John Simkin

Although she has been long forgotten, Maude Allan is one of the most fascinating figures in history. She was born Beulah Maude Durrant in Toronto, Canada, on 27th August, 1873. The family moved to San Francisco in 1879 and she also spent time studying music in Berlin.

In 1895 her brother, Theodore Durrant, was charged with the brutal murders of Blanche Lamont and Minnie Flora Williams. He was executed on 7th January 1898. As a result of the case, she changed her name to Maude Allan.

In 1900 Allan published an illustrated sex manual for women. She also began to dance professionally. Inspired by Salomé, a play written by Oscar Wilde, she created Vision of Salomé. Its first production was in Vienna in 1906. Her Dance of the Seven Veils created great controversy. Allan promoted her career by publishing her autobiography, My Life and Dancing (1908).

In 1908 Allan took her production of Vision of Salomé to England. According to James Hayward, the author of Myths and Legends of the First World War (2002): "Allan had performed her dance with great success in London in 1908, its popular success due in large part to her voluptuous figure and revealing costume."

In an article that appeared in The Daily Mail on 3rd May, 1908, Allan argued: "The art of dancing, as understood by the great masses, is a series of regular rhythmical movements requiring a certain music; not so in my work. In that the movements of the plastic poser are inspired by the music.... What one usually only vaguely feels when listening to beautiful music I am trying, through movement and mimicry, to express clearly and deeply - the thought which seems to hover on the wings of the melody."

During the tour Allan was banned from appearing in Manchester: On 8th June 1908 the New York Times reported: "Miss Maud Allan, the barefooted and otherwise scantily clad dancer, in whose favor a very profitable boom has been worked up in London, and whose manager is anxious to give New Yorkers a chance of witnessing her Salome and other dances, has been warned off the stage in Manchester, which is the most important theatrical city in England outside of the capital."

After 250 performances in England she returned to the United States. Allan appeared at Carnegie Hall for the first time January, 1910. The New York Times reported: "Bare-limbed and scantily draped in filmy gauzes, diaphanous in texture and unvivid in colour, she floats from one pose to the next, emphasizing the plastic transitions with waving arms and raised legs and sundry poses of the head. Miss Allan in spirit and in the nature of her dances resembles her predecessors. However, she is more beautiful in face and figure than some of them, and she has a grace, a picturesque personal quality, which is all her own."

Allan embarked on a world tour and in 1915 she starred in the silent film, The Rug Maker's Daughter. When she arrived back in New York City in October 1916 a critic commented that the 43 year-old Allan had "succeeded in preserving the litheness of body desirable for this kind of dancing, and she has lost none of her grace". He went onto say that her dancing was "an art, no longer new, that depends on its novelty for popularity" and that this was reflected in the "scanty audience that greeted her yesterday."

Allan decided to return to London where she had so much success eight years earlier. In her previous visit she had made many enemies. This included Noel Pemberton Billing and Arnold Henry White, who had established the Vigilente Society, an organisation with the "object of promoting purity in public life". In December 1917, Billing published an article in The Imperialist by White that argued that Germany was under the control of homosexuals (White called them urnings): "Espionage is punished by death at the Tower of London, but there is a form of invasion which is as deadly as espionage: the systematic seduction of young British soldiers by the German urnings and their agents... Failure to intern all Germans is due to the invisible hand that protects urnings of enemy race... When the blond beast is an urning, he commands the urnings in other lands. They are moles. They burrow. They plot. They are hardest at work when they are most silent."

Billing and White had hears a rumour that Allan was having an affair with Margot Asquith, the wife of Herbert Asquith, the former prime minister. They believed all three were German agents. In The Imperialist Billing claimed the existence of a secret society called the Unseen Hand. As Ernest Sackville Turner, the author of Dear Old Blighty (1980) has pointed out: "One of the great delusions of the war was that there existed an Unseen (or Hidden, or Invisible) Hand, a pro-German influence which perennially strove to paralyse the nation's will and to set its most heroic efforts at naught... As defeat seemed to loom, as French military morale broke and Russia made her separate peace, more and more were ready to believe that the Unseen Hand stood for a confederacy of evil men, taking their orders from Berlin, dedicated to the downfall of Britain by subversion of the military, the Cabinet, the Civil Service and the City; and working not only through spiritualists, whores and homosexuals."

Relying on information supplied by Harold Sherwood Spencer, Billing published an article in The Imperialist on 26th January, 1918, revealing the existence of a Black Book: "There exists in the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute."

Noel Pemberton Billing claimed the book listed the names of 47,000 British sexual perverts, mostly in high places, being blackmailed by the German Secret Service. He added: "It is a most catholic miscellany. The names of Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors, members of His Majesty's Household follow each other with no order of precedence." Billing went onto argue that "the thought that 47,000 English men and women are held in enemy bondage through fear calls all clean spirits to mortal combat". The comment about "dancing girls" was a reference to Maud Allan.

In February, 1918, it was announced by theatrical producer, Jack Grein, that Maud Allan would give two private performances of Oscar Wildes's Salomé in April. It had to be a private showing because the play had long been banned by the Lord Chancellor as being blasphemous. Noel Pemberton Billing had heard rumours Allan was a lesbian and was having an affair with Margot Asquith, the wife of Herbert Asquith, the former prime minister. He also believed that Allan and the Asquiths were all members of the Unseen Hand.

On 16th February, 1918, the front page of The Vigilante had a headline, "The Cult of the Clitoris". This was followed by the paragraph: "To be a member of Maud Allan's private performances in Oscar Wilde's Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of those members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000."

As soon as Allan became aware of the article she put the matter into the hands of her solicitor. In March 1918, Allan commenced criminal proceedings for obscene, criminal and defamatory libel. During this period Billing was approached by Charles Repington, the military correspondent of The Times. He was concerned about the decision by David Lloyd George to begin peace negotiations with the German foreign minister. According to James Hayward, the author of Myths and Legends of the First World War (2002): "Talk of peace outraged the Generals, who found allies in the British far right. Repington suggested that Billing get his trial postponed and use the mythical Black Book to smear senior politicians and inflame anti-alien feeling in the Commons. By this logic, the current peace talks would be ruined and Lloyd George's authority undermined."

Toni Bentley has argued in her book, Sisters of Salome (2002) that the government hired Eileen Villiers-Stewart to compromise Billing: "Lloyd George and his advisers hired a young woman with some experience in political subterfuge, as an agent-provocateur. She was to offer Pemberton-Billing her support, information, and sexual favours if necessary, and then lure him to a male brothel to be secretly photographed for blackmail. Eileen Villiers-Stewart was a political adventuress primed for the job. She was an attractive, twenty-five-year-old bigamist, and her lunch with the Independent M.P. was all too successful. By the end of the afternoon, mesmerized by him, she flipped her allegiance, slept with him, and divulged the Liberals' conspiracy to blackmail him. She even agreed to testify as a star witness in her new lover's libel case."

The libel case opened at the Old Bailey in May, 1918. Billing chose to conduct his own defence, in order to provide the opportunity to make the case against the government and the so-called Unseen Hand group. The prosecution was led by Ellis Hume-Williams and Travers Humphreys and the case was heard in front of Chief Justice Charles Darling.

Billing's first witness was Eileen Villiers-Stewart. She explained that she had been shown the Black Book by two politicians since killed in action in the First World War. As Christopher Andrew has pointed out in Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (1985): "Though evidence is not normally allowed in court about the contents of documents which cannot be produced, exceptions may be made in the case of documents withheld by foreign enemies. Mrs Villiers Stewart explained that the Black Book was just such an exception." During the cross-examination Villiers-Stewart claimed that the names of Herbert Asquith, Margot Asquith and Richard Haldane were in the Black Book. Judge Charles Darling now ordered her to leave the witness-box. She retaliated by saying that Darling's name was also in the book.

The next witness was Harold S. Spencer. He claimed that he had seen the Black Book while looking through the private papers of Prince William of Wied of Albania in 1914. Spencer claimed that Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII, was a member of the Unseen Hand and has visited Holland as a go-between in supposed peace talks with Germany. The prosecuting counsel, Travers Humphreys, asked Spencer what he meant when he said during cross-examination that "Maud Allan was administering the cult.... Will you tell the court exactly what you meant by that?" He replied: "Any performance of a play which has been described by competent critics as an essay in lust, madness and sadism, and is given and attracts people to it at from five guineas to ten guineas a seat, must bring people who have more money than brains; must bring people who are seeking unusual excitement, erotic excitement; and to gather these people together in a room, under the auspices of a naturalised alien (Jack Grein), would open these people to possible German blackmail, and that their names, or anything that transpires, might find their way into German hands, and these people would be blackmailed by the Germans; and it was to prevent this that the article was written."

Spencer then went onto to explain what he meant by the "Cult of the Clitoris". In reply to Travers Humphreys: "In order to show that a cult exists in this country who would gather together to witness a lewd performance for amusement during wartime on the Sabbath... The Cult of the Clitoris meant a cult that would gather together to see a representation of a diseased mad girl." Billing joined in the attack on Maud Allan: "Such a play.... is one that is calculated to deprave, one that is calculated to do more harm, not only to young men and young women, but to all who see it, by undermining them, even more than the German army itself."

On 4th June, 1918, Noel Pemberton Billing was acquitted of all charges. As James Hayward has pointed out: "Hardly ever had a verdict been received in the Central Criminal Court with such unequivocal public approval. The crowd in the gallery sprang to their feet and cheered, as women waved their handkerchiefs and men their hats. On leaving the court in company with Eileen Villiers-Stewart and his wife, Billing received a second thunderous ovation from the crowd outside, where his path was strewn with flowers."

Cynthia Asquith wrote in her diary: "One can't imagine a more undignified paragraph in English history: at this juncture, that three-quarters of The Times should be taken up with such a farrago of nonsense! It is monstrous that these maniacs should be vindicated in the eyes of the public... Papa came in and announced that the monster maniac Billing had won his case. Damn him! It is such an awful triumph for the unreasonable, such a tonic to the microbe of suspicion which is spreading through the country, and such a stab in the back to people unprotected from such attacks owing to their best and not their worst points." Basil Thomson, who was head of Special Branch, an in a position to know that Eileen Villiers-Stewart and Harold S. Spencer had lied in court, wrote in his diary, "Every-one concerned appeared to have been either insane or to have behaved as if he were."

Billing retained his seat at the 1918 General Election but with the end of the First World War he was seen as an irrelevance. His reputation was severely damaged when Eileen Villiers-Stewart admitted that the evidence she had given in the Maud Allan trial was entirely fictitious, and that she had rehearsed it with billing and Harold S. Spencer. Knowing that he faced defeat in the next election he retired in 1921 claiming he was too ill to continue.

Allan never returned to dancing and according to her biographer, by the outbreak of the Second World War "she was living in comparative poverty in a section of the West Wing, a large mansion on Regent's Park". After her house was damaged during the Blitz she returned to the United States.

Maude Allan died in a Los Angeles nursing home on 7th October 1956.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWallanM.htm

This forum often discusses political conspiracies that have never been accepted by the general public. However, there was a politicial conspiracy during the First World War that was completely untrue but was believed because it was promoted by the newspapers in the UK.

In 1916 Noel Pemberton Billing, the Independent MP for East Hertfordshire founded a journal called The Imperialist that was part-funded by Lord Beaverbrook. His biographer, Geoffrey Russell Searle, has pointed out that "Billing campaigned for a unified air service, helped force the government to establish an air inquiry, and advocated reprisal raids against German cities. He also became adept at exploiting a variety of popular discontents."

The journal also claimed the existence of a secret society called the Unseen Hand. As Ernest Sackville Turner, the author of Dear Old Blighty (1980) has pointed out: "One of the great delusions of the war was that there existed an Unseen (or Hidden, or Invisible) Hand, a pro-German influence which perennially strove to paralyse the nation's will and to set its most heroic efforts at naught... As defeat seemed to loom, as French military morale broke and Russia made her separate peace, more and more were ready to believe that the Unseen Hand stood for a confederacy of evil men, taking their orders from Berlin, dedicated to the downfall of Britain by subversion of the military, the Cabinet, the Civil Service and the City; and working not only through spiritualists, whores and homosexuals."

Billing now joined forces with Lord Northcliffe (the owner of The Times and The Daily Mail), Leo Maxse (the editor of The National Review), the journalist, Arnold Henry White (the author of The Hidden Hand), Ellis Powell (the editor of the Financial News), Horatio Bottomley (the editor of John Bull) and the former soldier, Harold S. Spencer, to claim that the Unseen Hand were working behind the scenes to obtain a peace agreement with Germany.

Noel Pemberton Billing was a strong opponent of the Russian Revolution and feared that the Bolsheviks would try to persuade influential people in Britain to seek a peace deal. He argued that money from Germany and Russia was being used to fund the peace movement. These people were part of what became known as Boloism (Paul Marie Bolo was a German spy who was executed by the French during the First World War). According to Billing and other supporters of the Hidden Hand theory, Boloism was the distribution or receipt of funds calculated to assist the act of treason.

In December 1917, Billing published an article in The Imperialist by Arnold Henry White that argued that Germany was under the control of homosexuals (White called them urnings): "Espionage is punished by death at the Tower of London, but there is a form of invasion which is as deadly as espionage: the systematic seduction of young British soldiers by the German urnings and their agents... Failure to intern all Germans is due to the invisible hand that protects urnings of enemy race... When the blond beast is an urning, he commands the urnings in other lands. They are moles. They burrow. They plot. They are hardest at work when they are most silent."

Relying on information supplied by Harold S. Spencer, Billing published an article in The Imperialist on 26th January, 1918, revealing the existence of a Black Book: "There exists in the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute."

Billing claimed the book listed the names of 47,000 British sexual perverts, mostly in high places, being blackmailed by the German Secret Service. He added: "It is a most catholic miscellany. The names of Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors, members of His Majesty's Household follow each other with no order of precedence." Billing went onto argue that "the thought that 47,000 English men and women are held in enemy bondage through fear calls all clean spirits to mortal combat".

In February, 1918, Noel Pemberton Billing changed the name of The Imperialist to The Vigilante. Soon afterwards it published an article that argued that the Unseen Hand was involved in a plot to spread venereal disease: "The German, through his efficient and clever agent, the Ashkenazim, has complete control of the White Slave Traffic. Germany has found that diseased women cause more casualties than bullets. Controlled by their Jew-agents, Germany maintains in Britain a self-supporting - even profit-making - army of prostitutes which put more men out of action than does their army of soldiers."

Later that month it was announced by theatrical producer, Jack Grein, that Maud Allan would give two private performances of Oscar Wildes's Salomé in April. It had to be a private showing because the play had long been banned by the Lord Chancellor as being blasphemous. Billing had heard rumours Allan was a lesbian and was having an affair with Margot Asquith, the wife of Herbert Asquith, the former prime minister. He also believed that Allan and the Asquiths were all members of the Unseen Hand.

On 16th February, 1918, the front page of The Vigilante had a headline, "The Cult of the Clitoris". This was followed by the paragraph: "To be a member of Maud Allan's private performances in Oscar Wilde's Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of those members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000."

As soon as Allan became aware of the article she put the matter into the hands of her solicitor. In March 1918, Allan commenced criminal proceedings for obscene, criminal and defamatory libel. During this period Billing was approached by Charles Repington, the military correspondent of The Times. He was concerned about the decision by David Lloyd George to begin peace negotiations with the German foreign minister. According to James Hayward, the author of Myths and Legends of the First World War (2002): "Talk of peace outraged the Generals, who found allies in the British far right. Repington suggested that Billing get his trial postponed and use the mythical Black Book to smear senior politicians and inflame anti-alien feeling in the Commons. By this logic, the current peace talks would be ruined and Lloyd George's authority undermined."

Toni Bentley has argued in her book, Sisters of Salome (2002) that the government hired Eileen Villiers-Stewart to compromise Billing: "Lloyd George and his advisers hired a young woman with some experience in political subterfuge, as an agent-provocateur. She was to offer Pemberton-Billing her support, information, and sexual favours if necessary, and then lure him to a male brothel to be secretly photographed for blackmail. Eileen Villiers-Stewart was a political adventuress primed for the job. She was an attractive, twenty-five-year-old bigamist, and her lunch with the Independent M.P. was all too successful. By the end of the afternoon, mesmerized by him, she flipped her allegiance, slept with him, and divulged the Liberals' conspiracy to blackmail him. She even agreed to testify as a star witness in her new lover's libel case."

The libel case opened at the Old Bailey in May, 1918. Noel Pemberton Billing chose to conduct his own defence, in order to provide the opportunity to make the case against the government and the so-called Unseen Hand group. The prosecution was led by Ellis Hume-Williams and Travers Humphreys and the case was heard in front of Chief Justice Charles Darling.

Billing's first witness was Eileen Villiers-Stewart. She explained that she had been shown the Black Book by two politicians since killed in action in the First World War. As Christopher Andrew has pointed out in Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (1985): "Though evidence is not normally allowed in court about the contents of documents which cannot be produced, exceptions may be made in the case of documents withheld by foreign enemies. Mrs Villiers Stewart explained that the Black Book was just such an exception." During the cross-examination Villiers-Stewart claimed that the names of Herbert Asquith, Margot Asquith and Richard Haldane were in the Black Book. Judge Charles Darling now ordered her to leave the witness-box. She retaliated by saying that Darling's name was also in the book.

The next witness was Harold S. Spencer. He claimed that he had seen the Black Book while looking through the private papers of Prince William of Wied of Albania in 1914. Spencer claimed that Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII, was a member of the Unseen Hand and has visited Holland as a go-between in supposed peace talks with Germany.

On 4th June, 1918, Billing was acquitted of all charges. As James Hayward has pointed out: "Hardly ever had a verdict been received in the Central Criminal Court with such unequivocal public approval. The crowd in the gallery sprang to their feet and cheered, as women waved their handkerchiefs and men their hats. On leaving the court in company with Eileen Villiers-Stewart and his wife, Billing received a second thunderous ovation from the crowd outside, where his path was strewn with flowers."

Cynthia Asquith wrote in her diary: "One can't imagine a more undignified paragraph in English history: at this juncture, that three-quarters of The Times should be taken up with such a farrago of nonsense! It is monstrous that these maniacs should be vindicated in the eyes of the public... Papa came in and announced that the monster maniac Billing had won his case. Damn him! It is such an awful triumph for the unreasonable, such a tonic to the microbe of suspicion which is spreading through the country, and such a stab in the back to people unprotected from such attacks owing to their best and not their worst points." Basil Thomson, who was head of Special Branch, an in a position to know that Eileen Villiers-Stewart and Harold S. Spencer had lied in court, wrote in his diary, "Every-one concerned appeared to have been either insane or to have behaved as if he were."

Although membership of Vigilante Society grew dramatically after the trial, victory proved short-lived. The sinking of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle on 28th June, 1918, with the loss of 234 lives, brought an end to peace negotiations. By September it became clear that Germany was beaten and Billing's claims about the Unseen Hand created little fear in the population.

Billing retained his seat at the 1918 General Election but with the end of the First World War he was seen as an irrelevance. His reputation was severely damaged when Villiers-Stewart was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to nine months' hard labour. In a sworn statement she admitted that the evidence she had given in the Maud Allan trial was entirely fictitious, and that she had rehearsed it with Spencer and Noel Pemberton Billing. Knowing that he faced defeat in the next election Billing retired in 1921 claiming he was too ill to continue.

Spencer also had a bad end. According to James Hayward, the author of Myths and Legends of the First World War (2002): "Spencer returned to the courts in 1921, where he was convicted of libel following the publication of an anti-semitic article in the journal Plain English. He was sentenced to six months in gaol, and stripped of his army rank by the War Office. A few months after his release Spencer was convicted of unspecified 'disgusting behaviour' and fined 40 shillings."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWunseen.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWblackbook.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWbilling.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWvilliersS.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWspencerHS.htm

This story did not receive as much publicity as it should:

The brother of Sean Hoare, a former News of the World journalist who made claims about the paper phone hacking, says the practice was "used widely".

Stuart Hoare told the Leveson Inquiry his brother had witnessed phone hacking at the News of the World and the Sun.

"It was a routine at the Sun and it was probably more daily at the News of the World," he told the ethics inquiry.

Sean Hoare, who suffered from alcoholic liver disease, was found dead at his home in Watford, Herts, in July 2011.

He had alleged former News of the World (NoW) editor Andy Coulson was well aware that phone hacking had taken place. Mr Coulson has strongly denied the claims.

Sean Hoare's brother told the inquiry they had "shared a lot of secrets". He said they had talked at length and exchanged emails about phone hacking and the "strange world" he operated in.

"These alleged practices not only went on at the News of the World but it went on at the Sun," he said.

He said his brother had initially enjoyed working for the NoW when he began in 2001 but was struggling to cope in the latter years, until he was sacked in 2005.

"He got carried away - like a lot of journalists did - but they were under a lot of pressure from seniors to deliver," he said.

Mr Hoare was not allowed to name names at the inquiry, but said the "seniors involved in the practices know they were involved and know they were in the wrong".

Sean Hoare had a history of drug and alcohol problems, but his brother said he had been clean for about eight months before an article about phone hacking appeared in the New York Times in July 2010.

He also said Sean had not been paid for any of the interviews he had given about hacking.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16241359

I am as impressed now as when I lived there with the acceptance of diversity and just complete genius that abounds there. It is almost like a separate country to me; I know when I am there the most unexpected things will happen, and the most magical surprises as well.

I love California. As you say, it is like a separate country. But so is New England. It always annoys me when people generalize about the United States. As the name suggests, it is really a collection of different countries that are as different to each other as is Europe.

Perhaps a bit off topic here, but I do think it's worth mentioning.

It is a sad day. Christopher Hitchens passed on Wednesday. One of the most exciting, thought-provoking and endlessly masterful debaters of our - and I'd say, of all - times. This UK born American never ceased to provoke or stand rock steady no matter what. A master of the English language as well as a staunch atheist - or with his own words, anti-theist.

Here he is with his brother, in the US 1995:

Hitchens on Camelot

This is from Fora.TV, "Hitchens in memoriam":

Fora.TV.

A sad day, the world need lots more personalities of "The Hitch" caliber.

I couldn't agree more. This guy had a great mind and never compromised his principles or pulled his punches. The world could use a few more like him.

I disagree. What about sending his three children to private school? He sold out his socialist beliefs to become a media star in the US. His brother did the same in the UK. They were both socialists of the "I hate my Conservative father" type. University was full of them. They virtually all ended up on the right supporting the status quo.

The Greene anecdote is also humorous, as if the Germans would attack a small town to

the *west* of London on their way in. Of course, these stories illustrate the fear of Germany

that must have been palpable during that time. Kind of ironic though given how much the

British actually fomented that war :-)

I would love to hear more about these two incidents, however.

Graham Greene was describing the anti-German feeling that existed in the United Kingdom in 1914. Anyone who could speak in German was suspected on being a spy. Greene was not the only one to report dachshund dogs being attacked. James Hayward has argued: “Famously, dachshund dogs (although not apparently Alsatians) were put to sleep or attacked in the streets, a persecution which endured so long that in the years following the war the bloodline had to be replenished with foreign stock.” The reason for the hostility towards dachshunds was that at the beginning of the war they were seen as a symbol of Germany. Political cartoonists commonly used the image of the dog to ridicule Germany. This continued during the Second World War when Hitler’s face was put on the body of a dachshund. This caused a stir when in 1943 the United States government used such a cartoon to advertise war bonds. Hans Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, was forced to issue an apology where he denied there was no intention of questioning the patriotism of the owners of dachshunds. A full account of these anti-German incidents can be found on my website.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWantigerman.htm

My name’s Billy, I’m 19 years old and I’m currently living in the UK where I’ve been all my life so far. I came across the JFK assassination over a year ago now where I choose to look into it just by chance (I guess I wanted to see “what it was all about” I guess) and ever since I’ve just been so fascinated with the entire case, particularly Lee Harvey Oswald, his time in Russia, the possibility of Intelligence work involving the assassination of JFK, and of course the events surrounding his death at the hands of Jack Ruby.

It is good to see that young people are still interested in the case.

I'm an artist/writer with Walt Disney. I've drawn Donald Duck professionally for 20 years. I am a voracious reader, and have made it through the requisite 26 volumes and the House set, along with the majority of important books on the assassination. Most of the major books I've read multiple times.

Working as a cartoonist with Disney, I have particular expertise in classic animation/special effects work. My father is probably the best known ballistics expert/deer hunter in western Pa. giving me some practical and considerable experiance with firearms- I've handled the things since I was under that ironing board.

I've gotten to the point, I guess, where I feel I am confident enough with the material to feel like I might make the occasional contribution. Thank you for having me aboard.

I await your contributions with interest.

The other two are harder.

The bar story is hard to decode because that area wasn't affected by any sort of prohibition

and suffrage doesn't appear to play a part either. The shocking elements of the story are

really the escalating fines (it doesn't say what they husband was fined). To fine the barmaid

5 quid for selling a 6 pence drink seems almost humorous.

During the First World War, David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, led the campaign against alcohol. He had been told by shipbuilders and heads of war factories that men's wages had gone up so much that they could earn in two or three days what would keep them in drink for a week. A Newcastle shipbuilder complained that double overtime on Sunday meant no attendance on Monday. In January 1915, Lloyd George told the Shipbuilding Employers Federation that Britain was "fighting German's, Austrians and Drink, and as far as I can see the greatest of these foes is Drink."

The government was particularly concerned about the amount of alcohol being consumed by female munition workers. A survey of four pubs in London revealed that in one hour on a Saturday night alcohol was consumed by 1,483 men and 1,946 women. Newspapers claimed that soldiers' wives were "drinking away their over-generous allowances". The Times reported that "we do not all realise the increase in drinking there has been among the mothers of the coming race, though we may yet find it a circumstance darkly menacing to our civilisation".

In October 1915 the British government announced several measures they believed would reduce alcohol consumption. A "No Treating Order" stated that any drink ordered was to be paid for by the person supplied. The maximum penalty for defying the Government order was six months' imprisonment. The Spectator gave its support to the legislation. It argued that it was the custom of the working-classes to buy drinks for "chance-met acquaintances, each of whom then had to stand a drink to everyone else" and believed that this measure would "free hundreds of thousands of men from an expensive and senseless social tyranny". A detailed account of legislation can be found on my website.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWalcohol.htm

Another good lesson on the First World War at this time of year concerns the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in 1914.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWchristmas.htm

The final lesson before the Christmas holiday is a good time to cover the topic of ghosts and visions during the First World War. It is a subject that students usually find very exciting.

The students are given the following sources concerning ghost stories from the First World War:

(1) The Daily Mail, quoting an anonymous Lieutenant-Colonel, who took part in the retreat from Le Cateau in August, 1914 (14th September 1915)

We came into action at dawn, and fought till dusk. We were heavily shelled by the German artillery during the day, and in common with the rest of the division had a bad time of it. Our division, however, retired in good order. We were on the march all night of the 26th, and on the 27th, with only about two hours' rest. The brigade to which I belonged was rearguard to the division, and during the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with fatigue - both bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt we also suffered to a certain extent from shock, but the retirement still continued in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were still... in good working condition.

On the night of the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers. We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep on our horses. As we rode along I became conscious of the fact that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen. These horsemen had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were going, and keeping level with us...

I did not say a word about it at first, but I watched them for about 20 minutes. The other two officers had stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in the fields. I told them what I had seen. The third officer then confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the last 20 minutes. So convinced were we that they were real cavalry that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out to reconnoitre, and found no-one there. The night grew darker, and we saw no more. The same phenomenon was seen by many men in our column.

(2) Lance-Corporal Johnstone, letter to The London Evening News (11th August, 1915)

We had almost reached the end of the retreat, and after marching a whole day and night with but one half-hour's rest in between, we found ourselves in the outskirts of Langy, near Paris, just at dawn, and as the day broke we saw in front of us large bodies of cavalry, all formed up into squadrons - fine, big men, on massive chargers. I remember turning to my chums in the ranks and saying: "Thank God! We are not far off Paris now. Look at the French cavalry." They, too, saw them quite plainly, but on getting closer, to our surprise the horsemen vanished and gave place to banks of white mist, with clumps of trees and bushes dimly showing through.

(3) All Saints Parish Magazine in Clifton reported that two officer servings at Mons told Sarah Marrable about what they saw on the front-line (May 1915)

Both of whom had themselves seen the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans when they came right upon them during the retreat from Mons... One of Miss Marrable's friends, who was not a religious man, told her that he saw a troop of angels between us and the enemy. He has been a changed man ever since. The other man... and his company were retreating, they heard the German cavalry tearing after them ... They therefore turned round and faced the enemy, expecting nothing but instant death, when to their wonder they saw, between them and the enemy, a whole troop of angels. The German horses turned round terrified and regularly stampeded. The men tugged at their bridles, while the poor beasts tore away in every direction.

(4) An English engineer, who had been serving in the line at Ypres in August 1915, during one of the early German poison gas attacks. He told his story to an American clergyman from Massachusetts in 1956 and it eventually appeared in Fate Magazine in May 1968.

They looked out over No Man's Land and saw a strange grey cloud rolling towards them. When it struck, pandemonium broke out. Men dropped all around him and the trench was in an uproar. Then, he said, a strange thing happened. Out of the mist, walking across No Man's Land, came a figure. He seemed to be without special protection and he wore the uniform of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). The engineer remembered that the stranger spoke English with what seemed to be a French accent.

On his belt the stranger from the poison cloud had a series of small hooks on which were suspended tin cups. In his hand he carried a bucket of what looked like water. As he slid down into the trench he began removing the cups, dipping them into the bucket and passing them out to the soldiers, telling them to drink quickly. The engineer was among those who received the potion. He said it was extremely salty, almost too salty to swallow. But all of the soldiers who were given the liquid did drink it, and not one of them suffered lasting effects from the gas.

When the gas cloud had blown over and things calmed down the unusual visitor was not to be found. No explanation for his visit could be given by the Royal Medical Corps - but the fact remained that thousands of soldiers died or suffered lasting effects from that grim attack, but not a single soldier who took the cup from the stranger was among the casualties.

After reading these stories the students can try and come up with some logical explanation for these events. Later they can carry out a search on the web for these stories. This will bring them to my website where they can read about the context of seeing these visions. They will also discover that the full quotations reveal that the soldiers themselves were aware that these visions were linked to the fact they were suffering from extreme tiredness and stress at the time.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWghosts.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWangelsmons.htm

James Murdoch was told in email phone hacking was 'rife'

Daily Telegraph

4:57PM GMT 13 Dec 2011

Recently discovered emails show that News International boss James Murdoch was sent details in 2008 of claims that phone-hacking was ''rife'' at the News of the World.

But Mr Murdoch told the House of Commons Culture Committee, which is investigating the phone hacking scandal, that he did not read the email exchange forwarded to him by the paper's then editor Colin Myler.

In an email dated Saturday June 7 2008, Mr Myler requested a meeting with Mr Murdoch to discuss the case being brought against the paper by Professional Footballers Association chief executive Gordon Taylor over claims reporters had eavesdropped on his messages.

The News of the World editor warned Mr Murdoch: ''Unfortunately, it is as bad as we feared.''

Attached to his message was a "chain" of emails detailing discussions between News International's legal adviser Julian Pike of Farrer & Co and Mark Lewis, who represented Mr Taylor.

Mr Murdoch and Mr Myler met three days later on June 10, along with Tom Crone, legal manager for the NotW's publishers News Group Newspapers. Mr Myler and Mr Crone say that they told Murdoch at that meeting about the discovery of the notorious "For Neville" email, which proved that phone-hacking was not limited to a single "rogue reporter" on the paper as the company had claimed.

But Mr Murdoch insists that the meeting was simply to authorise an increased settlement offer to Mr Taylor and that he was not shown the email or told that it proved that wrong-doing was more widespread than previously thought.

The email exchange released today shows that Mr Pike wrote to Mr Crone on June 6, following his meeting with Mr Lewis.

Mr Pike said that Lewis had told him Taylor "wishes to be 'vindicated or made rich'. He wishes to see NGN suffer. He wants to demonstrate that what happened to him is/was rife throughout the organisation. He wants to correct the paper telling parliamentary inquiries that this was not happening when it was."

The solicitor noted that Mr Taylor was referring to NGN's position that Clive Goodman - the royal correspondent jailed in 2007 for intercepting messages - was a "rogue trader" acting alone with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

NGN had already offered Mr Taylor a £350,000 settlement, but he was demanding "seven figures plus indemnity costs", which could run to £1.2 million, said Mr Pike, who told Crone he would meet Mr Mulcaire to try to prepare a defence.

Mr Crone forwarded the message to Myler, making clear that details of the hacked emails were contained in what he refers to as "the Ross Hindley email" - believed to be the message entitled "For Neville" obtained by Mr Taylor.

Mr Crone voiced his concern about a "nightmare scenario" in which the PFA's in-house lawyer Joanne Armstrong may be able to sue because voicemails were also taken from her phone.

"There is a further nightmare scenario in this, which is that several of those voicemails on the Ross Hindley email were taken from Joanne Armstrong's phone. We can also assume that she will have seen this evidence and is waiting to see how Taylor's case concludes before intimating her own claim," he wrote.

He said he expected the company to enter a defence that while it "knew of and made use of the voicemail information Mulcaire acquired between Feb(ruary) and July 2005" - the period of the hacking which led to Goodman's conviction - it did not know whether "any of its employees... acted in concert with" him over the following year.

Mr Crone also refers to a tape obtained by Mr Taylor, which the PFA boss alleges records Mulcaire informing someone called Ryan about how to get into his voicemail. But the NGN legal manager says that Mulcaire appears to address the person as "Rial", which "can only be helpful" to the paper's case as it has never had a reporter of that name.

Passing the email exchange on to Mr Murdoch in an email with the heading "Strictly Private and Confidential and subject to legal professional privilege", Mr Myler wrote: "Update on the Gordon Taylor (Professional Football Association) case. Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared.

"The note from Julian Pike at Farrer's is extremely telling regarding Taylor's vindictiveness. It would be helpful if Tom Crone and I could have five minutes with you on Tuesday."

In a response timed just two minutes later, Mr Murdoch said: "No worries. I am in during the afternoon. If you want to talk before, I'll be home tonight after seven and most of the day tomorrow."

In a letter to the Culture Committee yesterday, Mr Murdoch said that he had forgotten about the email exchange until he was reminded of it on December 7 by the Management and Standards Committee set up by NI's owners News Corp to look into the hacking affair.

Mr Murdoch told the Commons committee that he was "confident" that he did not review the chain of emails before or after agreeing to meet Mr Myler and did not have a phone conversation with the NotW editor that weekend.

"Having agreed to meet the following Tuesday, I would have relied on the oral briefing on 10 June 2008 that I have previously described in my testimony before the committee," he wrote.

In a statement released later, Mr Murdoch said: "I was sent the email on a Saturday when I was not in the office. I replied two minutes later accepting a meeting and did not read the full email chain.

"As I have always said, I was not aware of evidence of widespread wrongdoing or the need for further investigation

I cannot see how he is going to survive this disclosure. He is a dead man walking.

Another source of information you can give the students is from Ernest Sackville Turner's book, Dear Old Blighty (1980). He tells a story of how Commander Alfred Rawlinson employed blind men in 1915 to sit on the top of high buildings with a pole attached to their heads. Any idea why he did this?

To listen for Zeppelins.

In January 1915, two Zeppelin navel airships 190 metres long, flew over the east coast of England and bombed great Yarmouth and King's Lynn. The first Zeppelin raid on London took place on 31st May 1915. The raid killed 28 people and injured 60 more. (24)

Soon after this raid, the government appointed Alfred Rawlinson to take charge of early anti-aircraft defences. In his book, The Defence of London, 1915-1918 (1923), he explains how he placed naval guns in Regents Park and Tower Bridge and a number of Hotchkiss six-pounders scattered about the city. (25)

Ernest Sackville Turner explains in Dear Old Blighty (1980) that Rawlinson also developed an early warning system against the Zeppelins: "An early inspiration in the war against Zeppelins was to recruit the blind, whose ability to hear the throb of distant engines was deemed to be greater than that of the sighted. In south-east England they manned a binaural listening service which fed information of range and altitude to the defences. Commander Alfred Rawlinson, who claims some credit for this innovation, has explained that the system was based on the natural instinct which urges a person, on hearing a distant sound, to turn his head towards it, so that it is heard equally in both ears. In the early experiments the blind man was fitted with a stethoscope to intensify his hearing and a pole was attached to his head, which would turn in the direction of the raider and indicate the bearing on a compass dial.... How substantial was the contribution of the blind does not emerge from Rawlinson's account; certainly listening posts consisting of stethoscopes attached to wide-mouthed, rotatable trumpets were eventually worked with some success by the sighted."

What about the other two?

Graham Greene, was born in Beckhamstead in 1904 and published his autobiography, A Sort of Life in 1972.

"There were dramatic incidents even in Beckhamstead. A German master was denounced to my father as a spy because he had been seen under the railway bridge without a hat, a dachshund was stoned in the High Street, and once my uncle Eppy was summoned at night to the police station and asked to lend his motor car to help block the Great North Road down which a German armored car was said to be advancing towards London."

That's a pretty good description of the invasion of North America and the slaughter of the buffalos, the infecting of natives with tainted cloth, the herding into reservations, the massacres, etc etc.

Good point. I suppose the only difference is that it was "the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted".

Unfortunately others employed such tactics before the British.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp#Concentration_camps

Hobhouse argued that Kitchener’s "Scorched Earth" policy included the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields - to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base. Civilians were then forcibly moved into the concentration camps. Although this tactic had been used by Spain (Ten Years' War) and the United States (Philippine-American War), it was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whobhouse.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWkitchener.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WfawcettM.htm

Emily Hobhouse, like many members of the radical wing of the Liberal Party, was opposed to the Boer War. Over the first few weeks of the war Emily spoke at several public meetings where she denounced the activities of the British government.

In late 1900 Emily was sent details of how women and children were being treated by the British Army. She later wrote: "poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance. And from that moment I was determined to go to South Africa in order to render assistance to them".

In October 1900, Emily formed the Relief Fund for South African Women and Children. An organisation set up: "To feed, clothe, harbour and save women and children - Boer, English and other - who were left destitute and ragged as a result of the destruction of property, the eviction of families or other incidents resulting from the military operations". Except for members of the Society of Friends, very few people were willing to contribute to this fund.

Hobhouse arrived in South Africa on 27th December, 1900. After meeting Alfred Milner, she gained permission to visit the concentration camps that had been established by the British Army. However, Lord Kitchener objected to this decision and she was now told she could only go to Bloemfontein.

She left Cape Town on 22nd January, 1901, and arrived at Bloemfontein two days later. There were at the time eighteen hundred people in the camp. Emily discovered "that there was a scarcity of essential provision and that the accommodation was wholly inadequate." When she complained about the lack of soap she was told, "soap is an article of luxury". She nevertheless succeeded ultimately to have it listed as a necessity, together with straw and kettles in which to boil the drinking water.

Over the next few weeks Emily visited several camps to the south of Bloemfontein, including Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River. She was also allowed to visit Mafeking. Everywhere she directed the attention of the authorities to the inadequate sanitary accommodation and inadequate rations.

By the time that Emily returned to Bloemfontein in March 1901, the population had grown considerably. She later wrote: " The population had redoubled and had swallowed up the results of improvements that had been effected. Disease was on the increase and the sight of the people made the impression of utter misery. Illness and death had left their marks on the faces of the inhabitants. Many that I had left hale and hearty, of good appearance and physically fit, had undergone such a change that I could hardly recognize them."

Hobhouse argued that Kitchener’s "Scorched Earth" policy included the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields - to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base. Civilians were then forcibly moved into the concentration camps. Although this tactic had been used by Spain (Ten Years' War) and the United States (Philippine-American War), it was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted.

Emily decided that she had to return to England in an effort to persuade the Marquess of Salisbury and his government to bring an end to the British Army's scorched earth and concentration camp policy. David Lloyd George and Charles Trevelyan took up the case in the House of Commons and accused the government of "a policy of extermination" directed against the Boer population. William St John Fremantle Brodrick, the Secretary of State for War argued that the interned Boers were "contented and comfortable" and stated that everything possible was being done to ensure satisfactory conditions in the camps.

The vast majority of MPs showed little sympathy to the plight of the Boers. Hobhouse later wrote: "The picture of apathy and impatience displayed here, which refused to lend an ear to undeserved misery, contrasted sadly with the scenes of misery in South Africa, still fresh in my mind. No barbarity in South Africa was as severe as the bleak cruelty of an apathetic parliament."

In August, 1901, the British government established a commission headed by Millicent Fawcett to visit South Africa. While the Fawcett Commission was carrying out the investigation, the government published its own report. According to the New York Times: “The War Office has issued a four-hundred-page Blue Book of the official reports from medical and other officers on the conditions in the concentration camps in South Africa. The general drift of the report attributes the high mortality in these camps to the dirty habits of the Boers, their ignorance and prejudices, their recourse to quackery, and their suspicious avoidance of the British hospitals and doctors.”

The Fawcett Commission confirmed almost everything that Emily Hobhouse had reported. After the war a report concluded that 27,927 Boers had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died. However, the South African historian, Stephen Burridge Spies argues in Methods of Barbarism: Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics (1977) that this is an under-estimate of those who died in the camps.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whobhouse.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWkitchener.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WfawcettM.htm

Another source of information you can give the students is from Ernest Sackville Turner's book, Dear Old Blighty (1980). He tells a story of how Commander Alfred Rawlinson employed blind men in 1915 to sit on the top of high buildings with a pole attached to their heads. Any idea why he did this?

This absolutely is NO surprise and should definitely not be considering the "wacky" discussions that go on on this forum, whic, oddly, still doesn't have a topic/thread dedicated to one of the largest PsyOps in modern times: 9/11. Secondly, as reported wonderfully by Fintan Dunne, 9/11 connects directly with why the internet may indeed be filled with so much disinfo, CIA "rats" etc. It was rather clear and obvious to me long ago after much study that Wiki is definitely "CIA". Tom has hit it RIGHT on the head that most MAJOR traffic sites havebeen basically "bought out". Consider disinfo sites as well (prison planet, etc).

That may be the case but it does not have to be that way. One of the reasons why left-wing newspapers have never had a chance is that to get a cover-price that people are willing to pay, you have to carry advertising. The problem is that if you have an anti-capitalist message, large companies and multi-national corporations will not place advertising in your newspaper or magazine. This is the reason why Henry Luce changed the political slant of Time Magazine (he started off as a liberal).

The beauty of having a website is that the content is not influenced by advertisers. Companies are only interested in the number of page impressions you are getting. This is why the internet is undermining the power of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch.

One afternoon a lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw two men along the road-side eating grass. Disturbed, he ordered his driver to stop and got out to investigate. He asked one man, "Why are you eating grass?"

"We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass."

"Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the lawyer said.

"But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there, under that tree."

"Bring them along," the lawyer replied. Turning to the other poor man he stated, "You may come with us, also."

The second man, in a pitiful voice, then said, "But sir, I also have a wife and SIX children with me!"

"Bring them all as well," the lawyer answered. They all entered the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as large as the limousine. Once under way, one of the poor fellows turned to the lawyer and said, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for taking all of us with you.

The lawyer replied, "Glad to do it. You'll really love my place. The grass is almost a foot high."

Come on now...you really didn't think there was such a thing as a heartwarming lawyer story...did you???

One way of introducing a new topic is to look at a couple of sources that encourages the student to think deeply about the period of history they are studying. For example, they could be asked to look at the following passage from The Morning Post (14th March 1916): "At Southampton yesterday Robert Andrew Smith was fined for treating his wife to a glass of wine in a local public-house. He said his wife gave him sixpence to pay for her drink. Mrs Smith was also fined £1 for consuming and Dorothy Brown, the barmaid, £5 for selling the intoxicant."

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has said that Tim Collins, a senior director at Bell Pottinger, has been recorded as saying how his agency manipulates Google and Wikipedia. They assert they could manipulate Google results to "drown" out negative coverage of human rights violations and child labour, and add that Bell Pottinger has a team which "sorts out" negative Wikipedia coverage of clients. I wonder if the CIA are clients of Bell Pottinger.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/dec/06/bell-pottinger-claims-access-politicians

David Lifton has sent me a copy of Harrison Sailsbury's review of "Best Evidence" on 22nd February, 1981.

We live in the 18th year since John Fitzgerald Kennedy's life was brought to an end on a bright November day in Dallas, Texas. The shelves are burdened with reports of official investigations and the endless tomes of inquiring scholars, sensational scribblers and assassination freaks.

When will it end? Not soon. Four days after the assassination, in a memorandum to myself (I was in charge of The New York Times's coverage and inquiry into the Kennedy assassination), I wrote:

''The echoes of this killing will resound down the corridors of our history for years and years and years. It is so strange, so bizarre, so incredible, so susceptible to legend making. It matches Lincoln's assassination and may well have equal public effects.''

The latest addition to the assassination literature, ''Best Evidence'' by David S. Lifton, underscores that observation. Nor will this new entry bring an end to what has become a macabre industry.

Mr. Lifton's work has been introduced by Macmillan with fanfare. The advertisements blazon ''The Coffin Was Empty.'' Review copies come with a handy kit of ready-to-ask questions for television interviewers too busy to read the book. There are charts and photographs to provide the all-important visuals.

Mr. Lifton's basic concern is to show that it was physically possible that Mr. Kennedy's body could have fallen into the hands of unknown conspirators some time between 2:18 P.M. November 22, when it was (supposedly) loaded onto Air Force One in Dallas, and about 8 P.M., when it was officially observed arriving at the Bethesda Naval Hospital morgue, where the autopsy was conducted. During this interval, Mr. Lifton postulates, what he calls ''medical forgery'' could have been perpetrated to change the nature of Kennedy's wounds.

Mr. Lifton does not seem very certain about who might have carried out this complicated caper. In fact, he seems to find himself in a state of creative exhaustion after so many years of burrowing in minutiae for materials with which to concoct his elaborate and sometimes almost incomprehensible timetable of the movements of coffins, coffin guard teams, doctors, Secret Service agents, F.B.I. men, Kennedy people and, of course, the actual body of J.F.K.

But, if I read him right, Mr. Lifton suspects several sinister forces - possibly Lyndon Baines Johnson, possibly the C.I.A., possibly the F.B.I., possibly parties unknown. The only thing of which he seems strongly convinced is that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in his words, ''a patsy.'' Mr. Lifton is willing to concede, I think (these points are not always a model of clarity) that Oswald was in the Texas School Book Depository; that Oswald was equipped with a rifle, though he doesn't believe it was the one Oswald ordered from a mail-order house; and that Oswald may have fired one or more shots from that sixth-floor window. But all that is, to Mr. Lifton's way of reasoning, designed only to set Oswald up as a fall guy so that the actual killers, whom he believes assembled on the ''grassy knoll,'' could make their getaway unsuspected by anyone except Mr. Lifton. As to what may have motivated the killers - forget it. Mr. Lifton is too busy with his timetables, his tape recorders, his interviews and his own personal reactions to bother with that.

The ''real'' assassins - and this is the whole point of Mr. Lifton's 747 pages of dense prose - had to alter Kennedy's body so that the autopsy, the inquest, the medics, the reporters, the investigators, the whole world would believe that the assassin was Oswald and not the sinister forces who caused a ''puff of smoke'' on the ''grassy knoll.'' This was no easy task. But, as Mr. Lifton describes it, the assassins were willing to go to any lengths: manipulation of evidence, use of two or more coffins, exchanges of coffins carried out so rapidly it makes the head spin, squads of undercover conspirators (not one of whom has ever been identified) and possible subversion of security personnel. So it was, he concludes, that the conspirators were able to steal the corpse of J.F.K. from under the eyes of his widow and the Kennedy party and accomplish the ''brain-wound forgery'' that threw us all off the track and caused the Warren Commission and almost everyone except Mr. Lifton to suppose that Oswald fired those bullets.

No says Mr. Lifton. The bullets came from the front, from the grassy knoll where so many critics, as he calls them, think they can see a blurred man with gun in hand in one of the snapshots taken of the area.

Well, I guess you can say that no one before Mr. Lifton has constructed a theory so complicated, so quirky, in such violation of every law of common sense and reason. But that is not to say that his efforts will not be surpassed in the future. So far as I know, Mr. Lifton is the first to advance the ''empty coffin'' notion. But it was bound to come. Years ago, when I was a young reporter in Chicago, I had to produce each year a story to run on April 14, the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. I well remember one such story, which was headlined ''The Coffin Was Empty.'' I got it from an elderly Lincoln buff who claimed that the accepted Lincoln assassination story was a cover-up, that in fact Lincoln had never been shot, that he had wearied of life in the White House and had stage-managed the scene with John Wilkes Booth. The old man claimed that Lincoln had lived on a farm in some backwater of southern Illinois until well into the 1880's. Seven million people had seen Lincoln's black coffin in the procession that made its way from Washington to Philadelphia to New York and west to Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago and Springfield. They did not know that the coffin was empty.

So it goes. Probably after the year 2000 the Kennedy assassination books will begin to thin out, but mark my word, 2063 will bring a new spate.

But out of all of this, I suspect, not one tangible piece of new evidence will be established: not one new witness who will say, ''Yes, I saw the killer''; not one man who will say, ''Yes, I helped forge the surgical evidence''; not one new bullet, not one new accomplice, no mastermind, no evidence of involvement of L.B.J., Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, the K.G.B., the C.I.A., the K.K.K., oil millionaires, Maoists, fascists or members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

The labor of Mr. Lifton is the best evidence for my assertion. He has worked 15 or 16 years. He has interviewed hundreds of persons; he has read, so he says, everything. But he has made no case. He has tried to count all the trees in the forest and prove that others have sometimes identified an ash as a maple or an oak as a willow. But he has given us no vision of the forest equal to the one presented by the ordinary working reporters who threw themselves into the inquiry a few moments after John Kennedy was shot.

But none of this will halt the tide of rumor. Psychologically, we cannot now, and probably never will be able to, accept the mean notion that one social misfit with a mail-order gun could bring an end to the dream of Camelot.

Kimon Evan Marengo was a cartoonist who had trouble getting his work published in the British press. Every year he sent out a Christmas Card.

The one for 1936 featured Benito Mussolini as the mother wolf from Rome's Capitoline Hill. In place of Romulus and Remus are infant fascists, Adolf Hitler, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, AIoannis Metaxas, Francisco Franco and Oswald Mosley.

In 1945 Kem produced a Christmas Card that commented on the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It shows President Harry S. Truman in the guise of the Statue of Liberty, showing him holding both physical and monetary power. In the picture Joseph Stalin, Clement Attlee, Charles De Gaulle and Chaing Kai-shek all hold out hands of friendship, but they are really reaching out for the atom bomb in Truman's hand.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWmarengo.htm

Gino Boccasile was a supporter of Benito Mussolini, who produced propaganda material for the Italian government. Anthony Rhodes, the author of Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion: World War II (1987) has argued: "Posters were created for the Duce by Italy's leading graphic artists. Foremost among them was Gino Boccasile, whose posters epitomized the Fascist themes: the courage of the black shirts against the Allies, anti-Semitism, and the portrayal of the enemy soldiers as barbarians."

On the outbreak of the Second World War he produced several racist and anti-semitic posters that targeted the allies. This included one poster that referred to African-American soldiers in the United States Army. As Mark Bryant has pointed out in his book, World War II in Cartoons (1989): "In Gino Boccasile's famous Italian poster depicting the cultural barbarism of the American troops, the black American sergeant, his features transformed nearly into a gorilla's face, grasps Greek art treasures, ludicrously under priced with animal savagery."

Anthony Rhodes has argued: "Their propaganda about barbarian mercenaries in the British army was supplemented when the United States came into the war by Boccasile's famous poster of an American black G.I. carrying off the marble statue of the Venus de Milo with a $2 price ticket attached to its neck. The Americans would plunder and destroy the cultural treasures of the more civilized continent."

Later that year Boccasile was arrested and imprisoned. He was later tried for crimes committed during the war. Although he was acquitted, he had trouble getting work as an illustrator. However, he eventually set up his own agency in Milan.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWboccasile.htm