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https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/fisbpw/til_of_patient_ab_the_first_and_only_instance_in/
    TIL of patient AB - "the first and only instance in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient, offered her a specific diagnosis, directed her to the hospital, expressed pleasure that she was well again, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
    ResearchGate

A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices

December 1997BMJ Clinical Research 315(7123):1685 - 1686

...A previously healthy woman began to hear hallucinatory voices telling her to have a brain scan for a tumour. The prediction was true; she was operated on and had an uneventful recovery.

...In the winter of 1984, as she was at home reading, she heard a distinct voice inside her head.

...This made it all the more frightening for her, and the voice intervened again: “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following”—and the voice gave her three separate pieces of information, which she did not possess at the time. She checked them out, and they were true, but this did not help because she had already come to the conclusion that she had “gone mad.” In a state of panic, AB went to see her doctor, who referred her urgently to me.

...She returned to London and I saw her again at my out patients clinic. By this time, the voices had given her an address to go to. Reluctantly, and just to reassure her that it was all in her mind, her husband took her by car to the address in question; it was the computerised tomography department of a large London hospital. As she arrived there, the voices told her to go in and ask to have a brain scan for two reasons–she had a tumour in her brain and her brain stem was inflamed. Because the voices had told her things in the past that had turned out to be true, AB believed them when they said that she had a tumour and was in a state of great distress when I saw her the next day.

...In order to reassure her, I requested a brain scan, explaining in my letter that hallucinatory voices had told her that she had a brain tumour, that I had not,personally, found any physical signs suggestive of an intracranial space occupying lesion, and that the purpose of the scan was essentially to reassure the patient.

...Eventually, after some negotiation, the scan was done in April. The initial findings led to a repeat scan, with enhancement, in May, revealing a left posterior frontal parafalcine mass, which extended through the falx to the right side. It had all the appearances of a meningioma.

...AB later told me that when she recovered consciousness after the operation the voices told her, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” There were no postoperative complications. The dosage of dexamethasone was halved every four days, and then it was stopped. She was on prophylactic anticonvulsants for six months. Antipsychotic medication was discontinued immediately after the operation, and there was no return of the hallucinatory voices or the delusions which she had expressed.

...It is well known that intracranial lesions can be associated with psychiatric symptomatology. But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared.

...she had been so relieved when the voices first disappeared on thioridazine that she had gone on holiday to celebrate the recovery of her sanity.

...

Historians note that the story of Joan of Arc is very well documented. Nevertheless, important details her of life remain largely unknown to the public.

Joan publicly and repeatedly said she spoke for God. Joan was questioned by Charles VII's "learned men" and was found to have "appeared to have studied at university rather than cared for sheep in the fields." She told Charles' men she "had voices and a counsel who told her what she was to do" and confided in the Duke of Alençon that "she had been questioned at length but that she did not know and could not do more than she had said to those who were questioning her," suggesting that the voices had guided her through her interrogation by Charles' men. Despite being illiterate, a farmer peasant girl, and a teenager, Joan "just sort-of showed up" and was able to convince Charles to give her control of his army.

Though the Siege of Orleans had been underway for five months, Joan lifted the siege in days in a "miraculous victory." Joan was called "very simple in all her actions, except in the conduct of war, in which she was altogether an expert." "He also said that Joan, outside the sphere of warfare, was pure and youthful. But she was very skilful in war, both in carrying the lance and in deploying the army, organizing combat and preparing artillery. Everyone was full of admiration for the fact that she could bear herself so skilfully and prudently in military actions, as if she had been a captain fighting twenty or thirty years, and above all with regard to the preparation of the artillery, in which she excelled."

Joan went on to lead the French in many "stunning victories" over the English and was said to turn the tide of the One Hundred Years War. Early in her Campaign, Joan massacred the English troops. The English grew to fear Joan.

Multitudes of sources attest to Joan's excellent character. Those who knew her as a young child said she was "so pious that her comrades and myself told each other that she was too much so."

https://once-and-future-classroom.org/archives/?page_id=530
    Joan of Arc is simultaneously one of the most well documented figures in history and one of the most widely represented in literature and film.  We know more about her than any other person up until her lifetime, and yet she is still a mystery in many ways. How did she come to accomplish what she did? How do we explain her voices?

https://www.ancient.eu/Joan_of_Arc/
    Joan was born in Domremy village to Isabelle Romee (l. 1377-1458 CE) and Jacques d'Arc (l. 1380-1440 CE). ...Jacques d'Arc was a farmer, and the children would have all been brought up learning that trade.

At her later trial, the records of which are the main source of information on Joan's life, she claimed that she received a vision from God one day in 1425 CE when she was 13 years old. Saint Catherine, Saint Michael, and Saint Margaret appeared to her in her father's garden and instructed her to drive the English from France and see that the dauphin was crowned king at Rheims.

Joan never seems to have doubted that her vision was a genuine message from God

https://www.jeanne-darc.info/biography/letters/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-2
    1429 (22 March) -To the English

JHESUS MARIA

King of England, and you duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France; you, William Pole, count of Suffolk; John Talbot, and you Thomas Lord Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said duke of Bedford, make satisfaction to the King of Heaven; surrender to the Maid who is sent here by God, the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns which you have taken and violated in France. She is come here by God’s will to reclaim the blood royal. She is very ready to make peace, if you are willing to grant her satisfaction by abandoning France and paying for what you have held. And you, archers, men-at-war, gentlemen and others, who are before the town of Orléans, go away into your own country, in God’s name. And if you do not do so, expect tidings from the maid, who will come to see you shortly, to your very great harm.

https://www.ancient.eu/Joan_of_Arc/
    ...In 1428 CE, she appeared at the office of Robert de Baudricourt (c. 1400-1454 CE), captain of the garrison of Vaucouleurs, a nearby town, asking to be taken to the dauphin. De Baudricourt laughed her away at least twice before she convinced him of the seriousness of her mission.

...Charles VII had been apprised of Joan's visit and decided to test her by dressing as one of his courtiers and having one of them dress as the dauphin; if Joan were truly sent by God then she would know the true dauphin. When Joan entered the assembly, she went directly to Charles and addressed him as the dauphin, and when he protested and tried to trick her further, she held her ground. Later, in private, she is said to have convinced him of her legitimacy by telling him things he had only said to God in prayer.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Joan_of_Arc.html?id=3_hE5UNzUQYC
    Alian Chartier (c. 1390-1430) was a notary and secretary of Charles VII ...His letter regarding the Pucelle [Joan of Arc] is one of his very last works and survives in four manuscripts

...the King, having heard of the arrival of the Pucelle, and having realised why she had come, first decided to take the advice of the council; he neither dismissed her nor accepted her until he could establish how he could prove whether she was good or bad, real or fake, peaceful, or dishonest. Therefore, the Pucelle was examined in front of very learned men as if in a contest, and thereupon, having been questioned again and again about many things, both human and divine, she always answered in an honourable and praiseworthy way, so that she appeared to have studied at university rather than cared for sheep in the fields.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Joan_of_Arc.html?id=3_hE5UNzUQYC
    Deposition of the Duke of Alençon (3 May 1456)

...But then the King decided that Joan would be examined by the church-men ...She replied that she had come from the King of Heaven, that she had voices and a counsel who told her what she was to do ...later Joan, who was dining with the witness, confided in him that she had been questioned at length but that she did not know and could not do more than she had said to those who were questioning her.

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OW8CEAAAQBAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA318
    Deposition of Simon Charles
    ...President of the Chambre des Comptes (chief audit court) of the King

...After the King learned that she had been investigated and nothing had been found in her except good, he had her armed and gave men to her; she also received control over military affairs.

https://www.ancient.eu/Joan_of_Arc/
    ...Prophecies had been in circulation in France for years that a maiden in armor would arise from the region of Lorraine to save the country, and Joan now fulfilled that prophecy in traveling with the army to Orleans in full battle gear. Although she had thus far had nothing to do with the war and had never been involved in a single military engagement, the prophecy attached itself to her so firmly that she was welcomed in the city as a hero.

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2020/01/03/joan-of-arc-siege-of-orleans/
    ...In his youth Jean d’Orleans, Lord of Valbonais, Count of Dunois and Longueville, had known the Maid well. “I think that Joan was sent by God, and that her behavior in war was a fact divine rather than human,” he testified 2 1/2 decades later. “Many reasons make me think so.”

...“I was at Orleans, then besieged by the English when the report spread that a young girl, commonly called the Maid, had just passed through Gien [upriver from Orleans], going to the noble Dauphin, with the avowed intention of raising the siege of Orleans and conducting the Dauphin to Reims for his anointing,” said Dunois.

In the spring of 1429 news of this 17-year-old girl from Lorraine in the eastern Meuse valley was all over France, or at least the half of it that was still French. It was said she talked to angels. They had told her of the Battle of the Herrings, even though her little village of Domremy was 200 miles away. With this revelation she had convinced the commander of neighboring Vaucouleurs to outfit her with men’s clothing, a horse, and an armed escort. They had ridden 300 miles through enemy territory to the dauphin’s castle at Chinon.

https://www.ancient.eu/Joan_of_Arc/
    ...The Siege of Orleans had been underway at this point for five months, and the French had found no way to lift it.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/joan-of-arc-relieves-orleans
    Joan of Arc relieves Orleans

During the Hundred Years’ War, the 17-year-old French peasant Joan of Arc leads a French force in relieving the city of Orleans, besieged by the English since October.

https://www.jeanne-darc.info/biography/letters/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-2
    Letters by Jeanne d'Arc

...King of England, if you do not do so, I am a chieftain of war, and in whatever place I meet your people in France, I shall make them leave, and in whether they will it or not.

https://scottmanning.com/content/joan-of-arc-military-successes-and-failures/
    Joan of Arc’s Military Successes and Failures

...Historians have debated Joan's contributions for centuries. Bernard Montgomery fenced his opinion by stating that he never determined "whether Joan had any God-given military ability herself or whether she was merely a tool in the hands of the French generals."15 By "tool," Montgomery meant that Joan merely inspired men to fight and contributed little else. It is true that Joan inspired. In most of her engagements, she carried a white banner that depicted Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and two angels. This banner was easily recognizable by the French and their opponents. Circumstances--whether they were miraculous or just great war stories--showed that her aggressive approach inspired the French and frightened the English. While trying to lift the siege at Orléans, there were several instances where Joan inspired the troops to press their fight in the midst of panic. On May 4, the French attacked an English fortification without Joan. As she rushed to the frontlines, "she found many wounded, which distressed her greatly."16 Seeing the gruesome sight of retreating, wounded troops must have discouraged her as it would any soldier, but she pressed on and pushed the French to continue their attack. They took the fort and "many English were killed."17 During an attack on another English fort outside Orléans, an arrow hit Joan above the ****** in plain sight of everyone in the battle. While Joan had her wounds dressed, the French, who had been attacking all day long, faltered. As her troops were retreating, Joan returned, stuck her banner on the edge of the ditch surrounding the fort, and declared, "[T]here should be no retreat."18 Both the French and English soldiers who previously thought she was dead--or at least mortally wounded--were shocked. The French gained courage and attacked; the English were afraid and fled. Joan's troops took the fort with little resistance.

...This intimidation factor followed Joan from May through September 1429, where more than thirty cities surrendered without a fight. These cities, however, had more to fear than Joan's banner. By July, the French had killed upwards of 3,500 English troops.21 Before Joan fought her first battle, she sent a letter to the English demanding that they surrender all their French cities and leave the continent. Those that did "not obey, I shall have them all killed."22 These were not empty threats. At the Siege of Jargeau, 700 English troops defended the town for two days. After the first night of fighting, Joan demanded the town's capitulation or "you will be massacred."23 The English refused and Joan's cannons bombarded the town. Eventually, the French assaulted the walls and killed as many as 1,100 people, which means the dead included English troops and French civilians.24 This was not the only incident of massacres that Joan left in her trail and word of these events surely preceded her throughout France. Joan and her banner inspired her troops and struck fear in her enemies, but the massacres certainly aided her in the thirty-plus bloodless capitulations.

...Inspiration and intimidation were not the only advantages Joan brought to the battlefield, as she also possessed a martial aptitude with directing armies and positioning artillery. This is tough to fathom, because even with Joan's military prowess, she was still only eighteen.25 One Frenchman recalled that she "was very simple in all her actions, except in the conduct of war, in which she was altogether an expert."26 The Duke of Alençon, who was present for most of her battles, also reaffirmed that she was a simple girl, but "in the conduct of war she was most skillful."27 He clarified the "conduct of war" to mean carrying a lance, directing armies, and placing artillery. The latter is something that he emphasized twice saying that she "acquitted herself magnificently."28

The evidence for Joan's skill with artillery is strong. Consider that after four days of negotiations, the city of Troyes was no closer to surrendering to Charles VII. The Dauphin asked Joan what they should do and she insisted that they begin a siege. He agreed and put Joan in charge of the assault. She spent the night placing artillery and ordered the troops to gather material to fill the ditches around the city. When the morning arrived, Joan yelled "to the attack" and the city immediately capitulated.29 The mere sight of Joan's artillery made 500-600 English and Burgundian troops in a fortified city surrender. One experienced French commander observed that the "positions she took up were so admirable that even the two or three most famous and experienced captains would not have made as good a plan of battle."30

...Joan, the seventeen-year-old, was childlike, but when it came to war, she was a professional.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Joan_of_Arc.html?id=3_hE5UNzUQYC
    Deposition of the Duke of Alençon (3 May 1456)

...He also said that Joan, outside the sphere of warfare, was pure and youthful. But she was very skilful in war, both in carrying the lance and in deploying the army, organizing combat and preparing artillery. Everyone was full of admiration for the fact that she could bear herself so skilfully and prudently in military actions, as if she had been a captain fighting twenty or thirty years, and above all with regard to the preparation of the artillery, in which she excelled.

https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/saint-joan-of-arc
    After such a miraculous victory, Joan’s reputation spread far and wide among French forces.

https://www.jeanne-darc.info/biography/letters/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-2
    Letters by Jeanne d'Arc

...you will not hold the kingdom of France from God, the King of Heaven, son of Saint Mary; for the king Charles, the true heir, will hold it, as is revealed to him by the Maid, he will enter Paris with a good company.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/joan-of-arc-relieves-orleans
    During the next five weeks, Joan led French forces into a number of stunning victories over the English, and Reims, the traditional city of coronation, was captured in July. Later that month, Charles VII was crowned king of France, with Joan of Arc kneeling at his feet.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/world-history-magazine/article/joan-of-arc-warrior-heretic-saint-martyr
    How Joan of Arc turned the tide in the Hundred Years’ War

Divine voices guided a young girl to lead the French against the English.

...The Hundred Years’ War would continue for 22 years after her death.

http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_faq.asp
    What was Joan of Arc like when she was young? One of Joan's friends when she was young named Hauviette described her as being "good, simple, and sweet." Another young friend of Joan's named Mengette later said the following about Joan: "My father's house and the house of Father d'Arc joined. Thus I knew Joan intimately. Often we spun together and performed in company the household labors, by day or by night. She had been nurtured in the Christian faith, and was of good habits: loved to go often to church and gave alms of whatever she received from her father. She was a good girl, simple and pious, so pious that her comrades and myself told each other that she was too much so.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Joan_of_Arc.html?id=3_hE5UNzUQYC
    Deposition of Louis de Coutes

...he was always with Joan, always going with her in his capacity as her page, serving her both at Blois and at Orleans, and until the reached the city of Paris.

...He also declared that Joan was very pious and felt great pity in the face of such killing, because on one occasion a Frenchman, who was escorting certain English prisoners, struck one of them on the head so hard that he left him for dead. Seeing this, Joan dismounted and [arranged for] the Englishman's confession to be heard, supporting his head herself and comforting him as far as she could.

https://www.jeanne-darc.info/articles-essays/jeanne-darc-considered/
    Early Life and the Coming of the Voices

By all accounts Jeanne was noted to be an exceptional child in her conduct and manner. She was industrious, obedient and very compassionate toward the poor and sick. She was noted for her great piety, her devotion to God and to the Virgin Mary. She attended mass daily. When she heard the church bells ring she would fall to her knees. Sometimes she was teased for being too pious.  While Jeanne did play with the other children she later became more focussed on chores and often chose prayer over dancing and singing with her peers. Her mother, Isabelle, stated that despite her youth she would fast and pray with great devotion for those who suffered.  She was loved by all in her village for her good nature. (2)

Jeanne’s first encounter with her voices occurred when she was around thirteen years old. At her trial she described this as a vision of St. Michael:

“I saw him before my eyes; he was not alone but quite surrounded by the angels of heaven” (3)

She claimed to have seen them “with my bodily eyes, as well as I see you.” (4) From that time on her voices came to her often making known she was to go into France, raise the siege at Orleans, and have Charles crowned King at Rheims. At the age of seventeen she achieved all this and more.

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OW8CEAAAQBAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA318
    Under extensive interrogation, she revealed that she spoke directly to three individuals: Michael the Archangel, St Margaret of Antioch and St Katherine of Alexandria [37,39, 46]. Yet Joan did not actually identify these saints until the fourth public session of the Rouen trial: during her earlier testimony, she only said that she had heard a voice from God at the age of thirteen; when asked directly about the identity of her voices, she denied that she was speaking with any saint [35-6]. Similarly, in the letters that she wrote before he capture she simply stated that she was communicating directly with God, without making any mention of intermediaries [4, 17, 25].

For some reason, it isn't hard to find a few historians who say odd things about Joan of Arc:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/26/jonhenley
    ...a new book that casts serious doubt on nearly every aspect of the myth of the Maid of Orléans

...much of the adulation is down to wishful thinking, Mr Caratini claims. "Psychologically, her story is beautiful," he said. "It's the little girl who lives out her dreams to the end. But she really wasn't the heroine who saved France - just a human being with exceptional energy and self-belief."

...Worse, he goes on to say: "Joan of Arc played no role, or at best only a very minor one, in the Hundred Years War. She was not the liberator of Orléans for the simple reason that the city was never besieged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Orl%C3%A9ans#References
    Siege of Orléans

...General references

Beaucourt, G.F. (1882). Histoire de Charles VII, 2: Le Roi de Bourges 1422–1435 (PDF) (in French). Paris: Société Bibliographique. Archived.
    Charpentier, Paul & Cuissard, Charles (1896). Journal du siège d'Orléans, 1428–1429. H. Herluison.
    Cousinot de Montreuil, G. (1864). M. Vallet de Viriville (ed.). Chronique de la Pucelle ou chronique de Cousinot. Paris: Delays. link
    Davis, P.K. (2003-06-26). Besieged: 100 great sieges from Jericho to Sarajevo. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-521930-2.
    DeVries, K. (1999). Joan of Arc: a Military Leader (PDF). Stroud: Sutton Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7509-1805-3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-27.
    Jones, M.K. (2000). "'Gardez mon corps, sauvez ma terre' – Immunity from War and the Lands of a Captive Knight: The Siege of Orléans (1428–29) Revisited". In Mary-Jo Arn (ed.). Charles d'Orléans in England (1415–1440). D.S. Brewer. pp. 9–26. ISBN 978-0-85991-580-9.
    Pernoud, R. & Clin, Marie-Véronique (1998). Joan of Arc: her story. Translated and revised by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, edited by Bonnie Wheeler. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 978-0-312-21442-5.
    Pollard, A.J. (2005-11-19). John Talbot and the War in France 1427–1453. Pen & Sword Military. ISBN 978-1-84415-247-6.
    Quicherat, J. (1841). Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc dite La Pucelle. 1. Paris: Renouard. link
    Quicherat, J. (1844). Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc dite La Pucelle. 2. Paris: Renouard. link
    Quicherat, J. (1845). Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc dite La Pucelle. 3. Paris: Renouard. link
    Ramsay, J.H. (1892). Lancaster and York: A century of English history (A.D. 1399–1485). 1. Oxford: Clarendon. Archived.

...

John Dee, the man who came up with the idea of the British empire, had a different sort of run-in with hearing voices, which he called "spirits":
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee
    John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was an English/Welsh mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and occult philosopher,[5] and an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He spent much time studying alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. He also advocated turning England's imperial expansion into a "British Empire", a term he is generally credited with coining.
 
 
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/John_Dee
    In this role, he provided both technical assistance in navigation and ideological backing in the creation of a "British Empire" (a term that he coined).[14] Pursuant to this experience, in 1577 Dee published General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, a visionary work that set out his vision of a British maritime empire and asserted England's territorial claims on the New World.
 
 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/the-man-who-spoke-to-angels/
    Born to a merchant family in London and educated at Cambridge, he rose to eminence during the rule of Elizabeth I, when he became one of the few commoners to be honoured with personal visits from the queen. He was also intimate with the major figures of her court, such as Sir Walter Raleigh and the spymasters Walsingham and Cecil.
 
    ...Although Elizabeth was fascinated by his astrological methods, he also corresponded with her intelligencers on cryptography, advised her explorers on navigation and travelled throughout Europe to meet the greatest scholars of his era.
 
 
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/john-dee.pdf
    I suppose you're wondering what Dee was in fact doing, as a government consultant all this time. But you must remember we're talking about the government service. Whatever he did that was significant has no doubt gone into the classified files of Elizabeth's ministers, and from there to complete oblivion.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/john-dee-thought-he-could-talk-to-angels-using-medieval-computer-technology/
    John Dee thought he could talk to angels using medieval computer technology
 
    But as this new exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians shows, he was much more than just a loony witch
 
    ...He explained his intentions in a little speech to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II on a visit to Prague in 1584, saying that he had spent 40 years in study ‘to come by the best knowledge that man might attain unto in the world’, but had found that no book could teach him the truths he longed for, and so he had prayed to God, whose ‘holy Angels for these two years and a half, have used to inform me’.
 
    ...These angelic conversations went on for more than two decades, at first when Dee was trying to interest the Emperor and the King of Poland in the transmutation of base metals into gold. It might be expected that Kelley was a con man taking advantage of Dee. But it was Kelly who was frightened to go on. The fear was that the messages came not from benign angels but from wicked spirits intent on the damnation of these arrogant magi.

https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/3149/1/Whitby82PhD1.pdf
    This thesis presents an investigation of the nature of the earliest extant records of the supposed communication with angels and spirits of John Dee (1527-1608)

...Arguments that the manuscript represents a conscious fraud or a cryptographical exercise are examined and disproved ...The last chapter of the Introduction examines Dee's motives for believing so strongly in the truth of the Actions and suggests that a principal motive was the conviction, not held by Dee alone, that a new age was about to dawn upon earth.

The British empire, as it turned out, was a terrible idea. The British would go on to commit much of the atrocities of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries: https://pastebin.com/fyhep7jC

...

Among those who hear voices, attributing the voice to external entities and supernatural entities is common:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK540478/
    What are the voices that people hear today actually like?

In a study of the phenomenology of AVHs in 30 outpatients (Stephane et al., 2003), drawn from a larger sample with diagnoses of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and psychotic depression, a cluster analysis revealed two main types of voices. The first had low linguistic complexity, were repetitive, located in outer space, but identified as one’s own, and patients attempted to control them. The second type had high linguistic complexity, systematised content, were often multiple voices, were located in inner space and were attributed to others. Three important dimensions of voices were identified: linguistic complexity, attribution to self or others, and location in inner or outer space.

In a more recent and larger study, McCarthy-Jones et al. (2014b) studied the phenomenology of voices of 199 psychiatric patients (81 per cent with a diagnosis of schizophrenia). The results of the cluster analysis partly replicated those of Stephane et al. (2003) but also produced some new findings. The first cluster was described by the authors as “Constant Commanding and Commenting” and represents the typical voice-hearing experience of patients with schizophrenia. This group were seen as being similar to the first type identified by Stephane et al, and were typically repetitive. Three less common subtypes were also identified. The “Replay” type experienced voices which were identical to memories – something which Stephane et al. did not study – and which might be related to a history of traumatic abuse. An “Own Thought” type comprised first person voices which were recognised as possibly belonging to the patient’s own voice/thoughts. This group included some voices/thoughts which were similar to (but not identical) with memories. Overall, 39 per cent of patients reported voices that seemed to be similar to, or identical with, memories of conversations. Finally, the “Nonverbal” type included words that did not make sense and other nonverbal sounds.

In a major UK study of 153 participants recruited by advertisement from voice hearing groups and clinical/mental health contexts, most voice hearers (81 per cent) described multiple voices, and less than half (46 per cent) reported literally auditory voices (Woods et al., 2015). Although voices were often associated with unpleasant affective states (anxiety, depression, fear), 31 per cent reported a positive emotional experience, and for 32 per cent it was a neutral emotional experience.

Importantly, voices are not “just” voices. Woods et al (2015) reported that 69 per cent of their respondents had “characterful” qualities. The voice was either identifiable as a specific, recognisable, individual (22 per cent) or at least had person-like qualities – of age, gender, emotional tone and intent. 16 per cent of voices in this study were identified as emanating from supernatural agents. Voices are generally perceived as being the voice of someone specific – an individual “agent” (Wilkinson and Bell, 2016, Leudar et al., 1997). They are thus acts of communication and many voice hearers can engage in dialogue with their voice and may form a relationship with “the voice” or, rather, the agent understood to be the source of the voice (Chin et al., 2009).

...

In one well-documented case, a number of school children (up to 62) from Zimbabwe apparently attributed voices in their heads, or something like voices in their heads, to supernatural beings:

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/gsl3vu/a_group_of_60_kids_saw_a_ufo_land_in_their_school/
    A group of 60+ kids saw a ufo land in their school yard in 1994. in 2016, they were interviewed again and still stood by their experiences. "he was trying to tell us to look after the planet because there won't be any air"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9mzpFnSqp4

https://web.archive.org/web/20101003114450/http://witness.co.za/?showcontent&global%5B_id%5D=6379
    American film maker Randall Nickerson is currently visiting southern Africa to make a documentary that follows up an incident that happened at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994, when 62 children aged between eight and 12 reported seeing a UFO and “strange beings” during their morning break.

Those children are now young adults scattered around the globe. Nickerson is tracking them down and interviewing them about the experience. "Their stories have not changed at all," he says. "Not what you would expect if they had made it all up."

So what exactly happened on that day in 1994 at the school in Ruwa just east of Harare? “It was morning break and they were out in the school yard playing,” says Nickerson. “They saw one main silver craft that had four others around it,” says Nickerson. “It came down on a hill beyond the school yard that was out of bounds. The boundary was the edge of the school yard, then it was bush and the hill.

“They ran to the edge of the school yard to see what this thing was. They saw this small creature walk around on top of the craft while another came down to check out the children. He was all in black, with a very tight suit. The children said he had big eyes ‘like rugby balls’.

“The children had direct eye contact with this creature. There seems to have been some kind of communication with the children about the state of the world — what we are doing to the planet, the destruction we are causing, although not all the children got this message. Some of the children were traumatised, others were excited. The young children were the most traumatised as they were at the front of the group.

“They all went screaming back to the teachers. The teachers didn’t believe them at first. But then they went home and told their parents who came to the school and wanted to know what had happened.”

Soon afterwards the children were asked to draw pictures of what they had seen. “They did this separately. The drawings were all the same.”

...Carter has no doubt the children were telling the truth. “When they were interviewed by Mack with all his professional skills it was clear they were telling the truth — their voice tone, their body language. They were so consistent, they told their stories with such conviction. And they spoke about it in their own language.

https://www.thurstontalk.com/event/the-ariel-school-ufo-encounter-ruwa-zimbabwe/
    In 1994, the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe is the site where approximately 60 students reported a UFO and a “strange being” which communicated with them.

According to the students, the being warned them to take care of the environment.

Each child drew a picture of what they saw independently. Their pictures and story’s were remarkably similar.

The accounts of the Ariel school children suggest the "communication" from the strange beings to them happened in a way that didn't involve sights or sounds.

...

Before his rise to power, Hitler claimed he heard voices which gave him advice, once saving him from death:

https://books.google.com/books?id=lcy_BAAAQBAJ&pg=PT54&lpg=PT54
    Hitler braved daunting perils at the front. He narrowly escaped death on November 15, 1914 when a French artillery shell landed nearby.

"I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades. Suddenly, a voice seemed to be saying to me: 'get up and go over there.' It was so clear and insistent that I obeyed automatically as if it had been a military order. I rose at once to my feet and walked twenty meters along the trench carrying my dinner can with me. Then I sat down to go on eating, my mind once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and deafening report came from the part of the trench I had just left. A stray shell had burst over the group in which I had been sitting, and every member of it was killed."

The same voice--Which he called "Providence"--would later give him political counsel.

https://militaryhistorynow.com/2017/05/11/lucky-bastard-seven-times-hitler-narrowly-escaped-death/
    Lucky Bastard! – Seven Times Adolf Hitler Cheated Death

“Hitler had the Devil’s own luck, but his luck ran out in the end – it’s just a pity it took so long.”

By David Lawlor

NAPOLEON ONCE SAID that he liked his generals to be lucky. Well, if Adolf Hitler somehow could have served in the Grande Armée, he would undoubtedly have become one of the emperor’s favourites. That’s because when it came to good fortune, Hitler was overflowing with the stuff. Aside from surviving four years in the trenches of the First World War (no small feat), there are at least seven other occasions in which history’s most hated dictator foiled the Grim Reaper.

https://historywithatwist.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/the-six-lives-of-adolf-hitler-2/
    The Seven Lives of Adolf Hitler

...On July 20, 1944, a one-eyed, one-handed German officer by the name of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg entered a wooden hut at Adolf Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair HQ in Eastern Prussia and placed a briefcase at the base of a map table where Hitler was standing. The case contained a bomb – one of two von Stauffenberg and brought with him. Due to time pressure, the Colonel could only arm one device before the meeting took place.

Unfortunately, a general who was present moved the case further away, behind a thick piece of wood which supported the table. The wood absorbed much of the blast and Hitler escaped with some cuts and bruises when the bomb exploded.

...People might bemoan that lost opportunity to be rid of the monster that was Hitler, but there were plenty of other lost chances down the years. Read them and weep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler
    This is an incomplete list of documented attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler.[1]

All attempts occurred in the German Reich, except where noted. All attempts involved citizens of the German Reich, except where noted. No fewer than 42 plots have been uncovered by historians.[2] However, the true number cannot be accurately determined due to an unknown number of undocumented cases.

Hitler was an idiot and by all accounts truly believed in odd theories about the supernatural and believed himself to be very special, lending credence to the idea that he believed his story of voices saving him from death:

https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136
    Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show | Opinion

...In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/it-turns-out-raiders-of-the-lost-ark-wasnt-so-far-off-about-the-nazis/2017/08/01/d22f640e-75f5-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html
    It turns out ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ wasn’t so far off about the Nazis

...Hitler apparently studied Ernst Schertel’s “Magic” as a self-help manual, underlining personally useful passages, among them “He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.” Such a channeling of demonic power or “mana” has always been central to occultism. The psychologist Carl Jung would even assert that Hitler was a medium, a “mouthpiece of the gods of old.”

It may seem paradoxical that once firmly in charge, Hitler turned against astrology, tarot reading and all “commercial” uses of the supernatural. In fact, he feared that these could be used to manipulate the public in ways outside his control. Even professional magicians were legally compelled to demonstrate how their tricks were accomplished. Still, Hitler and his inner circle continued to firmly support “scientific occultism.” In the mid-1930s, for instance, Rudolf Hess hoped to create a Central Institute for Occultism.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/a-psychological-analysis-of-adolph-hitler-his-life-and-legend-hitler-as-he-believes-himself-to-be
    At the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler made use of an extraordinary figure of speech in describing his own conduct. He said,

"I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker."

Even at that time it struck the world as an unusual statement for the undisputed leader of 67,000,000 people to make at the time of an international crisis. Hitler meant it to be a form of' reassurance for his more wary followers who questioned the wisdom of his course. It seems, however, that it was a true confession and had his wary followers only realized its significance and implications they would have had grounds for far greater concern that aroused by his proposal to reoccupy the Rhineland.

...Hitler's guide is something different entirely. It seems certain that Hitler believes that he has been sent Germany by Providence and that he has a particular mission to perform. He is probably not clear on the scope of this mission beyond the fact that he has been chosen to redeem the German people and reshape Europe. Just how this is to be accomplished is also rather vague in his mind, but this does not concern him greatly because an "inner voice" communicates to him the steps he is to take. This is the guide which leads him on his course with the precision and security of a sleep-walker.

"I carry out the commands that Providence has laid upon me." (490)

"No power on earth can shake the German Reich now, Divine Providence has willed it that I carry through the fulfillment of the Germanic task." (413)

"But if the voice speaks, then I know the time has come to act." (714)

It is this firm conviction that he has a mission and is under the guidance and protection of Providence which is responsible in large part for the contagious effect he has had on the German people.

Many people believe that this feeling of Destiny and mission have come to Hitler through his successes. This is probably false. Later in our study (Part V) we will try to show that Hitler has had this feeling for a great many years although it may not have become a conscious conviction until much later. In any case it was forcing its way into consciousness during the war and has played a dominant role in his actions ever since.

...Then, also, there was the vision he had while in hospital at Pasewalk suffering from blindness allegedly caused by gas:

"Als ich im Bett lag kam mir der Gedanke, dass ich Deutschland befreien wuerde, dass ich es gross machen wuerde, und ich habe sofort gewusst, dass das verwirklicht werden wuerde." (429)

These experiences must later have fit in beautifully with the views of the Munich astrologers and it is possible that underneath Hitler felt that if there was any truth in their predictions they probably referred to him.

...As time went on, it became clearer that he. was thinking of himself as the Messiah and that it was he who was destined to lead Germany to glory. His references to the Bible became more frequent and the movement began to take on a religious atmosphere. Comparisons between Christ and himself became more numerous and found their way into his conversation and speeches. For example, he would say:

"When I came to Berlin a few weeks ago and looked at the traffic in the Kurfuerstendamm, the luxury, the perversion, the iniquity, the wanton display, and the Jewish materialism disgusted me so thoroughly, that I was almost beside myself. I nearly imagined myself to be Jesus Christ when He came to His Father's temple and found it taken by the money-changers. I can well imagine how He felt when He seized a whip and scourged them out." (905)

During his speech, according to Hanfstangl, he swung his whip around violently as though to drive out the Jews and the forces of darkness, the enemies of Germany and German honor. Dietrich Eckart, who discovered Hitler as a possible leader and had witnessed this performance, said later, "When a man gets to the point of identifying himself with Jesus Christ, then he is ripe for an insane asylum." The identification in all this was not with Jesus Christ, the Crucified, but with Jesus Christ, the furious, lashing the crowds.

As a matter of fact, Hitler has very little admiration for Christ, the Crucified. Although he was brought up a Catholic, and received Communion, during the war, he severed his connection with the Church directly afterwards. This kind of Christ he considers soft and weak and unsuitable as a German Messiah.

The latter must be hard and brutal if he is to save Germany and lead it to its destiny.

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned me to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love, as a Christian and as a man, I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord rose at last in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was the fight for the world against the Jewish poison." (M.N.O. 26)

...A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice which have guided and protected him in the past. This conviction is not rooted in the truth of the ideas he imparts but is based on the conviction of his own personal greatness. (146) Howard K. Smith makes an interesting observation:

"I was convinced that of all the millions on whom the Hitler Myth had fastened itself, the most carried away was Adolph Hitler, himself." (290)

...

Though George Washington never reported hearing voices, he did write to his brother that he was "protected beyond all human probability or expectation" from bullets:

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/letter-from-george-washington-to-john-augustine-washington-july-18-1755/
    Author: George Washington

To John Augustine Washington

Dear Brother,

As I have heard; since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech; I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you, that I have not, as yet, composed the latter.—But, by the All-powerful Dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four Bullets through my Coat, and two Horses shot under me; yet escaped unhurt, altho[ugh] Death was leveling my Companions on every side of me!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/22/heres-to-george-washington-afflicted-with-so-many-killer-diseases-its-miraculous-he-became-father-of-our-nation/?
    Here’s to George Washington, afflicted with so many killer diseases it’s miraculous he survived to become father of our nation

...It’s something of a political miracle that the man indispensable to the founding of his country came into the world just at the right time, in 1732, so that when he reached manhood, he was there when we needed him.

More miraculous still is that he survived so long, until 1799.

During the course of his 67 years on Earth, the father of our country survived smallpox, bouts of malaria, multiple infections and abscesses, tuberculosis, dysentery and in the first six months of his presidency, an extraordinarily painful boil “the size of two fists” accompanied by a fever.

So worrisome was his health at that point that some feared a “dreadful calamity,” and as James Madison wrote, a “crisis” in the affairs of the new nation, which had given no thought to anyone else as president.

As perhaps the only man who could have done it, Washington failed to end slavery in America. Washington also greatly inflamed conflict with the native Americans and started-off the Americans' genocide of the native Americans:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/25/george-washington-owned-slaves-ordered-indians-killed-will-mural-that-history-be-hidden/
    “There wasn’t much evidence prior to the revolution that he ever considered slavery to be wrong,” said Mary V. Thompson, a Mount Vernon historian and author of the new book “‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon,” in an interview with The Washington Post.

But then came the Revolutionary War, and for the first time in his life, Washington spent time in areas where chattel slavery was less common, even taboo. Plus, there was all that talk of “liberty” floating around.

“He’s leading a war where people are saying that people are born free, that freedom is a god-given right,” Thompson said. “And he’s not stupid. He can see the hypocrisy of owning slaves.”

In 1778, Washington sent a letter to his cousin confiding that he wanted to “get clear” of slave ownership. At the time, it wasn’t even legal to free them without a special act from the state legislature.

He stopped buying and selling enslaved people after the Revolutionary War, Thompson said. But when it became legal to free them in 1782, he didn’t.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-washington-used-legal-loopholes-avoid-freeing-his-slaves-180954283/
    George Washington Used Legal Loopholes to Avoid Freeing His Slaves
    One of his slaves fled to New Hampshire to escape becoming a wedding present

...In 1780, Pennsylvania passed the Gradual Abolition Act, a law that freed people after they turned 28 and that automatically freed any slave who moved to the state and lived there for more than six months. Dunbar tells the story of how Washington got around it:

Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

Despite these attempts to hold on to his property, Ona Judge, a 22-year-old slave, escaped when she learned that the Washington’s intended to give her to a relative as a wedding present. She made it to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she married and began life as a free woman. Judge was one of thousands of blacks who escaped to freedom, both independently and as part of the loose network that would later be known as the Underground Railroad.

The New England Historical Society reports that Washington was enraged by what he saw as Judge’s “ingratitude” and that he assumed she had been convinced to escape rather than deciding to run away on her own volition:

… it is certain the escape has been planned by some one who knew what he was about, and had the means to defray the expence of it and to entice her off: for not the least suspicion was entertained of her going, or having formed a connexion with any one who could induce her to such an Act.

Despite three years of searching, Washington never recovered Judge.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/25/george-washington-owned-slaves-ordered-indians-killed-will-mural-that-history-be-hidden/
    ...there’s also a record of him ordering an enslaved man to be whipped for walking on the lawn, Thompson said. Washington aggressively pursued runaways, and took steps to prevent his enslaved people from being freed accidentally while visiting free states. Plus, he was a workaholic, and sometimes expressed an obtuse dismay that the people he enslaved didn’t, by his estimation, work as hard as he did.

Washington left instructions to free the 123 people he owned when he died, which was a rare move at the time, and one that he hoped would set an example. But those instructions came with some big asterisks.

First, he stipulated that the enslaved people wouldn’t actually be freed until after his wife’s death. Martha worried this would entice them into murdering her, so she freed them a year later, largely out of fear.

https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/7.2.20-how-america.pdf
    How America’s Founding Fathers Missed a Chance to Abolish Slavery

There was no greater devotee to the American cause of independence than the Marquis de Lafayette. The young and idealisticFrench aristocrat endured the terrible winter at Valley Forge and fought bravely in critical battles in the Revolutionary War—playing a decisive role in George Washington’s victory at Yorktown. He revered the man he called his “beloved, matchless Washington” as a surrogate father. Gen. Washington was just as enamored of the Frenchman who helped him win the war: If you visit the first president’s estate at Mount Vernon today, you will see, displayed prominently in the front parlor, the rusted key to the Bastille in Paris that Lafayette sent Washington during the FrenchRevolution, describing it in a letter as a tribute from a “missionary of liberty to its patriarch.”

And yet when the war was done, Lafayette expressed disillusionment with the patriarch of liberty, who politely rebuffed or ignored the Frenchman’s repeated pleas to free America’s slaves—some of whom had fought valiantly as soldiers in the assault at Yorktown. “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery,” Lafayette later said, according to historian Henry Wiencek’s 2003 book An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.

...“That moment at the founding was really a horrible missed opportunity,” said another historian, Sharon Murphy of Providence College, author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America. “Many of these slave owners weren’t wedded to slavery in a real hard way. It wasn’t empty talk. They really did see it as going against what they were preaching as a new nation.”

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/washingtons-changing-views-on-slavery/
    There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for this abolition of [slavery] but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority.

-George Washington, 1786

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/george-washington-abolition-slavery-1786
    Washington gradually came to realize that slavery was immoral and contrary to the Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality. In 1774 he endorsed a document, known as the Fairfax Resolves, which condemned the slave trade as "unnatural" and recommended that no more slaves be imported into the British colonies. Five years later, he approved a plan to grant slaves their freedom in exchange for service in the Continental Army.

Washington never spoke out publicly against slavery. But in this private letter to fellow Virginian John Mercer, dated September 9, 1786, and written at a time when he owned 250 slaves, Washington avows his dislike of the institution of slavery, an institution that violates the ideal of freedom and equality: "I never mean . . . to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished."

https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/7.2.20-how-america.pdf
    Indeed, in the early years of the republic, slavery looked destined for extinction not only because it was antithetical to the founding principles of the nation, but also because it wasn’t working economically. Before the invention of the cotton gin at the end of the 18th century, when manyVirginia plantations like Jefferson’s and James Madison’s were mainly growing tobacco and only beginning to shift to wheat, they were actually losing money on slavery. “Tobacco was destroying the soil. At the time,Virginia would have been better off without slavery,” Ellis said.“Washington had over 300 slaves but only a third of them worked. The res were too old. ... Jefferson, Madison, and [James] Monroe all ended up bankrupt because of this problem. The right way to go was to end slavery economically, as well as for justice’s sake.”

...“There was a chance that could have happened. If Washington had decided, ‘Let’s go to the capital; this is a testament I want to make about the country’s future.’ Instead of delivering a Farewell Address about foreign policy, which is what he did, make it about slavery; that would have made a huge difference.” But Washington at the time was far more preoccupied with keeping his new nation out of entanglements with France and England and tamping down the emerging factionalism between Jefferson and Hamilton over the powers of the federal government. So he and the other founders took the less onerous path of sweeping the slavery issue under the rug, believing that time was on their side. “My feeling is that Washington believes slavery would come to an end when the international slave trade ended in 1808,which is what the U.S. Constitution called for,” Wiencek said.

...And so, in one of the consummate ironies of American history, it was Jefferson—the author of the Declaration of Independence who wrote that “all men are created equal”—who proved central to institutionalizing the racial inequality that still pervades American life. Though as a young man,Jefferson, too, had gingerly advocated freeing the slaves, as time passed,his statements on the topic became more contradictory and deceptive, and he gradually hardened toward emancipation. Indeed, perhaps no founder embodies the grotesque ambiguity of America’s original sin more than Jefferson, who called slavery a “hideous evil” but, by the time he reached middle age, had turned Monticello into a slave factory to pay down his debts—and until he died, he never truly acknowledged the hypocrisy that defined his entire life.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/25/george-washington-owned-slaves-ordered-indians-killed-will-mural-that-history-be-hidden/
    ...Speaking of properties, George Washington’s lifelong pursuit of Native American land is one of the least-explored aspects of his life, but it took up a lot of his time, as explored by Dartmouth professor Colin G. Calloway in his recent book “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation.”

“Washington lived in a world where Indian people were present and almost omnipresent,” Calloway told The Post.

As a young man, Washington started his military career alongside Native American politicians and warriors much more sophisticated than he was.

As a landowner, he constantly sought to expand his holdings with Native American land, claiming or buying large tracts and then fighting protracted battles to prove the deeds he held legitimate.

As commander of the Continental Army, he ordered the destruction of indigenous communities when it helped the American cause.

...As president, Washington frequently received Native American diplomatic delegations at his residence in Philadelphia. When American settlers didn’t abide by treaty boundaries, he complained that only “a Chinese Wall, or a line of troops” would keep them from encroaching on Native American land.

Washington believed the government should offer a fair price to Native Americans for their land, and the “opportunity” to embrace “American-style civilization,” Calloway said, “but if they say no, then he describes them as recalcitrant savages who need to be ‘extirpated’ ” — which is an old-fashioned word for genocide.

https://www.historynet.com/massacre-retribution-the-1779-80-sullivan-expedition.htm
    Massacre & Retribution: The 1779-80 Sullivan Expedition

...They referred to themselves collectively as Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse”). They were the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and by choosing sides during the American Revolution, they ensured their own destruction. Before the war was over, Iroquois’ homes lay in ruins, their crops and orchards burned, their people freezing and starving.

For hundreds of years the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy occupied most of what would become New York state. Their territory included the Mo-hawk Valley and the eponymous river that courses 130 miles from the Adirondacks to the Hudson. The river valley was a gateway to the West, and with the coming of the whites, it would become one of the most hotly contested grounds in North America.

In the years before the Revolution, the Iroquois tribes had developed close relationships with the British, based on commerce, war and—in some instances—intermarriage. When war threatened between Britain and its colonies, the Iroquois at first sought to remain neutral. But with prompting from British leaders, Joseph Brant (known in Mohawk as Thayendanegea) and his influential sister, Molly, soon joined with Seneca chiefs Sayenqueraghta and Cornplanter to pressure the Mohawks, Senecas, Onondagas, Cayugas and some Tuscaroras to fight alongside the British. In September 1776, over strong internal dissension, the Iroquois tribes formally and secretly agreed to side with the British; only the Oneidas and some Tuscaroras aligned with the Patriots.

...Command of the expedition then settled upon Maj. Gen. John Sullivan, a truculent onetime New Hampshire lawyer whom Washington instructed in a detailed May 31, 1779, letter to move “against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents.” The immediate object of the campaign, Washington said, was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and *** as possible.” Sullivan was told to carry out his mission “in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” The “total ruin” of the Indian settlements, Washington wrote, would guarantee America’s future security by inspiring the Indians with terror through “the severity of the chastisement they receive.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701180546/https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/nice-day-for-a-genocide-shocking-quotes-on-indians-by-us-leaders-mggXatQDCUuNzQ_bfuyUPg
    Orders of George Washington to General John Sullivan, May 31, 1779

“The immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and *** as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more.”

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/708886/pdf
    Hostile Nations: Quantifying the Destruction of the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide of 1779

In 1779, with the violence of the American Revolution still smoldering, General George Washington embarked on the first genocidal campaign in US history. His aim: to “chastise and intimidate” the Haudenosaunee or, as one of his subordinates more succinctly put it, “to extirpate those hell-hounds from off the face of the Earth.” With over 85 percent of the national budget in hand, General Washington enlisted the aid of military experts, including Generals John Sullivan, James Clinton, and Horatio Gates, as well as Colonels Daniel Brodhead and Goose van Schaick. Together, these men directed hundreds of US troops to ensure the total destruction of Iroquoia in order to clear US lands for settler occupation. This article is the first historical intervention that both traces the geopolitical situation that created the impetus for the dispute and then quantifies the destruction of the campaign. Using the UN’s 1948 definition of genocide and the framework of settler-colonialism, it examines the United States’ broad-scale effort to annihilate the Haudenosaunee. It argues that their systematic destruction was part of a broader ideological initiative during which US leaders eschewed diplomacy in favor of denying the authority, sovereignty, and humanity of the Iroquois.

https://around.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-american-genocide-its-legacy-and-survivors
    Historian Examines Native American Genocide, its Legacy, and Survivors

Jeffrey Ostler has spent the better part of three decades researching and teaching the thorny legacies of the American frontier. His conclusion: the wars the US government waged against Native Americans from the 1600s to the 1900s differed in a fundamental way from this country’s other contemporaneous conflicts. “Against Native nations and communities,” he says, “it was genocidal war.”

The Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon believes that in their description of the conflicts with Native Americans, mainstream political and historical discourses in the United States have often obscured this deadly distinction.

https://www.history.com/news/californias-little-known-genocide
    California’s Little-Known Genocide

...In just 20 years, 80 percent of California’s Native Americans were wiped out. And though some died because of the seizure of their land or diseases caught from new settlers, between 9,000 and 16,000 were murdered in cold blood—the victims of a policy of genocide sponsored by the state of California and gleefully assisted by its newest citizens.

...

In the mid 16th century, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro lead a small band of mercenaries to what is now known as Peru. Pizarro's arrival preceded the end of the Incan empire and the mass death of its citizens. The genocide of the Inca was part of a wider genocide of all of South and Central America:
 
http://users.pop.umn.edu/~rmccaa/aha2004/whypox.htm
    Why Blame Smallpox?
    The Death of the Inca Huayna Capac and the Demographic Destruction of Tawantinsuyu (Ancient Peru)
 
    ...Smallpox is widely blamed for the death of the Inca Huayna Capac and blamed as well for the enormous demographic catastrophe which enveloped Ancient Peru (Tawantinsuyu).  The historical canon now teaches that smallpox ravaged this virgin soil population before 1530, that is, before Francisco Pizarro and his band of adventurers established a base on the South American continent.[2]  Nevertheless the documentary evidence for the existence of a smallpox epidemic in this region before 1558 is both thin and contradictory.  In contrast to Mexico, where there is a broad range of sources documenting the first outbreak and the death of the Aztec ruler Cuitlahuatzin from smallpox in 1520, for Peru, the evidence rests almost entirely on rather brief references in chronicles, few of which state unequivocally that Huayna Capac died of the disease.
 
    ...From our re-examination of early chronicles (see table 1), linguistic evidence in three early dictionaries (table 3), physical descriptions of pock marked native peoples (or the lack thereof before 1558), we conclude that, as in the Caribbean also in the Andean region, the preponderance of the evidence points to a late introduction of smallpox—a quarter center after initial contact (in 1518 and 1558, respectively), after an enormous demographic devastation had already occurred.
 
 
http://paititieldorado.fr/en/paititi-eldorado/lhistoire-inca
    The Genocide
 
    Viceroy Toledo instituted a reform of the indigenous habitat which made it possible to regroup the useful “mass of work”, subjected to compulsory labor, without remuneration, so to speak clearly reduced in slavery. The entire Inca agricultural system, very productive, is annihilated to favor productions destined for export. The organization of farms in gigantic plantations drastically reduces yield, leading to terrible famines in the population.
 
    Indigenous slaves are especially affected in the terrible mines, where it is estimated that out of 12 million inhabitants, 5 million men, women and children perish in 25 years, victims of the insatiable thirst for gold and the inhumanity shown by the Spaniards towards them. In some provinces rich in gold or silver, two-thirds of the population is enslaved in the mines and perishes there. So much so that the Spaniards will finally have to bring “cargoes” of black slaves to replace them ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_Empire
    The long-term effects of the arrival of the Spanish on the population of South America were simply catastrophic. While this is the case for every group of Native-Americans that encountered Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards, the Incan population suffered a dramatic and quick decline following contact. It is estimated that parts of the empire, notably the Central Andes, suffered a population decline ratio of 58:1 during the years of 1520–1571.[21]

https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-01-31/european-colonization-americas-killed-10-percent-world-population-and-caused
    European colonization of the Americas killed 10 percent of world population and caused global cooling
 
    ...Our new data-driven best estimate is a death toll of 56 million by the beginning of the 1600s — 90 percent of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population and around 10 percent of the global population at the time. This makes the “Great Dying” the largest human mortality event in proportion to the global population, putting it second in absolute terms only to World War II, in which 80 million people died — 3% of the world’s population at the time.
 
 
Though they outnumbered the Spanish by more than a factor of 100 to one, the Incans did not fight back. Some stood where they were as they were hacked to pieces:
 
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015054032365;view=1up;seq=9
    The conquest of Peru as recorded by a member of the Pizarro expedition.
 
    Sinclair, Joseph H
 
    ...The New York Public Library possesses in the anonymous "La Conquista del Peru" an exceedingly rare and valuable printed book -- one of the two known copies.
 
    ..."La Conquista del Peru" was printed in Seville in the month of April, 1534, by the printer Bartolome Perez, and the author is unknown. He states that he embarked with Francisco Pizarro in Panama, February, 1531, and accompanied him during the stirring events which terminated in the execution of the last Incao ruler, Atahuallpa, and was one of the twenty-five permitted to return to Spain shortly after that event.
 
    ...Hernando Pizarro and Hermando de Soto asked permission of the Governor to let them go with five or six horsemen and with an interpreter to speak with the Cacique Atabalip and to see how he had arranged his camp. The Governor allowed them to go but much against his will. They went to the camp which was a league distant. The entire plain where the Cacique was camped was closed from one side to the other by squadrons of pikemen and halberdiers and bowmen, and there was another squadron of Indians with arrows and slings, and others with clubs and sticks shod with metal. The Christians passed in the midst of those who stood as statues. And they arrived in the presence of the Cacique and they found that he was seated at the door of his house with many women around him for no man dared to be near. And Hernando de Soto rode to him horseback and he [the Cacique] was like a statue and he rode so near that the royal headdress which the Cacique wore on his forehead touched the horse's nose. And even then the Cacique did not move. Then Captain Hernando do Soto took from his finger a ring and gave it to him as a token of peace and love from the Christians. He accepted this with little sign of appreciation. Then Hernando Pizarro who had remained in the background to place three or four horsemen at a gate where there was a bad passage arrived and brought at the haunches of him [the Cacique] and all his army came close to the Cacique and told him to raise his head which he kept bowed low and to speak to him for he was his friend and he had come to see him and begged him to come tomorrow to see the Governor who was very anxious to see him. The Cacique replied with his head [still] bowed that he would go to see him to-morrow.
 
    ...Hernando de Soto ran his horse many times full speed toward a squadron of pikemen and these stepped back a step. After the Christians had departed, these [pikemen] paid dearly for the movement, for the Cacique ordered them and all their wives and children to be beheaded, saying that they should move forward and not back and that the same punishment would be handed out to all who retreated. The Captains returned to the Governor and they told him all that had taken place with the Cacique and that it seemed to them that there were 40,000 fighting men and they told this to encourage their forces for in reality there were more than 80,000 and they related what the Cacique had told them.
 
    ...The next morning there was nothing but the coming and going of messengers to the camp of Atabalipa. And one time it was said he was to come armed, another time they said he was to come unarmed. The Governor sent word that he should come as he wished, that his men looked well with their arms.
 
    At noon Atabalipa began to leave his camp accompanied by so many people that the whole plain was filled with them and all those Indians wore a kind of crown of gold and silver on their heads. It seemed that all were coming in their gala clothes. At the moment of Vespers they began their entry into the village and there the Cacique waited a little while for his people so that all should come together. When all had arrived and his commands were obeyed, he moved at the head and he arrived [seated] on his palanquin in the center of the square although with considerable misgivings. The governor then sent a man to him asking him to come to where he was, assuring him that he would suffer no harm of any kind nor insult, that he should come without fear although the Cacique did not seem afraid.
 
    The Cacique had in front of him dressed in livery 400 Indians removing from his path all the stones and sticks which they found in the road along which they were carrying the Cacique in his palanquin and these 400 men carried secretly under their livery clubs with a thick knob at the end, and even doublets [jubones] of strong arms and slings with selected stones to be used in these. The Governor had his men stationed in three large houses each one of which had more than 200 windows and 20 doors. In one of these houses was stationed Hernando Pizarro with 14 or 15 horsemen; in another Captain Hernando do Soto with another 15 or 16 horsemen and in another house Benalcazar with as many more or less. In another house was the Governor with two or three horsemen and 20 or 25 footsoldiers. All the other men were on guard at the doors so that no one could enter a very strong fort in the middle of the square in which was stationed Pedro de Candia, captain of His Majesty, with 8 or 9 musketeers and 4 small cannon because he was guarding the fort at the command of the GOvernor. The Governor commanded that if as many as ten Indians should ascend to it to permit them but no more.
 
    When the Cacique arrived in that place he asked where the Christians were for all were concealed and not a man was in sight. At this moment 7 or 8 Indians ascended to the fort. And a captain with a very long spear on which was a flag made a sign to bring the arms because the pikeman who was coming behind was carrying the spears of those who were ahead. In this way they seemed to be without arms and yet had them. And a priest of the order of Santo Domingo with a crucifix in his hands desiring to speak to him of the things of God went to speak to him and told him that the Christians were his friends and that the Governor loved him very much and that he should enter his house to see him. The Cacique replied that he would advance no further until the Christians had returned all they had taken in his country and after that he would do what he wished. The priest, not paying any attention to this remark, with a book which he held in his hands began to say the things of God which seemed fitting to him; but he did not care to listen and asking for the book the priest gave it to him thinking he would like to kiss it. And he took it and threw it over his retinue and the boy who acted as interpreter and was there translating these remarks ran after it and took it and gave it to the priest; and the priest turned then, calling and crying out "Come out, come out, Christians, and attend to these unfriendly dogs who do not care for the things of God. That Cacique has thrown on the ground the book of our sacred law." And in this moment a signal was given to the artillerymen to fire into the midst of them and they let go two salvos all they could do and the Indians who had climbed to the fort did not descend in the way they had ascended but rather jumped down. The cavalrymen who were in the three houses seeing this came out as if at a given signal and so also the Governor with the infantrymen who were with him and he went straight to the palanquin on which the Cacique was seated. And many of the infantry men who were with him withdrew a little from him, seeing that the Indians against him were very numerous. And in order to avenge himself more on them with the few men at his disposal, the Governor came to the palanquin although they did not let him reach it [without opposition] and many Indians had their hands cut off and with their shoulders were supporting the palanquin of their master. His body guard did not profit him because soon all were dead and their master a prisoner of the Governor.
 
    With the few infantrymen that he had and with the cavalry, he sallied out into the plain and many of them fell upon the Indians who were in flight and who were so numerous that in their flight they knocked down a wall 6 feet wide and more than 15 feet long and of the height of a man. Here many horsemen fell and in a space of two hours (during which night had fallen) all of the mass of Indians were routed. And in truth it was not by means of our forces for we were few in number but by the grace of God which is great.
 
    That day the dead in the plain amounted to six or seven thousand Indians not counting the many others who had their arms cut off and other wounds and that night the cavalry and infantry marched through the village because we saw five or six thousand Indians on a mountain which rose above the village and we kept on guard against them. In order that the Christians should collect in the camp, the Governor ordered the artillery to give a salvo and soon there collected the cavalry which was moving about on the plain thinking the Indians were attacking the camp and the infantry likewise, more than four or five hours of the night having passed by.
 
    The Governor was very pleased over the victory which God our Lord had given us and he asked the Cacique why he was sad and told him not to be sorrowful because we Christians had not been born in his country but far from it and that in all the lands through which we had come there were very great men and all these had been made friends and subjects of the Emperor for war and peace and that he should not be frightened at having been taken prisoner by us. He answered half-smiling that he was not sad about that, but because he had expected to make the Governor a prisoner and that the reverse had come true and for this reason he was sad. But as a favor of the Governor asked that if there was nearby one of his Indians to order him to come as he would like to speak to him. The Governor soon ordered two Indians to be brought, the leading ones of those captured in the battle. The Cacique asked them if there were many dead. They replied that the plain was covered with the dead. Then he sent word to his people not to flee but to come and serve him because he was not dead but was in the power of the Christians and it seemed to him that the Christians were good people and therefore he commanded that they should come to serve them. The Governor asked the interpreter what he had said. The interpreter told him all he had said. The Governor said he had more to say to them, and making a Cross he gave it to the Cacique saying that all his people both those here and far distant should take each one in his hands a cross like that and that the Christian cavalry and infantry to-morrow would march out into the plain and would kill all they found without the sign of the cross. And the next morning all marched out into the plain in great good order and found many squadrons of Indians. The nearest of these in very great fear carried crosses in their hands.
 
 
It defies explanation that the Inca did not fight back and that Pizarro felt confident he could win against such overwhelming numbers.

...

Famed physicist Enrico Fermi acted to delay the discovery of nuclear fission in a series of strange "missteps, misfortune, and oversights" that all but certainly altered the course of world history:
 
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.2817    
    On the belated discovery of fission
    A remarkable sequence of missteps, misfortune, and oversights delayed the discovery of nuclear fission until the eve of World War II—and likely altered history’s course.

...When Fermi published the results of his uranium experiments in 1934, his transuranic interpretation was almost universally accepted. However, almost immediately a German chemist, Ida Noddack, pointed out that he had not eliminated the possibility that the bombarded uranium was breaking up into two or more comparably sized nuclei.15 Fermi was aware of her suggestion, and though he never published a refutation, he certainly declined to act on it.
 
    Postwar reminiscences of Segrè and Amaldi confirm that there was some discussion of Noddack’s paper within Fermi’s group, but there is no clear recollection of why Fermi decided to ignore it.2
 
    ...Even more remarkable in Fermi’s indifference to the Noddack proposal was his apparent failure to consider the energetics of a possible uranium fission reaction. Those energetics had already been well established by the time Fermi began bombarding uranium.8 Had he considered them, he would have seen that a fissioning nucleus should release not only an enormous amount of energy but also some free neutrons. The prospect of a fission chain reaction sustained by neutrons would surely have motivated Fermi to pay a little more attention to the Noddack paper.

...the implications for world history are staggering. The war almost certainly would have taken a different form had fission been discovered even two years earlier. Quite possibly it would have gone nuclear earlier, although the fear of nuclear weapons could conceivably have prevented war altogether—and, as a side effect, allowed the Nazi regime to survive. On the other hand, that same fear might well have accelerated the outbreak of war, with each side seeking to destroy the other’s nuclear installations with conventional arms.
 
 
Fermi was also fingered for helping the Soviets get the atom bomb, setting up the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War:
 
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/28/world/pavel-sudoplatov-89-dies-top-soviet-spy-who-accused-oppenheimer.html
    Lieut. Gen. Pavel A. Sudoplatov, a legendary Soviet spymaster who plotted and carried out assassinations with cold-blooded efficiency and claimed to have engineered the theft of atomic secrets from the United States with the aid of four eminent scientists, died Tuesday at his home in Moscow. He was 89.
 
    ...Published by Little, Brown & Company in 1994, ''Special Tasks'' caused a sensation because of the general's detailed assertions that the Soviet Union had obtained atomic secrets with the aid of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., and Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, three other physicists with central roles in the development of the atomic bomb.

Leo Szilard, who was was also accused of being a spy for the Soviets [see above], had been working on the same problem, and later worked with Fermi on Nuclear Fission in 1939:
 
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.2817
    Actually, preoccupied with the potentialities of the neutron, Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard had been searching, unsuccessfully, for just such a chain reaction. When he heard about the experiment of Hahn and Strassmann in 1939, he understood at once the implications, and he and Fermi went on to lead the development of the first nuclear reactor.
 
 
Szilard is the one who convinced Einstein to sign the letter asking the U.S. government to create the atomic bomb:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter
    ...On July 12, 1939, Szilárd and Wigner drove in Wigner's car to Cutchogue on New York's Long Island, where Einstein was staying.[9] When they explained about the possibility of atomic bombs, Einstein replied: Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht (I did not even think about that).[10] Szilárd dictated a letter in German to the Belgian Ambassador to the United States. Wigner wrote it down, and Einstein signed it. At Wigner's suggestion, they also prepared a letter for the State Department explaining what they were doing and why, giving it two weeks to respond if it had any objections.[9]
 
 
Szilard did other questionable things, such as writing letters that "blackmailed" the U.S. government: https://www.space.com/25692-manhattan-project-einstein-szilard-blackmail.html

According to Scientific American journalist Ashutosh Jogalekar, Szilard got the idea for nuclear fission from a "genie":

https://web.archive.org/web/20180705092914/https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/why-the-world-needs-more-leo-szilards/
    Why the world needs more Leo Szilards
 
    By Ashutosh Jogalekar
 
    ...The project may have been the product of this sprawling hive mind, but one man saw both the essence and the implications of the bomb, in both science and politics, long before anyone else. Stepping off the curb at a traffic light across from the British Museum in London in 1933, Leo Szilard saw the true nature and the consequences of the chain reaction six years before reality breathed heft and energy into its abstract soul.
 
    ...After playing a key role in the founding of the Salk Institute in California, Szilard died peacefully in his sleep in 1964, hoping that the genie whose face he had seen at the traffic light in 1933 would treat human beings with kindness.

...

The Soviets quickly stole the atom bomb and built their own en masse. Not too long afterward, Stalin, Che Guevara, and others acted suicidally towards starting a nuclear war:

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005403452.pdf
    Segments of the Chinese Nationalist and of the Japan underground government are attempting to implement plans to provoke a third World War.
 
    This is being done in the name of Greater Asian-ism with the purpose of fostering an asiatic race liberation movement and reviving the influence of the Chinese Nationalist Government. OKAWA Shumei reportedly emphasized the fact that only through a third World War can complete independence of Asia be realized.
 
    ...These four men are reported to be planning in secret the reconstruction of the Japanese military. "Their initial aim is the organization of a volunteer corps to join the Chinese Nationalists in their defense of Formosa and then to gradually increase the size and equipment of the group until it becomes a power for those whose service both the East and West will bid prior to the inevitable World War III."
 
    ...In the event of war between the US and the USSR, ultra-rightists OKAWA Shumei, ISHIHARA Kanji and KITA Ikki groups will aid the Soviets.
 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/world/new-study-supports-idea-stalin-was-poisoned.html
    New Study Supports Idea Stalin Was Poisoned
 
    Fifty years after Stalin died, felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he was actually poisoned, perhaps to avert a looming war with the United States.
 
 
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-22-bk-khrush22-story.html
    Their book suggests that Stalin had a plan for worldwide chaos, starting by fabricating a Jewish conspiracy and ending in nuclear war. Even more startling, the authors suggest that this plan was foiled by one of Stalin’s own men, who killed the leader.
 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/world/new-study-supports-idea-stalin-was-poisoned.html
    That war may well have been closer than anyone outside the Kremlin suspected at the time, say the authors of a new book based on the records.
 
    ...Why Stalin might have been killed is a less difficult question. Politburo members lived in fear of Stalin; beyond that, the book cites a previously secret report as evidence that Stalin was preparing to add a new dimension to the alleged American conspiracy known as the Doctors' Plot.
 
    That report -- an interrogation of a supposed American agent named Ivan I. Varfolomeyev, in 1951 -- indicated that the Kremlin was preparing to accuse the United States of a plot to destroy much of Moscow with a new nuclear weapon, then to launch an invasion of Soviet territory along the Chinese border.
 
 
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-22-bk-khrush22-story.html
    ...there was a rumored plot to destroy the Kremlin called “The Plan of the Internal Blow.” That plan revolved around the case of I.I. Varfolomeev, an alleged “spy who had worked for the Japanese prior to the Great Patriotic War [World War II] and for the Americans beginning in 1948.”
 
    Five nuclear devices were to be fired from the windows of the U.S. Embassy (then on Red Square) at the Kremlin: The whole Soviet central government “would go up in smoke, as would most of Moscow.” Here, Stalin’s paranoia moves from the world of Beckett to Eugene Ionesco and to the theater of the absurd.
 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/world/new-study-supports-idea-stalin-was-poisoned.html
    ...Mr. Naumov said in an interview today that that plan, combined with other Soviet military preparations in the Russian Far East at the time, strongly suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war along the United States' Pacific Coast. What remains unclear, he said, is whether he planned a first strike or whether the mushrooming conspiracy unfolding in Moscow was to serve as a provocation that would lead both sides to a flash point.
 
    "I am told that the only case when the two sides were on the verge of war was the Cuban crisis," in 1962, he said. "But I think this was the first case. And this first time that we were on the verge of war was even more dangerous," because the devastation of nuclear weapons was not yet an article of faith.
 
    Mr. Brent said he believes that fear of a nuclear holocaust could have led Beria and perhaps others at that final dinner to assent to Stalin's death.
 
 
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/366261/summary
    One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
 
    How close was nuclear war in October 1962? As the title of Michael Dobb's compelling and evocative book suggests, he believes that we were one minute from midnight on the Doomsday Clock. His arguments and his account are based on extensive research, drawn from U.S., Soviet, and Cuban sources. He interviewed more than 100 veterans of the missile crisis and used archival sources (mainly American) that included raw U.S. intelligence material, from which photographs are produced to fascinating effect in the book. Dobbs's goal is to "help a new generation of readers relive the quintessential Cold War crisis" (p. xiii).
 
 
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article4230507.html
    Intrepid terrorists could get maximum bang for their buck on “Black Friday.” A few well-placed bombs and the carnage would easily shame 9/11’s.
 
    Indeed, on Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a terrorist plot by Fidel Castro’s Cuban agents that targeted not only Macy’s in New York City but also Gimbels, Bloomindale’s and Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.
 
    A little perspective: The March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of the explosions that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on Earth — and on the year’s biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers — probably mostly women and children given the date — were to be incinerated and entombed.
 
    Castro and Che Guevara planned their murderous act just weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger massacre during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “If the missiles had remained,” Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker the following month, “we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.”
 
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=UMGp5XQ4CA8C&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13
    Guevara says: "What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims. The Cuban people are advancing fearlessly towards the hecatomb which specifies final redemption."
 
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=s_uTDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT205&lpg=PT205
    Perhaps the single most revolting thing about Che (which is really saying something) was his willingness to actually fire those atomic weapons at the United States and launch a nuclear war that he understood would lead to the nuclear destruction of Cuba too. The Argentine annihilator bragged that "this country is willing to risk everything in an atomic war of unimaginable destructiveness to defend a principle."
 
 
https://www.lingq.com/sv/lesson/history-vs-che-guevara-alex-gendler-1195073/
    And it was [Guevara] who urged Castro to host Soviet nuclear weapons, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of destruction.
 
 
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/366261/summary
    One illuminating insight is Che Guevara's willingness to travel the "path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims" (p. 245)—an attitude seemingly shared by Fidel Castro.
 
 
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-should-che-be-an-icon-no-394336.html
    Che had implored the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles on Cuba. He knew the US would interpret this as an act of aggression and probably retaliate with nuclear weapons – but he said that “the people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face if the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names… they will feel completely happy and fulfilled” knowing the revolution had inspired people for a while. Che did not say how he knew the Cuban people would be delighted to die of radiation sickness, their hair burning on their heads and their skin slopping from their faces.
 
    The Soviet Union followed Che’s advice – and the world came closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point before or since. On the American side, maniacs like General Curtis LeMay implored Jack Kennedy to nuke Moscow immediately. On the Soviet side, Che Guevara played exactly the same role. He urged Khrushchev to launch a nuclear strike, now, against US cities. For the rest of his life, he declared that if his finger had been on the button, he would have pushed it. When Khrushchev backed down and literally saved the world, Che was furious at the "betrayal". If Che's recommendations had been followed, you would not be reading this newspaper now.
 
 
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/cuba/2018-01-11/dark-beyond-darkness-cuban-missile-crisis-book
    Believing they were irrevocably doomed by an imminent U.S. nuclear attack on the island, Fidel Castro wrote to Khrushchev urging him to launch an all-out nuclear attack on the U.S. ASAP, once the Americans began invading the island. The Cubans, and their Russian comrades in Cuba, prepared to nuke the U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base, and to use their short-range nuclear weapons against the invading U.S. forces. Had these been carried out, a U.S. nuclear response would likely have followed, and Armageddon would have commenced then and there.

...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/why-humanitys-survival-may-depend-colonizing-mars-n446196
    Why Humanity's Survival May Depend on Colonizing Mars

...He characterized Earth as existing in "a dangerous part of the solar system" that runs the outside risk of being hit by a "planet-killing" asteroid.

...“They cross our orbit frequently, and we know we're going to get hit again," Greene said. "It’s not a matter of if, but when."

...The panoply of risks makes it important to seek out viable alternatives to ensure humanity's survival. Likening the idea of an extraterrestrial colony to a computer's external hard drive, Greene told CNBC that "If we're going to live as a species, we're going to have to 'back up' in other places ... and that place is Mars."

According to reports, there are many cases of people sabotaging civilian space programs:

https://spacepolicyonline.com/pages/images/stories/List%20of%20Russian%20Space%20Launch%20Failures%20Since%20Dec%202010%20as%20of%20May%2016%202015.pdf
    Russia’s once reliable fleet of space launch vehicles began a string of failures beginning in December 2010 that has created significant consternation in Russia’s space program and brought about firings and reorganizations, but the failures continue.

https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/russia-suffers-another-soyuz-rocket-failure/
    ...This is Russia’s fifth launch failure in 2011, a surprising number given the usual reliability of Russian rockets.

https://translate.google.ru/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://iz.ru/news/511258
    [Izvestia:] **This year, Russia had four accidents at launches, according to which a lot was said about insufficient control of the quality of products. What did Roskosmos do to reverse the trend towards a decrease in the reliability of missile technology?**

[Vladimir Popovkin, head of Federal Space Agency:] Firstly, we have at times increased the list of operations subject to triple control, including objective, through photography and video recording. Secondly, created operational groups, which now before each launch look at the documentation for the manufacture, literally looking for deviations from the technological processes. And sometimes interesting things are found out: there they retreated a little, here they did not even twist it. There are significant deviations, which the designer did not evaluate in the complex.

https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/roscosmos-official-confirms-proton-sensors-upside-down-flights-may-resume-in-september/
    Despite skepticism from a Russian Deputy Prime Minister, an official with Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, confirms that the recent Proton-M launch failure was caused by sensors that were installed upside down.

Alexander Lopatin, a deputy director of Roscosmos, is quoted today by Russia’s official news agency, Itar-Tass, as confirming earlier reports that angular rate sensors were installed “head over heels.”  Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin disputed the earlier reports saying that installation of the sensors was virtually foolproof.

Nonetheless, that is what happened according to Lopatin.  “The cause was an industrial process violation, the human factor,” he said.  The six angular rate sensors themselves were fine and passed all tests, but three of them were installed “head over heels” by workers at Khrunichev, the rocket’s manufacturer.

https://www.rt.com/news/162228-proton-rocket-failure-sabotage/
    Sabotage considered in Proton rocket crash – investigator

The botched launch of the Proton-M rocket this month may have been caused by sabotage, the chair of the investigating commission said.

https://www.rt.com/news/165024-proton-booster-sabotage-investigation/
    Intentional damage to a Proton rocket booster was reportedly established by a polygraph and a criminal case has been initiated, Izvestia daily quotes the Ministry of Interior. Previously sabotage was considered an unlikely option.

...when the FSB was informed about the incident, it launched a lie detector probe of about 15 assemblers who could have been in physical contact with the duct during the assembly, a source at the Khrunichev Center told Izvestia.

The results of the FSB investigation were delivered to the Ministry of Interior and became the basis for the criminal case. The names of the established suspects have not been made public for legal reasons, a source in the ministry informed Izvestia.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/45943952/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/russian-space-chief-claims-space-failures-may-be-sabotage/
    Russian space chief claims space failures may be sabotage

1/10/2012

MOSCOW — Some recent Russian satellite failures may have been the result of sabotage by foreign forces, Russia's space chief said Tuesday, in comments apparently aimed at the United States.

Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin stopped short of accusing any specific country of disabling Russian satellites, but in an interview in the daily Izvestia he noted that some Russian craft had suffered "unexplained" malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of his nation's tracking facilities.

Popovkin spoke when asked about the failure of the $170 million unmanned Phobos-Grunt probe, which was to explore one of Mars' two moons, Phobos, but became stranded while orbiting Earth after its Nov. 9 launch. Engineers in Russia and the European Space Agency have failed to propel the spacecraft toward Mars, and it is expected to fall back to Earth around Jan. 15.

https://translate.google.ru/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://iz.ru/news/511258
    [Izvestia:] **That is, the degree of risk to the mission of "Phobos" was clear, but there was nowhere to go?**

[Popovkin:] There was simply no other way. Today, it is not clear why the Phobos-Grunt propulsion system was not started. There are also incomprehensible frequent failures with our devices during the period when they are flying over the shady side of the Earth for Russia - where we do not see the apparatus and do not receive telemetry from it.

...I do not want to blame anyone, but today there are very powerful means of impact on space vehicles, the possibilities of using which can not be ruled out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Popovkin
    [Popovkin] was admitted to Burdenko Military Hospital in Moscow on 7 March 2012 because of "physical and emotional exhaustion."  Kommersant claimed that he fainted on the stairs outside the agency  and Russian tabloid Life News claimed he was hospitalised with head injuries. Other media claims that he was hospitalised after being struck on the head with a bottle during a fight, and that the fight was over his press secretary and former model Anna Vedicheva.

When Popovkin returned to work on 19 March 2012 he gave an interview with Izvestia in which he vehemently denied some of the stories about the reasons for his hospitalisation, which he blamed on sections of the Russian space industry who are threatened by his attempts to counter corruption.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=34984.0
    Vladimir Popovkin has died

...

Izvestiya quotes a Roskosmos official (Denis Lyskov) as saying that Popovkin’s disease (cancer) was most likely brought on by his exposure to toxic fumes after the Proton crash last July.

http://izvestia.ru/news/572644

“At the moment of the launch we were in a bunker several hundred kilometers from the launch pad. After the explosion of the rocket we remained in the bunker for a while until we received information that the air outside was safe to breathe. Vladimir Aleksandrovich [Popovkin] was the first to leave the bunker, he ordered his driver out of the car,  jumped in the car himself and drove to the crash site without taking any protective measures. He felt personally responsible for what had happened and simply didn’t think of protecting himself.
    ...
    When [Popovkin] got ill, doctors concluded that the disease had been triggered by the hydrazine cloud. ...”

http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Hydrazine
    Case Study of Hydrazine Poisoning

In a 1965 correspondence from F. James Reid to the British Medical Journal, the effects of accidental hydrazine ingestion can be seen.

A young English sailor had been drinking beer during the afternoon before being placed on duty in the evening. He was considered to be fit for duty and competent until the accident. While working in his ship's engine room, the young sailor ingestion between a mouthful and a cupful of concentrated Hydrazine believing it was water.

...Immediately upon drinking the chemical, the sailor vomited and returned to the deck to report to his superior officer at 11:30pm. After having been given a raw egg and milk, he vomited once more and collapsed, unconscious onto the floor.

Upon admission in a West African Hospital at midnight he was flushed, afebrile, unconscious, continent, and vomiting. His pupils were dilated, central and reacted to light; however, there were no chemical burns on his lips or mouth and he was able to swallow. At this time the respiratory and central nervous systems were normal upon clinical examination.

...The patient improved hour by hour, though the main concern was for his neurological state. His psyche, memory, voluntary motor skills, and higher functions were normal. However, he had ataxia even with his eyes open, a lateral nystagmus to the right, and a loss of vibration sense. ...Fortunately, the ataxia was improving to the point that the sailor would able to travel unescorted by air to England, only two weeks after leaving Africa.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=34984.0
    The same day Popovkin died, a 53-year old Khrunichev quality control manager (Gennadiy Lashkov) apparently committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the mechanical shop where he worked.  Inevitably, at least one Russian media outlet has linked both events :

http://www.kp.ru/daily/26245.4/3126245/

However, it would appear the suicide took place several hours before news of Popovkin's death broke.   Other reports link the suicide to wage cuts at Khrunichev in the wake of recent Proton failures.

...

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/WALLENBERG,%20RAOUL%20%20%20VOL.%203_0101.pdf
    HEADQUARTERS COMMENT ON OR FOLLOWUP QUESTIONS FOR WALK-IN DMITRIY ALEKSANDROVICH ((DRUZHININ)) (SUBJECT).

...SUBJECT HAS NO INFORMATION ON SABOTAGE OF U.S. SPACE PROGRAMS OR VEHICLES

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-07-06/opinion/op-23298_1_u-s-air-force
    In a departure from its public position, the French government has concluded that the explosion of its Ariane rocket at the Kourou launch site in French Guinea on May 30 may have been due to sabotage. According to French intelligence officials, the investigation into the Ariane accident has been secretly reopened because, "Initially we had no reason to raise the question of sabotage, but now we have reason to ask that question."

France has shared its concerns and suspicions about Ariane with the highest levels of U.S. intelligence--French Defense Minister Andre Giraud is believed to have touched on this topic when he visited Washington last Tuesday and Wednesday--because of the series of catastrophes involving American space launches this year. The French and American accidents are adding up to a bizarre pattern, surrounded by strange coincidences and unexplained events, deeply preoccupying Western intelligence. These include the apparent defection to the Soviet Union in 1983 of the U.S. Air Force's leading expert on rocket self-destruct procedures.

...French intelligence officials say that while the report is technically correct (the 1985 Ariane accident had the same cause), "it is very easy to perform sabotage in this context by one very well-placed person."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
    Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

...The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Rogers Commission found NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been key contributing factors to the accident,[4] with the agency violating its own safety rules. NASA managers had known since 1977 that contractor Morton-Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings, but they had failed to address this problem properly. NASA managers also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning, and failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors.

https://www.quora.com/Did-the-USSR-ever-try-to-sabotage-the-Apollo-program
    "'Doc' Tripp, who was then working on America's first space telescope, recalls, 'Those batteries were shepherded around, I swear, just as though it was a Brink's truck full of gold.  I was aware that we were competing very strongly with the Russians, and one way to beat us, of course, was to sabotage our effort here.  I don't know how many saboteurs there were on the program.  I never met one, as far as I know, but apparently there were.  And one of the places I remember where we got really involved with protection and security was with the batteries.'"

https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2007-07-27-voa2-66781427/565173.html
    NASA Finds Evidence of Sabotaged Computer Bound for Space Station

Two weeks before the US space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to lift-off, the US space agency NASA says a piece of equipment that was to fly on the mission was deliberately sabotaged.

During a briefing on launch preparations for space shuttle Endeavour, NASA officials revealed that a space program worker deliberately damaged a piece of equipment that is scheduled to fly aboard the space craft.

The tampered device was due to be delivered to the International Space Station by Endeavour. It measures strain on a space station beam and relays the information to controllers on the ground.

NASA's chief of space operations, Bill Gersteinmaier, says the space agency was notified of the sabotage by the company servicing the mission.

"We then inspected the flight unit and determined that some wires were cut on the inside of that unit. It's a subcontractor on the space station side," he said. "We'll fix the hardware. We'll get [it] ready to go fly. I can't really discuss that and won't discuss that much more at this point."

Gerstenmaier says the sabotage is under investigation and officials declined to speculate on a motive.

...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/21/european-schiaparelli-mars-lander-exploded-on-impact-nasa-images-suggest
    Prof David Southwood, a space scientist at Imperial College London, noted that Mars missions seem particularly prone to mishap. “If one were superstitious, one would say it is a return of the Mars gremlin.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/20/total-recall-of-unsuccessful-mars-lander-schiaparelli-exomars
    Many spacecraft built by the US or the Soviet Union failed to even reach orbit around Mars. In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter became the Mars Collider and a case study for students of planetary exploration. The spacecraft was meant to be the first to observe the weather on another planet, but instead slammed into the atmosphere and tore apart. An investigation panel found the glitch in the spacecraft’s software. The force delivered by onboard thrusters was coded in imperial pounds instead of metric Newtons.

https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/38186/D-18441.pdf?sequence=1
    ...Lockheed-Martin Astronautics (LMA) reported that the files containing the magnitudes of the small forces impulses applied to the spacecraft had been delivered in English units (pounds-force seconds) instead of metric units (Newton-seconds). The interface agreements specify metric units.

...The third causative factor was the decision not to execute TCM-5. The mission plan called for the execution of a fifth contingency maneuver (TCM-5) in case of trajectory errors following TCM-4. However, this maneuver was never executed. In spite of anomalous orbit determination results following TCM-4, the mission managers decided not to execute TCM-5, the risk-reduction contingency maneuver. Again, a major factor in this decision was project management's lack of knowledge of the true trajectory uncertainty. The other major factor in deciding not to execute TCM-5 was project management's decision to change the baseline risk-management strategy in the days immediately preceding Mars orbit insertion.

...Project management did not seek an outside peer review of the orbit determination problem (see section 4.9). Instead, a single navigation consultant was commissioned. The consultant focused on data quality issues.

A hastily organized meeting of a small subset of the MSOP Standing Review Board convened on September 18, 1999, to discuss the need for TCM-5. Contrary to the typical practices of other flight projects, the Navigation Team was not represented at this meeting. The utilization of a small subset of the Operational Readiness Review Board to make recommendations on the operational decisions without all viewpoints is inappropriate.

MCO project management did not communicate to the Navigation Team a major change in the TCM-5 go/no-go decision strategy. Specifically, the Go/No-Go meeting scheduled for Sunday, September 19, 1999 was superseded by the provisional decision made Saturday morning described above. The project management, in consultation with the Spacecraft Team and the attending members of the Review Board, made a provisional decision not to proceed with TCM-5 provided the navigation results were substantially the same as those of the previous day. The Navigation Team was not informed of his change in decision-making strategy.

...Based upon 2 hours of post TCM-4 tracking, the estimated P2 altitude was 138 km ...At or shortly after this became known, it was decided to undertake the building of TCM-5

...On September 16, 1999, the altitude estimate for P2 had moved back up to the region of 150 to 170 km. A TCM-5 delta-V magnitude was chosen that would raise P2 back up to the value of 210 km targeted at TCM-4 ...The date scheduled for TCM-5 was September 20, 1999.

A nominal MOI sequence had been sent to the spacecraft earlier as a precautionary measure in case the final upload could not be sent. On September 17, 1999, the project decided to delete the planned final MOI sequence load and to continue with the nominal sequence. Navigation was not aware of this decision until September 19, 1999.

...

https://books.google.com/books?id=qCAVQ_cdomcC&pg=PA179&lpg=PA179
    ...Born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Stone dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to become a journalist. After several years as the youngest editorial writer for a major metropolitan newspaper, the *Philadelphia Inquirer*, he moved to the *New York Post* with instructions from its owner, J. David Stern, to transform it into a champion of New Deal liberalism. ...In June 1933 he declared that a "Soviet America" was "the one way out that could make a real difference to the working classes"

...I.F. Stone assisted in recruiting William Dodd Jr., as a KGB agent in 1936

http://www.ifstone.org/weekly/IFStonesWeekly-1957oct14.pdf
    I. F. Stone's Weekly
    
    October 14, 1957

A Terrifying Stranger Knocks at Heaven's Gate

With the launching of the first artificial moon into the skies, man stands at last on the threshold of the universe. Outside takes on a new meaning. There new worlds beckon a new Columbus. The Infinite, on which mystics brooded, may become the playground of the astronaut and man roam where God is supposed to have presided.

Like any other stranger, knocking at a new door, Man must nervously adjust his tie and give himself a quick once-over, hoping to make a good impression. The self-inventory is not reassuring. To a fresh eye at the outer world's window, the newcomer may seem a creature of terrifying habits.

Only the Excuses Change

Wherever man goes, he brings with him war. His poets glorify it. Each generation's healthiest youth is trained for it. Any difference within the human species is enough to serve as excuse for it. Religion, coloring, national jealousy, capitalist competition for markets, deviations of dogma among communists—the excuses vary, the behavior remains the same. One may easily imagine the anxious debates of an interstellar conference called to consider the danger. What if men transplant their feuds, as Spaniards and Englishmen did after crossing the Atlantic? Theological gibberish was imposed by fire and sword on the bewildered Indian. What if the Russians reach the far side of the moon and demand that its creatures eschew bourgeois ideas? What if we Americans, suspicious of uncommitted neutrals, land atom-armed on Mars and insist that the inhabitants adopt free enterprise? The human race may seem a pest which has suddenly appeared out of one small planet, making unsafe the highways among the stars.

A Heterogeneous Horde

Were some flying saucer to land cosmic investigators for a closer look, they would be startled to find that mentally men live centuries apart. Here are men with modern instruments so fine they can plot the course of the most distant suns. Next door to them may live men who turn for guidance, in their daily newspapers, to horoscopes like those cast by Babylonian astrologers millennia earlier. Here walk men brooding on the new multi-dimensional geometries. Past them in the same streets walk others who cross themselves when they see a black cat. Some men seem the harbingers of a new race; others seem fresh from the cave. Little wonder that so heterogeneous a mass is swept from time to time by outbreaks of madness, from the St. Vitus dance of the Middle Ages to those furnaces into which some human beings shovelled several million others only yesterday. Ours may not seem a wholesome breed for stellar immigration.

A gleaming metal ball hurtling regularly around our planet may be the first signal of intelligent life on earth to observers elsewhere who could not see into the murky depths of our aerial ocean. They might be surprised to learn that the minds which have made such wonders possible nowhere rule the human societies of which they are a part. Whatever the ostensible form of the society, everywhere the cunning govern. Here the ruler may be a Tammany-style politician, there a Commissar. The finer minds everywhere are subordinate to the inferior.

...Objectively speaking, it would probably be better for the universe if man remained earthbound. In the wake of the first satellite, we give no sign of closing ranks and facing out- ward as a united species. There is no sudden sense of how petty has become all that once divided us. There is little reverent wonder for the adventures which could lie ahead. Instead there is intensified fear, and a demand to step up preparations for the next war, which must now be fought in the upper skies as well. Missile stocks are up. Nothing has changed but the magnitude of our potential for mass murder.

As the sky fills with satellites and the sky platforms are manned and armed, will Americans and Russians shoot it out in the wild yonder, destroying each other and the world with them? It might be better, after all, if space were left to a newer species, bred to live in peace and to take joy in diversity. Our first reactions, like all our past, show how unfit men are for the heavens. We would only stain red the Milky Way.

...

https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/nick-bostrom-on-whether-we-live-in-a-matrix-simulation.html
    Philosopher Nick Bostrom on Whether We Live in a Simulation

When Morpheus told us our reality was fake, it sounded far-fetched. Since then, though, the idea has picked up steam. In 2001, two years after The Matrix hit theaters, Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom circulated the first draft of his “simulation argument,” which posits three scenarios: (1) Humanity will go extinct before creating technology powerful enough to run convincing simulations of reality; (2) humanity will live to see such technology but decide, for whatever reason, not to run any simulations; (3) humanity will create that technology and run many different simulations of its evolutionary history — in which case there would be lots of simulated realities and only one non-simulated one, so maybe it’s more likely than not that we’re living in a simulation right now. That third scenario has excited many over the years, including Elon Musk, who in 2016 put our odds of living in a non-simulated reality at “one in billions.” We called Bostrom to discuss his paper’s legacy.

...As a civilization, we’re not very sophisticated in thinking about these kinds of things and what makes sense and doesn’t.

...**Has any strange or unexpected news in the world — Trump’s election or Brexit — made you think we’re more likely to be living in a malfunctioning simulation?**
    I hear [about these events] sometimes. Sometimes, an individual will write to me and say they had some personal experience that they attribute to being in a simulation. So, maybe with psychological problems. At any given time, there are metaphors that people reach for if they experience something and don’t know how to fit it within a normal framework. In earlier ages, they would say they were possessed by a demon. And maybe there are other metaphors to reach for that I’ve heard about that are in the Zeitgeist with computers and their simulations or whatnot.

I don’t think [unusual news] is evidence of a simulation. We’re fairly ignorant about what kind of simulations would be produced. So we can only make weak inferences from those kinds of observations. If you had some view about what kinds of simulations would be more likely to be created or created in larger numbers, then in principle, you could see when the world seems to take the shape of one of those. That might be some evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis.

**Do you play video games? I’m thinking of detailed open-world games like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption.**
    Not a lot. I have a son now who’s just reaching the age where he can play computer games. So I play a little bit with him. I’ve seen footage. I haven’t played them, but I know of them. I think that helps make it easier for people to take seriously something like the simulation hypothesis, that you can get these quite immersive three-dimensional virtual-reality experiences even with present-day technology. It doesn’t take a huge leap of inference to think that could get better and eventually maybe good enough that you can’t tell the difference. So it makes it less simply an abstract claim, with some probability theory and some formulas, and more something that people can experience themselves. That brings it home on a more gut level that simulations are a real possibility. You could see a very advanced civilization maybe being able to create high-fidelity simulations and a lot of them.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/did-the-oscars-just-prove-that-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation
    Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?

...the sheer improbability of the happenstance scarily alike. Nothing like this has remotely happened before. This wasn’t just a minor kerfuffle. This was a major malfunction. Trump cannot be President; forgetting all the bounds of ideology, no one vaguely like him has ever existed in the long list of Presidents, good, bad, and indifferent; no one remotely as oafish or as crude or as obviously unfit. People don’t say “Grab ’em by the *****” and get elected President. Can’t happen. In the same way, while there have been Oscar controversies before—tie votes and rejected trophies—never before has there been an occasion when the entirely wrong movie was given the award, the speeches delivered, and then another movie put in its place. That doesn’t happen. Ever.

And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I'm told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There's a glitch, and we are in it.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order.

...Since the advance of intelligence seems like the one constant among living things-and since living things are far likelier than not to be spread around the universe-then one of the things that smart living things will do is make simulations of other universes in which to run experiments.

...Since there will be only one "Real" universe, and countless simulated ones, the odds that we are living in one of the simulations instead of the one actual reality are overwhelming.

...As Clara Moskowitz, writing in Scientific American, no less, explains succinctly, "A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds."

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/are-we-living-simulated-universe-here-s-what-scientists-say-ncna1026916
    Are we living in a simulated universe? Here's what scientists say.

...That question makes sense to Rich Terrile, a computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Detailed as they are, today’s best simulations don’t involve artificial minds, but Terrile thinks the ability to model sentient beings could soon be within our grasp. “We are within a generation of being those gods who create those universes,” he says.

...Some thinkers, including Terrile, welcome the analogy to religion. If the simulation hypothesis is correct, he says, then “there’s a creator, an architect — someone who designed the world.” It’s an ancient idea recast in terms of “mathematics and science rather than just faith.”

...And Bostrom insists that he takes the simulation hypothesis seriously. “For me, it’s not just an intellectual game,” he says. “It’s an attempt to orient myself in the world, as best I can understand it.”

...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120422081110/http://news.brunei.fm/2010/05/13/mass-hysteria-product-of-jinn-or-anxiety/
    Mass hysteria: product of ‘jinn’ or anxiety?

...May 13th, 2010

...BRUNEI-MUARA

IN THE past month, recent incidents of mass hysteria among students at two all-girls secondary schools in the Sultanate created a wave of panic among many parents, educators and members of the community, frightened of what was causing the phenomenon.

On April 19, more than 15 students were struck by the mass hysteria at Sufri Bolkiah Secondary School (SMSB) in Tutong followed by another incident on May 1 at Pengiran Anak Puteri Hjh Masna Secondary School (SM PAP Masna), Berakas, in which approximately 15 students were involved.

Some of the students affected by the phenomenon claimed to have been possessed by spirits, or jinn, displaying histrionic symptoms such as screaming, shaking and crying.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48850490
    The mystery of screaming schoolgirls in Malaysia

11 August 2019

It was a quiet Friday morning last July when pandemonium broke out at a school in north-east Malaysia.

...This is her account of what happened.

The assembly bells rang.

I was at my desk feeling sleepy when I felt a hard, sharp tap on my shoulder.

I turned round to see who it was and the room went dark.

Fear overtook me. I felt a sharp, splitting pain in my back and my head started spinning. I fell to the floor.

Before I knew it, I was looking into the 'otherworld'. Scenes of blood, gore and violence.

The scariest thing I saw was a face of pure evil.

It was haunting me, I couldn't escape. I opened my mouth and tried to scream but no sound came out.

I passed out.

...Siti's outburst triggered a powerful chain reaction that ripped through the school. Within minutes students in other classrooms started screaming, their frantic cries ricocheting through the halls.

One girl fainted after claiming to have seen the same "dark figure".

...Classroom doors slammed shut at the Ketereh national secondary school (SMK Ketereh) in Kelantan as panicked teachers and students barricaded themselves in. Islamic spiritual healers were called to perform mass prayer sessions.

By the end of the day, 39 people were deemed to have been affected by an outbreak of "mass hysteria".

..."We rode it to school on the morning I was possessed by 'spirits'," Siti says.

...One case in the nearby town of Pengkalan Chepa attracted significant media attention. Students and teachers were described in reports as becoming "possessed" after seeing a "dark, shadowy figure" lurking around the compound. About 100 people were affected.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/20/malaysia-school-shut-amid-mass-hysteria-over-sightings-of-a-blac/
    20 April 2016

...A school in Malaysia was forced to close after sightings of a mysterious "black figure" sparked a suspected outbreak of "mass hysteria".

The panic began last Monday when several students and teachers in the city of Kota Bharu said they had seen a "black figure" in the school.

Sightings continued to be reported for the next two days, with about 100 people affected by what they believed were supernatural experiences.

The school was shut on Thursday while Islamic traditional experts, scholars and even witch doctors were called in to carry out prayer sessions and "exorcisms".

Although the school reopened on Sunday, screaming and shouting continued to be heard at SMK Pengkalan Chepa 2 secondary school on Sunday, according to Free Malaysia Today.

"Our students were possessed and disturbed [by these spirits]. We are not sure why it happened. We don't know what it is that affected us," a senior school staff member told the BBC.

...Norlailawati Ramli, a teacher, said she was among the people affected.

"When I was holding one of the pupils, my arms felt extraordinarily heavy. I recited the istighfar. Things were truly out of control at the time," she told local news channel Astro Awani.

"But after the pupil recovered and went home, I then felt as though someone was hanging onto the left side of my body. I saw flashes of black, like a black figure," Ms Norlailawati said.

Another teacher, Kamariah Ibrahim, she said also saw the black figure.

"It was trying to enter my body, but my colleagues were surrounding me, reciting verses from the Koran," Ms Kamariah said. "I felt like my head was bloating, I felt numb and tears kept pouring down my face.

...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1386254?seq=1
    The Psychodynamics of Demon Possession
    Colleen A. Ward and Michael H. Beaubrun
    Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

...Mental illness has often been attributed to supernatural powers. Although a conception of man as the supernatural battleground of eternal demonic war for the possession of his soul was most prevalent in the Middle Ages, archeological and anthropological evidence indicates that even Stone Age man had a demon-ridden cosmos and a sorcerous treatment of madness. With modification, this "evil spirit" theory has endured for centuries, and instances of demon possession are still apparent in both primitive and advanced twentieth century societies.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/3/15/1643270/-Religion-101-Demons
    Religion 101: Demons

In cultures throughout the world there is a belief in malevolent entities known collectively as demons. In some religious traditions, particularly those which are monotheistic, demons are responsible for the existence of evil.

...In many religious traditions, it is possible for demons or evil spirits to possess the body of a human, which results in culturally strange or inappropriate behavior.

https://products.abc-clio.com/abc-cliocorporate/product.aspx?pc=A4264C
    This book provides a fascinating historical and cultural overview of traditional beliefs about spirit possession and exorcism around the world, from Europe to Asia and the Middle East to the Americas.

Possession and exorcism are elements that occur in nearly every culture. Why is belief in spiritual possession so universal?

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-37947-001
    Paranormal experiences in the general population.

Ross, C. A., & Joshi, S. (1992). Paranormal experiences in the general population. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 180(6), 357–361. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-199206000-00004
    Abstract

Administered the Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule to a random sample of 502 Canadian adults. Paranormal/extrasensory experiences were common in the general population. A factor analysis of the paranormal experiences identified acquisition of paranormal knowledge of the past, present, or future; possession; and demon possession and poltergeist phenomena as factors accounting for 44.0% of the combined variance of the scores. A model is proposed in which paranormal experiences are conceptualized as an aspect of normal dissociation. Like dissociation in general, paranormal experiences can be triggered by trauma, especially childhood physical or sexual abuse. Such experiences discriminate individuals with childhood trauma histories from those without at high levels of significance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefano-Ferracuti/publication/14534428_Dissociative_Trance_Disorder_Clinical_and_Rorschach_Findings_in_Ten_Persons_Reporting_Demon_Possession_and_Treated_by_Exorcism/links/0912f50a570ac64fc1000000/Dissociative-Trance-Disorder-Clinical-and-Rorschach-Findings-in-Ten-Persons-Reporting-Demon-Possession-and-Treated-by-Exorcism.pdf
    JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT, 1996, 66(3)

Dissociative Trance Disorder: Clinical and Rorschach Findings in Ten Persons Reporting Demon Possession and Treated by Exorcism

Stefano Ferracuti, Roberto Sacco, and Renato Lazzari

Department of Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine
    University of Rome "La Sapienza"

Although dissociative trance disorders, especially possession disorder, are probably more common than is usually thought, precise clinical data are lacking. Ten persons undergoing exorcisms for devil trance possession state were studied with the Dissociative Disorders Diagnostic Schedule and the Rorschach test. These persons had many traits in common with dissociative identity disorder patients. They were overwhelmed by paranormal experiences. Despite claiming possession by a demon, most of them managed to maintain normal social functioning. ...Most had severe impairment of reality testing

https://www.amhonline.org/article.asp?issn=2589-9171;year=2014;volume=15;issue=1;spage=111;epage=116;aulast=Pathapati;type=0
    A study to assess the prevalence of possession disorder in a district of South India

...Then the subjects and the families were interviewed using ICD-10 RDC criteria for diagnosing Possession disorder. Prevalence rates were calculated as per the data available and an attempt was made to compare the data available in the department. Results: 364 cases were diagnosed based on the methodology of inquiry of key personnel in the community. A prevalence rate of 0.048 % that is 48 per 100,000 populations is identified. But S.V.R.R.Government General Hospital Psychiatry unit being the only tertiary care facility in this area, should have treated 200 cases in a district having five million populations. During the same period census showed only four case of possession disorder out of fifty five conversion disorder patients which was a small fraction. The reason for the above finding could be that many of these cases were utilizing alternate medical or socio cultural interventions. Conclusion: Prevalence of possession disorder is still high in the rural areas and public need proper education regarding the nature and management of possession disorder.

https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/ps.49.3.360
    The Clinical Characteristics of Possession Disorder Among 20 Chinese Patients in the Hebei Province of China

OBJECTIVE: This paper describes the clinical characteristics of 20 hospitalized psychiatric patients in the Hebei province of China who believed they were possessed. METHODS: A structured interview focused on clinical characteristics associated with possession phenomena was developed and administered to 20 patients at eight hospitals in the province. All patients had been given the Chinese diagnosis of yi-ping (hysteria) by Chinese physicians before being recruited for the study. RESULTS: The subjects' mean age was 37 years. Most were women from rural areas with little education. Major events reported to precede possession included interpersonal conflicts, subjectively meaningful circumstances, illness, and death of an individual or dreaming of a deceased individual. Possessing agents were thought to be spirits of deceased individuals, deities, animals, and devils. Twenty percent of subjects reported multiple possessions. The initial experience of possession typically came on acutely and often became a chronic relapsing illness. Almost all subjects manifested the two symptoms of loss of control over their actions and acting differently. They frequently showed loss of awareness of surroundings, loss of personal identity, inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, change in tone of voice, and loss of perceived sensitivity to pain. CONCLUSIONS: Preliminary findings indicate that the disorder is a syndrome with distinct clinical characteristics that adheres most closely to the DSM-IV diagnosis of dissociative trance disorder under the category of dissociative disorder not otherwise specified.

The experience of being "possessed" by another entity, such as a person, god, demon, animal, or inanimate object, holds different meanings in different cultures. Yet the phenomenon of possession states has been reported worldwide. In a survey of 488 societies in all parts of the world, Bourgignon (1) found that 437 of the societies (90 percent) had one or more institutionalized, culturally patterned form of altered states of consciousness. In 252 societies (52 percent), such experiences were attributed to possession.

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