Prisoners of the Moon review – the dark side of the Apollo 11 story

This considered documentary blends archive, original interviews and reconstruction to track down an ugly, sticky thread from the great tapestry of self-congratulation that is forming around the 50-year anniversary of the first moon landing. Where a number of recent documentaries and dramatic features celebrate, however justly, the bravery, vision and scientific achievement of the Apollo 11 mission, writer-director Johnny Gogan’s collaboration with co-writer Nick Snow is a reminder that it was thanks to contributions from scientists smuggled out of Nazi Germany after the second world war that the Americans beat the Russians to the moon.

In particular, this zeroes in on the story of Arthur Rudolph, who is played in flashbacks with enticing ambiguity by Jim Norton. Rudolph, an engineer, joined the Nazi party in 1931 and worked directly under the pioneering rocket scientist Wernher von Braun on the V-2, which was constructed using slave labour drawn from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Along with Von Braun and others, Rudolph ended up in the US, playing a major role at Nasa in its early days.

All this gives the film a timely charge, but the emphasis is much more on Rudolph’s later years, particularly 1990 when he tried to enter Canada and ended up facing an immigration hearing, big chunks of which are re-enacted here, with Cathy Belton playing Rudolph’s sinister barrister Barbara Kulaszka. Meanwhile, actor Marty Rea, dressed in concentration-camp striped pyjamas, recites passages from the memoir of survivor Jean Michel to chilling effect, appearing like Banquo’s ghost during the trial scene to see justice done.  (more...)

Prisoners of the Moon review – the dark side of the Apollo 11 story

Prisoners of the Moon

Related news stories:

Ex-nazi Arthur Rudolph Leaves Canada, but Immigration Proceedings Continue

Arthur Rudolph - Denaturalization and Departure To West Germany

‘Canada Adopts America First Foreign Policy,’ US State Dept boasted in 2017, with appointment of FM Chrystia Freeland

The US State Department boasted in a declassified memo in March 2017 that Canada had adopted an “America first” foreign policy.

The cable was authored just weeks after the centrist government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Chrystia Freeland as foreign minister. The former editor of the major international news agency Reuters, Freeland has pushed for aggressive policies against states targeted by Washington for regime change, including Venezuela, Russia, Nicaragua, Syria, and Iran.

The State Department added that Trudeau had promoted Freeland “in large part because of her strong U.S. contacts,” and that her “number one priority” was working closely with Washington.

Under Freeland, the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist, Canada has strongly campaigned against Russia, strengthened its ties with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and played a key role in the US-led right-wing coup attempt in Venezuela.

The memo offers the most concrete evidence to date that the United States sees Ottawa as an imperial subject and considers Canadian foreign policy as subordinate to its own.  (more...)

‘Canada Adopts America First Foreign Policy,’ US State Dept boasted in 2017, with appointment of FM Chrystia Freeland

Drinking your maple-sweetened Kool-Aid

Stalinist Purges and More in the Knights of Malta: New Fast-Breaking Developments

On 16 May OnePeterFive described the takeover of power in the Order of Malta by the German, secularizing party led by the Grand Chancellor, Baron von Boeselager. The story goes back to December 2016, when the then Grand Master, Fra Matthew Festing, attempted to dismiss Boeselager. The latter got Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, to intervene and annul the Order’s acts. Next, in January 2017, Pope Francis ordered Fra Matthew to resign as Grand Master, and Boeselager was reinstated. In 2018 Boeselager insisted on the election as Grand Master of a nonentity, Fra Giacomo dalla Torre, who is now the figurehead for Boeselager’s regime. Then, last May, the takeover was completed by the elections to the new government of the Order, which amounted to the total victory of the German party. As OnePeterFive revealed, the list that the Germans presented was elected almost unchanged: all four of the high officers of the Order, five out of the six other members of the Sovereign Council, and all six members of the Government Council, which has an ancillary role.

Within weeks, any thoughts that this absolute power might be exercised with discretion and moderation have gone by the board. In Portugal, an emissary of the Grand Magistry has arrived, dismissed the entire council of the Portuguese Association, and appointed a new council by fiat, in defiance of the custom that such bodies are elected by the local members. In England, the Grand Prior has been dismissed and a Procurator has been imposed, again without election. In Rome, the entire council of the Delegation (the body that assembles all the knights of the Roman area) has resigned. This is significant, since these are the members of the Order closest to what is going on in the Grand Magistry, and what they see horrifies them. What the foregoing acts seem to show is a Stalinist purge by the new regime, when they have been in power for less than two months.  (more...)

Stalinist Purges and More in the Knights of Malta: New Fast-Breaking Developments

BREAKING UPDATE: This article has shaken the Boeselager regime hard, and letters and statements are now flying. Some national presidents have written their members saying "Many of the facts cited in this article are true", while expressing hope for some resolution to the crisis. https://t.co/Yha8p0vwe1

— Dictator Pope official site (@DictatorPope) July 4, 2019

SMOM conferred honors on Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen. It cooperated in the escape of Nazi war criminals from justice and facilitated their folding into the CIA, Latin American dictatorships, and stay-behind terrorist armies. Now, their slimy guests choose to loot them, just as they have the rest of the world? What kind of mafia of the mediocre would lay down with these dogs? Could they not imagine that they would get up with fleas?

Related:

That lingering odor of saurkraut, or is it corpses? Secret German Armies

Defense Department Computer Network Among Top Sharers of Child Pornography

Defense Department computers are among the top distributors of child pornography. An untold number of Department of Defense (DOD) employees and contractors have subscriptions to child pornography websites, and the problem is apparently so pervasive it requires new technical solutions to address it.

"Hundreds of DoD-affiliated individuals" were recently identified as suspects in child pornography cases, according to an investigation by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

So far, authorities have only looked into about 20 percent of these cases. But already, they've found "several" individuals "using their government devices to download or share said pornographic material."

Last year, an investigation by the National Criminal Justice Training Program found DOD computers were among the top networks nationwide for peer-to-peer sharing of pornographic images of minors. DOD's network ranked 19th out of 2,891 computer networks studied.  (more...)

Defense Department Computer Network Among Top Sharers of Child Pornography

Constance Cumbey: Throwing light on Lucifer's dark children

The Secret of Benedict XVI: Is He Still the Pope?

Review:

I read this book expecting to be skeptical of an author who would argue that Benedict XVI did not validly or fully resign the papacy. After all, it sure looked as if he intended to do that in his famous speech of abdication, and the world seems to have accepted it as such.

Socci, however, gave me much to think about with his careful analysis of Benedict's XVI's utterances on the subject (and there are a surprising number of them!), Archbishop Gaenswein's speeches, and, above all, the interpretations of canon lawyers -- none of them traditionalists, by the way -- who argue that the resignation lacks several conditions for validity. The argument is not based so much on the machinations of the St. Gallen Mafia as on the inherent actions and statements of Benedict XVI and others, all publicly available. In other words, this is no "conspiracy theory" but a soberly argued case. There are certainly steps in the argument that I wonder about or find less than convincing, and the book raises quite as many questions as it purports to resolve, yet the complete picture is nothing less than apocalyptic.

Even those who think they have a watertight case in favor of validity should, out of intellectual honesty, grapple with what Socci presents here. If they can defeat his arguments, all the better for the defense of truth. If they cannot or will not, however, this would seem to indicate a moral or mental weakness. I would be happy to see a refutation, but it has to go beyond the anodyne statement that "general acceptance of a pope is equivalent to the validity of a papacy." We are in uncharted waters, and we need to recognize that the safe and sound ecclesiology of the preconciliar period is being burst open in all sorts of ways.  (more...)

Ever been troubled by what look like two Popes at the Vatican?

Hamilton’s landscape of hate: How far-right extremists are finding fertile ground

He was 12 when two neo-Nazi thugs followed him and his brother into a downtown Hamilton shopping mall and jumped them.

Matthew Green, who is black, shares this Jackson Square incident of more than 20 years ago to show how a pair of goons can do a lot of damage.

"It only took two of them to change the way I felt in my own city," says Green, executive director of the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion and a former city councillor now running federally for the NDP.

He also offers this anecdote in the aftermath of a bigoted, violent protest mounted by Christian extremists, with alt-right companions in tow, that targeted Pride celebrants at Gage Park on June 15.

Drawing from his own experience at Jackson Square, Green speaks with authority when he laments how the LGBTQ+ teens who were exposed to the hatred will remember it for years to come.

"It was a traumatic experience for them. What should have been a celebration has turned into this trauma."

Green and other advocates say the Gage Park violence was just another sign that dangerous right-wing extremists have found fertile ground in Hamilton to organize activities.  (more...)

Hamilton’s landscape of hate: How far-right extremists are finding fertile ground

Related:

RCMP launch hate crime probe of leader of nationalist group vying for party status in federal election

The Religious Right must be scrutinized very carefully by social conservatives to ferret out infiltrators and provocateurs undermining their position. The conflation of sexual identity with ethnic oppression has been a project of covert eugenicists to neutralize opposition to ethnic cleansing by abortion, contraception, and sterilization. Sterile sex, for such closet Nazis, works just as well as gas chambers. Both the Left and the Right -- socially engineered fictions -- have been co-opted by the plutocratic elite to create a heads-I-win tails-you-lose dynamic that grinds inexorably toward population control. Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen became an Evangelical minister after the war. Think about it.

The Left oven and...                           the Right oven