that the Church's eradication philosophy is mainly what brought on the Dark Ages.[38] There is little overt evidence of what happened to the New Testament, but plenty of suspicious evidence. Probably the greatest evidence is the ungainly hole in Jesus' life. Sunday school children are told that Jesus spent his teenage and early adult years working as a carpenter. The New Testament gives zero evidence for such a belief. From age twelve to thirty, there is not one word about what Jesus was doing with his life. More than half of Jesus' life is missing. It vanished.

My mystical sources have long told me that the Council of Nicea was where much of Jesus' life was "weeded out" of the New Testament. That was partly because he spent those "lost" years traveling the world on his spiritual pilgrimage. He attained his enlightenment outside of the Roman Empire, gaining valuable insights from the Buddhaic and Hindu masters of the East, with their ideas of reincarnation and other ideas that were unacceptable to the imperial religion.[39]

Thusly did Jesus' life and teachings make it to the big time, although what it became was probably nearly unrecognizable to Jesus. Yet, in its core, it was still about love. The adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire was not as easy as Constantine may have hoped. His successors fought for years over the issue of Christianity, and Christianity and Paganism went at it tooth and nail at times, and Christianity prevailed. In the end, Christianity adopted many of the Pagan rites, partly to market it, further altering Christianity.

There is only one word worth remembering about Jesus' life: love. Using ancient teachings to justify judging, killing, punishing or oppressing people is not enlightened. It is not what one believes that gets them into “heaven,” so much as it is how they act. All religions are corrupted, not just Christianity. The Dalai Lama may have said it best when he said, "My religion is kindness."

Regarding holy words, it is instructive to recall that neither Jesus nor Buddha left behind any writings. Spiritual teachings have stated that when the master has left earthly life behind, the teaching is finished, and any writings left behind belong to the realm of philosophical literature, not the basis of religions. Jesus and Buddha cannot have believed much in the holiness of written words if they did not leave any behind.

Early Christians were persecuted and killed, which was typical in those days. The Coliseum, along with other arenas around the empire, was the site of constant bloodbaths. The Roman equivalent of going to the movies was going to the arenas and watching staged battles, put on for the masses' entertainment, a tradition that lasted for about 1000 years in that region. The prime attraction at the arenas was gladiatorial combat. Originally an Etruscan funerary rite, gladiatorial combat evolved into the Roman Empire’s primary entertainment. The gladiators were usually slaves, one of many slave classes in the Roman Empire, which meant that they were people conquered and captured by Rome's armies. They were trained for battle in the arena. While one-on-one combat was most common, group battles could become extravaganzas. Augustus Caesar once had 10,000 men fight each other in eight battles. The battles were usually to the death.

Roman historian Michael Grant noted that history's "two most quantitatively destructive institutions are Nazism and the Roman gladiators."[40] Any appreciative musings about Roman achievements in the area of law, architecture, economics and other "advances" of civilization need to be tempered by considering the unparalleled evil of forcing people to murder each other…for entertainment. The Romans themselves were not too proud of that form of entertainment, as imperial Roman coinage, which depicted all manner of Roman life and culture, never portrayed gladiatorial combat.[41]

The thumbs up, thumbs down gesture came from those times, when a gladiator might be spared if he fought valiantly enough. So the audience would not become bored, the events were creative. People fought lions, tigers and bulls. Fights were staged with lion against tiger, elephant against rhinoceros, bear against water buffalo. Other novel offerings were dwarves and cripples against women. The Coliseum could be filled with water for naval battles. A gladiator was nearly always doomed to an eventual death in the arena, although many killed themselves first. If a gladiator became the day's "hero," he would be showered with gifts and applause, only to go into battle the next day. Sometimes it was declared that no warrior would be allowed to survive the day, and every one would have to fight to the death.[42] Few survived long enough to "retire." That was the favored entertainment of the day. Criminals and Christians were among those condemned to die in the arena. Few Romans ever complained or questioned the nature of that entertainment.[43] In those times, cruelty and bloodshed was equated with fun. The more cruel a spectacle was, the more the crowd liked it.[44]

What is generally credited with the end of gladiatorial combat was the spread of Christianity, although it was far from an immediate effect. Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion, issued an edict forbidding gladiatorial combat in 326 AD, the year after the Nicean Council, but he never enforced the order. Constantine was hardly a "good Christian," having both his wife and son executed, his wife by boiling her. Constantine staged some of the gorier spectacles that ever graced the Coliseum. For Constantine, Christianity was a strictly political matter. In 404 AD, a Christian monk from Asia Minor apparently leapt into the arena to try separating the combatants, and the enraged crowd tore the man to pieces. Gladiatorial combat was not finally abolished until 681 AD.[45]

The earliest Christians were Jews, and Rome considered Christians a Jewish sect. By 212 AD, Jews became imperial citizens, and their life was as good as the times could dictate, until Constantine made Christianity into the state religion in 325 AD. Then the Jews began a hard ride. Although the Christian hierarchy at the time did not advocate anti-Jew violence, Christian mobs regularly burned down synagogues. Babylonia, outside of Christian and Roman influence, became the center of Judaism by 300 AD. Pagans were being wiped out too, even while Christianity appropriated many of its customs. Christian intolerance replaced the laissez faire spirituality that characterized pre-Christian Rome.

Power corrupts, and as the Christian church became more powerful, pagans and Mosaic Law Jews paid heavily. Constantine's ploy was not very successful, as the Western Roman Empire crumbled in 476 AD.

Jews were dispersed across the Roman Empire and further, and when the Empire collapsed, the Catholic Church became Europe’s unifying institution. It was a different kind of Roman Empire. For all its spectacular failures and the great evils it would eventually wreak on its subjects, the Catholic Church may have held European civilization together for the next five hundred years.

As the Catholic Church gained in strength as the state church, it became increasingly bigoted and racist. Although three early popes were black Africans (Miltiades, Victor 1, and Gelasius 1; saints Augustine and Benedict were also black) the Church became decidedly racist, and Vatican artists later "whited out" those African popes and saints.

When the Western Empire crumbled, the Eastern Empire, under almost wholly Greek influence, was not inviting, so Babylonia became the center of the Jewish world. Around 600 AD another radical splinter sect of Judaism took root, led by a prophet named Muhammad. He was more the messiah that the Jews originally sought: a sword-wielding destroyer of his enemies, but one who also lived by a moral code, conversed with his God, and the religion of Islam took root and swept the Arab lands and further. Although Muhammad killed his fair share of Jews, they were treated far better by the Islamic code than the Christian one in those days. Although the spread of Islam was often bloody, and conversion by the sword was sometimes a method of Islamic proselytizing, it was a decidedly color-blind faith, which was part of its appeal to people of color. The rapid expansion of the Islamic faith in the 600s and 700s brought many Jews under Islamic rule. Jews existed more peacefully under Islamic rule than Christian rule, and consequently they lived in greater numbers in the Islamic world than the Christian one. Islam conquered the Mediterranean’s southern periphery, all the way into today's Spain.

In 711 AD, Islamic armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula, which eventually established Moorish rule. Jews of the peninsula had been suffering under the cruel rule of the Visigothic kings, who practiced forced conversion and executed those who remained "secret Jews." Those dynamics reappeared several centuries later. When Islamic armies overran the Iberian Peninsula, Jews were fighting right beside them. Under the subsequent Umayyad dynasty, Jews flourished as nowhere else. In Babylonia, they were still subject to persecution from the local rulers, but under Umayyad rule on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews lived in a golden age. Life under the Umayyad dynasty in Moorish Spain was as good as Jews would have it until the nineteenth century.

By 1000 AD, Jews were widely scattered across Europe and the Middle East (even China.), and Córdoba (Spain) became the most prosperous center of Jewish life, and Europe’s most civilized place. Until around 1000 AD, relative harmony existed between Jews, Muslims and Christians. Unfortunately for the Jews, the Christian and Islamic worlds would soon make their lives more precarious. One of the earliest expulsions of Jews in Europe was from the Rhineland in 1012. Jews did not come to the British Isles until William the Conqueror invaded them in 1066.

Violent Berber Muslims made their play for power, seizing Córdoba. When the Umayyad dynasty ended in 1036, Moorish Spain splintered into fractious petty kingdoms. In 1056 the Christian Reconquest was initiated, and Toledo was retaken in 1085. During the Reconquest, the Iberian Peninsula degenerated into a militarized land, with constant wars, not only between the Christians and Moors, but the Moors became mutually hostile and warred against each other. Soldiers became more important than poets, and life became harder for Jews as well. Virulent outbreaks of Islamic fundamentalism marred the times. In 1066, Islamic preachers incited the slaughter of about 5000 Jews in Granada, claiming that they had too much influence. Although Jews generally had a better life in Islamic cultures, there were slaughters of Jews across the Islamic world from time to time, mainly in North Africa. Although Jews were "People of the Book" and had theoretically protected status, they were still a minority and held to be inferior to the Islamic overlords.

The rise of Europe as a cohesive entity took shape around that time, and the first Crusade of 1096 can be seen as the first act that "Europe" took. Europe began seeing itself as one people, united by Christian faith and white skin. By that time, the Catholic Church had become a great temporal power as well as religious institution, owning about a quarter of Europe's land. Tales were told of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land being mistreated by Islamic people. Since Jews lived in the Holy Land also, Christians in those days barely distinguished the two. During friction between the Eastern Roman Empire and Turkey, Pope Urban II initiated the first Crusade in 1096, whipping up European Christians to go battle the Turks. As the Europeans were riled up to do battle, the soldiers made a detour before "liberating" parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that the Turks had taken. Beginning in France and soon spreading to Germany, the Crusaders engaged in what is considered the first holocaust of European Jews by Christians. In a frenzy of bloodlust, the Christian soldiers engaged in mass murders of Jews. As many as 8000 Jews perished in the massacres.[46]

From that time forward, Jews would no longer be safe in Europe. There had been slaughters of Jews before, many times, but that part of the world was very violent. The massacres of 1096 were the first with a decidedly religious, anti-Jewish fervor. That first Crusade was the most successful, and was a thoroughly imperial venture that climaxed in "liberating" Jerusalem from the Muslims. Christian fanaticism fueled the fire of those marching hordes. The Crusaders laid siege to the Holy City, and when they breached the walls they massacred nearly every inhabitant. The city was bathed in infidel blood. It was an Old Testament-style bloodbath. One could not walk through the city without walking on bodies, sloshing through pools of blood and navigating heaps of severed heads. As when Joshua’s Jews laid waste to Jericho, the Crusaders turned the slaughter into a sacred affair, the knights “sobbed for excesses of joy” as they bathed in infidel blood, cooked up Muslims and ate them, and other wonders. Those are not “Black Legend”-ish allegations, but events proudly written up by the Crusaders and their chroniclers themselves.[47]

In England in 1144 were recorded the first European accusations that the Jews killed babies in their rituals.[48] That accusation took on a life of its own, inciting mass murders of Jews in England, especially around Crusade time. The accusation of ritually murdering children is an old one, often combined with cannibalism and/or drinking their blood. Ironically, Roman pagans accused the new cult of Christianity of the very same crime.[49]

While Jews were being massacred in England and France regularly, the first Jewish expulsion in France occurred in 1182 after closing the Jewish academy in Paris. While European anti-Semitism began rearing its head, the Catholic Church was becoming thoroughly corrupt. Popes were leading Crusade after Crusade, Pope Innocent III calling for the fourth Crusade in 1199. There were also minor Crusades being mounted throughout Europe. The concept of Christian armies marauding through Europe was becoming ingrained, and the idea of a perpetual Crusade took root. Christianity was becoming the polar opposite of Jesus' teachings.

By the early 1200s, the Church was thoroughly corrupt and there were attempts made at reform. The Council of Evreux in 1195 mentioned the selling of indulgences by the clergy, and bishops selling holy oil and relics. The Council of Avignon in 1209 mentions a priest who diced with his parishioners regarding their penances (double or nothing?), and priests opening taverns with a priest collar as the inn sign. Priests had families, lovers and concubines, and drank heavily, hunted and gambled with abandon.[50]

When the Christian Crusaders showed up in Constantinople to "help" in 1096, their Byzantine "hosts" were shocked, and saw their European "allies" as uncouth and barbaric backwoods rubes, as their most pronounced characteristics were their filthiness, fanaticism and violence. The Hellenistic culture of the Eastern Roman Empire was far more refined than European culture.

While the Church was becoming increasingly degraded, the Islamic culture pursued a different path. By about 1200, the Islamic culture may have had the world's highest standard of living (the only “competitor” for the title would have been China). The Arabic Islamic culture emphasized learning and built some of the world's greatest libraries. The Catholic Church specialized in burning libraries. The West knows about the ancient Greek philosophers and culture largely because their work was preserved in Islamic libraries. The Catholic Church spent centuries eradicating any literature considered pagan or heretical, and all the Hellenistic writings in Europe were consigned to the flames.

The Church's intolerance would express itself quite violently after 1200 AD. Not only was the Church mounting Crusade after Crusade, its priestly ranks were filled with corruption, and Jews and Islamic people were not the only people on the Church's hit list. Because of the wholesale corruption and debauchery of European Christianity, with Crusades becoming perpetual, with gambling, drunken, philandering priests and the like, the Catholic Church did not inspire much obeisance from the flock. In France, while Jews were having a rough ride, there were two movements that tried getting back to the spiritual roots that the Catholic Church had largely forsaken.

In 1175 in Lyons France, Peter Waldo (or Valdés) sought the meaning of God, and was told by a theologian to sell what he had, give it to the poor, and follow Christ. Waldo did just that. His fervent passion for the essence of Christianity gave birth to a new religious movement. His followers were originally known as the "Poor Men of Lyons," and they eventually adopted Waldo's name, becoming Waldensians. Waldo was a devout Christian; too devout. He originally tried reforming the Church, bringing it back to its humble roots. The Church would not tolerate it, and Pope Lucius III excommunicated Waldo in 1184. In that same year, Lucius III issued a bull ordering bishops to "direct inquisitions" on heresy. The roots of the Inquisition are in Roman law, where the inquisitio, originally a routine act of Roman judicial investigation, degenerated into torturing confessions out of suspected criminals.[51] The ancient Roman practice was revived to deal with heresy. Heresy was usually nothing more than refusing to be an obedient subject of the Church.

Waldo and his movement was a thorn in the Church's side, but there was a much greater threat to the Church's religious monopoly: the Cathars. Unfortunately, there are no Cathar writings extant. Nearly all that is known about them derives from reading the attacks of Catholic scholars.[52]

The popularity of the Cathars and Waldensians was partly due to the Catholic Church's spiritual bankruptcy. The Cathars exceeded the austere mien of the Waldensians. Their creed was dualistic, meaning that they believed in a good god in heaven and an evil god who ran earth. It is said that they were not really Christians, but that is misleading. A number of early Christian sects were also dualistic, such as the Gnostics. The dualistic aspect of Gnostic philosophy was older than Christianity. It can be argued that the dualistic creed of the Gnostics and Cathars was Christian in that it centered on Jesus. The Gnostics considered themselves Christians, as did the Cathars. The Gnostic philosophy antagonized other Christian sects, and the Gnostic sects lost the political battle of what Christianity would become. What is called Christianity today is merely the victorious viewpoint of the most powerful Christian sects, especially the one aligned with the Roman Empire’s might. Gnostic texts were carefully excluded from the New Testament, such as the gospels of Thomas, Peter, Mary, Philip, Nicodemus and the Gospel of Truth. Dualistic thought is prominent in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, with apocalyptic struggles of good against evil becoming the philosophical underpinnings of Christian institutions such as the Crusades and the Inquisition.[53]

The Cathars were dualistic, but so is any Christian who believes that the devil is influential on earth. In theory, there is a distinction between the two. In the standard Christian view, God created all, and Satan was a fallen angel. Satan is not a creator as such, but a corrupter. The agent of darkness that the Gnostics, Manicheans and Cathars believed in was a creator in its own right. A good god ran heaven, and a dark god ran the physical world. Theologians have spent centuries arguing such matters, but if the evil is due to Satan or a dark creator is a relatively fine distinction, and in practice, the difference is on the order of splitting hairs. How one deals with the darkness is all-important.

Manicheanism was a bona fide world religion, comparable to Christianity or Islam. Mani founded it in the late 200s AD, and it was an amalgam of Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and elements from other religions. Mani pursued a consciously syncretic attempt at a universal religion. The religion he founded flourished in the Middle East and Central Asia, and even spread to China. The Manicheans practiced one of the gentlest religions. Believing matter to have inherent darkness within it, yet with God's light inside also, the Manichees killed no animals, ate no animal flesh, and cultivated melons as a staple, as they would not kill the plant to gain the melon. They even apologized to their bread as they ate it. As with the Gnostics, women had a prominent place in Mani's religion, able to become the "elect," (the priest class, but they could not take office…not being entirely free from the day’s misogyny).

Christian doctrine states that souls are tainted with original sin. The Manichean doctrine stated that the only taint was from being in a physical body. The soul was untainted, and the path to salvation was through "gnosis," which means "knowing." Awakening the soul and purifying the inherent light in matter, sending it back to its source, were the goals of Manichean practice. As with all religions, Manicheanism devolved when it mistook the symbolic for the literal, or when it proposed spiritual regulations, with their inevitable dos and don'ts. Yet, a religion whose central tenet was causing no harm to living beings gets high marks, and they apparently lived by it. While the Catholic Church devolved to granting salvation to those who paid enough money, the Manichean faith largely avoided that corruption, although the faith had the "hearers" (similar to "the flock," in Christianity) financially support the "elect" (such as the priests).

Manicheans were first persecuted by the Roman Empire in about 300 AD. They were treated worse than Christians. The totalitarian nature of Christianity could not abide Manicheanism either, and as Christianity became allied with the Roman Empire, the Manicheans, like the Pagans and others, became the object of Christian destructive zeal. Long after Manicheanism had been eradicated in the Christian world, it continued flourishing in Asia, and the religion lasted for more than a thousand years before finally being wiped out.[54]

The world would be a gentler place if religions such as Manicheanism were not destroyed. As with other extinct religions, the Manicheans are not here to defend themselves, and until recently, the West knew of the Manichees largely by reading Christian polemics against them, which surely did not provide a sympathetic or balanced view. Mani, unlike Buddha or Jesus, put his words on paper and tried founding a religion, although modern scholars still do not know how he exactly practiced his craft. Apparently he could tailor it to his audience, be they Buddhist, Christian, or of any religion. Manichean missionaries, partly because of their syncretic views, were more successful in their recruiting efforts than their Christian counterparts. Christianity prevailed largely due to brute force and the temporal power it cultivated.

The Cathars followed in the tradition of Gnostics and Manicheans. The Cathars followed Jesus' living example the best they could, and took it to greater extremes. Cathars would not willingly kill any living thing, and the most accomplished Cathars, the Perfecti, fasted three times a year for forty days each and were celibate, similar to the Manichean Electi. The Cathar faith was an ideological descendant of Manicheanism. So were the Bogomils and Paulicians. The Cathars' most devout members would not even eat eggs, milk or cheese, "unclean" foods that were associated with procreation. The Perfecti lived the simple and austere life that Christians imagined Jesus lived, and their no meat and no wine policy took it further than Jesus did. Again, no Cathar writings have survived the Inquisition's bonfires. Cathar critics stated that the Cathars did not even believe in procreation, which led the great Inquisition historian Henry Lea to state that the Church's attack on the Cathars was probably justified because a few generations of Catharist abstinence would extinguish the species. The Manicheans apparently discouraged having children, although marriage was fine for the "hearers," and even keeping mistresses, as Saint Augustine did when he practiced the Manichee faith.[55] Procreation was discouraged but not forbidden, particularly as Manicheanism was a pacifistic religion. They indeed were austere ascetics, but there is more to intrigue about their faith than there is to deplore. Manicheans considered themselves Christian.

It is possible that their critics, to make them seem crazy, exaggerated their austerity. The Western mentality for millennia has been a bizarre and fanatical denial of the flesh, as demonstrated by the self-tortures that priests and nuns inflicted on themselves. It is perhaps too convenient that the Cathars were accused of autogenocide as a rationale for eradicating them.

The Cathar faith apparently came from the Balkan region, probably as a side effect of the Crusades, arriving with returning soldiers.[56] The Cathar faith spread rapidly in France. The Perfecti attained an outward holiness that made all priestly piousness pale beside it.

Catharism and Waldensianism spread like wildfire throughout France. In parts of France, half the population became Cathar. The Catholic Church saw that development as a threat. Various analyses justify the Catholic Church's position toward the Cathars as "defending" itself from Cathar attacks, or defending the entire European worldview from such an affront. It appears that the "threat" was more like the threat the Washington electric companies felt when Dennis Lee appeared on the scene with a superior energy conservation technology. The main Cathar threat was that the Catholic Church's pews would become empty, and their coffers would no longer be filled. Much of the spiritual and cultural theorizing is probably a smokescreen to disguise the dictates of raw power. The Cathars were a threat to the racket.

Innocent's strategy was one that businessmen can appreciate: put cement shoes on the competition while simultaneously marketing an ersatz version of their product. In the span of a few years, Innocent authorized the establishment of two new priestly orders. He authorized the Franciscans in 1209, and in 1214 the Dominican order was founded, officially approved by Innocent's successor in 1216. Those were the first two mendicant orders founded by the Catholic Church. As with the Cathars and Waldensians, the priests of the new orders took vows of poverty. In 1204, Innocent tried getting the Cistercians to preach against the Cathars. The Cistercians were founded during the first Crusade, in 1098, and were the dominant order of the 1100s. They originally had ascetic ideals, but were not mendicants, and when 1200 rolled around their mission had changed significantly. Forty-eight knights joined the Cistercian order in 1112, led by the man who became Saint Bernard. The notion of the oxymoronic monk-like, chivalrous knights, already on the rise, became more popular. In 1119, the Knights Templars were formed in Jerusalem. The Cistercians were not the ideal monks to counter Cathar preachings. Dominic tried bringing Cathars back to the Catholic fold in 1205.

Dominic had limited success, but his order became the Catholic Church's priestly army. In 1208, Innocent called for a Crusade on France to stamp out the heresy of Waldensians and Cathars. In 1209, the Crusade’s purpose was made evident when the Catholic army, led by the Abbott of Citeaux, Arnauld-Amalric, surrounded the city of Béziers. When asked how to distinguish faithful Catholics from heretics, the Abbott allegedly told his Christian soldiers to "Kill them all; God will know his own."[57] The army, so instructed, proceeded to kill every resident of the city. Estimates range from 7000 to 20,000 people dying in that slaughter.

The irony can be overwhelming. The Cathars were devout pacifists. They rarely put up any resistance. Many fled across Europe, making the murderous Christian task more difficult. Early Christians in the Roman Empire were also noted for their pacifistic non-resistance to Roman violence. A thousand years later, the Christians were the butchers, doing the same thing to those non-resisting Cathars. Burning the Cathars alive was a favored method of dealing with them, especially the Perfecti. The awesome violence that the Crusading army inflicted on the local populace was a method of terror, a timeless and effective method of pacifying the population, making examples out of the disobedient. The Albigensian Crusade waxed and waned in France for decades, and entire regions were depopulated. Perhaps a million people died in the Albigensian Crusade. The massacre at Montsegur occurred in 1247, which nearly put the last nail in the coffin of Catharism. Crusades were nearly a constant in those days, marching back and forth across Europe and into the Holy Land, in an unending orgy of bloodshed. Jews were being slaughtered, but Christian was slaughtering Christian also, something Jews and Muslims had difficulty comprehending at times. Jews were banned from France in 1254, and expelled from England in 1290.

One of Innocent's last acts was convening the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, perhaps the single-most ambitious conference in Christian history. Innocent tried reforming the church, restating the faith, calling for a new Crusade, and making annual reception of Holy Communion and confession a requirement for all Catholics. Innocent also raised Church taxes, condemned the Waldensians and Cathars, and made a further definition of heresy and how to deal with it. One of that council's edicts was forcing Jews and Muslims to wear clothing that marked them as non-Christian, something the Nazis would do much later. Although Innocent was responsible for initiating endless bloodshed with his Crusading zeal and political machinations, he did not initiate the Inquisition, as such. A series of bulls by Pope Gregory IX in the late 1220s and early 1230s further established the concept of the Inquisition, and by 1260 the Inquisition was rolling along. Dominicans and Franciscans usually ran the Inquisitions. There was not yet a central Holy Office as such, but the Inquisition was known and feared. Mendicant friars became the scourge of heretics. The almost total annihilation of Cathars by 1250 had eliminated the direst threat to the religious monopoly, and the Inquisition became a standard feature throughout Europe, where it was needed to keep the restive flock in line.

During the second half of the 1200s, Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas wrote what many consider the greatest works in Catholic history. His work also further solidified the Inquisition’s philosophical underpinning, and helped set the stage for later witch hunts.

The Catholic Church may have helped hold Europe together back then, similar to Constantine's strategy of using Christianity to hold the Roman Empire together, with the Catholic Church being Europe’s only unifying institution. The Church often vied with kings and emperors for power, in an intricate dance that characterized Europe for centuries. Charlemagne formed the Holy Roman Empire during the 700s, which became an attempt to revive the union of Church and state that Rome had for a short time. For the next thousand years, European nations and the Catholic Church had a wide spectrum of interaction, the Church often bringing the rulers to heel, but eventually losing power struggles with the Protestant Reformation.

The fate of European Jews was often the subject of European caprice. When times got bad, the Jews suffered for it. The 1200s, for all its bloodshed, possessed a pastoral calm compared to the 1300s. In the 1300s, warfare, famine and disease swept back and forth across Europe constantly. The Black Death swept across Asia from China. It killed tens of millions of people, with a third of China, a third of the Muslim world and a third of Europe dying, producing the greatest carnage in Europe in 1348-1349. Europe’s response to the Black Death was blaming Jews for introducing it. Tens of thousands of Jews were burned alive for "bringing" the plague to Europe, as well as lepers and other outcasts. Church policies fomented anti-Semitism, but when the mobs began murdering Jews, Church officials often tried preventing them. Church officials abetting anti-Semitism were usually not the same ones who tried saving Jews from the mobs.

Franciscans were the scourge of Jews in those days. Jews were restricted from numerous professions, but in one profession their religion and the Christian religion meshed. According to the Biblical code that guided Christians, they could not lend money and earn interest. The Jewish code allowed them to earn interest on money lent to "strangers," which came to mean non-Jews, and that was how the Jews became bankers and the source of many conspiracy theories.[58]

With all the anti-Jewish violence in Europe, European Jews fled to where they could, usually out of Christianity’s reach. It was not always nice for them, but present-day Spain was the safest place in Europe for Jews during those early anti-Semitic massacres. Under Moorish rule, Jews often flourished. The Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula took place over several centuries. Jews who lived under Moorish rule for centuries suddenly found themselves the new subjects of Christian rulers. As one more Moorish city-state fell to the Christian armies, Moors and Jews fled to another Moorish city-state, or tried fitting in under the new regime. With the degeneration of Moorish rule in Spain, sometimes Jews felt they had a better deal with the new Christian overlords, and sometimes they did…for awhile.

Dominican priest Vincente Ferrer preached many hysterical anti-Semitic diatribes in the late 1300s in Seville, leading to riots and mass murders of Jews in 1391. The slaughters spread out and dotted the Iberian Peninsula. One option of Jews finding themselves under Christian rule was converting to Christianity to stay alive. It amounted to conversion by the sword. Previously, the Jews often chose the sword, but in 1391 something broke in them, and many chose conversion. Those "New Christians" were called conversos or marranos, marranos being derived from the Spanish word for swine.

A significant motivation for the mass murders of Jews that peppered Europe was greed. When Jews were murdered, their property was taken. Many of those inciting the massacres got rich from Jewish plunder.

After "conversion," many Jews strove to hide their Jewish heritage. For Christians, conversion still did not take Jews off the hook. The persecution became racial rather than religious. Jews were white people too, and it was not easy to distinguish them from other Europeans, especially in Spain. When the racial strategy proved unworkable, the strategy then became ferreting out New Christians who secretly practiced their Jewish faith. Throughout the 1400s, Jews in Spain were oppressed, with riots and massacres. Being a converso was no guarantee of safety, and some riots were specifically directed toward conversos. It escalated throughout the century, the Christian armies kept gaining ground, and Moors were pushed to the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula. The last remaining Moorish city-state was Granada.

In 1474, Ferdinand and Isabella ascended the throne, and idea of Spain grew from their rule. The peninsula was under one rule during the Roman days, but that was a thousand years previously. In 1480 Isabella began the Spanish Inquisition, and life got much worse for Jews. The Inquisition specifically targeted conversos who secretly practiced their Jewish faith. Many Jews did keep their faith in secret, which was understandable. The Inquisition's job was hunting down those "traitors." The Inquisition's fires then began burning across the Iberian Peninsula, consuming Jews by the thousand.

Jews were not Europe's only oppressed group. As the Spanish Inquisition heated up, witches were burning from one end of Western Europe to the other. The Inquisition had a hand in the witch-hunts, and could feign clean hands. The Church never officially burned a heretic. They would condemn them and "relax" them to secular authorities for their punishment. Similarly, the Church wrote the handbooks for finding and dealing with witches, and their treatment of heretics was adopted to various degrees in the witch-hunts. While the Inquisition did not play in England, burning witches did. England had expelled its Jews centuries earlier, as had France, so Jew-hunting was not a sport for them. About 85% of the witches executed were women, and many were healers of some kind. The witch-hunts were a women's Holocaust. There were instances where villages committed effective suicide by killing all of its women.

In 1492, Granada fell to the Christian armies, ending several centuries of Moorish rule on the Iberian Peninsula. When the Spanish armies controlled everything on the Iberian Peninsula except for Portugal, the Spanish sovereigns issued a new decree: Jews faced the choice of either conversion or expulsion. The numbers for Spain's Jews were 160,000 expelled, 50,000 converts and 20,000 deaths.[59] Some estimates go much higher, with 400,000 Jews leaving Spain. During the 1400s, Jews were expelled throughout Europe: Vienna, 1421; Cologne, 1424; Bavaria, 1442 and 1450; Milan 1489; Florence and Tuscany, 1494, and many other places. Although Poland had anti-Jew riots in 1348-49 (Black Death) and 1407 and 1494, by 1500 Poland was considered the safest place in Europe for Jews. Most Jews expelled from Spain went to the Ottoman Empire, where the Islamic culture welcomed them. About 10,000 went to Italy, but Spain invaded Italy during the 1500s, and those Jews again ended up in the wrong place.

When Jews were expelled, ending up in a region already filled with Jewish refugees, that would often trigger expulsions in that region also. The Wandering Jew became a part of the folklore about that time. In 1517, Martin Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation with his Ninety-five Theses. In the long run, it probably helped Jews by dividing Christians. However, the early protestant theologians were not kindly disposed to Jews, Martin Luther perhaps the worst of them, with his 1543 pamphlet "On the Jews and their Lies." His diatribe is seen as a stepping-stone to the Jewish Holocaust.

Virtually all of Western Europe was hostile to Jews, and those who did not flee to Islamic lands went to Poland. During the 1500s, the Jews thrived in Poland and nowhere else in Europe, except for some in Southern Italy. In 1541 in Venice, the first European ghetto was formed. The Jews had lived in segregated living before in Europe and in Islamic lands, but the Venetian ghetto was a kind of Jewish prison. Some historians have questioned why the Jews accepted their fate in Venice, while others feel it was understandable, after all the demoralizing events during the previous centuries, climaxing with the mass murders and expulsions from Spain, and further expulsions and murders when the Spaniards conquered Northern Italy. There was a certain passivity and acceptance of their condition. It was partly due to their religious convictions. It was also an attitude remarked upon as they were being herded to their deaths in World War II.

Wealth, Jews and the Age of Colonialism

In 1493, the New World's rape began with Columbus’ second voyage. Although the Crown had specific laws forbidding Jews from sullying the New World with their presence, it is estimated that of the 200,000 European residents in Mexico by 1570, a third were converted J