1/5/25

 Sunday, January 5, 2025

D+61

1531 Pope Clement VII forbade English King Henry VIII to remarry

1886 "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson was published

1895 French Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason

1957 US President Eisenhower asked Congress to send troops to the Middle East

1968 Dr Benjamin Spock was indicted for conspiring to violate draft law

In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, up at 3:10, lit my Kitty candle thinking of her and of Tom's upcoming 2nd yartzeit.  9° outside with a wind chill of  -3°.  As usual, the thermostat shows 71° but I am cold even in my sweat pants and long-sleeved turtleneck. . . Now I've wrapped my green ngingey around my shoulders like some old geezer (oh, wait, I am an old geezer) and I'm still cold.  I brought up two thermometers/hygrometers from the basement to put in the TV room and my bedroom, which seems to be the coldest room in the house.

Prednisone, day 236, 7.5 mg., day 51.  Prednisone at 5 a.m., with some soda bread.   Other meds at 4!!!

Ann Telnaes has resigned from the Washington Post after Jeff Bezos spiked this editorial cartoon she submitted for publication.  It shows Bezos and other billionaires on their knees groveling at the feet of an imperial Donald J. Trump.  Mickey Mouse, i.e., Disney Corporation, owner of ABC television network which cravenly settled Trump's defamation suit against it for $15 million, is shown prostrate.  The editorial page editor cravenly denied that the cartoon was spiked because it offended Bezos and said it was rejected simply because it was repetitious of stories it had run and was about to run, as if editorial cartoons aren't always related to current news stories.    

Europe Against the Jews I started reading on Kindle this book by German historian Götz Aly. I am reminded of the excellent Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll.  Both authors are non-Jews and both honestly relate the sorry history of Christendom's centuries of persecution of Jews.  The two books remind us of Mankind's capacity for cruelty, savagery, and evil (homo hominis lupus) and that Christianity did nothing to prevent it; indeed, Christianity was a precipitating cause of it, the main point of the book by Carroll, a former Catholic priest in the Paulist Order.   “If you think of religion as a great lake,” he warns, “it’s a lake of gasoline, and all it’s going to take is someone to drop a match into it for a terrible conflagration.”

On a related note, this afternoon I watched two items on YouTube about Winston Churchill, Jews, Zionism, and the Palestinians.  The first was a dicussion by a British commentator on the book "Churchill: His Times and His Crimes."  He focused his comments on the book's chapter dealing with Hitler's admiration for Jews generally, not an attitude widely shared by his peers in England, and his disdain for Arabs.  

Even though he was wary of communist Jews, Churchill strongly supported Zionism and he described Jews as "the most formidable and the most remarkable race", whose "first loyalty will always be towards [Jews]". . ." We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together."

Churchill described the Arabs as a "lower manifestation" than the Jews, whom he viewed as a "higher grade race" compared to the "great hordes of Islam"

Regarding Zionism and Jews controlling lands occupied for centuries by Arab Muslims, he said:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here'. They had not the right, nor had they the power."

This statement is of a piece with William F. Buckley's statements in 1957, when he wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?”  His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race. " . . . “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added: “The claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”  It is in large measure this kind of thinking and this value system that we are still fighting about in 2025, but referring to the conflict between "voter fraud" and "voter suppression."

In any case, the other YouTube video I watched was a speech by Andrew Roberts titled "Winston Churchill - The Great British Zionist" at the Jewish Learning Conference in 2019.  Roberts is a conservative historian, journalist, and member of the House of Lords.  He wrote a biography of Churchill, Churchill: Walking With Destiny.  Before his Jewish audience, he extolled Churchill's long and early embrace of Zionism, which comported with his British and White European imperialist values.  I stopped listening to his lecture before its conclusion, but I suspect he did not make a point of Churchill's racist contempt for Arabs.

David came over to help his mother disassemble the Christmas tree and get it and other Christmas paraphernalia down to the basement.  He is a blessing.  I drove up to Sendik's to get some white vinegar to put in the dishwasher running the 'sanitize' cycle after Geri cleaned out the machine's filter.

Anniversaries.  The high and mighty pope told the high and mighty king he couldn't do something.  We know how much good that did.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reminds of my 'monster story' binge-reading phase.  I read the classics: Mary Wollstonecraft's 1818 Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula and lastly, Stevenson's 1886 Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.  Poor Frankenstein was just a lonely guy looking for love in our cruel, rejecting world.  Dr. Jekyll thirsted for power and Mr. Hyde was his raging libido.  Dracula of course lusted for blood.  I enjoyed each of the books, perhaps Dracula the most of the three.  I had other binge-watching era, like whale books after reading Moby Dick, and an epic saga period, with El Cid, Chanson de Roland, and Beowulf after reading The Iliad.  I think I enjoyed all of them, but probably The Iliad the most.

Captain Dreyfus was yet one more victim of vicious European, Catholic, anti-semitism.  He and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are distant, indirect relatives. 

In 1957, President Eisenhower, himself a 5-star general, asked Congress to send troops to the Middle East.  How quaint.  How far we have moved from those days in terms of presidential powers.

1968, the world was falling apart and the United States was indicting the nation's baby doctor for conspiracy because of his, and much of the world's, opposition to the Vietnam War.  I was about to start my second semester of law school, trying to forget about Vietnam but reading about it, hearing about it, and watching it every night on the nightly news from Walter Cronkite on CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, or Peter Jennings andFrank Reynolds on ABC.  There was no escaping Vietnam,  There is still no escaping Vietnam.