El Dorado Located

As I have posted on extensively, the creation of terra preta soils permitted dense urbanized Stone Age populations.  Present day clearing activity is now exposing their presence for the archeological record.

 

It is noteworthy that these cities show dates only as early as 200 AD.  This is likely a result of limited sampling.  The tool set necessary was already a couple of thousand years old.  This is common though for such dating because most samples come from areas representing the maximization of the culture and likely miss the long early development.

 

The late dates support the idea that the whole society was extent when the new world was discovered.  Once again Europeans did not so much as miss these antique civilizations so much as their pathogens got there first and threw these societies down.  The nastiest pathogen was the slave trade of course.

 

With out question, these were states and they certainly fit the story of El Dorado.  They most likely decorated buildings with gold and this enhanced the story.  We are not seeing stone structures but we did not see them in Mesopotamia either.  We have mounds and these were certain to hold wood frame structures of the leaders.

 

Terra preta made possible an Amazonian population in the tens of millions.  The culture itself most likely prevented it from happening except for locales like this.

 

Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado

 

Satellite technology detects giant mounds over 155 miles, pointing to sophisticated pre-Columbian culture

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/05/amazon-dorado-satellite-discovery

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/1/6/1262773040517/arthworks-built-by-a-lost-001.jpg

An aerial picture of traces of earthworks built by a lost Amazonian civilisation dating to 200AD. Photograph: National Geographic

It is the legend that drew legions of explorers and adventurers to their deaths: an ancient empire of citadels and treasure hidden deep in theAmazon jungle.

Spanish conquistadores ventured into the rainforest seeking fortune, followed over the centuries by others convinced they would find a lost civilisation to rival the Aztecs and Incas.

Some seekers called it El Dorado, others the City of Z. But the jungle swallowed them and nothing was found, prompting the rest of the world to call it a myth. The Amazon was too inhospitable, said 20th century scholars, to permit large human settlements.

Now, however, the doomed dreamers have been proved right: there was a great civilisation. New satellite imagery and fly-overs have revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia.

Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283.

Scientists who have mapped the earthworks believe there may be another 2,000 structures beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies.

The structures, many of which have been revealed by the clearance of forest for agriculture, point to a "sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society", says the journal Antiquity, which has published the research.

The article adds: "This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. The 'geoglyph culture' stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands … we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it."

The structures were created by a network of trenches about 36ft (nearly 11 metres) wide and several feet deep, lined by banks up to 3ft high. Some were ringed by low mounds containing ceramics, charcoal and stone tools. It is thought they were used for fortifications, homes and ceremonies, and could have maintained a population of 60,000 – more people than in many medieval European cities.

The discoveries have demolished ideas that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support extensive agriculture, says Denise Schaan, a co-author of the study and anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil. She told National Geographic: "We found this picture is wrong. And there is a lot more to discover in these places, it's never-ending. Every week we find new structures."

Many of the mounds were symmetrical and slanted to the north, prompting theories that they had astronomical significance.

Researchers were especially surprised that earthworks in floodplains and uplands were of a similar style, suggesting they were all built by the same culture.

"In Amazonian archaeology you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems," said Schaan. "So it was odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region." The first geometric shapes were spotted in 1999 but it is only now, as satellite imagery and felling reveal sites, that the scale of the settlements is becoming clear. Some anthropologists say the feat, requiring sophisticated engineering, canals and roads, rivals Egypt's pyramids.

The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as "garden cities". Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats and palisades.

"These revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus," said David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, a book about an attempt in the 1920s to find signs of Amazonian civilizations. "The discoveries are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilisations."

They are also vindicating, said Grann, Percy Fawcett, the explorer who partly inspired Conan Doyle's book The Lost World. Fawcett led an expedition to find the City of Z but the party vanished, bequeathing a mystery.

Many scientists saw the jungle as too harsh to sustain anything but small nomadic tribes. Now it seems the conquistadores who spoke of "cities that glistened in white" were telling the truth. They, however, probably also introduced the diseases that wiped out the native people, leaving the jungle to claim – and hide – all trace of their civilisation.

• This article was amended on Wednesday 6 January 2010. Percy Fawcett's experiences in the Amazon were said to have partly inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, but Fawcett's disappearance did not, contrary to a suggestion in the original article - he vanished after the book was published. This has been corrected.

SCOTLAND COULD BECOME THE WORLD’S FIRST ‘REWILDING NATION’. HOW DID THEY GET HERE?

Northern Scotland is ideal country for all forms of wild terrain.  Think all the higlands.

Now imagine not only restoring the biome of hte post ice gae forest, but also along the caost, transplanting the multi million years old evolutionary biome of the Pacific North west.  Bring along a few grizzly bears to fish the rivers as well.

All this is completely possible and it would rapidly colonize the whole of highland scotland.  The wolves cwould chase the deer populations into cpover as well and allow the trees to fully recolonoize as well.

My point is that we do not have to retsore our nascent post pleistcene biome which is actually under evolved to begin with.

 

Are you ready to ‘rewild’ you country!? SCOTLAND COULD BECOME THE WORLD’S FIRST ‘REWILDING NATION’. HOW DID THEY GET HERE?

"To rewild our environment, we need to create the correct conditions. This can be done through actions like reintroducing species that have disappeared, allowing forests to regenerate and preventing the fragmentation of rivers."

By: Admin - Climate DepotApril 30, 2021 4:37 PM

https://www.euronews.com/living/2021/04/26/scotland-could-become-the-world-s-first-rewilding-nation-how-did-they-get-here

By Rosie Frost

Over the last 50 years, two-thirds of the world’s wildlife has been lost. Around 40 per cent of plant species are threatened with extinction and scientists say we may be losing them faster than they can find, name and study them.

Our world exists in a balance and, with so many species lost or disappearing, that balance is under threat. Restoring this natural mosaic of interrelated species is vital to the future health of the planet and our own, say experts.

Tree planting schemes, active conservation efforts, and high tech carbon capture solutions all look to help tackle biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.

But a growing number of people believe that the only way to bring back what we’ve lost is through trusting natural environments to recover themselves- a process called rewilding. For some, it can be a contentious issue with worries about the reintroduction of apex predators like wolves and the Eurasian Lynx.

The progressive conservation movement, however, has found particular resonance with one European nation.

WHAT IS REWILDING?

Rewilding is based on the principle that nature knows best when it comes to protecting itself.

But due to the damage we have already done to the natural world, it needs a helping hand to recover to the point where it can do that. Across Europe, we’ve lost massive amounts of native flora and fauna that are essential to keeping our ecosystems balanced.

To rewild our environment, we need to create the correct conditions. This can be done through actions like reintroducing species that have disappeared, allowing forests to regenerate and preventing the fragmentation of rivers.

The theory goes that by giving nature a little push and then stepping back, we can put a stop to the incredible loss of biodiversity and worsening climate crisis.

A classic example of the success of rewilding can be found in Yellowstone National Park in the US. When wolves were hunted to near extinction at the start of the 20th century, their prey multiplied. Elk took over and their exploding numbers overgrazed the land.

It prevented trees like aspen and willow from reaching maturity. That in turn meant songbirds lost their habitat and beavers no longer had materials with which to build their dams. Riverbanks started to erode and water temperatures rose without the natural shade of the trees. The loss of Yellowstone’s wolves had a cascade effect on the park’s entire ecosystem.

Then, in 1995, 14 wolves were captured in Jasper National Park, Canada and transported across the border by wildlife officials. They were acclimated to their new surroundings and then released into the park to replace those lost in the preceding centuries.

Within 20 years, their numbers had boomed and the renewed presence of this apex predator had started to bring balance back to Yellowstone. Now the reintroduction is considered a model for how seemingly small steps like these can help to heal the natural environments we’ve ravaged.

So could steps like these work for another ecosystem suffering from the impact of centuries of humanity’s destructive actions?

THE WORLD’S FIRST REWILDING NATION

Rewilding has become an increasingly popular movement in Scotland over the last few years. Politicians are being called on by the Scottish Rewilding Alliance (SWA) to create policies that would see the country become the world’s first “rewilding nation”.

Ahead of the Scottish parliamentary election next month, the SWA want to see a solid commitment from political parties to tackle the nature and climate crisis as well as bringing employment to rural communities. Rewilding, the alliance believes, should be a part of those commitments.

“The parties and the public face many choices at this election, including major decisions which will shape the future of Scotland’s lands and seas,” says Steve Micklewright, convenor of the SWA.

He explains that they are urging all political parties to commit to five different measures to protect nature and boost the economy:

Commit to rewilding 30 per cent of public land.

Establish a community fund to support rewilding in towns and cities.

Backing the reintegration of keystone species such as rehoming beavers and reintroducing the Eurasian Lynx where there is local support.

Create a coastal zone where dredging and trawling are not permitted

Introduce a plan to control deer populations, allowing land to recover from overgrazing.

The Scottish public is behind the idea too. Last year the SWA commissioned a poll across Scotland which found widespread support for the principle of rewilding. More than three-quarters of people who expressed an opinion backed the concept, ten times as many as those who objected to it.

“We know the public wants to see politicians make real progress on rewilding, and we would encourage people to take these issues into account when they’re looking at the parties’ manifestos,” adds Micklewright.

“The opportunities here are substantial, for our climate, biodiversity, and for a wide range of potential social and economic benefits associated with making Scotland the world’s first Rewilding Nation.”

Filed under: deforestation, europe, gnd, species

What is the Muslim world?

The battle against racism and its sister, tribalism has only been won in the Western world and even there it is often incomplete.  The West also never licensed tribalism and racism elsewhere.

The fundamental error of Islam is that it preserves Racism and tribalism in its full expression.  It was the unique nature of the Christian dispensation that Racism and tribalism could even be challenged in the West.  Even that demanded the reformation 1500 years on.  We could rightly call it the five hundred year war.

It is actually for this express reason that the Muslim world will need to be confronted and then made to actually one by one, read the Quran itself to understand those sentences not accepted by Christ.  This will surely induce conversion and a real end to the natural political threat of Islamic Fascism..



What is the Muslim world?



Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda



https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-a-muslim-world-is-both-modern-and-misleading?



On 17 May 1919 in Paris, three Indian Muslim leaders met the United States’ president Woodrow Wilson to make a case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate in Istanbul, and for the national self-determination of Anatolia as a homeland for Turkish Muslims. The Indians advocated for the independence of what they called ‘the last remaining Muslim power in the world’. Indian Muslim leaders speaking up on behalf of an Ottoman caliphate might appear to represent a global Muslim unity, but such a conclusion would be a mistake.



In fact, the details, arguments and ideals of the meeting reveal how incoherent and misleading the prevalent presumption is of any distinction between ‘the Muslim world’ and ‘the West’. The Indian Muslims made their case for Turkish independence by appeals to Wilson’s 14 points for peace. Their success in getting the meeting with Wilson owed much to their sacrifice as soldiers in the British army fighting and defeating the German-Ottoman alliance. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for British-ruled India, arranged the meeting because he believed that the British empire, as the biggest Muslim empire in the world, had a moral responsibility to listen to the Indian Muslim case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate. All three Muslim leaders asserting their spiritual ties to the Ottoman caliph – the Aga Khan, Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Sahibzada Aftab Ahmad Khan – were loyal subjects of the British Crown. Several Indian Hindu leaders joined the meeting, making clear their solidarity with their fellow Indian Muslim brethren and their support for the Ottoman caliphate.

[ talk about good intentions - arclein ]


This conversation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 does not reveal a clash between an Islamic world and a Western world. It reveals one complex and interdependent world. Yet, consider Bernard Lewis’s influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, ‘The Roots of the Muslim Rage’ (1990): ‘In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam.’ Lewis left little doubt that this alleged ‘duty’ of Muslims meant violent means: ‘The obligation of holy war … begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.’ In spirit and substance, the Indian Muslim leaders meeting with Wilson in 1919 contradicts every single claim by Lewis. The Muslims were loyal supporters of the multi-faith British empire, cooperating with Hindus, and had fought against the Muslim soldiers of the Ottoman empire during the First World War. They did not see Westerners as any kind of enemy, and made their case for the Ottoman caliphate according to international norms about national self-determination and imperial peace.


Though he has been influential in US policy circles, Lewis did not come up with the idea of ‘a Muslim world’ distinct from a Western one. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Western journalists and radical Islamists popularised the idea. In their view, contemporary Pan-Islamism draws on ancient Muslim ideals in pursuit of restoring a pristine religious purity. According to this account, Pan-Islamism is a reactionary movement, in thrall to ancient traditions and classical Islamic law. The peculiarities of Islam, it is always argued, compel Muslims’ religious affiliation to transcend other political affiliations. This Pan-Islamism not only survives but thrives in the contemporary world, and is a civilisational artefact deeply at odds with modern times.


Lewis might not have originated the idea of the Muslim world, but he gave it an intellectual polish, and inspired Samuel Huntington’s even more popular work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). ‘The struggle between these rival systems [of the Islamic world and Christendom],’ wrote Lewis, ‘has now lasted for some 14 centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the 7th century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.’


Such remains the dominant Western view of Pan-Islamism, expressed in the phrase common to punditry and journalism – ‘the Muslim world’. Yet, contrary to this dominant view of an eternal clash with the Christian West, Pan-Islamism is in fact relatively new, and not so exceptional. Closely related to Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism, it emerged in the 1880s as a response to the iniquities of European imperialism. Initially, the idea of global Muslim solidarity aimed to give Muslims more rights within European empires, to respond to ideas of white/Christian supremacy, and to assert the equality of existing Muslim states in international law.

[ not unreasonable at all - arclein ]


The idea of an ancient clash between the Muslim World and the Christian World is a dangerous and modern myth. It relies on fabricated misrepresentations of separate Islamic and Western geopolitical and civilisational unities. Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism offer a better context for understanding Pan-Islamism. All three emerged in the late 19th century, at the height of the age of empire, and as counters to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the white man’s civilising mission. Pan-Islamists in the age of empire did not have to convince fellow Muslims about the global unity of their co-religionists. By racialising their Muslim subjects with references to their religious identity, colonisers created the conceptual foundations of modern Muslim unity.


At the time, the British, Dutch, French and Russian empires ruled the majority of the world’s Muslims. Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, the first Pan-Islamists were intellectuals who wanted to counter the slights, humiliations and exploitation of Western colonial domination. They did not necessarily want to reject the imperial world or the reality of empires. In their sensibilities, the leading Pan-Islamist intellectuals Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Syed Ameer Ali strongly resembled the Pan-Africanist W E B Dubois or the Pan-Asianist Rabindranath Tagore. Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, Pan-Islamists emphasised that European empires discriminated against Africans, Asians and Muslims, both within empires and in international affairs. All three challenged European racism and colonial domination, and promised a better and freer world for the majority of human beings on Earth.


European colonial officers began to worry about a potential Muslim revolt when they saw how the modern technologies of printing, steamships and the telegraph were creating new links among diverse Muslim populations, helping them to assert a critique of racism and discrimination. Yet there were no Pan-Islamic revolts against colonialism from the 1870s to the 1910s. The alleged threat of Pan-Islamism made its first notable appearance in the West during the First World War, in part because the Ottoman and German empires promoted it in their war propaganda. Yet there was no Muslim revolt during the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers served British, French and Russian empires. During the Second World War, Pan-Asianism was associated with the Japanese empire’s promises to liberate the coloured races of Asia from white hegemony. And in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, the historic decolonising of Africa raised the profile of Pan-Africanism among European concerns.


By the 1960s, with the fading of the colonial world and its replacement by a world of independent nation-states, the political projects of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism had almost disappeared. They had, however, won many of the intellectual battles against racism, defeated colonial arguments of white supremacy, and helped to end European imperial rule. Disappointments about the failure of Africa, Asia and the Muslim world to become comparable in equality and freedom to the West also contributed to the declining status of the pan-nationalisms. By the 1980s, African and African-American intellectuals grew more pessimistic about the key Pan-Africanist dream of gaining racial equality for black people in the modern world, and making the whole of Africa prosperous and free. The Pan-African vision of uniting newly independent, weak African nations to create the necessary synergy of a federative global power and give them both liberty and prosperity has not materialised. Although there is still an international organisation – the African Union – it is ineffective, and far from achieving the goals of Pan-Africanism. The hopes of the Pan-Africanist generation, from Dubois to Frantz Fanon, for a future decolonised Africa remain a lost project for the next generation.


The first Pan-Islamists were highly modernist proponents of the liberation of women and racial equality


On the other hand, with multiple great powers such as China, India and Japan, the decolonised Asia of today would have made the early 20th-century Pan-Asianists proud. Yet 20th-century Pan-Asianism took a complex course. Japan’s exploitation of Pan-Asianism to rationalise its colonial occupation of China and Korea left many supporters feeling betrayed. Independent India’s foreign policy under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru showed a commitment to some Pan-Asian principles, which retained popular appeal at the Bandung Conference of 1955. This meeting of 29 Asian and African states, comprising more than half the world’s people, was the last major expression of Asian solidarity, and was later subsumed by Cold War rivalries and nation-statebuilding projects.


Pan-Islamism has also proceeded in a series of fits and starts over the past century. From Turkey and Egypt to Indonesia and Algeria, the idea of Muslim intellectualism and global Muslim solidarity empowered 20th-century nationalist leaders and movements. By the mid-1960s, the majority of the world’s Muslims had gained freedom from European colonial rule. The Turkish Parliament had abolished the Ottoman caliphate back in 1924, and by the 1950s that caliphate was almost forgotten.


Nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century, however, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism seems to have vanished but Pan-Islamism and the ideal of Muslim world solidarity survives. Why? The answer lies in the final stages of the Cold War. It was in the 1980s that a new Muslim internationalism emerged, as part of a rising political Islam. It was not a clash between the primordial civilisational traditions of Islam and the West, or a reassertion of authentic religious values. It wasn’t even a persistence of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism, but rather a new formation of the Cold War. A Saudi-US alliance began promoting the idea of Muslim solidarity in the 1970s as an alternative to the secular Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country allied with the Soviet Union. Any ideas of an ‘Islamic’ utopia would have floundered if not for the failures of many post-colonial nation-states and the subsequent public disillusionment of many Muslims.


The notion that Pan-Islamism represents authentic, ancient, repressed Muslim political values in revolt against global Westernisation and secularisation was initially a paranoid obsession of Western colonial officers, but recently it comes mainly from Islamists. Western pundits and journalists have erred in accepting at face value Islamist claims about Islam’s essential political values. The kind of Islamism that’s identified with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran did not exist before the 1970s. None of the Indian Muslims meeting Wilson, nor the late Ottoman-era caliphs, were interested in imposing Sharia in their society. None of them wanted to veil women. On the contrary, the first Pan-Islamist generation was highly modernist: they were proponents of the liberation of women, racial equality and cosmopolitanism. Indian Muslims, for example, were very proud that the Ottoman caliph had Greek and Armenian ministers and ambassadors. They also wanted to see the British Crown appointing Hindu and Muslim ministers and high-level officials in their governments. None would have desired or predicted the separation of Turks and Greeks in Ottoman lands, Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and Muslims and Hindus in India. Only the basic form of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism survives today; the substance of it has, since the 1980s, transformed completely.


The fact that both Lewis and Osama bin Laden spoke of an eternal clash between a united Muslim world and a united West does not mean it is a reality. Even at the peak of the idea of global Muslim solidarity in the late 19th century, Muslim societies were divided across political, linguistic and cultural lines. Since the time of prophet Muhammad’s Companions in the seventh century, hundreds of diverse kingdoms, empires and sultanates, some in conflict with each other, ruled over Muslim populations mixed with others. Separating Muslims from their Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Jewish neighbours, and thinking of their societies in isolation, bears no relationship to the historical experience of human beings. There has never been, and could never be, a separate ‘Muslim world’.


All the new fascist Right-wing anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the US obsesses over Ottoman imperial expansion in eastern Europe. They see the Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 as the Islamic civilisation’s near-takeover of ‘the West’. But in the Battle of Vienna, Protestant Hungarians allied with the predominantly Muslim Ottoman empire against the Catholic Habsburgs. It was a complex conflict between empires and states, not a clash of civilisations.


The Hindu nationalism of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi promotes the idea of an alien Mughal empire that invaded India and ruled over Hindus. But Hindu bureaucrats played a vital role in India’s Mughal empire, and Mughal emperors were simply empire-builders, not zealots of theocratic rule over different faith communities. There are also Muslims today who look back at the Mughal empire in India as an instance of Muslim domination over Hindus. It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another. They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa, the Muslim world, Asia and the West.


Contemporary Pan-Islamism also idealises a mythical past. According to Pan-Islamists, the ummah, or worldwide Muslim community, originated at a time when Muslims were not humiliated by racist white empires or aggressive Western powers. Pan-Islamists want to ‘make the ummah great again’. Yet the notion of a golden age of Muslim political unity and solidarity relies on amnesia about the imperial past. Muslim societies were never politically united, and there were never homogeneous Muslim societies in Eurasia. None of the Muslim dynasty-ruled empires aimed to subjugate non-Muslims by pious believers. Like the Ottoman, Persian or Egyptian monarchs of the late 19th century, they were multi-ethnic empires, employing thousands of non-Muslim bureaucrats. Muslim populations simply never asked for global ummah solidarity before the late 19th-century moment of racialised European empires.


The term ‘the Muslim world’ first appeared in the 1870s. Initially, it was European missionaries or colonial officers who favoured it as a shorthand to refer to all those between the ‘yellow race’ of East Asia and the black race in Africa. They also used it to express their fear of a potential Muslim revolt, though Muslim subjects of empire were no more or less rebellious to their empires than Hindu or Buddhist subjects. After the great Indian Rebellion of 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims rose up against the British, some British colonial officers blamed Muslims for this uprising. William Wilson Hunter, a British colonial officer, questioned whether Indian Muslims could be loyal to a Christian monarch in his influential book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871). In reality, Muslims were not much different from Hindus in terms of their loyalty as well as their critique of the British empire. Elite Indian Muslims, such as the reformist Syed Ahmad Khan, wrote angry rebuttals to Hunter’s allegations. But they also accepted his terms of debate, in which Muslims were a distinct and separate category of Indians.


To assert their dignity and equality, Muslim intellectuals emphasised the past glory of ‘the Muslim world’

The growth of European nationalisms also found a useful enemy in Muslims, specifically the Ottoman sultan. In the late 19th century, Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists all began to depict the Ottoman sultan as a despot. They appealed to British liberals to break the Ottoman-British alliance on behalf of a global Christian solidarity. Anti-Ottoman British liberals such as William Gladstone argued that Christian solidarity should be important for British decisions with regard to the Ottoman empire. It is in that context that the Ottoman sultan referred to his spiritual link with Indian Muslims, to argue for a return to an Ottoman-British alliance thanks to this special connection between these two big Muslim empires.


In his influential book The Future of Islam (1882), the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt argued that the Ottoman empire would eventually be expelled from Europe, and that Europe’s crusading spirit would turn Istanbul into a Christian city. Blunt also claimed that the British empire, lacking the hatred of Muslims of the Austrians, the Russians or the French, could become the protector of the world’s Muslim populations in Asia. In patronising and imperial ways, Blunt seemed to care about the future of Muslims. He was a supporter and friend of leading Muslim reformists such as Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and served as an intermediary between European intellectual circles and Muslim reformists.


Around the same time that Blunt was writing, the influential French intellectual Ernest Renan formulated a very negative view of Islam, especially in regard to science and civilisation. Renan saw Islam as a Semitic religion that would impede the development of science and rationality. His ideas symbolised the racialisation of Muslims via their religion. Of course, Renan was making this argument in Paris, which ruled over large parts of Muslim North Africa and West Africa. His ideas helped to rationalise French colonial rule. Al-Afghani and many other Muslim intellectuals wrote rebuttals of Renan’s arguments, while being supported by Blunt. But Renan enjoyed more success in creating a distracting narrative of a separate Islamic civilisation versus a Western, Christian civilisation.

European elites’ claims of a Western civilising mission, and the superiority of the Christian-Western civilisation, were important to the colonial projects. European intellectuals took up vast projects of classifying humanity into hierarchies of race and religion. It was only in response to this chauvinistic assertion that Muslim intellectuals fashioned a counter-narrative of Islamic civilisation. In an attempt to assert their dignity and equality, they emphasised the past glory, modernity and civility of ‘the Muslim world’. These Muslim opponents of European imperial ideology – of the white race’s civilisational superiority over Muslims and other coloured races – were the first Pan-Islamists.


During the early 20th century, Muslim reformers began to cultivate a historical narrative that emphasised a shared civilisation, with a golden age in Islamic science and art, and its subsequent decline. This idea of a holistic Muslim history was a novel creation fashioned directly in response to the idea of a Western civilisation and the geopolitical arguments of Western/white racial unity. Like the early generation of Pan-African and Pan-Asian intellectuals, Muslim intellectuals responded to European chauvinism and Western orientalism with their own glorious history and civilisation. Throughout the 20th century, the great Muslim leaders such as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nasser in Egypt, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddeq and Indonesia’s Sukarno were all secular nationalists, but all of them needed and used this notion of a glorious history of Muslim civilisation to talk back against ideologies of white supremacy. Nationalism eventually triumphed, and during the 1950s and ’60s the idea of Islam as a force in world affairs also faded from Western journalism and scholarship.


Pan-Islamic ideologies did not resurface again until the 1970s and ’80s, and then with a new character and tone. They returned as an expression of discontent with the contemporary world. After all, gone were the heady days of mid-20th-century optimism about modernisation. The United Nations had failed to solve existential issues. Post-colonial nation-states had not brought liberty and prosperity to most of the world’s Muslims. Meanwhile, Europe, the US and the Soviet Union showed little concern for the suffering of Muslim peoples. Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan appeared, maintaining that the colonisation of Palestine and the tribulations of poverty required a new form of solidarity.


Ideas of Western and Islamic worlds seem like enemies in the mirror

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 proved a historic moment. To condemn the status quo, Khomeini appealed to this new form of Pan-Islamism. Yet, his Iran and its regional rival Saudi Arabia both privileged the national interests of their states. So there has never been a viable federative vision of this new Pan-Islamic solidarity. Unlike Pan-Africanism, which idealised black-skinned populations living in solidarity within post-colonial Africa, Pan-Islamism rests on a sense of victimhood without a practical political project. It is less about real plans to establish a Muslim polity than about how to end the oppression and discrimination shared by an imagined global community.

The calls for global Muslim solidarity can never be understood by looking at religious texts or Muslim piety. It is developments in modern intellectual and geopolitical history that have generated and shaped Pan-Islamic views of history and the world. Perhaps their crucial feature is the idea of the West as a place with its own historical narrative and enduring political vision of global hegemony. The Soviet Union, the US, the EU – all the global Western projects of the 20th century imagine a superior West and its hegemony. Early Pan-Islamic intellectuals developed Muslim narratives of a historical global order as a strategy to combat imperial discourses about their inferiority, which suffused colonial metropoles, orientalist writings and European social sciences. There simply could not be a Pan-Islamic narrative of the global order without its counterpart, the Western narrative of the world, which is equally tendentious as history.

Ideas of Western and Islamic worlds seem like enemies in the mirror. We should not let the colonisers of the late-19th century set the terms of today’s discussion on human rights and good governance. As long as we accept this tendentious opposition between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’, we are still captives to colonisation and the failures of decolonisation. In simply recognising and rejecting these terms of discussion, we can be free to move forward, to think about one another and the world in more realistic and humane ways. Our challenge today is to find a new language of rights and norms that is not captive to the fallacies of Western civilisation or its African, Asian and Muslim alternatives. Human beings, irrespective of their colour and religion, share a single planet and a connected history, without civilisational borders. Any forward path to overcome current injustices and problems must rely on our connections and shared values, rather than civilisational tribalism.

Who Lost the World Bush 41 Left Behind?

 

What happened was a complete loss of imagination and a DEEP STATE conspiracy ultimately run by stupid people. Let us leave it at that.

Bush 41 was their choice as well, but it can be said that he chose them as well.  The CIA provided the internal glue that preserved the Status quo that then ran its course through 2016.

The talent to create a great country is rare and its is even more rare for the talent to be inherited or chosen by a committee.   Thus we had good leadership in Ike, JFK, LBJ ( sorry folks) Nixon, and Reagan and got spoiled. Since then we have had a leadership gap and that includes both Bushes.  That Gap allowed the opportunity provided by Russia to be thrown away and for CHINA to remain unchecked as well as allowing smaller shows to simply fester.

Now we can expect a return to competent leadership for several terms as the path has been established to make this true.  . 
.

Who Lost the World Bush 41 Left Behind?

Friday - December 7, 2018 at 12:45 am

By Patrick J. Buchanan

https://buchanan.org/blog/who-lost-the-world-bush-41-left-behind-130749


George H.W. Bush was America’s closer.

Called in to pitch the final innings of the Cold War, Bush 41 presided masterfully over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the liberation of 100 million Eastern Europeans and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nations.

History’s assignment complete, Bush 41 was retired.

And what happened to the world he left behind?

What became of that world where America was the lone superpower, which 41 believed should lead in creation of the New World Order?

The Russia that back then was led by Boris Yeltsin, a man desperate to be our friend and ally, is now ruled by an autocratic nationalist.

Was not Vladimir Putin an inevitable reaction to our treating Russia like an untrustworthy and dangerous recidivist, by our expansion of NATO into the Balkans, the eastern Baltic and the Black Sea — the entire front porch of Mother Russia?

Have something to say about this column?

Did the America that in her early decades declared the Monroe Doctrine believe a great nation like Russia would forever indulge the presence of a hostile alliance on her doorstep led by a distant superpower?

In this same quarter century that we treated Russia like a criminal suspect, we welcomed China as the prodigal son. We threw open our markets to Chinese goods, escorted her into the WTO, smiled approvingly as U.S. companies shifted production there.

Beijing reciprocated — by manipulating her currency, running up hundreds of billions of dollars in trade surpluses with us, and thieving our technology when she could not extort it from our industries in China. Beijing even sent student spies into American universities.

Now the mask has fallen. China is claiming all the waters around her, building island bases in the South China Sea and deploying weapons to counter U.S. aircraft carriers. Creating ports and bases in Asia and Africa, confronting Taiwan — China clearly sees America as a potentially hostile rival power and is reaching for hegemony in the Western Pacific and East Asia.

And who produced the policies that led to the “unipolar power” of 1992 being challenged by these two great powers now collaborating against us? Was it not the three presidents who sat so uncomfortably beside President Donald Trump at the state funeral of 41?

Late in the 20th century, Osama bin Laden declared war on us for our having planted military bases on the sacred soil of Mecca and Medina; and, on Sept. 11, 2001, he made good on his declaration.

America recoiled, invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban, and set out to build an Afghan regime on American principles. Bush 43, declaring that we were besieged by “an axis of evil,” attacked and occupied Iraq.

We then helped ignite a civil war in Syria that became, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions uprooted, the greatest humanitarian disaster of the century,

Then followed our attack on Libya and support for Saudi Arabia’s war to crush the Houthi rebels in Yemen, a war that many believe has surpassed Syria as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Where are the fruits of our forever war in the Middle East that justify the 7,000 U.S. dead, 60,000 wounded and untold trillions of dollars lost?

Since George H.W. Bush left the White House, the U.S. has incurred 12 trillion dollars in trade deficits, lost scores of thousands of manufacturing plants and 5 million manufacturing jobs. Our economic independence is ancient history.

After 41 left, the Republican Party supported an immigration policy that brought tens of millions, mostly unskilled and poor, half of them illegal, into the country. Result: The Nixon-Reagan coalition that delivered two 49-state landslides in the ’70s and ’80s is history, and the Republican nominee has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.

From 1992 to 2016, the American establishment contemptuously dismissed as “isolationists” those who opposed their wars for democracy in the Middle East, and as “protectionists” those who warned that by running up these massive trade deficits we were exporting America’s future.

The establishment airily dismissed those who said that pushing NATO right up to Russia’s borders would enrage and permanently antagonize a mighty military power. They ridiculed skeptics of our embrace of the Chinese rulers who defended the Tiananmen massacre.

The establishment won the great political battles before 2016. But how did the democracy crusaders, globalists, open borders progressives and interventionists do by their country in these decades?

Did the former presidents who sat beside Trump at National Cathedral, and the establishment seated in the pews behind them, realize that it was their policies, their failures, that gave birth to the new America that rose up to throw them out, and put in Donald Trump?

Robert Kagan on USA Decline

This article is a much needed antidote to the inveterate pessimists out there who allow wishful thinking to run far ahead of the facts.  The USA is suffering from self inflicted economic damage brought about by rather bad financial policy that may well have sobered up a lot of fools who thought themselves above the law, economic or otherwise.

The USA learned that the only creditable strategic deterrent is to outspend the whole world in terms of deliverable military power.  The second leg on that deterrent is to promote friends into self sufficiency so that they can never become allies of your enemies.

In fact the only two creditable threats to the present world order happen to be India and China who are way more creditable as threats to each other than as a threat to the West itself from mere geographical proximity.  In practice of course, China is on the way to transitioning to a modern democratic system comparable to what India already enjoys, even if they do not believe it.  Thus the three great centers of the modern world will share common political ideas and common economic interests and be totally bound by trade.

Thus will arise a communion of nations rather than an empire as others understand it.

The rest of the world that actually tries to challenge this growing hegemony can be separated into the Islamic crowd and the rest.  The rest will make their transition into modernism surprisingly quickly and are doing it now.  The Islamic world continues to see a rise in fascism that acts counter to the modernizing tendencies of the population itself and will continue to drag its feet.  I do not think they can hold it off for long and the actual pending demise of the oil crutch will upend all that even.

In the end it is not and never has been about the USA as about modernism itself.  A modern world in which Western values are established needs almost no force of arms at all.  The truth remains that war is swiftly going out of business and local empowerment is the future of business everywhere.

Robert Kagan: Rumours of America’s demise are an exaggeration

Special to National Post  Mar 10, 2012 – 11:45 AM ET | Last Updated: Mar 8, 2012 6:05 PM ET

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/10/robert-kagan-rumours-of-americas-demise-are-an-exaggeration/

Shannon E. Renfroe/AFP/Getty Images

The USS Nimitz enters San Francisco Bay. Despite much talk of America’s decline relative to other countries, the U.S. military remains the world’s dominant fighting force.

In a new book, excerpted below, acclaimed foreign-policy expert Robert Kagan challenges the conventional wisdom that U.S. global power and influence are waning:

Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose economies are, for the moment, in better shape than their own, and which seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, “That used to be us.”

It doesn’t much help to point out that Americans have experienced this unease before, that many previous generations have also felt this sense of lost vigour and lost virtue. Even in 1788, Patrick Henry lamented the nation’s fall from past glory, “when the American spirit was in its youth.”

The perception of decline today is certainly understandable, given the dismal economic situation since 2008 and the nation’s large fiscal deficits, which, combined with the continuing growth of the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Turkish, and other economies, seem to portend a significant and irreversible shift in global economic power. Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the United States has lost favour, and therefore influence, in much of the world, because of its various responses to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The detainment facilities at Guantanamo, the use of torture against suspected terrorists and the widely condemned 2003 invasion of Iraq have all tarnished the American “brand” and put a dent in America’s “soft power” — its ability to attract others to its point of view. There have been the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many argue proved the limits of military power, stretched the United States beyond its capacities and weakened the nation at its core. Some compare the United States to the British Empire at the end of the 19th century, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars serving as the equivalent of Britain’s difficult and demoralizing Boer War.

With this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of the United States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression. Arabs and Israelis refuse to make peace, despite American entreaties. Iran and North Korea defy American demands that they cease their nuclear weapons programs. China refuses to let its currency rise. Ferment in the Arab world spins out of America’s control. Every day, it seems, brings more evidence that the time has passed when the United States could lead the world and get others to do its bidding.

Powerful as this sense of decline may be, however, it deserves a more rigorous examination.

Measuring changes in a nation’s relative power is a tricky business, but there are some basic indicators: the size and influence of its economy relative to that of other powers; the degree of military power compared with potential adversaries’; the degree of political influence it wields in the international system — all of which make up what the Chinese call “comprehensive national power.” And there is the matter of time. Judgments made based on only a few years’ evidence are problematic. A great power’s decline is the product of fundamental changes in the international distribution of various forms of power that usually occur over longer stretches of time. Great powers rarely decline suddenly. A war may bring them down, but even that is usually a symptom, and a culmination, of a longer process.

Some of the arguments for America’s relative decline these days would be more potent if they had not appeared only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one recession, or even a severe economic crisis, need not mean the beginning of the end of a great power. The United States suffered deep and prolonged economic crises in the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1970s. In each case, it rebounded in the following decade and actually ended up in a stronger position relative to other powers than before the crisis. The first decade of the 20th century, the 1940s, and the 1980s were all high points of American global power and influence.

Less than a decade ago, most observers spoke not of America’s decline but of its enduring primacy. In 2002, the historian Paul Kennedy, who in the late 1980s had written a much-discussed book on “the rise and fall of the great powers,” America included, declared that never in history had there been such a great “disparity of power” as between the United States and the rest of the world. John Ikenberry agreed that “no other great power” had held “such formidable advantages in military, economic, technological, cultural or political capabilities … The preeminence of American power” was “unprecedented.” In 2004, Fareed Zakaria described the United States as enjoying a “comprehensive uni-polarity” unlike anything seen since Rome. But a mere four years later, Zakaria was writing about the “post-American world”; and Kennedy, again, about the inevitability of American decline. Did the fundamentals of America’s relative power shift so dramatically in just a few short years? The answer is no.

Let’s start with the basic indicators. In economic terms, and even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position in the world has not changed. Its share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably steady, not only over the past decade, but over the past four decades. In 1969, the United States produced roughly a quarter of the world’s economic output. Today it still produces roughly a quarter, and it remains not only the largest but also the richest economy in the world.

People are rightly mesmerized by the rise of China, India and other Asian nations whose share of the global economy has been climbing steadily, but this has so far come almost entirely at the expense of Europe and Japan, which have had a declining share of the global economy. Optimists about China’s development predict that it will overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world sometime in the next two decades. This could mean that the United States will face an increasing challenge to its economic position in the future. The sheer size of an economy, however, is not by itself a good measure of overall power within the international system. If it were, then early-19th-century China, with what was then the world’s largest economy, would have been the predominant power instead of the prostrate victim of smaller European nations. Even if China does reach this pinnacle again — and Chinese leaders face significant obstacles to sustaining the country’s growth indefinitely — it will still remain far behind both the United States and Europe in terms of per capita GDP.

Military capacity matters, too, as early-19th-century China learned, and as Chinese leaders know today. As Yan Xuetong recently noted, “Military strength underpins hegemony.” Here the United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no decline in America’s relative military capacity — at least not yet. Americans currently spend roughly $600-billion a year on defence, more than the rest of the other great powers combined. They do so, moreover, while consuming around 4% of GDP annually, a higher percentage than the other great powers but in historical terms lower than the 10% of GDP that the United States spent on defence in the mid-1950s or the 7% it spent in the late 1980s.

The superior expenditures underestimate America’s actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, are the most experienced in actual combat and would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle. American naval power remains predominant in every region of the world.

By these military and economic measures, at least, the United States today is not remotely like Britain circa 1900, when that empire’s relative decline began to become apparent. It is more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power. It is possible to imagine a time when this might no longer be the case, but that moment has not yet arrived.

But what about the “rise of the rest” — the increasing economic clout of nations like China, India, Brazil and Turkey? Doesn’t that cut into American power and influence?

The answer is: It depends. The fact that other nations in the world are enjoying periods of high growth does not mean that America’s position as the predominant power is declining, or even that “the rest” are catching up in terms of overall power and influence. Brazil’s share of global GDP was a little over 2% in 1990 and remains a little over 2% today. Turkey’s share was under 1% in 1990 and is still under 1% today. People, especially businesspeople, are naturally excited about these emerging markets, but just because a nation is an attractive investment opportunity does not mean it is also a rising great power. Wealth matters in international politics, but there is no simple correlation between economic growth and international influence. It is not clear that a richer India today, for instance, wields greater influence on the global stage than a poorer India did in the 1950s and 1960s under Nehru, when it was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, or that Turkey, for all the independence and flash of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, really wields more influence than it did a decade ago.

As for the effect of these growing economies on the position of the United States, it all depends on who is doing the growing. The problem for the British Empire at the beginning of the 20th century was not its substantial decline relative to the United States, a generally friendly power whose interests did not fundamentally conflict with Britain’s. Even in the Western hemisphere, British trade increased as it ceded dominance to the United States. The problem was Britain’s decline relative to Germany, which aimed for supremacy on the European continent, sought to compete with Britain on the high seas, and in both respects posed a threat to Britain’s core security.

In the case of the United States, the dramatic and rapid rise of the German and Japanese economies during the Cold War reduced American primacy in the world much more than the more recent “rise of the rest.” America’s share of the world’s GDP, nearly 50% after the Second World War, fell to roughly 25% by the early 1970s, where it has remained ever since. But that “rise of the rest” did not weaken the United States. If anything, it strengthened it. Germany and Japan were and are close democratic allies, key pillars of the American world order. The growth of their economies actually shifted the balance irretrievably against the Soviet bloc and helped bring about its demise.

When gauging the impact of the growing economies of other countries today, one has to make the same kinds of calculations. Does the growth of the Brazilian economy, or of the Indian economy, diminish American global power? Both nations are friendly, and India is increasingly a strategic partner of the United States. If America’s future competitor in the world is likely to be China, then a richer and more powerful India will be an asset, not a liability, to the United States. Overall, the fact that Brazil, India, Turkey and South Africa are enjoying a period of economic growth — which may or may not last indefinitely — is either irrelevant to America’s strategic position or of benefit to it. At present, only the growth of China’s economy can be said to have implications for American power in the future, and only insofar as the Chinese translate enough of their growing economic strength into military strength.

If the United States is not suffering decline in these basic measures of power, isn’t it simply true, nevertheless, that its influence has diminished, that it is having a harder time getting its way in the world? The almost universal assumption is that the United States has indeed lost influence. Whatever the explanation may be — American decline, the “rise of the rest,” the apparent failure of the American capitalist model, the dysfunctional nature of American politics, the increasing complexity of the international system — it is broadly accepted that the United States can no longer shape the world to suit its interests and ideals as it once did. Every day seems to bring more proof, as things happen in the world that seem both contrary to American interests and beyond American control.

And, of course, it’s true: the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then, it never could. Many of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy, that there ever was a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and could, as the political scientist Stephen Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”

If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize that this image of the past is an illusion. There never was such a time. We tend to think back on the early years of the Cold War as a moment of complete American global dominance. They were nothing of the sort. The United States did accomplish extraordinary things in that era: the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic system all shaped the world we know today. Yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War, there was at least one equally monumental setback.

Excerpted from The World America Made, by Robert Kagan, published by Knopf. © 2012 by Robert Kagan.

Genesis for the New Space Age with John Leith - Chpt IX - Vanishing Germans Discover the Mystery of the Ages

Now we are into full blown fiction, unfortunately. They even haul out Sir Robert Scott who was long dead.  The story of a long lost German colony makes no sense in the time and place suggested and is merely a plot device.

Worse we are introduced to a magical tunnel system somehow located in the Amazon.  Even its discovery fails to make use of a plausible Indian.  Totally ignored is the need for serious lighting.  Again none of this could happen but it has been a plot device of earliest fantasy fiction into the 1930's.

Besides lighting, it is physically impossible to penetrate tunnels much below a mere 10,000 feet. That is about two miles.  At that point, rock temperature is way too high. Elementary physics and geology eliminates what is an old and attractive idea.  In short a barely plausible historical fantasy runs smack into scientific reality.

The rest can be written of as pure fantasy because nothing is plausibly glossed even.  We do know that habitats can be readily build down to ten thousand feet which is actually good enough for human habitats.  We also know about claims regarding reptilian populations doing just that which we have as yet been unable to show as fiction.  In short it is possible to provide a real gloss to this narrative to get them underground and keep them there and have it supported by other reports.  Yet it is assumed that all this is even possible when it is not and if written in the past fifty years ignores those exact questions.

Vanishing Germans Discover the Mystery of the Ages

The international race to put a fleet of round wing planes in the air went unabated by those Germans

who started life anew in another hemisphere after they had abandoned their ancestral home at the end of World War U. The new frontier life seemed to stimulate the Germans with a perserverance which enabled them to survive and continue on. But actually their iron determination could be attributed to a twist of fate which had begun 400 years earlier.

To understand the significance of certain historical evidence relating to the continuing German effort to build a new country under the protection of the round wing plane, the reader should  become acquainted with the following true adventure. It is a kaleidoscope of German resourcefulness bridging the 16th and 20th centuries.

The explanation centers around 500 warrior-colonists who left Germany in the 16th century and were presumed to have perished 4,000 miles up the Amazon River. The existence of those ancient adventurers was forgotten. Allied agents searching for Hitler's lost minions in the late 1940s unknowingly found descendents of the 16th century colonists whose current presence in that hemisphere actually changed the outcome of World War U, an astounding revelation still kept hidden from press and public.

The adventure in question began in 1572 when a select and hardy group of about 500 German colonists originating mainly from the Dukedom of Sax-Coburg, and including recruits from Bavaria and East Prussia, were hired as soldier-mercenaries by Sebastian I, King of Portugal, to man a garrison up the Amazon River. The German soldiers were allowed to bring their wives, for after building the fort and doing garrison duty, they were to be given land grants in the interior of what is now Brazil. The families were mainly Lutheran who had been subject to Catholic persecution.

These adventurers set sail from Lisbon, Portugal in three 130-foot, lightly armed warships named Ureas. Their first task was to build a Portugese fort on the upper reaches of the Amazon in a region of what today is the approximate border between Brazil and Ecuador. Upon completion of the fort, the Germans were to man the same against the Spaniards located on the other side of the river. 

By territorial aggrandizement, Pope Pius V had issued a Papal Bull dividing the interior of South America, between the Spanish on the west bank of the Amazon and the Portugese on the east bank.

The ships were destroyed at the end of the journey when the Portugese crew and German mercenaries 

were ambushed by the fierce Indians. In orderly fashion, the Germans and Portugese removed cattle, pigs, chickens and a few horses, as well as valuable seed grains for fruit and vegetables. Taking to the jungle, the Europeans fought an enemy who attempted to kill them to the last man and woman. It was a battle of bows and arrows, deadly blowguns and spears against crossbow and body armor. But it was a battle of survival for the Europeans who were quick to adopt stealthy Indian tactics of forest fighting, as opposed to open European massed battle formation.

Eventually, the white men stumbled upon a cave entrance into the side of a mountain. Fighting a rear-guard action, the German remnant was saved and also their livestock and possessions. Because the Indians were terrified of the cave spirits, they abandoned the siege and left. The hole in the side of   the earth became a refuge for those white men. Periodically the mercenaries were able to make armed sorties out to procure fresh produce and game. Meanwhile, inside the cavity, the besieged people found plentiful fresh water, and by lighting fires, they learned to sustain themselves in a primitive routine. With ingenuity and skills the group persevered, but dared not establish themselves again in the dangerous world outside. Only their basic survival instincts kept them from total despair.

After agonizing on their dilemma, scouting parties explored the cavity's interior, and reported that the  cave of refuge was actually the entrance to a deep underground tunnel. They also found  there was evidence of human occupation before them, perhaps accounting for the fear which the  Indians had of the interior. The white men took to the tunnels, not knowing where they were going, but hoping the routes would eventually digress to the surface again where they could resettle among friendly Indians.

A documented story of this adventure was recorded in diary form on the ship's log which the group saved.

The hardships were endured by the German colonists for three generations, until they "emerged" in 1647. The episode is told briefly here because what those 16th Century Germans accomplished enabled the German Third Reich to continue after World War H Leader of the original survivors of the 1572 Indian attacks was a German named Von Luckner. It was he who also organized the tunnel escape and unknowingly led the remnants of his party through the fissures in groups of 30, deep into the earth where several months later they found a huge, faintly lit cavity of approximately 75 square miles. The ceiling was 300 feet in height and the floor consisted of  soil with all the natural nutrients for crop growth. Here the Germans established their first community, free from outside aggression. Insulated from the surface world of head-hunter Indians and an unfriendly jungle, they built a village which over the years became their permanent home. On their journey down, the Europeans generally had fresh water, at times icy cold which came in trickles and rivulets from above. The temperature remained the same as on the surface for approximately the first 100 miles; but in later years, as they penetrated deeper, they were to experience an increase in heat from 80 to 100 degrees. Subsistence was a daily problem but the raw elements of nature on the surface such as rain, cold, wind and predators were totally absent.

At that time these colonists were a lost civilization. As a group they would never return to the surface.  

Hopelessly, but with an instinctive urge for survival, they surrendered their old ties to Germany and took on a new identity. But the cultural, linguistic, and religious heritages from their homeland remained strong. These assets they would carefully preserve and record for their children as they wandered in the tunnels and adapted to their changed life style.

Persistent stories have been told for centuries that white men were seen on Brazil's upper reaches of the Amazon. These tales we now realize are true. Their basis grew in part as the hunted Germans cautiously reemerged to the surface where they developed trading routes much like the French "coeur  de bois" in North America. Of necessity, the Germans had to barter with the Indians and, also, eventually trade with posts and forts which other non-Germanic white men had subsequently built on the river. But the lost Germans kept their hideaway a secret. At all costs, they made sure that no outsiders would stumble upon the new camouflaged tunnel entrance leading to their habitation in the interior of the earth. Those who did, never returned.

In 1980 that village which the Germans started still survives and bears the name of its original founder, Von Luckner, who was proclaimed first king in 1572. The habitation now has a population of over 30,000 souls.

As American colonists heading west in 1700's broke through one natural obstacle after another, so the Germans inside the tunnel continued to explore and move on. From the first settlement of Von Luckner, a group under the leadership of a man named Wagner moved further into the tunnel. They located another cavity where a settlement was started under Wagner's surname. (Population 1977, 60,000). By mid 1600, the Germans had developed a system of crude tracks and carts on wooden wheels. On this rudimentary railroad system they were able to haul their farm produce and livestock. They began to grow crops (particularly barley) which adapted itself to the photosynthesis emanating from the rock glow. This faint natural light coming from the rock walls also enabled them to see and their eyesight adjusted to the dark. Further down the tunnels the Germans descended and eventually established six   cities along their 3,000 mile crude wooden rail system. Their offspring survived disease and hunger.

Like an army, they established each base, and after consolidating it, moved on to repeat the conquest

of the tunnel system.

One recurring ordeal confronted the colonists. To understand their trouble, it is necessary to explain

that the original tunnel they followed meandered and wound through 3,000 miles of labyrinths. From the seclusion of the numerous tunnel off-shoots, the Germans were frequently attacked by a subterranean race of creatures who tried to kill them as had the Indians on the surface. At one point, these "evil ones" or "Sons of Satan," as the colonists nicknamed them, walled-up the community of new German arrivals. To break out, the Germans were forced to tunnel out through a mile of rubble. 

The inner-race dwellers strongly resented the newcomers and agreed to guide them back to the surface if they would vacate and leave. Germans who still dwell in these original interior cities say the interior of the earth's mantle is filled with many cities inhabited by the "evil ones." These Germans who have now lived in the tunnel cities below South America for over 400 years, contend that the entire mantle of the earth is filled with different races of rock dwellers who went underground for survival after different surface upheavals or floods which occurred during the former pre-adamite and postadamite civilizations. They contend there are literally hundreds of huge cities located in pockets around the globe and under the seas, from 350  feet below the outer surface to many miles in depth. The German colonists of 1572 may have been the  latest arrivals to wander into the earth's mantle - like it - and remain.

As the years passed, three generations of infants were bom in the tunnel system. The German "Rock Moles" had established a chain of settlements named Hagner (population, 1977, 180,000) and Baron Von Brighttner (population 1977, 100,000); Sillisteen (population 1977, 12,000), and Archduke Von Kitchiner (population 1977, 62,000). Then, on the 75th year of their forced sojourn, their scouting parties broke out into the promised land. Emerging through a rock opening the advance party looked about in wonder. All of them had been bom inside the earth's mantle but had been raised to believe here was another world. As the first guides looked about, they beheld unending sky, trees and rolling land. But more fascinating, everything including themselves was bathed in light from a faint man-made orb that hung in a real sky. (Their arrival inside the earth's rock mantle was at a midway point below today's countries of New Zealand and Australia.) The Germans cheered, they prayed, and they laughed for they thought they had arrived back on the outside of the world again.

Hurrying inside the tunnel, they told of this new wonder they had discovered. More jubilant Germans from the tunnel system emerged. Some time later, contact was made with the occupants of this new  land who advised the German explorers that they had descended to the inside of the earth where hundreds of millions of peaceful people lived who shunned surface dwellers. The new Atlanteans, which they were called, moved through the air in magical, silent, round winged craft and drove four wheeled vehicles without horses or oxen. These people had an advanced civilization which the amazed Germans recognized was hundreds of years ahead of the surface civilization their fathers had left years before.

Also amazing to the Germans, the new Atlanteans had an ageless longevity span, with no noticeable

traces of old age in their bodies, no ancient furroughs in their facial features and no senility in their
mannerisms. What was missing was the presence of old people, the Germans quickly noted.

Yet another surprise awaited the tunnel Germans. The Atlanteans or Atturians called in advisors from another Inner World continent named Bodland in order to further apprise the new immigrants. As the Bods and tunnel Germans conversed, the tunnel arrivals exploded with excitement. The Inner World Bodlanders and newly arrived tunnel Germans from the Upper World had the same root language!  Unbelievable, the tunnel Germans heard a story of how the Bodlanders some 30,000 years earlier had sought refuge in underground tunnels when attacked by a vicious race which had come out of the sky in space craft using superior weaponry to destroy their cities and kill their people by the millions. Only a few thousand survivors were left and they were pursued into mountainous caves. The calamity had occurred in what today is Iran, Pakistan and Syria, once peopled by a race of fair people who called themselves Bacchis later changed to Bods. Many years later the Bods reached the Inner World via tunnels and pockets in the earth's mantle.

The group of emerging tunnel Germans were then invited to visit Bodland, and it was soon apparent to the tunnel Germans that the Bods were the most advanced civilization they had ever seen. The Atlanteans, also called Atturians, agreed to permit the new German race to settle on a relatively unoccupied continent adjacent to Bodland in the southern hemisphere where the second race of Inner  World Aryans began anew. Only one stipulation was required, the tunnel Germans must live in peace and friendship and never return to the outside world.

A new German race, therefore, evolved. Its roots began in Germany. Uprooted, they were established

in the tunnel system which began in the underground headquarters of South America. From here they migrated over a period of three generations to the interior of the earth where, reborn, the 250 original couples grew into a nation known today as the Six Kingdoms of Saxony. In the intervening years, surplus people from the cities confined within the mantle were forced to migrate to the interior and take up new residence in one of the six inner kingdoms. Eventually, in the 1900's, each family in the tunnel system was allowed only two children as population density was dictated by the cavity size in which each city was located.

In the early 1700's the elder Germanic race of Bods were persuaded by members of the new German

royalty to transport their eldest sons back to Germany for schooling in the universities.

These young men were first sworn to secrecy and flown to their ancestral homeland in Bodland aircraft in less than half a day. In Germany proper, these Germans from the lost civilization were introduced as sons of wealthy German plantation owners along the Amazon. For over 200 years in this manner, these German princes of a lost world received their advanced education in the arts and history of the Upper World at the leading universities of Europe. Upon return to their interior homeland inside the earth's mantle and the earth's interior, these young Germans showed merchandise and told of the technical advances in the outside world which they had visited. Thus, for instance, those below learned of such Upper World processes as the printing press made in Germany and first brought to the interior by the  Crown Prince Von Luckner.

In spite of this isolation, German communities in the tunnels also heard that the outside civilization which their forefathers had left had again been recontacted. But, since they had grown and thrived in their new tunnel locales, they decided to remain there.

The original migratory tunnel route hit many dead ends, and although substantial improvements were  made by use of the single car on wooden wheels and track, the tunnel still followed natural fissures, many of which doubled back like a winding creek.

In 1853 the tunnel Germans abandoned their reticence toward upper surface outsiders and brought in a German engineer from the surface in order to improve the system. In one place he shortened a circuitous length of 273 miles by boring out a new three mile stretch. Within this three mile bore they struck a large room over a mile by three-quarters of a mile in area. In this cavity they later constructed railroad shops, yards, storage tracks, buildings, etc. Continuing to bore the tunnel system, repetitive curves and bends were straightened and the old length of 3,000 miles was shortened considerably.

Borrowing technology and materials from the Bods inside the earth, a single track electric railway system evolved which the tunnel Germans improved annually. However, the tunnel entrance in Brazil/Peru border was kept a well guarded secret.

For those Germans who had eventually settled in the center of the earth, the interior climate was hospitable, and by the turn of the 20th Century their numbers had reached ten million. Because of increased visitations, reports about the sojourning princes had seeped out in Germany proper. At that  time the German engineer had told of his work among the lost German cities in the tunnel. Finally, in  World War I, the Germans in the tunnel sent a volunteer regiment to fight with their homeland cousins. At this juncture in the reviewed relationship between the subterranean Germans and the fatherland, the World War I regiment located many missing relatives from whom their forefathers had been separated  14 generations before. However, the Inner World Germans did not participate in the Upper World wars.

Did Germanic underworld cousins, visiting Germany during World War I, advise her to abandon caution, and reveal the existence of the underworld? The answer is yes, in part, plus other  considerations. American State Department papers of December, 1914 and January through March, 

1915, describing America's peace efforts to end World War I clearly outline the strenuous efforts by Germany to insure a free access route to their underground nation. One of their most stringent demands in order for them to sign the Armistice was as follows: "Imperial Germany demands free access through the Antarctic via the South Pole to the inner earth for the purpose of future colonization."

American Secretary of State Representative Colonel House, later showed this clause to British Prime Minister Lloyd George. He laughed and said, "Give the Germans that icicle land of seals and penguins. It's nothing but a giant icebox. The Germans have gone insane." As for the interior earth, 

Prime Minister Lloyd George suggested to Colonel House that somebody was pulling his official leg. Obviously, even in 1915 German foreign minister Count Zimmerman was more aware than the allies that planet earth was hollow in its center.

By 1930, limited contact and communications had again been established with the tunnel Germans, and a sparse trade evolved, but Upper World Germans had never been taken into the subterranean localities or to the Inner World. But despite their insulation, the presence of the lost German civilizations was being pieced together and recorded by German authorities in the Fatherland.

At the request of Adolf Hitler, officials in Nazi Germany carefully and meticulously gathered all these facts of the German Walhalla. However, Hitler's ambitions as a demagogue to place Germany on a war footing and move toward a total European conflict of arms if necessary had not gone unnoticed by the Germanic cousins of the Inner World — particularly the Bodlanders who had been at peace for 30,000 years.

It was in 1936 that Hitler, prompted by immediate and unknown reasons, decided to send an exploration team to the Inner World (presumably by air). The Bodlanders from inside the Earth watched the upper Germans all the way and eventually invited the team to the capital city of Bod where Hitler's Upper World Germans were treated royally before returning home. The King of Bodland was invited to come up to Germany's Third Reich for a return visit and in October 1936 the Inner World Bodland King Haakkuuss the Third responded, arriving secretly in Germany via his private space ship. After talking to the Upper World Germans he was impressed by their national spirit and drive, but he also recognized they were war prone and had placed themselves in the direction of a total war footing. Taking Hitler and some of his officers aside King Haakkuuss said: "I warn you as a long lost German brother that you are on the brink of a colossal war that will lead Germany only to  disaster. I urge you to stop this madness and reconsider before taking your nation down the wrong road a second time in this century. War is hate - full of negative karma and national agony. Develop a peaceful policy in a positive way."

He then explained that his own intelligence indicated the American President was also power oriented and would like to rule the world. Russia's Stalin was also bent on world domination. Then the King prophesied that if Hitler pursued his dreams of German expansion by war, he would eventually end up being crushed by the armies of Russia and the United States and Britain and its allies.

Hitler, of course, disregarded this sage advice from the ruler of another German nation which had not been at war for thirty milleniums and had built the greatest nation on or in the globe.

Following the official visit of the King of Bodland, Hitler instructed his general staff to mount an immediate combined naval and air operation leading to the opening at the South Pole by which they intended to locate again the lost German civilization in the interior of the Earth. That 1937-38 search   came to light in 1945 when American and British Intelligence officers in London began examining captured German records. Revealed were the intimate details of the German penetration of the Antarctic under Captain Ritscher whose exploration teams fanned out to unlock the   secrets of the subcontinent — once a tropic.

One German name, Kurt Von Kugler, an experienced mountain climber, stood out. He actually descended with his German crew through two miles of ice in the vicinity of a place called "Rainbow City," and found evidence of an ancient but advanced civilization older" than all of man's measured past. The Germans spent over a month there, and in this oasis of hot springs found tropical trees, melons and other succulent fruits. This find spurred the German teams to expend greater efforts and other lost valleys were located and Antarctic data developed. The 100 page report and 300 photos which allied officers read regarding this singular explorer's activity was an astonishing discovery. These records of the peacetime German conquest on Antarctica were eventually turned over to the United States where   they were quickly filed in Washington's Polar Archives in the National Archives Building under the recent guardianship of Franklin Birch, whose twofold job is to deny that they exist and also to prevent  public scrutiny.

The Germans had left maps with routes, and aerial photographs. On finding these, America notified Britain of their find and sent Admiral Byrd into the Antarctic to retrace the German routes. Byrd's expedition was composed of Americans, British and Canadians, one of the famous Britons being Sir Robert Scott whom the authors interviewed.

In 1938 German teams composed of military specialists and scientists finally found the long valley at the South Pole. Both land and aerial groups began the penetration. As they entered the 125-mile-wide Antarctic opening, the mystery unfolded. Traveling on, the valley deepened and 500 miles later, as the valley floor continued to drop, the snow and ice disappeared. Eventually, without being totally aware,  the land teams (supplied by air drops) were descending into the doughnut-like hole to the interior of the earth. A German air team flying a Dornier-Wal made the descent. The rest is history. They flew north into the interior and landed thousands of -miles away - among a race of people who resembled the aerial explorers themselves and spoke an ancient German dialect.

The descendants had been found of those German mercenaries whose forefathers had disappeared up the Amazon of the Upper World in the year 1572. The captured Bonn records tell how Hitler's advance parties met their long lost relatives and were joyously welcomed. The jubilant interior Germans then allotted unpopulated adjoining lands to the Germans of the Third Reich and signed six treaties of occupation, one for each autonomous German Kingdom below.

But a snag debarring total acceptance of the new political alignment occurred during the good- will visit. When the Upper World Germans visited the neighboring continent and nation of Bodland who were also Germanic in origin, they were rebuffed by the first settlers of the Inner World.  The Bods categorically informed their upper world relatives that they would not be admitted below except through a singular treaty made with the Parliament of Bodland and that any lands to be allotted for future colonization of Upper World Third Reich people would be at the sole discretion of the senior Inner World Bodland power and no other nation. The ultimatum was plain. Any Upper World German immigration would be under the terms of another German nation who over a span of many thousand years had developed a political structure of government that precluded war. If the Upper World Germans wanted to live in this chaste environment, they were told, they must be re-indoctrinated throughout the whole gamut of their existence from the relearning of the family, school and college perspectives towards a new outlook at adulthood life. Thus any Upper World immigration of the Germans planning another world war, would require total renunciation of their basic destructive behaviourisms before they could become federated with the Inner World people whose constant objective was peace.

The German Dornier-Wal was refueled with a chemical superior to gasoline and the surface Germans flew home. They had found their ancient Thule, but they had not experienced the applauding adulation expected from their long lost kin.

The Upper World War began without respite. In September 1939 Hitler's legions of invincibility invaded Poland. Britain, France and their colonial empires declared war on the Germans. In 1940 the Germans had turned on the Russians and inl941 the Americans under Roosevelt had come in on the side of the allies. The prophecy for fulfillment of the 1936 warning by King Haakkuuss in was about to unfold. By 1943 Hitler realized he could not fight a war on three fronts against enemies with inexhaustable supplies of men and materials despite advanced German preparedness.

Therefore the Third Reich altered its plan for conquest of the world. Early in 1943 Adolf Hitler dispatched a delegation of unknown emissaries below to entreat King Haakkuuss in of Bodland to sell some unsettled land near the Inner South Pole entrance. The King refused to sell them any territory for expansion but as a brother German nation he welcomed Hitler's people to come down and occupy semi-desert land without compensation, provided they agreed to sign a treaty of perpetual peace with Bodland and dwell quietly with the other nations.

The visiting Upper World Germans agreed, whereupon the Bodland King called a special session of

Parliament inviting the delegation of Third Reich emissaries to attend. As the visitors from the Upper

World listened, they observed King Haakkuuss open the special session of Parliament and deliver the

following address which was televised to the entire nation:

"Citizens of Bodland: As you are already aware, a delegation of fellow German kin folk from the Earth's Upper surface is visiting the leaders of our nation. These visiting Germanic speaking people from the   surface call themselves citizens of the Third Reich, have a common ancestry with us dating back 30,000 years at least when we existed together on the surface, where our history teaches we dwelt principally as a great nation in what is called Persia since former times (and currently named Iran). Our ancestors also occupied other adjoining lands in this area of the world including what is today called India, Pakistan, Afganistan, Syria, etc., all of which are now peopled by non-Germanic peoples.

"The cradle of our race, of course, was in the Antarctic from which our ancestors migrated to Persia

(Iran) when the Antarctic area slowly became frozen over with ice which is now two miles thick.

"But completing the story of our ancient history, you know our surface nation was destroyed and our people hunted and killed by the millions when a vicious race from another planet named "The Serpent People" landed among us from spacecraft. Many of our ancestors were driven into caves for survival,   where for many years they remained. They were never able to return to their native lands occupied by the alien invaders whom our astronomers believed came from a strange planet which intruded into our solar system and also caused the earlier ice age over our original lands.

"While our ancestors were in the caves and tunnels, a remnant of them became separated from Bodland forefathers and eventually this grouping arrived back out on the surface through a cave in what today is called the Black Forest in Bavaria. They became the modern surface Germans and their kin scattered throughout the northern hemisphere above. As you listeners will know, we Bodlanders are the other part of the Persian exodus who eventually migrated through caves and tunnels into the center of the Earth, coming out in these very mountains of Bodland through the tunnels of which we can still connect with hidden exits on the upper surface with our fast magnetic trains and cars. To conclude the capsule history, I would point out that the languages of the upper and lower Germans are today somewhat different but our root words and our customs and even our music are all identifiable with each other."

The King paused and the Parliament of ancient Germans and newly found surface relatives listened with solemnity. His Majesty then re-addressed himself to the vast listening audience throughout the nation. "Fellow citizens, the subject matter on which I address my main remarks is simply this: Our brothers on the surface are involved in a war that can only mean their annihilation as a nation, having been led into this catastrophe by one man - a foolish leader (Adolf Hitler) - whom I tried to warn of his wrong doing three years before the war began - but he rejected my advice. At that time I predicted his downfall if he were to engage his nation in war because two other surface nations, whose leaders also wanted to rule the entire upper world, would unite and destroy the German leader. I refer to Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States and Joseph Stalin of Soviet Russia.

"Our brothers on the surface are losing the war. It is only a matter of time before most of the country  of Germany as a nation will be defeated and destroyed according to the plans of their enemies. A delegation of our surface kinsmen are sitting in the Parliamentary visitors' gallery even today. They have come on behalf of their leaders, to beg for our help. Without our befriending them, their people above are lost.

"Their foolish leader in spite of his evil deeds which are mountainous, still has the makings of a great  man if guided in the right direction, and therefore he is part of my proposal, in that he be allowed to

enter the Inner World as a catalyst to reunite the exodus of his people under the following conditions:  

"That we deed our southern wastelands to them for new settlements.

"That we assist them in developing these vast lands into productive croplands and urban centers. (Eventually the Bods drilled 1800 artesian wells in the arid lands for the incoming German tide from above and also built the first railroads and laid out the new cities.) Later the newcomers may stay in peace or return to the surface.

"That we give all our services to nurture their beginnings as a great nation like ourselves. But before committing our brain power and labour to help them, a charter must be signed by their leaders agreeing to renounce war and not provoke any conflict as long as they remain among us. Each new arrival would sign such an oath before being accepted as an Inner World citizen.

"That Bodland supervise all new construction and make certain that no war-like beginnings are started by them while on the alloted lands. Those among the Upper Germans who exhibit a war prone attitude and want to continue World War II at a later date would not be allowed to settle among  us, and therefore any new war beginnings would have to take place on the surface of the planet, for which it is already infamous.

"That Bodland's government would screen all newcomers and this immigrant supervision would last for a term of 30 years ending in 1973."

King Haakkuuss finished his speech and a Parliamentary Committee worked out details of the Charter.

Three days later the treaty had been drafted and passed by the Bodland Parliament for signature of the King. The visiting Germans were shown a copy of the draft in the language of the Bodlanders, but the   Upper World Germans could not decipher the text. Placing a glass screen over the pages, the Bods showed their astonished cousins the same pages again. Through the opaque screen the language was in modem idiomatic and precise German. The document was accepted without revision and shortly afterwards the signed text was made available in both languages. There remained a place for the signature of Adolf Hitler and other German signatories.

The treaty in effect welcomed the defeated Germans into the Hollow Earth under strict conditions imposed by the Bodlanders' Parliament. The arid lands were to be made productive in order to sustain the newcomers. Strict immigration factors would constitute entry acceptance. Those denied entry would be top Nazis, all personnel connected with concentration camps or those who had hunted Jews and other ethnic groups or political or idealogical enemies of the Third Reich. The list of immigrant denials was extensive. Only those in the present Reich armed services with clean records would be accepted for continuing police and defense duties. The Bodland criminal law denied citizenship to murderers, sadists, rapists and kidnappers, aside from spelled out treaty conditions.

The King took the Upper Germans aside and told them that if they broke the treaty by warfare they all would be eliminated so quickly they would barely have time for their lives to flash before them, so quick and devastating would be their destruction by Bod weaponry.

When the delegation returned to the surface they presented the treaty to Hitler. He angrily fumed and ranted but signed the document. From that day on, a secret government department was established answerable only to Hitler and three other unknown men. The task of this department was to prepare the Third Reich for migration into the Inner Earth to resettle in the general vicinity and under the watchful eyes of the old kingdoms of Germans and the strict surveillance of the Bodlanders who would control all facets of the New German nation for 30 years. Albert Speer's grand designs for the public buildings to be erected in a victorious post-war Berlin were to become instead the models for a New Berlin in the underworld capital as batteries of Bodlanders swarmed in to help the latest arrivals build a new nation from the ground up.

Beginnings of the construction of New Berlin were started in 1943 including the new Reichstag and a  palace for Hitler. By 1944 underground water and utilities were laid out for a New Berlin and temporary living and office quarters had already been erected by the Bods and new German workers. 

Two obstacles faced the Germans migrating from the Third Reich. The first was the descent into the abyss for 125 miles through a wide hole in the Antarctic. No land entrance over the ice covered continent leading to the abyss had been revealed by the German exploration teams. Hence, all personnel or supplies reaching the earth's interior via the South Pole route must be freighted in by conventional aircraft - an almost impossible task even with naval and land relay depots.

One alternative later devised was to have the five relatively untried round wing planes (powered by magnetic energy) flown to secret hideouts in the southern hemisphere to become the nucleus of a giant airlift. Two additional craft were later flown down (one in 1946 and the other in 1947).

The second obstacle was the antiquated tunnel leading to the Old Germany in the interior. The original tunnel of 3,000 miles, of course, had been reworked in the mid 1800's, but was still old-fashioned by modem standards. It had been used more or less for interior trade of the various communities inside the mantle, and not for mass transit. An updated German survey by Bod engineers) therefore, recommended rebuilding the system. Involved was a shortening of the total lineal miles - more secondary lines to serve the local interior cities - and a new monorail track system with sufficient electric power to carry up to 12 cars.

As World War II unexpectedly deteriorated for Germany proper after 1943, communications with the interior Germans increased via conventional aircraft and the tunnel system. Sometime in 1941 the

subterranean German settlements invited their surface brothers to help modernize the tunnel system according to the earlier decision, and to expedite use of its facility in case they had to relocate their emigrants to the interior. Unable to await reconstruction of the tunnel system and its train then nicknamed "the space elevator," hordes of defeated Germans in 1944 began coming through the Brazil corridor via the tunnel to their new homes below.

Germans were questioned recently about the attitude of the interior Germans toward those surface Germans defeated in World War II who relocated underground. They described the relationship as somewhat parallel to the British/American wartime relationship: "England, the older Anglo-Saxon race,  was in trouble, and America, a brother offshoot came to her rescue." German sources for the underworld reports were also asked by the authors if the old Six Kingdoms of interior Germans or the   Bods would amalgamate with Hitler's new arrivals. "Not so," said the German sources. Each of the interior Germanys continues to value its strong nationalistic pride which none will surrender. The peaceful political tone has been long established and ingrained in the Bod Germans and the newcomers are expected to abide by these standards, the source declared.

The pair of nations could be described somewhat like the U.S.A. and Canada. Each has an English common law tradition and a stranger would not recognize any significant social or political differences between Calgary and Dallas - except for accent and nationalistic pride.

The German source went on to explain that the tunnel Germans whose forefathers began the exodus would remain economically and socially connected with the old six interior kingdoms of New Germany, but recent fraternization and trade was making differences less recognizable.

In 1943 the tunnel railway custodians named "Two World Railroad Company" were reincorporated under the "Inner Earth Railway Company." On the advice of engineers from Bodland, they sent for a famous Swiss-speaking German engineer named Karl Schneider to rebuild the tunnel on a five year contract. Schneider's vast knowledge of railway tunneling came as a result of his experience in Ruilding the Simplon Tunnel from Milan, Italy through the Alps to Srig, Switzerland and also tunneling jobs in Russia, Australia and South Africa. (On July 1, 1977, he completed the north-south tunnel under the Potomac at Washington in three months time with three additional months needed for drying and hardening of the glazed tunnel interiors. As of July, 1977, he had two more Potomac tunnels to complete under his contract with Metro.

Schneider's survey crew under the direction of Bod engineers took two years to survey the proposed rerouting of the "Inner Earth Railway Company." A total of 316 miles of new tunnels were opened by

Bod laser and drilling, often through solid rock. Many additional natural pockets were discovered and these were utilized for freight and railway transit supplies.

After survey completion, Schneider returned to the surface where he hired 5,000 Indians who were familiar with underground mine labor. Schneider also hired experienced bilingual Indian overseers in charge of illiterate Indian workers. They were transported below to quarters located in a rock pocket.

The tunnel beginnings were cut in spiral-shapes for 32 miles, where the gravity pull was unchanged from that on the surface. Below the 32 mile Earthen skin, the tunnel was changed from the spiral formation, and descended more vertically at an angle of about 32 degrees. As the Indians descended deep into the rock mantle, they were surrounded by a greater land mass and consequently were able to walk on the entire 360 degrees of inner tunnel circumference and not fall.

They therefore were unaware that they were employed on a project that was going from the outside to the inside of the Earth's mantle and believed, as they had been told, that they were in a mine digging for gold. Correcting the tunnel at the interior side of the Earth's mantle required another spiral 32 miles from the interior surface. (HypotheticaUy, a stone dropped from the upper surface into a hole would fall straight through the planet's entire mantle, eventually spiralling to a point mid- way in the mantle, where it would cling to the side of the descending hole or tunnel in the mantle.) The tunnel was finished in 1948, and as a sidelight, Schneider moved enough gold from the project to pay all his expenses. Meanwhile,   as new tunneling progressed, the trains continued to carry German emigrants to the interior of the Earth, landing them in the continent of Agharta, where the original German colonists had first settled. Innerworld surface trains and boats then took the emigrants to their new locale inside the Earth's interior in the southern hemisphere.

Trains upbound from inner earth and downbound from outer earth follow the regular falling gravity norm and use breaks and gears until point zero gravity is reached, midway in the mantle. Then, on the second half of their journey, the electric power source is used to ascend.

As the tunnel was drilled and allowed to cool, the monorail system now in use was incrementally installed. Upon completion of the tunnels, new electric trains were brought in from Germany capable of pulling 12 cars. The power source originates at a South Pole generating station inside the earth; the actual source being solar energy coming through the South Pole entrance. The train rides on a double flanged bottom wheel over a single energized rail. The top of the train is held in place by another double flanged wheel gliding under a top rail.

The made-in-Germany round wing planes also had to prove their capabilities quickly. Demands to relocate personnel and equipment were soon begun, using the new planes. After the German equipment and tools for continuing the manufacture of the round wing planes had been removed to the earth's interior via the South Pole entrance, the five planes were put into international service operating from secret bases in South America. The first industrial task started below was to build a foundry, and the second endeavor was a factory for production of a 120 foot diameter round wing freighter, a model which the Germans had tested in 1942.

The test flight of the first round wing freighter made in New Germany was completed in 1946. The giant UFO's first job was to fly to America and haul back six caterpillar machines. German buyers had purchased the machines in Detroit and shipped these earth movers and their spare parts by train to New Orleans. Then, under cover of darkness, the "caterpillars" were taken on low-boy trailers to a

remote farm where they were loaded on the huge, round wing freighter. Piloted by Captain Erie Von  Schusnick, the round wing plane took off to Brazil to onload other accessories and tools. On the second day after leaving the New Orleans area, and stopping over for 36 hours in a hidden Amazon airfield, the freighter landed in New Berlin and discharged its first cargo.

In much the same manner, the fleet of smaller German round wing planes picked up such equipment as turret lathes, shapers, milling machines, cranes, etc., from secret locations in German and American depots. The American goods bought by Germans prior to war's end were purchased by their New York office for shipment to Rio de Janeiro, but often were moved out of America by round wing planes   landing in sparsely inhabited desert areas. These goods were paid for by check from Swiss Banks in New York, where German gold was stored by the New York Trading Company.

In late 1944 and early 1945, the Germans also shipped many trainloads of supplies to Spain to be lifted by the round wing planes or loaded on new super subs and older-class subs nicknamed "sea cows" for eventual delivery up the Amazon to interior ports. These subs were eventually scuttled at the war's end.

Another priority below was for tool and die making and foundry work. Each machine required was shipped below by round wing plane in order to resume the various capital projects including a fleet of  round wing planes and other defense priority needs. In 1946, exploration teams in the interior had located excellent deposits of iron, copper and aluminum and these were now used in the foundry. Wooden products including finished plywood were shipped down from Brazil via the tunnel.

In the first few months of operation in 1944 and 1945, the Germans had proven the round wing plane

was superior to any conventional aircraft and would become the actual workhorse and front line military aircraft of the world by the year 2000. But in 1945, the total reality of the German evacuation had not  been fathomed. The only clues of which the allies were certain were that masses of Germans, including Hitler had disappeared.

Hitler, after debarking from his submarine, had arrived in Argentina by way of a routing through Columbia and Brazil. His trip was deliberately unhurried until initial preparations and housing were ready below in New Berlin. King Haakkuuss of Bodland sent his personal space ship to Argentina to bring Hitler below. Upon arrival in the capital of Bodland, Hitler was told authoritatively the peaceful conditions of residence by which he and his subjects must abide in their new land. Hitler re-affirmed his acceptance pledge in what would ultimately lead him into an untried life of human co-existence.

Upon arrival King Haakkuuss told Hitler: "We have permitted you to emigrate because you will serve as the catalyst by which New Germany will be reborn. Your good ideas you should keep and develop.

The bad must be eradicated. The hateful aspects of your character must never assert themselves here

below and notwithstanding your heinous record of evil to fellow mankind, we believe you can channel your drive into a positive direction as a national leader." The king added, "But your Nazi cronies from above like Borman, Himmler, Goering, etc. can never come below. We (the Bods) will personally scrutinize each arrival." He concluded: "It will take three generations to correct your (Hitler's) past mistakes in wrongfully indoctrinating German youth, and six generations will be required to bury completely the national instincts of aggressive and wasteful war."

In 1945 and 1946, American OSS agents began closing their net on the Quito, Peru area. Here the Germans were seen departing for the interior via the Inner World Railway. The American observers were confronted now by a different German than those who had left Europe weeks or months before. Now the Americans and other international agents, including the British and Canadians, ran into confident Germans who revealed openly their true Teutonic character. But they were still secretive about their reasons for being in that part of the world. Camps of Germans were hidden in Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, British Guiana and other outlying areas. These Germans were emerging when called to take the last train ride to their new homeland. Skills and professions needed below were sent down in the first trains available while those of top priority were flown through the South Pole entrance in German or Bod round wing planes. Eventually 2-1/2 million Germans settled below. In 1944-45 alone, combined methods of transportation including the railroad and round wing planes carried over 200,000 Germans below. No annual census was taken, but the population expansions into the interior increased yearly. By 1948, German girls from the homeland began arriving and marrying  their sweethearts. Families whose husbands had gone below in the first waves were also reunited by various methods and routings. When completed in 1948, the "Space Elevator" was carrying up to 3,600 passengers weekly, most traveling down. Schedules ran three times weekly each way.

In 1948 the new train schedule made six stops for food, beverage and lodging, traveling up to 300 miles per hour in between stations, and traversing the entire distance in less than a 24 hour period. Scores of smaller inner tunnel communities were built up in newly discovered pockets and these new communities were served by interior based, local trains which never surfaced. In 1978, three to five car trains only  300 to 500 passengers weekly, the remaining cars being filled with freight and commodities.

A large German community has grown up in the vicinity of the underground depot that once was only a hole into a cave in 1572 and for eons of time before that. Today Germans return to the surface close to Iquitos, thence to Manaus and via VARIG Airways fly to Rio de Janeiro. From there they travel by PanAm to San Juan, Puerto Rico or Lisbon, Portugal and then by plane or train to Germany.

Currently, many of these interior Germans are coming back to the surface to retire in their homeland.  

Some of the Germans also elect to retire in various South American countries or the United States, Canada, Britain and Spain rather than go to their old homelands in communist held East Germany.

In 1946 while the Bods strictly supervised the building of a rninimal aerial, navy and land force to be used only for New Germany's national police protection and defense, a setback occurred which was to test their survival. It was from an unexpected source.

On July 12, 1946, Interworld Radar picked up an airborne invasion - bogies coming from the north. The New Germans knew an enemy might attack them from either the large 1,400 mile North Pole opening which the Russians had used, or the South Pole entrance. But the Germans were psychologically unprepared for this particular confrontation. The bogies were not airplanes or rockets sent down from their former surface enemies. They were round wing planes.

The old, inner world Viking race to the north had been watching the Germans grow in strength. Disliking what they saw in this militaristic action on the part of the new inhabitants of the interior of the earth, and aware of Nazi occupation of Norway and Denmark, the Vikings attacked the new Germans. The German defense was to be their first attempt to defend their new land.

Radar picked up the Viking round wing planes moving southward toward New Berlin and New Hamburg at 5,000 miles per hour, from a northern city in Vikingland called Kupenhaggen (population 3,000,000). A red alert was sounded and five German UFO's, the first ones made in upper Germany before surrender, took to the air.

The aerial vanguards of the 12 million Viking nation on the continent called Vikingland had challenged the small 300,000 fledgling German nation. The aerial battle had lasted sporadically for several hours when the Atlanteans (Atturians) delivered an ultimatum to the Vikings that if they didn't stop the attack, the Atlantean craft would join the fray and cut up the Vikings with advanced lasers. The Atlanteans reassured the Vikings that the Germans must be made welcome inasmuch as they were making unclaimed arid land productive. The New Atlanteans further told the Vikings that the New Germans (related to the Vikings) in peacetime were the most productive people on the face of the upper earth - but in war could be the most destructive. Finally, the Atlantean ambassador to the Vikings stated: "Let the newly arrived Germans live among us in peace! We don't want the war from above renewed below."

Unbeknownst to the combatants or to the Atlanteans (Atturians) the Bodlanders who had been grievously watching the unexpected Inner World beginnings of a war, moved in with their own round

wing planes. Moving ahead and above the advancing Viking formation, the Bod craft repeatedly threw out what appeared to be a solid force field. The oncoming Viking craft, unaware of the invention, struck the barriers and were turned back. The beginning of a war of attrition was stopped. (As far as is known the above account is the first mention of the Bod's involvement in preventing the New Germans and the Vikings widening that aerial confrontation in the Inner World.)

But the New Germans had no sooner tested their combatant abilities against the Vikings within the

Earth, when an old foe from above began to stir.