January 15, 2025

Michał Boym


Wikipedia:

Michał Piotr Boym, SJ (Chinese: 卜彌格; pinyin: Bǔ Mígé;[1] c. 1612 – 1659) was a Polish Jesuit missionary to China, scientist and explorer. He was an early Western traveller within the Chinese mainland, and the author of numerous works on Asian fauna, flora and geography. The first European Chinese dictionary, published in 1670, is attributed to Boym.

. . .Boym is best remembered for his works describing the flora, fauna, history, traditions and customs of the countries he travelled through. During his first trip to China he wrote a short work on the plants and animals dwelling in Mozambique. The work was later sent to Rome, but was never printed. During his return trip he prepared a large collection of maps of mainland China and South-East Asia. He planned to expand it to nine chapters describing China, its customs and political system, as well as Chinese science and inventions. The merit of Boym's maps was that they were the first European maps to properly represent Korea as a peninsula rather than an island. They also took notice of the correct positions of many Chinese cities previously unknown to the westerners or known only by the semi-fabulous descriptions of Marco Polo. Boym also marked the Great Wall and the Gobi Desert. Although the collection was not published during Boym's lifetime, it extended the knowledge of China in the west.

. . .In his other works, such as Specimen medicinae Sinicae ("Chinese medicinal plants") and Clavis medica ad Chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus ("Key to the Medical Doctrine of the Chinese on the Pulse") he described the Chinese traditional medicine and introduced several methods of healing and diagnostics previously unknown in Europe, particularly measurement of the pulse. The latter book was likely written by the Dutch doctor and scholar Willem ten Rhijne.

Video Title: Who was Michał Boym and how did he get to China? O. Uziembło explains Polish-Chinese connections. Source: Poland Daily Live. Date Published: January 22, 2021.

January 14, 2025

Kurt Baschwitz


Wikipedia:

Siegfried Kurt Baschwitz (2 February 1886, Offenburg – 6 January 1968 Amsterdam), was a journalist, a professor of press, propaganda and public opinion, scholar on newspapers, and crowd psychology.

Baschwitz, who, as was customary in German middle class, was known by his second name Kurt, was a German Jew and a friend of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Baschwitz was called upon as an expert to advise on the publication of the Diary of Anne Frank and later again authenticate it.

. . .After World War II Kurt Baschwitz was reinstated as a private lecturer and then an ordinary lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

In 1948 he became associate professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and four years later he was made full professor in press science, public opinion, and mass psychology.

In July 1948 he founded and became the first director of the Dutch Institute for the Science of the Press which organized courses for the training of young journalists, as well as established ones. Baschwitz was considered to be a pioneer in communication science and mass psychology and contributed much to the international exchange of information and research among scholars in the field. First as a driving force behind the International Society for "Publicistics", and then as a key figure preparing the International Association of Mass Communication Research IAMCR.

After 1945, one of his major efforts was to rediscover information on the field had been lost because of the war and on the previous underground press. Gazette, the international journal that he founded in 1955, acted as a liaison centre for research and researchers from different parts of the world. His later works all dealt with the mass psychology of witch hunts, but were also a reflection on the mechanisms of mass persecutions in general, and those of Jews in particular. His magnum opus, in his own opinion, Hexen und Hexenprozesse: Geschichte eines Massenwahns und seiner Bekaempfung which discussed methods of fighting attempts at mass delusion appeared in 1963 and was printed in several languages. Baschwitz also contributed to the founding of a ‘seminarium’ for mass psychology, public opinion and propaganda at the University of Amsterdam. In 1972 it was renamed the Baschwitz Institute for collective behavior studies, before merging with the public opinion section within the department for communication studies in 1985.
An excerpt from, "Kurt Baschwitz: A Pioneer of Communication Studies and Social Psychology" By Jaap van Ginneken, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, Introduction:
Kurt Baschwitz (1886-1968) had a lifelong fascination for ‘the riddle of the mass’ in both its visible and invisible forms. He was a major pioneer of communication and media studies on the European continent, an early student of the social, political, and mass psychology of crowds, publics, audiences, and public opinion, as well as a versatile social historian. Half a century after his death, however, he risks being forgotten and misunderstood, falling through the cracks of history.

Baschwitz was one of the many founders of the social sciences who came from a Jewish background, and who were forced to flee the Hitler regime. Fate dictated that he made it no further than The Netherlands: then still neutral, later occupied anyway. He did not reach the Anglo-American world, which came to dominate the global linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and scientific spheres after the war.

After Baschwitz’s death, one commemorative article noted: ‘Unlike colleagues like Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin, he did not end up in [the United Kingdom or] the United States’. This contributed to his unique contributions being overlooked. In 1986, upon the centenary of his birth, his successors from both press history and mass psychology joined together to claim that ‘Baschwitz’ work deserves a good English translation, or at least a summary’. 

Upon a later jubilee, one of those successors repeated: ‘Had he fled to the U.S. [from Nazi Germany in 1933], he would have been world famous today’. So ‘His publications deserve to be reprinted and translated’. This present book is an attempt to fulfil part of that wish by providing an outline of Baschwitz’s life and times, as well as summaries and brief excerpts from his half-dozen books, for English-language and international readers.

Throughout his life, Baschwitz was a defender of constitutional rule and law and order against authoritarianism, intimidation, and civil violence. This was especially true during the two World Wars and the Inter-War years, when those values were alternately assaulted by both the radical socialist or communist left, and by the radical nationalist or fascist right.

Three of his major dictums illustrate his stance. One: Mass delusions are best stopped by preserving freedom of expression (meaning critical discussion) at all times. Two: The most important part of a newspaper is formed by the mass of its readers (meaning a group of citizens), not by the institution itself. Three: Practical politics needs to rediscover (i.e., put trust in) the large mass of decent people if they are to stand up to tyrants. He wrote this in the 1920s and 1930s, when Europe and the rest of the world began to slide toward another major conflagration.

January 12, 2025

Arson, The Political Weapon Par Excellence

Arson is the original false flag tool, the ultimate political weapon. From Nero to the Nazis it has been wielded to great effect and for a variety of purposes, political and otherwise.

"Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" By Bench Ansfield (due to be available for purchase in August 2025).

A revelatory account of the wave of arson-for-profit that hit American cities in the 1970s, and of the tenants who put out the fires and reclaimed their neighborhoods.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” Supposedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, the phrase encapsulated an entire chaotic era in this nation’s history. Across the 1970s, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, leveling poor communities of color. However, as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the majority of those fires weren’t set by residents—as is usually assumed—but by landlords seeking insurance payouts. Ansfield introduces the term “brownlining” for the subprime insurance practices imposed by the federal government and insurance industry after 1968, and shows why, with buildings worth more dead than alive, landlords turned to the torch. In an expansive narrative stretching from the Bronx to Britain to Brazil, Ansfield tracks the flows of money that signaled the arrival of our financialized age. From the ashes arose the modern tenant movement and the fight for housing justice amid a new era of housing insecurity.

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Ansfield holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians.

An excerpt from, "Organized Arson as a Political Crime. The Construction of a Terrorist Menace in the Early Modern Period" By Johannes Dillinger, Crime, History and Societies, 2006:

The list of those who allegedly engaged in secret warfare against their enemies by hiring vagabonds as arsonists is long and impressive. A few examples shall suffice. One of the earliest cases of politically motivated organized arson is the Bundschuh of 1517. Prior to the Great Peasants’ War (1524-1526) the German Southwest experienced a number of peasant rebellions, the so-called Bundschuh upheavals3. The term Bundschuh was originally used for cheap footwear worn by peasants. As rebellious peasants chose the Bundschuh as their symbol the word ‘Bundschuh’ took the meaning of ‘organized peasant upheaval’. There were Bundschuh activities in 1493 in Schlettstadt (Alsace), 1502 in Untergrombach (Baden), 1513 in Lehen near Freiburg im Breisgau and supposedly in 1517 in the entire upper Rhine region on both sides of the river. None of these rebellions succeeded. The sixteenth century Bundschuh risings were all supposed to have been initiated and organized by the same man: Joss Fritz, a peasant and surveyor of the fences from the village of Untergrombach. After the failure of his two earlier insurgencies Fritz supposedly chose a new tactic in 1517. He allegedly recruited a large number of vagabonds. In turn, these vagabonds were to recruit new adherents to the Bundschuh among the rural population. In addition to that, the vagarants were paid to raise fires at the beginning and throughout the uprising. One of these vagabonds was arrested and betrayed all the plans of Fritz. Thus, the 1517 Bundschuh revolt was over before it even started. In 1524 three hundred houses burned down in Troyes. The damage was blamed on vagabonds who were said to work for the Habsburgs. These arsonists were allegedly about to target other towns in France. At the imperial diet at Regensburg in 1540, the Protestant estates demanded that emperor Charles V should take action against a Catholic conspiracy. This conspiracy supposedly planned to eradicate the new creed by destroying whole regions: a series of arsonist attacks by vagrant beggars were to raze Protestant towns and villages to the ground. As one might expect, Heinrich von Braunschweig was supposed to pull the strings of this conspiracy in the Reich while the pope himself financed this gigantic autodafé. In German Habsburg countries there were rumours about arsonist attacks organized by the Hussites in the 1420s, by the Venetians in early sixteenth century and finally by the Turks from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, princes who had been forced out of their territories were suspected to have made pacts with itinerant arsonists to prepare the military retaking of their respective lands. Duke Ulrich of Württemberg and Albrecht Alcibiades von Brandenburg-Kulmbach are well-known examples. On a smaller scale, members of Southwestern Germany’s lower nobility were accused of having enlisted the help of Mordbrenner against the domineering power of the dukes of Württemberg. After the devastating fire of London, British cities took measures against vagrants who were said to be the henchmen of the Quakers, or of the Catholics. These religious minorities were supposed to be eager to spread terror and insecurity in the Anglican kingdom. There were rumours about organized crime in Poland in the seventeenth century. A Polish secret organization was said to offer the ‘services’ of tramps as arsonists. Probably the best-know example of politically motivated organized arson is that of the arsonist scare in revolutionary France. During the Grande Peur especially the rural population feared a pact between the aristocracy and the itinerant poor. The vagrants were to raise fires to destroy the crops and to spread fear and tumult in order to stop the revolutionary movement. During the English ‘Captain Swing’ protests of the 1830s it was rumoured that Irish itinerant working men were paid by wealthy Jews to commit arson. The adherents of ‘Captain Swing’ were at pains to emphasize that they did not cooperate with the fireraisers.

Wikipedia:

The day after the fire, at Hitler's request, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law by using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone. These rights were not reinstated during Nazi reign. The decree was used by the Nazis to ban publications not considered friendly to the Nazi cause. Despite the fact that Marinus van der Lubbe claimed to have acted alone in the Reichstag fire, Hitler, after having obtained his emergency powers, announced that it was the start of a wider communist effort to take over Germany. Nazi Party newspapers then published this fabricated story. This sent the German population into a panic and isolated the communists further among the civilians; additionally, thousands of communists were imprisoned in the days following the fire (including leaders of the Communist Party of Germany) on the charge that the Party was preparing to stage a putsch. Speaking to Rudolph Diels about communists during the Reichstag fire, Hitler said "These sub-humans do not understand how the people stand at our side. In their mouse-holes, out of which they now want to come, of course they hear nothing of the cheering of the masses." With communist electoral participation also suppressed (the communists previously polled 17% of the vote), the Nazis were able to increase their share of the vote in the 5 March 1933 Reichstag elections from 33% to 44%. This gave the Nazis and their allies, the German National People's Party (who won 8% of the vote), a majority of 52% in the Reichstag.

January 11, 2025

Western Woke Era Ends In A Blaze


Hollywood hasn't made a good film for a decade and a half. 2007 was the last good year for movies. Ever since it embraced the ridiculous woke ideology it stopped telling good stories. That same ideology permeated the politics of California and we are witnessing the consequences today. 

The Climate Change death cult, having cannibalized cultural and political thought, is now aiming to destroy the natural environment in the name of saving it.

But it's not California alone that has pursued destructive policies for stupid ideological reasons. Europe's disastrous and nonsensical war against Russia in Ukraine has left it weakened, economically and militarily. Canada under Trudeau has seen living standards plummet.

Of the major powers China is the only sensible, responsible, and rational actor on the world stage at the moment. Japan, Germany, the Muslim world, Africa, forget about it. They're lost. Unfortunately North America has fallen into the later category instead of rising with China.


Video Title: Intentional Bureaucratic Sabotage of LA's Firefighting Infrastructure Confirmed! Desperate Democrats Now Turning On Each Other As Gavin Newsom Calls for An Investigation into Why the Palisades Reservoir Was Drained Before the Historic Blaze. Source: Alex Jones. Date Published: January 11, 2025.

Kate Rusby - Let The Bells Ring



Kate Rusby - Let The Bells Ring. Source: Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall.