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Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

It's like taking candy away from a baby. The candy's no good for the kid, but it will take him many years and much learning to realize the favor you did for him. In the meantime he'll whine about how mean you were and how wrong it was to do that. But when he's a healthy adult, because of the very thing you took away, he may actually develop the judgment and wisdom to thank you for what you did. In any case, he'll be much healthier.

So too with beliefs. If you believe in magic, that some special phrase will keep you safe from harm in all situations and even immunize you from death, you can't help but fail to perceive the true reality of the world before your eyes - that all things must pass, even though subtle aspects of us may journey onward through our offspring.

It's a beautiful system when you think about it, one that governs every living thing in the known universe. And every living thing is more than satisfied with it - in fact, prospers in its vital joy because of it - except one. Us.

Humans, normally very discerning in every aspect of their infinitely varied lives, possess absolutely no standards at all when it comes to one subject - death. It is often said that instinct is stronger than reason, and in all the realms of human endeavor, nowhere is this more evident than in the amusingly inventive strategies humans develop to pretend they don't really die.

The second most common human trait after survival is the urge to prosper and be secure, so it should come as no surprise that, very early on in our history, perceptive and enterprising people, upon recognizing this universal human need to deny that we die, rushed to develop and market products that satisfied the public demand to alleviate this fear. Every culture ever known to man left significant traces of this spiritual commerce.

You know the argument. Can we live our lives and accept that nothing follows? Or must we deceive ourselves and invent, with the power of our infinite imaginations, a way past this daunting wall of mortality. Well, the answer's in, and the human species has clearly opted for the unprovable hope. But exactly what is the price of this willful self-deception?

This is no attempt to demean many thousands of years of honest effort by sincere people to distill lessons essential to healthy living into practical codes of conduct that reinforce the cause of harmony and provide useful paths to peace of mind. But given the nature of our affliction, of the terror of death we all have that needs to be repressed for our own tranquility, it is not difficult to understand how those who wield these secret formulas for happiness might just be tempted to exploit them for their own selfish purposes. It's called the temptation of power, and I don't think I need to explain it to you.

Furthermore, given that this problem has a higher priority than any other we face in our entire lives, and also that to each of us, the effectiveness of the cure is far more important than the actual legitimacy of the method, this leaves us - as we know from history - with a situation ripe for exploitation.

Lastly, there is the little matter of actually knowing the secrets of the universe. This we consign to the province of priests, and we pay them to make us happy, to make up a story that ties up all these loose, bleak ends which we don't want to think about. But what if these beliefs hurt us in ways we don't realize. Even as they may make us comfortable with simple tales that magically explain everything, do we really understand what the concepts of communion and resurrection really mean in terms of how we relate to our neighbors and our world? What is the danger when logic is subsumed by the magic of religious belief?

First, we must understand the process by which people think.

There is alluring evidence that ancient cultures actually possessed much more realistic religions than our own contemporary society. And they were developed by studying the sky. During the day, it was obvious that all life depended on the beneficent properties of the Sun. And during the fearful night, humans studied the stars for their cues to survival, and projected their own thoughts onto these phenomena. These two things form the basis of all existing religions, according to Acharya S.

How do people think? We anthropomorphize everything. It is how we learned to understand things. We talk to our plants and our stuffed animals. We give them names. Thus is it has always been, with all perceived phenomena. This is how stars became people, or at least animals. From Amun Ra, piloting his boat of heaven across the sky all those centuries ago, to the Great Bear, whom we still see every night.

The Sun became Krishna. The moon Inanna. Their setting and disappearance created new gods reborn daily, or monthly or yearly. They all got names, different ones, depending on where you lived. Osiris. Tammuz. Orpheus. Mithra. Millions of names. Millennia passed. One day, after thousands of years of war and peace, of fighting and loving, of civilizations rising and falling, suddenly, after a Roman conclave of regional movers and shakers, the approved deity's name became Jesus. And he was still the Sun, and his disciples were the stars (the twelve signs of the Zodiac, actually).

Or so Acharya says, and I believe her. Why? Because it's logical. It's actual history. And though still myth, it is empirical rather than manipulative, a causative explanation rather than the magic trick of some unfathomable man who showed up one day and claimed he was God to people who wrote it all down and put it in a book called the Bible.

That's the short version. The long version is two thousand years of suppressed scholarship, kept secret because it simply didn't gibe with the propaganda organized religions produce to attract and addict adherents to their own particular interpretation of cosmic events and everyday life. But this more scientific explanation has always been out there, and reasonable, thinking people, who aren't blinded by their own fear and cowed by their own self-inflicted spiritual gurus, have always known about it.

And Acharya S. has gathered it, folded it neatly and logically into two encyclopedic volumes of scholarly excellence. These are titled "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" (1999) and "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" (2004). Both are published by Adventures Unlimited Press.

Look at the world today. Endless wars, festering hatreds, a multitude of government lies telling us the world is one way when we suspect that's not really the way it is. We should listen to our own voices and not blindly accept the smug statements of "authority" figures. How did we learn to do that? Guess. Just take a wild guess.

This story is not about taking your God away. Only an idiot would insist that men created the sunset, the orbits of the planets, or baby drool. This story is about analyzing the terminology you use to explain the way you see your life and the universe. And most of all, it is about the lies we have been told to keep us in our mental chains while those who control us - our preachers, priests, rabbis, mullahs, lamas and other assorted "holy" men - reinforce fear, abet slaughter, and profit mightily from the conspicuous lies that they promote as sacred gospel.

Sorry to be so blunt. You need to pay attention to this. The future of human society depends on your understanding what you are reading at this moment, and even that is kind of an understatement.

To our contemporary Christianized Western minds, the most astonishing thing Acharya S. proves beyond doubt in her two scholarly tomes is that the much-revered personality known as Jesus Christ is a completely contrived fictional character, and that Christianity has no substance whatsoever that was not stolen - created whole cloth out of pagan myths and traditions - from many of the world's more ancient religions.

How does she prove this?

• By telling you about the many other "saviors" who existed prior to the creation of Jesus, many of whom were born in late December of virgin mothers and were of divine origin, most of whom performed miracles, held high morals, healed the sick, were the catalysts for salvation, were called "Savior" or "Redeemer," and were crucified; whose legends all contain elements that were later plagiarized by unscrupulous Roman plutocrats when they got together to construct the Jesus myth as a method to usurp and unify preexisting creeds to better control their diverse and obstreperous masses.

• By analyzing all the contributions of known writers of that ancient time, through decades of study of the works of skeptical historians who have been researching this hoax for centuries, and observing that virtually none of these early historians ever mentions Christ or Christians, except for the works of a special few, and deeper analysis reveals these works to have been tinkered with, or outright fabricated, for the benefit of the manipulative politicians who created the most powerful mindlock human society has ever known.

• And by providing a detailed and accurate portrait of the actual evolution of religious myth, with a clear explanation of how all messiahs are merely anthropomorphic representations of the Sun, and how all the other mythological supporting characters, particularly when they are described in groups of 12, are merely personalities projected onto the stars.

This, not the debunking of the Jesus myth, is the overarching value of the book, and makes Acharya, in my sincere estimation, the ranking religious philosopher of our age, simply because she cuts through the sanctimonious crap and deals empirically and forthrightly with the facts.

But more than that, in this age of deliberate disinformation and mass mind control, the works of Acharya provide those who wish to think deeply about the nature of the human condition with a startling survey of priestly misbehavior and deliberate deception, which is what religion really is - a magic show that exploits people's need for answers to unanswerable questions.

As such, her works furnish us with an essential tool to help us understand why we are powerless against an onslaught of facile mass media that keep telling us things we know are not true. What the state does the church first perfected with threats, violence, and forcing us to believe in our inmost hearts things that were never true.

But it's the Jesus argument that gets everybody's attention.

Or, as Acharya puts it, " ... there is no evidence for the historicity of the Christian founder, that the earliest Christian proponents were as a whole either utterly credulous or astoundingly deceitful, and that said ‘defenders of the faith' were compelled under incessant charges of fraud to admit that Christianity was a rehash of older religions."

Let's start with legendary figures of far greater antiquity whose attributes appear to uncannily resemble the much later legend known as Jesus Christ.

"The Jesus story incorporated elements from the tales of other deities recorded in this widespread area of the ancient world, including several of the following world saviors, most or all of whom predate the Christian myth," Acharya writes.

These include (and I'll edit this list, because it's very long)

• Adad and Marduk of Assyria.

• Adonis, Aesclepius, Apollo, Dionysus, Heracles, and Zeus of Greece.

• Alcides of Thebes, divine redeemer born of a virgin around 1200 BCE.

• Attis of Phyrgia.

• Baal or Bel of Babylon/Phoenicia.

• Buddha and Krishna of India.

• Hermes of Egypt/Greece.

• Hesus of the Druids.

• Horus, Osiris, and Serapis of Egypt.

• Indra of Tibet/India.

• Ieo of China.

• Issa of Arabia, born of the Virgin Mary in 400 BCE.

• Jupiter/Jove of Rome.

• Mithra of Persia/India.

• Odin/Wodin/Woden/Wotan of Scandinavia.

• Prometheus of Caucasus/Greece.

• Quetzalcoatl of Mexico.

• Salivahana of southern India, "who was a divine child, born of a virgin, and son of a carpenter."

• Tammuz of Syria, the savior god worshipped in Jerusalem.

• Thor of the Gauls.

• Zoroaster of Persia.

Attis of Phrygia was born on December 25 of the Virgin Nana, and considered the savior who was slain for the salvation of mankind. His body as bread was eaten by his worshippers. He was crucified on a tree, descended into the underworld and was resurrected annually on March 25 as the "most high god," many centuries before Christianity was invented.

Buddha was born on December 25 of the virgin Maya, and his birth was accompanied by a special star, wise men and angels. He was baptized in water with the holy ghost present. He was resurrected and will return in the "latter days" to judge all men. His legends extend back more than a thousand years before Christ.

The Greek god of wine was actually a savior (as any drinker will tell you). Dionysus, born of a virgin, who rode in a triumphal procession on an ass, is considered by some scholars as the prototype of Christ.

The real model for all saviors, according to Acharya, was the Egyptian god Osiris. Quoting Barbara Walker, from "The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" (Harpers, 1983):

Of all the savior gods worshipped at the beginning of the Christian era, Osiris may have contributed more details to the evolving Christ figure than any other. Already very old in Egypt, Osiris was identified with nearly every other Egyptian god and was on the way to absorbing them all. He had well over 200 divine names. He was called the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, God of Gods. He was the Resurrection and the Life, the Good Shepherd, Eternity and Everlastingness, "the god who made men and women to be born again." (Sir Wallis) Budge (once the preeminent Egyptologist) says, "From first to last, Osiris was to the Egyptians the god-man who suffered, and died, and rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven. They believed that they would inherit eternal life, just as he had done ...

Some claim Osiris lived up to 22,000 years ago. Acharya writes:

As Col. James Churchward naively exclaims, "The teachings of Osiris and Jesus are wonderfully alike. Many passages are identically the same, word for word."

Acharya also exhaustively compares the details of Krishna and Mithra, as well as Prometheus, Quetzalcoatl, and Serapis. The reader soon begins to realize that all these stories the same. Conclusion?

It is evident that Jesus Christ is a mythical character based on these various ubiquitous godmen and universal saviors who were part of the ancient world for thousands of years prior to the Christian era.

Now, once you realize that, you know you have to prepare for the onslaught of true believers, who, when you mention that Jesus was a fictional character, are going to come at you with every verbal weapon they have retained during their misguided and propagandized lives.

The Bible is not a valid historical document. It is work of political and philosophical propaganda, designed to deceive and control, and take advantage of people's need to have answers to questions that really have no answers, as far as human perception is concerned.

Often, fundamentalist Christians try to cite classical historical sources to buttress their unshakable belief that Jesus resurrected and (according to George Bush and the neocons) will return one day to blow up Jerusalem and lead his followers to a pleasant destination in the sky.

This may be the most valuable aspect of Acharya's work. She considers the name of every known historian of the period and explains why what Christian fanatics insist they said can't possibly be accurate.

Using thousands of footnotes from serious scholars over the many centuries, Acharya deftly explains all the revisions, interpolations and forgeries that allow some of the diehard faithful to argue that there actually is historical evidence of the existence of Jesus - when in fact there is not.

All the great first century historians - Pliny the Elder and Younger, Suetonius, Dio Chrysostom, Livy, Petronius, Plutarch, Seneca and many others whose works are still extant - never make any mention of the founder of Christianity.

Even though he lived in Jerusalem during the time Jesus was supposed to have existed, the well-known Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria never mentions Christ or Christianity even once. Acharya quotes religious scholar John Remsburg about Philo:

He was there when the crucifixion with its attendant earthquake, supernatural darkness, and resurrection of the dead took place, and in the presence of many witnesses ascended into heaven. These marvelous events which must have filled the world with amazement, had they really occurred, were unknown to him.

The well-traveled Philo had pleaded the Jewish cause in Rome, knew of Pilate, the Essenes and the Therapeuts, yet never once mentioned Jesus or Christians.

As Acharya surmised: "One would think that if ... Jesus had suddenly appeared in Philo's homeland, during his life, when he was a sentient adult, Philo would not only have noticed but would have jumped for joy, and written reams about the glorious event, seeing the promises and prophecies of Israel fulfilled. It could not be more obvious that nothing of the sort happened during Philo's lifetime."

But most Christian apologists don't even know about Philo. The one historian they most often use to legitimize their claims that Jesus Christ was an actual historical personage is Flavius Josephus. And Acharya devotes a considerable amount of space demolishing those claims.

Josephus (37-95 CE) is the most famous Jewish historian of the time. Acharya writes:

... in the entire work of Josephus, which constitute many volumes of great detail encompassing centuries of history, there is no mention of Paul or the Christians, and there are only two brief paragraphs that purport to relate to Jesus. Although much has been made of these "references," they have been dismissed by scholars and Christian apologists alike as forgeries ...

Many scholars investigating the matter believe that single mention of Jesus in all of the works Josephus was forged - interpolated - centuries later by an unscrupulous Christian named Bishop Eusebius.

In her second book, Acharya recounts the analysis of Bible expert Dr. Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768):

Mattathias, the father of Josephus, must have been a witness to the miracles which are said to have been performed by Jesus, and Josephus was born within two years after the crucifixion, yet in all the works he says nothing whatever about the life or death of Jesus Christ; as for the interpolated passage it is now universally acknowledged to be a forgery.

But perhaps the most curious episode Acharya covers involves the Roman historian Tacitus, whose oft-cited passage about Nero persecuting the Christians is revealed as a fraud. And that leads to an interesting story so typical of the questionable construction of the Christian myth.

It seems that this particular mention by Tacitus, who lived in the first century CE, does not appear in literature until the 15th century, because numerous scholars have noted that not even the most ardent Christian apologists ever mentioned it until then. But that's not the worst part.

Perhaps the quintessential bogus reproduction of a classical source for devious Christian purposes resides the famous passage in "The Annals" by Tacitus that describes Nero blaming Christians for the burning of Rome. Unfortunately for the Roman church's propaganda machine, numerous experts have deduced that since neither Eusebius nor Tertullian nor any of the other devoted church fathers knew of the existence of this passage - because they surely would have mentioned it because it was so vividly sympathetic to their cause - it is likely that this entire book - The Annals of Tacitus, which is a staple of some classical libraries - is a 15th century forgery about a 1st century event meant to improve the nonexistent historical veracity of the Christian church.

But the history of real religion, ah, that's a different and happier story. Acharya quotes Indian scholar S. B. Roy from his "Prehistoric Lunar Astronomy":

To the ancients ... heaven was the land of gods and mystery. The sky - the Dyaus of the Rig Veda - was itself living. The stars were the abodes of the gods. The shining stars were indeed themselves luminous gods. Astronomy was the knowledge of not of heavenly bodies, but of heavenly beings.

"Astronomical or astrotheological knowledge reaches back to the dawn of humanity, appearing widespread and becoming highly developed over a period of millennia," Acharya writes, and after a thorough examination of the subject, concludes:

The church fathers and other Christian writers also acknowledged this astrotheology and its antiquity, but denigrated it as much as possible. Why? ... the knowledge about astrotheology would reveal the Christians' own religion to be Pagan in virtually every significant aspect .... the restoration of this knowledge is not to be despaired but rejoiced.

Summation:

The Christian religion - as well as its monotheistic cousins, Judaism and Islam - are all based on primitive vestiges from a dim past that certainly most of their adherents do not adequately understand and doubtless many of its top officials do not comprehend, either. These are cannibalism and child sacrifice.

The tangent to cannibalism can be clearly seen in the act of Holy Communion, in which the faithful are urged to swallow "the body of Christ." The example of child sacrifice occurs in the myth of "God" supposed sending his only son into the corporeal realm only to be tortured and murdered. This has always sounded to me like deep cover conditioning to indoctrinate believing dupes into being willing to die, or sending their children off to die, for their blessed country.

I don't know of any literature that adequately analyzes the psychological ramifications of these two symbolically barbaric acts. But I do know that billions of people have participated in these crazed rituals and based their lives on the veneration of them. And we see too clearly the results of the belief paradigm in the senseless murder of billions over the century generated by the blind and savage faith in this supposedly holy cause.

Though there are infinite examples, the two that initially come to mind are the centuries of slaughter in the Western hemisphere by Spanish conquistadores and British pioneers who regarded different-looking fellow humans as mere animals eligible for thoughtless extermination. And now, there are the perverse rape- murders of innocent Iraqis by drug-addled and uranium-poisoned American, British and Israeli heroes. Same ballgame, different day - every single bit of it directly attributable to this bloodthirsty Judeo-Christian legacy.

And I also know one other important thing in these matters. When you live your life convinced that reality is a certain way and base your life on it, your life will turn out to be exactly what you believe. I believe there is a direct connection between the great Christian lie that you will survive death if you do what the priest says, and the everpresent reality of violence in the world.

The church teaches you to believe in the infallibility of what its leaders say, and to follow their orders no matter what, or you will roast in the fires of hell. History shows us, clearly, that no matter what denomination, the church fathers have lied terribly and caused billions of needless deaths. This lying, sanctimoniously emulated by government leaders - be they kings or presidents - has transferred this supernatural authority to the secular realm, and allowed our leaders to dupe their populations into endless killing for what our leaders said was right, but for what were ultimately deceitful reasons because they were based on deliberate lies. Just like the Christian religion, and its monotheistic cousins.

The population's willingness to believe these lies relates directly to what their holy men told them - believe this, or you will suffer in hell for eternity.

What you believe is what you become, and this attitude engendered by the Christian church and its maniacal monotheistic counterparts have, with their transparent lies that have been swallowed by millions of gullible people, lived up to the impotent threats of their insincere promises by creating hell on earth to convince you that they are right.

This holy mindlock has never been more obvious - nor more lethal - than it is today, in the year 2005, in which a despotic U.S. president who insists he talks to God has killed and is killing hundreds of thousands people all over the world, for reasons that anyone with a whit of sense knows are lies.

The two voluminous, solidly referenced works of the woman known only as Acharya S - "The Christ Conspiracy" and "Suns of God" - provide a valuable first step for many bewildered believers who have come to disbelieve the doubletalk of their religious leaders in detoxifying the self-deceptive misinformation that most of us have been bombarded with throughout our lives.

This knowledge has always been known, but it has been suppressed by the spin machine that organized religion, conferring its corrupt grace on tyrants for centuries, has always censored. The real picture of our misguided Christian believer was probably best expressed by St. Augustine himself all those long and agonizing years ago, in this passage recounted by Acharya S:

... one of the most famed and respected Christian doctors was St. Augustine, who "stakes his eternal salvation" on his assertion that he preached the gospel to "a whole nation of men and women, who had no heads, but had their eyes in their bosoms."

• • •

Footnote: Just who exactly is Acharya S and why is she so hard to find? Really, it's because of the persecution she has been forced to endure because of her work. Right now, not even her publisher knows where she is. She has gone underground after several unpleasant incidents during the past few years, one of which was the kidnapping of her son, a crime that was happily resolved after some period of intense stress that may have involved a well-known New Age guru.

A study in contradictions, Acharya S is obviously a nom de plume for an archeologist, historian, mythologist and linguist who has the qualifications, courage, and integrity to so professionally and thoroughly debunk the collective religious spin machine. But to talk to Acharya S is markedly different than reading her work, about the like the difference between a biker chick and a college professor, leading some to speculate if the rough-edged radical and the creator of the meticulously argued and scholarly tomes which bear her name are actually the same person.

Nevertheless, her two meticulously footnoted books present the lay reader and professional historian alike with a stark assessment of the outright lies the Christian church has told about its namesake. You can order the books from http://www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com/ or find out more about Acharya at http://truthbeknown.com/

If you read these books, it's extremely doubtful you'll ever go to church again. And if you do, you must carry with you the reverberating question: What happens to you when you know that what you have believed in the deepest recesses of your own heart is false?

All this time, in the name of a bogus magic formula stolen from others and renamed with lie upon lie, billions have been slaughtered, and billions more about to be. Open your eyes, for the real God's sake, for the beauty of this universe that gives us life, that does not distinguish between man or beast, but gives everything that breathes this exquisite gift, with only one, single string attached - a string attached to everything that lives.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida and writes essays seen on hundreds of websites around the world. These stories have been collected into two anthologies, "America's Autopsy Report" and "The Perfect Enemy." In addition, "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001," is a 48-page booklet written for those who still believe the government's phony version of the events of that tragic day. For information on his books, check out
http://www.johnkaminski.com/

A manuscript containing the oldest known Biblical New Testament in the world is set to enter the digital age and become accessible online.

A team of experts from the UK, Europe, Egypt and Russia is currently digitising the parchment known as the Codex Sinaiticus, believed to originally been one of 50 copies of the scriptures commissioned by Roman Emperor Constantine after he converted to Christianity.

The Bible, which is currently in the British Library in London, dates from the 4th Century.

"It is a very distinctive manuscript. No other manuscript looks like this," Scot McKendrick, the head of the Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Department in the British Library, told BBC World Service's Reporting Religion programme.

"On each very large page, about 14-16 inches (34-37cm). It has a Greek text written in four columns.

"That's the really distinct feature of it - layers of text - it's one of the fascinating aspects of it and it shows us how the Biblical text developed over a certain period, how it was interpreted in those crucial early years of Christianity."

Stolen

The digitising project is particularly significant because of the rarity and importance of the manuscript.

The original document is so precious that it has only been seen by four scholars in the last 20 years.

The Codex Sinaiticus contains the whole of the Christian Bible; specifically, it has the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, as well as the Greek Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, which includes books now regarded as apocrypha.

It is named after the place it was written, the monetary of Saint Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, set beneath the mountain where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments.

It remained there until the middle of the 19th Century when a visiting German scholar, Constantin von Tischendorf, took parts of it away to Germany and Russia. To this day, the monastery officially regards it as stolen.

In total the codex is now in four portions, the largest of which - 347 of the 400 pages - is that at the British Library. The rest are split between Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, and the monastery.

Free website

All four institutions are co-operating to digitise the entire text, as well as using hyperspectral imaging to photograph it, in order to find any hidden or erased text.

"To do it also in infra-red or ultra-violet photography, as in forensics, you'll find out any hidden aspects of it as well," explained the British Library's digitisation expert Lawrence Pordez.

The British Library bought the codex from Russia for £100,000 in 1933
He added that a further advantage of using photographic of the manuscript to make a facsimile of it was that were "no chemicals involved".

"It's also faster to produce," he added.

For his part, Dr McKendrick said he estimated it would be about four years before the codex is fully available online.

This is to give time "to essentially photograph the manuscript, to conserve it, to transcribe anew the whole of the text, and to present that in a new form electronically".

The British Library will also develop a free website to present the manuscript.

The website will both "present the manuscript - just the facts as it were, the images and the transcription - but also interpret it for different audiences, from scholars right through to people who are just interested in this manuscript or in Christianity".

CHICAGO - An aging Chicago carpenter should be stripped of his U.S. citizenship because he was a member of a police unit that helped the Nazis round up Ukrainian Jews for forced labor and death camps during World War II, federal attorneys argue.

"He acquiesced in conduct contrary to civilization and decency," government attorney Gregory Gordon told U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan as a civil trial against Osyp Firishchak began Monday.

Firishchak, 86, came to the United States after World War II, settled in Chicago and obtained American citizenship. But the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations says he lied on his visa application and broke other rules.

The government says he joined the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and helped in widespread roundups of Jews who were sent to forced labor camps and death camps after the Germans occupied Ukraine in 1941.

If Der-Yeghiayan rules against him, Firishchak would be stripped of his citizenship. The government then likely would seek to deport him.

Defense attorney James Maher III told the judge that Firishchak was never a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and that there is no proof he did any of the things the government claims. Maher also said there is nothing to suggest Firishchak was dishonest on his visa application.

The government's first witness, Holocaust researcher Dieter Pohl, described what happened to the Jewish population in the city of Lviv at the hands of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

"There was constant violence against the Jews," Pohl said.

Firishchak's name of surfaced after the fall of the Soviet Union when the newly independent Ukraine opened its archives to Holocaust researchers.

Government attorneys acknowledged they have only a smattering of direct evidence that specific acts allegedly were committed by Firishchak. But they say they can prove he was part of the auxiliary police throughout the war and that the unit was instrumental in carrying out the Holocaust in Ukraine.

RACINE, Wis. -- Two government lawyers knocked at the door of a brick, ranch-style house here two years ago and, getting no answer, wandered around back. There they found an old man sitting alone on a patio chair. He wore a cap to shield himself from the afternoon sun. He noticed that one of the lawyers was pregnant, and he cleaned off another chair. Sit down, he said.

Josias Kumpf had been living in the United States for nearly half a century. He had been an American citizen for 40 years. He had married, raised five children and worked for 35 years stuffing sausage at a factory in Chicago. Retired and a widower, his health failing, he was living at his daughter's home in Racine.

His visitors were prosecutors from the Justice Department. They had come to inquire about his immigration status. There was a more urgent matter too, but before they could get to it, they recalled, Kumpf, 80, laughed out loud. He knew why they were there. Without prompting, he snapped them a "Sieg Heil'' salute. They talked for more than an hour, and Kumpf signed a four-page, 17-point, handwritten sworn statement that the lawyers drafted right there on the patio.

Yes, he had been a "soldier for Hitler.'' Yes, he had served in the feared Nazi SS corps and stood sentry over Jewish prisoners as an SS Death's Head guard in concentration camps in Poland.

But, he added, "I have nothing to hide. I don't do nothing to nobody. My fingers are clean.''

In May, Kumpf became the 100th former Nazi successfully prosecuted by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations. A federal judge in Milwaukee ordered his citizenship revoked and, should his appeals fail, Kumpf will be deported.

The Justice unit was formed in 1979 to identify, hunt down and remove former Nazis who came into the United States after World War II. With a staff of lawyers and historians, the office found Kumpf after matching newfound Axis records and SS muster rolls with U.S. immigration documents.

In all such cases, federal officials are racing the clock. Just as America's WWII veterans are dying, so are those who fought on the other side. And so too are the concentration camp survivors who might be able to identify their persecutors.

As memories fade, accounts of individual atrocities become murky. So it may never be known for sure what role Kumpf played on Nov. 3, 1943, at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland.

This much is known: Jewish prisoners had been forced to dig a network of trenches and then lie down in them, naked. Guards machine-gunned them, a hundred at a time, until thousands filled the earth. Nazis blared music from the camp loudspeakers to drown out the cries all that morning, noon and night. When it was over, up to 10,000 corpses were set ablaze.

Kumpf says that he cannot be held responsible for what happened that day. But at least one survivor of Trawniki, Vivian Chakin of Beverly Hills, Calif., scoffs.

Chakin, like Kumpf, immigrated to this country; she too became a U.S. citizen and raised a family here. But she lost her parents and her only brother in the camps. She wants Kumpf gone.

"He had a good life. He had a family,'' said Chakin, 78. "That's what all my people never had. That's what my brother never had. So why not let him feel a little bit of the suffering? Shouldn't he be punished at last?''

Kumpf and his family will not discuss his past while he is appealing the deportation order. But his story is documented in depositions, sworn statements, historical records and other papers that make up the government's case to remove him.

An ethnic German, Kumpf was born April 7, 1925, in Neu Pasua, Yugoslavia. He attended the local Lutheran church and, after less than three years in school, he quit to help his father on their small horse farm. Like most in the town of 8,000, the Kumpfs were poor. [...]

The German army marched into Neu Pasua in fall 1942. Kumpf was 17 when he was ordered to report for duty at the local train station.

Any young man not boarding the train, Kumpf said, "would be put up against the wall.'' Some tried to run, and they "were brought back before the rest of us and shot.''

Valdis O. Lumans, a German historian retained by Kumpf's lawyer, said Kumpf "certainly was not one of the enthusiastic ones. He did not volunteer. They came and took him.''

The army made Kumpf a private and gave him a gray and green SS uniform. His hat had a skull sewn on it, as did the collar of his shirt. A Nazi tattoo was etched under his left arm. He was issued firearms and trained to use a rifle, a machine pistol and a light machine gun.

For 11 months, he served as a tower guard and sentry at several camps in Germany. Thousands of prisoners arrived by truck or rail. Thousands never left.

"I watch them, how they go,'' he said. Many went to the crematoriums. "I hear they put the people in and that's all,'' Kumpf testified. "They don't come out no more, that's what I hear.'' [...]

Elizabeth B. White, chief historian for the Office of Special Investigations, said that on March 21, 1956, Kumpf applied for an immigrant visa to enter the United States. He visited the U.S. consulate in Salzburg, Austria, and stated on his application that his place of residence from 1942 to 1945 was "German Army: Germany, Poland, France.''

During Kumpf's interview, White said, "he did not disclose his service as an armed SS Death's Head guard.'' Richard Bloomfield, then the U.S. vice consul in Austria, told prosecutors the system regrettably was lax.

Although Bloomfield could not specifically recall Kumpf, he processed countless visa applications. "I wouldn't ever have anybody admit he was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp,'' Bloomfield said. "That's why they got visas. They lied. But if I knew they had been a guard in a concentration camp, usually that would be a reason to deny it.'' [...]

Kumpf received an immigrant visa and, on May 25, 1956, entered the United States via New York. He settled in Chicago, and went to work at a Vienna Sausage factory.

Eight years later, he petitioned to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Again, he listed his past as "German Army, 1942 to 1945.'' Under oath, Kumpf told a U.S. immigration examiner in Chicago that he had served only as a combat soldier. On May 9, 1964, he received a certificate of naturalization. [...]

Prosecutors already had reviewed interviews of other SS guards taken by German authorities in the 1960s, when that country was beginning to confront its past. [...]

On May 10, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee revoked Kumpf's citizenship. He ruled that Kumpf had misrepresented himself to immigration authorities. "American citizenship,'' the judge said, "is bestowed only upon those who meet fundamental standards imposed by law.'' [...]

While he waits, his fate all but out of his hands, Kumpf often has trouble sleeping, frightened awake by nightmares. For years he had hoped to keep his secret about Trawniki, and in fact he told prosecutors that he never even told his wife or children.

But now, he said, it is too late. "I'm in trouble, more in trouble'' than ever, he said.

Once upon a time, a dangerous radical gained control of the US Republican Party.

Reagan increased the budget for support of the radical Muslim Mujahidin conducting terrorism against the Afghanistan government to half a billion dollars a year.

One fifth of the money, which the CIA mostly turned over to Pakistani military intelligence to distribute, went to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a violent extremist who as a youth used to throw acid on the faces of unveiled girls in Afghanistan.

Not content with creating a vast terrorist network to harass the Soviets, Reagan then pressured the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to match US contributions. He had earlier imposed on Fahd to give money to the Contras in Nicaragua, some of which was used to create rightwing death squads. (Reagan liked to sidestep Congress in creating private terrorist organizations for his foreign policy purposes, which he branded "freedom fighters," giving terrorists the idea that it was all right to inflict vast damage on civilians in order to achieve their goals).

Fahd was a timid man and resisted Reagan's instructions briefly, but finally gave in to enormous US pressure.

Fahd not only put Saudi government money into the Afghan Mujahideen networks, which trained them in bomb making and guerrilla tactics, but he also instructed the Minister of Intelligence, Turki al-Faisal, to try to raise money from private sources.

Turki al-Faisal checked around and discovered that a young member of the fabulously wealthy Bin Laden construction dynasty, Usama, was committed to Islamic causes. Turki thus gave Usama the task of raising money from Gulf millionaires for the Afghan struggle. This whole effort was undertaken, remember, on Reagan Administration instructions.

Bin Laden not only raised millions for the effort, but helped encourage Arab volunteers to go fight for Reagan against the Soviets and the Afghan communists. The Arab volunteers included people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, a young physician who had been jailed for having been involved in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat. Bin Laden kept a database of these volunteers. In Arabic the word for base is al-Qaeda.

In the US, the Christian Right adopted the Mujahideen as their favorite project. They even sent around a "biblical checklist" for grading US congressman as to how close they were to the "Christian" political line. If a congressman didn't support the radical Muslim Muj, he or she was downgraded by the evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Reagan wanted to give more and more sophisticated weapons to the Mujahideen ("freedom fighters"). The Pakistani generals were forming an alliance with the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islam and begining to support madrasahs or hardline seminaries that would teach Islamic extremism. But even they balked at giving the ragtag Muj really advanced weaponry. Pakistan had a close alliance with China, and took advice from Beijing.

In 1985 Reagan sent Senator Orrin Hatch, Undersecretary of Defense Fred Iklé and others to Beijing to ask China to put pressure on Pakistan to allow the US to give the Muslim radicals, such as Hikmatyar, more sophisticated weapons. Hatch succeeded in this mission.

By giving the Muj weaponry like the stinger shoulderheld missile, which could destroy advanced Soviet arms like their helicopter gunships, Reagan demonstrated to the radical Muslims that they could defeat a super power.

Reagan also decided to build up Saddam Hussein in Iraq as a counterweight to Khomeinist Iran, authorizing US and Western companies to send him precursors for chemical and biological weaponry. At one point Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq to assure Saddam that it was all right if he used chemical weapons against the Iranians. Reagan had no taste in friends.

On becoming president, George H. W. Bush made a deal with the Soviets that he would cut the Mujahideen off if the Soviets would leave Afghanistan. The last Soviet troops departed in early 1989. The US then turned its back on Afghanistan and allowed it to fall into civil war, as the radical Muslim factions fostered by Washington and Riyadh turned against one another and used their extensive weaponry on each other and on civilians.

In the meantime, Saddam, whom the US had built up as a major military power, invaded Kuwait. The Bush senior administration now had to take on its former protege, and put hundreds of thousands of US troops into the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. The radical Muslim extremists with whom Reagan and Bush had allied in Afghanistan now turned on the US, objecting strenuously to a permanent US military presence in the Muslim holy land.

From 1994 Afghanistan was increasingly dominated by a faction of Mujahideen known as Taliban or seminary students (who were backed by Pakistani military intelligence, which learned the trick from Reagan and which were flush from all those billions the Reagan administration had funneled into the region). In 1996 Bin Laden came back and reestablished himself there, becoming the leader of 5,000 radical Arab volunteers that Reagan had urged Fahd to help come to Afghanistan back in the 1980s.

In the meantime, the US had steadfastly supported Israeli encroachments on the Palestinian Occupied Territories and the gradual complete annexation of Jerusalem, the third holiest city to Muslims.

Since the outbreak of the first intifada, Israeli troops had riposted with brutality. Even after the Oslo accords were signed, the size of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank and around Jerusalem doubled.

A steady drumbeat of violence against Palestinians by Israelis, who were stealing their land and clearly intended to monopolize their sacred space, enraged the Muslim radicals that had been built up and coddled by Reagan.

In 1998, al-Qaeda and al-Jihad al-Islami, two small terrorist groups established in Afghanistan as a result of the Reagan jihad, declared war on the United States and Israel (the "Zionists and Crusaders"). After attacks by al-Qaeda cells on US embassies in East Africa and on the USS Cole, nineteen of them ultimately used jet planes to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen warlords back in charge of Afghanistan's provinces, allowing Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading another old Reagan protege, Saddam's Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was "the War on Terror."

In Iraq, the US committed many atrocities, including bombing campaigns on civilian quarters of cities it had already occupied, and a ferocious assault on Fallujah, and tortured Iraqi prisoners.

In the meantime, the Bush administration put virtually no money or effort into actually combatting terrorist cells in places like Morocco, as opposed to putting $200 billion into the Iraq war and aftermath. As a result, a string of terrorist attacks were allowed to strike at Madrid, London and elsewhere.

Fred Ikle, who had been part of the Reaganist/Chinese Communist effort to convince Muslim fundamentalist generals in Pakistan--against their better judgment-- to allow the US to give the radical Muslim extremists even more sophisticated weapons, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal urging the nuking of Mecca.

Then in July, 2005, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that there was not actually any "War on Terror:" ' General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." ' (Question: Does this mean we can have the Bill of Rights back, now?)

The American Right, having created the Mujahideen and having mightily contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly announced that there was something deeply wrong with Islam, that it kept producing terrorists.

Last week, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said a "fairly substantial" U.S. troop withdrawal could begin by next spring.

At the same time, Iraq's U.S.-backed interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, during Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad, called for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from the country.

And last month, 82 Iraqi parliamentarians called for the U.S. withdrawal. But there was no media coverage.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed that his visit to Baghdad was aimed at urging Iraqi politicians to finalize the country's constitution which the U.S. says could lead to a viable national government, which might allow it to pull out some of its forces, pleasing the American public and lessening pressures on U.S. troops.

It seems that the Bush administration has finally realized the growing domestic opposition to what is increasingly seen as a failed war.

Republicans fear that the turmoil in Iraq and rising U.S. casualties may hurt them severely in the 2008 elections. They want to distract, divide and deflate the American and the international anti-war opinion.

They decided to withdraw some U.S. forces this winter or spring, but at the same time they are looking for a way to stay.

The Bush administration is taking a great risk. The U.S.-led Iraqi "security forces" cannot defeat the Iraqi resistance alone. As the U.S. begins withdrawal steps, the Iraqi forces may become even weaker in morale. If Iraq falls into the hands of the resistance will the U.S. intensify its air war instead of ground troops?

The Pentagon's strategic plan for Iraq calls for establishing four major air bases from which U.S. mobile, rapid-reaction units and air power will permanently control the country and the entire oil-rich Middle East.

Imperial Britain once followed the same plan in Iraq.

Under the plan, about 200,000 U.S.-led Iraqi "sepoys" (native forces) and police will maintain order in urban areas, supported by a strong secret police force.

The whole strategy depends on the ability of the U.S. army to field reliable Iraqi security forces to defend the U.S.-run regime. Otherwise, even a partial U.S. pullout will be impossible.

Vice-President Dick Cheney's recent claims that Iraqi resistance fighters were getting weaker were absurd. They also prove how dangerously detached from reality the administration has become. In fact, the Iraqi resistance