I am incredibly hacked off!

April/May 2012

There can hardly be an adult in the country, other than a hermit, who is not now aware that there is something seriously wrong in public affairs. The press has been full of it. The Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking has developed into something much more sinister than a few journalists breaching the privacy of a few celebrities; it goes right to the heart of government. It's about the relationship between government, the press and the police force.

Tom Watson, the MP whose investigations led to this inquiry with journalist Martin Hickman, titled 'M for Murdoch'(http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/).



A Berkshire colleague of mine wrote, "I have read Flat Earth News and I think this will be even better".

Now we hear that government ministers have been having regular meetings with Google, too. We are seeing the merging of corporate and government interests, which the truth movement has been trying to warn the public about over recent years

Tory ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election.
The revelation of the extraordinarily close relationship increases concerns that the internet giant has the ear of the Government on a host of sensitive topics. Official records show that David Cameron has met Google executives three times and Chancellor George Osborne four times. Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm no fewer than seven times while his Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt – currently under pressure over his links to another media giant, News Corp – has held four meetings.

I think that this is now at last coming home to ordinary members of the public, via a very reticent mainstream media which is being dragged into reality.

So what do you do if you're in charge of the government, you're in the deepest economic crisis since 1929, the Euro looks as if it might collapse, you're involved in wars all over the Middle East, you've just been through a horrendous press frenzy on MPs expenses, and now the very existence of your government is under threat as more and more is being uncovered about the merging of government interests and massive corporate interests? Well, obviously, you introduce legislation to fine people for keeping too much rubbish in their gardens:

Householders who regularly dump rubbish in their own garden will be guilty of a criminal offence and hit with a hefty fine. The penalty will also apply to anyone who leaves an old sofa or fridge in their garden, or has mountains of pizza boxes or takeaway cartons lying around. They will receive an on-the-spot fine of up to £100 or be taken to court – where the maximum fine would be £2,500. The new Community Protection Notice is a key part of new anti-yob laws unveiled by Theresa May today.

Yes, that's what they're doing, and now they have the means of seeing just what rubbish we all may have in our gardens, thanks to their corporate links with Google. But Google not only provide aerial surveillance of the world, they have also been illegally collecting data on individuals via their home wireless computer networks. Many of these networks are not passworded, and so Google's vans, as they pass by taking street videos, have been tuning into these home networks, to find out what we are all up to:

Google has been accused of a cover-up over claims it knew its controversial Street View programme could collect private wi-fi data for three years before admitting it publicly. The US media regulator said the technology giant was aware in 2007 that it was harvesting personal information such as emails and passwords. But it was not until 2010 that Google owned up to what it was doing when concerns were raised by others, the Federal Communications Commission said.

Of course, such information may not be too intrusive when it is used only for advertising, but if it is supplied to government, then there is plenty of scope for it to be misused. It could, for instance, be linked to their database of dissidents. I know two individuals who tell me they have been harassed by the police for no apparent reason. It's already considered an offence in the US to 'drive whilst black'. It's already dangerous in the UK to criticise the government whilst Muslim. Perhaps soon it will be an offence to criticise the government whilst having rubbish in your garden.

During the Royal Wedding last year the police went on a rampage of pre-emptive arrests. There were press reports that 52 people had been arrested, including five young people drinking coffee in a coffee shop, out of whom three had zombie make-up on, preparing to go on a zombie picnic, as an alternative to the Royal Wedding.

The Network for Police Monitoring reported:

"Thirteen months later, 15 of those arrested have been granted leave to challenge their arrests by way of a Judicial Review, which will begin at the High Court on Monday 28th of May 2012. It is hoped that the results of the court case will have an impact on future policing of such events such as the Olympics, or the Diamond Jubilee which will take place immediately after the Judicial Review hearing"

I have heard comments from all sorts of people saying they will stay clear of London for the period of the Olympics. They give a variety of reasons, ranging from the traffic chaos which has already been arising
at Heathrow Airport well before the Olympics, to a possible terrorist event, whether by Al Qaeda or false-flag. It seems now that it could be dangerous for anyone on the police's dissidents database to be seen walking down the street in London during that period. Indeed, according to the Network for Police Monitoring mentioned above, one of those arrested during the Royal Wedding was a man who was simply walking in London and was stopped and arrested by plainclothes officers because he was a 'known activist'.
The main question for me is whether the UK will be catapulted into the 'Post Democratic Era', as some are calling it, by a false-flag terrorist event, which many have been predicting, or whether we will just slide
into it, as the police seize the opportunity to arrest whoever they don't like the look of.

The whole set-up for the Olympic Games in London is now looking ludicrous, with ordinary citizens being told that the the military are installing surface to air rocket launchers on the roofs of their flats, in preparation for possible terrorist attacks

London is fast becoming a military police state, with a military build-up, arbitrary arrests, suppression of free speech, and a secret political police force. The Daily Mail on its front page illustrated 'the chilling (and balaclava-clad) face of modern British policing', showing a picture of an armed-to-the-teeth London police officer.

Even the Amateur Photographer was getting worried when someone sent in the conditions of entry for Olympic ticket holders, which state that they may not publish recordings on social networking sites.

I thought the Olympic spirit was just the opposite of all this militarisation and control. And it has all been enabled by the simple fact that overwhelmingly the people of this country thought that such things were impossible here in the UK.

Newspaper headline writers drew their own conclusions. "Murdered" ran the headline in The Independent, "MI6 and Met condemned by coroner over spy death" announced The Guardian, and "50 agents face DNA test over spy in the bag killing" stated The Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail also compared the Gareth Williams case with those of other mysterious deaths of British intelligence agents, under the title 'Sex, spies and seven suspicious deaths: The murky waters of the intelligence world – coincidence or conspiracy?". They report that former spy Nicholas Anderson had told their reporter that he believes 'cleaners' – espionage experts trained in removing clues from a crime scene – had undoubtedly been into Williams's Pimlico flat before police were alerted.

So if it is now possible for the mainstream media to draw such conclusions, what about the death of former UK Weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, who never received an inquest because of government intervention? How long can the government continue to cover up over this? For that matter, what about the death of Princess Diana in 1997? Australian journalist John Morgan has just published a fifth volume in his series 'Diana Inquest: The untold story', and this one is titled 'Who killed Princess Diana?'. According to their product description, the book contains evidence that the assassination was carried out by MI6 on orders of senior members of the Royal family. When a human rights lawyer such as Michael Mansfield praises the book, you have to take it seriously

The government have had to back down on legislation to enable inquests to be held in secret, following an intervention by David Davis, MP, who claimed that US intelligence services used similar powers to cover up embarrassing details of how the attacks of 9/11 may have been prevented.

A senior Tory MP last night issued a warning over the dangers of Government plans for ‘secret courts’ as he claimed U.S. intelligence services used similar powers to cover up embarrassing details of how the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.

Former shadow home secretary David Davis used Parliamentary privilege to allege that officials squandered the chance to have access to al-Qaeda and Taliban calls and emails two years before the attacks in New York.

Last week, when I went down town to the market, someone asked me, "Syria – what's going on?" I had met him in a shop several months earlier, and told him about 9/11. We are no longer being dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists, because the idea that we are constantly lied to is now very credible. The fact that the mainstream media is so packed with stories about the abuse of power of those we had previously had some trust in means that the 9/11 truth movement is no longer just a voice in the wilderness. People start to latch on to propaganda on all sorts of other issues, too. Yet the vilification of President Assad by the Western politicians and the Western mainstream media seems to have been particularly successful. Virtually everyone seemed to be persuaded by it. In most people's minds there was no doubt about it: Assad was gratuitously killing his own people. What I wrote in my previous newsletter was unthinkable. Nevertheless, public opinion is strongly against a British military intervention.

Yet as I write this newsletter on 28 May, I hear on the one o'clock BBC Radio 4 news for the first time that Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has stated that both sides were involved in the latest outrage – that was the massacre of over a hundred people in Houla. What's more, that was the main BBC news headline. Why couldn't the BBC admit the blindingly obvious months ago? Why do people like me have to balance the story by finding out about the unreported side to conflicts?

The horrific rows of bodies laid out on the ground in Houla reminded me of similar scenes we had been seeing on previous occasions in Iraq. Is what Assad is reportedly doing in Syria any worse than what NATO was doing in Iraq, I wondered. Within seconds of Internet searching I found, to my surprise, that one of the pictures of Houla put out by the BBC was actually taken on 27 March 2003 in Iraq.

The BBC is facing criticism after it accidentally used a picture taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate the senseless massacre of children in Syria. Photographer Marco di Lauro said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources. The picture, which was actually taken on March 27, 2003, shows a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad. It was posted on the BBC news website today under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.

The Syrian National Council's (SNC) call on Monday for military intervention by Arab and Western governments has widened divisions in an already fragmented Syrian opposition.

George Sabra, a spokesman for the SNC, told a news conference in Istanbul that the Turkish-based opposition group had decided to arm rebels inside Syria and added that some foreign governments were helping to send weapons, without specifying which countries.

It seems that Kofi Annan's peace plan never did get off the ground. A call by the Syrian National Council at its meeting in Ankara in March for military intervention by Arab and Western governments can not have helped Relations between the US and Russia really hit a low when Hillary Clinton called the Russians 'despicable'. At least if you're going to take a view on a conflict you really should find out what both sides are claiming, rather than just cheering one side on. But they treat international conflicts as if they were football matches. I suppose the BBC eventually realised that they can't suppress what the Russians are saying for too long, if their foreign minister is prepared to make a stand on the issue. As I reported in my last newsletter, it looks as if the Russians and the Chinese were prepared to draw a line in the sand over Syria. I have found the reporting on Russia Today on the Syria issue fair-minded. Most people in the UK can now tune into Russia Today to get the other side. It's on Freeview, Channel 85.

But then, having reported on that BBC Radio 4 news headline what Sergei Lavrov had to say, the BBC News reporter went on to ask whether they had enough evidence to charge President Assad for war crimes. What about the war crimes of those who were sending prisoners of war to Syria, Poland and other places, for torture by their secret services under 'extraordinary rendition'. My guess is that Bashir al-Assad had every good intention of liberalising the regime he inherited by his father, but at some stage he would have been told of the likely consequences if he did – that there would be destabilisation of the country by the CIA and MI6, resulting in armed insurrection and the bringing in of Syria into the US sphere of influence.
The implication, of course, is that the crime is in killing your own people, as if it's OK to kill others. The pretexts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were faked. Most of us think the pretext for the intervention in Libya was faked, too, but that one seems now to be backfiring, as evidence emerges of UK complicity in extraordinary rendition to Libya of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, then leader of the anti-Ghadafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and now Tripoli's military commander .

In fact, there is much evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the British elite throughout Britain's imperial past, and continuing to the present day. A new book was published in November
last year called 'Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt':








"This revelatory new history punctures the still widely held belief that the British Empire was an enlightened and civilizing enterprise of great benefit to its subject peoples. Instead, Britain’s Empire reveals a history of systemic repression and almost continual violence, showing how British rule was imposed as a military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship. For colonized peoples, the experience was a horrific one—of slavery, famine, battle and extermination."

Yet the crimes of 9/11 and 7/7 just seem too awful to take in. Could these really have been carried out by agents of the state killing their own people? We don't know who did carry out those crimes, but we do know who is covering them up: the US and the UK governments. Their stories just do not tie up, and as the public become more and more aware of the awful lies that governments of so-called democratic countries are capable of, they become more and more amenable to taking seriously the possibility that 9/11 and 7/7 may have been committed not by Islamic terrorists, but by Western terrorists who speak English and have white skins.

But there is one elephant in the room which has to be uncovered before the general public and the mainstream media will start taking such a possibility really seriously. It's called Operation Gladio. Former British television journalist and Member of the European Parliament Richard Cottrell has just authored a book called 'GLADIO NATO's Dagger at the heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia terror axis', published by Progressive Press in May 2012.




"Masquerading as a rear guard against Soviet invaders, NATO’s covert forces warped into psychological and physical terrorism. These were the ‘years of lead,’ in which hundreds perished in a synthetic war in the
streets of Europe. NATO commander General Lyman Lemnitzer ordered serial attacks on French president Charles de Gaulle. Sacked from the Pentagon by John F. Kennedy for rank insubordination, then exiled to Europe, Lemnitzer reaped revenge in Dallas. The secret armies forged bonds with organized crime and neo-fascists. NATO-backed coups struck down governments in Greece and Turkey; the island state of Cyprus was sundered amid bitter genocide. Urban guerrillas like the Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof Gang were cunningly manipulated. Italy gained a deep-state government, the ultra-secret P2 pseudo-Masonic lodge founded by former Blackshirts. Swedish PM Olof Palme and Italian ex-PM Aldo Moro were assassinated. Pope John Paul II was shot by Turkish gangsters who had regular work as Gladio guns for hire. In 2009 a Gladio copy-cat outfit codenamed Ergenekon came to light in Turkey. The shootings in Norway in July 2011, and in Belgium, France and Italy in 2012, all bore the classic stripe of Gladio false-flag operations."

You wouldn't think it, but Operation Gladio was even the subject of a BBC television programme before "things went wrong", as Jeremy Paxman put it – although at the stage in which the BBC screened its programme on Operation Gladio, it was only on the urban terrorist events. This book puts together the whole range of issues, and I shall read it with great interest. We need to get it talked about, because when people can talk about that, 9/11 and 7/7 start to make sense.
So who is behind all this? According to a new video, "The governments don't rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world". '97% Owned' is a public education film about how money is really created, and how the ability of banks to create money out of thin air has led to the present economic crisis, with enormous implications for democratic government. They are looking for translators to get it out into as many languages as possible, and I've just submitted an Esperanto version. They are holding a 'Cast and Crew' event in London on 26 June.

Anne Belsey of the Monetary Reform Party said in the video, that when she tried to explain to people just how the money system really works, she found an almost in-built refusal of people to accept that such a bizarre situation could actually exist, saying such things as: "Ah no, it can't possibly. What do you mean? It can't...banks can't...banks don't create money out of thin air. That's ridiculous".

I was getting similar reactions to that when I ventured into the high finances of Esperanto Association of Britain, which was later to lead me on to greater things. The treasurer, Mrs Joyce Bunting, has now accepted that my figures were correct, which means that she did indeed put out an untruth before members voted to sell their building in London, and the Inner Circle were indeed to blame in covering this untruth up from the members. Yet for several years the editor of EAB Update would only say to me: "Go away!". Even when he was finally persuaded to publish my data I had to endure a whole page of insults before it appeared. It's called Cognitive Dissonance.

I recently received an anonymous letter through the post, with an address format identical to that in the EAB membership database. I recognised the style, too, from messages I was getting from the inner circle shortly after I had joined the Management Committee in 2005. It was in Esperanto and ran:

"Dear Mr Fantom,

"With interest I read your usual mailings (I suppose that all members of EAB with a valid email address receive the same copy).

"I said 'with interest', but not 'with concern'. EAB is a quasi-freemasonic association. If you are not in accord with the collective mindset and actions of the membership, you may not penetrate the secret places of the association. That is happening to you. You refuse to drink from the same chalice. You, as one says in English, 'are barking up the wrong tree'. For your own mental health, perhaps it would be advisable for you to concentrate your energies on Esperanto outside EAB."

I sent a copy of that anonymous letter to the Charity Commission, and they replied that in the lack of any evidence the Commission cannot become involved! They also wrote, "Where there are properly appointed trustees in place we will not get involved". So, the trustees can tell untruths to the members over major issues of finances, and the Charity Commission will not intervene? And interfering with the election procedure is not of concern to the Charity Commission if "properly appointed trustees" are in place? I see what David Cameron means when he says they're all in it together.
I think someone must be getting desperate. What is he suggesting about my "own mental health". Perhaps I'd better have a look at 'CIA Mind Control Brainwashing. So if I start saying that I'm the Messiah you'll be able to guess what's going on!

Ian Fantom

War is nothing more than a business venture

April 2011

We seem to have got ourselves embroiled in yet another war, leaving us trying to figure out just what happened when it’s too late to do anything about it. For a while, the world faced a dilemma of letting the people of Benghazi be slaughtered or let in NATO under a dark suspicion that their motive may not be humanitarian but oil. Was it really like that?

Analysts are working on it, but there were dire warnings in the UK Parliament against mission creep. It now seems that that is exactly what is happening. Surely, if the mission is to protect the population in an area, the remedy is not to send in the bombers, but to set up a UN protectorate and send in UN peace-keeping troops, under a mandate that allows them to do just that and nothing more.

The President of the Public Banking Institute, which campaigns for banking reform in the US, thinks that the motive may be to do with banking. Writing in Global Research, Ellen Brown reports on

“the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from the rebellion in March to create their own central bank – this before they even had a government”.

It appears that the Central Bank of Libya is state owned, and that it has nearly 144 tons of gold. Retired US General Wesley Clark is reported to have said that after 9/11 there were plans to take out seven countries, including Iraq and Libya.

“What do these countries have in common?” asks Ellen Brown, “In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements ... The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq”.

If wars are really manufactured for financial gain, then it makes sense to try to figure out how the rich and powerful operate, and that means looking fundamentally at the banking system.

I’ve been following the development of a group called Positive Money (http://www.positivemoney.org), which is campaigning in the UK for fundamental reform of the banking system.

At first I thought they wouldn’t stand a chance against the gigantic vested interests of the top bankers, so I went to a public meeting at Oxford University on ‘The Future of Banking’ at which Ben Dyson of Positive Money was one of the speakers, in order to hear what the mainstream economic gurus had to say about his ideas.

I was expecting them to say that they had already studied such proposals before, but they didn’t. It was as if it was all new to them, too. I was interested to hear that the Governer of the Bank of England himself is sympathetic to reform. “Of all the ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today”, he is quoted as saying. Positive Money have opened up an office in London, and are, or have been, looking for volunteers to man it. They are engaged in research, education, and promotion of ideas on banking reform.

I went to a meeting in London on 5th April, which they were videoing for the purposes of producing a DVD. Ben Dyson explained the problems of the current banking system, and how it is open to abuse.

One statement that amazed me was that most of the mainstream economists, including many financial journalists, don’t understand how the fractional reserve system works. I suspect in many cases it’s just that they don’t want to.

Watch 'Money as Debt'

In the subsequent discussion, I said that I had first had it explained to me by people I happened to meet in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square on 9/11 truth demonstrations and Iraq war demonstrations. I had been amazed to hear that banks just create money out of thin air whenever a loan is made. They were telling me of the forthcoming economic crisis long before it actually happened. It would be contrived, they said, and that is how it appears to have been.

I recently saw the film ‘Inside Job’ about the financial corruption leading to the economic crisis:

From Academy Award nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs.





Even the credit rating agencies seem to have been corrupted, which is very worrying, considering that the fete of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and any other country with a vulnerable economy is largely determined by such agencies.

Positive Money are now asking people to write to their MPs, and one early MP to speak out is 9/11 truther Michael Meacher, who agrees with two reforms:
():

"One is that the bank payments system is separated from risky lending activity" and the other "is that the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) should influence money supply, not by the indirect and uncertain method of setting interest rates, but directly through the creation of new money when necessary, though only within strict constraints to avoid inflationary and deflationary pressure."

It seems that banking reform, because of the high impact that the economic crisis is having on everyday life, is getting reasonable coverage in the mainstream media where other topics, such as what really happened in 9/11 and 7/7 remain taboo (although Mr Meacher did write the foreward to the revised edition of David Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbour"). It seems, though, that the government will be more concerned in appearing to do something than actually doing something.

Positive Money have produced a video response to the government’s Independent Banking Commission’s interim report, saying that it gives a biased and misleading summary of the proposals that they spent three hourse explaining to them.

Just after I had sent out my last newsletter I heard that Muad’Dib, the author of the ‘7/7 Ripple Effect’ video, had been released from Wandsworth prison on bail. This was a surprise, since the previous day he had been refused the right to attend his own bail hearing. So we invited him to an informal meeting of the London ‘9/11 Keep Talking’ group, which we held one afternoon because of a curfew being imposed. We heard how the prison authorities had been making excuses for not taking Muad’Dib to court, but eventually were forced to do so by the judge who “got serious” with them. It was also a good meeting from the point of view of exchanging information on 7/7, even though Muad’Dib had not been able to keep up with the inquest hearings from his prison cell.

Later, he was interviewed on Kevin Barrett’s Truth Jihad Radio, which is run as part of American Freedom Radio. He explained how he had sent a padded envelope of DVDs to the court administrators. On receiving it, they called in the bomb squad, and then the anti-terrorist branch of the police.

“They’re treating me as though I’m a terrorist”, he said, “It’s absolutely ridiculous”.


His trial is set for 9 May, three days after the verdict of the 7/7 inquest is to be announced. I see that there are legal procedures for submitting information to a court of law under ‘amicus curiae’; you can’t just send the material to the court.

But to get a conviction, the prosecution would have to prove intent to pervert the course of justice, which is not proven merely by showing that the accused has not followed proper procedures. I should have thought that common sense would dictate that the court administrators would merely send a copy of the legal procedures to anyone approaching them. It’s not as if he had approached jurors individually. Muad’Dib told us that others had sent the DVDs to the court and had not been arrested, so clearly he was arrested because he was the author. I got a bit concerned at the meeting, when Muad’Dib said that he was going to challenge the jurisdiction of the court on a religious argument concerning the authenticity of the coronation stone. But then he assured us that if that failed, he would have proper legal representation in the court to defend him on the specific charge. The question of the coronation stone doesn’t mean much to me personally, since I don’t believe in divine rights of the monarchy anyway. I see state religion as being a pretext for power rather than an authority for power. But then, if they justify themselves on religious grounds, I suppose they should expect to be challenged on religious grounds. It seems to me that the court will reject Muad’Dib’s argument on the grounds that it is not in their interests to accept it.

The people who really matter in the power structure are the people who control the wealth of the nation. They are now generally believed to be the power behind the monarchy. They are also widely believed to be the people behind the current economic crisis and lots of other things.

Two days before Muad’Dib’s interview on Truth Jihad Radio, I was interviewed on the contents of my previous newsletter, in which I had reported Hillary Clinton’s statement that they, whoever they were, were losing the information war.

Kevin Barratt did a nice write-up on his website before the interview, quoting the relevant text from my newsletter. I felt quite honored to be interviewed on an American radio channel about Hillary Clinton.

Essentially, if they are losing the information war, then we in the truth movement are winning it. But it’s not quite that simple, because here in the UK the truth movement seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, and the truthers seem to be plagued by various types of trolling by enigmatic people.

During the interview I gave an example of how people can be accepting of authority, and not see the obvious, even when it is presented before their own eyes.

The phenomenon, together with the sense of discomfort they experience, is called ‘cognitive dissonance’, and it’s the same whether we’re talking about the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, or the financial chart of Esperanto Association of Britain, which shows the opposite of what members had been led to believe.

I went to the Annual General Meeting of Esperanto Association of Britain, which was held during the British Esperanto Congress in Eastbourne. I was a presidential candidate, standing on a platform of openness, though few would have known it because my election statement wasn’t published this year. They seem to get everything wrong all the time, then blame it on cock-up theory or play dumb.

Before going to Eastbourne, I sent an email round to the Keep Talking group to ask for their impressions of the description on the congress website. I got just one answer, which stated: “Language buffs should go for it if your web page gets an airing ... I’m not into languages at all though, so my judgement might be marred by a lack of awareness”. Exactly. You wouldn’t think that the Esperanto movement was meant to be a popular movement promoting an easy-to-learn second language for people who aren’t necessarily into languages. They’ve presented it as if it were some sort of deviant Klingon club with a pussy cat on the committee. Their congress theme of ‘Lumturoj, Lumuloj, Lumaĵoj’ wasn’t translated on the English-language page, and if it had been it wouldn’t have thrown much light on the matter. It means: ‘Light houses, luminants, illuminations’. If the topic had had anything to do with what the association existed for I might even have gone to the congress. When I was there for the AGM I told two people that I hadn’t joined the congress because no programme had been published. They both looked non-plussed. One of them was on the organising committee and insisted that you first join, then you get the programme. What’s happened to these people? They would have been amongst the first to insist on common sense until recently.

Now if you look back to how those of us who were organising the ‘Renewal’ congress of 2007 were castigated by the editor of The British Esperantist, you have to wonder what’s going on.

We had at that stage published quite a full programme, focusing on renewal of the Esperanto movement in Britain, yet the Esperanto association itself was putting out that we only had a ‘vague programme’ and that there was little on renewal in it, saying that at the end of January the organisation of the May congress seemed ‘still chaotic’. It was hypocritical negative propaganda undermining the concept of ‘renewal’, and was put out with the backing of the president. If you want a case study to see how brainwashing works, you couldn’t do better than to study the Esperanto movement in Britain. At the AGM the president did, to his credit, allow me to read out my 200 word election statement, but I had prepared a five-minute address as presidential candidate, which I was not allowed to present, because it was “not on the agenda”. No discussion on the candidates was allowed. That idea was introduced in 2002 when there were vigorous protests from members, but the then Director of Development, who chaired the meeting during the voting, insisted that he had strict instructions from the Management Committee. So this year I handed out copies of my election address to members as they were voting. It pointed out that two of the people they were just about to elect to the committee had been openly castigating the objectives of the Esperanto movement. One of them had written obsene stuff about not giving “two f**ks about harassing MPs into accepting Esperanto”, and the other had sabotaged proper discussion about furthering Esperanto in the Yahoo email group esper-brit. I had been trying to warn of negative things going on covertly in the Management Committee, but now they seem to be openly admitting it. This reminds me of the report by the think tank DEMOS, ‘The Power of Unreason’ which I reported on in my newsletters last year. They were essentially saying that the public are now so brainwashed that it is no longer necessary to infiltrate groups covertly when you can do it overtly. That’s exactly what seems to be happening. I had eventually managed to persuade the editor of the association’s newsletter to publish my financial chart, which had brought about the personal attacks and condemnations for ‘behaviour’ by the president, Professor John Wells, after I had delivered it to him in December 2005. It showed that, contrary to popular belief, the capital of the association had not been ‘eaten up’ before the sale of their property in 1999, but had been rising dramatically. I had expected to be ignored again, but this time I was delighted to receive a full page of invective, in which he stated that he would consider publishing an article including the chart if it wasn’t critical of the committee.

So I sent him a purely historical article, and he published it. After the AGM I wrote the whole thing up in the Esperanto web newspaper La Libera Folio.


The new treasurer has added an agressive comment, saying that she was a professional accountant, and “as a trustee of the association, I of course have already studied and, to use Ian’s preferred expression, ‘researched’ the accounts of EAB”, adding that her professional opinion is that everything is in order and that there has been no fraud. I suppose a new treasurer would by the end of her first week, as a matter of course, have checked all the accounts of the association back to about the time she was in nappies. Yet no-one was suggesting that the accounts weren’t in order; I had merely compared them with what members were being led to believe at the time.

Last November, the association’s secretary, Dr David Kelso, disappeared without trace in the hills of Calabria. The President, in his election statement, stated that David Kelso should now be presumed dead.

Yet the statistics from the Missing Persons Bureau give a 90% probability of a missing adult being alive, and a 64% probability of having preplanned his own disappearance, perhaps in order to take on a new identity. So why should the President want members to believe he is dead?

I wrote this up in La Libera Folio, and added in previously published material on the problems of the association. This caused something of a storm. A retired lawyer told me the other day that he thought there was something weird about the Kelso case. Normally, in his experience, you would expect such a disappearence to be widely reported, but in this case it was as if people were uninterested.

Also, he said, you would expect the police to be contacting virtually everyone who knew him. “Would that include me?”, I asked. “Definately”, he replied, “That’s their job”. I suppose from the police’s point of view it could be potentially an investigation of murder, abduction or concealment. Any decent investigation would quickly have revealed that David Kelso had been a top civil servant who took early retirement and then became heavily involved in a voluntary organisation, where he became involved in some sort of major dispute for five years before his disappearance. Of course they would have been contacting people.

This makes me think of the failure of Thames Valley Police to open a murder investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly, on which I have reported in previous newsletters.

I am particularly concerned because Thames Valley Police is the police force for my area. Several years ago I reported to my local police station the apparent theft of a thousand pounds from a charity based in Oxford; I had been following the story as editor of the now defunct news website ‘Esperanto Britain’. The administrator of the charity was reluctant to contact the police herself, but agreed to my doing it. I was amazed that as soon as I mentioned Esperanto they played dumb. So I tried the Oxford police station and they did the same. I had at that stage no thoughts of the possibility that there could be some sort of blacklist of taboo topics. It’s all fascinating stuff when you follow through how it works. And, of course, it can happen in any social movement that is promoting something that the Establishment doesn’t want to happen. It tells us how propaganda works at the microlevel, which is really important to understand if we want to preserve democracy at all levels. There must be something resiliant about Esperanto. “There must be something irresistable about it” said the Polish ambassador to the UK at the opening of Esperanto House in Barlaston in 2002. Indeed, it took over a century to do to the Esperanto movement what it took less than a decade to do to the 9/11 truth movement. The problems of the Esperanto movement and the 9/11 Truth Movement are essentially the same: most people want to believe what they are told by authority, however ridiculous it may be. A hundred years ago, when the Esperantists were complaining of ‘fraud and treachery’, there was no talk of ‘paranoia’ or ‘conspiracy theories’. I first became aware of ‘paranoia’ following the resignation of the president of the Universal Esperanto Association, Professor Ivo Lapenna, in 1974, when John Wells – yes the same John Wells – told me: “Lapenna is paranoid”. I was puzzled about that, but put it out of my mind until Autumn 2004, when I had asked John Wells for a chat, and he went into histrionics saying “You are childish and like Lapenna”. Then in December 2005, on seeing my financial chart, he said: “Ian is paranoid”. Now we all know what ‘paranoid’ means: it says more about the speaker than the accused. It seems that a whole set of psychological vocabulary has been brought into force since the end of the Second World War. Breaking that now seems to me to be of the highest priority in winning the information war. They seem to be succeeding in the US. Can we do that here in the UK?