Illuminati

Vfew people really know that Professor Antony Sutton revealed throughout his historical research that an American power elite, otherwise known generally among Conservatives as the “Liberal Establishment”, had effectively a substantial role in three significant twentieth-century historical events: the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia, the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, and the 1933 seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in Germany. So, we are dealing here with a fundamental historical research almost totally unexplored by the academic world, especially concerning the Portuguese one.

Meanwhile, regarding the rise of Hitler in pre-war Germany, the British Professor also puts in evidence another area to be explored by independent and competent researchers, such as in the stretch:

«The role of this American power elite in the rise of Hitler should also be viewed in conjunction with a little-known aspect of Hitlerism only now being explored: the mystical origins of Naziism, and its relations with the Thule Society and with other conspiratorial groups. This author is no expert on occultism or conspiracy, but it is obvious that the mystical origins, the neo-pagan historical roots of Naziism, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Thule Society, are relatively unknown areas yet to be explored by technically competent researchers. Some research is already recorded in French; probably the best introduction in English is a translation of Hitler et la Tradition Cathare by Jean Michel Angebert.

Angebert reveals the 1933 crusade of Schutzstaffel member Otto Rahn in search of the Holy Grail, which was supposedly located in the Cathar stronghold in Southern France. The early Nazi hierarchy (Hitler and Himmler, as well as Rudolph Hess and Rosenberg) was steeped in a neo-pagan theology, in part associated with the Thule Society, whose ideals are close to those of the Bavarian Illuminati. This was a submerged driving force behind Naziism, with a powerful mystical hold over the hard-core SS. faithful. Our contemporary establishment historians barely mention, let alone explore, these occult origins; consequently, they miss an element equally as important as the financial origins of National Socialism»[1] .

Werner Gerson, the author of an interesting work entitled Le Nazisme Société Secrète, is another researcher who has also studied the occult forces in the side-scenes of human history. In his book, comes mentioned the main role of Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Orden der Illuminaten, a secret society with origins in Bavaria. As we know, Weishaupt was born on 6 February 1748 in Ingolstadt, a university city at the time as well as an active centre on behalf of the Counter-Reformation. In 1773, Weishaupt became a professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, from where some of his students were recruited into the ultra-secret Order of the Illuminati[2] , in which most historians still believe as having been a branch of Freemasonry.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that Weishaupt’s Order was somehow inspired on Masonic Constitutions, as it is possible to see through the esoteric and symbolic language used in the Order, such as apprentice, companion, master, Scottish shield bearer, Scottish Knight, etc. The Order’s mission consisted in the subversion and destruction of all monarchical governments and state organized religions in Europe and its colonies[3] . So, the character of such Order was an elaborate network of spies and counter-spies based on secret reports.

Moreover, Weishaupt knew very well how the Lodges of Freemasonry, namely the Blue one constituted by three degrees – apprentice, companion and master -, would be very useful to counterfeit the true objectives of the Bavarian Illuminati. After all, those degrees could indeed emerge as a veil to simulate the lowest degrees of Weishaupt’s Order. And, in fact, the founder of the Illuminati used his secret society in such a way that every candidate would see it accordingly to his own personal view, or even through his particular interest eventually focused on a specific branch of Freemasonry, or perhaps on a Rosicrucian circle, whenever not in a political association.

Usually presented as a conspiracy theorist, John Robison published in 1797 his work full titled Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. By some means or other, the author provides interesting material on how the Illuminati have started a subversion process that many others[4] believe susceptible to be carefully traced in subsequent organizations throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries[5]. Besides, a French Jesuit priest, named Augustin Barruel (1741-1820), developed a similar view about the infiltration of the Illuminati in the Continental Freemasonry, from which would supposedly come the excesses of the French Revolution as it is historically known.

Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme became Barruel’s book published in 1797-98. It can be considered a crucial document made up of four volumes in which Barruel claims that the French Revolution was deliberately consecrated to the annihilation of Christianity according to a plot hatched by a coalition of philosophers, Freemasons and the Order of the Illuminati. In other words, Barruel alleged that a conspiracy was ultimately carried out by the Jacobins to overthrow the throne and the altar in the name of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”.

On the other side, Barruel’s charges relapse into “philosophism”[6] and intelectual framework promoted by some proponents of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu. Barruel inclusively believed that Voltaire, d’Alembert and Frederick II, the King of Prussia, were working from behind the scenes to plan the course of events that lead to the French Revolution[7]. Besides, Diderot’s Encyclopédie was a Masonic project[8].

Meanwhile, Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, wrote a letter expressing his admiration about the author of the Memoirs. Significantly, he states: «I forgot to say, that I have known myself, personally, five of your principal conspirators; and I can undertake to say from my own certain knowledge, that as far back as the year 1773, they were busy in the plot you have so well described, and in the manner, and on the principle you have so truly represented. To this I can speak as a witness»[9] . In turn, Joseph de Maistre, a French philosopher and a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, rejected Barruel’s conspiracy theory, particularly regarding the implication of the Illuminati in order to overthrow the Church and destroy all monarchies in Europe.

Maistre also refused the idea that Freemasons were behind the French Revolution, though being himself a member of the Scottish Rite Masonic lodge at Chambéry from 1774 to 1790[10] . In spite of his interpretation of the Revolution of 1789 as a providential event, Maistre finally understood that the crimes of the Reign of Terror were the consequence of the rationalist rejection of Christianity, to which the monarchy worked in general by not attending, untimely, the spiritual, social and political tensions developed through the Ancien Régime. So, instead of directing the influence of French civilization to the benefit of mankind, the monarchy somehow promoted the atheistic doctrines of the eighteenth century philosophers, who, intellectually speaking, were indeed responsible for the disorder and bloodshed of the French Revolution.

Besides, the influence of Maitre’s thought on the “utopian socialists”, such as Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, can and should be explained by means of his own analysis of the problem of authority and its legitimacy. That is why Comte acknowledged that the absolute monarchy was not abruptly overthrown by new Enlightenment principles of equality, citizenship and inalienable rights. It was, on the contrary, a gradual process in which feudal, aristocratic and religious privileges, as well as the respective form of government were mostly responsible for the collapse of the status quo.

At the same time, Comte also admitted that the major principles which inspired the final assault against the European feudalism – such as the principle of liberty of conscience, or the principle of popular sovereignty –, were, once having achieved the revolutionary process, no more useful to develop, scientifically, a new secular ideology in the wake of European secularization. The scientific stage[11] , meanwhile designed to come after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, could now be the right one wherein a special science, primarily known as “social physics”[12], would be established to dethrone the so called metaphysical stage[13]. Thereon, while Maistre’s writings, postulating a hierarchical society and a monarchical State, could influence not only “utopian socialists”, but also conservative political thinkers – such as the Spanish Juan Donoso Cortés and, later, the French monarchist Charles Maurras and his counter-revolutionary political movement Action Française –, Comte could, in turn, set his main influence on Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and George Eliot, as well on Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkeim.

By the way, Maistre inclusively saw Bacon as an indisputable forerunner of the Enlightenment. In short, the dubbed “Father of Experimental Science” made from the very beginning a crucial influence[14] on groups of physicians and natural philosophers that finally came up, in 1660, with the “Royal Society of London”. Originally known as the “College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning”, this Society began to be a research group with occult interests, as it can be reported by some illustrious members, among which overtops the astrologer and alchemist Sir Isaac Newton, who also became the Society’s President from 1703 until his death in 1727[15].

Regarding Bacon’s Instauratio Magna[16], it is a matter of greater importance to see how Aristotle’s physical, logical and metaphysical thought was subverted in the Modern Age. With Bacon behind the dawning of the Industrial era, nothing could now prevent the scientific revolution practically made by personalities that, generally speaking, were more interested on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics. So, even when Isaac Newton was able to conceive his theory of colour demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a visible spectrum of colours[17], or, eventually, shared the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus, he could really do it without discarding his religious character[18].

Having acquired many of Newton’s writings on alchemy, John Maynard Keynes stated that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason: He was the last of the magicians”. This surely explains Newton’s Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion in order to expound his corpuscular theory of light, or even his idea of action at a distance, without which he might not have developed his theory of gravity[19]. But, in the end, what really matters is that Newton’s conception of the Universe based upon natural and rationally understandable laws would be one step away from atheism, as largely promoted by Enlightenment ideology.

Since Bacon’s involvement in scientific inquiry, there had to be some way by which his method could become widespread. And we have already said how “The Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge” had started this method with the help of natural philosophers whose influence resided in Bacon’s New Atlantis. But now is time to say something about Maistre’s work titled Examen de la philosophie de Bacon (1836).

The author began to examine how Bacon’s new system of logic, as practically depicted in his new instrument of science (Novum Organum Scientiarum), pretended to be a superior one. This superiority was proclaimed on behalf of what Bacon called true induction in opposition to a pure deduction as a means of discovering truth in natural philosophy. Besides, the Baron of Verulam speaks by himself, as follows:

silogismo1-001“The syllogism is made up of propositions, propositions of words, and words are markers of notions. Thus if the notions themselves are confuse, and recklessly abstracted from things, nothing built on them is sound. The only hope therefore lies in true Induction. (I, Aph. XIV)

In front of Bacon’s eliminative induction opposed to deductive reasoning stemmed on general axioms, or first principles, Maitre argues pointing out the other side of the shield:

1. The Syllogism is profoundly connected with man in such a manner that, changing it, is like changing the real and spiritual nature of the second one.

2. Aristotle’s glory consisted on discovering different types of syllogism and its respective laws. Such discovery can be inclusively understood as a “spiritual anatomy” through which the human thought can be perpetually examined and demonstrated.

3. The inductive reasoning contains virtually the syllogistic one. So, conversely, induction is a syllogism without a middle term.

4. The tri-logical nature of syllogism has an analogical resemblance to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Bacon effectively contrasted the new method of science with that of Aristotle’s works on logic. But, in reality, he spoke of it as a great reformation of all process of knowledge, wherein most sciences and arts – optics, astronomy, music, ethics, politics and medicine – should deeply depend on natural philosophy overruled by inductive reasoning purged of opinions, idols, and false notions. So, as much as the Aristotelian syllogism had been, through the ages, applied to natural and even spiritual realms beyond the physical, Bacon’s induction should now penetrate the forms of nature concealed by the Creator (I, Aph. CXXIV, CXXIX).

The British alchemist probably wouldn’t say, like Goethe did, that “Nature conceals God”, but he certainly would say that man could become much closer with the All-Good while working as “the minister and interpreter of nature”. Besides, if the Creation of God could not be denied by the senses, the best way to contemplate it required a strict scientific study of light at varying rates of vibration as it passes through matter.

For this purpose, Bacon distinguished two types of experiments, the first of which – the luciferous one was especially directed to the light process impressed by God upon the primary particles of matter which makes them come together to produce all the variety of nature. Most useless from a materialistic point of view, this experiment seemed to be the touchstone from which depended the collected and experimental knowledge directed to divine, natural and human fulfillments. Finally, the fructiferous one only offered particular benefits without any solid foundation in scientific inquiry about the modus operandi of Nature itself (I, Aph. XCIX, CXXI).

The Novum Organum – written in Latin and published in 1620 –, was indeed an influential work where Bacon definitely proclaimed the purpose of obtaining knowledge of and power over nature[20]. In any case, this undeniable formulation of the scientific method centered on experimental research shall not be reduced to anti-religious and materialistic concepts. Thus, it is a common mistake to consider Bacon an empiricist, especially when he states that:

1. The aim of human knowledge is to discover the primal and universal axioms regarding the hidden forms, or, more properly, the laws of nature-engendering nature as Bacon said to express the source of emanation, or true difference of a given body. Once accomplished such knowledge of the forms, the aim of human power turns on producing a new feature or property and adding it to a given body, whereas the subordinate goal rests upon the transformation of one concrete body into another within possible limits. Therewith begins the latent processes of natures related to underlying causes that are too small or fast to be perceived, as well as the latent configurations of bodies reported to the atomic structure susceptible of producing the natural world (II, Aph. I, V, VI, VII).

2. The operative process in nature can be sometimes fruitless, because there are natural recesses in which man has no power to act if not produce.

3. The interplay of forms, matter and motion are mostly invisible to the senses[21] . Natural changes are always preceded and followed by all sort of internal and translational movements which cannot be explained through anatomical research. For that reason, all body implies what in it really corresponds to the spirit, or at least to its tangible essence.

Unlike Plato, to whom the unchanging and unseen World of Forms were Archetypes on which depended the apparent world perceived by the misleading senses, Bacon remarks that forms aren’t modeled after anything else, on pain of just being “figments of the human mind…” (I, Aph. LI). The form of a nature is therefore its source for being what it is. In this sense, the form is always present when the nature is present in such a way that implies all the similar and the most unlike cases. Likewise, if the form ceases to exist, the nature infallibly vanishes or simply disappears[22] .

Considering Aristotle’s four types of causes – the efficient, material, formal and final –, Bacon argues that only the formal cause may lead to new discoveries and reach the deeper boundaries of nature. Hence, forms are also described as the laws of action in Bacon´s parlance:

«For when I speak of Forms, I mean nothing more than those laws and determinations of absolute actuality, which govern and constitute any simple nature, as heat, light, weight, in every kind of matter and subject that is susceptible of them. Thus the Form of Heat or the Form of Light is the same thing as the Law of Heat or the Law of Light» (II, Aph. XVII).

Additionally, Bacon refused Aristotle’s concepts of potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (entelecheia) in association with the matter and the form. None the less it is true that, for the Greek philosopher, all universals are instantiated for the reason that each universal can be predicated from existing things. But, if actuality is the end (telos) to which potentiality is acquired, how could Bacon receive such principle except for issues which deal with human action?

Despite Aristotle’s disagreement with Plato on the existence of universal forms that are not a part of particular things, Bacon was very clear stating that many objects in science won’t have explicit end-goals or purposes. Instead, Aristotle believed that final causes guided all natural processes in a graded scale of perfection rising from plants on up to man. In a similar fashion, Plato’s disciple also held that the level of a creature’s perfection was reflected in its form, but not preordained by that form.

For Aristotle, the motion of natural things is determined from within them, while in the classical mechanics motion is determined from without, whether it results from gravity, friction, contact, or some other source. But, unfortunately, the laws of nature became more and more subordinated to mathematical methods in which motion remained uniformly expressed, as it can be seen in Galileo’s theoretical work on falling bodies. In broader terms, Galileo clearly stated that the laws of nature were mathematical, as he wrote in Il Saggiatore, published in Rome in 1623:

«Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth»[23].

Descartes’ influence in mathematics is equally known, especially through his development of analytic geometry. Descartes also suggested that the body works like a machine, advocating that the pineal gland is “the seat of the soul” by means of which the body interacts. In contrast, Aristotle placed the rational soul in the heart, rather than the brain.

At any rate, who did not have a human heart was José Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, also known as the most prominent and despotic Minister in the government of D. José I from 1750 to 1777. Ironically rewarded by the King of Portugal as Count of Oeiras in 1759, as well as Marquis of Pombal in 1770, the powerful Minister was instrumental in advancing the new secularist zeitgeist of the Enlightenment at the expense of individual liberty. From this viewpoint, Pombal showed no mercy in establishing censorship on one hand, breaking the power of the aristocracy on the other, to finally consolidate personal control and profit in the name of administrative, educational, economic and ecclesiastical reforms.

Having lived in Vienna and London, the latter city in particular being a major centre of the Enlightenment[24], Sebastião José began accusing the Jesuits of having a secret code of instructions in order to gain power, wealth and influence on behalf of world domination[25]. This propaganda war[26] was inter-connected with an international campaign for the suppression of the Society of Jesus, in which the Minister of D. José I managed to be a pioneer with the help of an organized system of works, laws, libels and pastoral charters[27]. So, as soon as the Portuguese crown expelled the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759[28], most European countries went carrying on the same process, such as France (1764), Spain, Austria, Parma, Naples and the Two Sicilies (1767).

Ensuring the tyrant’s victory against his enemies, Pope Clement XIV finally issued the brief Dominus ac Redemptor (21 July 1773) to suppress the Society of Jesus. Even so, in non-Catholic nations, particularly in Prussia and Russia, the order was plainly ignored. Nevertheless, the political moves that led to it would not only inspire, in the future, the upholders of the prerogatives of kings, but also new anticlerical movements settled by a large number of Freemasons as well as monarchical and republican positivists.

In due proportion to his subtle and unscrupulous character in attaining ends, Sebastião José kept for a long time the Inquisition with the help of his brother, Paulo de Carvalho, who, in one’s possession, preserved the older stratagems of torture and physical abuse to serve the crown interest. So, for at least twenty four years under the consulship of the Marquis of Pombal, the dungeons of the Inquisition were functioning alongside with the prisons of the Bugio, Foz, Pedrouços and suchlike. In the presence of this scaring scenario, neither the Duke of Choiseul could himself believe on how the Marquis dared to keep a tribunal independently established by the papacy.

Besides, the Pombaline reform of education[29], otherwise supported by new taxes, had but one goal: the centralization of every public and particular teaching structure in order to ideologically work into shape the professorship. In one word, all the teachers of “primary and secondary” schools – exactly the same as the university ones – changed into something ruled by bureaucratic and economical profits dictated by a heavy hand. On that account, the Pombaline Canon demanded the abolition of the neo-Scholastic movement based on the Aristotelian tradition carried on by whom, from the end of the 16th century, became the intellectual leader of the Roman Catholic world[30].

It is a fact that the Marquis of Pombal considered Aristotle abominable. But, in reality, his true enemy was not the Greek philosopher, as he perfectly knew. It was, on the contrary, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez whose doctrine, adopted by the Dominicans and the Jesuits, advocated, if necessary, the act of killing a tyrant.

Descartes himself was surely acquainted with the Commentarii during his passage into the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche (1606-1615). In truth, he was a student of Father Estevão Noel, who, apart from the Commentarii, used to teach the logic work of Pedro da Fonseca. The Météores, included with the Dioptrique and the Géométrie in the Discours de la méthod (1637), was, for instance, a Cartesian work inspired in the Aristotelian theory of meteors as exposed in the compendium (In Libros Meteororum, 1593) of Manuel de Góis.

In part, Immanuel Kant likewise developed his ideal of pure reason by studying the compendiums of the Portuguese schoolmen. In that way, Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism only proves that the previous Scholastic architecture, as taught in the European universities, became generally insufficient to elaborate a philosophical open system in which reason and faith are complementary rather than contradictory. Conceivable is thereby that Étienne Gilson, an “Immortal” member of the French Academy, would saw in Saint Thomas Aquinas the first of the modern philosophers as well as in Descartes the last of the scholastic one.

The most reliable thinker to eventually draw the inference about Aristotles’ exclusion of the Portuguese culture was Álvaro Ribeiro. Such a one has consisted above all in the outlaw of the philosophical thought from the academia establishment during the last two centuries. For that very reason, Positivism, Marxism and all forms of materialistic indoctrination have been unfortunately accepted and spread around every academic community and its subordinated educational system.

inwarAristotelian, Álvaro Ribeiro was also one of the first intellectuals able to see that the UN Organization was politically incompatible with the Portuguese spiritual ideal of a better world in support of individual freedom. For the rest, Álvaro´s criticism of the United Nations was overwhelmingly directed to the UNESCO, a specialized agency wherein the moral and the educational issues are strongly imbued of abstract and sociological methods. So, in his sharp-pointed view, the United Nations have been mostly created for the establishing of a one world government to which all the spiritual thinkers should definitely reply.

Further, the solution pointed out by Álvaro Ribeiro was basically focused on preserving and developing national tradition through philosophical thought. However, the fact is that throughout the 1960s Portugal became confronted with the armed revolutionary movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea. Salazar, firmly, resisted using, on one hand, military action against scattered guerrilla activity in Overseas Territories, while, on the other, ordered diplomatic reply in international organizations such as the UN as the most sneaky, criminal and perverted one.

Since 1945 and even before that, Salazar knew perfectly well how Western sovereign nations were eventually starting to migrate to a world government. With the UN Organization appearance, such process came into order with its parliamentary character more and more settled on abusive intervention in most countries’ policy around the world. Portugal, of course, was no exception, even when everyone knew how the terrorist attacks carefully planned and tactically perpetrated in its Overseas Provinces were equivalent to weaken the strategic fulcrum points of Western Civilization.

Comprehensively, Moscow, at the time, played this insidious game. But, unfortunately, Washington[31] , London and other leading capitals of the so called Western world also did it by means of financing, recruiting, arming and training gangs, factions and movements of guerrillas to subvert pacific populations in Portuguese Africa. Besides, being Portugal a multicultural, multiracial and a pluricontinental nation since the 15th century, it is not difficult to accomplish that, once questioned and deprived of its political rights based on historical tradition, the progress and the well-being of Africa’s continent would be forever lost.

There is a movement afoot known as the John Birch Society, founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958, by a group of 12 led by Robert Welch, Jr. (1899–1985). One of the first public activities of the society, otherwise pledged with Christian principles and conservative values, was a campaign which claimed in 1959 that the UN globalist agenda consisted of building a “One World Government”. In short form, the Bircher slogan campaign, pressing for an end to United States membership in the United Nations, was “Get US Out!”

In fact, Robert Welch denounced that the governments of both the United States and the Soviet Union were controlled by a cabal of corporate internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians whose roots could be found in the Enlightenment-age secret society of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, Welch somehow acknowledged how difficult it was to trace the Illuminati conspiracy after the Order suppression by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his preemptive campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies able to overthrow the Bavarian monarchy and its state religion: the Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, Welch referred to the Conspirators as “The Insiders”, relating them with the international financiers widely known as the Rothschild and the Rockefeller families, as well as with nongovernmental organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission as fronts for a master conspiracy in which the Communist movement was also a very useful instrument managed by a shadow government[32].

Today, we live undoubtedly in a less free world. Reasonable doubts, however, can exist about knowing if the Illuminati survived its suppression in 1784. But, in the end, one thing can be sure: “The Insiders”, whosoever they may be, will definitely lose because All-mighty God is the greatest “Conspirator” of all.

FOOTNOTES:

 


[1] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Clairview, 2010, p. 14.

[2] This Order was founded on 1st May 1776 as the “Order of Perfectibilists”. From 1782 “Brother Spartacus”, the symbolic name adopted by Weishaupt, recruited in Weimar the Duke Charles August (Eschylus), Goethe (Abaris), Herder (Damasus pontifex), Schardt (Apollonius), von Fritsch (Werner). By the time, he also recruited the Baron Dalberg, the Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, the Count and the future Prince of Metternich, and last but not least, the Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha.

[3] Weishaupt’s radical goal was from the very beginning not only directed towards the German society but to the entire world. Besides, he had developed a Gnostic worldview in order to achieve an age of Enlightenment raised by natural reason. Thus, a welcome reform would finally come through Deistic reeducation regarding the “moral perfection of human nature”.

[4] That is the case of Nesta Helen Webster, a British feminist writer who, inclusively, considered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an “open question”. However, the crucial point regarding the Illuminati conspiracy proceeds from her book The French Revolution: a Study in Democracy, in which she says: «The lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati were thus the source whence emanated all those anarchic schemes which culminated in the Terror, and it was at a great meeting of the Freemasons in Frankfurt-am-Main, three years before the French Revolution began, that the deaths of Louis XVI and Gustav III of Sweden were first planned». Curiously, Winston Churchill himself praised her in a 1920 article entitled Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People, in which he asserted: «This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution» (Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920).

On the other hand, we have also the case of William James Guy Carr, whose works were notably influenced by the writings of Nester Webster and many other authors such as Léo Taxil, l’abbé Augustin Barruel and John Robison. Carr sustained a global conspiracy theory consisting of two main subjects: international communism and international capitalism, both controlled by the Illuminati and the international bankers, mainly represented by the Rothschild and the Rockefeller families. Carr also refers to an alleged plan for Three World Wars, inspired, as he believed, by the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction, Albert Pike. Carr’s books such as Pawns in the Game (1955), The Red Fog over America (1955) or even Satan, Prince of This World (1959), were really influential among conspiracy believers like Dan Smoot (The Invisible Government, 1962), Gary Allen (The Rockefeller File, 1976; Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State, 1976; Say “No!” to the New World Order, 1987), Richard T. Osborne (The Great International Conspiracy, 1974 ; The Coming of World War III, 2006), Myron C. Fagan (Audio Document (LP) : The Illuminati and The Council on Foreign Relations, recorded in 1967-1968).

[5] In Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), there is some evidence on how the “New World Order” is being carefully prepared, especially through the international banking system by means of the US Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In his book The Anglo-American Establishment: from Rhodes to Cliveden, written in 1949 but published posthumously in 1981, Quigley also purports that a secret society, formally established in 1891 by John Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, has played a significant role in recent world history. Curiously, it seems that this secret society, which as a whole does not have a formal name, was simultaneously based on the Jesuit and the Masonic models, due to its elaborate hierarchical structure with an inner circle (“The Society of the Elect”) and an outer circle (“The Association of Helpers”). According to Professor Quigley, the outer circle became, through Lord Milner’s initiative, the British Round Table organization in 1909, namely responsible for several historical events, including the Jameson Raid, the Second Boer War, the founding of the Union of South Africa, the replacement of the British Empire with the Commonwealth of Nations, and many of Britain’s foreign policy decisions in the twentieth century.

In addition, the American historian states, in Tragedy and Hope, that he had been in direct contact with this organization, whose nature he contrasts to right-wing claims of a communist conspiracy: «This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements…. This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies… but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known».

Yet, Antony Sutton stated in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler: «Quigley goes a long way to provide evidence for the existence of the power elite, but does not penetrate the operations of the elite. Possibly, the papers used by Quigley had been vetted, and did not include documentation on elitist manipulation of such events as the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s accession to power, and the election of Roosevelt in 1933. More likely, these political manipulations may not be recorded at all in the files of the power groups. They may have been unrecorded actions by a small ad hoc segment of the elite. It is noteworthy that the documents used by this author came from government sources, recording the day-to-day actions of Trotsky, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, J.P. Morgan and the various firms and banks involved».

[6] Barruel defined “philosophism” as «the error of every man who, judging of all things by the standard of his own reason, rejects in religious matters every authority that is not derived from the light of nature…» (Vol. I, chap 1, 4).

[7] Curiously, the individuals that played a direct role in the Enlightenment and within the planned conspiracy against Christianity used secret names: Voltaire was “Raton”, d’Alembert was “Protagoras”, Frederick II was “Luc”, and Diderot was known as “Plato”.

[8] As a Freemason, Condorcet was also an influential leader who supported the French Revolution. Too many others conspired equally, as, for instance, the Baron d’Holbach, Buffon, La Mettrie, Raynal, Abbé Yvon, Abbé de Prades, Abbé Morrelet, La Harpe, Marmontel, Bergier and Duclos.

[9]Edmund Burke to Abbé Barruel, May 1, 1797, in Thomas W. Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 Vols. (Chicago and Cambridge, 1958–1978), 9: 319–320.

[10] In turn, Gerard Encausse, a Parisian doctor whose esoteric pseudonym was Papus, said that Ramsay’s Scottish System was the one behind the French Revolution and the principles of atheism and materialism (cf. Martinésisme, Willermosisme, Martinisme et Franco-Maçonnerie, 1899). While claiming an alleged revenge of the Knights Templar, this System not only prepared and spread a revolutionary subversion within a great number of Masonic degrees, orders and bodies, but also applied the new dictatorial Masonic Constitutions to society. Meanwhile, a considerable opposition to such political revolving movement – and particularly to the Bavarian Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt –, came especially through Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. They were both initiated in the Christian Enlightenment by Martinez de Pasqually, a Portuguese theurgical operator who founded the Ordre des Chevaliers Maçons Élus Cohens de L’Univers (Order of Knight-Masons Elect Priests of the Universe), which apparently functioned as a Masonic obedience in France.

[11] The scientific stage, rejecting introspective and intuitional attempts, resides on observation and classification of data derived from positive sense experience in order to establish cause and effect relationship. Therefore, Comte would say: “from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action.”

[12]Physique social, according to Comte, and later renamed sociology.

[13] Comte offered an account of social evolution based on the general “law of three stages”: (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical and (3) the positive. The progression of the three stages is deeply connected with Comte’s proposal of a systematic and hierarchical classification of the sciences, developed in this order of growing complexity: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. However, there was a seventh science, one even greater than sociology, which was Anthropology or the true science of Man as the last gradation in the Grand Hierarchy of Abstract Science.

[14] This influence can, eventually, be found in Bacon’s work titled “New Atlantis”, in which the so called “Solomon’s House” seems to have inspired an attempt, in 1667, to establish a permanent “College” for the Society. For the rest, Frances Yeats, in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), says that the Royal Society began to be a Masonic institution deeply influenced by figures such as Elias Ashmole and Robert Fludd identified themselves as Rosicrucians. So, the British historian not only points how Hermetic tradition and magical thinking played an important role in early modern science and philosophy, but also reveals how the “Invisible College”, exactly the same as described in the Rosicrucian Manifestos written in the early 17th century in Europe, finally became the Royal Society.

[15] Today, the Society formally acts as Her Majesty’s Government’s chief scientific advisor, and is the United Kingdom’s Academy of Sciences. Besides, the Royale Society acts as well as an advisor to the European Commission and the United Nations on matters of science.

[16] “The Great Instauration” is Bacon’s universal reform of knowledge inspired in the Work of the Six Days of Creation, as defined in the Bible, leading to the Seventh Day of Rest or Sabbath in which Adam’s dominion over creation would be restored.

[17] Regarding the refraction of light, Newton, due to his knowledge of “corpuscular alchemy”, was also capable, by using a lens and a second prism, of recomposing the multicoloured spectrum into white light. While doing so, his main conclusion was that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves.

[18] It seems that Newton wrote more on religion than he did on natural science. As we know, Newton’s religious view rejected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that defines God as three divine persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. Put another way, Newton, an unorthodox Christian, held an Arian view which taught that God the Father and the Son did not exist together eternally.

Newton’s studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers become specially known in a critical dissertation titled An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, where, besides blaming the Roman Church of “pious frauds”, claims to review all the textual evidence available from ancient sources on two dispute Bible passages: 1 John 5:7 and 1 Timothy 3:16. Based on the King James Biblical Version, Newton argues that the first passage must have been “He was manifest in the flesh” instead of “God was manifest in the flesh.” As far as the second one, Newton claims that the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” – which stands God in three persons co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial –, did not appear in the original Greek Scriptures.

[19] It is also worth noting that Newton did not actually use the term “inertia” with regard to his First Law of Motion. In fact, Newton’s original idea, borrowed from Kepler’s definition of “inertia” in terms of a resistance to movement, was focused on “the innate force of matter” possessed by an object to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line. Given this perspective, we must conclude that Galileo and Descartes were the ones who really unified the Aristotelian principles of rest and motion into one mechanical principle subjected to mathematic analysis.

[20] For Bacon, matters of policy were likewise inseparable from a widespread science revolution (I, Aph. LXXX). During Queen Elizabeth’s Office, he even advocated for the employment of a Minister for Science and Technology, which never took place. Then it is no surprise that Bacon’s view of the theory and practice of law and his view of the theory and practice of science were strictly parallel, as Barry Gower recognized more emphatically: «Those who concern themselves with the nature of justice and its relation to legitimate authority in a state need to reflect on the ways in which justice is administered, determined and delivered. In a similar way, those who would concern themselves with nature must have, or be prepared to acquire, knowledge of the ways in which nature works. If, to have that knowledge, they need experiments to make the world reveal its secrets, then there is a continuing parallel with the law in that … lawyers need inquisitions and trials to make justice prevail. As Bacon put it when drawing King James’s attention to the expenses incurred by experimenters: “as secretaries and spials of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spials and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills.” The value of experiments which exhibit nature under investigation lies in their ability to reveal the truths nature would otherwise conceal, just as the value of espionage and inquisition lies in their ability to reveal the truths people would otherwise conceal» (Scientific method: An historical and philosophical introduction. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 45-46).

[21] Leaning on the “physical” theory of Democritus which says that atoms are not visible to human senses, Bacon adds that all the instruments able to amplify and accurate those senses are worthless without science’s knowledge of and over nature (I, Aph. L).

[22] For more in this matter, Bacon explains: «For since the Form of a thing is the very thing itself, and the thing differs from the form no otherwise than as the apparent differs from the real, or the external from the internal, or the thing in reference to man from the thing in reference to the universe; it necessarily follows that no nature can be taken as the true form, unless it always decrease when the nature in question decreases, and in like manner always increase when the nature in question increases» (II, Aph. XIII).

[23] In this treatise, Galileo evaluates the astronomical views of a Jesuit, Orazio Grassi, who, based on mathematical reasoning, asserted that comets move above the Moon. Galileo, in turn, countered that comets were just an optical illusion.

[24] As the Portuguese ambassador to Great Britain, Melo was especially familiar with the anti-Jesuit British tradition, and in Vienna he had made friendship with Gerhard van Swieten, a confidant of Maria Theresa of Austria and a staunch adversary of the Austrian Jesuits’ influence.

[25] Pombal inspired himself in the Monita Secreta – otherwise known as Secret Instructions of the Jesuits – to orchestrate a conspiracy theory supporting the Order’s desire for power by means of crimes and abominations of every kind – immoralities, conspiracies, murders and regicides. It is widely known that such Secret Instructions were a forgery considered to be made by one Jerome Zahorowski, a Pole, who, having been a member of the Society, had been expelled in 1611. The Secret Instructions first appeared in Krakow in 1612 in the form of a manuscript, purporting to be a translation from the Spanish, and were printed in the same city in 1614. Amongst those who have argued that the Secret Instructions are a hoax are, for instance, Bishop Lipski of Cracow (1616), Fra Paolo Sarpi (the historian of the Council of Trent), the Jansenist Henri de Saint-Ignace and Blaise Pascal.

[26] Étienne Pasquier, a French lawyer, was one of the former propaganda theorists over against the Society of Jesus. In 1565, he became famous by pleading the cause of the University of Paris against the Jesuits, and won it. Later on, was published Pasquier’s work titled Le Catéchisme des Jésuites (1602), translated in seven languages at least.

[27] Most chief European libraries preserve many of these works, mostly translated to French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Latin and even Chinese language.

Sample 17[28] In the sequence of the attempted assassination of D. José I on September 3, 1758, Sebastião José took, at the very beginning, the opportunity to implicate the Jesuits by alleging their prior knowledge of the attempted regicide. Among those arrested and executed was Gabriel Malagrida, the Jesuit confessor of Leonor of Távora. Unfortunately, she and her husband the Count of Alvor, along with the Duke of Aveiro, the Marquis of Alorna and the Count of Atouguia, were not spared as well for the reason that they were also among the bitterest enemies of the “Prime Minister” of Portugal.

[29] The chief inspirer of such a reform was a representative of the Enlightenment: Luís António Verney (1713-1792). Owing to his anti-Jesuitical learning outlook, Portugal imported a great number of professors skilled in modern physics as thenceforth practiced in Central and Northern Europe. Thus, the Enlightenment’s entry in Portugal stemmed on denationalized professors of algebra, astronomy, surgery and natural philosophy.

[30] In Portugal, the neo-Scholastic movement was founded by the Jesuits of Coimbra, also known as the Conimbricenses. Between 1592 and 1601, they published eight voluminous commentaries on the philosophical writings of Aristotle titled Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societis Iesu. Originally, these commentaries were dictations to the students by the professors and as such were not intended for publication. But, fortunately, the Commentarii were afterwards corrected and supervised for publication through the chief work of Manuel de Góis and his auxiliaries Baltazar Álvares, Cosme de Magalhães and Sebastião do Couto.

Written in flowing Latin, the Commentarii included all the commentators of Aristotle since the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (232–304) to the Andalusian Muslim Ibn Rush (1026-1198), commonly known as Averroes or, inclusively, “The Commentator” with regard to Aristotle’s philosophy. On the whole they included all the Greek, Roman, Arabian and Latin medieval schoolmen for the main purpose of setting reliable explanations and exhaustive discussion of the system of Aristotle. Besides, they were translated and used in many European countries, such as Germany, France, Italy, and also printed in Jesuit schools outside Europe, particularly in Bahia (Brazil), Goa and even China.

But, for the present, let us remind the Jesuit philosopher Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599), known in his time as the “Portuguese Aristotle”. In fact, he was one of the first school teachers selected with tree others (Marcos Jorge, Cipriano Soarez e Pedro Gómez) to realize the Commentarii project, which, in the meantime, did not proceed under the auspices of such an illustrious group. Nevertheless, Father Pedro da Fonseca wrote two masterworks worthy of memory, such as the Instittutiones Dialecticarum and the Commentariorum in Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis. The later one included the Greek text of Aristotle, while the first one – much appreciated by Gottfried Leibniz – enjoyed great success throughout European universities well into the eighteenth century.

[31] In Interdicted Dialogues (Vol. I, 1979), Franco Nogueira – the Salazar´s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1961 and 1969 – records what, in May 16th, 1962, was told to him in Lisbon by an American journalist, Constantine Brown: 1. President Kennedy was a weak character entirely dominated by a group of a dozen personalities in which figured Bundy, Schlesinger and Rostow as the most likely influential of all; 2. This group had an ultimate goal: a) appease Russia by all means; b) sacrifice, if necessary, all Western Europe by destroying the Governments of Adenauer, De Gaulle and Oliveira Salazar; c) submerge all sovereign nation-states, including the US one; d) bring up a single world order ruled by the United Nations.

[32] Regarding the global conspiracy, Welch also pointed the government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Welch, inclusively, accused some collegiate fraternities (Skull and Bones) and gentlemen’s clubs (Bohemian Club) as front organizations on behalf of a “New World Order”. And more recently, the Birch’s society accused the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by favouring political and economic globalization before the principles of the U.S. Constitution.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

Our Lady of Fatima

Nossa Senhora do Rosário de Fátima (Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima) is the Portuguese devotional name given to the Blessed Virgin Mary who reportedly appeared to the three shepherd children at a location known as the Cova da Iria near their home village of Fatima in Portugal. These Apparitions occurred on the 13th day of five months in 1917[1], starting on May 13th. The three children were the ten year old Lúcia de Jesus dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto who were nine and seven years old respectively.

According to Lúcia’s account, the Lady, “brighter than the sun, shedding rays of light clearer and stronger than a crystal ball filled with the most sparkling water and pierced by the burning rays of the sun”, confided to the children three secrets which expressed elements of prophecy and eschatology with regard to a possible war[2] and the conversion of Russia. Consequently, while the first secret was a vision of Hell, the second one included instructions on how to save souls and convert the world to the Christian faith, without which suffer and punishment would certainly come by means of war, famine, nations annihilated and persecutions of the Church and the Holy Father.

To prevent this, the Lady asked for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart. Pope Pius XII apparently did it, according to his Apostolic Letter Sacro Vergente of 7th July 1952:

«Just as a few years ago [1942] We consecrated the entire human race to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, so today We consecrate and in a most special manner We entrust all the peoples of Russia to this Immaculate Heart…».

In fact, Pope Pius XII had a special relation to Our Lady of Fatima. Besides, Eugenio Pacelli began his Church career when Pope Benedict XV elevated him to archbishop in the Sistine Chapel on 13th May 1917, the date of the first of Our Lady’s Apparitions. And, curiously, he was also laid to rest in the crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica on 13th October 1958, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

On the other hand, the theology of Pius XII is so very deeply related with his Mariology that, on 1st November 1950, the Pope itself defined the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary, as follows:

«By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory».

By the way, the «immaculate heart», in compliance with the Gospel of Matthew (5, 8), means the inner unity to «see God» as the perfect and harmonious centre of all existence. Thereby, we must not exclude the confluence of reason, wish and sensibility to search God’s love and His grace in order to redeem the world. Thus, the Apparitions at Fatima can be felt and understood as a miracle of God, especially when we know how they predicted the beginning of an era of error, atheism and mass destruction.

In 1917, most people ignored the true meaning of the word Communism. Even today, the general public doesn’t know that 200 millions of Russians were then delivered to a Communist tyranny which was not possible if a small secretive group with a globalist agenda worked for it. So, the head masters who financed the Bolshevik Revolution where not Russian millionaires, but especially some Anglo-American banking circles, in which we can find the brothers Warburg, the American banker Jacob Schiff and some English figures as Sir George Buchanan and Lord Alfred Milner[3].

Trotsky, for instance, was living in New York at the beginning of 1917. His family, while living in a sumptuous apartment with a telephone and a refrigerator, occasionally travelled in a chauffered limousine. This was really possible because Trotsky was being financed by the brothers Warburg, who also made possible Trotsky´s return to Russia with an army supply and 275 revolutionary terrorists well trained. In turn, Lenin was, meanwhile, living in Switzerland, sponsored by the same brothers in order to prepare the destruction of Imperial Russia through the implantation of the Bolshevik Revolution.

From where else would then come the millions of dollars to finance and bankroll the Soviet Union, namely the New Economic Policy (NEP), without which the collapse of Communism would be eminent? And the answer is: from international bankers and leading businessmen such as the Rothschild[4], Rockefeller[5], Schiff, Warburg, Milner and Harriman, whose chief goal was to implant Communism to control the global economic production and, by that, to assure that no country, nation or empire could risk or put in danger the major corporations of such mega-capitalist families.

By the way, it seems that The Great War (1914-1918), as well as the Second World War (1939-1945) were both previously planned and conducted not only to insure the implantation of Communism in Russia but also its expansion into Central Europe and even into the Chinese Continent. Besides, a distinguished Professor named Antony Sutton, reveals, by original documents and eyewitness accounts, how Western technology planned an important role into the Soviet economic development[6]. In other words, the British professor carefully traces how some industrial and financial circles of the US[7] captured the huge Russian market a decade and a half before the US recognized the Soviet regime.

On the other side, we can find more unconventional views exposed by Deirdre Manifold in Fatima and the Great Conspiracy, in the following terms:

1.Towards the end of World War II the German High Command, by means of its Ambassador to Turkey, secretly requested a peace negotiation. This request was sent only to President Roosevelt, whose silence can be confirmed by Curtis B. Dall, the author of F. D. R.: My Exploited Father-in-Law. Meanwhile, the American Generals, who were commanding the European Forces, wanted to reach Czechoslovakia to finally reach Berlin. Nevertheless, they were hindered by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, since he was practically aware of the secret ultimate goal of such a war, which was the imposition of Communism in Poland[8], Pomerania and Eastern Prussia[9].

6832164 f5202.The attack on Pearl Harbor conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy on the morning of December 7th, 1941 (December 8th in Japan), was a favorable issue coming from a Machiavellian plan whose goal was to inflict a profound shock on the American people in order to accept the US entry into World War II in both the Pacific and European theatres. By this means, Roosevelt’s Administration could really find a backdoor entry to declare war to the Axis Powers headed by Germany, Italy and Japan. So, when the Japanese attack was finally launched upon the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, the US Intelligence Forces already knew the hour and the precise minute of such a sneaky attack.

3.The Japanese also tried to get a peace negotiation twelve months before their formal surrender aboard the United States Navy battleship USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945. General Mac Arthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), received inclusively a peace offer which was practically the same achieved by the two belligerents at the end of World War II. General Mac Arthur immediately sent a memorandum to President Roosevelt, hoping to cease war operations in the Pacific theatre. But Roosevelt ignored the memorandum up to the point of not taking it with him to the Yalta Conference, held in Crimea (4-11 February, 1945) for the official purpose of discussing Europe’s post-war reorganization. An unfortunate tragedy, indeed, if we consider the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

4.For the implementation of Communism in Eastern Asia, a secret pact was subscribed in Yalta between Roosevelt and Stalin. Alger Hiss, a Soviet secret agent, was present at that meeting[10]. Besides, the Soviet spy was also a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IRP), founded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations.

5.At the cost of 200 000 American soldiers killed in the Pacific War, the Soviet Union amazingly plucked the fruits coming from the capitulation of Japan. Thus, the USSR not only invaded Manchuria on 8th August 1945, but also took possession of the Kuril and Sakhalin Islands, as well as Mongolia and even of three provinces which by itself represents the third part of China, otherwise known as Sin-Kiang. In truth, China’s communization was a complete success no matter how certain periods of apparent hostility were sustained between both Russian and Chinese Powers.

6.The Soviet agents infiltrated in the US establishment orchestrated a larger propaganda against Chiang Kai-shek through mainstream media or, more properly, through editorialists, Statesmen and annalists bent on crucial disinformation about the Communist methods of Red China. Several books such as The Making of Modern China, by Owen and Eleanor Lattimore, or New Frontiers in Asia, by Mark Gayn[11], or even United States and China, by John K. Fairbank, are main examples on how these authors, as members of the Institute of Pacific Relations, were all favorable to the expansion plans of Communism in Eastern Asia. And, of course, Henry Kissinger himself performed also an important role in establishing a “New World Order” in the sequel of two trips he made to the People’s Republic of China in July and October, 1971, during Nixon’s Administration[12].

In Fatima, the Blessed Mother exhorted us to find peace in the world by giving ourselves back to God, particularly through prayer and devotion. But unfortunately, man continues to perpetuate terror and slavery around the world, by means of economical, political and psychological war. The military view is obviously a crucial part in this process, though its chief goal is especially conducted to promote chaos and anarchy through revolutionary strategy and guerrilla warfare. This aspect was eminently put in practice by Communist agents in the twentieth century, such as Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and suchlike.

Accordingly, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, can all be considered the paragon of how the guerrilla tactics normally operate to induce domestic subversion, treason, deception, duplicity, falsehood, hate and civil war. Stalin, for instance, had the very spitting image of a plan like Lenin’s, a revolutionary plan to conquer Europe, then the Extreme East and finally the United States corrupting the American youth through drugs, pornography, the Hollywood Film Industry and anti-Homeland propaganda.

Based upon theory, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was supported by the United States to help the European Powers against Russia’s Communist expansion. But, in practice, there were times when the US policy went on lethal contradiction, expressly during Kennedy’s Administration in what regards Africa’s destiny. In this sense, the US policy was practically parallel to Russia’s, because of its results in debilitating Europe’s strategic and economical fulcrum points.

Generally speaking, the United States certainly didn’t approve or advise terrorist action. In any case, Kennedy’s Administration supported political and financially some guerrilla movements in Angola and Mozambique[13]. And, above all, America’s influence in Congo – crucial for its frontier with Angola -, was an indubitable fact over increased by the US instruction to the UN forces, which, in turn, were also providing the leaders of guerrilla movements.

Even the Nordic countries, ideologically immersed in social democracy (socialism), financed terrorist action in Portuguese Africa, such as Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The Vatican itself, through His Holiness Pope Paul VI, has collaborated with the Soviet Union’s Communist strategy by receiving in Rome the African terrorist leaders in sign of political recognition. Amongst this leaders of guerrilla movements were Amílcar Cabral, from the PAIGC («African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde»), Agostinho Neto, from the MPLA («Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola») and Marcelino dos Santos, from the FRELIMO («Mozambican Liberation Front»).

Very interesting is yet the content of the verbal message from Roswell Gilpatric to Oliveira Salazar by the hand of Prince Radziwill, a well known scion of the Polish princely house of Radziwill. So, in March 2nd, 1965, Salazar was informed that the United States were available to restart the war material supply to Portugal and, at the same time, ready to guarantee that no more secret aid to terrorist leaders in Angola and Mozambique would take place coming from North American private institutions, as, specifically, the Ford Foundation.[14]. But the US President, Lyndon Johnson, did not have any interest in Portugal’s affairs, making ultimately useless the verbal message of Gilpatric[15].

In 1984, Pope John Paul II consecrated also the entire world to the Virgin Mary without explicitly mentioning Russia. Yet, there is a statement coming from Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, claiming that he had met with Sister Lúcia, who reportedly told him: «I have already said that the consecration desired by Our Lady was made in 1984, and has been accepted in Heaven». But there is more coming now from one of Lúcia’s letters (1990) in response to a question by Rev. Father Robert J. Fox: «I come to answer your question, “If the consecration made by Pope John Paul II on March 25th, 1984 in union with all the bishops of the world, accomplished the conditions for the consecration of Russia according to the request of Our Lady in Tuy on June 13th of 1929?” Yes, it was accomplished, and since then I have said that it was made».

So, the question still is: are we safeguarded against Russia’s errors and sins in the present day? The answer to such a question is a very difficult one, because there are too many difficult issues to attend in the so called Post-Cold War World. We have, for instance, what Daniel Estulin, in his work Shadow Masters, describes as new world supremacy without national frontiers, where a financial global network offers more and more opportunities to criminal organizations which conspire to carry out illegal acts merged with all types of political and economic systems. Today, Russia is more than ever a clear example of how organized crime is an institutionalized part of the administrative bureaucracy government, or, more accurately, how the Russian mafia, otherwise known as Vorovskoi Mir (“Thieves’ World”), is conducting an informal as well as a professional criminal process as it was practically developed in the Soviet era.

Unlike Colombian, Italian, Mexican, or other well-known forms of organized crime, the Russian mafia is today the most powerful enterprise on the planet. This was only possible because the old Soviet state and its command-economy system prepared secretly, through the KGB and the Soviet party’s Central Committee, an organized retreat in order to strategically preserve a kernel to, in time, return to a governmental Communist structure. Now, many of the KGB agents are not only government bureaucrats, but also the elite criminals who are responsible for perpetuating the historical symbiosis between the Soviet state and the illegal enterprises with both legal and black-market connections that were based on the misuse of state property and funds.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the author of The Grand Chessboard, considers Russia’s abundance of material resources the turning point issue to the American Foreign Policy. Thence his emphasis on Eurasia’s total control, where 75% of the world population lives wrapped up by the most material wealth in the planet, such as petroleum, precious metals, natural gas and all kinds of raw material. Moreover, Eurasia’s total control brings with it Africa’s subordination, as well as the power control in the Western hemisphere and in the Eastern one.

Between Two Ages: American’s Role in the Technotronic Era is also a Brzezinski’s book much appreciated by David Rockefeller. According to his thesis, coordinating policy among developed nations is necessary to consolidate economic and political global stability, or, in a few words, a one world government. This is why Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, serving as director from 1973 to 1976.

The Polish American was as well the responsible for selecting Georgia governor Jimmy Carter as a member of the Trilateral Commission. To play another tune, Brzezinski, as it is told by Daniel Estulin in The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, considers the US Constitution as an untimely document, thereby justifying that the old policy dominated by sovereign nation-states is incompatible with future world governance based on transnational corporations and financial, political and industrial interests. Portugal, to offer an example, has just grossly lost its nation-state’s power on behalf of a few heads of international organizations, such as the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, otherwise known as “Troika”.

Portugal, Greece and Ireland are just the first assemblage of countries in which the financial measures they have been forced to take precedes the implementation of a far-reaching authoritarian world government controlled by the United Nations and a global central bank. So, what we have in the near future is the global economy regulation especially based on a single global currency and on a compulsory taxation on individuals, such as income tax. The outcome, beyond doubt, is a forced and coercive system to create theft, slavery and the violation of property rights just like the regulation and restriction of speech through the concentration of media ownership, mass surveillance and the widespread use of world state terrorism.

1fatAs a last resource, the “Miracle of the Sun” as a divine sign promised by the Virgin Mary during her last Apparition on 13th October 1917, was indeed a dramatic affirmation of divine power in an increasingly irreligious and secular age. Nearly 70 000 people, including newspaper reporters and photographers, gathered at the Cova da Iria to witness what become known as a solar phenomenon otherwise visible from up to 40 kilometers away[16]. Some people who were in the crowd gave their written testimony of such a phenomenon, among which are the three following ones:

1.«Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was biblical as they stood bare-headed, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws – the sun “danced” according to the typical expression of people» (columnist Avelino de Almeida of the Portuguese newspaper “O Século”).

2.«The sun, at one moment surrounded with a scarlet flame, at another aureoled in yellow and deep purple, seemed to be in an exceedingly fast and whirling movement, at times appearing to be loosened from the sky and to be approaching the earth, strongly radiating heat» (eye specialist Dr. Domingos Pinto Coelho in the Portuguese newspaper “Ordem”).

3.«…the silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy light was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds… The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass of a cathedral, and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands… people wept and prayed with uncovered heads, in the presence of a miracle they had awaited… seconds seemed like hours, so vivid were they» (the special reporter for the 17th October 1917 edition of the Lisbon daily “O Dia”).

Despite private revelations not being a part of the deposit of faith of the Catholic Church, the reported Apparitions at Fatima were officially declared “worthy of belief” after a canonical enquiry in October 1930 by the Bishop of Leiria-Fatima. Popes Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI all voiced their acceptance of the miracle of Our Lady of Fatima in unusually clear, strong and avowed terms. More broadly, the Portuguese people were not only blessed by the Holy Mother of God, but also by the Angel of Portugal who appeared in 1916 as the Angel of Peace to the most famous shepherd children the world has ever known.

 


[1] On 13th August the children were not able to see the Lady as she gracefully wished, because they were intercepted and jailed before they could reach the Cova da Iria that day. The responsible for such arrest was the provincial administrator of the village of Ourém called Artur de Oliveira Santos, a well known anticlerical Freemason who interrogated the children in order to get the contents of the secrets. He also threatened the seers, saying he would boil them in a pot of oil, one by one unless they confessed those same secrets. So, that month, instead of the usual Apparition in the Cova da Iria on the 13th, the children saw the Lady on 19th August, at nearby Valinhos.

[2] This refers to the Second World War, as predicted in the content of the second secret. In other words, the Lady prophesiesed a great sign given by God in the night sky which would precede the bloodiest and most destructive war of the twentieth century. And in fact, on January 25th, 1938, an “unknown light” appeared at least all over the European sky, from 20h45 till 1h15, with brief intermittences. In Paris, for instance, people believed that a great fire was burning and fire departments were called. Just over a month later, Hitler seized Austria and eight months later invaded Czechoslovakia.

[3] Cf. Deirdre Manifold, Fatima and the Great Conspiracy, Chapter VI.

[4] There is a well known expression coming from a member of the Rothschild family concerning the world domination, as follows: «Let me issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who writes the laws» (Mayer Amschel Rothschild). And another major member said in his turn: «I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply» (Nathan Rothschild).

[5] Regarding this Family, there is also an interesting message coming from David Rockefeller: «We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers are surely preferable to the national auto-determination in past centuries». As for the rest, in his 2002 autobiography Memoirs, Rockefeller wrote: «For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it».

[6] Cf. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917 to 1930, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 1968.

[7] Regarding those circles, A. Sutton points out the case of J. P. Morgan, T. W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan Banks, among other institutions. All these aspects can be found in Sutton’s books, as, for instance, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, or, last but not least, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.

[8] In 1945, Arthur Bliss Lane was the US Ambassador to Poland. He wrote a book entitled I saw Poland Betrayed, where it is described how the Polish people were abandoned and delivered to Stalin by the Allied Forces.

[9] Many historians conclude that the demands of the rival commanders to optimize the Allied Forces, such as Montgomery, Bradley, Patton and Devers, delayed the Allied victory in Europe. And in fact, Eisenhower’s high command was not able to avoid, as Winston Churchill wanted, Moscow’s maneuvers to capture Berlin in a very large-scale bloody battle.

[10] In his work The Bilderberg Group, Daniel Estulin says that Alger Hiss and his colleagues of the US State Department were responsible for writing out the United Nations Constitution. Hiss was, in the meantime, a temporary UN Secretary-General, who allegedly created the Department of Political and Security Affairs, responsible for the UN future military operations. According to the rules of this Department, the chief appointed to it could only be a soviet citizen or a military one. In fact, 14 Communists were the only ones capable of occupying the charge of Undersecretary General over the first 15 years.

Meanwhile, Deirdre Manifold relates that Alger Hiss, as many other Communist spies – such as Frank Poe, Laughlin Currie, William Ullmann -, was named to the International Monetary Fund by President Truman. In this context, it does not surprise that the architect of such a global institution was a Communist spy too, named Harry Dexter White.

12 title[11] There are FBI files which show that Gayn was working as a spy for the Soviet Union. Dick Russell argues in his book, The Man who Knew Too Much, that a deal was done and that Gayn “kept his freedom in return for serving as a “double agent” at some point in the future”.

[12] During 1955 and 1956 Kissinger was Study Director of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy at the Council of Foreign Relations, or, rather, the shadow government created in 1921. From 1956 to 1958 Kissinger also worked for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as director of its Special Studies Project. Due to his greater influence in US foreign policy, Kissinger finally became an advisor of Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, who sought the Republican nomination for President in 1960, 1964 and 1968. After Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, Nelson Rockefeller made Kissinger National Security Advisor.

[13] The American secret support was firstly directed to the Union of African Populations (UPA), headed by Holden Roberto. At the beginning, the “nationalist” movement received 6 000 dollars increased after that by 10 000 dollars by year between 1961 and 1969. Guns support was also included. Secondly, the US prop was directed to the Mozambican African National Union (MANU), the foregoing movement of the FRELIMO guerrilla headed by Eduardo Mondlane, who, not surprisingly, had been a teacher in a North American university and an official of the United Nations Organization.

The penetration of missionary community was another channel of the US African policy to Covert operations in the Portuguese Overseas Territories. The Methodist together with the Baptist Church were both used by CIA agents to assure US interests in Africa, as it can be proved by John Stockwell as the chief of a task force to Angola in 1975.

[14] In exchange, Portugal should satisfy Washington interests regarding the Loran-C installation, otherwise known as a high system technology ready to locate submarines on the open sea.

[15] It is worth noting that Gilpatric was secretly invited by Oliveira Salazar to visit Angola and Mozambique in 1964. Once there, he became very impressed by the Portuguese high standard Administration, therefore denying the US Embassy statements against Portugal’s management in those territories. Giipatric, inclusively, delivered in Washington a report with his conclusions, generally favorable to Portuguese Overseas Territories. It is useless to say that the African section of the State Department didn’t approve this report at all, especially when coming from officials such as Mennen Williams and Averell Harriman.

[16] Witnesses gave widely different descriptions of the “sun’s dance”, while Lúcia, Jacinta and Francisco were seeing, through inner sight, lovely images of the Holy Family and Our Lady of Sorrows with Jesus Christ. They also saw Our Lady of Mount Carmel, besides Saint Joseph and Jesus blessing the people. Curiously, António Sérgio, a Portuguese educationist and essayist who was there to confront his attitude of disbelief, didn’t see anything from both internal and external point of view.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

Imago Dei

“And the Logos (Word) became flesh, and dwelt amongst us.” (John 1: 14).

There is a mystery of the human soul which, by itself, implicates the platonic world of Ideas. In other words, it is as if we were rediscovering the pre-historical times, or, more precisely, the mythological experience of what we are as a creation of God. In this fashion, we must remind ourselves of the numb condition of Narcissus when he saw his own reflection in the waters and fell in love with it, or even the Myth of Eros who, according to Plato’s Socratic dialogue, the Symposium, was conceived by Poros («Resource») and Penia («Poverty») during the divine birth celebration of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

So, the numb condition of Narcissus can be understood as the fall of the astral or ether substance of the soul into material darkness. This fall is also present in the Myth of Eros, namely when Poros, just before his sexual union with Penia, fell asleep due to being enraptured by the nectar of the gods. Besides, this is probably the reason why a Portuguese occultist, universally known as Fernando Pessoa, said that whoever had invented the mirror had also poisoned the human soul. Therefore, according to the impenitent Heterodox, every man remains naturally powerless to face himself, even when he is symbolically capable of taking a bent posture to contemplate his own reflection in rivers and lakes.

Nevertheless, it is through the “Image of God”, often appearing in Latin as Imago Dei, that we should more properly embrace the sacred mystery of God’s creation. The cornerstone of such a mystery can be found in Genesis (1: 26. 27), where Revelation took place in the following terms: God created Adam in His image and likeness, that is to say, God created him, male and female. Therefore, the Fall of Adam and Eve can be seen as the mythical process separation of the “androgynous”, which, in Biblical terms, corresponds to a rejecting process of their spiritual likeness to God.

But, meanwhile, a miracle occurred in the entire universe: Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, was born among us in order to redeem us and forgive us our sins. So, glorious light shone out of darkness as the glory of God in the holy face of Jesus Christ. In other words, the ancient and sacred Mysteries were no longer a supreme legacy reserved to initiates, because once, through Jesus Christ, God’s spiritual love could finally be revealed to all mankind.

By no means is this loving and cosmic phenomenon compatible with pseudo historical theories about the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Many of those theories can be found, for instance, in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), as also in The Messianic Legacy (1986), or even in Lyn Picknett & Clive Prince’s Templar Revelation (1997)[1], not to speak, of course, of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003).

Here are, generally speaking, some aspects of such false and irreligious theories:

1.The divine nature of Jesus Christ has no substantiality, because he was, on the contrary, a revolutionary nationalist whose purpose was to free Israel from the Roman domain. Besides, he was, in this very context, a royal descendent of the House of David, who had also married with a royal descendent of the Jewish House of Benjamin: Mary of Magdalene.

2.The Holy Grail was not a chalice, but more precisely Mary of Magdalene, who carried the bloodline of Christ to France, where she was sheltered by the Jews of Marseille. Meanwhile, the bloodline of Christ became the Merovingian Dynasty of France, which was the secret discovered by the Crusaders after they conquered Jerusalem in 1099. That secret was kept till our days by the mythical Priory of Sion, a secret society founded by Godfrey of Bouillon on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099).

3.The Church has suppressed this secret about Jesus’ bloodline for 2000 years in order to establish the primacy of Saint Peter over the sacred feminine represented by Mary of Magdalene. From there the reason appears why the wife of Jesus was a prostitute invented by the Church to obscure their true relationship.

4.This secret is also revealed in Leonardo Da Vinci´s work, “The Last Supper”. So, the figure next to Christ is not the Apostle John, but “the Disciple Jesus loved”, or, in other words, the code for Mary Magdalene. Moreover, the same idea can be found in the letter “V” that is formed by the bodily positions of Jesus and Mary, as “V” is the symbol for the sacred feminine. On the whole, the parity between the cosmic and archetypal forces of masculine and feminine has long been a serious threat to the established and concentrated power of the Church.

In the midst of these controversial theories, we should note that, in March 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed a lawsuit in a British court against Brown’s publisher, Random House, claiming copyright infringement. This claim was rejected by the High Court judge Peter Smith on 7 April 2007 whereby Dan Brown won the court case. But why, in the meantime, was not Lincoln involved in the proceedings in Dan Brown’s lawsuit? Because, as he stated in the Channel Five documentary, Revealed… The Man behind the Da Vinci Code, the ideas brought forth in Holy Blood were not even original themselves.

So, this “revelation” is by itself a very interesting and crucial fact, especially when we carefully observe the bibliographical elements included in books such as The Holy Blood and The Messianic Legacy. However, there is a French author who is strangely not quoted among the former ones, namely Robert Ambelain, who became, in 1953, the founder of l’Église Gnostique Apostolique (The Gnostic Apostolic Church), as well as, in 1960, the Patriarch of l’Église Gnostique Universelle (The Gnostic Universal Church) under the name of Tau Jean III. Besides that, he was also a Freemason[2], becoming inclusively the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Memphis-Misraim. But for what reason is not Robert Ambelain – as a specialist on esoteric issues -, quoted or bibliographically considered by the co-authors of The Holy Blood and The Messianic Legacy? We do not know for certainty. Nevertheless, it is perfectly evident that many aspects presented in Ambelain’s books, such as La Vie Secrète de Saint Paul (The Secret Life of Saint Paul, 1972) or Les Lourds Secrets du Golgotha (The Dark Secrets of the Golgotha, 1974), are directly related with an extreme desacralization of the life, passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Just to give an example of such misconception, in order to degrade the Bible, Ministry and Sacred Tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, here are some proving points extracted from another Ambelain’s book, entitled Jesus ou Le Mortel Secret des Templiers (Jesus or The Mortal Secret of the Templars”, 1970):

1.Jesus had a mysterious brother called Thomas – who according to the Gospel of John (XI, 16; XX, 24) was also called Didymos, a Greek expression which means twin. On the other hand, Thomas comes from the Hebrew taoma or toama, which again means twin. From this philological point of view, Ambelain’s conclusion is that we are before a nonsensical expression: «Thomas called Didymos», that is to say «Twin called Twin»[3].

2.Based on the “Acts of Thomas”, an apocryphal that still exists in Latin, Greek and Syrian versions, Ambelain states that, regarding the true name of Thomas, the former one was Judas.

3.The Gospel of John was especially designed in such a way that Thomas could be presented as the doubting disciple of Jesus Christ, when, in reality, he was an accomplice of an extraordinary deceit: the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ to heaven.

4.According to Ambelain’s misconstruction, Thomas, “the second Christ”, had to use a mask to not be publicly recognized by the Roman legionaries. Consequently, the author refers to some Biblical passages to barely sustain this materialistic point of view, such as: a) after the resurrection of Christ, Mary of Magdalene didn’t recognize Jesus, for whom she took as the gardener (John: XX, 15); b) in front of Jesus’ appearance in the Road to Emmaus, two disciples didn’t recognize him either (Luke: XXIV, 13-32); c) two more disciples of Jesus saw him «in another form» (Mark: XVI, 12); d) Jesus’ appearances indicate traces of usual materiality, due to the fact that he could eat and absorb food, which is by itself very strange in a disunited spirit (Luke: XXIV, 38-43).

5.Between 200 and 300 A.D., the existence of a Jesus’ twin brother was not a scandal. So, it was much later that the miraculous conception was forged about Christ’s Incarnation, or, more precisely, the fundamental theological teaching of orthodox Christianity which affirms the belief that a non-created second hypostasis of the triune God joined but did not mix in a human body and nature and became both man and God. Therefore, this is why Jesus’ twin brother had practically disappeared in the New Testament, or simply been obscured by the Mother of God (Theotokos), who, as we know by the Roman Catholic Tradition, conceived her son miraculously through the Holy Spirit.

As we see it, there is not a simple coincidence on how this sort of «campaign» against the Roman Catholic Church continues nowadays. In The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince proposes a superficial hypothesis regarding the relationship between Jesus, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. In other words, they upheld that Jesus was a disciple initiated in the inner circle of John the Baptist[4], whose teachings were basically that of the Egyptian mystery religion of Isis-Osiris-Horus. Briefly speaking, Jesus was not only an astute and aggressive political competitor against John, but also an initiate in the ritualized and sexual sacred mysteries of Mary Magdalene, who, afterwards, had an equal relationship with Jesus. In short, he was simply one god in the line of many dying-and-rising gods, who just share similar or common traits.

Despite all those imagery elements, it is a fact that the co-agetsemani-versao-castelo (2)uthors[5] of The Templar Revelation have also teamed up on several similar works, such as the following ones: Stargate Conspiracy: The Truth about Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt; The Sion Revelation (2006); The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Man Believed to be God (2008); Turin Shroud: in Whose Image? the Truth Behind the Centuries-Long Conspiracy of Silence (1994).

In the last mentioned book, it was proposed that Leonardo da Vinci had faked the Shroud by using a real corpse treated with chemicals and then exposed to be reproduced by an early form of camera obscura (pinhole camera) to obtain the image. Due to his secret alchemist experiences, Leonardo also used his own face for the model of Jesus, thereby creating a double photographic exposure. So, according to the authors, the Shroud seems to be the oldest known surviving photograph, notwithstanding that John Jackson, in the quality of director of the Turin Shroud of Colorado, had meanwhile dismissed the possibility of it.

There is no doubt that the image on the Shroud is much clearer in black-and-white negative than in its natural sepia color. This fact was first observed in 1898 by Secondo Pia, an Italian photographer who was allowed to photograph the Shroud while it was being exhibited in the Turin Cathedral. He was finally startled by the visible image on the reverse photographic plate in his darkroom, as if the Shroud image was itself effectively a negative of some kind.

But, even optically speaking, the Shroud image is far beyond being a negative image. And the main reason is based on this axial fact: the Shroud image has properties that, when submitted to a digital image processing, yields a 3-dimensional image[6]. Consequently, this is not a process that occurs in photography, which, as we know, is strictly confined to a bi-dimensional structure.

Otherwise, there is also the controversial radiocarbon dating test performed in a small sample of the Shroud in 1988. The laboratories at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology dated the Shroud material from the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390. In the meantime, criticisms have been raised regarding the choice of the sample taken for testing, because it may have not been representative of the whole Shroud, or it could even be a medieval repair fragment rather than the image-bearing cloth.

In 1983 the Shroud was given to the Holy See by the House of Savoy. The Roman Catholic Church made no pronouncements claiming whether the Shroud is authentic or not. But one thing we can be certain of: being or not being Jesus Christ’s burial cloth, the death and resurrection of the Son of God remains an objective belief to most Christians in the world.

But who better than the Philosopher Pope John Paul II to testify the mystery of the Incarnation, according to some words of his Holiness’s address in Sunday, 24 May 1988:

«The Shroud is a challenge to our intelligence. It first of all requires of every person, particularly the researcher, that he humbly grasp the profound message it sends to his reason and his life. The mysterious fascination of the Shroud forces questions to be raised about the sacred Linen and the historical life of Jesus. Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions. She entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate, so that satisfactory answers may be found to the questions connected with this Sheet, which, according to tradition, wrapped the body of our Redeemer after he had been taken down from the cross. The Church urges that the Shroud be studied without pre-established positions that take for granted results that are not such; she invites them to act with interior freedom and attentive respect for both scientific methodology and the sensibilities of believers.

(…) The Shroud is also an image of powerlessness: the powerlessness of death, in which the ultimate consequence of the mystery of the Incarnation is revealed. The burial cloth spurs us to measure ourselves against the most troubling aspect of the mystery of the Incarnation, which is also the one that shows with how much truth God truly became man, taking on our condition in all things, except sin. Everyone is shaken by the thought that not even the Son of God withstood the power of death, but we are all moved at the thought that he so shared our human condition as willingly to subject himself to the total powerlessness of the moment when life is spent. It is the experience of Holy Saturday, an important stage on Jesus’ path to Glory, from which a ray of light shines on the sorrow and death of every person. By reminding us of Christ’s victory, faith gives us the certainty that the grave is not the ultimate goal of existence. God calls us to resurrection and immortal life».

 


[1] Picknett and Prince’s book was certainly inspired by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It has also become central to the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

[2] Furthermore, it is also publically known that Michael Baigent is a Freemason and a Grand Officer of the United Grand Lodge of England.

[3] These philological relations are practically repeated in The Messianic Legacy, without any reference to Ambelain’s analysis of the subject.

Imago Dei[4] The pointing gesture of St. John the Baptist, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, is also seized, in this particular context, as a possible sign of unorthodox Christian thinking. In fact, and beyond all this heterodox assumption, the same pointing gesture can be found in The School of Athens, the most famous frescoes made by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael between 1510 and 1511. In the centre of the fresco are the two indisputable philosophers of all times: Plato and Aristotle. And that is precisely Plato, to which Leonardo’s portrait was used as the iconic image of the Greek philosopher, who personifies the pointing gesture into the beautiful vault above, while Aristotle initiates a horizontal and powerful flow of spiritual energy toward viewers. On the whole, we are in front of a theoretical or speculative conception, and not before a “thread of heresy” that reaches back over 2000 years.

[5] Regarding the Works of Lynn Picknett, there are at least two of which stand out in our context research: Mary Magdalene: Christianity’s Hidden Goddess and The Secret History of Lucifer. Lynn Picknett is, on the other hand, a member of The Ghost Club, a paranormal investigating and research organization that was founded in London in 1862. Notable members since its foundation includes Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir William Crookes, Arthur Koestler, W. B. Yeats, Peter Cushing, Nandor Fondor, psychologist and a former associate of Sigmund Freud, Maurice Gross, famous for his investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist.

[6] This image analysis was firstly made by John Jackson and Eric Jumper in Colorado Springs in 1976. For this purpose, an analog computer was used, the VP8 Image Analyzer, produced by Peter Schumacher. As we know, no researcher was capable to replicate the 3-dimentional effect, even when they have already attempted to transfer similar images using techniques of block print, engravings, a hot statue or a bas-relief. At that rate, this same process converges, in a certain sense, with a detailed examination that it was carried out by a team of American scientists called STURP, in 1978. In other words, they did not find any reliable evidence of forgery, while, at the same time, were incapable to explain the question of how the image was formed. So, according to them, it remained “a mystery”.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. Translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

Winston Churchill and Oliveira Salazar

In 1974, a British Colonel, named Frederick W. Winterbotham, was authorized to reveal the existence of a system of classified information designed Top Secret Ultra (1). Its proper base, located in Bletchley Park, was indeed a formidable concentration of British scientists, professors and students that worked on codified messages changed by the enemy during the Second World War. Besides, when Winston Churchill arrived at Downing Street, the Ultra service, based on the computer Colossus, was able to decipher the principal code of the Luftwaffe (2).

On the other hand, two old institutions, dating from 1909 and especially related with the War Office – the MI5 and MI6 (3) – were operating with three new services created in 1940: the MI9, also known as the Escape Service (4); the SOE (Special Operations Executive) (5), whose purpose was to debilitate, through small teams specialized in sabotage, the enemy war production regarding Europe and even Asia; finally, the PWE (Political Warfare Executive), charged with propaganda and, at the same time, dependent on the Foreign and Intelligence Offices.

When Churchill became Prime-Minister, in 1940, he ordered his Chiefs of Staff to conduct a full revision of the British Secret Service in order to divide the functions and assure the circuit distribution of the classified information collected and deciphered. So, the main exigency concerning the Ultra service was the ability to keep a secret, or, in other words, to hold a secret circle focused on:

a) decoding, in Bletchley Park, the enemy messages transmitted after that to Colonel Stewart Menzies, the chief of SIS;

b) transmitting of those messages to Downing Street, to which Churchill, judging by default of the majority of ministers, secretaries and military chiefs, gave obviously a crucial importance that, in many ways, was even more necessary to win the war than the ingots accumulated in the vaults of the Bank of England.

In fact, Churchill always liked the underground action worked out by secret agents and sabotage operations in the enemy territory. An identical tendency could be found in Colonel Lawrence, who, by himself, defended a war strategy based on an invisible and invulnerable force that, without any front or rear-guard, would be, like a gas – metaphorically speaking -, capable of penetrating anywhere. Thus, to fight the political and military power of Nazism, it was necessary to implement a “Shadow War” or, more precisely, a parallel one using a subversive strategy by using the new technical possibilities offered by radio and plane incursions within the enemy space.

Too many secret services were active in Portugal during the Second World War. Besides the British one, there was also the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), superintended by Edgar Hoover, and specially, dating from 1942, the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), whose structure would become, after the war, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Soviet Secret Service was also in Portuguese territory, namely the Rote Kapelle, as well as the German one through several agencies, among which was the Abwehr, headed in Portugal by Major Albrecht von Auenrode, also known as «Ludovico von Karshtor».

According to the North American historiographer, Douglas Wheeler, Portugal was, between 1939 and 1945, something like a «spyland» (6). Generally speaking, it can be acceptable, if we consider that too many secret agents were lodged in hotels such as the following ones:

a) Hotel Tivoli, in Lisbon, where German spies abounded as well as in hotels like Vitória, Suíço-Atlântico, Duas Nações, Avenida Palace;

b) Hotel Avis, also in Lisbon and, above all, a very luxurious one in which the Duke of Windsor rejected the Nazi plan already mentioned, not to say in which lived Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, a magnate of the Armenian petroleum whose son, Nubar Gulbenkian, worked for the MI6 through his union with Donald Darling;

c) Hotel Atlântico, located in the villa of Estoril, as well as Grande Hotel do Monte Estoril, Hotel do Parque e Hotel Palácio (7).

Far beyond the international espionage in Portugal, hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Lisbon to escape from the Nazi persecution as also from the horrors and destruction of war itself. Once there, many of them – Polish aristocrats, Czechs without nation, persecuted Germans, French runaways from Nazi occupation, expelled Scandinavian and Austrians, Belgians and Dutch, Jews of Central Europe and so on – waited in order to embark to the New World. Thus, Portugal, owing to the fact of being a neutral country, received and sheltered (8) people of all kinds of countries during the time that Europe was, unfortunately, under darkness by means of goods rationing, air raids and war operations.

In 1942, Oliveira Salazar’s international policy had effectively cause serious perturbation in some British diplomats and politicians, like Sir Donald Campbell, Ambassador in Lisbon, as well as Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War appointed by Churchill. In fact, both really thought that Salazar’s Portuguese policy, despite strictly stemming from a neutral status, had not contributed unequivocally to the war effort made by both UK and US governments (9). And, besides that, Salazar had also anticipated the most woeful consequences for a British victory based on an Anglo-Russian alliance, given the fact that reality itself could not admit ideological contradictions, especially when Communism expansion through erroneous Western strategy was at stake.

It is well documented by Franco Nogueira, Salazar´s minister of the Foreign Office (1961-1969), as also his best biographer (10), how some lower officials of British diplomacy considered, along their correspondence with Campbell, the possibility of removing Portugal’s leader to set a more propitious government of their own. Therefore, it seems conceivable that, in critical moments where Portugal’s political independence could be in jeopardy, Salazar decided to engage firmly any pressure or imposition coming from the British Empire, or even confronted every range of interests of His Majesty’s Government which would be, notwithstanding the historical Anglo-Portuguese Alliance (11), in opposition with the Lusitanian ones. Rather, it is also true that, regarding the cooperation between the British Embassy and the Portuguese Government, the agents of the Intelligence Service were working behind Portugal’s back with some bad elements of the internal opposition, many of them mistakably taken by anglophiles (12).

Salazar 2-002In spite of such incidents, Churchill, while lunching at Portugal’s Embassy, on 7 January of 1943, said to Armindo Monteiro that Salazar was a man whose intelligence and wisdom were really crucial to preserve Spanish neutrality. But, by the time, Churchill and Roosevelt, thinking about the idea of installing an aerial base in the Portuguese Archipelago of the Azores, didn’t exclude the possibility of using force (13). Meantime, the opposition came from Anthony Eden, to whom the violation of the Portuguese neutrality could destroy, despite the theatre of war, the moral foundation of a true community of sovereign nations.

So, the dilemma of Roosevelt and Churchill consisted of, regarding Salazar´s Atlantic policy, using force or of setting up a diplomatic approach to obtain military facilities in the Archipelago of Azores, especially in the islands of S. Miguel, Terceira and Faial. It seems that Salazar disowned the Anglo-American conspiracy to undertake a strategic incursion into such an Archipelago, but he really had, nevertheless, a deep intuition of the possibility of it (14). That is why, considering what, finally, would be the British appeal to the Azores issue, Salazar agreed in discussing the conditions of such a delicate case, which could certainly bring to Portugal some political advantages, like the most vital one: the preservation of the Portuguese sovereignty in the Oversea Territories (15).

Sustained the Anglo-American impetus upon the Azores, Campbell reopened the wolfram issue, supplied by Portugal to Germany as well as to England. Regarding this issue, we must remember that, since 1942, Portugal was being extremely affected by the British blockade in what respects the provision of some goods and raw materials, in order to stop the wolfram supply to Germany. Salazar immediately understood the British attempt to protect proper interests while disregarding Portugal’s neutral ones, purposely expressed, by the way, in a war commercial agreement between Lisbon and London (1941).

For a more fundamental explanation, here are some arguments of Salazar to defend Portugal’s attitude toward the wolfram problem:

1. Portuguese interests are in first place. From this point, the Portuguese Government must do what it can to defend the war commercial agreement far beyond the wolfram question. The priority goes to commercial and financial relations with England in order to safeguard the Portuguese interests without admitting any arbitrary activity upon them.

2. The wolfram transaction to England and the United States was much larger than it was to Germany (16). Besides, the last one had already protested against the imposing restrictions, almost seen as a down of neutrality.

3. Portugal was not disposed to be drawn to war, directly or indirectly, for the sake of the wolfram problem.

4. Many of Portugal’s mines were German property. Such mines were equipped and invested by German capital, susceptible of limiting, consequently, the legitimate action of the Portuguese Government. Moreover, Portugal could trade wolfram for German raw materials considered essential and, as we know, fully denied by the United Kingdom and even by the United States.

5. Despite the last item, Portugal, willing to satisfy the British demands, reduced the wolfram exportations to Germany. Salazar was, inclusively, too technical and factual about it: in 1942-43, 37% of wolfram was supplied from Portugal’s mines, while, in 1943-44, just 25% was extracted. From this 25%, only a quarter could represent what the British experts considered to be the wolfram necessities of the German military industry.

Finally, Churchill wrote a letter to Salazar saying, subtly, that the Iberian Peninsula was alone in providing wolfram to Germany and that British soldiers were being killed by a German war industry based on the Portuguese wolfram, etc. Obviously, these allegations were tactically endorsed to intimidate Salazar, but, beyond that, without any legitimacy respecting Portugal’s neutral position at the time. Salazar, instead, remained in his attitude reconcilable and yet refutable.

After that, several incidents took place, like for instance:

a) the American, Brazilian and South Africa diligences to contain the wolfram Portuguese production;

b) Campbell’s idea to throw out Salazar, promptly excluded by the Foreign Office;

c) Salazar’s conditional proposals to cut the wolfram supply to Germany even more;

d) the variance between the Foreign Office and the Department of State to what should have been the respective sphere of influence upon Portugal’s affairs;

e) finally, Salazar’s assent in the presence of the British appeal to stop the wolfram production to Germany in the name of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance (17).

Salazar considered the war through peace, or, more properly speaking, wished to know on what base of values and principles the peace process would be raised up. In this context, he didn’t approve of Churchill’s speech in which the British leader salutes the entry of Russia to fight Hitler’s Germany. So, if Salazar could see and recognize the British strategy in using Russian force, he couldn´t also forget that the Soviet Union, besides invading Finland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia, collaborated with Germany to share Polish territory.

In Churchill’s case, the main goal was strictly focused on the Nazi defeat. To him, it was an extermination war not braced by armies or governments, but by and among people. And the Allied Powers’ victory should be, above all, a History lesson to the Germans as well as to the future world.

After the most lethal conflict of the twentieth century, Churchill came up with a crucial warning about the possibility of a Third World War caused by the URSS military expansion. Inasmuch as Salazar had already anticipated it, the «wisest man of Westminster» could finally recognize, while pronouncing a speech in an American University, that Europe itself was day after day submitted to a totalitarian domination coming from international Communist organizations planned and disseminated by Moscow’s World Wide Revolution. Thence his reference to the eccentric “Iron Curtain” between Eastern Europe and everything eastward, like Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.

Curiously, Joseph Goebbels, the well-known Minister of the Nazi Propaganda, had already used the term “Iron Curtain” to warn the Germans against an eventual advance of the Red Army in Europe. In such circumstances, Churchill once more subscribed, as in the past, the idea of the United States of Europe based on Christian values and cultural, scientific and philosophical ones. Therefore, Western Europe should be the centre of civilization, in which Great Britain, in spite of being an expression of such civilization, was not really part of it.

In fact, the ultimate vision of Churchill was really vital to England in order to protect its integrity and to make sure that it would not be absorbed in continental problems either, such as economical and political ones. In truth, Churchill worked for the Atlantic Europe and not for the Carolingian oneof the Shuman, Monnet and Adenauer. In short, he wanted the doctrine of the three circles, the first of which was the Commonwealth and the British Empire centrally considered, while the others were the Anglophone world and the united Europe stemming from French and German´s spiritual and material development.

mooreSalazar, on the other hand, worked to preserve Portugal’s historical mission in Europe and in all places of the planet signed by the Lusitanian spiritual culture. Thus, what made him special was, in fact, his own political intuition to defend Portugal’s sovereignty in front of other national interests and global organizations which were working, conscious or not, to the constitution of a New World Order. Until his final moment, the Portuguese statesman could also see that Portugal’s Oversea Territories were being under attack by terrorist forces prepared, directed and launched by foreign countries.

As we can see it, nothing of what has been told here corresponds to what is a complete process of subverted omission in Portugal’s university as well as in media ideological disinformation. Even numberless figures of the show business are somehow connected, in Portugal, with such ideological disinformation. An example, among others, can and should be made as regards an old James Bond actor, called Roger Moore.

So, about fifteen years ago, the illustrious actor came to Portugal and was interviewed on a television set by Herman José, a “German comic” as stupid as he can also be tremendously ignorant. While chatting, the name of Salazar came up and, informally, Roger Moore treated the Portuguese leader respectfully; the “German comic”, reacting like a little child, immediately said that his interlocutor was wrong about the man, adding that he was a terrible dictator, a fascist as no other. It was then interesting to see Roger Moore’s face with an astonished expression of disbelief.

And à propos the disbelief, George Ball, an important figure of the US Government, recognize, after a meeting session in 1963, that Salazar was a man with charm and grace. But became puzzled when found that, besides mentally sharp as well as extremely conservative, Salazar was – paraphrasing Ball’s impression -, living in another century as if Henry, The Navigator, Vasco da Gama and Magalhães still were conducting the Portuguese policy. And, in fact, he was really living in it, especially because past generations, based on a secular Portuguese secret, were being connected through time and space.

 


Footnotes:

(1) Cf. Frederick W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. The results of the Ultra Secret service, during the Second World War, were really considerable, as, for instance, In the context of the Atlantic battle against the submarines (1942-43), or facing the Africakorps during the first battle of El-Alamein (1942), or, last but not least, in breaking the German counter-offensive of Mortain in Normandy (1944).

(2) In 1941, the decipherers of Bletchley Park dominated completely the Kriegsmarine code, while, in the Spring of 1942, they also decoded Wehrmacht’s one. Nevertheless, the Germans, by means of the Abwehr, deciphered, at the beginning of 1940, the Royal Navy code, as were also capable of reading, till 1943, the Merchant Navy one.

(3) The Military Intelligence 5, charged with counterespionage, operated in British territory, while the Military Intelligence 6, generally known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), operated in foreign lands. Moreover, the MI6 created a «double cross system» to reinforce the proper detection of German secret agents. The Yugoslavian Dusko Popov is one of the most famous double agent at the time, especially for transmitting secret information to the Bristish about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) and for also projecting, through the Gestapo, the kidnapping of the Duke of Windsor in Portugal. “Operation Willi” was the German code name for such an unsuccessful attempt, because Edward rejected the Nazi plan bent on the peace settlement with Britain and on the restoration to the throne after the German conquest of Great Britain. So, before his departure to the Bahamas as Governor, Edward stayed a month in the villa of Estoril, to be more exact in the house of Ricardo Espírito Santo, a Portuguese banker.

(4) The Military Intelligence 9, while operating in Portugal with the help of the Consulate of Great-Britain, organized the flight of allied and military prisoners in occupied countries. The objective was to maintain entry and escape lines through Gibraltar and Lisbon to London.

(5) The name of this organization was created by Neville Chamberlain and connected, by the hand of W. Churchill, with the War Office. Jack Grosvenor Beevor, military adjoined attaché of the British Embassy in Lisbon, was the local director of the SOE propaganda action and sabotage. In 1941, the SOE organized a movement of resistance against an eventual German invasion of Portugal, supported by Portuguese elements and based on a network known as «Shell», meanwhile dismantled by the PVDE (“State Defence and Surveillance Police”).

(6) Due to the fact that, in Portugal, several networks of espionage were being detected and dismantled, the result would be the criminalization of such phenomenon occurred in 7 June of 1943.

ianfleming(7) The German spies seemed to prefer the two first mentioned ones, while the others were chosen by the Allied spies. Furthermore, there were also many diplomatic attachés and rich refugees who spent their fortunes in the Estoril Casino. At this point, we shall not forget the inspiration that such a Casino had on the imagination of Ian Lancaster Fleming to write his James Bond novel: Casino Royale (1953). And the reason for that is very simple: Ian Fleming, during his career at the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, went to the Estoril Casino, habitually full of a great number of spies of warring regimes.   (8) For that specified purpose, the police had to organize residential centres in Lisbon suburbs.

(9) It is crucial to note how Armindo Monteiro, while Portuguese Ambassador in London, conceived the war problem according to the British point of view, and specially how he was not capable of getting a deeper understanding of Salazar´s delicate position in the presence of the most dangerous conflict that ever existed on earth.

(10) Cf. Franco Nogueira, Salazar, Livraria Civilização Editora, Vol. III, pp. 398-400.

(11) Salazar was indeed very suspicious concerning the richer, more powerful and greater nations. In other words, he knew that the Portuguese were educated to believe in the thesis that Portugal’s independence and integrity depended on Great Britain’s generosity. With this in the background, he argued that, even if it would be true, every Portuguese should have the moral and the political duty of renouncing to such an alleged thesis, just because the Lusitanian people must have, above all, the strength sufficient to be themselves.

(12) In this particular sense, Salazar, which economical liberalism was an undoubted fact, repudiated the political one, especially when it was responsible for immoral and not an upright action.

(13) After their meeting in Casablanca, where Churchill and Roosevelt discussed again the Azores case, the second one proposed to Getúlio Vargas the occupation of the Portuguese Archipelago by Brazilian forces.

(14) On Portugal’s neutrality, Salazar, relating one of his own conversations with Ronald Campbell, said to Armindo Monteiro: «The Secretary of State [Anthony Eden] can be sure that Portugal, as a neutral country, will retaliate, up to the limit of its forces, against an attack coming from the British fleet in the Azores and Cape Verde. I can´t imagine what else can be done with dignity». Before this statement, Armindo Monteiro, inspired by panic, couldn’t believe in such audacity. However, this episode can give to the world an idea about the greatest statesman of the twentieth century.

(15) From this vital advantage, Salazar would get: 1. The Exclusive use of the Archipelago of Azores by the British forces; 2. The safeguard of the Archipelago of Cape Verde, due to the fact of being a key strategic position in the Southeast Atlantic Ocean, in which Brazil and the United States were well interested; 3. The guarantees of Australia and South African Union related to the non-violation of the Portuguese territories, the first one related with Timor, invaded by Japanese forces at the time, while the second one with ambitious incursion of Southeast Mozambique.

(16)  In 1942-43, the Allied forces received 3 184 tons of wolfram while Germany got 1 900; in 1943-44, the former received 4 660 against 1 555 to Germany.

(17) Salazar, however, formulated to Campbell his own reserves concerning the invocation of such Alliance in so particular circumstances. And, of course, he also applied the embargo to any other belligerent country in order to guarantee Portugal´s neutrality.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. Translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

Portugal’s Oriental Odyssey

During the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, the Lusitanian discoverers were especially focused on finding the Christian kingdom of Prester John, mythically located in the Orient[1]. So, the story begins with two secret agents of D. João II – António de Lisboa e Pero Montarroio – searching across overland routes for the Christian King, who never went beyond Jerusalem due to not knowing the Arabic language in order to achieve the goal of the journey. Then came, in 1487, Afonso de Paiva and Pero da Covilhã, both leaving from Santarém to Valencia, then to Barcelona, Rhodes, Alexandria, Cairo and El-Tor in the Red Sea. Finally, as merchants in caravans, they crossed Arabia[2] to reach Aden, from which they took different paths: Covilhã went to India (Cannanore, Calicut and Goa), Paiva, in turn, went to Suakin, on the coast of Abyssinia.

The last one died prematurely, while the former, once again in Cairo, sent his new information[3] about the oriental coast of Africa[4] and the Island of the Moon (Madagascar) to Lisbon. In fact, it was indeed Pero da Covilhã who helped to set the itinerary of India’s navigation to the Portuguese discoverers, especially pointing out the south passage of Africa from where it was possible to reach Calicut. After visiting Aden again, Covilhã went to the trackless mountains of Ethiopia from where, due to the imposition of a descendant of Prester John, was not allowed to leave it for the rest of his life, despite being well treated.

The Portuguese, while discovering the oriental Ocean mysteries and secrets, really found a commercial and a maritime monopoly set by Muslims, Ethiopians, Turks, Egyptians, Venetians, Persians, Afghans and Chinese. Despite all, the Portuguese discoverers tried to establish good relations with the oriental natives, especially with the Rajah of Calicut (now Kozhikode), who, unfortunately, betrayed the Portuguese people by allowing them to be killed in order to save commercial and religious interests in the Indian hemisphere. The Portuguese, who, at the time, were undoubtedly a spiritual force of nature, had no other option except to wage war by constructing trading dêpots and fortresses in every key strategic position from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of China.

In fact, many places – such as Quiloa, Anjediva, Mombasa, Sofala, Onor, Diu, Curiati (Kuryat), Sohar, Muscat, Khor Fakkan, Kalhat, Orfacate, Hormuz, Goa, Cannanore, Cochin, Malacca, Daman -, are historical ones regarding the Portuguese Diaspora. Besides, it is perfectly known that the Governors of Portuguese India, like Francisco de Almeida, Afonso de Albuquerque and João de Castro, were indeed military geniuses by closing all the Indian Ocean Naval passages to the Atlantic, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and the Pacific, transforming them into a Lusitanian mare clausum established over the Turkish, Muslim and Hindu colonies, emporiums and feudal lord systems. Nevertheless, those Governors, despite being fiercely feared and respected by their enemies, were capable of guaranteeing that many natives could pursue their own lives according to their religion and, especially, making full use of their own properties[5].

Far beyond the usual commercial and military reasons about the Portuguese Diaspora ascribed by superficial academia, we must say that a deeper one was taking place at the time, evidently rooted in the Christian Holy War which occurred in the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and the Middle East[6]. So, the ultimate mission, dating from Henry, the Navigator, was not confined to the circumnavigation of Africa’s coast to reach Ethiopia through the West, but especially to pontificate an alliance with oriental Christian kings, remotely related to Saint Thomas, the Apostle. Paradigmatic of this spiritual mission can also be the military prowess planned by Albuquerque to steal the Prophet’s body in Mecca to ransom the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from the infidel’s yoke[7].

Albuquerque, The Caesar of the East, successfully created, for barely seven years, a Portuguese Empire in Southeast Asia. To assure it, he set up the respective limits through three key strategic positions: Hormuz, Goa and Malacca. Consequently, the real aim consisted in enclose the Red Sea entry in order to obstruct the network passage of spices into the Mediterranean[8].

Also known as The Portuguese Mars, or even as The Lion of the Seas[9], Albuquerque seems to be a unique character historically and religiously speaking. In the battle of Goa, he suddenly got an extraordinary vision of a knight who used a red cross over his mantle while fighting the Muslims infidels with blank arms. This knight was, according to Iberian religious tradition, an Apostle of Christ, named Santiago[10].

Thus, the military history of the Portuguese, especially in what respects the oriental Odyssey, is a supernatural phenomenon. Remembering the first siege of Diu (1538), it is really astonishing how the Lusitanian heroism could face a numberless Turkish army to which the Governor, António da Silveira, resisted so Homerically that even the King of France (Francisco I), marvelled with such exploit, ordered that the portrait of Diu’s illustrious hero should be installed in the Palace of Fontainebleau.  When Diu was encircled for the second time (1546), João de Mascarenhas, emerging as a brave and courageous Governor, would be able, in turn, to resist during seven months against consecutive battles and as many constant assaults which were permanently repelled, or even against eventual open breaches caused by hundreds of Muslims rapidly detained by a handful of invincible Portuguese, including children, women and older men[11].

Despite all the heroic, religious and military achievements of the Lusitanian people in the Orient, it is also true that a careless administration put a brief end to a spiritual mission prefigured in the Armillary Sphere. Ormuz, for instance, was deprived of the Portuguese domain in 1622, while Malacca suffered the same fate in 1641. Goa, also known as the “Rome of the Orient”, remained integrated in the Portuguese State of India till 1961, as it also occurred with Diu, Daman, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, unlawfully invaded by the Indian Union troops[12].

Only one man resisted using unusual diplomatic agenda regarding the historical rights of the Portuguese people, to which Goa strictly belonged as well. That man was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Oliveira Salazar. His political strategy consisted of several main goals during Goa’s crisis, such as:

1. Showing to the world that Pandit Nehru was, no matter his nominal pacifism, an imperialist aggressor in whom the British education did not deeply remove the primitive one. Focusing on this point, the Portuguese leader could also indicate how England, as a civilized nation, had always respected the Portuguese State of India.

2. Letting one see that the Indian accusations against Portugal concerning colonial imperialism were a pure product of political propaganda, since Goan citizens had already their own legislative college as well as their own representation in the Deputy Chamber, not to speak of the possibility of being able to exercise their own professional duties in every Portuguese territory, including metropolitan ones.

images GoaInvasao4803. Renouncing Indian Union proposals since 1950, through which the main purpose was to convince Portugal to compromise Goa’s future. Nevertheless, Portugal never denied the genuine predisposition of resolving the multiple problems regarding the joint state affairs.

4. Resisting against Indian Union violence and oppression based on a state war or even on a psychological state of terror purposely created upon Goan citizens, namely through the interdiction of the circulation of persons and merchandise by overland and sea, and through railway cuts, communication interruption, harbor enclosures, freezing deposits and, finally, through terrorist attacks against frontier stations and the population itself.

5. Appealing to the International Court of Justice which recognized, in 12th April 1960, Portugal’s rights respecting Dadra and Nagar Haveli, in spite of being ignored and disrespected by the Parliament of New Delhi, from which finally came the illicit act of annexation by simple decree.

6. Comparing not only the moral population of Goa, deprived of religious and racial conflicts, with the precarious, racial and anti-Western way of life imposed by the Indian Union in so many States of the Hindustan Peninsula.

7. Considering secular alliances and treaties between England and Portugal, such as the Declaration of 14th October 1899, also known as the Treaty of Windsor. According to this one, the British Government was obliged to defend the Portuguese overseas territories from all present and future enemies[13]. Consequently, Oliveira Salazar, forced by the circumstances involving Goa’s crisis, invoked the reported alliance in order to request the Government of His Majesty about the possible cooperation against Indian aggression. Unfortunately, the answer, expressing the subtle pragmatism of British diplomacy, came through “inevitable limitations” on preventing armed attacks taken by members of the Commonwealth against Portuguese territories.

8. Requesting the United States intervention based on the assumption of the moral responsibility of one of the most powerful nation at the time. But unfortunately, the political and diplomatic intervention, though repeated diligences in Washington and New Delhi, did not make any difference at all. On the contrary, it had not only revealed the defeat of the less powerful nations of the world, but, above all, the utter inability of the most powerful ones to defend International Law.

9. Denouncing the United Nations Organization, which could not prevent Goa’s invasion no matter how the world would be shocked in the presence of such an alarming aggression[14]. It was, perhaps, one of the last few chances that the Western civilization had to establish, in a classical way, a universal system of balanced forces in order to keep a desirable solidarity between noble and pacific nations. Instead of that remained the crash of the United Nations invaded by a tumultuous crowd of States, parties, majorities and anti-Western groups bent on continental revolution and International Law subversion.

10. Dissuading, through a military position, an eventual Indian aggression, even if the military superiority of the last one could not allow any hope for a Portuguese success without allied support. Besides, in case of attack, Oliveira Salazar ordered, notwithstanding such terrible grief of soul, full sacrifice of spirit and honor by all Portuguese forces in order to: a) resist as much as possible – at least eight days -, to mobilize international instances in profit of the Portuguese Government b) preserve, at one time, Portugal’s historical dimension by assuming an old Lusitanian tradition in India c) valorize the military capacity of the Portuguese concerning their own territories, especially in Africa.

At mid-night, 18th December 1961, Portuguese Goa was finally invaded by Indian military forces. Despite the surrender of the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief Vassalo e Silva – whose heroic intentions were till the last minute very well known -, there was, symbolically speaking, some resistance expressed by Cunha Aragão and the ship´s crew of Afonso de Albuquerque, vanished after an artillery duel with Indian cruisers[15]. On the whole, 45 Portuguese and 22 Indians were killed.

In consequence, Goa’s fall was indeed disastrous for Portugal’s future as a political and an economical nation. So, for the first time, Portugal was not the same country as it had been for five hundred centuries, even becoming, for that very reason, much more vulnerable in its spiritual unity. Besides, the strategy of Nehru was, at that critical moment, reinforced by the Kremlin’s communist policy in order to attack and neutralize Portugal’s vital points based on African territories.

If it is true that some U. S. political and diplomatic personalities have perceived Portugal´s strategic position in facing international communism subversion, as, eventually, John Foster Dulles or even Dean Rusk, it is also true that Kennedy’s Administration, intellectually bounded by anti-colonialism illusion, commended an unrealistic policy that, in so many aspects, was incapable of protecting the Western allies and, in the end, of taking down terrorist forces by helping ironically some alleged alternatives based on pro-Western “nationalism”, democracy and human rights in Africa[16].

Oliveira Salazar, while establishing a parallel between international communism and American democratic “liberalism”, had the feeling that within twenty or thirty years the world would be entirely communist. Today, many academic analysts, scholars and political scientists can abstractly say that his prevision failed, no matter how the world came into an incredible mess. But, for the most precautious and independent thinkers, that same intuition can, surprisingly, make some real sense as it approaches one more battle between the forces of Good and Evil[17], both prefigured, in many ways, in the Atlantic and Eurasian conceptions of Life and Humanity.


[1] According to Marco Polo´s information, the enchanted prince lived in Central Asia.

[2] They also travelled through Medina and Mecca. While in the sacred city of Islam, both, in disguise, prayed to Maome, the Prophet.

[3] In Cairo Covilhã met with two Portuguese Jews sent by D. João II: Rabbi Abraham of Beja and Joseph, a shoe-maker of Lamego. The second one returned to Portugal with all the information gathered by the “Perfect Prince’s” secret agent.

[4] Pero da Covilhã had, for the purpose, visited Melinde, Quiloa, Mozambique and Sofala, recording the centres of commerce dominated by local sultans.

[5] After the victory of Goa (1510), Albuquerque was very generous in preserving the natives from slavery as well as being deprived of their own lands, riches and religious cults. The only demand was indeed Mamluk’s expulsion. In the conquest of Malacca (1511), another example can be found in Albuquerque´s tolerance with regard to the existence of cult places and Koran teachings. Generally speaking, he wished to preserve the coexistence between Jews, Muslims and Christians as Portugal earlier did in the Iberian Peninsula.

[6] Regarding the Portuguese Knights Templars, the greatest one was the Grand Master Gualdim Pais, companion of D. Afonso Henriques, the first King of Portugal. During the 3rd Crusade (1189-1192), guided by the tree most powerful princes of Europe – Federico Barbaroja, Emperor of Germany, Richard the Lionheart, King of England and Philippe August, King of France -, a considerable number of crusades, disembarking in Portugal´s coast, helped D. Afonso Henriques making the conquest of Lisbon (1147). However, the King responsible for transferring the Order of the Temple, extinguished by Pope Clement V (1307), to the Order of Christ (1319), was, fortunately, D. Dinis. This providential diligence, connected with the construction of a naval army, would permit the prospective knowledge and the financial resources to finally project the Portuguese navigators into the greatest Oceanic adventure of all times.

lisbonne torre de belem[7] Albuquerque received secret instructions from D. Manuel I in order to form a Christian Crusade to save Jerusalem from Islamic domain. The chief goal was to plan a strategy to reach the rear of the heart of Islam through the Indian Ocean. For that special purpose, D. Manuel I sent several emissaries to contact the European kings (Louis XII of France, Henry VII of England, Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain) and even search for the approval of Pope Alexander IV, who himself, in spite of the Turkish advance into the Balkans, did not accept the Portuguese Crusade.

[8] Alexander the Great planned, in times of yore, to open a canal between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Albuquerque was so attracted by that possibility that he even considered doing it by recruiting land undertakers of Madeira Island.

[9] This last expression belongs to Shah Ismail I from Persia.

[10] On the other side, Malacca was military taken in Santiago’s day (25th June). Curiously, Albuquerque was already a knight of the Order of Santiago.

[11] At the occasion, D. João de Castro, an intrepid warrior as well as a man of science specialized in hydrography, meteorology and the art of navigation, ran to help Diu with a small army that put to flight forty thousand Turks.

[12] The Indian forces were composed by an army of 45 000 soldiers and 26 000 reservists, supported by heavy ordenance, combat cars and several squadrons of Aircraft Bombers. The Portuguese forces, in turn, were barely composed by 3 500 officers, sergeants, metropolitan soldiers and 900 Indo-Portuguese.

[13] With regard to such Declaration, the first article of the Treatise of 1642 was expressively ratified as well as the final article of the Treatise of 1661. The former was generically related with an alliance between both Atlantic nations, while the other was related with the Portuguese Overseas defence by the British Government.

[14] The motion approved by a majority of seven votes to cease immediately the hostilities and to make the invasion forces drawback, was rejected by Russia. Once more become demonstrated not just the influence of the Soviets to support the New Delhi belligerency, but especially the inability of the Western nations to defend collectively their own strategy, interests and good will for the well being of Mankind. On the other side, the United Sates, guided by Kennedy’s Administration, joined again the day after with all members to vote against Portugal and, curiously, to guarantee, two days later, financial support to the Indian Union.

[15] There also died in combat brave Portuguese men, as the second lieutenant Santiago de Carvalho and lieutenant Oliveira e Carmo.

[16] In fact, a great number of juridical principles coming from the United Nations siege, such as the plebiscite or the principle of self-determination, were indeed abstract and negligent principles applied to Portugal’s case. Firstly, because Portugal’s Political Constitution had been expressively conceived to assume and guarantee the existence of a sentimental community of multiracial people spiritually united. Furthermore, Portugal was not a classical colonialist nation as England, France, Holland and Spain really were, simply because its peculiar racial interpenetration was not a fictitious theory, or even less an ideology or propaganda illusion, but a real fact. And that is why there is, according to traditional Portuguese culture, a deep distinction between colonialism and colonization. In other words, the Lusitanian secret conception of life had always been focused on historical and future nation embracement of many and different cultures in most places in the planet. So, in these armillary context, Salazar’s Portugal wished to preserve political ties – constitutionally different but not incompatible with a tendentious autonomic administration concerning individual participation on sovereign powers in all Portuguese territories – in order to unite all community parcels based on linguistic, national and Fatherland common values.

[17] We see Good and Evil as principles in a symbolical way and not in a strictly Manicheaistic one.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

The British and Portuguese Philosophies

Dedicated to Nicholas Maxwell

It is indeed a fact that the title of my latest article, From Knowledge to Wisdom, is literally the same as Nicolas Maxwell’s work. And as we know, there isn’t, spiritually speaking, any coincidences. And that’s why we are now reading his work to find, eventually, actual connections between the Portuguese and British philosophies.

Concerning European thought, it is perfectly known that both philosophies have a distinct role compared to the French and German ones. Firstly because the former seem especially related and traditionally “confronted” with the Continental culture. Secondly because both spiritual traditions have a unique interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy, chiefly regarding on practical fulfilments based on living and spontaneous experience (1). Moreover, it is known that the Aristotelian notion of experience was not inspired on mechanical or technological procedures, those barely practiced in Antiquity and increasingly developed in the Modern Age. Besides, the works of Baron of Verulam, namely the Novum Organum, were most useful in pointing out why the induction problem needed to be solved beyond syllogistic exercises practiced by medieval scholars in a purely formal registry.

We don’t think, like many western academics do, that the British thought is simply reduced to empiricism, pragmatism and materialism. In Bacon’s scientific methodology, the crooked mirror and the theory of the idols are, for example, true philosophical resources to understand how the human mind can wrongly judge, while distorting, the immanent forms of nature itself. And that is why the induction process, going from sensible experience to lower axioms or propositions, is fundamental to guarantee new and general axioms based on intermediary ones. So, the “living axioms” or the middle ones were meanwhile considered, not according to a syllogistic method stemming from abstract propositions, words and notions, but under the light of a natural history, made of particular facts gradually and carefully inducted to perform the knowledge of forms (2).

This same process was, curiously enough, analogical to the Socratic induction, in which the crucial aim was to extract concept definitions, especially regarding the negative cases, under the method of exclusion, in order to conclude for the positive ones (3). So, as Socrates was always ready to persecute dialectically the divine world of Ideas, Francis Bacon was trying to implement aninduction methodology capable of perceiving the interplay of matter, forms and motion in nature, mostly invisible to human senses. Moreover, the mathematics application on Bacon’s operative induction was just an auxiliary one, scarcely coming after the process in which the multiple would give its place to the simple (4), the incommensurable to what was susceptible ofmeasure, the insensible to what could be calculable, vagueness or confusion to what offered certainty, as we can similarly experience or testify before the alphabet letters and note music itself.

On the other hand, Galileo Galilei was not the founder of the experimental method, according to some academic manuals of philosophic history. The true one was indeed Francis Bacon, whose experimentation methodology was an admirable model of investigation of causes about the elastic, fluid and ethereal elements. An example of this can be found in his work, Novun Organum, where he makes the famous investigation of the form of heat.

It is possible that some historians of science could see or detected in Bacon a forerunner of Karl Popper in respect of the method of falsification. Despite of everything, we think that Bacon’s natural philosophy should be investigated further into the limits and the possibilities of classical knowledge, principally enunciated by John Locke, David Hume and by the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant. Subsequently, the problem is to know how the empirical facts and the formal sciences expressed by logical and mathematical propositions work.

In other words, the problem emerges as a remote one. So, Francis Bacon needs, perhaps, to be strongly reconsidered in order to weigh how Aristotle’s physical, logical and metaphysical thought was eradicated in the Modern Age. Therefore, a new scholastic system was born based on mechanical science and, naturally, more and more dependent on mathematical logic and analytical thought.

Crucial it is as well to see how John Locke had, effectively, recognized mathematics as an independent knowledge domain facing the empirical one. And how, in turn, David Hume conceived the same thing with one single exception: the mathematical concepts would have their origin in sensitive or perceptual experience. And last but not least, how Bertrand Russell reduced mathematics into formal logic (5).

So, at this point supervenes, according to our perspective, the philosophical problem of the present Anglo-Saxon culture: a specific form of positivism due to a contemporary deviation from the philosophia perenis, mostly represented by Aristotle’s logic. In fact, the Greek philosopher did not conceive a mathematical logic.

Aristotle´s induction is indeed the first logical inference by which the human spirit operates the transition of the multiple towards the unit. Philosophy, by considering images (fantasmata) originated in senses, begins with audacity of inferences just to transcend time and space determinations. In fact, the process of conception can be no more reduced to mathematical abstraction, as currently demonstrated in geometric postulates or paradoxical notions (6) which, by itself, are in contradiction with natural experience.

Fractional, negative, irrational, imaginary numbers are just mathematical fictions, like when we define a point without dimensions, or even a line without breadth. Mathematical fiction can also include the tendency of the polygon to the circumference and, most of all, the non-distinction between straight lines and curves. We must recognize that similar fiction represents a different world outside nature and life, a world in which industrial and machinery activity are solidly dependent.

Basically, the damaging consequences of modern science is certainly the centre of the Portuguese philosophy inquiry, especially regarding the calculating progress based on extensive and disqualified abstraction. Mathematics cannot hence explain phenomenal motion in spite of the possibilities of non-superficial and volumetric operations of arithmetic – multiplication and division -, whose respective incognita is foremost implicated in generation and corruption phenomena. But, of course, there also exists the Pythagorean point of view, a deeply one dependent at least on a minimum of divine revelation, or, more precisely, on a speculative process beyond all kinds of quantitative applications confined to extensive observation, construction and experimentation.

It is out of question that William Hamilton’s studies about the “quantification of the predicate” are useful to modern logic, namely those ones regarding Morgan and Boole’s studies. But it is also true that Aristotle’s logic is not a particular case of the theory of classes as is commonly presented in academic institutions. Aristotle’s logic surpasses the conversion of combined propositions, useful for lawyers and judges, as celebrated in the classical period of Roman rhetoric, but, in the end, not capable of realizing a philosophical speculation or a wisdom inquiry.

Therefore, if the process of academic culture expands and communicates human knowledge, the art of invention increases much more and infinitely the living world of metaphysical wisdom. The British thinkers, logicians, psychologists, epistemologists, can meanwhile recognize that even Sherlock Homes, a fictitious character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, used an investigative method in many senses beyond the positivism of the Nineteenth Century. Deduction, induction (7), abduction (8), all this can be undoubtedly found in Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. Nevertheless, we shall carefully listen to the man who was, fictitiously speaking, an experimentalist in “Baritsu” (9) and, more surprisingly, unacquainted with something referred to Philosophy: «imagination is often the mother of truth».

 


 

brasao(1) Aristotelian experience is not a locked up process. In fact, it is not possible to reach the universal by just knowing partial, regular or cyclical accidents extracted from induction reasoning. Empirical process demands also deduction reasoning for conclusive universal science. In this sense, the Portuguese discoveries were consequently inspired in the empirical “revolution” of Aristotle’s cosmology, particularly represented in the realistic vision of Henry, the Navigator, or even more through the classification of zoological, botanic and mineralogical phenomena.

(2) The following passage is a specific expression of Bacon’s non-Aristotelian Aristotelianism: «There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of the middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms at last. This is the true way, but as yet untried» (Novum Organum, I, Aph. XIX, Bacon, IV, 1901, 50).

(3) This induction method goes beyond the remit of induction by simple enumeration. By that it means that Bacon’s induction is especially founded on collection, comparison and exclusion of factual qualities in things and their hidden structure.

(4) Bacon’s natural philosophy is concerned with simple natures or the ultimate ingredients of things, as, for instance, heat, light and weight. In this particular sense, Bacon´s interpretation concerning the basic structure of matter is not identical with natural law.

(5) Two main things overtop Russell’s objective in his way to logicism: 1. Mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths; 2. All mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs, or more properly, theorems of mathematics can constitute a proper subset of the theorems of logic, like numbers can be identified with classes.

(6) Worth of memory is Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, in which method does not enter Aristotle´s third term. And that is why dialectics are especially important in this paradoxical method, where God Himself is presented like a sphere whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. In short, Nicholas of Cusa conceived God as a non- physical centre of all beings and all things.

(7) Despite Holmes’s deductive proceeding, inductive reasoning is often valorized: «It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts».

(8) Abduction, originally formulated by Aristotle, is a syllogism in which the second premise has only the character of probability.

(9) “Baritsu”, or more correctly Bartitsu, was an eclectic martial art and self-defence method created by Edward William Barton-Wright, a British engineer who lived for three years in the Empire of Japan. Bartitsu was developed in England in the years 1898-1902 and became somehow immortalized as “Baritsu” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The “New Art of Self-Defence” combined several fighting styles like fencing, boxing, wrestling, savate, jujitsu and a walking stick as a means of self-defense. At the present, it is known as the martial art of Sherlock Holmes.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

From Knowledge to Wisdom

In his book, The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek wrote that «knowledge exists only as the knowledge of individuals». In this sense, it is also true when he says that «it is not much better than a metaphor to speak of the knowledge of society as a whole. The sum of the knowledge of all the individuals exists nowhere as an integrated whole. The great problem is how we can all profit from this knowledge, which exists only dispersed as the separate, partial, and sometimes conflicting beliefs of all men».

He also explains – according to the Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom – how civilization is much more a result of a continued experience rather than a theoretical process conceived by human intellect. It is like an open process that no longer can be misconstrued with erroneous intellectualism based on reasoning capacity outside nature and human experience. In other words, the growth of knowledge in our society is not confined to the expert methods of needed information, but more to the non-explicit knowledge dispersed among countless individuals.

Consequently, too many people, believing or following the “empty intellect”, do not even realize that scientific methods and similar ones can no longer satisfy all society’s needs for organized well-being. Besides, several factors can make their own progress, especially those ones concerned with the human adaptations to environment in which historical and spiritual experience have been incorporated. In most cases, tradition itself is a more powerful factor regarding the spirit of one nation or country, without which the successive generations can no longer integrate the cultural heritage into the pursuit of noble and civilized ends.

Moreover, knowledge is not wisdom. The first one is a process of accumulation in what concerns cultural and scientific information. The second one is a personal creation, a discovery process coming from a singular human being. It might even be said that the very division of knowledge increases the necessary ignorance about spiritual human nature, or even that new intellectual obstacles can emerge and bound a better comprehension of the world around us.

No man, even with the greatest knowledge he could obtain or accumulate, would be capable of direct control of individual efforts to achieve particular things and happiness in life. Even the wisest ruler could not be able of such a thing without creating a stagnant society in which all individuals would be conditioned by a restricted freedom. However, it is always better for all that some should be free than none, especially when historical and philosophical reasons can prove that it is possible to unfree societies to benefit from what they obtain and learn from free societies.

In Portugal, for instance, freedom is just a nominal and formal expression. More specifically, freedom of speech and discussion is only an empty promise, largely worthless, because intellectual liberty is not practiced in school and university institutions. The main reason relies on a superficial or repeated intellectualism, scientifically false and secularly limited by ecclesiastic heritage respecting censorship of cultural information.

In some way, socialism is now conducting a new form of censorship based on intellectual control, a more subtle process early promoted by Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party. The objective, therefore, is to substitute revolutionary proletarians by “intellectual workers” regarding an official socialist propaganda based on Marxist culture. This non-explicit process, firstly suggested by university teachers to higher school and primary teachers, secondly by the students themselfs, has, finally, decayed in Stat omnipotence, denial of liberty, property abolition and priority of will.

To every socialist agent, directly or indirectly conscious of what he really represents in the New World Order, the category of modality, implied in Aristotle’s thought, does not make any minimal difference. In fact, too many intellectuals in Portugal are still conceiving the principle of freedom as an absolute value, on one hand well affirmative, and on the other purely transcendental. To them it can only be one or a unique way, without any concession to human limitations or even to the possibility of making real some social, political and jurisprudential aspects that might elapse from freedom’s principle.

Curiously, the absolute sense concerning freedom can be found in theological, catholic and medieval tradition, later reflected in modern and secular humanism. Among the Portuguese, this type of transition began to occur in the eighteen century, especially due to José Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal, who himself, as a despotic Minister of D. José I, expelled the Jesuit Order from Portugal (1759), and, with it, the neo-scholastic system based on the Aristotelian tradition. In short, the new rhetoric of liberty, in its rationalist, anti-theological and anti-religious character, became immediately a desperate pragmatism where freedom was supposed to be for all or, simply, for none.

Another case can be, contextually speaking, found in Japan after the Second World War, namely in what respects the proper reconstruction based on America’s democracy model. For the record, we must remind ourselves that the Allied Powers for the Occupation and Control of Japan were confronted with an ancient culture where the Emperor himself was traditionally considered “a living god”. So, basically, Hirohito was forced to renounce to his divine ascendency at the same time Japan’s modernization took place through the following aspects: a new Constitution in which, according to article 9, the right of belligerency was fully denied; decentralization of political power; religion and State separation; equal and liberal education; a free syndical movement; women liberation; sex equality; free elections; independent judicial power; abolition of noble titles; political, military and economic sanitation and so on.

This was, certainly, the initial plan to set, through democracy and human rights, the necessary reconstruction of Japan after the Second World War. But some Americans soon understood that democracy and human rights could not simply be applied into Japan’s spiritual culture once and for all. Apart from that, a new factor arose: the communist peril.

General MacArthur was one of the first Americans to fully understand this peculiar process, just because he knew how important it was to keep the Imperial Institution as a way of symbolizing the unity of the Japanese nation. Otherwise, the Occupation could be not only interpreted as an American imposition, but also because the communist peril, represented by China, Korea and the Soviet Union, was a real threat for the Free World, including Japan’s new reconstruction. In some way, General MacArthur was indeed the great “saver” of Hirohito, who was also, in turn, undoubtedly an enemy of any form of anarchy and communism.

With the beginning of the Korean War, in 1950, it is interesting to see how America’s administration of Japan took another direction regarding the previous procedures facing social, political and economical aspects, as, for example, a more flexible antitrust legislation against monopolistic companies (Zaibatsu), or a more restrictive legislation to prevent the industrial downfall caused by strikes and syndical movements. In fact, Japan´s economy practically increased during the Korean War, recuperating, by the end of it, in 1953, the production levels as they were before the Pacific War (1941-45).

Morihei-Ueshiba-foto-4In terms of material development, the Japanese people have without doubt won in preventing the communist peril, by becoming one of the great world economical powers. But spiritually, the Japanese people are still wondering how to combine their ancient culture with the materialistic world of the present day. One man, the highest symbol of Japan’s modern culture, Morihei Ueshiba, appeared, instead, as a mysterious force that had effectively the wisdom to preserve, in a new form of light, the union between Heaven and Earth by practicing the heritage fighting skills coming from Budo.

O’Sensei is the Founder of Aikido, “the harmony way of the Spirit”. During the Second World War, Master Ueshiba went to Iwama, a sacred place localized in the Prefecture of Ibaraki, in north-east Tokyo. Once there, he preserved the spiritual tradition of the former Aiki-bujutsu, saving the future of Aikido fromButokukai, the national school for all martial arts, otherwise created in 1897 by the Japanese government.

After the Second World War, he trained many people coming from all planet points, including American Army soldiers. O’Sensei, like no other men in Japan or in any part of the world, could really master the Ki, a vital force containing all beings, forms and creatures in the universe. In spiritual terms, he could also touch without being touched. But, of course, that process was a longue and a profound result of his daily practice in the presence of the Japanese gods, on whom O’Sensei entirely depended, on his way to wisdom.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. Translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

Philosophy of Freedom

According to F. A. Hayek’s social and political thought, the tradition of liberty is not the exclusive creation of any single country. Consequently, no nation or group of individuals have sole possession of the secret related to such tradition whose origins can be found in the ancient Greeks, the Italians of the early Renaissance, and also on the French and German contributions. Briefly, the tradition of liberty is an open system not bounded by particular institutions or policies taking place in specific and eventual circumstances.

Hayek also said that the principles of a philosophy of freedom extends far beyond technical economics or any other single discipline. This is a very crucial point of view, because without a theoretical vision it is not possible to understand the unity that must be found in every political, economic and cultural aspects of our society. This is also why there is a very important distinction to be made between freedom and liberty, the first concept being related to a transcendent principle that justifies, in all senses, the second one.

In other words, freedom is the principle that guarantees, by itself, that liberty cannot depend on discretionary authority stemming from social or political rulers, neither stemming from a previously defined framework of rights and duties that, somehow, enable the individual conduct in what respects his own fate or destiny. Going further, the principle of freedom is revealed by the Spirit, making its own appearance in human thought, then capable of bringing it to concrete and civilized existence.

The words freedom and liberty have been both distorted, intentionally or not. First of all because emotions and even noble sentiments have perverted the intellectual sphere capable of guaranteeing the real content of those words. Second because that same content has been disparaged to the point where vague terms are undermining all kind of clarification in what concerns conceptual guidance.

That´s the reason why Hayek insists, pertinently, in the interweaving of philosophy, jurisprudence and economics with the purpose of a better understanding of the value of freedom and, consequently, of a free society. Besides that, he also warns that freedom is not merely one particular value, but the source and chief condition of all moral and spiritual values. In this sense, Hayek, especially in his book The Constitution of Liberty, says: «What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free».

In fact, Hayek´s terminology preference points tofreedom, being more related with the original meaning of the concept, this one regarding not the mere range of one person’s choice, but basically his own expectation regarding the course of action in accordance with present intentions. Besides, the original meaning of the word can also be described as “independence of the arbitrary will of another”, a more sharp but unquestionable expression.

Above all, it is important to clarify that freedom does not mean physical “ability to do what I want”, because, if so, we are contributing to a confusion that may become very dangerous, once it can, eventually, lead political and intellectual leaders to identify liberty with power. In this way, very common to socialist leaders, the word liberty, once perverted, can be used to destroy individual liberty, which, conceptually speaking, transcends most deeply the absence of obstacles to the realization of our desires. According to this, freedom does not means omnipotence, or a demand of power like it can be found, for example, in some “liberal” circles, in the United States.

These circles are, in some sense, inspired by intellectuals like John Dewey, whose ideology has been spread, not only in the United Sates, but also in European countries, like Portugal. In the last one, the high school students are, somehow, obliged to assimilate this ideology inserted in school programs, to not speak in whom, mentality conditioned by “university Marxism”, is responsible for officially teaching that same ideology. Moreover, the appeal of this false ideology is perfectly understandable in a socialist content, claiming as it is the redistribution of wealth in the name of liberty.

According to Hegel’s Principles of Philosophy of Law, the redistribution of wealth is, significantly, named as an abstract product of the “empty intellect”, or an “abstract idealism”. In another words, coming now from Orlando Vitorino, a Portuguese philosopher, the true question can be defined in the following terms: justice is not related with equal distribution of wealth according to socialism, but instead related with uneven disparity among men, things and the world itself.

To the philosophical conception of Orlando Vitorino, Freedom´s universal, being a different issue regarding Justice – whose real concept takes place only when it implies everyone -, does not prevent individual liberty in the presence of collective liberty, once freedom, in its absolute and universal meaning, is not realizable in extensive terms to the totality. Thus, property can be understood, more even as an economic relation, like an effective manifestation of freedom, where, through its substantial religiosity, is also the main basis of the personality and, above all, the perpetuation of the family and love relations.

Orlando VitorinoIn fact, Orlando Vitorino, inspired by the Aristotelian philosophy of Álvaro Ribeiro, could also see that human reason is always inscribed in the world relations between beings, souls and spirits. In this sense, human thought, more properly said, appears like a spiritual and rational movement capable of knowing the genuine world, and, by that process, guarantees that no longer principles like Freedom, Truth and Justice can be conceptually crystallized or, simply, determined by mere human subjectivity. According to this, the principle of Freedom, for example, is not, by essence, immediately related with action, in spite of, through it, being susceptible of revealing itself in deep and multiple ways.

It seems perfectly understandable that Freedom, characterized as a transcendental principle, cannot be either physically or conceptually conquerable. However, it must be possible the existence of conceptual thought without which Freedom can no longer exist among us. Despite all, we should be aware in the presence of empty and revolutionary ideologies which have been and still are preparing global’s serfdom.

In Portugal, political, economical and cultural serfdom is an indisputable fact, although most people, living as such, are not conscious of it. And the reason for their awareness can be accurately found in university structures practically dominated by materialistic ideologies, initially imposed under the consulship of the Marquis of Pombal, a tyrant of the eighteenth century. Just to have an idea of the pombaline structures impact in the last two centuries in Portugal education, we must say that the existence of private education institutions have just appeared after the Communist Revolution in 1974.

“Universidade Livre” (“Free University”) was, probably, the first private university institution coming from those days of revolutionary delirium. That can be explain by the fact that all teachers, methods or programs schools were being undermined by Marxism ideology, responsible for the breakthrough of institutions, financiers enterprises and private properties. As most similar institutions of the present, the “Free University” was, ironically, not free, or really independent from public education, because, implanted as an administrative extent of it, was simply keeping and promoting the same teachers and the same learning methods coming from school state institutions.

Orlando Vitorino was a vehement critic of this cultural centralization, especially when he was working as an inspector for the Gulbenkian Foundation, namely to the Gulbenkian Library Service. He mainly wished that a private institution, like this Foundation, could indeed take the opportunity to create an independent University, truly inspired by the Portuguese culture routs. Unfortunately, it was totally in vain because the Gulbenkian cultural policy was then, like it is in present days, adopting an official model practically dominated by state cultural institutions.

Orlando Vitorino, a classical liberal thinker, just knew very well how powerful socialism was, especially regarding to cultural activities, such as music, architecture, poetry, literature and, most of all, philosophy. Today, socialism continues to be very powerful not just in cultural activities, but also in political and economical ones. In conclusion, socialism is, specially today, a non-ideological combination of public and private sectors, but still projected by a powerful global movement whose historical existence is barely perceived by normal and common people.

19Miguel Bruno Duarte is a Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.