Pius XII and the Jewish Question in the Second World War

Heard from Israel

Talks in Jerusalem

The Palestinian's Complaint

The Strange Meeting at Ely

The Cyprus Problem

Studies in the Turkish Mentality, by Doctor Sandy

The Kurdish War in Turkey, by Doctor Sandy

Religious Assessment by John

Doctor Sandy Concerning "The New Frontier"

What the Holy Quran does not say about Mahomet

The Problem Concerning Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, etc.

The War in Afghanistan (1996)

Eric Newby: A Short Walk in the Hindukush

Two Letters from an Old Doctor

Moslem News

Doctor Sandy's Lecture

His one possible defence is that he chose the difficult path of total silence in order not to expose the church to any anger from the Germans - they did control Italy and Rome, and their capricious cruelty was capable of anything. They might have blown up the Church of St. Peter for him. He had no wish to make an extremely difficult situation even more difficult for a much larger number of people. He preferred protecting his church to imperilling it by breathing one word in favour of the Jews.

This is what sentences him and his church. If he had dared to side with the Jews with his world-wide Catholic church, the greatest and most influential of all Christian communities, he would have saved not only Christianity morally but also countless numbers of Jews. Instead he chose the opposite in his folly.

Since the days of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor in the 4th century, Christianity has claimed an absolute monopoly of religion by accusing the Jews for having crucified Christ and condemned them as heathens although they always believed in God, only because they never were formally baptized. This prejudice was not abandoned by the church until the days of pope John XXIII in 1959.

The parting line between Christianity and Jewry is the Christian notion that Christ was the son of God. The Jews prefer believing in God directly without by-roads. This is really the only thing separating these two faiths from each other. Although the Jews believed in God long before Christ was born, the Christians have always asserted that their faith is the only true one and always denied the Jewish faith any legitimacy in comparison. Of course this is pure stupidity and unpardonable ignorance, which according to the wisest heads of Hinduism and Buddhism is the only unpardonable sin.

People have often been curious about my own standing-point. Since I read the Bible the first time from beginning to end at the age of 21 I have preferred the Old Testament to the New one, since nearly everything in the New Testament was already written in the Old. I always had faith in Christ as a divine personality but carefully avoided taking sides to all the later constructed dogmas of the church. At the same time I agreed with St. Paul refuting Jewish formalism concerning circumcision and other such matters, which at least on our latitudes no longer are hygienically necessary formalities.

At the same time I willingly embraced the vast fields of knowledge of Hinduism and the humane constructivity of Buddhism. If I embrace all these different faiths - how then can I tell where I stand exactly? You need two feet to stand on for some security - one is not enough. I prefer standing on at least four.

Two Jews discussing.

"Don't let the Hebron massacre disturb your mind. It has nothing to do with anyone's religion or move towards peace since it was only executed for egoistical purpose by a mad American. He claimed to be a Jew, but no Jew could possibly call him Jewish since he violated the most sacred of all God's commandments: Thou shalt not kill. His design was not only to kill as many Arabs as possible but also to destroy the entire peace process. He was not only the enemy of all Arabs but also of all Jews, all Muslims and all Christians and the mortal enemy of all people of a constructive mind. Those Jews who bless Benjamin Goldstein, extol his deed and honour his memory are not Jews but like Goldstein himself a disgrace to Israel.

On the other hand, those who hold forth this psychopathic example as an example typical of Israel, who use this example to curse Israel and to add fuel to the hatred of Israel are not in the least any better. The example of this American psychopath was unique as such and only prominent as an example of inhumanity and almost only comparable to the Charles Manson case, who was also an American.

Therefore, the less said and thought of this lonely psychopath, the better. Such loonies are only to be buried in memory as excrement smelling to foully to be humanly possible to be dealt with."

"No, brother, you can't explain it away. Baruch Goldstein was a Jew, born a Jew, educated a Jew and even a doctor, and he did what he did in the name of Israel and even on the eve of a joyous Jewish holiday. He had even planned it very carefully. It was a premeditated mass murder executed on purpose in the name of God. It can not be compared with the ritual murders of Charles Manson 25 years ago but rather with the suicidal attacks of Muslim fundamentalists. As Jews we can not free ourselves from the responsibility. We have to take it on our backs and carry it forever."

Talks in Jerusalem, part 3.

On my second day in Jerusalem I entered by the New Gate and went directly to the Temple area. I had heard that the Chain Gate (the only entrance) was to be closed already at one o'clock, and my bus from Natanya was late. I reached the gate in the last minute and was instantly assaulted by the friendliest voluntary guide in the world, who was very disappointed when I didn't need his service. He wanted 20 shekels to show me the way to the ticket office and refused to leave me until he had obtained something. I got rid of him for 2 shekels - a bribe just to dispose of an embarrassing and depressing problem.

The Dome of the Rock, the oldest sacred monument in the history of Islam, now became the first mosque in my life which I entered. It is well worth a visit. You can well understand the enthusiasm of the emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen as he during his peaceful crusade to Jerusalem in 1228 was so impressed by the fantastic architecture of this sacred building that he later built his own most important castle (Castel del Monte between Aquila and Pescara in Abruzzi) in the same octagon form. As you wander about in this marvellous construction and study its wonderful cupola from the inside you are seized with a kind of vertigo and bewildering dislocation of the perspective, which makes you think something is wrong with your eyes, but there isn't. The Dome of the Rock was simply designed that way by its incredibly clever architects.

From there I went out through the Damascus Gate and down back across Kidron to Gethsemane. Unfortunately the Russian church of St. Mary Magdalene was closed and inaccessible, which from the outside is the most beautiful church in Jerusalem. After having revisited the garden of Gethsemane and the ecumenical garden of prayers of pope Paul VI almost at the top of the hill I went back down to Kidron and followed it to the City of David to ascend Mount Sion and enter by the Gate of Sion. Next I went to make my second visit to Rabbi Yohanan.

He took me through Cardo to the Wailing Wall, where we seated ourselves on the long stone bench beneath the flagstaffs furthest from the Wall. He was in his very best teaching mood, and it was obvious how carefully he had considered the things he wanted to tell me.

"Moses was probably the only real prophet who ever existed. Elijah was of course number two, but then there were not many others. But even such a grand old man as Moses had his foibles. He was not easy to deal with when he got angry, in his fits he was about as mad as your saint Savonarola, who was burnt at the stake for a greater lack of sins; and he was probably much worse and more difficult than your Giordano Bruno. Our astrologers think he might have been born in the sign of Capricorn, since it's noticeable how he constantly wanted to climb mountains, both real ones and greater mountains of human effort. He was so enthusiastic about climbing Mount Sinai that he brought his whole people to the mountain, and as an old and dying man he insisted on getting up the Mount Nebo. But mind you: no ascension! He may have had fits of bad temper now and then, but he was not vain, but always strove honestly for the welfare of his people. And he was the first one to start compromising with his own Law, which art and practice has continued ever since. The Law of Moses has never been followed exactly, but it has always been compromised with. Moses himself probably only brought the commandments and then tried to apply them practically by taking their consequences in each individual case. The great bulk of the Law was probably collected after his time and then consisted of a collection and concentration of all those individual judgements and decisions he had made that could be remembered. He was really the first judge, and the final edition of the Torah might have been completed during the times of Samuel, the last great judge, since during the reign of king David the Law is already well known and referred to.

Take a look at these black-coat Jews with their long ornate whiskers. I can well understand that gojim find them ridiculous. These are today the Jews who come closest to the ideal pursuit of the Law of Moses, but just the way they do their hair is a compromise. The Law says, that no razor is to touch the head of a Nazir as long as he remains holy as such, which means he may not cut his hair nor his beard. But these holiest of Jews cut all their hair except the whiskers, which they grow just to show something to prove that they haven't compromised everything away."

"What about the other prophets then, like Jesus and Mahomet? Are they completely worthless from a Jewish point of view?"

"Of course not. Jesus was probably the most learned young Jew of his age, he must have known the entire Law, Prophets and Scriptures by heart, he was probably something of what we call an infant prodigy, but special circumstances made something unsound rise in his mind. He got the idea that he was the real Messiah, and he acted that part admirably well all the way to the bitter end but got the hell out of it and died too soon as a result of it. But his performance was unforgettable, which resulted in the most powerful religion that ever existed, because all people with high regard for themselves, who wanted to be superior to everyone else, like kings and emperors, were inspired by the greatness of Christ's example and became Christians. He probably came closest to the Messianic ideal of all candidates ever, but that doesn't mean he was the only possible Messiah, no matter how much common sense he preached, no matter how much good he did, no matter how many patients he cured and how many he resurrected from the dead apart from his playing the part of the Messiah. Of course, many of your readers will object to my words if you quote them, so please, don't define my person too clearly but keep my name unknown. But the same thing that I am telling you, every rabbi in Israel and in the world would tell you also."

"And what about Mahomet?"

"That's the real problem. You see, of all religions only Islam takes itself dead seriously. You can not have a sense of humour in Islam, it has never been possible, and whenever someone has tried to crack an apposite joke about the slightest triviality in Islam, the bud of self-irony has been crushed and banned and never been permitted to blossom. In Islam, good humour, self-irony and self-criticism only exist as underground activities. That's why Islam has become the most imprisoned and bleak and morbid of all religions.

The less said about Mahomet himself, the better. I sincerely hope you don't have any Moslem readers of the only proper faith. He was an epileptic who used his illness for his own benefit by taking his epileptic hallucinations seriously. His epileptic ecstasy he called prophetic visions and revelations by the angel Gabriel. The Arabs at that time were the most primitive people in the world, and they were enough superstitious to believe in such a scary prophet. He didn't write anything down himself though, just like Jesus, but all his holy writ was taken down from hearsay long after his death, some even say in the Aramaic tongue by Jews. All he did was to copy the Torah, and he translated the Genesis into the Arabian mentality. For us, the Quran version of B'reshit is like a Donald Duck version of a great classic. But the Arabs liked it. And then he also fancied the absurd story of the Ascension. He found it a good idea, so he went up to heaven too, but he had to do it even better than Jesus, so he started off from the very rock of Moriah, the most sacred rock of Jerusalem, where Abraham had considered sacrificing Isaac, the holiest spot for all our three religions.

Of course, you can't just explain it all away like that, and also the prophet Elijah went up to heaven - but in an entirely different way. Elijah was picked up by something, while Jesus and Mahomet sailed up by themselves. Now there is in your theology a famous Christian phenomenon called levitation. Your Saint Thomas Aquinas is supposed to have levitated now and then and in the presence of witnesses, and the Ascension of Christ could be an expansion of the remarkable incident where he was seen by the apostles together with Moses and Elijah. In that moment he also appeared in a somewhat elevated situation. It is well known, that people subject to an extraordinary inspiration can be carried away to such an extreme degree of ecstasy by their emotions that it becomes noticeable to other people who are terrified by the fact that the inspired person becomes someone else, like an illumined stranger. The episode on the mountain with Christ appearing like this was probably such an occasion and why not to an excessive degree, so that the memory thereof became so unforgettable that it gradually developed into the Ascension, which Mahomet found such an irresistible idea, so he found it convenient to be placed in the same position and, if possible, in an even better one.

But most interesting and important about Islam is its origin as a challenge against Christianity, which at that time was suffocating the world in dogmas and intolerance. Still today, Islam is the greatest Christian challenge, and between ourselves I think it is quite appropriate that the Dome of the Rock over there in the middle of the Temple area remains Islamic giving both Christianity and all self-righteous over-learned all too orthodox Jews sore eyes. Also the nicest parts of Jerusalem are all Moslem, where life is at its most natural, while unfortunately the rest of the city no longer is dominated by poor pilgrims but rather by rich dollar tourists, who gradually are becoming the only welcome people here. Still, the state of Israel is not just an extra American state or colony. Only our economy is American. The identity of the Jew was rediscovered and resurrected in Germany in the 18th century, and Israel is still ruled and dominated by those German Jews, ashkenasim. Our culture is European. Only our economy is Jewish-American. But we shouldn't have turned Jerusalem into our capital. That was an error. We should have allowed it to remain a wholly international religious city reserved for poor pilgrims and sacred graves. Tel-Aviv is a much more positive, happy and extrovert city and much more suitable for a capital and centre of secular politics. The politicians should have left the sanctity of Jerusalem in peace, for there is no better witness in the world of the consequences of political power than our sacred Jerusalem. Many times Jerusalem has been destroyed, and here you see all that remains of the first, greatest and holiest Temple in the world, which after its restructurization was only even more utterly destroyed. This is the true God: the Wailing Wall, the crucifixion and all the graves of Jerusalem. God is history, which always will make all empires and political dreams of greatness crumble and fall to dust. Our God is the God of Job, who caused Job to lose all his children and all his property although Job had done nothing to deserve it. This is the only God we are able to present: the brutal and ruthless historical truth about the destruction of all empires and the death of six million innocent Jews for nothing. This is not the God of Moses, your Jesus or Mahomet, but it is the God that always exists no matter how you believe in him or not, always unfathomable, undefinable, relentless and overwhelming in his total power and control of history, which humankind never has been able to control."

"Do you mean to say that Islam has no future?"

"I feel sorry for Islam. Look at all these beggars in the streets of Jerusalem. They are all Muslims. Look at all these boys of the Intifada throwing stones at us, who have upset the whole world and almost turned the United States against us. They are only children, but they hate us, because they feel so painfully inferior to us. The Arabs and the Bedouins can not compete with us, because they are not that adjustable. We easily learn all the languages of the world, and we print and read five alphabets on our public signposts, but the Arabs only know their Quran and their Arabic. Their five service duties every day make it impossible for them to relax from the strains of their religion. They are constantly being brainwashed and made dependent like serfs. They have my sincerest and greatest compassion, I worry about them quite a lot, because unless we care for them when misfortune falls upon them, no one else will either. Islam has an increasingly bad reputation all over the world among the Hindus and Buddhists of Asia as well as among the Christians of Europe and America. And in Africa the Moslems are still trading with slaves. Enough. There was something you wanted to ask."

"Time is passing, and it will soon be dark. Isn't it about time that we come to the point?"

"What point?"

"Has anybody else come here to find you except me? Has any of the others written any message?" And I reminded him of the important theological question which our friend John had tried to make a theme for a conference.

"Best things last," he said. "Some letters really did arrive. You can see them, if you like. You can take them with you. I actually thought of it before leaving home."

And he offered me a package of letters. I hesitated, but he insisted benevolently. "Take them and read them! You may do whatever you like with them. I don't want them."

They were all there, almost everyone, - our Christian brethren from Egypt, our Muslim brothers from Iran and Bosnia, the Armenian and even the couple that got away. "None of them has complained about God," rabbi Yohanan said, "but they are all complaining anyway. Read!"

The perusal of the excuses gave me a shock. They were all about the same. Our brother from Egypt excused himself, saying that he would much have liked to come if only John had been there but that he couldn't trust a Jew. The Assyrian wrote that he would have enjoyed meeting John but was not very interested in meeting the Rabbi. The Gipsy from Bosnia stated bluntly that he could trust John with an ecumenical chairmanship but not a Jewish rabbi. Even the Iranian excused himself, stating that he would gladly have come to meet his friend John but didn't know the Rabbi. Only our Armenian friend expressed himself decently and correctly without wounding anyone's feelings, but also he excused himself although respectfully. But all the others were negative and condescending towards a Jewish hostship. They all consciously or unconsciously insulted rabbi Yohanan and Jewry.

"You see what I mean," the rabbi told me with a smile, "it's still the Jews who get most of the hell out of having founded all monotheistic religion."

And this was in the good old days before the massacre at Hebron.

Baruch Goldstein, you didn't murder any Moslems.

You only killed your own brothers and sisters and children.

Those were your closest friends, whom you cut down

with careful premeditation and without any concern.

You didn't help or fight for Israel;

you shot her down, your own mother, from behind,

having planned it very carefully and with your fullest intention.

Arabs do not do like that, nor any people.

You proved worse than any traitor and worse than any swine.

Your most cowardly massacre on people praying in peace by a sacred grave

makes you a rapist of the inmost sanctity and soul of Israel,

and thereby to a killer worse than any holocaust-executioner in history.

Once again you have only caused your own people to bleed to death,

you poor demented American assassin and inhuman suicide.

I knew that rabbi Yohanan was dead. John had reported that to me in April, but the circumstances had not been very clear. What decided his death was probably the Baruch Goldstein massacre in Hebron, even if this incident had broken him down very slowly. It had struck rabbi Yohanan to his heart. "Do we not have enough Jewish tragedies already in our most sad history?" he had exclaimed after the massacre and then left Jerusalem to return to his home by the Kinneret lake. There he had died in March only just about 70 years old.

The Baruch Goldstein case has since then proved to be not quite simple. Investigations after the catastrophe showed that the Arabs themselves had hidden guns and rifles in the tomb of the Patriarchs. This opens up the inevitable possibility, that if doctor Goldstein hadn't made his massacre on the Arabs, the Arabs might have performed it on the Jews. It's just a possibility and no certainty. Doctor Goldstein might have learned something about the hidden depot in the mosque and therefore taken the initiative to anticipate a disaster in his own way by at the same time taking revenge for those 30 Israelis who had been killed by Arabs since the peace treaty in September and the even greater number of Jews who had been massacred by Arabs at Hebron in the 1920s.

The death of rabbi Yohanan put my talks with him in Jerusalem only two months earlier in a most remarkable light. John wrote to me in April, that "as no one knew he was to die so soon, my sojourn with him led to a kind of documentation of his testament", which no one could guess at the time.

It is quite clear that the Hebron massacre broke his heart. "Why do we use violence when we are only good for love?" was his personal protest.

My man at Ely explained the case of rabbi Yohanan thus: "He was a quite small and inconsiderable man who performed his miracles in silence and obscurity. He did not want to be noticed or that anyone should know what he was really at, in order to be able to continue his work in peace. He was in fact the driving force behind the ecumenical conference in Egypt early in 1992, although our man John Westerberg organized and led the whole thing. That conference was in fact the seal on the doom of Islam. No one knew better than rabbi Yohanan that the Moslem fundamentalism is only the self-destructive weapon of Islam against itself, and that nothing else actually threatens Islam. His aim was to have these subconscious fanatical mechanisms ecumenically discussed and defined in the course of the Egyptian conference, which, although it didn't fall out entirely well, all the same was a great effort and considerable initiative."

After these words he gave me rabbi Yohanan's last letter. It had been found after his death with the words "Aux Mains" under my name. Thus could one of his last wishes be entirely fulfilled according to the letter.

This letter is so remarkable in its wordings that I can't keep it secret. Here it is:

"My dear son, One last wish to you and your friends. I have worried all my life about the destiny of Jewry, and I am today more worried than ever. Our chief double problem is the inevitability of assimilation and the inevitability of orthodoxy making a fool of itself by means of fanaticism. The tragedy of our orthodox faith is its own blind alley - by being perfect we eliminate all other human ways of being more human and tolerant than perfect. This kind of Jewish orthodoxy has always ultimately systematically become the machination and vicious circle of its own downfall, to which it inevitably leads. The tragedy about it is that Jewish orthodoxy is the heart of Jewish religion. We are the tragic schizophrenic leaders of Jewry throughout history towards universality.

This tragedy calls for help, constantly and urgently. It is only human that gojim hate us because we consider ourselves the only truly holy people. Our character is a constant challenge to all human envy. But not all are envious about us. To our most respected friends belong people like you and John and Kim, who understand Jewry without being Jews. You and your kind are the best friends of Israel in history. We need you in the world as our advocates and defenders. If you did not understand us and defend us, no one would. You are our hope, and this hope is very strong, because we know that you are trustworthy, because of your universal tolerance and understanding of all religions. If any new world religion would rise again in the hearts of men, it would be a religion comprising all religions, like yours.

These words were never spoken by me to you in Jerusalem, which is why I write them down in afterthought, hoping that you will receive them at least posthumously.

Your old friend, Rabbi Yohanan."

A bit shaken I regarded my confidential man in Ely. He smiled for the first time. "That's all," he said very simply and rose from his seat. It was obviously all and enough for the entire voyage. He left the place before me. When I came out he was already gone. That was quite all right.

For me it was just to roll on further down to Cambridge. But even if I shall never see Ely again, this occasion will for ever live in my memory connected with Ely and its wondrous cathedral in looming majesty and mysterious sanctity.

When the British took over Cyprus from Turkey, it was their expressed purpose to let Greece have Cyprus in due time, since the population of the island was 80% Greek. They would just develop the island; but during the first world war it proved of so great a strategic significance in the war against Turkey and in the Orient, that instead of allowing it to become Greek, the British made it a crown colony, which it remained until 1960. Only by violence and five years of civil war the Cypriots managed to convince the British of their obligation to leave.

But Englishmen don't give way so easily. They tried to convince the Cypriots about the propriety of the British to remain by giving the Turks dangerous illusions of a future on the island and by using these against the Greek Cypriots. The result of these British manoeuvres became a government of independent Cyprus with 30% Turkish ministers (although the Turkish population was only 18%) and a permanent Turkish vice-president with a right of veto. These privileges to the Turks paved the way for the tragedy. They gratefully received the offered fingers in their jaws and never let them go. The Greeks thereby entered the tragic position of constantly having to battle against a pretentious Turkish minority which was impossible to satisfy. When the military dictatorship of Athens committed their last and greatest political mistake by annexing Cyprus to Greece, Turkey used this as a justification for occupying nearly half of the island by military force. Only a few days later the Greek military government was ousted while the Turkish military forces on Cyprus stayed on - and expanded the occupation. In August the occupation also comprised the second greatest town of Famagusta, which inhabitants had to run for their lives. Since then Famagusta is a ghost town fenced in with barbed wire where no one is allowed except Turkish military.

So much for the British on Cyprus, perhaps the only colony in the British Empire which they managed to destroy to a great extent by political mistakes. The Turkish occupation has been going on for twenty years by now, and the Turkish authorities are constantly evacuating Turks from the mainland to the island in order to increase the Turkish population and legitimize their occupation, while the Greeks to save their lives have to leave their homes in the Turkish zone, where everything Greek and cultural is being plundered and systematically exterminated. The art markets of the world have been invaded with art objects from Cyprus which the Turks have taken from the Greeks or from monasteries and churches that have been vandalized into ruins.

The British still occupy two great military bases on the island, of which the greatest is Episkopoi on the southern peninsula. They are perhaps 30,000, and sometimes their activities increase intensively, as in the Gulf War in January 1991 and also when the Americans bombed Libya in April 1986 with benevolent compliments from Mrs Thatcher. The entire Commonwealth supports the Greek Cypriots against the Turkish occupation. But if Turkish violence ceases and leaves Cyprus, the Greeks will hardly continue to support British presence on Cyprus, at least not as long as Cyprus is not yet a member of the European Community. Most parties consider it a good idea, though, to enter Cyprus into the EC, which probably also would make way for a future Israeli membership - both nations are already European.

by doctor Sandy.

The Turk has always suffered oppression. He has never been free, able to speak his mind, been allowed to live without fear or even tasted the small freedom of not being constantly ordered about. The Turk's life has never been his own. His masters have owned him body and soul since the middle ages, and he has never been able to turn his life into something creative.

In that sense he is a hopeless peasant. The only thing in life he knows to be sure of is obeying orders. When his masters order him to report on his friends, he has no choice but to do so. When he is ordered to bomb Kurdish civilians, eradicate and plunder their villages, shoot every person to death who tries to escape even if they are women and children, and to let his wife be used by soldiers while he is away, he has no choice but to comply, although he knows it well to be wrong, all the victims to be innocent and that his colleagues using his wife are the worst of barbarians although they call themselves his friends and colleagues. If he protests his life is ruined and worth nothing.

The Turks coming to Cyprus from the mainland are in this dilemma. They don't want to leave their Anatolian homes and move to Cyprus, but if they don't they will be ruined, their wives and sons taken, they will be considered dangerous enemies to the state and treated as such, and their lives will be worthless. They know it to be wrong to move with their families into evacuated homes that belonged to expelled Greeks in Kyreneia or Famagusta, but they have no choice. Most Turks coming to Cyprus have been tricked into the island. They are offered vacation jobs, and when the season is over and they want to return to their homes in Turkey they are not allowed to. They have been trapped, and they are exiled for life from Turkey. What shall they do? Their only possibility of surviving is to remain on Cyprus as loyal subjects to Turkish imperialistic egoism and megalomania.

But such a government has to commit mistakes. The mistakes of the Turkish government are constantly multiplying. Their most recent blatant mistake was to turn Theofilos Georgiades into a martyr by shooting him. This cold-blooded murder hit simultaneously the heart of the Cyprian cause, the Kurdish cause and the Greek cause and turned the three into one. Theofilos was an educated highly cultivated man of great qualities, heading a family of three children, speaking Turkish and Kurdish fluently, heartily engaged in the cause of Human Rights both on Cyprus and in Kurdistan and playing a completely honest game with all his cards on the table. He was shot down in broad daylight by order of the Turkish government, and the assassin got away. It is easy for Turks to hide, strike and get away on Cyprus. But morally this murder was a suicide.

The Turkish aggression is very much like the Serbian aggression. Both parties excel in ethnic wars against every people except their own. Both parties practically brag about their imperialism, they are aware of their totalitarianism and are proud of it, they don't try to hide any of their crimes against human rights but rather find some macabre pleasure in practising them. But such governments can never last for long.

Atrocities are never economical. The Serbian inflation has been the thermometer of the national disgrace. The same is happening in Turkey. From every 100 liras 40 go to the civil wars against Kurds, Cyprus, communists and a number of other groups who find Turkish conditions intolerable. Tourism is more and more evading the country, violence is never good for tourism and public relations, and also Nato friends and colleagues are lifting their eyebrows more and more on Turkey, questioning her open follies. Turkish politics are gradually developing into a vicious circle that can't disentangle itself out of its imperialistic mistakes of intolerance and oppression. Turkey is a sick patient who is getting worse, and the temperature is constantly rising.

The first victim, though, is the Turk himself, who may not rule his own life, who is never relieved from his fears, who is ordered about by the constant nightmares of his life, authoritative tyrants or bureaucrats, who force him to execute their wrongs, and who doesn't see any way out of the hopeless curriculum of steadily worsening conditions of violence, oppression and fear.

(June 1994)

This report is confidential containing only my personal observations and deductions.

On the dark side, the war is approaching catastrophic proportions, the Turks well on their way of performing their second genocide this century. The story is sordid and stale, every day the same, villages destroyed for no purpose, babies, women and old people killed for being "revolutionaries and accomplices" without trial, the government silencing the whole thing up, and the country of Kurdistan turning into a desert by the hand of man.

The more interesting side can't be seen. There is no one controlling it, but the more you discover of it, the more interesting it becomes in its gigantic complexity.

Everything is going down in Turkey because of the war, the economy, the morale, the organization, everything. As long as a woman heads the country there will certainly be no improvement in either of these three ground pillars for every functioning nation. On the other hand, if a man takes over, things will certainly become even worse, because the military is the hooligan in the bargain, and the entire military force leading the whole country to ruin consists only of stupid men.

The politically interesting situation is that Turkey is isolating itself losing friends more and more rapidly everywhere. All its neighbours are enemies today: Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia. Only Azerbadjan is a reliable ally, Syria is something of a friend, Iran is an ally but only against the Kurds - an ally in a genocide is hardly a friend to be trusted in the long run, and especially not fundamentalistic Iran, the fundamentalists of Turkey being the chief undermining factor of political Turkey. Other friends are only to be found further east, the former Soviet Muslim republics, but they are not interested as allies in the genocide. The worst possible friend to have today is Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and he might actually be Turkey's best friend today, at least as a close colleague in the Kurdish genocide.

Within Nato there are constantly more voices heard demanding the exclusion of Turkey for moral reasons. Turkey continues in Nato only for military reasons, and gradually the military back-up by Nato is becoming the only thing keeping Turkey together in the continued self-destructive pursuit of genocide.

If Nato lets Turkey go, it will probably collapse with great political turmoil and possibly the fundamentalists taking over with chaos and oppression for some decades to follow like in Iran. Of course, no one is interested in this. Instead, Nato continues to support Turkey with a constantly more alarming genocide at their hands. The situation is unbearable, Turkey is dwindling down into an abyss of national disaster and ruin, and its only means of protection is to blindfold itself by suppressing journalists' reports. It is forbidden to tell the truth, because no one wants to be made responsible for it.

From my point of view, a general collapse of the country in one way or another is inevitable. This is the only bright ray of sunshine for the Kurds. A sordid ordeal indeed, if the only bright side of it is its own destruction.

(We put to him the question, concerning an article by him against Islam: Would he still maintain his objections against Islam in the face of the ethnic cleansings by the orthodox Serbs in Bosnia? He is himself a well educated Christian orthodox theologian. An elaborate answer was expected. Here it is:)

"My dear friend, Your query compels me to some painstaking elaboration. I hope at least some of your readers might cope with it.

My distance from Islam has only been more marked with the years. Islam today is the religion with the greatest double standards with on one hand a generous, attractive and reasonable universalism and on the other hand the most extreme terrorism and fanaticism which is seen in the world today. Good Muslims can not understand the fear and prejudice of others against Islam while at the same time they close their eyes to its dark sides; and the greatest danger of Islam today is that all these good and somewhat naïve Muslims, who constitute a majority, are being driven over by the fanatics and fundamentalists.

The situation in ex-Yugoslavia, though, concerns religion least of all. There is a very old hatred against an ancient Turkish-Muslim oppression at the bottom of the conflict, but this originally logic hatred is not what the conflict is about. From the beginning of the civil war, the Orthodox Church of Serbia definitely denounced the Milosevic regime and its manoeuvres. The Church has never supported the Serbian ethnic cleansings or any war in or against Bosnia, not even morally.

The conflict is extremely complicated since Croats, Bosnians and Serbs really are one and the same people with one and the same language. The differences between them are partly religious, since Croats are Catholics, Serbs are orthodox and Bosnians Muslims; but more prevailing than the religious discrepancies is the heavy historical legacy, which in my view is the villain in the drama. Croats and Serbs have always been fighting each other, although they are one and the same people, only because of a bitter historical inheritance. A wall was erected between them from the beginning by the Church, which prescribed the Croats to become Catholics with a Latin alphabet and the Serbs to become orthodox with a Cyrillic alphabet. In almost every war they happened to land on different sides against each other. The process hardly improved by the Croats developing into good organizers and business men, leaders in peace and war, and the Serbs never getting away from the turf but remaining an uneducated ignorant stock of peasants. The difference between them that never existed in language, culture or religion formed during the centuries into a definite difference in mentality.

It became the task of a Croat to organize and keep modern Yugoslavia together, which at the death of this hero, the leader Tito, lapsed into total dissolution from want of an equally competent Croat to take over.

The lack of education and contact with other peoples has turned the Serbs into a hard and stupid people. By that civil war, which only they have forced upon the country, they have made themselves deserving of a thorough chastizement; being so stupid and hard they need a good thrashing, and that is probably also the opinion of their own Orthodox Church. So much about the Orthodox Church in the civil war of Yugoslavia and my own stand against Islam.

That this religion is on its way out appears to me as self-evident. Only the most stupid, the most oppressed and most uneducated embrace Islam and generally with much fear and superstition. They all seem bound to become losers. Islam is sinking down to some status of the great world religion of pariahs.

But also Christianity is in danger. Jewry manages as it always has managed by primarily safeguarding its own religious core at the cost of expansion and dissemination. Among the Christian churches the Orthodox manages the best, also by consistently turning away from the world to instead carefully watch its own retrospective stability, which has been strongly consolidated during 70 years of communist oppression and persecution; while both the Catholic and the Protestant churches are in a crisis of identity in a modern world which they imagine it is important to follow. This might be their great mistake.

Searching desperately for means of renewal without knowing where, they search in blindness. The Protestant Church is more flexible and therefore has greater chances of success, while the Catholic Church is stuck in old prejudice, which unfortunately seems impossible to break away from.

The only solution as I see it is to commonly strive for the original Church, which existed before Constantine the Great turned it into a state religion, before the massive Catholic dogmatic beton bunker was constructed as a devastating anti-Christian anti-cathedral with heresies and inquisitions in unendingly deplorable towropes, before the popes became infallible and before the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches separated. As I see it, the Christian Church can only survive if it find itself again as it thrived before the year 325.

Of course you can't just abolish everything that happened after the year 325 including the activities of Augustine and Martin Luther. But what you should do is to reassess all the authorities after 325, investigate them critically and cease to consider anyone as infallible just because he or she represented the Church. The principle of infallibility is the worst trap that any man can fall into.

Many monotheistic fanatics have wandered into this trap with flying colours dragging uncountable innocents with them unto death and perdition. This is the peril of monotheism: it can be abused. Without mentioning any names that could generate protests ( - so I say nothing about Moses, Jesus or Mahomet - ) you can from our own times pick doubtful characters of that kind like David Koresh, Charles Manson and even Adolf Hitler, who earnestly believed himself to be an instrument of God.

There are such traps and risks also in Hinduism but curiously enough not in Buddhism. During 2500 years, Buddhism has never succeeded in bringing forth any fanatic leader, as far as I know, who in the name of his religion has dragged others into perdition. On the contrary, there are many examples in the history of Buddhism of fanatical leaders who have dragged others into perdition and misery by persecuting Buddhism.

Buddhism and Hinduism walk together and have never persecuted each other, like for instance Christianity and Islam have persecuted each other and Jewry. Both Buddhism and Hinduism have been severely persecuted by Islam, though, which tried to extirpate both religions from India 500 years ago. It only succeeded in destroying an enormous amount of monuments, temples and monasteries from Pakistan all the way down to Indonesia and Java.

In addition to this you also have to acknowledge Hinduism for being an incredibly dynamic and expansive religion, which during so many thousand years (at least three, probably more,) has succeeded in maintaining an originality and multiplicity which no other religion ever could vie with.

For its sobriety and tolerance, lack of abuse, its basic constructiveness and humility, and its human and universal common sense in connection with a faculty for self-denial and self-sacrifice, which is only equalled by Christianity, which has not succeeded equally well in keeping clean from abuses, Buddhism must objectively be regarded as the world's most interesting religion.

I mentioned previously that the only salvation for Christianity is to rediscover its true identity as it was manifest before 325. At that time there were many Christian books which in 325 and later on were completely suppressed. Many were lost in the process. One of the most ruthlessly suppressed was the great orthodox apostolic father Origen, who made magnificent efforts to unite Christianity with the ancient philosophical schools of Greece, so that these would survive within Christian frames. Origen was for example completely open to the idea of reincarnation (the Pythagorean school), and he was far from being alone. For such tolerance, universalism and mental open-mindedness, the establishment of Christianity as an established dogmatic state religion was a catastrophe as disastrous as the invasion of the barbarians was to the civilization of classical antiquity.

During the first half of the 20th century, Jewry became the most important religious issue in the world above all through the terrible martyrdom which that religion suffered in the second world war. In the same manner I think Buddhism today is becoming the world's most serious religious issue through the remarkable martyrdom of Tibetan Buddhism under the hands of a Chinese atheistic establishment of force. The Jews were reconditioned after the war and had their state of Israel, which almost the whole world has supported ever since. The Tibetans were robbed of their own country in 1950, and no one did anything about it, although Tibet appealed to the UN. Not until in 1959, when Dalai Lama was compelled to leave his country, the world started to pay some attention to Tibet, but still nothing was made. The only important initiative to do something about it was the International Jurists Commission's enquiries and reports in 1960 about what really happened. The only other actions was the generosity of the Indian government to support Tibetan refugees and a vague American support to the Tibetan resistance movement among a handful of warriors of Kham. Nothing else was done; and those very few travellers who China allowed to visit Tibet were all naïve obedient lackeys, who were used by China to propagate to the world the one-sided Chinese view of things. Thereby China was given free hands to launch the unspeakably cruel cultural revolution in Tibet with the destruction of 98,5% of all the religious monuments and institutions of Tibet and 85% of all Tibetan original literature as a result, apart from the genocide of 1,2 million Tibetans or a fifth of the population. From 1959 until 1979 the world left the Tibetans to languish or die in their own country under the occupation of an alien nation of murderers. And those very few who knew something about it and who could give the world some information were not allowed to appear, were not believed or were silenced.

The long space of time (20 years, really 30 or even 45) makes the sufferings of the Tibetans from one aspect even more remarkable than those of the Jews 1933-45, which only lasted for twelve years, or at least equally remarkable. More Jews were murdered, but they were also a greater people with some prominence in the entire world. The Tibetans were only a small people living only in Tibet, who only wanted to stay there in their own country and live there in peace.

From a theological point of view, the Tibetan situation thereby is the most interesting situation for any people in the world today. In some way I believe the Tibetans have the future and destiny of the world in their hands. According to my experience, they have thought deeper and further than any other people; and as an example of what they really occupy themselves with, I can recount a discussion which at the moment is very much in vogue among high lamas.

You could say that it is intimately connected with the theory of relativity of Einstein's, which also speculates in the manipulation and change of laws for the fourth dimension of time. A few lamas I am acquainted with, who are deeply engaged in the world's affairs and feel some responsibility for its destiny, are completely united in their conviction, that it is absolutely possible, solely with the power of thought (which is neither limited by time or space or distance), to correct historical mistakes, by practically journeying back in time, visit the exact spots in space and time of critical events (for instance the Sarajevo murders in 1914 or the releasing of the bomb over Hiroshima in 1945,) change the historical course for a better one (by for example letting the Hiroshima plane crash into the ocean) and then return to the present time as if nothing had happened. The world would look decisively different, history would be written in a different way, the whole historical course would be something else, but all this would be natural and accepted both to oneself and to all other people living, who would have experienced something completely different from the Sarajevo murders, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts or the Kennedy assassinations.

Of course, this would categorically be refuted by all realists as wishful thinking and science fiction, but to certain Tibetans it is absolutely possible and perfectly realistic.

That was now a general survey of the religious situation in the world of August 1995 fifty years after the termination of the second world war from a Tibetan point of view in the Himalayas. I hope you and your readers don't mind."

(The famous physicist Stephen Hawking of Cambridge had a comment on the possibility of "journeying in time" in September, in which he completely agreed with the Tibetan lamas about the realistic possibility of the phenomenon.)

"I am very sorry to hear that you will not come down to me this year. But hold out, my dear friend! - Your old doctor will probably live at least one more year.

Answering your query concerning the Oriental mess, I would prefer a rather careful standing-point, since I know that you are not an atheist, and since my natural atheism during the years only has been confirmed. Without entering into this, without defending my atheism and without accusing any monotheistical religion, I would like to hint at a point or two which simply is too obvious to be ignored.

My probably greatest objection against monotheism is that it has the most infallible fallibility of always leading to partiality and biassed conclusions. In spite of my atheism I can stand up to defending Jewish monotheism for the simple reason that it is based on a good book. Not everything is up to par in this good book, but that which is good enough is for me an enough reasonable defence for jewry to outlast time.

The Quran is a different thing however. Its aggressiveness is almost admirable for its sustained continuity, indefatigably preaching the enforcement of religious laws preferably by violence and excluding the female part of human life, (love, tenderness, consideration, sensitivity,) as if such disturbances in a monotheistically perfect world must needs be banished. To this comes the established intolerance in practical life and double standards often to the extreme. Islam preaches tolerance but is practically the most intolerant of all religions.

My greatest objection against Islam, however, is that it is naturally anti-democratic. Turkey could only turn itself into a democracy by cleansing the state from Islam. It could not be done away with completely, and that's why Turkish democracy never succeeded completely. Islam can only be sustained by totalitarianism. When a Moslem country goes democratic, its Moslem system goes out of order. Islam and democracy are incompatible. Strange enough, that is not the case with any other religion: they all mix well with democracy. Only communism suffers from the same problem

That's why as a casual and practical pragmatist my only possible diagnosis on Islam has to be, that the Moslem world will never taste freedom until it is freed from Islam. If Islam can find it satisfactory to exist outside politics, which was Kemal Atatürk's definite desire, Islam would survive, especially if it concentrated on developing such constructive forms as Sufi, Ahmadiyah, Bahai and whirling dervishes; but politically Islam has no future. Without admitting it, it is well aware of the fact, which it tries to hide by applying such desperate measures as the enforced backwardness of Algeria and the latest terror the Talibans in some kind of a strange bolting self-destructiveness, like the swine running into the sea of Galilee.

It is interesting to analyze the political changes of the world since 1989, but it really hasn't changed at all. Only the frontiers have changed. During the cold war the frontier went right across Europe. Almost all of Asia sided with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact against the free world west of the iron curtain, while only a few islands remained out in the dark: Hongkong, Israel, Kuwait, Singapore and Indonesia. This darkness has greatly been reduced by the Soviet Union changing side and becoming white with the whole of eastern Europe - it is almost unavoidable now that Russia joins NATO to insure itself against the growing threats from Moslem Asia and China. While only ten years ago the Russians were the villains in Afghanistan, they are now on the right side against the Taliban terrorists. The nations which today are found on the "wrong" side, and thereby continue to make a frontier, are really only Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, China, Burma, North Korea and Cuba. Foul players but not lost in the dark are the dictatorship of Indonesia, the double-crossing Pakistan and civil war Turkey. But the frontier in Turkey is a separate front outside the great game. Paradoxically the terrorist Ghaddafi is right when he tries to persuade Turkey to let the Kurds have their own state. But the Kurds do not belong in the bad lot of Sudan-Iraq-Iran & CO.

The cold war is over, but instead we have a new frontier against China and Islam. The cold war lasted for 40 years. I don't think the new battle will take as long, especially since the Russians now are on our side."

This diagnosis of doctor Sandy's has caused some reactions, but the general view among professionals seems to be, that "the worst thing about doctor's Sandy's diagnosis is, that he is perfectly right". Living as a guest in a Moslem country, (now and then also residing in Greece, Cyprus, Hungary and other exotic countries,) he expresses his ideas only in private letters and never in the press. For security reasons, he is unknown to the world and leads a private life incognito.

There are two stories about the Prophet which have been told and spread ever since his death but which no faithful Muslim ever mentions a word of. The first tells the story about how it befell when he forbade the use of strong drinks. He had had some carousal with some pals in such a swell party, that none of the participants could remember anything afterwards. Apparently the drinking bout had not been entirely successful, though, as the gay guys with hang-overs woke up the day after and found one of the party stone dead cut to pieces by a scimitar. The pals were terrified and most of all the Prophet. No one could explain what had happened. As they looked things over it proved no better, than that it happened to be the very Prophet's own scimitar that was bloody, and not only his scimitar, but even his clothes and his very own hands. The Prophet was mortified by such a dreadful situation. He promised to never again taste any strong liquor, and to make an example he ordered all his followers to obey this most sacred commandment. Since that party Muslims are not allowed to drink any alcohol, as a consequence of the Prophet having had one glass too much.

The second story is about the Prophet's unhappy death. He was only some sixty years when he began to suffer from gaga and start chasing the fair young daughters of the faithful. There was one girl in particular whom he just couldn't stop persuing, which was a most improper thing for such a holy Prophet to do. So her family decided to make an end on the disgrace for the good of all, for the sake of the Prophet's own reputation and for the sake of the whole of Islam and its glorious future. So they framed him and used the girl for a bait one night as it was dark, so that, as he chased her, he was trapped to fall down into a deep well. They pretended not to have noticed it and let him languish to death safely in the bottom of the well. Of course, such a sorry end to the Prophet was an impossibility to Islam, so the thing was hushed down completely. Instead the official version of the Prophet's death is, that he was carried off from the rock of Jerusalem by angels - or was it white horses? - and brought directly home to heaven. Whatever version is more credible appears from the fact, that the later version obviously could have been made up from the motive, that the truth needed some face-lifting - for the sake of Islam.

Because of such stories, which have been current in those parts of the world ever since the Prophet's own lifetime, innocent people like Salman Rushdie are banned and proscribed, and all faithful Moslems are encouraged to murder him in the most sacred name of Allah. The Prophet himself forbade the telling of stories and myths but seems to have had no objection against stories and myths about himself.

"Starting in Iran, the worst seems to be over. President Rafsanjani has managed a difficult position for two years, and his becoming a president at all must be regarded as lucky considering the darker profiles of the other candidates. He is flexible, is able to listen and can adapt to changing circumstances, which none of the others can do. Against him stand the more militant and one-sided Shia Muslims, Hizbollah the dreaded servants of Khomeini, and the Mujaheddin NLA (operating in western Iran) organizing strikes, demonstrations and riots in the country. The NLA are militant leftists, they worship the memory of the 70,000 martyred victims of Khomeini and have lost some importance after the death of Khomeini. They made a bad show by siding with Saddam Hussein against Iran in the eight years war. Their leaders are a romantic couple who are recognized by their crimson scarfs and turbans. It would be vital for them to reach some agreement with Rafsanjani to survive and to get the Hizbollah under control. The revolutionary aggressions of Iran today are limited to barking against Israel and the stubborn maintenance of a most stupid death sentence against the harmless philosopher Salman Rushdie.

More worrying is the situation in Iraq, which will not improve as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power. The Kuwait crisis stroke hard against everyone except the guilty, and the hardest hit were the Kurds, the Shia Muslims of the south and the 13 percent Assyrian Christians. The Assyrian Christians in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon and other places in the area are about 5 million and have a hard time everywhere. If any, they are to be counted with in building a future in this politically collapsing area.

Naturally the Kurds are entitled to their own state. The sooner it is consituted (at the cost of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria,) the better. As long as they are forbidden a state of their own, the civil wars will continue. They are not, however, entirely innocent of their own situation.

In the beginning of the century a strange political ethnic cleansing took place in the area (mostly in the years 1895-1908) which must be considered as the chief source of all the troubles. Two million Armenians (Christians) were systematically massacred by the Turks. The world just watched it and did nothing. There is only one parallel in history: the holocaust against 6 million Jews in the second world war. Everyone knows about that. The Jews now have their own state, the Germans have confessed their crimes, many of the guilty have been punished, and Israel still today receives large amounts of money for indemnity. Of course, nothing of this will in the least compensate the brutal slaughter of 6 million Jews. But nothing has been done to indemnify the slaughter of 2 million Armenians. Not a penny has been paid for indemnity, not one Turk has officially confessed any part of any crime in this, there are only 100,000 Armenians left in Turkey today, and many of them have been forced to become Muslims.

The Kurds took part in the massacres. In the name of Allah the Turks and the Kurds went together extirpating the Armenians, the Kurds being promised the lands of the Armenians as a reward. Today the Kurds have the same problem with the Turks as the Armenians had a hundred years ago, and the Turks have even greater problems with the martial Kurds. As long as the Turks continue battling this problem Turkey will never be accepted in the EC. While the Turks seem as reluctant to let the Kurds have their own state as in his days the great Pharaoh was reluctant to let the children of Israel go, the problem seems too difficult for a solution, especially since 2 million innocent Armenians are waiting for a compensation which they never can get, since they were all brutally murdered. In comparison with this, the sacrifice of 70,000 martyrs to Khomeini appears as something of a modest parenthesis.

The best thing we Europeans can do to solve our immigrant problems is to arrange matters so that people can live in peace and security in these their own war-torn home countries from which they come."

Since these words were written in March 1992, things have grown worse for the Kurds and for the Shia Muslims in southern Iraq by 1) the failure of the USA in the Gulf War to depose Saddam Hussein, which they thought they could arrange by simply telling the Kurds to do away with him, which only resulted in the increased oppression of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein, and 2) the mad project of Saddam Hussein to drain the marshes of the southern Shia Muslims by digging a monstrous canal through the marshlands, which turned these into a desert in a full scale environmental disaster, as if all Saddam's environmental disasters in the Gulf War in the Persian Gulf had not been enough. The USA thought Saddam's remaining in office would add to the stability in the area, while the Free Thinker considers this measure a most fatal error.

"There has been a war going on in Afghanistan for 17 years. There is no sign of any peace there. I have always been interested in Afghanistan since my grandfather was an Afghan and my father used to travel to Afghanistan to see his cousins. But it's twenty years since we last heard anything about my father's relatives because of the war.

Some facts of Afghanistan:

The last king was Mohammed Zaher Shah, and he still lives in Italy. Monarchy fell in Afghanistan in 1973 when the Shah's son-in-law Mohammed Davod organized a coup while the Shah was abroad. Afghanistan was then made a republic. The communists seized power in 1978 in another coup, and the new leader was Nor Mohammed Taraki. Since the Afghans are Muslims, they could not accept the communists in Afghanistan, and as the communists were threatened with defeat they asked the Soviet Union for help. The Russians occupied Afghanistan in 1979, and since then there has been war. Nearly two million Afghans have died and five million have fled to the neighbouring countries. The whole country is ruined. The Russians left Afghanistan after ten years of war in 1989. But there are millions of mines left in Afghanistan which kill innocent civilians every day. After the Russians returned to the Soviet Union, the communists remained in office until 1992. During their time many leaders followed each other and killed each other or were killed by the people or by Russians. After Nor Mohammed Taraki there was Mohammed Hafizollah Amin and after him Babrak Karmel and then Najibullah until 1992.

The communists were overthrown in 1992 by the Muslims, and Najibullah found protection at the UN headquarters of Kabul. There are many different Islamic groups in Afghanistan who fought together against the Russians, but they couldn't agree in peace, so there were new wars between them after 1992. More than 100,000 have died since then in the fighting. A few great names are the former president Rabbani and the general Ahmad Shah Masoud, who is also called the Panjshir Lion: he was a legendary warrior against the Russians. Golabodin Hektmarjar and general Dostam are other important war leaders. They almost overdid it in the war against the Russians and the communists. The Talibans, who were formed only two years ago, conquered Kabul in the end of September, and a new civil war has begun as a preliminary result. Kabul is the only capital in the world which has been completely destroyed. It's incredible how the destruction of Kabul has been going on from the fall of the communists in 1992 until 1996. The Talibans executed doctor Najibullah, the former president of the communists, without a trial three weeks ago. At the moment the war is carried on between the forces of Masoud and those absolutely fundamentalistic Talibans. Is 17 years of war not enough? The Afghans wonder how long they have to keep waiting for peace.

Most Afghans miss the monarchy and the former king Zaher Shah, but he has declined to return to Afghanistan. He survived a knife assault a few years ago and lives in Italy since 1973 and is almost 80 years old. We feel very much sorry for the Afghans and Afghanistan when we think of the happy golden days during the reign of Zaher Shah. Alas, times have changed.

Here is an old song from the days when the British were defeated in Afghanistan:

Take it easy, and play no more with fire,

for I was an Afghan, and I made the British run away.

I thundered against them like lightning,

and with my bare hands I crushed them.

So, get lost, you miserable British, for you can't escape us.

This is the land of the Afghans, and you can't kid us any more."

This is a marvellously entertaining travel story glittering with good humour from beginning to end. The two Englishmen Eric Newby and Hugh Carless abandon themselves in an effort to climb one of the highest peaks in Afghanistan without any experience at all from mountaineering, so they practice at first on a few hills in Wales. Now the Afghan Himalayas happen to be most atrocious and hostile mountains which hardly have been climbed at all - rather have they always claimed victims - and dreadful weather combined with savage local barbarians did not make things easier. You get a vivid insight into the unfathomable mysteries and absurd conditions of an alien world, where the people of Nuristan maybe were the last people in Asia to be islamized by the sword in 1895. Before that, the people of this country, which previously was called Kafiristan, were among the world's wildest savages with a polytheistic mythology of their own, and their main professions were as goatherds and robbers. This was the area where Alexander the Great in his time had the greatest difficulties on his quest for India, where he found the hardest resistance from the most qualified fighters he ever knew. Many of them have still today blue eyes and blond hair, but all the varieties of the human race are to be found among these hills, like in Pakistan and northern India. The one thing which Eric Newby neglects in his hilarious chronicle is to mention Rudyard Kipling, whose maybe most fantastic short story "The Man who Wanted to be a King" is a story about this very country of Kafiristan, nowadays Nuristan.

The mountaineering then only resulted in disasters. Twice the stalwart British attacked the forbidding summit of Mir Samir at almost 20,000 feet and had to turn back only a few hundred meters from the top on both occasions. They laboured in this enterprise for two weeks until dysentery and diarrheas and other Himalayic symptoms of overstraining forced them off the mountain; and retreating for good they had no better luck than to find a witness to their total defeat in Wilfred Thesiger, who was on his way up alone.

The book deserves to be read carefully, because there are wonderful details everywhere, the conversation is reliably spiritual all the way, and it is great fun to partake in all the disasters and hilarious catastrophes of the intrepid couple. One has to be grateful for their safe return, so that they could tell the story of their defeat, since this part of the world is famous for all the visitors who just vanished without even a story to tell.

(We have only his permission to publish them anonymously.)

"Pray excuse an old man's dotage. Since you already know that I am getting old, at least I need not be afraid of making a bad impression of myself in front of you, since you are such a paragon of tolerance. On the contrary, I am myself getting the worse by the years. The more I outgrow my own justification for remaining in this world, the more critical I become against it and against humankind. My last trip down to Syria, Jordan and Israel has not cured me of my like a cancer steadily increasing scepticism. As you already know, I witnessed the bomb havoc at the greenmarket in Jerusalem on the 30th of July. I saw the blood everywhere, the limbs lying around, the chaos of war like in the blitz of London in 1940, the total hysteria of violent despair at the unjustness of the meaningless assault. I am sorry, but as a doctor I must penetrate into the source of the evil and blame the idea of God.

Not that I am an atheist, but you already know how I can't accept the preposterous absurdity of Islam claiming the Muslims' right to be God's own people in almost the same way as Israel. The children of Israel deserved that light, Moses bequeathed it to them through endless hardships, and the history of Israel, with the downfall of the realm and millennia of persecutions, has confirmed that right. Nothing can take that right away from Israel. But Islam has never deserved that right of divine privilege in the same way.

So you can say I am an atheist concerning Islam but a believer concerning jewry. I have to be an atheist concerning Islam, because everything that goes on theologically in Islam speaks against the absurd atrocity of that so called religion. Did you know, for instance, that there was a secret Islamic conference at Lahore in 1980, in which leaders of the Muslim faith decided, that the whole Muslim world should be islamized by the year 2000, that is, that all people of other faiths in Muslim countries should be islamized or extirpated. You can call it a Muslim equivalent to the Nazi conference at Wannsee in January 1942, which decided the extirpation of all Jews in all Nazi occupied countries. It is exactly the same mentality.

In brief, Islam is asking for trouble and heading for immersion in very difficult problems. Turkey is maybe leading the way out of this dilemma in its decisive stand against Muslim fundamentalism. Let's hope so. There is always a way out from every sickness, and the only way out of that mental derangement and hysterical aberration called Islam is to take a firm stand against the whole religion and denounce Allah as an equally mentally unsound idea as the movements of Jim Jones, David Koresh and others who mistook their own self-love for the idea of God and lost their reason in the bargain.

As a doctor I can se very much reason and constructiveness in the Jewish, the Christian and the Buddhist faith but none whatsoever in Islam, which I can only regard as a very serious if not fatal illness, like a brain tumour. That's my diagnosis concerning the Muslim idea of God, and I am afraid that everything that goes on in the Muslim world is just obvious symptoms confirming it, from the terror of the Talibans to the massacres in Algeria and the bombs in Jerusalem.

Also I have no faith whatsoever in mr Arafat. He got a certain air of positive credibility during the days of Simon Peres and Isaac Rabin, but before they gave him that status he was just a wicked terrorist and a crook, no matter how much mr Olof Palme and mr Bruno Kreisky embraced him, and his few positive traits from the dealings with mr Peres and mr Rabin are now gradually falling off him like old dirty clothes, again exposing him as the pathetic fraud and miserable crook he is and always has been to the backbone, if he has any, which I doubt."

"My dear friend, Your request is of course not easy to grant, but above all it's of course the least enjoyble task imaginable for a doctor to diagnosticize the patient of all humanity, since it has never been sicker.

The only positive thing about the Kyoto conference was that at least it was an effort. At the best, it was even a beginning, as the Americans put it, putting a smiling attitude on everything to conceal the facts. The fact is that nothing really was done. The effects of global warming have to be stopped now, because being a runaway train constantly accelerating, it will be increasingly difficult to stop it later.

The main sickness of humanity comes from the simple fact, that a hundred years ago we were 1500 million people, while we today are 6000 million. In only a hundred years humanity has increased in number by 400%. A hundred years ago humanity was in control of itself, the great European monarchies ran the world with decent stability and knew what was going on, but that control went out of hand in 1914. Stability, order and world control vanished and were swamped in the population explosion, resulting in populistic autocracies in many parts of the world (Germany, the Soviet Union and China above all) which only made matters worse. Common sense was driven over by the animal instincts of the lower masses of the human race, the morals and norms of the previously Christian society were simply abolished, and as the most irresponsible leaders of the population explosion, running the merry-go-round of the world at a constantly increasing speed towards hell, emerged the Catholic Church, refusing to interfere with the population growth, and Islam pushing it even harder.

In my opinion, only bachelors and virgins are responsible people in the world today. No responsible person being aware of the general condition of the world can give birth to children with a good conscience. And the rest being occupied with their family problems, only bachelors and virgins, I believe, can do something about the dreadful condition of the world.

Of course nature must react. You can't destroy forests all over the world at a constantly increasing pace without the natural consequences of growing deserts, dying species and changes of climate. Man is always wrong and nature is always right, and nature will always have it her way. If man does not adapt himself to the ways of nature, man must needs perish.

The Ebola epidemic in Africa was only a warning. Worse will come and is starting already. In India the population has increased 300% in 40 years, but the Aids statistics have increased 500% in only 5 years. Malaria and tuberculosis are coming back strong all over the world. And then we have the giant urbanizations turning their poison traps against themselves, becoming death traps for tens of millions of people in cities like São Paulo, Mexico City, Delhi, Calcutta, Cairo and Istanbul.

In Turkey the population count was successfully carried through and showed a shocking figure of more than 60 million people to only 15 a hundred years ago. This is curiously enough an exact mirror of the real condition of humanity: Turkey is keeping an exact pace with the self-destructive explosion of humanity.

In our western countries there is not much to worry about, though. We have the knowledge and the experience and the technology to use them. We don't multiply our populations any more. Our democratic stability in EC, US and Canada, Australia and Japan and perhaps even Eastern Europe makes it even unnecessary to worry about our money. All the blows will be taken by the third world.

Whatever you do, don't make any investments in Africa, Latin America or even in Asia. Nothing is under any control in these parts of the world. Here the population explosion is constantly at its epidemic height, and where there is no control of the population explosion, there can be no economy. So forget about South America (except perhaps Argentina and Chile) and Africa (except perhaps South Africa). There is not much hope for these sinking ships.

China and India represent one third of the world population. Both are interesting from an economic point of view. China is the only country in the third world which has managed to control the population growth. Outwardly it shines and boasts of stability, which attracts much investment. The unaccountability of China is that it remains an autocracy. You can never trust dictators, because they always will fall.

In India there is no birth control, but on the other hand its economy is surprisingly stable, which is due to its stability as a democracy. Indians have always been master business men. The richness of India has been constantly swamped by its exploding population growth, but it constantly remains a gold mine all the same. There are no brighter minds and brains than in India.

So Asia remains interesting from an economic point of view. There are possibilities. Just forget all about the Moslem countries (including Indonesia), and be careful about China. The economic plunge of Hongkong after the Chinese take-over is a sign as clear as any."

1) The Mysterious Death of Princess Diana. It has appeared afterwards, that the driver, who drove the Princess and her fiancé to their deaths and lost his life with them, a few days earlier had mysterious deposits on his bank accounts consisting of millions of francs. No one has been able to explain from where this money has arrived. Consequently there are speculations. Could anyone rich enough to have been able to furnish the driver with considerable millions have desired the deaths of the famous couple and paid the driver to arrange matters accordingly? The answer is yes.

Both the house of Windsor and the family of the cavalier would have had reasons to desire that the wedding never took place. It would not have been very suitable for the heir to the British crown to have Moslem half-brothers and -sisters. But above all, the family of the Moslem fiancé were busy with arms sales in the billionaire category, which would have given them a world of motives to block the possibility of getting a leading celebrity into the family who was making her chief aim to stop the sales of arms and lucrative landmines.

Who would then have had the greatest motive to stop the wedding? The weapon dealers family, without doubt. So the death of Princess Diana could have been arranged by the family of the future husband? As long as question marks remain around the accident, like for instance the mystery of the vanished car, this suspicion can not be disposed of.

The criminal implications of the case are highly aggravated though by the results of the October investigation reports. There are witnesses to the fact that the driver of princess Diana's car was blinded from in front by one of the paparazzi using a special device to blind the driver on purpose. This suggests a perfect set-up. The driver was forced into excessive speed by the frenetic paparazzi chasing him, and one of them, disguised as one of them, used this to put the driver out of control in the very strategic tunnel for numerous car disasters. It was the perfect homicide, and it is impossible, according to the October report, to implicate anyone for it.

2) Algeria. There is no longer any doubt about that many massacres in Algeria are planned and executed by the rulers of the country in order to control the subjects by means of violence and terror. The rulers of the country are militaries, who establish and depose ministers as they wish. The massacre executors are disguised soldiers, who are masked with phoney beards and loaded with drugs, so that they can perform their missions without any scruples. The enormity of the crimes then binds them to the generals with loyalty and silence. Nothing is more revealing of the established government than the fact, that they label all investigators in the crimes as traitors to the nation. The situation is a typical vicious circle of power abuse: from fear of losing power the rulers constantly commit worse crimes to keep it.

3) The Most Destructive Man in the World. To allow Saddam Hussein to remain as dictator of Iraq after the Kuwait crisis was equal to if the allies after the second world war had allowed Adolf Hitler to remain dictator of Germany. General Schwarzkopf wanted to continue to Bagdad to complete his work in 1991, but the USA would not allow him with the motivation that they feared the danger of instability in the area and above all the menace of Iran. From fear of taking a political risk they allowed the greatest mass murderer in present history to remain as supreme dictator in one of the most important states of the Middle East. President Bush told the Kurds and the Shia Muslims to by all means do what they could to do away with the tyrant, but the result of the US allowing Saddam to continue as dictator was that he also was free to continue his genocides especially among the Shia Muslims in the south and transform the wet lands of the Marsh Arabs into a desert in the worst deliberate environmental destruction in history premeditatedly committed by a responsible regime.

Still, war is only the worst and the last solution, which the various Christmas bombings prove. The best thing would be if at last one of the many efforts to kill off Saddam Hussein privately would succeed.

4) Yassir Arafat. "Yassir Arafat came to Gaza in July 1994 with a league of men not carrying ploughbills and spades but guns and bazookas. He created ten security services and an armed police force of more than 40,000 men, which is more policemen per capita than in any other country in the world. This police force mainly consisted of local Palestinians, but most officers have experience from outside the West Bank and Gaza, above all from the civil war in Lebanon. Many have at times been stationed in countries like Iraq and Algeria. The Oslo agreement allows a security force of not more than 20,000 men. The United States, which during the years have helped many dictators to survive, is now also backing one in Palestine."

- a retired counsellor of Yassir Arafat's.

5) Bethlehem. 25 years ago most inhabitants of Bethlehem were Christians. Seven years ago they still made up half of the population, but today they are barely 15%. After Israel retired and Arafat moved in, mosques are growing out of the grounds like mushrooms after rainfall, while the Christian churches one by one are closed down, since many Christians emigrate to Canada, Australia or the US, which has more security and a safer future to offer than the PLO.

"It was the US foreign secretary Henry Kissinger who gave Indonesia leave to occupy and suppress East Timor. Whether the brain behind it all was Kissinger himself or President Nixon I can't tell, but it certainly was American and all in line with American foreign policy after the war."

Evidently this was one of his great favourite topics, for now he entered on a lengthy lecture.

"It was all the fault of that Foster Dulles," he began.

"Who was Foster Dulles?"

"The leading American diplomat after the war. He was all effort to eliminate the European colonial empires, so that the US could start ordering the world about alone.

What really happened after the war was, that Europe lay in ruins, and the only real victor, England, had completely overstrained herself in that victory. There was nothing left of us. We were down on our knees. In that moment the US decides to give Marshall aid to all Europe except England. Germany above all got all the support in the world on that condition only, that the communist party should be forbidden. It's a matter of discussion whether that was a democratic condition. But Germany got 100% back-up from America to rise again while England got nothing and not even Marshall aid.

De Gaulle reacted strongly against the American way of manipulating Europe in their own way. Italy got all the help in the world from America just because there was a strong communist party there. But France was still a colonial power, and America demonstrated all too clearly that France should let go of her colonies for the sake of NATO. That's why de Gaulle hated America almost as much as England.

Secretly but actively the US supported the national independence movements of India and Indonesia. In Indochina the US realized soon enough that they had made a mistake by supporting Ho Chi Minh and his rebels to establish communism in North Vietnam, a mistake which later on led the US to commit further mistakes.

But through the uncompromisingly negative policy against the European colonial powers these were forced into bankruptcy and liquidation, first of all the Netherlands, England, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy and finally even Portugal. The US starved the British Empire to death, and France was forced into the same abyss. When de Gaulle was compelled to give Algeria independence it was his life's tragedy, because it was the ruin of everything he had lived for and sacrificed all his French idealism for. But the most tragic sacrifice was Algeria herself, which we see results of still today.

So all these hundreds of states all over the world were suddenly independent and democratic without ever having had any experience of independence or democracy. Most of them were immediately taken over by ruthless militaries who exploited and suppressed them twice as hard as France and Britain had done. Others degenerated and disintegrated into complete chronic anarchy, like the Congo. Others turned into hopeless terrorist states torn asunder by eternal civil wars like Sudan, Iraq and Sierra Leone. In India one million people were killed for nothing in the Punjab crisis as a direct result of independence, when Hindus were to move from Pakistan and Muslims into Pakistan, an artificial construction of Muslim policy, which never existed earlier as a state. Look at the civil wars in Ceylon. See what became of Indochina after the French leave. Look at Indonesia today, the greatest Muslim nation in the world, completely ruined and heading straight towards anarchy, terrorist militia exploding like mushrooms after tropical showers and with the priceless tropical rain forests devastated and burned to cinders by mismanagement and corruption.

In all these modern states without any history and experience, put the question to those who have some education and maturity, who feel responsible and are competent, and each one will say that life was better from all aspects in the colonial days. There was less corruption, less anarchy, less war and violence, there was law and order and working communications and better education possibilities. Ask in Indonesia about the Dutch, and you will be answered with eyes full of tears out of nostalgia. Ask in Kenya about the times before the Mau-Mau, ask in Malaysia about the times before the communist guerrillas, which were armed by the US; ask in Libya about the Italian days, ask the Angola which bled to death under the treatment of Cuban arms, and the now poorest country in the world, Mozambique, about how the Portuguese ran their business, the first and last and most exemplary colonial power; and ask any remaining colony in the world, for instance Macao or Bermuda, if they would like to get independent from the mother country, and you will get a firm answer of 'No!' All the same Macao will be taken over by China later on this year, that very China, which the US always helped to suppress all their neighbours, especially Tibet, probably the worst example in the world of how the end of colonialism brought about much more evil than did ever colonialism. You know yourself, that the British departure from India directly gave the communists of China the opportunity to capture and extinguish Tibet as a nation, which the US gave China free hands in. But the history of Tibet goes back more than a thousand years before the American history begins.

In brief, the American enforced liquidation of the European colonial powers bears the same mark of that short-sighted and destructive irresponsibility which also unnecessarily bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's irresponsibility and short-sightedness - nothing else. But England was the mother of the US, and most American families have their origin in old Europe. The part played by the US in the destruction of the British Empire is that of a most spoiled and ungrateful son - a regular mother-fucker.

And what's been done can't be undone. The most important thing to be done now is the complete dismantling of all nuclear weapons and the establishment of perfect control of all use of nuclear power for a total elimination of all possible abuse. America dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for no constructive reason at all and bears the highest responsibility."