The Awful Truth

I was thrilled when Noah Shachtman, formerly of Defense Tech, started a new multi-author blog called Danger Room. So imagine my dismay when I learned that he's decided, wittingly or otherwise, to participate in the coverup of what is perhaps the most vital story of our time: Hitler's secret UFO bases at the South Pole.

DR contributor Sharon Weinberger writes:

You would think the Nazis' military regime was so grotesque that there wouldn't be the need to create any myths -- reality was hard enough to comprehend. Not so. Conspiracy theorists for years have connected the Nazis to everything from UFO sightings to anti-gravity technology. One particularly persistent myth -- that the Nazis established a secret base in Antarctica -- is now the subject of a peer reviewed scientific paper...to debunk the entire idea.

This is heartbreaking stuff. One can only hope that Mr. Shachtman and Ms. Weinberger are befuddled dupes, rather than active agents of the disinformation brigade. Mark my words, though: When the saucers swarm out of New Swabia in order to establish the Fourth Reich, you will believe. For as Miguel Serrano observes:

The Golden Age, Ultimate Thule, Hyperborea, the other side of things; so easy and so difficult to attain. The inner earth, the Other Earth, the counter-earth, the astral earth, to which one passes as it were with a "click"; a bilocation, or trilocation of time.

In any case, Mr. Shachtman lets the cat out of the bag with this post on American-made saucers, which (like this 50-foot, laser-equipped, robotic Michael Jackson) are clearly meant to be deployed against the forces of Hyperaustralian fascism. Unfortunately, scholars like myself, who've spentless many fruitless years trying to puncture the Abscess of Ignorance with the Lancet of Truth, realize that these weapons are too little, and have come too late, to pose more than a mild inconvenience to the New Swabian ubermenschen.

Joking aside, the Nature article makes a good point:

If the people advancing this kind of stuff — one of whom was recently jailed for holocaust denial — cared about the evidence, they wouldn't be where they are in the first place.

Apropos of which, a nicely restored print of one of my favorite movies - Jacques Rivette's Paris Nous Appartient (1960) - has finally been reissued on DVD. Among other things, it deals with a fascist conspiracy so shocking, and so widespread, that it reduces the people who learn of it to despair. This despair has its consolations, though: the romantic apotheosis of possessing forbidden knowledge that elevates one above the herd, for instance, as well as the convenience of understanding the "futility" of political resistance.

Which is what leads one character to say, finally, that "nightmares are alibis." It's a very timely sentiment, in my view.