Wednesday, October 31, 2012

246. Censored history. Case: the Arendar system.

This blog: http://tiny.cc/abhsnw


For 300 years a quarter of Europe was a 'Jewish State'.

Poland, Belarus, Lithouania  and the Ukraïne are huge countries.

From 1500 to 1800 they were one country, called the 
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  ( PLC) 

This is a map of the PLC in 1619:




For 300 years the Jewish People had an enormous influence in this large part of Europe.  

They were almost ruling the country.

To quote the famous historian Fernand Braudel:

 "In Poland, which burst suddenly into modernity at the beginning of the fifteenth century, there is a growing jewish ascendance, the result of numbers, and almost a jewish nation and state…."

(from:  La Mediterrannée.. pag 137)




Why is this unknown history ? 

Why do we not know that almost 25% of Europe, for 3 centuries, was de facto a 'Jewish State' ? 
Who censored this part of history? 

I think we don't know this, because the people of Poland were treated worse than slaves, by the jews. 

And because it si not compatible with their self propagated image of  'eternal victims', which became - in combination with the holocaust horror -  the way by which they have taken over power in the last decennia. One accusation of 'anti-semitism' could neutralise any opposition. 

In the Library of Congress (150 miljoen items) the word 'Arendar' appears only 10 times,  and never in English. 
On the internet there are just a few sites about this subject: 
Alan Weisers site about the Arendar system
The most informative part of Weisers site. I have copied this site under my blog.
Alan Weisers main site about Jews in an Ukraïnian region. 



How did it work? 

The polish King , the Nobility and the Church owned all the land and all the enterprises: farms, breweries, factories. 

They leased out these properties for 3 year periods to whomever was interested. Even complete villages and counties and provinces were leased out.

The lease-takers were called Arendars. (or: Arendator)

It turned out that almost every Arendar was a jewish person.
And that 80% of the jewish households were by profession 'Arendar'. ( This is information from Alan Weiser).
Not surprising that the word 'arendar' became a synonym for 'jewish person'. 


Slaves and serfs.
The polish and ukraïnian farmers were serfs to these  Arendars.
A kind of slaves. They were not allowed to leave the farm, and obliged to work on the farm, trying to survive.

But their fate may have been far worse than that of the slaves: if a serf living on  a leased farm would die from exhaustion and malnourishment, the arendar would not suffer a big loss: his lease would end after 3 years, at most.  But if a slave died, the slave-holder would suffer a loss that remained forever. 

In the beginning of the Arendar system, the serfs had to work only 1 day per week for the Arendars. In the last years this had become 6 days per week. This shows how life got from bad to worse under the jewish arendars. ( Wikipedia )


Justice in the courts?

Also all the courts were leased to the Jewish arendars.

If a serf could not stand the exploitation anymore and rebelled, he would be 'impaled'. This is a terribly cruel execution: a wooden pale with a sharp point will be entered anally into the body and leaves the body through the shoulders. It was done in such a way that no vital organs were touched. Then the person would be put upright, hanging on the pole, and it would take days before the poor serf would die. 

De straf is zo gruwelijk dat hij nergens meer wordt toegepast, behalve door onze bondgenoten die Libië hebben bevrijd, natuurlijk: hier een beeld van een jongetje dat nog leeft en 'impaled' is, in Libië. Ik kan er zelf niet meer naar kijken, en ik raad U aan om dit ook niet te doen. ( Ik weet niet of de link nog werkt) 

The revolte of 1648.

In 1648 the serfs, under the lead of cossack Khmelnytsky, revolted.
The cossack people were vassals of the PLC. 

Wikipedia about the cossacks :  the increasing social and religious pressure from the Commonwealth caused the cossacks, who were the vassals of PLC,  to proclaim an independent Cossack Hetmanate, initiated by a rebellion under Bohdan Khmelnytsky .

Three possible reasons for this revolt: 

1. " the increasing social and religious pressure from the Commonwealth." ( see above)

2. Another Magnate tried to take over Khmelnytsky's land: 
Wikipedia:  Aleksander Koniecpolski, heir to Hetman Koniecpolski's magnate estate, attempted to seize Khmelnytsky's land.  

3. The way these serfs were treated by the jewish Arendars,
 according to several sources cited by Nicholas Lysson



Which of these  3 reasons was the main reason, I do not know. 

But two important facts may be concluded:

1. Life under the jewish Arendars was terrible for the serfs.

I will quote a part of Lysson's essay where he writes about  the Arendar's cruelty: 


According to Chaim Bermant, The Jews, p. 26 (1977):

. . . [O]ne cannot see the events of [1648-49] as entirely the result of crazed fanaticism or mindless superstition. . . . [I]f the nobility were. . . the ultimate exploiters,the Jews were the visible ones and aroused the most immediate hostility. Rabbis warned that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest of hatred, but while the revenues rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover, the rabbis themselves were beneficiaries of the system.

Those rabbinical forebodings are also mentioned in Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, p. 152 (Oxford University Press, 1961). Graetz (vol. 5, pp. 5-6) says of the Jewish arendars that they had lost “integrity and right-mindedness. . . as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating.” He adds that they “advised the [Polish noble and ecclesiast-ical] possessors of the Cossack colonies how most completely to humiliate, oppress, torment, and ill-use [those colonies]. . . . No wonder that the enslaved Cossacks hated the Jews. . . . The Jews were not without warning what would be their lot, if these embittered enemies once got the upper hand.”
Graetz (vol. 5, p. 7) also says Khmelnytsky had personal reasons for leading the revolt: “A Jew, Zachariah Sabilenki, had played him a trick, by which he was robbed of his wife and property.” It says everything, of course, that it was possible by trickery to rob a Cossack of his wife.




2. The Khmelnytsky uprising and killing of jews was the beginning of a chain of cruelty between jews and goyim in the Ukraïne. 

 Khmelnytsky's uprising killed about 200.000 jews, and this was the only fact that the jews remembered. They forgot about the 800.000 non-jewish people killed in the uprising. They forgot about the reasons for the uprising.

Here are quotes from Lysson's 'Holocaust and Holomodor':

Shahak,... traces Jewish “hatred and contempt” for peasants— “a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies”—back to the great Ukrainian uprising of 1648-54, in which tens of thousands of “the accursed Jews” (to quote the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky) were killed. Some say the number is more accurately stated in the hundreds of thousands. Heinrich Graetz says the number “may well be. . . a quarter of a million.” See his History of the Jews, vol. 5, p. 15 (1856-70, English tr., Jewish Publication Society of America ed., 1956).

The Jews at the time of the massacres were serving the Polish szlachta (nobility) and Roman Catholic clergy on their Ukrainian latifundia as arendars—toll-, rent- and tax-farmers, enforcers of corvee obligations, licensees of feudal monopolies (e.g., on banking, milling, storekeeping, and distillation and sale of alcohol), and as anti-Christian scourges who even collected tithes at the doors of the peasants’ Greek Orthodox churches and exacted fees to open those doors for weddings, christenings and funerals. They had life and death powers over the local population (the typical form of execution being impalement), and no law above them to which that population had recourse. See Graetz, vol. 5, pp. 3-6; Subtelny, pp. 123-38; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1, p. 444 (Oxford University Press, 1982); and Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 68-79, 283 (1993). According to the last three of these sources, the arendars leased estates for terms of only two or three years and had every incentive to wring the peasants mercilessly, without regard to long-term consequences.

As Shahak points out in Three Thousand Years, chs. 3 and 5, a non-Jew, in traditional Judaism, was never “thy neighbor” for purposes of Leviticus 19:18—which was doubtless an advantage in such taxing work as an arendar’s. Shahak has much to say about rabbinical pronouncements, abundant in Israel even now, that gentile souls are closer to the souls of animals than to those of Jews. Those pronouncements are grounded, at least in part, on Ezekiel 23:20 (“[their] flesh [i.e., penises] is as the flesh of asses and [their] issue [i.e., semen] is like the issue of horses”).[v]

Norman Cantor comments in The Sacred Chain, p. 184 (1994) that “perhaps the Jews [of the arenda period] were so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman. . . . There is a parallel with the recent attitude of the West Bank Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox toward the Palestinians. Judaism can be in its Halakhic form an extremely restrictive and blinding faith.”


According to Davies (God’s Playground, vol. 1, p. 444) the oppressiveness of the Jews as arendars “provided the most important single cause of the terrible retribution that would descend on them on several occasions in the future. . . .” 

In short, then, the history of Jewish relations with Slavic peasants—together with the much longer history of Jewish attitudes toward “the nations”—has enormous rele-vance in explaining why hereditarily-Jewish Bolsheviks in the 1930s, using supposedly scientific Marxist terminology, defined the Ukrainian peasantry as the “class enemy” and carried out a policy of genocidal starvation.

 In The Jewish Experience, p. 364 (1996), Norman Cantor freely admits as much:

The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. . . . During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that—as 1930s anti-Semites claimed—Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back. (Emphases added.)




It would be interesting to compare Jewish influence in the PLC  with the way they controle the USA today. 
I think the jewish controle back then was much more in the open: It was an official fact that the judges and the courts were done by jewish people. It was an official fact that all the enterprises were jewish-lead. 
Just how much influence they had on the King, the nobility and the Clergy, that I don't known. But it may have been considerable too. Everywhere in Europe the 'Hofjuden' ( court-jews) had a lot of influence, behind the screens,  on the governments. It would be a surprise if they did not have this in Poland. 


So far this blog.

=====================






Here is Alan Weisers page about the Arendar System.

I copy it here because information about the Arendar system is almost non existent, and one day the site might disappear.



THE ARENDA SYSTEM

A Boon or Bane For Jews
Foreword
I am indebted to Edward Goldstein, editor of the Gesher Galicia SIG’s quarterly journal, The Galitzianer for drawing my interest to the arenda system. I answered Ed’s call for volunteers to research and write an article on the arenda system for The Galitzianer. During the course of my research, I am grateful that Ed provided me with an abundance of reference materials to supplement what I acquired from the Internet, answered many of my questions, and provided me with his insight on the impacts of the arenda system on Jews.
I submitted my article for evaluation and recommendations to Pamela Weisberger, Research Coordinator for Gesher Galicia. Because of her encouraging evaluation and her excellent suggestions for making the article more interesting and instructive, I decided to make the research and reporting on the arenda system a project in progress. What this means is that this initial posting is just a beginning. It will be revised and expanded as additional information is obtained on Jews that were arendars, the lands and businesses that were involved, the financial and humanistic consequences that were felt by Jews over the ages, and clues that will aid family researchers to identify ancestors that may have been arendars or possibly even magnates.
Without regard to the source of information I take sole responsibility for any errors of omission or commission in the current issue and future issues of the report. I welcome all constructive criticism and any information on arenda terms and conditions, arenda costs, Jews who may have been arendars, lands and businesses that were under arendas, financial rewards earned by arendars, and any government-inspired or privately-instigated anti-Semitic actions perpetrated on arendars.
Alan Weiser
21 February 2004
EMAIL

TABLE OF CONTENTS


REVISION A 17 March 2004

This is a tentative Table of Contents subject to future revisions.

These are clickable links to report sections
Section 1 Introduction
Section 2 Magnates and Jews Who Were Arendars
Section 3 Magnates’ Estates
Section 4 Arenda Enterprises
Section 5 Arenda Socioeconomic Impacts On Jews
Section 6 Clues For Identifying Ancestral Arendars
Appendix A Definitions
Appendix B Examples of Arendas
Appendix C References
All parts of this Report are under development. Researchers are needed to aid in the development of each part. If you can help, please contact theKRG Coordinator
to discuss and obtain assignments.
SECTION 1 HISTORY IN BRIEF
If a term or phrase is defined or explained in Appendix A, the first time that it is used it will appear in bold italic. Can any humanistic system be both a boon and a bane? Why were Jews in particular selected for arenda awards? Who were these Jews that became arendars and carried the burden of managing for Polish and Lithuanian magnates’ latifundium in far off lands? Where were these latifundia located, how large were they, and what enterprises did they house? What impacts were felt by Jews in general and Jewish arendars as a result of the arenda system that existed from about 14th through 18th century? Was it possible that you had ancestors that were at one time arendars and how can you find out? The purpose of the Arenda System Research Project (ASRP) is to develop answers to these questions. The results of this ongoing research will be added to this report periodically.
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE USE OF JEWISH ARENDARS
Polish history was reviewed as it applied to the award of large estates in far off lands to Polish magnates during the late Middle Ages to the first partition of Poland, circa 1772. Austria, Prussia, and Russia imposed the first partition of Poland. It marked the end of the glory days of Jewish arendars. There appears to have been four factors that contributed to the use of the arenda and enabled Jews to benefit from its use at its beginning.
Factor 1Mass Exodus Of Jews and Growth of Polish Lands. The forced mass exodus of Jews from royal France, England, Portugal, and Spain between 1182 and 1600 generated a mass of Jewish immigrants seeking a new homeland. It was reported that usurious interest charges of Jewish moneylenders coupled with the recurrent famines and pestilence eventually drew intolerance of Jews and caused their expulsions.
In 1241 there was the incorporation of the first Jewish municipality, Wroclaw. A period of reconstruction began then seeking immigrants to repopulate Poland. The first Jewish settlers were from German and other ethnic groups. Due to persecutions and massacres of the 14th (The Black Death) and 15th centuries, there was massive Jewish emigration from Bohemia and Germany of Jews seeking a new homeland. The transfer of Ukraine to Kingdom of Poland occurred in 1569. This provided more frontier lands requiring new settlers and arendars to oversee the development of the lands and the management of production and consumer enterprises.
Polish victories over the Teutonic Order in the West and against Muscovite and Ottoan armies in the East and Southeast led to great expansion of Poland-Lithuania. By 1616 over half of the crown lands in Ukraine were leased out to Jewish arendars. After the union of Poland and Lithuania, Polish magnates steadily gained more land in Lithuania. The Jews there came under Polish magnates’ jurisdictions. The magnates provided opportunities for the Jews to engage in works as physicians, scientists, land managers, tax collectors, and other special activities.
All of this massive growth encouraged Jews expelled from other lands to migrate to the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth.
Factor 2: Skilled Jews Seeking New Homelands. The money-lending, financial management, and business acumen of the Jews then reaching Polish lands were welcome. Before being expelled from Western European countries, Jews had owned land and managed workers. They had these skills that the magnates needed. Jewish industrial organizations were well developed too. In 1147 Jews with advanced technology helped to establish the silk industry in Southern Italy. Dyeing, weaving, tailoring, and the slaughter of animals were other businesses in which Jews excelled. Jews were engaged in pawnbroking and helped to stimulate various crafts. Jews also possessed unique skills as glaziers and operated businesses of shoemakers, basketmakers, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, harness makers, and bookbinders.
The first wave of Jews to arrive in Polish territory were merchants and were referred to as Radhanites. These merchants had international trade experiences over vast distances. They spoke Arabic, Persian, Greek, Spanish, Frankish, and Slav languages. These Jews were valuable additions to Poland which sought to sell agricultural produces abroad and import fineries.
Factor 3: Socio-Political Conditions Encouraging Jewish Immigration. The promise of religious freedom and self-governance were strong incentives for Jews to move into Polish territories. In 1264 Boleslav V. Wstydliwy issued a charter giving Jews complete freedom and imposing heavy penalties for those who would cause Jews bodily harm. He granted Jews a privilege known as Kalisz Statute. This statute and the later Extended Privilege became the major documents regulating Jewish legal and social position in Poland until the 18th century. These documents allowed Jews to engage in trade and moneylending. This open-arms policy of the Polish Court and magnates towards Jewish immigrants encouraged Jews to establish new settlements in frontier lands in what is now eastern Poland and western Ukraine. The policy encouraged Jews to take on management of arendas. These documents ensured the personal protection of Jews, their property, and religion. They allowed the creation of such institutions as the Kehila/Kahal and the Council of Four Lands. In 1573 the Confederation of Warsaw guaranteed religious tolerance.
Although it would seem that magnates would select Jews for an arenda based on the person’s ability to pay the cost of the arenda and his capabilities as a manager. As it turned out in many cases it was the Kahal that selected the arendar for the maganate. Council edits of 1671 and 1677 prohibited Jews from leasing estates or farming from Poles without the knowledge of the Kahals to which they belonged. These orders gave authority to the Kahals to require Jews to purchase licenses in order to bid on arendas. The Kahal would issue a liciense for a fee. The Kahal tried to prohibit Jews from using Gentile silent partners to get around the bidding for an arenda without a license. Magnates did not have to adhere to the licensing system, they did so when it was to their economic advantage. Once a Jew had an arenda he could continue with it, generally without competition from other Jews who adhered to the Kahal edicts.
Factor 4:Economic Opportunities Influencing Jewish Immigration. In 1386 Queen Jadwiga of Poland married Wladyslaw Jagiello, Grand Duke of Lithuania. Jagiello became King of Poland-Lithuania. The Jagiellonian Kings reined for nearly 200 years. During their rein, Poland was able to expand its territory. In the 1500s Poland reached its peak controlling a large portion of central Europe, including Ukraine and parts of Russia. These lands were awarded to various nobles.
At the end of the 16th century the nobility was becoming more oligarchic. Magnates were distinguished by their wealth and land holdings. These holdings were increasing particularly in the areas of southeastern Poland and the Ukraine. More information on the extent of these holding is provided in Section 3. They were the ones who were entitled to property or rights and transferred the property or rights to arendars for a predetermined rent or fee. Because the nobility either did not have the skills to manage their far off holdings or the desire to do so, it made good economic sense to lease out to Jews who possessed the skills to produce sufficient income to support the estate and the willingness to settle in frontier lands. Jews were forbidden by law to own land, but they were allowed to lease it. More information on Jews who were arendars is provided in Section 2. Section 6 gathers together those characteristics which were exhibited by Jewish arendars and offers clues on how to identify ancestors that may have been arendars. By leasing lands and concessions the magnate could reduce short term financial risk while obtaining a fixed income. More information on the enterprises included in arendas is provided in Section 4. The magnate was protected where potential income from the lease was underestimated and sold for too low a price by providing only short term leases. Leases often did not exceed three years and in some cases were only one year long. When the lease expired the magnate could then obtain a higher price on the next contract or seek another arendar for the lease. It was said that some Jewish arendars paid bribes to representatives of the magnate to avoid paying a higher price for the next lease. Arendars stuck with leases that produced less than the expected income, would try to obtain discounts on the next lease. Depending on the particular magnate, a discount might be taken or the arendar was forced to continue under the same terms. More on this in Section 5. One of the functions of the Kehila/Kahal was to prevent Jews from competing with each other for arendas and thus raising the price of an arenda. A Jew failing to adhere to Kahal laws could be excommunicated from the Jewish community. These short term leases and other controls put considerable pressure on the Jewish arendar to produce sufficient income to please the magnate as well as provide the Jew with a suitable profit. The Kahal tried to limit the arbitrary power the Jewish major arendar held over his sub-arendars. Well into the 18th century the Kahal tried to regulate the involvement of Jewish arendars as they entered into different types of leases. As it proved to be more profitable the Kehilot leaders attempted to tax the profits of individual Jews. Such payments plus those to magnates and king combined with large scale Jewish povety led to enormous community debt. Often in reaction to this pressure the Jewish arendars applied harsh measures to their serfs to ensure high productivity as soon as possible. There was considerable anti-Semitic backlash resulting from this interaction. This subject is covered more fully in Section 5.
It is believed that there were no more than 10 to 20 families in each generation who were of this aristocratic magnate class. Due to generally weak central Polish government, magnates held considerable power in determining the course the country would take in civil, military, and financial matters. The magnate held absolute authority over his latifundium. The magnate was the legislature, the judiciary, commander of his military, the governing body, and executioner when needed. The magnate was a tough one to do business with, yet Jewish arendars flourished. The magnate owed certain obligations to his arendars; such as, providing soldiers to keep out those who would violate the arendar’s monopolies and enforcing workloads on serfs. Because it was just good business economics, the magnate did whatever he could to protect his Jews during times of wars from without or revolts from within. The Jews made a profit for the magnate, as well as themselves.
The successes of Jewish arendars in making profits from what seemed to be unprofitable lands and enterprises and obtaining high yields from mandatory loans is said to have been their ability to take advantage of their international connections. Connections they established while they resided in Middle Eastern and Western European countries. These successes encouraged the continued use of Jews as arendars.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION 2 MAGNATES AND JEWS WHO WERE ARENDARS
This Section is under development. Research are needed to search various Polish and possibly Lithunanian and Ukrainian archives, generally online, for personal records of magnates. Among these personal records generally will be found copies of arendas. Once an arenda is located and reviewed it is possible to obtain names of arendars as well as terms and conditions of the arenda, what land was covered and/or what production or service facilities were covered. Language skills between English and Polish, Lithunanian, and Ukrainian are particularly needed. Assistance is need to obtain and translate magnates papers stored in various archives which may contain arendas.
References (14) and (15) have provided the names of many magnates. Additionally reference (15) identifies archives where personal papers of some of those magnates are stored.
MAGNATES Alojza (Anna)Bartoszewicz, Brankicki, Bruchnalski, Bykhovets, Chodkiewicz, Czajkowski, Czartoryski (Augustus Alexander), Derkach, Dernalowicz, Dizieduszycki, Godebski, Gorski, Gizycki, Glinsky (Michael), Halahan, Hochendorf, Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Jablonowski, Jazlowietski, Jelski, Kalinowski, Khanenko, Kizgaylo, Klucz (Sieniawa and Oleszyce), Koidell, Komorowski (Jacob) (obtained Wielkie Oczy from Laszce), Kondratev, Koniecpolski, Kossakowski, Krasinski, Lanckoronski, Leski, Laszce (obtained Wielkie Oczy from Modrewski), Lopacinski, Lubecki, Lubiensky, Lubomirski, Lukashevych, Mierzejewski, Mniszech, Modrewski (Andrej) (owned Wielkie Oczy), Myklashevskyl, Ogjnski y h. Oginiec, Ostrog, Osslinsky h. Topor, Paskevich, Passek, Pestov, Pininski (Count Leonard)(owned town of Grzymalow), Plater owie h wlasnego, Pociej, Pontiatowsky y h. Ciolek, Potocki h. lplawa (Andri) (owned Stanislaviv later to be come Ivano-Frankivsk), Raczynski, Radziwill h. Traby, Rakov (owned Zavisha), Romer, Rosenberg (Wilhelm von), Rosenberg (Peter), Rumiantsev, Rzewuski, Sambirski, Sanguszko, Sapieha, Sapiezanka (Anna), Shcherbynyn, Sieniawski (Maria Sofia), Sienicki (Michail), Skoropadssky, Slizien, Sluszka, Starz,nski, Storozhenko, troganov, Sulkowski, Sushchanski-Proskura, Tarnowski, Tereshchenko, Treter, Tyzenhauz, Vasilchikov, Weyssenhoff, Wielpolski, Wisniowjecki (Jeremi), Zabiello, Zagare-Gruzdziai, Zamojski (Maurycy), Zydowski

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION 3 MAGNATES’ ESTATES
A latifundium could consist of hundred of villages and towns with populations totaling into the tens of thousands. It could be producing hundreds of thousands of zloty in annual income and expenditures. The latifundium generally was organized into complexes. Each complex may have contained 2 to 10 manors, several towns, some 20 villages and a residence for the owner or general manger. Complexes were sometimes adjacent and were called a territory, barony, or after the 1750s a district. Often complexes were not adjacent to each other but located throughout Polish lands. Magnate lands were obtaied or lost due to purchase or sales or eresults of war, inherited or given away, or as royal leases.
Just to give an example of some latifundia sizes, consider the combined holdings of the magnates Maria Zofia Sieniawski and Augusts Alexander Czartoryski at the time of their marriage in 1731. Their propertiers were not contiguous but were spread over an area aproximately 539 miles (860 km) East-West by 539 miles (860 km) North-South. Some major towns that were not part of their properties but were located within the area defined included: Pozan to the far West, Panevezis to the far North, Mahilou to the far east, and Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankisk) to the far South. Warsaw and Cracow were also within the defined boundaries. The following villages and towns are believed to have become part of galicia in 1772 were part of the Sieniawski-Czartoryski holdings: Kalush, Burshtyn, Berezhany, Skole, and Pidhorodtsi.
A somewaht smalled latifundium was owned by Sieniawa and Oleszyce Klucz in 1716-1724. It was about 18 miles (29 km) East-West by 9 miles (14 km) North South. To the far East was the town of Sieniwawa and to the far West was the town of Oleszyce, namesakes of the owners.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION 4 ARENDA ENTERPRISES
Arendas generally were classified as Great Arenda or Agricultural Arenda. Great Arenda referred to leases of public revenue and monopolies. It included leases of royal revenues and functions like the mint, salt mines, customs, and tax farming. Jews did have some administrative positions on the larger estates and also served the lower nobility and competed with Christian administrators of crown lands. With the introduction of monetary trade Jews were involved with mints producing coins bearing the Polish King’s name. The lettering however was in Hebrew. In 1538 the Polish Sejm (diet) prohibited the lease of royal revenues to Jews. The Council of Four Lands in 1580 following the lead of the Polish Court forbade Jews to take Great Arendas.
Agricultural Arenda referred to the leases of landed estates or specific areas of agriculture, forestry, or processing. Jews did flourish in taking Agricultural Arenda, especially in the processing branch. These arendas included grain production, distillery operation, tavern (liquor) monopolies, furrier, tanning, saw mills, salt mines, grain warehousing, tobacco sales, and dairy production. In 16th centurya tavern was not just a place for to drink and eat. It served as a general store and an inn. Arenda even included development of towns and villages especially in frontier lands of Western Ukraine. These towns and villages later became part of Austrian Galicia after the first partition of Poland in 1772.
A large arenda covered several types of services or products. The arendar of such a large lease would then sublease individual services and products to sub-arendar. It was estimated that for the hundreds of major arendars there were perhaps thousands of sub-arendars. The Ostrorog fasmily lands were said to have 4,000 arendars. By using major arendars the latifundium administrator limited the number of arendars that were dealt with. The major arendar by subleasing could spread his investment lease risk among many sub-arendars and ensure that he would receive a fixed income and profit. The Jews of Rzeszow in late 18th century were involved with leasing of liquor stills, beer breweries, tavern keeping, and operating banquet halls.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION 5 ARENDA SOCIOECONOMIC IMPACTS ON JEWS
This section is under development and needs volunteer researchers especially with Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian language skills.
Arenda system impacts on Jews were mainly in terms of economic meaning income or debt and/or societal meaning respect and dependency on the one hand or anti-semitic behavior on the other. The fee for an arenda varied with the size of the land or rights conveyed. generally speaking such fees were considered very high. Depending on how the Jewish arendar was able to pay for the lease determined whether he led a enriched life relatively soon or whether he was soon buried in debt and struggled to barely make a livelihood. Three distinct methods for paying for a lease were:
1. When the Jew and his family was expelled from other countries he came to the new land with considerable personal property of substantial value which could be sold or traded to raise the arenda fee. The method would produce profit early on.
2. The Jew or his family members may have had craft, merchant, or trading skills which could be put to use in the new land to raise funds. This method took a bit longer for the Jew to become an arendar and increase his income substantially.
3. The Jew had to take a loan to pay for the arenda fee with the expectation that the lease would produce enough icome to pay back the loan with interest and produce suffient income to support a decent standard of living. This method ws the most risky. If the lease was for poor holdings and/or the arendar lacked the skills to make sufficient income, the Jew became a debtor and worked to pay off the loan with little left for a decent standard of living for himself and family. It was also possible that any combination of the three methods could be used whenever conditions warranted it.
Above all else it must be remembered that magnates were ever-chasing the financial gain. They had enormous expenses to keep them in the lifestyle they desired. Selling leases often gave them immediate cash to pay off their exiting debts as well as to allow them to make new to purchases. In some cases arrenda fees were not paid all at once. Often the contract called for quarterly payments. Even then the arendar was not expected to pay the quarterly sum in one payment. The magnate could issue payment requests whenever funds were needed. The arendar then was obligated to make the payment upon request. The total of all payment requests could not exceed the total designated for the quarter. Failure to make a payment could result in loss of both the arendar’s and his community’s personal property. These payment requests which could arrive without prior notice and as often as needed were a terrible burden on arendars. The problem was that the arrival of the request often did not coincide with the income generated by the leasde, so the arendar had to have some backup funds or chance losing his personal property.
The arendar, especially a major arendar had to have a many faceted personality in order to deal effectively with magnates, latifundium administrators, townspeople, Kahals, merchants, sub-arendars, the Jewish commuinity, with the Gentiles, who sought to takeover his profitable arenda, and with his serfs. Being a Jewish arendar drew some societal impacts not only on himself but on the Jewish community too. The Jew as an arendar appeared so often that it was common to use the term Jew and arendar interchangeably. Consequently, the negative impacts that felt upon the Jewish arendar also fell upon the Jewish community at-large.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION 6 CLUES FOR IDENTIFYING ANCESTRAL ARENDARS
This Section is under development. Research are needed to search various Polish and possibly Lithunanian and Ukrainian archives, generally online, for personal records of magnates. Among these personal records generally will be found copies of arendas. Once an arenda is located and reviewed it is possible to obtain names of arendars as well as terms and conditions of the arenda, what land was covered and/or what production or service facilities were covered. Language skills between English and Polish, Lithunanian, and Ukrainian are particularly needed.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
APPENDIX A DEFINITIONS
Arenda: The arenda has been defined by the University of Virginia in its course on European Jewry as a system of leasing property in early modern Poland in which in exchange for a predetermined rent the lessor agreed to transfer to the leasee control over property or rights; thus, enabling the lessee to pocket any income produced from the leased property or rights. The arenda provided a livilhood for a significant proportion of Polish Jewish families.
Arendars: An arendar, or sometimes called an arendator, was the leasee in an arenda contract.
Council of Four Lands: The Council of Four Lands was the central body of jewish autonomy for nearly two centuries, mid 16th to mid 18th century. In the latter part of the 16th century the various Kahals met in Lublin to creaye a supreme Jewish Council to oversee Jewish affairs in the lands of Poland (Great and Little), Lithuania, and Polish Russia initially. The council was initially called the Council of Lands. At later meetings the council was re-organized to cover 5 lands: Great Poland, Little Poland, Russia, Lithuania, and Volhynia. Eventually the organization was designated the Council of Four Lands and was comprised of Great Poland with capital in Posen, Little Poland with capital in Cracow, Polish or Red Russia which included Podlia and Galicia with capital in Lemberg, and Volhynia with capital in Ostrog or Kremenetz.
The Council was well suited to respond to the geographical spread and administrative position of Jews in the expanding use of the arenda in far-flung lands. The Council as well as local Kehila tried to control allocation of arendas so that Jews would not undermine each other or accept financial terms that they could not meet. The Council had the power to issue injunctions and binding decisions as well as to apply penalties for infractions. In 1581 the Council issued an edict to try and enforce moral ethics into the conduct of arenda management. The edict required that Jews not participate in the royal tax on drink nor shopuld they particiapte in the lease of mints, salt mines, or the collection of custom duties. Although the primary purpose of the Council was to protect the rights of Jews from overbearing government, it was not always successful. The Council compromised when it had to in order for the impact on Jews to be the lessor of two evils. In 1623 Lithuania withdrew from the Council. The Lithuanian Kehila in 1624 approved the Jewish taking of leases on collection of tolls. In 1764 the Polish Diet ordered the Council of Four Lands to be discontinued. This resulted in the removal of protection for Jews in remote areas from the capriciousness of the gentry.
Kehila/Kahal: Each Jewish settlement usually had a Kehila. The Kehila was a community organization set up to govern the Jewish community and would interface with the Council of Four Lands and gentile guilds and groups. The Kehila organization included administrative, judicial, religious, and charitable functions. The Kehila was controlled by a council called the Kahal. Elected elders were in charge of assessment of community taxes, charitable groups and other non-religious functions. The rabbis were in charge of religious and judicial functions. The Kahal as the governing coucil was empowered to establish standards for Jewish living and business, to adjudge complaints between Jews, and issue settlements of cases.
Latifundium: The vast lands held by magnates were called latifundium. The term is borrowed from the Latin. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia provides as a definition: In ancient Rome a large agricultural estate designed to make maximum use of cheap labor, whether free or slaves. In present day Italy, Spain, and South America, the definition expands to include, in the interests of absentee landlords. The Polish magnate latifundium would include in addition to agriculture, mining, fishing, mills, brewing and commercial establishments. The cheap labor on magnate estates were called serfs.
Magnates: All magnates were nobles, but not all nobles were magnates. In some case nobles were impovished and their homes were only distinguishable from those of serfs in that they were allowed to display a coat-of-arms. A noble generally became a magnate when large tracts of land were bestowed on the magnate by the King’s Court. Lands could be lost or gained through sales or purchases, as the result of wars, inherited or given away, and as a result of royal leases.
Serfs: The serfs were tied to the lands. They depended on the magnates and arrendars to provide rations and other goods in exchange for many hours of hard labor. They were taxed heavily and were restricted from moving to other regions. The serf could be sold with the land by the landowner or leased as was the case with arendas.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
APPENDIX B EXAMPLES OF ARENDAS
This Appendix is under development. Volunteer researchers, Polish and Lithuanian to and from English translators, and donations are required to find, acquire, and translate arendas.
If you can help, please contact the KRG Coordinator.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
APPENDIX C REFERENCES
BOOKS
1. Levine, Hillel, Economic Origins of Anti-Semitism, Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period,Yale University press, New Haven, 1991.
2. Rosman, M.J., The Lord’s Jews-Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth During the 18th Century, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard Judiac Texts and Stduies, VII Harvard Ukrainina Research Institute, Monograph Series, Cambridge, MA, 1990.
3. Barton, Salo W., et al, Economic History of the Jews, Schocken Books, 1975.
WEB SITES
1. jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=828&letter=c#2812, Council Of Four Lands.
2. tbns.net/poljs/history2.htm, Jews in Poland.
3. jmc.com.pl/paiz/facts/c.htm, Poland: Fundamental Facts, Figures and Regulations(c).
4. jewishgen.org/yizkor/rzeszow/rze047.html, The History of the Jews of Rzeszow.
5. jewishgen.org/yizkor/bolekhov/history_of_the_jews_in_bolekhov_htm, The History of the Jews in Belekhov at the end of the 18th Century.
6. jewishtribalreview.org/07poland.htm, A closer Look At Poland and eastern Europe.
7. Lipcon.org/fibel-review.shtml, Joe Fibel’s Book Review of Dr. Yaffa Eliachs’s, "There Once Was A World".
8. heritagefilms.com/poland.html, .
9. http://students.washington.edu/~birdman/#_hlk10995562, Role of the Jews in the Lublin Union, The Nobility, Mid 16th Century.
10. http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/exhibits/dignitydefiance/3.html, Jewish-Polish Relations, A Historical Survey, Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski.
11. webinfonet.net/heritage/history.html, History of the Jews in Poland.
12. http://freepages.genealogy/heritage/history/chronology.html, Heritage:History.
13. virgina.edu/~history/courses/hieu210/intro/glossary.html, Glossary.
14. http://www.jewishgen.org/wielkieoczy/history_wielkie_oczy.htm
15. http://www.avotaynu.com/magnates.htm
16. http://www.jewishgen.org/belarus/economic/rakovsum.html


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Copyright © 2004 Alan Weiser



Sunday, October 28, 2012

245 How our 'Reality' is constructed. Case study: Ghadaffi.

This blog: http://tiny.cc/6da1mw

This is a long article by Adam Curtis. ( The power of Nightmares)

In this article in ICH he explains how our view of Ghadaffi is completely false.
Ghadaffi may have given money to liberation-groups ( like Nelson Mandela's and the IRA ) , but that is about it. No Lockerbie, no discotheque bombs, no terrorisme.

How come we have this wrong impression ?

Curtis's story is simple:
Ghadaffi wanted attention from the world, but he did not get it. He found out that when putting on a show (  female guards, extravagant dressing) he got some attention.
But if he threatened The West he got much more attention.
So that is what he did.

This coïncided with the end of the Communist Threat.
Little by little the Neoconservatives (together with CIA ànd MI6) then created the Terrorist Threat.
And they started to use Ghadaffi's attention-seeking acts as an example of these Terrorist Threats.


I will give you a summary of the main topics in Curtis's article, and will number each with a yellow marked number [ 1 ] and key word or title. 

1. Ghadaffi wanted to make the world better by uniting countries against the imperialist West.
2. Suppport for the IRA and others.
3  Ghadaffi promoted a Third Way: between capitalism and communism.
4. The world only wants to listen to Ghadaffi if he behaves like a clown.
5. In America the Neocons under Reagan start with 'Perception Management', or, in plain English: lying to the world through the use of false accusations and spreading these lies via the Mass Media. In order to further some hidden agenda.
6. Police woman Fletcher: killed by Libya? Probably not.
7. Arthur Scargill: took money from Ghadaffi for himself? No.
8. Lockerbie: done by Libyans? No. 
9. Ghadaffi had no choice but to say that Libya did Lockerbie. 
10. Ghadaffi's message of 'giving up on WMDs' saved Blair.
11. Then Ghadaffi was accepted by the rest of the world. 
12. Even MI-6 started to cooperate with Ghadaffi.
13. Who is the puppet-master? Curtis has no answer, but I give my opinion. 

Everything written in red was written by Jan Verheul. 
All yellow and red markings are made by Jan Verheul.
Red is for the factual information. Yellow is about the false perception given to the public. ( Not strict)
Also all bold sentences were made by Jan Verheul. 
Here is the original article. I left nothing out, except the first title sentence: "He's behind you". I don't understand what is meant by it. It made things less clear, so I skipped it.
Note:  There are so many video's and pictures in this article that it slowed down the download. I planned to take them all out, but forgot some. These forgotten ones I left in, as the download-speed is acceptable now. I did not make a conscious selection. 

                              -------------------------------------------------------------



How Colonel Gaddafi and the Western Establishment Created a Pantomime World 

By Adam Curtis
October 25, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - Things come and go in the news cycle like waves of fever. A year ago Colonel Gaddafi was killed and an avalanche of camera phone footage of his last minutes was played again and again on the news channels. Then it stopped - and Gaddafi disappeared off into the dark.
What remains is all the footage recording Gaddafi's forty year career as a global weirdo. But the closer you look at the footage and what lies behind it - you begin to discover an odd story that casts a rather unflattering light on many of the elites in both the British and American establishments.
Because over those forty years all sorts of people from the west got mixed up with Gaddafi. Some were simply after his money and they flattered and crept to him because they wanted to be his friend. But for many others he was more useful as an enemy and they helped to turn Gaddafi into a two-dimensional cartoon-like global villain.
Those involved were not just politicians, but journalists, spies from the CIA and MI6,  members of Washington think tanks, academics, PR firms, philosophers of humanitarian intervention, posh left wing revolutionaries and the leaders of the IRA.
They all had different aims, and were trying to use Gaddafi in different ways. But underlying almost all of them was a common fear - a feeling that power and influence was slipping away from them, and that increasingly they didn't understand what was going on in the world.
In response, all these different groups began to simplify the world. They all did this in their own ways, but whether they were politicians or journalists or spies, they all began to create an almost pantomime-like picture of the world that maintained their own illusion of control and helped to disguise their loss of power from the general public.
And Colonel Gaddafi happily played a starring role in that pantomime as an absurd clown because it too gave him the global power and influence that he craved.
Together the western elites and Gaddafi helped to lead us into a simplistic two-dimensional vision of the world - full of exaggerations and falsehoods. A fake bubble of certainty that has imprisoned us in the west - and is now preventing us from understanding what is really going on in the world outside.

Picture: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/gaddaficomposite1.jpg

CHAPTER ONE – THE WILDERNESS YEARS
[ 1 ] The story begins back in the mid-1970s with a lonely and frustrated Colonel Gaddafi. He had come to power in 1969 with a burning ambition to transform the world - by liberating the Arab countries from the domination of the west, especially from Britain and America. But no-one would help him - or even cared. He was simply ignored.
Gaddafi was following the vision that had been set out by his hero Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt. Nasser had promised to unify the Arab world and transform it into a new revolutionary force that would be strong enough to stand up to the western powers.
But then, in 1970, Nasser died and his vision faltered. Gaddafi tried to keep it alive by unifying Libya with other countries - first with Egypt under Sadat, then with Tunisia and Algeria in something he called "The Steadfastness Front". He even tried Idi Amin in Uganda. But one by one the Arab countries gave up and slipped back to being the compliant puppets of America or Russia.
And Gaddafi was left all alone without any friends.
Here is some of the earliest footage of Gaddafi. It starts with his first appearance ever before the western press.
But Gaddafi wasn't going to give up. He was determined to challenge the old colonial powers.
[ 2 ] He was convinced that Northern Ireland  was very like Libya. The Catholics, he believed, were fighting a revolutionary struggle against the yoke of British imperialism. So he offered to supply them with money and arms.
He also offered the IRA semi-ambassadorial status - and an IRA supporter went out to live in Tripoli as the "ambassador". His Libyan handlers gave him the code-name "Mister Eddie" and Eddie lived a life of luxury in a grand mansion in the heart of the city eating his meals off the crockery of the deposed King Idris, while old trawlers took lots of guns and semtex from Libya to deserted coves on the coast of Ireland.
Gaddafi also wanted to undermine the west's support of Israel. He supported Palestinian groups fighting the Israelis. But he also decided ( planned; he did not do it. Jan Verheul) to do something more dramatic - to send a submarine to torpedo the QE2 that was taking a group of British tourists to visit Israel. Gaddafi mentioned this to President Sadat - who told him that he was completely mad.
And Gaddafi also funded a left-wing revolutionary party in Britain. It was called the Workers Revolutionary Party and its most famous members were the actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin. The only problem was that it was probably the most useless of all the revolutionary parties in Britain.
It was run a a paranoid Trotskyite called Gerry Healy who believed all other Trotskyites were really CIA double agents. And Healy was also secretly forcing lots of young female comrades to have sex with him "for the sake of the revolution".
I have found a wonderful film that was transmitted just once in a general election programme in 1974 at 4am in the morning. It shows what happened that night when Vanessa Redgrave stood as a WRP candidate for parliament - against a Labour MP called Reg Prentice. It was in Newham in east London and her behaviour as the results are announced shows dramatically why Colonel Gaddafi was backing the wrong revolutionary horse.
It is also very funny and very sad at the same time.
But there was also a sinister side to this relationship with Colonel Gaddafi. Later in the 1980s the WRP held an inquiry into what really went on. The report is still kept secret, but parts of it have been published. If these bits are true, they say that in April 1976 Corin Redgrave had signed a secret deal with the Libyan government for:
"providing intelligence information on the 'activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, business, the communications media and elsewhere' by 'Zionists'. It has strongly anti-Semitic undertones, as no distinction is made between Jews and Zionists"
In other words Corin Redgrave agreed to use the party as Colonel Gaddafi's spy agency in Britain and feed him information about prominent Jews in British society.
Here is Mr Redgrave preparing to do a party political broadcast on the BBC - promising to abolish parliament and create a workers state. But he seems to be most interested in how his tie looks.
By the late 70s Gaddafi decided that there was only one solution to his dilemma. If all the other revolutionaries were so useless - he would have to develop his own global revolutionary theory.
[ 3 ] So he did just that and he gave it a name. He called it "The Third International Theory". Gaddafi had discovered what he said was a Third Way, an alternative to capitalism and communism.  
Traditional democracy as practiced in Britain and America was a sham he said. It was actually a form of dictatorship. All a party needed was 51% of the vote and it could then impose its ideas on everyone for four or five years - just like clans in Libya did.
The alternative was a new kind of direct democracy in which the people governed themselves. There were no parties - instead Peoples' Committees elected People's Congresses that would manage things. Then there were Revolutionary Committees that made sure the Congresses and their administrators did things in a revolutionary way.
In reality it was a one-man show. Gaddafi made decisions about everything and played all the different committees and congresses off against each other to maintain his power.
But Gaddafi was terribly proud of it. He wrote it all down in what he called The Green Book which he then published in lots of languages because he believed it was a universal, global theory.

You can see just how much this idea pervaded Libyan society from these odd shots I found in some news rushes. They were filmed on a Libyan Ferry going from Malta to Tripoli in the early 1990s. Below decks there are permanent metal signs everywhere explaining the Third International Theory of direct democracy. Good music on the PA system as well.
[ 4 ] Gaddafi wanted to tell the world about his vision. He began to invite the BBC to come to Libya and film long interviews so he could explain how important it was.
The trouble though was that every time the BBC interviewers turned up they weren't really that interested in his theory. Instead they wanted to ask him whether he is sending arms to the IRA, and whether he was really planning to torpedo the QE2.
That's what they are really interested in. Not the Third Revolutionary Theory.
Colonel Gaddafi starts off being grumpy about this. But then you can see his face change as he begins to realise what the submarine story is doing for him. That maybe he doesn't need friends - what he really needs are powerful enemies that will make him, and his Third International Theory, infamous, and thus famous.
There is also a fascinating moment in one when Gaddafi breaks into English and describes his time when he came to study in Britain as a young military student. He tells how he went to Beaconsfield and was bullied by British students there. You begin to feel sympathy with him - and then he blows it. They must have been Jews, he says.



CHAPTER TWO – LOONEY TUNES AND CAPED CRUSADERS

Then, in the early 1980s Gaddafi got what he wanted, a global infamy that would make him a powerful presence on the world stage. And he got it because he suddenly became useful to two groups at the heart of the power structure of the West who were facing the growing uncertainty of the time.
One was a new wave of right wing ideologues around President Reagan in America who wanted to find a way of regenerating the moral purpose of their country in the world.
The other was the secret services in both America and Britain. The spies were beginning to realise that the Soviet Union might no longer be a serious threat - and that might threaten their own existence.
What they needed was a new enemy. And the more terrifying, unpredictable and mad the better.
At the beginning of 1981 President Ronald Reagan promised to regenerate America's moral mission in the world - above all to confront the evil empire of the Soviet Union.
But in the back rooms of the CIA, analysts were beginning to question whether this was necessary. They said that all the data they were gathering showed that the Soviet Union was in a terrible state. Even the invasion of Afghanistan, they said, was defensive. There was no way that the Russians wanted to take over the world any longer - even if they ever had.
But the new head of the CIA, William Casey, and the new Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig didn't want to hear this. They were convinced that America had to have something to fight for.
And bit by bit, through the spring and summer of 1981 a new enemy started to emerge in the American newspapers. It was Colonel Gaddafi. State Department officials and other administration "sources" briefed journalists that Gaddafi was at the heart of "the new global disease of terrorism".


In August, American jets patrolling off the coast of Libya shot down two Libyan fighters over the Gulf of Sidra. Gaddafi was furious and began issuing all sorts of threats against America.
Then, in October, a famous journalist called Jack Anderson wrote a sensational article. It said that Colonel Gaddafi had sent a six-man hit team to the US to assassinate President Reagan. Sources in the administration, he said, had concrete evidence that they were led by the most famous terrorist in the world called Carlos "The Jackal".
Then Newsweek said that Gaddafi had equipped them with "bazookas, grenade launchers and even portable SAM-7 missiles capable of bringing down the President's plane". The State department even issued photo fits of the six assassins.

[ 5 ]  But it seems that it was all completely untrue. Made up by the Reagan administration.
Here are some extracts from a documentary made later in the 1980s in which the journalist Jack Anderson explains how he was fed the story, why he believed it - and how it turned out not to be true.
It also includes an interview with one of the administration men who fed the story to the press. He was part of a committee that had been specifically set up to turn Gaddafi into the mad dog of terror. But even he admits that it was based on very little evidence.
It's a fascinating piece because it is the earliest evidence of what would become known later inside the Reagan administration as "Perception Management".

This was the idea that you could use the press and television to tell stories that simplified the world for the American people and turned it into a struggle of good against evil. A cartoon-like picture that justified America's policies in the world.

It didn't matter whether the stories were completely true or not because the overriding moral aim was good. 

Note from Jan Verheul: 
In the Neocon philosophy it is allowed and normal that the elite lie to the public.

Video 6 min.: see ICH:  Reagan begins campaign to demonize Ghadaffi with lies. 

But Colonel Gaddafi didn't mind the lies at all - because they turned him instantly into a global figure of power and importance.
Gaddafi was a man who understood Perception Management as well, if not better, than the men around Reagan. And he now began to act the part to the hilt. His key ally in this was TV - and in particular the rise of 24 hour news. 
Underlying it was a shift away from considered packages and towards an exciting sense of immediacy. ( bold added by Jan Verheul)
( Jan Verheul: I think that 'considered packages' is another word for 'reliable information according to journalistic rules of 'checking' etc.)  
Gaddafi was brilliant at it. Here are some of the best bits from the archives of that time. It starts with him appearing on a live satellite link to a mass meeting of The Nation of Islam in Chicago. Gaddafi offers to fund and arm a 100,000 strong black army in America so they can then go and shoot the whites who have oppressed them for so long.

Video 1 min:  Ghadaffi speaking by film to Blacks in the US. 


And here is a bit from a film exposing how Colonel Gaddafi has invited German rocket scientists, some of whom had Nazi pasts, to come and build a rocket in Libya. Gaddafi appears in the film explaining that Libya wants to investigate outer space for peaceful purposes. But the film says it may be also so he can attack anywhere in Europe within minutes.
The German company was called OTRAG, and it had previously been building rockets in Zaire for President Mobutu. The BBC had reported on this the year before.
The film has a great graphic showing how the rockets could hit Israel and even Europe. It is remarkably like all the graphics produced about Saddam's rockets attacking Europe in the "dodgy dossier" in 2003
And through it all Gaddafi plays the coy innocent beautifully. He knows just what he is up to.

Video 5 min.: OTRAG rocket.

And here's a great rant attacking America

Video, 35 sec.:  Ghadaffi threatening the USA. 

And then suddenly in the midst of being the world's most dangerous dictator, Gaddafi goes all soft and offers the hand of friendship. He invites the British national team to come and take part in the Libyan International Show Jumping Contest.
The BBC programme Nationwide made a film following the team and what happened. It is just a wonderful film. Not least because it includes a song Gaddafi commissioned - sung in English - to promote his Third Way theory. Plus lots of horses.
Here it is

Video 12 min. : Horses

Then Gaddafi went bad again. He arbitrarily arrested six British oil workers. Lots of people turned up to see him in his tent and plead for their release including a very odd Labour MP with a large plaster on his nose, and the Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy Terry Waite. There is a good bit where the Archbishop of Canterbury shows off the copy of the Koran that Colonel Gaddafi has sent him.
And the fashion choice Gaddafi makes when he walks in to be interviewed by the BBC's Kate Adie is fantastic. As is his eye-rolling.

Video: 3 min. :  Ghadaffi, Terry Waite, 6 prisoners. 

[6]But then all this went horribly wrong when WPC ( police-woman ) Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead in April 1984 by a "revolutionary student" inside the Libyan Peoples' Bureau in London.
Note by Jan Verheul: In the comments I read this: Britain's Channel 4 made a two-part documentary in the 1980s which showed, quite conclusively, that the theory that PC Fletcher was done by Libya was utter nonsense.
I seem to remember to have read information of the same kind. 

Here are some bits of the avalanche of news coverage. Even in the face of the tragic killing Gaddafi plays the cartoon villain - claiming that really it was the British who shot her. But there is also a strange two-dimensionality to the presenters in the studios - and to some of the police involved, especially the detective inspector in charge that day outside the Bureau. His description of how he sees the Libyans as strange aliens sort of sums it up.
At this distance you can see how terrorism and the beginning of rolling news coverage in the 1980s were somehow starting to work together to create a strange construction of an unpredictable but yet simplified world. Figures like Gaddafi, and later Saddam Hussein, along with presenters in TV studios holding up AK 47s, and "opposition" figures shot in shadow all combined with each other to create a weird pantomime version of the world outside.
[ 5 ]Perception Management. 

Video 7 min.: The BBC and Ghadaffi on Fletcher 

This all culminated in 1986 when the Americans bombed Libya, claiming that Gaddafi had been the mastermind behind a wave of terrorist attacks at European airports and the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin.
Reagan explained that Gaddafi was one of the central figures of global terrorism. Along with Iran and North Korea he was part of a set of:
"outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich."
And yet again Gaddafi played up beautifully. Here is a fantastic hand held video of him in his bombed-out house the next morning. He calls Thatcher a "harlot" and says that the Americans are trying to stop him spreading his Third Way theory to the young of the world.
And he says that the Americans killed his adopted daughter in the raid - which later turned out not to be true.

Video 2 min: Ghdaffi in destroyed home.

But yet again most of the American allegations turned out not to be true.
A year later the BBC journalist Tom Bower made a film that examined the claims in detail. It makes a very powerful case that Gaddafi had nothing to do with the airport attacks. It also looks at the facts behind the Berlin discotheque bombing and questions how much Libya was really behind that as well.

Also see my blogs about this: Ghadaffi. (Lockerbie at point 5  Discotheques at point 6)

The film interviews men from European intelligence agencies, from Israeli intelligence and even the ex-prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin. All of them say that the Americans had taken Colonel Gaddafi's mad rantings after 1981 and assembled the fragments of rants and quotes into a dossier that they said was "evidence" of him being a terrorist mastermind.
The hard evidence, they all insist, is that Syria was behind the attacks. They say that Libya had been chosen as a "soft target". It was too dangerous to confront the real culprit - Assad and the terrorist groups he directed - because of the dangers of destabilising the region. Instead you went for Gaddafi - a man without friends or allies. Even the Russians didn't care about him.
Note: ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky writes in his book about the Mossad that it was The Mossad who did the bombings of American soldiers in Berlin and Vienna, as a False Flag ( = suggesting it was Libya that did it).  Ostrovsky 1994 pag. 115
So the Israeli witnesses in Tom Bowers film are lying: not the Libyans, and not the Syrians did it,  but the Israeli's themselves ! Already by then, almost 30 years ago, they knew that they would transform the muslims into terrorists: in reality (training the Afghan rebels) but certainly in the world's Perception.

Video 14 min: 'US has circumstantial eveidence against Ghadaffi. Italians: it was Abu Nidal. Israeli's: they came from Syria. Israeli Eitan: Ghadaffi never killed non-Libyan's or non -arabs. The USgovernment lies about an evacuation happening in Berlin. Syria is much more a suspect. 


CHAPTER THREE – OUR NEW BEST ENEMY
[ 5 ]    Colonel Gaddafi had willingly helped the west turn him into a pantomime villain. That invented character was then very attractive to those in power in the west because it helped in turn make their simplified, and often fictional, version of the world seem real. 
And it wasn't just politicians and spies who got involved in this strange two-way collaboration. Increasingly journalists also found themselves seduced by the special power that Gaddafi had - he could help you transform the world into an entertaining story of global super-villains and a battle against dark forces - and he made it feel real.

But just as had happened with the politicians and spies this would lead some newspapers, and their grand traditions of investigation and truth-telling, to lose touch with reality and create a semi-fictional world.
[ 7 ]  It began with Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mine Workers.
Back in 1984, at the height of the miners' strike, the Sunday Times published a "sensational expose". It said that the Chief Executive Officer of the NUM had gone to Libya, met with Colonel Gaddafi, and that Gaddafi had secretly given money to help the British miners.
The Sunday Times said that the NUM man - Roger Windsor - had travelled there with "the European representative of a Libyan-backed terrorist group" and a high-up man in Libyan intelligence. The terrorist representative apparently also ran a grocers shop in Doncaster.
Here is the TV report that night - including footage of the NUM man meeting Colonel Gaddafi that had been released by the Libyans.

Video 2 min: Miners visit Ghadaffi.


A few months later the strike collapsed, and the story was forgotten. But five years later in 1990 the Daily Mirror and ITV's "Cook Report" programme brought it back to life in a sensational way.
They alleged that Scargill had used Colonel Gaddafi's money corruptly to pay off the mortgage on his house while his members starved. This effectively destroyed Scargill - because although many people thought him vain, pompous and scheming - no one had thought that he was corrupt.
It was full of breathless detail, of the money being smuggled through Heathrow in suitcases, being hidden in biscuit tins and then counted out and distributed in Arthur Scargill's office.
Here is a taste of the avalanche of reaction. Including the Mirror's new proprietor Robert Maxwell challenging Scargill to sue. I have also included an extraordinary shot from some news rushes of a camera constantly pursuing Scargill - up stairs, through corridors, into a ballroom and then through a car park. In its odd way it gives a very good sense of the mood, and of what Scargill was like as a person.
And, as he is followed, notice that Scargill stops to buy a left-wing newspaper called News Line. It is the paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party which had got funding from Colonel Gaddafi.

Video 5 min. : Scargill is accused of 'stealing' Ghadaffi's money for the miners. Note how big a lier mr Maxwell is !


But it seems that all the allegations of corruption were completely untrue.
It was true that Mr Windsor went to Libya and met Colonel Gaddafi. There was some money that was lodged in a bank account in Doncaster - but none of it seems to have ever got to the NUM or Arthur Scargill.
But more than that - many journalists and MPs who have looked into the whole episode are convinced that Arthur Scargill and the NUM were somehow set up, possibly by MI5. That the trip by Mr Windsor to Libya and the money he said received was stage-managed or manipulated in some way by the British intelligence services to smear Scargill.
On the other hand none of them have produced solid evidence. Some have alleged that Mr Windsor was really working for MI5, which he firmly denies. Others have asked whether the so called terrorist from Doncaster was a plant. He too firmly denies any such thing.
Then - in 2002 - the Mirror editor who had published the original expose, Roy Greenslade, wrote an article saying that he now believed that everything they wrote was false, and that the Daily Mirror with its great tradition of investigative journalism had been duped. It is a very powerful and courageous piece and it ends like this:
"I am now convinced that Scargill did not misuse strike funds and that the union didn't get money from Libya. I also concede that, given the supposed wealth of Maxwell's Mirror and the state of NUM finances, it was understandable that Scargill didn't sue.
Nothing I have said should be taken as criticism of the Mirror journalists: we were all taken in. I can't undo what has been done, but I am pleased to offer the sincerest of apologies to Heathfield and to Scargill, who is on the verge of retirement. I regret ever publishing that story. And that is the honest truth."
You can find the whole article here. It is really good.
In the article Greenslade speculates whether the Daily Mirror had been duped as part of an MI5 plot to discredit Scargill. But he says it remains a strange mystery.
His article though is fascinating because of the wider picture it gives of what was beginning to happen to investigative journalism as it got involved in this cartoon-like world of "internal subversion" and "international terrorists" and mad dictators. It didn't seem to be so much about just revealing the truth any more - rather it was helping create a sense of dark shadowy plots and impenetrable mysteries surrounding modern life.
And it was going to get a lot weirder - and yet again Colonel Gaddafi was going to be at the heart of it
 [ 8 ] On December the 21st 1988 a Pan Am flight from London to New York was blown up - and the debris came down on the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. It was one of the first of the modern terror panics - and what made it feel more intense and frightening was the avalanche of reporting in the new 24-hours news cycle.
In the face of this, investigative journalism was going to go beyond the fog of immediacy and cut through and tell the truth - what really happened.
And it did - or so it seemed. Within months of the attack the famous Sunday Times "Insight" team had a series of scoops that revealed that the bombing on the Pan Am plane was a revenge attack by Iran for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in the Gulf in 1988. The articles laid it all out in enormous detail - how the Iranians had paid a Palestinian terrorist group based in Syria to plant the bomb in a Toshiba cassette player. And that this had been done with the help of the Syrian authorities.
The terrorists were named and "intelligence sources" were quoted with absolute certainty saying that they knew this is what had happened. There was no mention at all of Libya.
But then suddenly in December 1990 there was there was a complete switch.
"Intelligence sources" in America began to tell journalists that they had found evidence that showed that it was Libya who had masterminded the bombing.
Then in June 1991 the British and American governments formally announced that Libya had been behind the bombing. Here is the first TV report, it includes a conservative MP called Teddy Taylor who had been to see Colonel Gaddafi. He raises the question that was going to lie at the heart of this puzzle.
Isn't it a bit odd, he says, that at the very moment in 1990 when Syria became America's ally in the first Gulf War, that America suddenly stopped accusing it of Lockerbie? And at the very same moment America and Britain suddenly find evidence proving it was Libya.

Video 1,5 min.:  Lockerbie done by Libya. Lot's of proof!

Suddenly the media was deluged with reports that said that the Lockerbie bombing had been carried out by Libya.
And many of the investigative journalists who had previously said that it was definitely Iran also changed their tune as well. Even the journalists who had written the Sunday Times articles saying there was concrete proof it was Iran and Syria now said it was the mad dog of terrorism - Colonel Gaddafi. And what's more their "intelligence sources" were absolutely sure too.
But a few old-school investigative journalists held out against this sudden swerve. The main one was Paul Foot from Private Eye. He wrote a devastating pamphlet that tears part the whole American and British case against Libya.

Foot showed that much of it rested on the evidence of one extremely dubious witness called Mr Giaka who claimed to be high up in Libyan intelligence. In fact he was a mechanic in a garage who serviced the vehicles for Libyan intelligence - and he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Americans.
Even his CIA handlers were very suspicious of him - and after two years of getting nothing from Mr Giaka they told him they would stop paying him unless he came up with some incriminating evidence for the US Department of Justice. The next day Giaka did just that - describing a samsonite suitcase that was loaded onto a plane in Malta by Libyan intelligence. Something he had forgotten to mention for two years.
Giaka explained:
"When I met with the representatives of the Department of Justice, they are very good investigators, and they can distinguish truth from lies. One way or another, they can obtain what they want."
The other key piece of evidence was a tiny fragment of what the Americans said was a kind of timing device that had been sold only to Libya. It too was only discovered to be important 18 months after the bombing - but yet again Foot shows how dubious the claims were that the Americans made about this tiny fragment.

Foot's pamphlet is a powerful piece of journalism that makes a strong argument that the case against Libya is at best massively flawed and more probably a work of fiction.

But it also shows what was happening to journalism - because Foot argues that the tradition of investigative journalism that the Sunday Times Insight team represented had fundamentally changed. And the reporting of Lockerbie and Gaddafi showed this.
When Rupert Murdoch had bought the Sunday Times in 1983 he had appointed a new editor who disapproved of the Insight column and its traditions. Foot says:
"One casualty was the tradition of independent journalistic investigation. This was replaced in the main by material which posed as "investigative" but which in fact recycled information from safe sources, safest of which were the police and the security and intelligence services."
That reliance on sources in the police would come to have disastrous consequences for News International - as we have recently seen.
But the key point back then in the early 90s is that that growing reliance upon sources in the secret intelligence world happened at the very moment when those sources were themselves becoming hopelessly lost. The Cold War was over and all the old certainties were disappearing and the spooks were floundering around, not really knowing what was going on any more.
This made both the intelligence services and their political masters increasingly prey to those right-wing ideologues who had first emerged around President Reagan and who seemed to believe that you could base policy "on not very hard evidence" in order to manage the world.

Jan Verheul: Here is a part of Curtis's film about how the Neocons turned Reagan into an asset for their agenda: Nightmares
And some journalists, desperate for crumbs from the powerful went on blithely publishing what they were told by their sources, no matter how illogical, contradictory or phoney it was.
And everyone moved further into a two dimensional world.

But Colonel Gaddafi did still have some friends in Britain. Yet again another group who were feeling power and influence slipping away from them turned to him for help. This time it was the National Front.
By the late 80s the extreme right in Britain were falling apart. To try and save themselves a new younger generation in the National Front decided that racist xenophobia was not enough and that what was needed was a positive, inspiring model for how to organise society as an alternative to the two-party parliamentary system.
And the model for that, they decided, was Colonel Gaddafi's Green Book and its Third Revolutionary theory.
A National Front delegation went to Libya. They asked for money to fund their new project - but all they got were bulk copies of The Green Book. Undaunted they decided to try and set up a model for this new politics in the London suburb of Isleworth.
Here is a lovely bit from a documentary made about what happened to the NF in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a great grabbed interview with the architect of the scheme - Phil Andrews. He admires Gaddafi because he criticises "traditional corrupt politics".
Phil sets out to create a Gaddafi -style popular democracy in Isleworth. To help in this he donates a copy of The Green Book to the local library.

Video 3,5 min.:  Ghadaffi gives only his Green Book to some 'nazi's'.

We went to Isleworth Library to see if anyone had borrowed the Green Book since the film was made. But we found that Gaddafi's book is no longer there. Robert Deighton who works in the library said that it had now become "a hub". To do this they had got rid of all the books that no-one borrowed, so it looks like no-one in Isleworth ever read about Gaddafi's Third Way. And now they never will.
Here is a picture of Robert in his "hub".
By the mid 1990s Colonel Gaddafi was all alone again. The sanctions over Lockerbie isolated his country from the rest of the world and his economy began to fall apart. With it also went his vision of the Third Way.
When he held a lavish parade for the 25th anniversary of the Libyan revolution practically no-one came from other countries. But John Simpson from the BBC turned up and did a very good report.
It's good because he cuts through the fog - and says clearly that Gaddafi is really a showman, he is not a serious threat. And that for the past ten to fifteen years Gaddafi has been used as the easy alternative to confronting the serious threats in the Middle East.
Here is his report.


Video 3 min.: Ghadaffi 25 years in power.  

CHAPTER FOUR - WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
But the fake vision of Gaddafi had by now gone very deep in the western  imagination. He was at the centre of an interconnecting web of ludicrous, largely fictional stories. And what was now going to happen was that those stories would begin to a coalesce with other simplified and exaggerated stories about other super-villains around the world. Out of that odd stew would come a grand unified theory that would be one of the central beliefs of our age.
MI6 called it "Global Risks" and it was a vision that we now lived in a terrifying world of mad dictators at the head of rogue states who were teaming up with international terrorists, drug barons and ruthless adventurers offering to sell things like smuggled nuclear weapons to the highest bidder.
The world, this theory said, now had to be seen as one interconnected system that transcended nations and their petty preoccupations. And western elites had a duty to defend the system against this new array of "Global Threats". In short they should become world policemen.
MI6 loved this theory because it gave them something new to do. And the obvious place to start was by getting rid of Colonel Gaddafi.
In 1998 a whistleblower from inside the British intelligence services called David Shayler claimed that in 1996 MI6 had paid an Islamist Jihadi group in Libya to kill Colonel Gaddafi. If true it was not very good for MI6 because it meant that agents of the British government were engaging in a programme of assassinating foreign heads of state.
The Islamist group were called The Libyan Islamist Fighting Group. But, Shayler said, they had bungled the operation and detonated a bomb under the wrong car, killing six innocent people.
Both MI6 and the Labour Government denied it. But Shayler agreed to appear on a special Panorama programme that examined his allegations. The presenter - Mark Urban - concludes that Shayler's claims might be true.

Video 7 min:  Shayler says that UK tried to kill Ghadaffi, using militant Islamic group. Indeed a reliable witness, I think. 

Although Shayler's story about the strange things that were going on inside MI6 might be true, Shayler then rather undermined his credibility by some of his subsequent behaviour. He decided to believe some of the conspiracy theories about Sept 11th - and then started dressing as a woman, giving himself the name Dolores Kane and declaring that the world was going to end in 2012.
But it also made no difference because by now everyone was believing in this vision of a world of hidden threats. And the biggest threat of all were WMDS.
Journalists also tried to turn themselves into World Detectives, trying to expose these new terrifying threats - the Weapons of Mass Destruction that the crazy but infernally cunning dictators were hiding. Their sources in the intelligence agencies told them the WMDs were there. Somewhere.
Here are some sections from a documentary made in 1998 about a search for Colonel Gaddafi's WMDs that both illustrates this perfectly - and then at the end shows the empty fatuity of this quest.
It is made by the journalist John Sweeney. He gets into Libya to make a film about Gaddafi's giant water project, but he has an additional aim which is to see if the Libyan's are hiding WMDs in the giant underground reservoirs
There are fantastic, beautiful shots of this extraordinary project as Sweeney tramps around looking for the hidden threats. He finds nothing yet keeps talking about how the CIA say there is the biggest chemical weapons plant in the world hidden somewhere.
But Sweeney is a very good and honest journalist - he has an ability that is very rare in TV reporting to emotionally judge the truth of a situation - and towards the end he confronts his minder about the WMDs. He does it on audio, but to do this he has to keep the video camera running.
What results is not only a piece of avant-garde film making. But the minder is also very sharp. In just a few sentences off-camera he makes you reflect on how ridiculous and paranoid this western mindset has become. And Sweeney gives him the space to do it.

Video 4,5 min:  Man made river, witness off screen.

But Colonel Gaddafi was by now in deep trouble, and he was desperate to get rid of the UN sanctions.
In 1999 - pushed by Nelson Mandela who Gaddafi trusted - he agreed that the two men named by America and Britain as suspects could be put on trial ( for the Lockerbie plane attack, Jan Verheul) in a special Scottish court in the Netherlands. Gaddafi believed that the lack of any substantial evidence would set them free.
But it didn't. One was acquitted, but Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a Scottish prison. Gaddafi protested as did lots of Libyans. But is important to realise so did lots of people in Britain. The Professor of Law at Edinburgh University, Robert Black has said bluntly that:
"It is the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years.
Every lawyer who has read the judgement says 'this is nonsense'. It is nonsense. It really distresses me."
And Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died on the plane, doesn't believe that the court got anywhere near the truth about Lockerbie. When the verdict was read out in court Swire fainted.
Jan Verheul: 
See: Tam Dalyell, Brittish MP. ( Video
See: Judge Black : ( Video
See: Jim Swire: ( Video

It would seem that possibly Colonel Gaddafi's distrust of Britain and America might not have been just another of his fantasies.

Video 2 min:  Ghadaffi very angry about the conviction of Al Megrahi for Lockerbie.
But even then the Americans refused to lift the sanctions until Libya admitted their guilt.
 [ 9 ] And in 2003 Gaddafi agreed to do that. Or so it appeared.
Gaddafi had decided - as had happened throughout this story - that the only way to get what he wanted was to pretend.
Here are some sections from the rushes of an interview with Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam. Again and again Saif insists that Libya's admission of guilt was a simply a necessary pretence. A lie that was "the only way to exit from the nightmare of the sanctions". They were being forced "to play by the rules of a game invented by Britain and America".
The interviewer is the BBC producer Guy Smith. He is brilliant at insistently pushing Saif about the terrible cynicism and hypocrisy that underlies such a decision. But Saif is also rather impressive in the way he responds. Not only was there no alternative, he says, but everyone involved - even the families of the victims - have become corrupted by the situation. The families are greedy, he says, constantly asking for more money.
If Saif is right - then the picture he gives is a very dark one, where the lies and exaggerations that started back in 1981 have stretched out to corrupt everyone involved.
But then he might be lying.
It is a really good interview.

Video 14 min: Saif Ghadaffi: We accept responsability, but don't agree we did it. 

But Gaddafi understood this fake world better than anyone else - and he was about to play with it, twisting the deceptions even further. His aim was to find a way of getting back to the centre of the world stage, and finally be accepted by those in power in Britain and America.
He was going to do it by doing what he had always done. He would pretend to be more terrifying and dangerous than he really was.
The key, Gaddafi knew, were weapons of mass destruction. America and Britain had invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003 - and they had justified this by claiming that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. But it turned out that he didn't and it was a disaster, especially for Tony Blair.
[ 10 ] So Gaddafi decided to help Blair. He admitted that Libya had indeed been hiding chemical weapons and nuclear research facilities, and he offered to give them up.
For Tony Blair this was a godsend because it allowed him to say that the Iraq invasion was having the desired effect of persuading other "rogue states" to transform themselves. And the BBC allowed Blair to break live into the 10 pm news to announce that Colonel Gaddafi had made an historic decision.

Jan Verheul: I wouldn't be surprised if the idea came from Blair c.s.: He simply had to point to Saddam and tell Ghadaffi: 'you may be next'.

The only thing that no-one mentioned was that Gaddafi didn't really have any dangerous weapons of mass destruction.
He had tried to develop nuclear research in Libya, and had bought lots of centrifuges and other equipment. But it had never got off the ground. The CIA would later be quoted as saying that it was way beyond the ability of Gaddafi's scientists even to assemble the equipment.
And one of the leading WMD experts - Jonathan Tucker from the Monterey Institute -said that the chemical weapons were "quite limited". Libya had made mustard gas but it remained in leaking barrels and hadn't been turned into weapon form. As for the more powerful nerve agents Tucker said Libya had tried to make them but turned out not to have the capabilites or the know-how.
Here are some bit of Tucker's 2009 report - The Rollback of Libya's Chemical Weapons Programme:
"The nuclear program was embryonic….while the biological weapons program was little more than a plan that had made minimal progress.
The Libyan Chemical Weapons program…had involved fewer than a dozen chemists and chemical engineers.
The size of the Libyan Chemical Weapons stockpile turned out to be far smaller than the 100 metric tons that the US intelligence community had estimated. Although the Chemical Weapons research program was still active, the production line had been shut down for more than a decade.
The large-scale production of nerve agents was beyond Libya's technological reach."
As the presenters wait for Blair to appear, Andrew Marr sums up what is happening brilliantly. The story that is central to Blair's "world picture" he says is that the modern global threat is "rogue states" coming together with "WMDs". And Gaddafi has just made that story real.
Although of course Gaddafi was - as usual - happily exaggerating how dangerous he was. 

Video 4 min:  Andrew Marr and Tony Blair: Ghadaffi gives up his WMDs.

There then followed a tidal wave of creepiness with ministers and commentators lining up to say how "courageous and statesmanlike" Gaddafi had been, and how he had "taken a step towards world peace". Culminating in Blair going to visit Gaddafi in his tent.
Blair, along with many commentators, also predicted that this would result in a new openness in Libyan society. Here is Blair's visit, but I have added an interview from 2009 with an internal dissident in Libya to show that even five years later Libya had not changed.

Video 3 min:  Blair visits Ghadaffi in his tent in Tripoli. 

And in return for this, many western institutions and eminent individuals now happily set out to create a new, alternative, and equally fictional image of Libya. It was no longer the dark realm of international terrorism. It was a "reforming" country joining the modern world. Led by an inspired "modern thinker" - Colonel Gaddafi.
Behind a lot of this was an American PR company called The Monitor Group. They were paid $3 million to conduct a cleansing campaign for Libya's image. The aim, according to an internal memo was to:
"enhance international understanding and appreciation of Libya and the contribution it has made and may continue to make to its region and to the world."
They did this by getting eminent liberal intellectuals and leading academics to come out to Libya and have economic forums where they all agreed that the country could develop into a "unique form of popular capitalism".
One of these intellectuals was the famous prophet of The Third Way who had inspired Tony Blair - Professor Anthony Giddens from the LSE. Giddens was flown out and met Colonel Gaddafi. He wrote proudly of how he discovered that his version of the Third Way was similar to Gaddafi's Third International Theory:
"You usually get about half an hour with a political leader. My conversation lasts for more than three. Gaddafi is relaxed and clearly enjoys intellectual conversation. He likes the term "third way" because his own political philosophy is a version of this idea. He makes many intelligent and perceptive points. I leave enlivened and encouraged."
 Very NBF.
Giddens was so encouraged that he went out again and took part in a panel of intellectuals chaired by Sir David Frost - and everyone talked about how "authentic" Colonel Gaddafi's conversion was.
Here they are sitting round a modern table - while Colonel Gaddafi reminds himself of his theories.
[11] With this new image Gaddafi then set off to tour the world as a new leader-cum- philosopher. And everywhere he went the westerners who had once laughed at him and tried to kill him now bowed down before him.
Here are the reports of him visiting the European Commission who were so kind as to have recreated and exact model of the Colonel's tent for him to stay in. Then Gaddafi was invited to the UN. By this time the "conversion" seems to be slipping a bit because he goes and makes a speech where he tears up the UN charter and tells them that swine-flu is man made.
Here are the reports of the visits.

Video 2 min:  Ghadaffi in Brussels. 

The Gaddafi family now become international D-list celebrities.
His son Saadi went to play professionally for Perugia FC in Italy. It was rumoured that the Libyans had paid Perugia to take Saadi on.
Another son - Hannibal - travelled the European party circuit staying in swank hotels. In 2008 he was arrested in Switzerland for allegedly assaulting two of his servants. Although the charges were dropped two days later, the Libyans threatened to stop trade with Switzerland, cancelled air flights, and Hannibal's father withdrew £3.2 billion from his Swiss account. It has been reported that the Swiss then apologised and paid Hannibal compensation.
His extremely glamorous daughter Ayesha was a lawyer. But the "conversion" didn't seem to work very well in her case. She went to Iraq to be one of the defence team in Saddam Hussein's trial.
Here is the fantastic sofa Ayesha relaxed on at her Libyan villa. The photo was taken after the revolution.
  
But the most sought after was Gaddafi's second son, Saif al Islam, because he was rumoured to be his father's successor.
  
He too wanted to become a "modern thinker' like his father, so he applied to the London School of Economics. One of the Professors discovered that he was helped in his application by British Aerospace.
Some of his teachers were a bit baffled by their new student. One professor later said - "I could never get clear exactly what he was arguing."  But another LSE professor had no such doubts. He was called David Held, and he was a great enthusiast for the idea of "globalisation". And Saif's thesis was very much on message - it was called:
"THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS: FROM 'SOFT POWER' TO COLLECTIVE DECISION MAKING"
When someone at the LSE explained Giddens' Third Way theory to Saif, apparently his immediate reaction was "my father invented that thirty years ago."
There was only one problem with Saif's thesis though. It appeared that he might not have written all of it himself. An investigation carried out after the Libyan revolution discovered that Saif had quite a lot of help from the Research Department of the Monitor Group. The same PR company that was flying all the global intellectuals out to meet Saif's father.
Saif probably needed this help because he was busy in other areas. At the same time he was becoming an international artist. He had a travelling exhibition of his own paintings. It was called "The Desert Is Not Silent".
Here are some of the paintings.
  
At the end of 2008 Saif was awarded his PhD. A few weeks later Professor David Held suggested to him that he might help fund the LSE's Centre For Global Governance. Held says that there was no connection between the two.
Saif said that he would give the Centre £1.5 million, and it would come, he said from his own Foundation in Libya.
What then happened was laid out last year in the investigation written by Lord Woolf. It is a brilliant piece of journalism - and it is a savage expose of what really went at the heart of one of the most eminent academic institutions in the world. The report is really worth reading and it is beautifully written.
A group in the LSE led by David Held were happy to accept the money. But then a Professor called Fred Halliday who had spent his life studying the Middle East rather than worrying about Global Governance pointed something very awkward out. He said that the money that was being offered was dirty money. It was actually bribes paid by western companies in order to secure contracts in Libya.
The LSE investigated and found out that this was probably true - and what were called "due diligence" documents laid this out. But then a strange thing happened. At an LSE council meeting these documents were not presented. Instead David Held described how he had monitored the blogosphere for reactions to the proposal and that there had been no negative comment about the relationship.
Lord Woolf is scathing in a very English way about this:
"I am unable to establish why the due diligence documents did not reach Council. It would have been much more valuable for the Council to have had documents relating to the source of the money rather than media clippings showing perceptions of the LSE's engagement with Libya."
It would seem that the practice of "Perception Management" might now have reached the mild liberal academics.
The loan was agreed, David Held joined the board of Saif's Foundation - and then Saif was asked to give a lecture in the big auditorium at the heart of the LSE.
Here is David Held introducing Saif al Islam Gaddafi's speech. Saif still tries to defend his father's idea that Libya is a better form of democracy than the democracies of the west. He points out how the increasingly low turnout of voters in America has allowed politics to be co-opted by special interests. But then he can't help collapsing into laughter when he says that this means that Libya is a truer form of democracy.


Video 5 min:  Speach of Saif al Ghadaffi at the London School of Economics. 


[ 12 ] And even Colonel Gaddafi's oldest enemies now became his new best friends.
Twenty years before officers in MI6 had allegedly tried to assassinate Gaddafi by paying a group of Islamist rebels called The Libyan Islamist Fighting Group.
Now MI6 wanted to do everything they could to please their new best friend, Colonel Gaddafi. So when Libyan intelligence asked MI6 help them capture one of the leaders of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group it seems that they were only too happy to oblige.
One of the leaders of the Fighting Group, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, has alleged that in 2004 Libyan Intelligence asked MI6 to help kidnap him. MI6 and the CIA then traced him and his wife to Thailand where the CIA kidnapped both of them and he was tortured. They were then flown to a Libyan jail and mistreated he says.
Belhaj says that in doing this the British Intelligence agencies effectively were colluding in kidnapping and torture. The evidence of their involvement in his case is strongly backed up by a series of secret memos found by Human Rights Watch in Libyan Intelligence after the revolution.
Here is a very good news report by Peter Taylor about what Belhaj alleges - and how the secret documents back him up.

Video 3 min:  Belhaj claims that the UK sent Belhaj to Libya. 

The British elites now got everywhere in Libya. Here is an odd moment from a documentary made by Simon Reeve that uncovers a telling detail.
When he gets to the city of Sabha Reeve goes to visit the hut that Colonel Gaddafi lived in when he was a schoolboy. It is now preserved in the middle of a roundabout. Reeve leafs through the visitors book and finds an effusive entry from a British General called Robin Searby.
General Searby was Tony Blair's Defence Co-ordinator for Libya. Documents later revealed that General Searby had helped negotiate a deal that would lead to the SAS training Libyan soldiers in "counter-terrorism".
Searby defended the programme by saying that the Libyans were woefully behind in counter-terrorism tactics:
"It was better to have them inside the tent rather than outside"
He added though that the programme had to be abandoned - because "the Libyans were not up to it".

Video 2 min:  Ghadaffi's hut. 

CHAPTER FIVE - DOWN THE DRAIN
But this dream world of global acceptance wasn't going to last. Gaddafi had managed to redeem himself by manipulating a simplified vision of the world that was divided into goodies and baddies in such a way that he became a goodie. But that simple universe had a remorseless logic to it - and Gaddafi was about to be brought down and destroyed by that logic.
Western elites by now saw much of the world through that goodies and baddies prism, so when the Arab Spring began in 2011 it was simply understood as the uprising of the good people against the bad rulers. Two months later the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi, and that mindset automatically saw the Libyan people as Goodies.
Which meant that Colonel Gaddafi must be a baddie. So everyone switched sides yet again, just like that. And the last dance began.
Here is a short film about that last dance - along with some of Colonel Gaddafi's friends.

Video 5 min: Flash backs of Ghadaffi and scenes of the 2011 revolt. 

The question at the heart of this whole story is - Who was the ventriloquist? And who was the dummy?
[ 13 ] Jan Verheul: about the ventriloquist.
  The most powerful in today's world are the Americans:  the Big Corporations, the Big Bankers and the Big Media bosses.  These three work together, but little by little all three of them have become more and more jewish. And those who are not jewish, will have to cooperate with the jewish agenda.
The ultimate goal of these people we can deduce from the Torah. They want  to rule the world. Their God expects this from them ( quotes), but also non-religious jews do have this goal ( as possibly all peoples in the world have this goal, but only become aware of it as it becomes more feasable, more realistic).  Their modus operandi was explained in the Protocols of Zion, who may not be genuine, but are very strong at predicting the future. 
(Protocols may be genuine: Peter Myers). 

Maybe we were the dummy? By allowing perception management with its simplifications, falsehoods and exaggerations to create a simplified vision of the world - we fell into a fake universe of certainty when really we were just watching a pantomime.
And now as the Arab Spring unfolds and reveals the true chaos and messiness of the real world – above all the horror of what is happening in Syria - we find ourselves completely unable to understand it or even know what to do. So those stories get ignored while we follow others with clearer and more simplified dramas which have what seem to be obvious goodies and baddies - thank god for Iran, North Korea and Jimmy Savile.
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