The Race is Run

The Empress of the USA : Part VII

...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part VI

THE MIRACULOUS CACTUS...or Tequila Sunrise?

It is from the flower spike of the Agave Tequilana that Tequila is produced.

The time has come to take a look at the Tilma.

First, its miraculous physical properties...

There appears to be a general confusion about the plant fibres used to weave the Tilma. A variety of Cactus? A variety of Agave? Hemp and linen? Despite conflicting opinions, devout scientists speak with great authority about the qualities of the cloth.

In 2002, art restoration expert José Sol Rosales said he examined the icon with a stereomicroscope and that he identified calcium sulfate, pine soot, white, blue, and green "tierras" (soil), reds made from    carmine and other pigments, as well as  gold. Rosales said he found the work consistent with 16th century materials and methods.*

At the recent 'International Marian Congress on Our Lady of Guadalupe' hosted by the Knights of Columbus, participants were informed by researcher and physicist Dr. Aldolfo Orozco** that:

"...there is no scientific explanation for the 478 [?] years of high quality-preservation of the Tilma or for the miracles that have occurred to ensure its preservation."

He went on to explain that:

“All the cloths similar to the Tilma that have been placed in the salty and humid environment around the Basilica have lasted no more than ten years...”

In contrast, Orozco said:

 “The original Tilma was exposed for approximately 116 years without any kind of protection, receiving all the infrared and ultraviolet radiation from the tens of thousands of candles near it and exposed to the humid and salty air around the temple.”

Dr. Orozco then discussed the Tilma’s fabric.  He noted that:

“one of the most bizarre characteristics of the cloth is that the back side is rough and coarse, but the front side is ‘as soft as the most pure silk, as noted by painters and scientists in 1666, and confirmed one century later in 1751 by the Mexican painter, Miguel Cabrera.”

to be continued...

*  Hispanic News

** Catholic News Agency

The Empress of the USA : Part VI

...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part V

La Virgen

The full title of Our Lady of Guadalupe is, La Virgen Maria Santísima, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Patrona de México y Emperatriz de las Américas (The Most Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas)

Rather than delve into the long and tortuous history of conflicts between "Protestant" and "Catholic" inhabitants and their descendants, suffice to say that the Catholic Church has never abandoned its dream to "catholicize" both North and South America - from pole to pole.

And so we will fast forward...

After centuries-long campaigns by a succession of Vatican agents and fifth-columnists to manipulate, destablize, isolate and undermine a largely "Protestant" USA,* the realization of the great dream sits perched upon the cusp of reality mainly due to entirely unrecognized but parallel activities.

The US-based Knights of Columbus, the world's largest order of lay Catholics, fired the latest salvo by recently hosting an 'International Marian Congress on Our Lady of Guadalupe' held in Phoenix, Arizona. 

From the Report posted on the Guadalupe Festival website

Joyful Festival Concludes Week of Guadalupe Events

"Our Lady of Gudalupe and the tilma [cloak] of St. Juan Diego took center stage, literally, before thousands of faithful ones at the Guadalupe Festival on August 8 [2009]. An afternoon of song, dance, prayer, joyful celebrations and witness talks, the festival was held at the Jobing.com Arena, just outside of Phoenix, which was filled with nearly 20,000 attendees of all ages and many ethnic backgrounds.

"The festival concluded a week of events sponsored by the Knights of Columbus in Phoenix, starting with the Order’s 127th Supreme Convention and continuing with a three-day Marian Congress on Our Lady of Guadalupe.

"The highlight of the festival was a procession with the tilma relic, a small portion that was cut from Juan Diego’s tilma, and is on permanent display at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. It was loaned to the festival by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The relic was encased in a reliquary and draped by a chain upon a 17th century statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe that was placed on the arena’s center stage.

"The festival concluded with the praying of an international rosary, with prayers read in many languages, and meditations on the mysteries given by prominent Catholics from a number of countries.

"...Supreme Knight Carl Anderson gave the closing address, saying that the Knights of Columbus would continue to seek to bring all the people of America – North South and Central – in unity under the mantle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to help build a culture of life and a civilization of love."

Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knight of Columbus

to be continued...

* See for example Honest Abe and the Vatican Parts I and II

The Empress of the USA : Part V

...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part IV

Elizabeth, by the Grace of God...Queene

According to Carroll,* many of the conquistadors were from the Estremadura region in Spain. Hernán Cortés himself was born in a village in the region and supported the nearby Gaudalupe shrine generously.

And we discover from Mexico : An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History** that -

 "Although a Guadalupe cult apparently flourished at Tepeyac as early as the mid-sixteenth century, it was probably modeled on the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe of Estremadura, Spain's dark-skinned virgin and a favorite of the conquistadors.

"The location of the cult at Teyepac, on an Aztec religious site dedicated to the goddess Tonanztin, was typical of Spanish efforts to turn Indian sacred spaces to Catholic purposes. The earliest sources indicate that a statue rather than the tilma was the central focus of worship and while historical sources mention miracles attached to statue and tilma, there in no mention of miraculous apparitions, even in the writings of Bishop Zumarraga himself."

We are told that millions of indigenous Mexicans converted to Catholicism in the decades following the 1525 miraculous apparitions at Guadalupe.

But a storm was approaching from the east. In 1584 -

"ELIZABETH by the Grace of God of England, Fraunce and Ireland Queene, defender of the faith, &c..." granted to Sir Walter Raleigh the right to discover and colonise any lands of the New World "not actually possessed of any Christian Prince, nor inhabited by Christian People..."***

The first successful English colony in the New World was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.  The Pilgrims, founders of Plymouth, Massachusetts, arrived in 1620.

Vatican dreams of a wholly Catholic New World were thrown into disarray when these groups of non-Catholic Christians began to colonise the eastern seaboard of what is now the continental United States of America.

To counter this influence, many prayers must have been directed to that Lady who claimed spiritual hegemony over the New World.

So in 1648, as if in answer to such prayers, the marvellous stories of Juan Diego, Bishop Zumarraga, and the miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary were committed to print in a book entitled Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe, Who Miraculously Appeared in Mexico City, written by a certain Miguel Sanchez.

to be continued...

* The cult of the Virgin Mary: psychological origins, Michael P. Carroll, Princeton University Press, 1992, page 185-186

** Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History, Don M. Coerver, Suzanne B. Pasztor, and Robert M. Buffington, ABC-CLIO, 2004, pp 533-535.

*** Yale University Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy.

The Empress of the USA : Part IV

...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part III

Where Castilian Roses Bloom

In 1525, an Aztec Indian named Quauhtlatoatzin was baptised by the Franciscan friars who were invited to Mexico on the very heels of the Conquest by Cortés himself. The Indian received the new name of Juan Diego.

Six years later, or so the story goes, the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego on Tepeyac hill, just north of today's Mexico City.

Juan Diego* was requested by Mary to go to the Bishop, Father Juan de Zumarraga, and ask that a church be built on Teyepac in her honour. Father de Zumarraga dismissed Diego's account, of course. Then Mary appeared a second time to Juan and repeated her request. The Indian again approached the Bishop and, this time, Zumarraga sent Diego away and demanded that he bring back proof of his story.

Proof was obligingly provided. Mary appeared a third time to Diego and told him to go right to the top of the hill and pick for the Bishop some Castilian roses, native to the Bishop's homeland, which he would find growing in the middle of winter. Of course, that is the nature of a miracle so Juan filled his cloak [tilma] full of these roses. On presenting the cloak full of roses to the Bishop, both men were amazed to see a painted image of an indigenous Virgin Mary miraculously appear on the tilma. 

The Castilian rose, brought from Spain and associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe

The supposedly indestructible image on the tilma has been preserved all these centuries and now is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Or so the story goes.

When the Aztecs discovered that this dark-skinned Virgin had not only appeared on Teyepac where they worshipped their own mother goddess Tonantzin, but that she had also spoken to Juan Diego in their native tongue Náhuatl, their conversion to Catholicism was assured.

to be continued...

*Juan Diego was made a saint by Pope John Paul II in the Basilica of Guadalupe in July of 2002.

The Empress of the USA : Part III

...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part II

The Plumed Serpent

The history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and its impact upon Mesoamerican religion and culture is a vastly complex subject so we will just touch upon it briefly.

In 1519 the Spaniard Hernán Cortés arrived at the gates of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztec Empire, with three interconnected dreams in his heart: expanding the Spanish empire, expanding Catholicism, and expanding his pockets with gold.

Model of the temple district of Tenochtitlan, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico.

One of the chief deities of the Aztecs was Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent.

 Quetzalcoatl as depicted in the sixteenth century Codex Telleriano-Remensis [Bibliothèque Nationale de France]

According to Robert D Kaplan,*

"Quetzal (bird) and coatl (snake) are metaphors for the sky and the earth in the Nahua language of the Aztecs..."

"According to Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan friar and the first great ethnologist of the New World, Quetzalcoatl ''was the wind . . . the guide, the roadsweeper of the rain gods,'' who restored humanity in the ''Time Before Time.''

Baldwin explains how the abandonment of the great city of Teotihuacan in the eighth century A.D., as well as the fall of the Toltec empire in the 13th, ''signaled the beginning of a sense of history in Mesoamerica,'' that is, ''reverence for the sacred past.'' This new historical sensibility embellished the myth of Quetzalcoatl. Henceforth, the Plumed Serpent was said to re-enter the world at intervals of 52 years, returning in different forms.

"So it was that the Aztec monarch Moctezuma II imagined Cortes as the returning Quetzalcoatl. Such fatalism abetted Cortes's conquest of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Venice, upon whose ruins Mexico City was later built.

"Since the Aztecs had never before seen horses or Europeans, Moctezuma's creduluity was understandable. Indeed, the first encounter between great civilizations of the Old and New World was like a nightmarish fantasy in which the Spaniards marched into a white city rising from a blue lake -- Tenochtitlan -- and witnessed a drumroll of human sacrifices: Aztec priests plucking still-beating hearts from their victims' chests with obsidian knives before tossing the bodies down pyramidal steps.

"The horrified Spaniards eventually responded with an even bloodier slaughter. They also brought smallpox. Baldwin notes that in 1519, when Cortes landed, Mexico's population was 25 million; in 1600 it was one million.

"The Spanish missionaries who infiltrated Mexico after the conquest did not obliterate the pagan pantheon. ''The old ways reappeared,'' Baldwin writes, ''in the faces of ancient gods incised into church niches; behind altars consecrated to the body and blood of Christ, where little idols lay buried.''

"The Plumed Serpent hid beneath the mask of St. Thomas. The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, seen hovering above a cactus by an Indian peasant just north of Mexico City, conflates the tale of Tonantzin, the ''snake-Earth Mother-goddess'' and the wife of Quetzalcoatl."*

The view expressed by Baldwin that the Aztecs believed Cortés to be the returning Quetzalcoatl has been challenged by a number of Mesoamericanist scholars.

to be continued...

* Robert D Kaplan, New York Times Review of Books, Legends of the Plumed Serpent : Biography of a Mexican God, Neil Baldwin, Public Affairs, 1998

The Empress of the USA : Part II

...continued from The Empress of the USA : Part I

The Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe

According to various Catholic sources, a statue of the Virgin Mary, supposedly carved by Luke the Evangelist,* had been given to Leander, the Archbishop of Seville by Pope Gregory I sometime between 590 AD and 604 AD.

When Seville was captured by the Moors in 711 AD, a group of priests [or knights] fled northward and buried the statue in the hills near the Guadalupe River in the Extremadura region.

Catholic Culture continues the story:

"In 1326, when a humble cowherd named Gil, from Extremadura, reported that Our Lady had manifested herself to him, and that he had found a casket buried in the earth, the announcement evoked great emotion. When ecclesiastical authorities reached the little village of Guadalupe in the neighborhood where the casket had been unearthed, they discovered that it contained a statue, which had been concealed six hundred years before by the Knights of Don Rodrigo during their flight. Pertinent documents vouchsafed for the authenticity of the image. The statue, though buried beneath the earth for six hundred years, was perfectly preserved."

Let us meditate for a few moments on this statement: "Pertinent documents vouchsafed for the authenticity of the image."

During the next 150 years or so, the Marian shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe became the most popular pilgrimage site in fifteenth-century Spain, as is evidenced by the fact that on July 29, 1496, Christopher Columbus visited the shrine to thank the Virgin for her protection on his voyages.**

The small shrine built around the excavation site evolved into today's great monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe.

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Spain and Portugal signed an agreement at Tordesillas in Spain in 1494. The agreement, known as the "Treaty of Torsedillas" was based on the Papal Bull "Inter Ceatera" issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI. [Rodrigo Borgia, famous as probably the most corrupt pope in history.]

The treaty effectively deeded to Spain and Portugal the entire New World and established "Christian" [Catholic] dominion and subjugation of non-Christian "pagan" peoples and their lands.

to be continued....

* See The King of Jerusalem : Part IV for other images supposedly painted by Luke the Evangelist

** In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain, Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau, Princeton University Press, 2003.

The Empress of the USA : Part I

The Vatican's campaign to "Catholicize" the USA through "Our Lady of Guadalupe" has reached a critical stage so, once again, we must temporarily suspend our series on 20th Century European Fascism.

To fully comprehend the Guadalupe campaign, we must first revisit a little Old and New World history, more than a little pious fable, and a giant dollop of trickery and deception.

In 1945, Pope Pius XII declared the Our Lady of Guadalupe “Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas.”

This papal declaration was not just overly pious sentiment or idle waffle designed to appeal to the emotions of the devout. On the contrary, it signalled the intensification of a religious war against "Protestant" USA, of both material and spiritual dimensions, which has been waged relentlessly for many centuries. [See for example Honest Abe and the Vatican Parts I and II.]

to be continued...

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?
-- John Adams, second President of the United States, letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821

The Wolff Pack : Part V

...continued from The Wolff Pack : Part IV

US Intelligence officials such as Allen Dulles feared that if Nazis such as Karl Wolff were ever brought to trial then not only would certain anti-Soviet features of Operation Sunrise come to the attention of various Allied governments but also the fact that the Allies policy of unconditional surrender had been deliberately violated.

Readers may have wondered why I have devoted so much time and space to SS General Karl Wolff and his connections with Intelligence organisations. A document presented by the Pave the Way Foundation as helping to exonerate the wartime role of Pope Pius XII provided us with an opportunity to look at a single character and his small niche within a vast web of interlocking components - the rise and fall of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and other fascist regimes of the 20th century, the involvement of financial/military/industrial interests, ex-nazi and anti-communist groups, interconnected intelligence networks and, of course, the Vatican and its will to power.

In our study of 20th Century European Fascism, we will encounter these various components as their activities become vital to our story but, unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, to tell the whole tale would probably consume so much time that Doomsday may well intervene.

The Wolff Affidavit was posted on the Pave the Way Foundation website in order to 'prove' the existence of a plot by Hitler to kidnap Pope Pius XII.

We have seen that the content of the Wolff Affidavit is worthless. Asserting that it constitutes historical evidence, without conducting even the most perfunctory examination of its context, is evidence of only one thing - the existence of an agenda which, even if pursued for some well-intentioned purpose, distorts historical truth and is doomed to certain failure...that is of course if you believe in the existence YHVH, the God of justice and truth. And we all know about the paving stones to hell...

A deadly trinity
In closing, I will just point out that almost the entire 20th Century could be characterised as one in which there existed a 'wolf pack' which hunted down a particular prey. The radical and seemingly exclusive poltical, philosphical and religious differences between the pack were swamped and overcome by a singular unity -  an all-encompassing need to utterly destroy Communism, both root and branch. The 'wolf pack' was composed of men like Adolf Hitler who consumed countless numbers of victims, and men like Pope Pius XII who sat on his throne and watched, and men like Allen Dulles who snatched such men as SS General Karl Wolff from the jaws of justice.

The Wolff Pack : Part IV

...continued from The Wolff Pack : Part III

Again, according to Michael Salter:

"In 1958, the German Federal Republic began to search for Nazi war criminals on a larger scale than had taken place previously...Under changed geo-political circumstances, in which the influence of American intelligence and military authorities in German domestic affairs had been sharply eroded, Wolff was investigated as a possible war crimes defendant.

"This followed international pressure triggered by disclosures at the Adolf Eichmann trials in 1960-61. At Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, Wolff's name was cited with reference to SS orders (albeit stemming from Himmler) deporting Italian Jews...

"On 18 January 1962, Wolff was arrested at his luxurious Munich lakeside villa...

At his trial, Wolff strenuously denied that he was involved in the mass destruction of Jews and claimed that he had never been personally committed to Himmler's racist agenda.

The prosecution presented as evidence, a letter Wolff had written in February 1939 to his first wife, Frieda, while he was in Sicily. He said:

"...destiny has placed me as the closest associate of a unique man, the Reichsfuhrer-SS, whom I not only admire immeasurably for his extraordinary qualities, but in whose historic message I deeply believe. Our mutual, to me infinitely satisfactory word...is rooted in the racial thought. My entire being and ambition is geared toward the SS and its distant goals."

The West German court did not accept Wolff's various defence arguments. On 30 September 1964, Wolff was convicted of responsibility for murdering 300,000 persons, mainly Jews, and overseeing the SS's involvement in slave labour programmes for IG Farben and numerous other companies.*

The Trial Judge, Emil Mannhart, characterised him as Himmlers' 'bureaucrat of death'. Wolff was sentenced to 20 years but served ten.

Wolff survived his prison term to become a prosperous West German businessman in the 1970s.**

As I said in The Wolff Pack : Part II, the principal reason for my focus on the case of SS General Karl Wolff is not the single strand of his affidavit and the use to which it has been put by the Pave the Way Foundation, which is really only a sideshow, but on Wolff himself and what his story reveals about 20th Century Religious and Political history.

to be continued...

* Nazi war crimes, US intelligence and selective prosecution at Nuremberg: Controversies Regarding the Role of the Office of Strategic Services, Professor Michael Salter, Routledge, 2007, pp 166-174.

** National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Records of the Directorate of Operations, Analysis of the Name File of Guido Zimmer, Professor Richard Breitman, American University, IWG Director of Historical Research.

The Wolff Pack : Part III

...continued from The Wolff Pack : Part II

In The Wolff Pack : Part I, I stated that:

"'Operation Sunrise' secured the future of both Dulles and Wolff. Dulles because he was later appointed CIA head under the Eisenhower Administration, and Wolff because he did not have to face trial at Nuremberg despite overwhelming evidence of his complicity in the Holocaust."

In the comments section of that post, Gary Krupp stated that he was:

"...truly fascinated watching an historical revisionist at work. Contrary to your implications, General Karl Wolff was in fact imprisoned in 1945. I fail to see what Allen Dulles has to do with the plot to kidnap the Pope. Your attempt to force your square peg theories into the round hole of reality, quite eloquently I might add, is impressive. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might wish to capitalize on your considerable revisionist talents in helping him with his quest to prove the Holocaust never really happened."

Aside from the deeply offensive nature of the Ahmadinejad remark, readers will note that my words were Wolff "did not have to face trial at Nuremberg..."

Mr. Krupp sidesteps the issue by stating that Wolff was "imprisoned."

Let us examine facts drawn from original [not revisionist] documents emanating from an unimpeachable source.

In 1999, in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998, President Clinton established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG). The group was directed to locate, inventory, recommend for declassification, and make available to the public all classified Nazi war criminal records. These records are kept by the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Professor Richard Breitman was appointed the Director of Historical Research for the IWG and, after examining a certain group of records,* had this to say about Karl Wolff:

" In a climate where world public opinion was shocked by photos of corpses and survivors from concentration and extermination camps, there was no way for Himmler's former chief of staff--one of the highest ranking SS officers to survive--to escape early imprisonment. Wolff was moved from one internment camp to another and regularly interrogated. He almost was named as one of the major defendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, but he lucked out.

"It seemed to him that Dulles had failed to carry out a promise or a moral obligation to help him. In early 1946 Wolff was diagnosed as paranoid and was confined in a mental institution: he thought he was pursued by Jewish demons. After considerable American hesitation about prosecuting him because of his participation in Operation Sunrise, the British proposed to try him together with Field Marshal Kesselring. But they changed their plans and instead held a little-publicized trial in Hamburg in 1949, in which Wolff's partners in Operation Sunrise wrote affidavits or testified on his behalf. He was acquitted."

Far from being a defendant at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Karl Wolff appeared only as a witness for the prosecution.**

to be continued...

* National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Records of the Directorate of Operations, Analysis of the Name File of Guido Zimmer, Professor Richard Breitman, American University, IWG Director of Historical Research.

** Nazi war crimes, US intelligence and selective prosecution at Nuremberg: Controversies Regarding the Role of the Office of Strategic Services, Professor Michael Salter, Routledge, 2007.