In the Netherlands, the country’s first National Holocaust museum opened in March this year. While there are museum’s dedicated to World War 2, and the plight of the Dutch under Nazi occupation, the new museum in Amsterdam is the nation’s first detailing the suffering of Netherlands’ Jewish community.

Seventy five percent of Holland’s prewar Jewish community (102 000 people) perished in the Holocaust, the highest proportion of any Western European nation.

In the country of Anne Frank, the plight of Dutch Jews has until recently been swept under the carpet. The question has been asked; why didn’t the non-Jewish Dutch people help the Jews? The Dutch prime minister in 2020, Mark Rutte, officially apologised for the failure of the Netherlands to assist the Jewish people. While there were individual efforts to rescue the Jewish community, the wartime Dutch authorities remained passive, and acquiesced in the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people.

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the homeland of Anne Frank is struggling to educate its population today regarding the Holocaust. There is a disturbing lack of awareness among the younger generation of Dutch about the Holocaust and the deportations of Dutch Jews.

Did non-Jews help Jewish people find sanctuary? The most famous gentile to rescue Jews is Oskar Schindler, now internationally known because of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1993 movie. Before Schindler became famous, there was another non-Jew who achieved the status of a cause célèbre – Raoul Wallenberg. Born in 1912 into a prosperous Swedish family, Wallenberg traveled to Budapest in July 1944 as part of the Swedish legation in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

Sweden was officially neutral during the war, but maintained business relations with both the Axis and Allied powers. Wallenberg, while not a professional diplomat, used his position to rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain captivity and death. Issuing passports and travel documents to the besieged Jewish community, Wallenberg is hailed as one of the Righteous among the Nations.

The latter is a category created by Yad Vashem and the Israeli government to honour those non-Jews who went to extraordinary lengths to provide sanctuary for European Jews. Budapest was a nest of spies in 1944-45, with the Allied powers competing for influence once the Axis-aligned dictatorship should fall. The Soviet army was rapidly approaching Budapest, and the Allies were concerned about a Communist-dominated Hungary.

The Jews of Budapest faced a daily struggle to survive. Subjected to pogroms, their situation became even more perilous in the later stages of the war. The Hungarian leader, Admiral Miklos Horthy, had been secretly contacting the British and Americans to arrange a surrender. When the Nazi leadership got wind of this, they viewed it as treason to their cause. Organising a coup d’etat, Horthy was deposed and replaced by the fanatical racists of the Arrow Cross.

Wallenberg faced certain death should his activities as a refugee advocate be discovered. He was a member of the American-financed War Refugee Board (WRB), an institution created by American president Roosevelt to rescue Jews from Europe. Too little, too late in my opinion. The US and Canada had highly restrictive immigration laws at the time, and European Jews fleeing persecution were turned away.

The WRB, in cooperation with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid (known as Joint), worked to save Budapest’s Jews. Wallenberg was part of this effort. So why did he become a cause célèbre in the 1980s and onwards?

In early 1945, Wallenberg was captured by Soviet counterintelligence, sent to the Eastern bloc, and never seen again. The exact circumstances of his death have remained a mystery ever since. The Soviet government stated that Wallenberg died of heart failure in July 1947. This explanation has never been fully accepted, especially by those whom Wallenberg rescued, and their descendants.

Awarded honorary citizenship by Australia, the US, Britain, Canada, Hungary and Israel, Wallenberg became a almost mythical figure – symbolising great personal courage and nonviolence in the face of unspeakable atrocities. From the 1980s, reports emerged that eyewitnesses spotted an ageing Wallenberg, still alive, in Soviet prisons.

From there, the campaign to internationalise his case ramped up – streets and public squares were named after him. Books were published and TV movies made, heroising Wallenberg as the moral hero of our times. The Cold War was in full swing, so a tale of sacrifice and courage brought down by Soviet ‘totalitarianism’ encapsulated by Wallenberg found a mass audience.

Interestingly, the CIA was helpful in promoting the Wallenberg case, bringing it into the public consciousness. His moral courage was exemplary – so we are told. There is one aspect of his case which only came to light decades after the publicity campaign died down – Wallenberg was a spy. He was an intelligence asset for the OSS – the predecessor of the American CIA.

His presence in Budapest was not motivated by pure altruism or overwhelming concern for the plight of the Jewish community. He was on an intelligence mission. His humanitarian work, while perfectly admirable, must be understood as part of a wider context of American (and Swedish) intelligence gathering. Budapest was in line to become a Communist-aligned state, and the Allies were doing their level best to prevent this postwar scenario.

Swedish military intelligence, during the war years, had a deliberate program of recruiting businesspeople to gather intelligence on the economic and military resources of European nations. Sweden and Hungary had established intelligence sharing networks for mutual benefit. This murky, yet practical side, of Wallenberg’s actions casts doubt on his status as the legendary Swedish Schindler.

The Swedish government, ever wary that Wallenberg’s role as a spy be discovered, did not sufficiently press Moscow for answers as to his ultimate fate. The Swedish authorities, in 2016, officially declared that Wallenberg had died in 1952, five years after the last credible information that he was alive. The statues of Wallenberg remain in place, reminding us of his heroism while keeping his secretive intelligence role hidden.

The angel was indeed a spy.

When discussing the rescue of European Jews in World War 2, let us remember that the Anglophone nations closed their doors to fleeing Jewish refugees. Denied sanctuary, they returned to their fate in Europe. The Wallenberg heroism story, while captivating, must not blind us to the fact that Jewish refugees were rejected en masse.

The pyramids of Giza have exercised the imagination of Anglophone nations, and their Western counterparts, for decades. The so-called mysteries of the pyramids have permeated popular fiction for a long time. When I tell people that my background is Egyptian (Armenians from Egypt to be exact), I know what is next; the inevitable and wide-eyed questions from my interlocutor about pyramids.

You see, when my late father migrated to Australia from Egypt, the first thing he did was build a house in the shape of pyramids……and if you believe that, I suggest you seek psychiatric help.

Discovering lost civilisations

The appeal of finding lost civilisations is durable and longstanding. We like to uncover lost worlds, and certainly archaeology is the study of the human past. There are long extinct worlds just waiting to be uncovered. Pseudoscience manipulates this healthy curiosity by taking it into dead ends, such as the mythical Atlantis.

The claim – or rather hallucination – that aliens built the pyramids, along with other ancient structures, is nothing new or original. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and practising egomaniac, made the ‘aliens built the pyramids’ claim in 2020. The Egyptian archaeological community, in so many words, told Musk to go take a running jump. The new boss of X/Twitter did his part in amplifying misinformation.

Zahi Hawass, veteran Egyptian archaeologist, commented that the pyramid builders were not slaves, as popular imagination would have it, but a dedicated workforce. The notion of slaves building the Egyptian pyramids stems from the fictional Hebrews-enslaved-in-Egypt portrayal in the Old Testament.

Steven Novella, neuroscientist and science blogger, writes that the aliens built things claim does contain an element of racism. Nonwhite civilisations are not given the credit for possessing the scientific and technological know how for building complex and impressive structures. The aliens built it trope is easy to deploy and requires no further scrutiny.

Notice how we in the West never ask how the ancient Greeks built the Parthenon in Athens, or the Acropolis of Rhodes, were built – no alien explanations required here. The Colosseum of Rome – was that built by aliens?

Those questions never arise because we in the Anglophone nations view ourselves as cultural descendants of a continuum starting in Greco-Roman times. They were smart enough to build their own structures. Funnily enough, the aliens only constructed complex structures in Egypt, or Mesoamerica, or sub-Saharan Africa.

How were the pyramids built?

That is a longstanding question, and numerous commentators, from Herodotus onwards, have been perplexed by this question and the enigmatic pyramids. The Egyptians certainly had all the requisite engineering technology to build the pyramids; using levers, wheels, pulleys and so on. How did they haul and lift such enormous blocks of stone over miles and secure them in place? A news item elaborating some recent archaeological research may have the answer.

A long-dried up branch of the Nile, a waterway, was the superhighway used by the Egyptians for constructing the pyramids at Giza. Researchers from North Carolina university, led by Professor Eman Ghoneim, have found a 64-km branch of the Nile, covered over for centuries by farmland and desert. The pyramids at Giza, 31 in all, are clustered in an area west of the Nile.

This new information regarding the river landscape helps scientists answer how the pyramids were built – water power was the main method of transportation.

An ancient water superhighway

This recently discovered branch of the Nile, called Ahramat, is in line with the ever-changing landscape. Yes, I know, we think of deserts as timeless and unchanging. Yet, mapping the environment of alluvial plains, obscured by centuries of cultivation and urban expansion, can reveal surprising results. The Ahramat flowed into the western desert floodplains of the Nile, close to the pyramids.

The pyramids were built over a thousand year period, commissioned by different pharaohs. They were the tombs of royalty, designed to enforce the legitimacy of dynastic authority. The pyramids of Giza, concentrated near the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, are located at an accessible location given the course of the Ahramat – a mega water highway and power source.

A word about Pythagoras

Every school student is familiar with the theorem that bears the name Pythagoras. The latter, a Greek mathematician from the Hellenic island colony of Samos, has been cursed by generations of students. The famous theorem, memorised by all of us going through high school, was known to the ancient Egyptians (and Babylonians for that matter). Samos, the island from which Pythagoras hailed, had extensive commercial exchanges with Egypt.

Various accounts of Pythagoras’ life explain that he traveled to Egypt. To be sure, the ancient Greeks were familiar with geometry and engineering – Euclid and Archimedes stand out. Pythagoras’ innovation was to take the practical mathematics of Egypt, which the latter developed in abundance, and place it on a metaphysical plane of abstract reasoning.

Numbers became an underlying framework for interpreting the cosmos, and mathematical mysteries were integrated into a semi-mystical religion. No Jehovah of the monotheistic cousins was required, just an overwhelming fascination with the infinite mystery of numbers which allegedly produced the apparent order of natural world.

The cult of Pythagoreanism has died out, but its remnants continue to mutate in the form of numerology. As for the pyramids – the Egyptians built them, based on the mathematical knowledge and engineering resources they had.

Creative writing is a huge umbrella term for all sorts of writing – including novels and poetry. Fiction writing is not necessarily political, and creative writers can choose their subject matter from the wide gamut of human lived experiences. However, there are novelists and poets who cross the boundary into the political, and their aesthetic sense influences, and is in turn influenced by, politics.

There is no shortage of materials covering the endlessly fascinating topic of writers, novelists and poets who have gone political.

We all know that Ezra Pound, arguably the most famous poet to emerge from the United States, was an out-and-out fascist. But how many of us know about the flamboyant, extravagant and determined proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio? The latter, known as the Bard (Il Vate) in Italy, D’Annunzio achieved fame as a poet, writer, soldier and a practitioner of aesthetic showmanship in politics.

Born to a wealthy family in 1863, D’Annunzio displayed a flair for poetry at an early age. He also developed an overinflated ego, with a penchant for theatrics. He lived, according to the motto of one of his characters in The Child of Pleasure, life as a work of art. Combining poetry with a decadent lifestyle – he was a lecherous, womanising profligate – he developed a national following in his home country prior to WW1.

He built and cemented his reputation as a novelist with his pre-WW1 literary output. From 1889 to 1910, D’Annunzio produced a succession of novels, elaborating his interpretation of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the superman. Let’s clarify one misconception here; the Nietzsche’s concept of the superman has been misappropriated by far right and ultranationalist political forces, mainly the Nazi party, to buttress their malignant view of a white Aryan superior race. That is bunk, along with the far right, drunk on bad misunderstandings of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman was not racial, but aesthetic and moral. Repudiating Christian morality as that of the slave, he was searching for a process of ethical self-discovery. The Ubermensch was not part of a collective; Nietzsche despised socialism and all notions of equality. He equally despised nationalism and antisemitism. D’Annunzio, a political figure, adopted the concept of a superman to mean a political strongman, directing the strength of the mass of people.

D’Annunzio was a proponent of Italian irredentism; the reclamation of lost Italian lands to create one unified Italy. The Austro-Hungarian empire, a protagonist in WW1, controlled territories in the northern Balkans populated by Italians. D’Annunzio, a combat veteran of WW1, got his chance to put his philosophy into action.

In the aftermath of WW1 and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, its territories were up for grabs. Believing that they had been cheated out of their ‘rightful’ claims for territory, D’Annunzio and his arditi – war veterans – marched in their thousands to the coastal town of Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) and declared a republic. It was to last 15 months.

This experiment of D’Annunzio’s prefigured Mussolini’s Italy in many ways. Setting up a corporatist, anarcho-syndicalist type structure, Fiume’s working class residents were organised into nine vertical ‘syndicates’, or corporations at the service of the state. Giving speeches from the balcony of his palatial residence, D’Annunzio incorporated the Roman salute – the outstretched right arm – in his theatrical displays.

The Fiume republic soon fell into decrepitude; attracting occultists, futurists, drug traffickers (cocaine became a major commodity) and practitioners of non-traditional sexual enthusiasm. Drug addiction was a major problem, superseded only by the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases. D’Annunzio was the supreme commander in chief of this mutilated schmozzle.

The sizeable Croatian population of Fiume was encouraged to leave – sometimes forcibly. The Italian government in Rome, finally running out of patience with D’Annunzio’s extravagance, the Italian army marched into Fiume and shut down the entire social experiment in 1920.

All the daily poetry readings encouraged by D’Annunzio, the mandated Italianised cheers copying the war cry from Homer’s Illiad, made for a remarkable spectacle, but was no substitute for practical administration.

D’Annunzio died in 1938, but the ideas he germinated, particularly the corporatist model, lived on in Mussolini’s Italy.

To be sure, D’Annunzio was not the only European bard attracted to the ideas of fascism. Ireland’s most famous poet, William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was writing his poems while the Fiume experiment was still in full swing. Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, has been quoted as nauseam by centrist political commentators as an expression of exasperation with the terrible after effects of revolution and civil war.

With its melancholic observations of how ‘things fall apart’ and the ‘centre cannot hold’, Yeats’ The Second Coming has acquired new resonance in the aftermath of Brexit and MAGA politics in America. But this deployment of his poetry overlooks an important component of Yeats’ outlook; he was a fascist sympathiser.

His conservative perspective led him, in the interwar years, to uphold the Irish Blueshirts as a political alternative to what he perceived was the chaos and crass consumerism of liberal capitalism. The Blueshirts, modeled on their German Brownshirt counterparts, were fanatically anticommunist, clashed with the IRA and the political Left, and advocated a corporatist style state along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy.

Yeats, in the 1920 and 30s, sympathised with the ostensible order and stability that the Blueshirts represented in contrast to the decadent liberal capitalist orthodoxy. Rather than a champion of democratic liberalism, Yeats supported the vision of the Irish Blueshirts. Although later distancing himself from the authoritarian tendencies of fascism, Yeats became, like his idol the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke, a champion of conservative traditional hierarchies and order.

I am definitely not suggesting that writers be canceled or their works destroyed because of their political beliefs. I am suggesting that we need to be mindful of the political context from which writers and novelists emerge, if only to better understand the messages they are trying to convey.

Every conflict produces its own set of acronyms; usually regarding weapons systems developed by the military. For instance, the US produced Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), provided to the Ukrainian government, were used in strikes on Russian targets.

The THAAD system – Terminal High Area Altitude Defence – is a type of missile defence system provided to South Korea by the US. There have been important and sustained protests by Koreans against the deployment of THAAD.

South Korean politicians and protesters are demonstrating their fundamental commitment to anti-imperialism, knowing full well that the stationing of THAAD on their territory is not a defensive posture, as Washington would have us believe, but an aggressive act in a widening imperialist adventure.

Each deployment of NATO weapons, American or otherwise, is accompanied by a fanfare of simplistic rationales about tipping the war. The sending of HIMARS – High Mobility Artillery Rocket System – was supposed to have turned the tide, enabling the Ukrainians to drive Russian forces out of eastern Ukraine.

The exact opposite has happened, with Russia constructing a steel wall in Ukrainian territory. Indeed, Ukrainian forces have been retreating, even though they possess the latest and greatest NATO weaponry.

Currently, the much hyped capabilities of ATACMS are in the news, in the latest cycle of ‘they are going to turn the tide’ shenanigans.

Such language is eerily reminiscent of the media releases and carefully orchestrated political stunts of the former US client state of South Vietnam. Headquartered in Saigon, the major corporate media parroted the lines – tipping the balance, turning the corner, on the edge of victory – but all these phrases turned out to be deceptive illusions. The parallels between Kyiv and Saigon are deepening with every passing day.

In fact, the battlefields in Ukraine have become the graveyard of US and NATO weapons systems about which American and European politicians have bragged. That is the assessment of a North Korean government official, and Pyongyang has been keeping a close eye on the purported effectiveness of American weaponry in Ukraine – know thine enemy.

Hubris is a condition characterised by excessive pride, an arrogant belief in one’s own invincibility or invulnerability. The Roman Empire suffered this kind of malaise; and now the collective imperialist West is exhibiting this mass delusion. What am I referring to?

Sending much vaunted NATO weapons to Kyiv, plus slapping the Russian economy with sanctions, was supposed to have brought about the rapid economic, political and military collapse of the Russian state. Numerous and repetitively boring headlines, screaming about the impending defeat of Russia and its economic implosion, dominated the corporate media’s coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict since 2022.

That kind of systematic gloating has evaporated as the reality of Kyiv’s failures, and Moscow’s resilience, sets in. Not only did Moscow learn from and adapt it military tactics since its defeats in the initial aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, but has reorganised its military Keynesian economy to produce weapons at a faster rate, and technologically more advanced, than anything Kyiv and its NATO backers could offer.

Kyiv’s much heralded counteroffensive spluttered and stalled in the first months of 2024. The NATO sponsors of the Kyiv regime have failed to maintain an adequate pipeline of armaments because of their own industrial manufacturing deficiencies. The Russian economy, saddled with the burden of increased military spending, grew by only 1.7 percent. Meagre growth to be sure; but the EU economies, unencumbered by sanctions, grew by barely 0.3 of a percent.

European Commission president and expert PR practitioner Ursula von der Leyen is now demanding state subsidies for armaments production. Fair enough, but that violates a central precept of neoliberal capitalism, that private companies are routinely more efficient that state industries.

The partisans of free market capitalism are stating the quiet part out loud; giving money and weapons to Ukraine is a cheaper way to weaken Russia as a competitor, while the human toll is borne by Ukrainians, not westerners.

The collective hubris of the imperialist west today is in many respects a repeat performance of the hubris which characterised the ruling circles in 1930s Berlin in the lead up to the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. Let’s examine the words of Seymour Hersh, veteran journalist and commentator, on the conduct of Washington in our times:

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

What the American government is telling its people, about imminent victory, and the reality on the battlefield, demonstrates the rank hypocrisy of those in power. This dissimulation is highly reminiscent, as Conor Gallagher writes, of the disconnect between the Nazi party’s expectations of a quick victory over the USSR in 1941, and the stubborn resilience of the latter’s population.

Expecting the military campaign and occupation of the Soviet Union to be a cakewalk, Hitler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and the Nazi party hierarchy were stunned by the fierce resistance of the Soviet people.

Not only did they fight back, but these subhuman Asiatic hordes, (as Nazi ideology portrayed them), these people enslaved by Jewish-Slavic Bolshevism, organised their economy effectively, producing weapons of high quality in a short space of time, and inflicted serious defeats upon the mighty Nazi war machine.

The hubris of the West today mirrors that of the German government in the 1930s. Am I suggesting that Russian DNA is superior to that of other ethnicities? No, I am not. Am I suggesting that we all genuflect in front of a gigantic portrait of Vladimir Putin? No, I am not. If we want to understand Putin’s way of thinking, we can start by analysing one of his favourite philosophers, Ivan Ilyin (1883 – 1954). A Russian nationalist, anticommunist and conservative monarchist, Ilyin was expelled from Russia by the Bolshevik authorities in 1922.

It is very sad to see thousands of Ukrainians suffering trauma because of this war. At least 20 000 Ukrainians are amputees, a figure comparable to rates of injury during the intractable trench warfare of WW1. It is perverse of the Anglophone-EU axis to claim respect for Ukrainian lives, only to provide money and weapons for a NATO proxy war guaranteed to increase Ukrainian casualties.