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"I listen to right-wing talk radio the way that other people slow down to see a car accident." -- Steve Bergstein, in the current edition of Psychsound - http://psychsound.com Taking it All In | Oct. 8, 2006 AS I left Auschwitz, the original camp, I stopped to study and photograph the reactions of people gathered near the entrance. This photo, taken from inside the camp gate looking outward, pretty much sums it up: a combination of disgust and shock. These folks look sixtyish, so what they are hearing about happened in their lifetimes or very close to it. This the thing we need to remember: the Holocaust happened recently, in a society just like ours, where a lot of middle class people wanted to enjoy their lives and not be bothered with the affairs of the government. This is why we need to keep it in mind, and watch to see if any patterns are repeating. One of the framers of the U.S. Constitution once remarked that the time to start worrying is not when all your rights are gone, but rather when the first of them is threatened. I have noticed that it's finally becoming less taboo to "be political," as we figure out that "political" is about OUR lives, our futures. We might want to think of more creative ways to do that, how to raise awareness and how to take action. Tomorrow night we will begin exploring Auschwitz ii - Birkenau, and see if the history of this place, the Nazis' most cherished mass human extermination complex, holds any clues for us today. This series will remain on the cover of PlanetWaves.net and EricFrancis.com for about six more nights. Additional photos are being added to the October cover photo gallery: http://planetwaves.info/gallery2006/index.php?m=10&st=& The full series, in chronological order, is kept here: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html I'll catch you tomorrow. e Cell Blocks 10 and 11 | Oct. 6, 2006 Photo above: View from Cell Block 11 towards Cell Block 10 at Auschwitz. Photo by Eric Francis, Sept. 27, 2006. Additional view of Block 10 in current cover photo gallery. Link to full series: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html YOU HAVE to hand it to the Nutsies: they really were evil, possessed by evil and devoted to its full expression. They were more devoted to evil than the Beatles were to music, and they were more prolific. And it's funny, we prefer to remember the Beatles. The Nazis are now like a joke or a cliché. They are a bunch of movie characters. If you mention them, you must be ignorant, or a film buff. Besides, it was so long ago. If you take a look at what happened, it's really pretty shocking. Any public library will have a dozen books on the shelf. Librarians know what happened. Yet no matter how much we may look at them in astonishment, the ordinary people who let it go on, who knew and looked away, are, to me, stranger still. Perhaps we have some reckoning to do with the awesome power of fear. Tell me: when was the last time you said anything to anyone about the rendition and torture flights conducted by the United States all across Europe the past five years? How many times have you discussed with your friends the American torture center at Guantanamo Bay? I truly hope your answers were 'recently' and 'often'. Could you bring it up at a dinner party? I concede, it's impolite. I am uncomfortable doing it myself. Mentioning torture at dinner spoils the fun -- and there must be something wrong with you. And who knows if it's really true? The media always lie, right? But could it be that so many people believe that Muslims are a problem, that they are inherently evil, that they are terrorists, and that they are 'against our way of life', that it's more convenient to shut up than speak on their behalf? Maybe you don't like how they're being treated (imprisoned, bombed and tortured), but maybe some of them are bad people, right? If you speak up, then you can be accused of being soft on terrorism. Welcome to Nazi reasoning. They did not invent it -- like a lot of things, they just perfected it. The core of Nazi evil expressed itself in Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at Auschwitz, camp 1. Some of the planning and thinking went on elsewhere; the ecology of anti-Semitism within which it festered was to some extent resident in many millions of people, and deeply rooted in old cultural attitudes. But the actual expression of the worst atrocities and the thoughts lurking behind them found their true home in Cell Blocks 10 and 11. These were the working prototype. These were the place the model was created, for everything from sexual experimentation to gassing hundreds of people at a time. The photo above is what you might have seen in your last moments of life if you were imprisoned in Cell Block 11, the Death Block. You might have meditated on this view for some days, but probably not long, and miserably; those in Block 11 were beaten and tortured regularly, and like in the rest of Auschwitz, they were hungry, tired and sick. Interestingly, the Death Block includes a room that was used as a 'court' where sham military trials were held and people were condemned for various rationales. This got me angrier than any of the torture cells I saw. It's why you want your country to have real, civilian courts and actual trial by jury. It's why you want to have judges who are not appointed for their political stances but rather for their fairness and experience. True, it's accused criminals who get those trials, but you never know -- you could be one of them some day. Even my dad, a professor who worked as a consultant to police administrators for many years, was arrested once. The charge was dropped. It was ridiculous, but there he was -- facing the same bullshit as everyone else. So that little fake Auschwitz courtroom -- I would love to have smashed the place up. It was the room where the Nazis helped themselves feel better about what they were doing, condemning the innocent to death. Several thousand people were killed in the yard outside this window, which we will visit tomorrow. Most were shot, many were hung by the arms and allowed to die slowly as they helplessly watched others be executed. Further down the corridor, to the right of where this photo was taken, is a women's undressing room, with a toilet, where women undressed and went to their deaths one or a few at a time, stepped outside, faced a special wall, and were shot from behind. I did not see a corresponding room for men, but I am sure it's there somewhere. The Nazis had a morbid fascination with sex and nudity. Was it really necessary to shoot their victims naked? In their minds, yes. In part it contributed to the necessary belief that the victims were not human -- an idea perpetuated so fully that many upon whom it was projected apparently accepted it themselves. Many who survived the camps say that keeping their sense of humanity intact was how they did it. In the basement of Block 11 were something called 'standing cells', little brick cubicles where prisoners were forced to stand up for extended periods of time, sometimes all night, and even for days on end, sometimes till they died. Across the basement corridor was the test gas chamber where Zyclon B was tested on 600 prisoners, the first mass gassing at Auschwitz and, say the museums notes, the first time in the history of the German Reich. Also in the basement were suffocation cells, where prisoners were placed, in the dark, until the oxygen slowly ran out. If you tried to help someone escape, the punishment was death in a starvation cell. No form of murder was left out of the question. They were all interesting to the Nazis and there were plenty of people coming in every day to experiment on. In this photo, you are looking from the main corridor on the first floor, through a cell, and across the courtyard. The black fixture on the building across the courtyard is one of the blinded windows of Block 10, which was a special ward for gynecological torture. The blinds were put up so that the 'patients' in the that block could not see the continuously ongoing executions and torture in the yard outside their window. Who were those patients? I suggest considering they may have been Hlawica Zdenka and Holan Adalberta, the women whose pictures we began with. Those in Block 10 met a more sinister fate than their neighbors. There, Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg conducted sterilization experiments on women of 'undesirable' races and nationalities. Make no mistake: this is where racism and prejudice lead. This is the logical conclusion. The methods of sterilization included the extremely painful injection of caustic chemicals into the uterus, and use of X-rays. Those to whom this was done were usually too sick to recover, and were killed with an injection of a chemical called phenol to the heart. This is from the Wikipedia entry on Clauberg, who was actually turned free for a time in West Germany after the war, but later arrested: Clauberg looked for an easy and cheap way to sterilize women. He injected liquid acid into their uterus - without anesthetics. Most of his test subjects were Jewish or Roma women who suffered permanent damage and serious infections. Damaged ovaries were then removed and sent to Berlin for additional research. Sometimes subjects were bombarded with x-rays. Some of the subjects died because of the tests, and others were killed so they could be autopsied. Estimates of those who survived but were sterilized are around 700. The Nazis perfected this kind of conduct, but the Americans are excellent copycats. Personally, I find the ongoing silence of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal to be as frightening as anything I've ever encountered in a few decades of considering Nazi atrocities. We don't really know what's going on inside these extra-legal prisons, but we have a clue. (Did you ever wonder why Guantanamo is on the island of our supposed communist enemy, Cuba? Because it's outside the reach of legitimate American constitutional law and lawyers -- for a good reason.) And to think: if you're an American, you pay the salary of Donald Rumsfeld, you pay for Abu Ghraib, you pay for Guantanamo. These things always start small, and are directed at the obvious villainized enemy. As Americans, Europeans, Brits or Australians, we are used to calling a lawyer when we have legal problems. If we get arrested for something like DUI, pot, shoplifting, protesting or writing an article, we can get bailed out and then have some semblance of a judicial hearing. If your case is interesting, it gets in the newspaper, and that helps a heck of a lot. But we really should stop to consider just what it is that keeps that system in place -- and how fragile it is, and how subject to being rendered meaningless or nonexistent by fear and hatred. Finally, I leave you a question: What is the relationship between Janet Jackson's breast and the second photo down, at this next link? Wiki on Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse ...on Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detainment_camp ...on Dr. Carl Clauberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Clauberg A Prison System for the Innocent | Oct. 5, 2006 Photo at left: Looking to the right as you walk in through the main gate of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Oswiecim, Poland. This is the view standing directly beneath the sign that says 'Arbeit macht frei', or, 'Work makes one free'. Photographed Sept. 27, 2006 by Eric Francis. Link to full series: http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/auschwitz_photo_series.html WHEN the Nazis took control of Germany in February 1933, there was a fast seizure of, and concentration of, government power, and within eight days, the roundup of enemies of the Reich began. Hitler was not initially elected. After many months of extremely complex political maneuvering, he was appointed to the office of chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg, then the president of Germany, and this was the transition to the Nazi state. Hitler had been an up-and-coming figure in Germany for decades, and was the leader of something called the National Socialist movement. It had nothing to do with socialism in the true sense of the word; it was fascism supported by business leaders. Much of how power was concentrated involved a 9/11-like incident called the Reichstag Fire. This is an infamous event in 20th Century history that everyone should know about. Less than a month after Hitler assumed the chancellorship, the building where the German Parliament met in Berlin was burned down, and this was used as an excuse to give the government carte blanche to do anything it needed to "protect people." The fire was blamed on the Communists (enemies of the Nazis), but there is trial testimony from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that it was set by the Nazis, particularly Hermann Göring (who, according to court testimony, admitted to it). Wikipedia states that "it is generally believed the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain -- and it obviously did." In the aftermath of the fire, all basic civil liberties were curtailed, including freedom of the press, and the state granted itself extra powers to stop its supposed enemies -- which soon turned out to be everyone. Hindenburg, after signing these laws, died of lung cancer the next year, after which Hitler declared the office of the president perpetually vacant, in effect merging it with the office of chancellor. He thus held both offices for the duration of his life, and the war, about 11 more years. Initially, prisoners of the Reich were kept in makeshift or improvised facilities, such as the torture yard in Ilvers Gehoffen, now part of Erfurt, or a Roman Catholic citadel on a hill in central Erfurt. [Both of these are covered in my 1998 series written in Germany.] Soon after, construction of a highly organized camp system began, and then mass arrests, deportations, relocations, and then extermination of many millions of people. Jews were a central focus, and a major excuse, but nobody was exempt. The people arrested were guilty of no crime, though many of the early ones were those who opposed fascism. Many others were simply on the list of who was going next. The terror created by the roundups was enough to keep the rest of the population silent, and for the most part, people were glad the Gestapo were coming for their neighbors and not for them. Then the effort spread to the countries neighboring Germany, where poor farmers are said to have resented the wealthier urban Jewish people. At the beginning, this sentiment (known as rampant anti-Semitism) was an excuse for looking the other way as the atrocities began. There is a name for this routine: divide and conquer. The entity we call Auschwitz started with a relatively small facility, winding up with perhaps 50 brick buildings, in the polish town of Oswiecim (the Germans pronounced this 'Auschwitz' and that is where the name of the camp came from). It was founded May 20, 1940, based on the grounds of an old Polish army barracks, but soon expanded to the surrounding homesteads and farms of the locals. Of the 24 original farms in Oswiecim, only seven remained after the war, and were in bad shape; the rest had been subsumed into Auschwitz. Wikipedia tells us, "The camp was initially used for interning Polish intellectuals and resistance movement members, then also for Soviet prisoners of war." Today it's a seemingly pleasant enough place, with tree-lined walkways and neat brick buildings about three or four stories tall. Workmen are busy restoring the details and doing maintenance projects. The presence of graceful old trees 60 years later suggests that the Nazis were planning to be there for a while (they were obviously not planted by the survivors). Architecturally, it feels a little like an old-time psychiatric hospital or sanatorium; it's a bit too organized and sterile to be a college campus. Gradually, seeing detail after detail, one connects with the menacing purpose the place was invested with. Most of what we know about Auschwitz we know from movies, which perpetuate various inaccuracies. Few people -- I suspect even most visitors to the camps -- have read a book about the Holocaust. The facility depicted in the photo above was not the extermination facility, which was called Birkenau, and by modern historians, Auschwitz II - Birkenau. That came a little later. Let's start with the first one, and then deal with the second. Except for size and scale, one is no less atrocious than the other. Inside these gates, it's estimated that 70,000 people lost their lives, mostly Poles and Russian prisoners of war. It was originally a forced labor and torture center, but the first extermination experiments and mass exterminations were carried out here. Indeed, the first time Zyklon B gas was used was in the basement of Block 11, the Death Block, which was the 'prison within the prison'. It was basically a place people were sent to die, many by shooting, torture and hanging by the arms. But in the quest for more efficient ways of killing ever more people, new methods were developed. Wiki reports that, "On September 3, 1941, 600 Soviet POWs were gassed with Zyklon B at Auschwitz camp I; this was the first experiment with the gas at Auschwitz." Prior to that, 250 Gypsy children at Buchenwald had been used as guinea pigs for the gas, which was originally designed as an insecticide. Block 11 is preserved in its nearly original state, including the test gas chamber; we'll get to pictures of that tomorrow. Many of the other blocks have been renovated lightly and converted to museums and memorials which are open to the public without tour guides necessary. Some are dedicated to specific nationalities or religious faiths; others to photographic and artifact displays. The shock of the place sets in slowly. The war itself comes into some focus, particularly thanks to a photo display of the bombing damage to Warsaw. The day I went was a beautiful clear blue day, and the presence of tourists and a lot of students brings a higher vibration. But as you look at people's faces, it becomes obvious the difficulty they are experiencing processing what they are seeing. Many have pensive, tortured looks. Sometimes the teens are clowning around, which is the result of nervousness, but also sign that they have a guide who has not put them in the appropriate frame of mind. Most people are somber and reflective, slowly slipping into an altered state. I saw nobody crying. Most people are a little curious, even if it has a grim quality to it. Many seem to be struggling for understanding. There really is no way to comprehend what happened, but being confronted by the direct evidence is a step in the right direction. My first cognitive impression of the place involved the sign above the gate, "Work makes one free." I thought: the problem with the Nazis was that they were liars. Everything else derived from that. Wiki on Reichstag Fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire ...on Auschwitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz ...on Zykon B gas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B ...on Paul von Hindenburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg Auschwitz Photo Series | Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006 Photo Above: Mug shots of Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims Hlawica Zdenka and Holan Adalberta, in Oswiecim, Poland, surrounded by hundreds of others. Documentary photos that will be presented this week were all taken by Eric Francis, on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2006. WHILE I WAS visiting Poland last week, I went to pay my respects at Auschwitz. I actually didn't plan to go, and I didn't really want to go, but I've also had a lifelong commitment to do so, and this was my chance. Avoiding the place was why I planned a trip to Warsaw for a week -- halfway across the country, far away. But everyone I talked to said that Krakow was the more beautiful city, not bombed so badly during the war, still intact with all its old character, and that I must see it. So I went to Krakow, 70km from Auschwitz, not sure what I would do when the time came to decide if I wanted to make the rest of the trip. I arrived in my hotel, a beautiful, elegant little place that cost just $40 per night, including breakfast, and a dependable Internet connection in my room. There was a big Manora on the lobby window, facing out to the street -- the Jewish symbol of Hanukah. It seemed bold and reassuring to be staying in a place that was advertising its Jewishness to the world so close to where so much evil happened. Seeing that, I felt I had a purpose for being there. The next morning, I woke up, and called Arthur, the taxi guy who'd taken me from the train station the day before, who also takes people to Auschwitz for the day. It didn't cost that much more than a tourist bus, and I wanted the freedom to keep my own schedule as I explored the territory. He showed up for me, my cameras and my iPod stereo, on which I played a lot of Grateful Dead songs driving through the Polish countryside for an hour on the way to the camp. Arthur happened to be a fan of old American rock and roll, he knew some impressive details, and he'd heard of Jerry Garcia and loved Johnny Cash. It was still a grim journey, despite the great tunes and even if the land and buildings were beautiful. I've been involved with Holocaust studies for a long time, thanks to a teacher who ran a special center dedicated to the subject at my high school in Brooklyn. [This was Ira Zornberg at the Holocaust Education Center in the John Dewey High School library.] There is a reason we study these things, which is so that we can both honor history, and respect the loss to humanity. But it's also to be forewarned, in the present, when something amiss is happening again. The real problem with the Holocaust is how systematically exterminating 12 million people in the midst of civilized Europe kind of snuck up on the world. As part of my personal investigation, I had visited three different Nazi facilities prior to this -- first being the places I believe the Holocaust began in February 1933, in an urban neighborhood in Erfurt, Germany called Ilvers Gehoffen (see article "Hell's Bells" on the Planet Waves cover Wednesday). Incredibly, the one of the very first concentrations camp was surrounded by inhabited apartment buildings on all sides. On the same trip, I visited the Citadel of St. Peter and St. Paul, an actual citadel more than 1,000 years old, placed on a little hill in Erfurt. This is the walled-in Roman Catholic facility that was taken over by the Nazis and -- starting eight days after Hitler assumed office without havng been elected -- was used for imprisonment of people who disagreed with Hitler, for sham capital (as in death penalty) trials, and probably for executions. Napoleon had also been there -- the massive barracks he built in the Citadel were used by Hitler's army, too. Then some days later, I visited Buchenwald, the famous concentration camp for political prisoners near Weimar, in the "green heart of Germany." Fifty-four thousand people were shot, strangled or died of starvation, disease and overwork at Buchenwald, but it was not a death camp, per se, it was a forced labor camp where many people lost their lives. These visits were in 1998, and I've been considering what I saw ever since. So I had some preparation. Yet nothing prepares you for Auschwitz. I walked in knowing that. This was an industrial-scale factory devoted to mass murder and torture. It is as large as any full-scale state university campus, with land and buildings stretching in either direction as far as you can see. There were in fact three main camps and about 100 smaller sub-camps. Five gas chambers and crematoria were the murder scenes of as many as two million Jews, Poles, Sinti and Romany people, and nationals of every country in Europe from Russia all the way west to France; north into Scandinavia; and south into Greece. I lived in Paris for a while, and on every street, I mean every block, there is a plaque somewhere about the people who were deported to the camps during the war. They were sent to die in Auschwitz and similar facilities, sometimes after having been sold "new land" and "new businesses" in their "new homes" by the German government. Auschwitz was the prototype and the biggest of the death camps. About three-quarters of the people who arrived, with bags packed in earnest, with precious family photos and a little to eat, were taken to the gas chambers instantly on arrival; the strong were made to work for a month or two, to support the German war effort, and then they too were gassed. Those deaths could be called humane, compared to the thousands killed following medical torture and sexual experimentation (from castration of men to sterilization experiments conducted on women), most of whom were killed by injections of phenol to the heart; who died of starvation and exhaustion; who were beaten to death; who died of the cold or of dehydration. In this photo series, I'll share images of interior and exterior facilities at Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau as they exist today. When people were allowed to live briefly after arriving, they lived like we treat animals in industrial farms. They could be beaten or killed for having an accident outside the vastly overcrowded latrines. When condemned to die, they were made to strip naked and face a wall where they were shot, or died huddled naked together in gas chambers, breathing in cyanide. If they happened to be alive after the gassing, they were burned alive. Their hair, previously shaved off, was sent to a factory in Bavaria that made some kind of materials for the war out of it. It all sounds like so much. It sounds like nothing that could ever happen, but it did happen, and it happened yesterday. Though there have been many genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries, some of which are ongoing, the most frightening thing about what happened under the Nazis is that it occurred in a society just like our own, supported or acquiesced by normal people living normal lives. People with things to worry about other than the Jews or some dirty Gypsies. We need to remember how modestly this started, with a few undesirable people here and there rounded up for "good reasons" (they were the wrong religion, they were gay or lesbian, they were alleged Communists, they were alleged terrorists, they did not want to work so hard, etc.), until it knew no limits -- and 1,500 men, women and children could be gassed and cremated in a single session. On the way out at the end of the war, the SS men dynamited the gas chambers and crematories to hide the evidence of their crimes. The big problem with the Nazis is we consider them someone other than ourselves; a culture other than our own. But Nazi Germany was an advanced industrial and technical society, with ethics and an economy and lots of people who wore crosses around their necks and who went to church every Sunday. Germans are proud, intelligent people who like to do things right. The mass murder that was perpetrated was conducted by well-heeled, supposed Christians; by the highest orders of elite military men; and supported by capitalists and businessmen. One of the big things the whole plan had going for it was a "united Europe" which meant big business for certain people. According to what I learned in Holocaust Studies and in my follow-up research, the gassing effort was also supported by IBM (whose German subsidiary lent computers to the Reich to track concentration camp inmates); by ITT (which provided other technology); by Dow Chemical (which provided chemical components for the cyanide gas, called Zyclon [Cyclone] B). Other United States corporations and some politicians were involved. Swiss banks that today still exist processed all the gold taken from the teeth of the victims. I have read recently that there is no processed gold on the market that does not contain traces of concentration camp gold. And we forget how recently it happened. My parents were born in 1941 and 1942, when Auschwitz and many other death camps were in full operation. If something happened in your parents' lifetime, it happened yesterday, and it could happen tomorrow. The same is true if your grandfather or grandmother remembers it. That is the definition of 'very recently'. Mainly, we forget how it happened -- because people let it happen; because they were in denial about what was going on two miles from their house, or right outside their window. We forget that an environment of anti-Semitism in Europe allowed the beginning to occur, and that fear of others was used as a weapon against people -- much like in our own country (UK, United States and Australia) where an atmosphere of anti-Muslim sentiments is allowing many laws that protect everyone to be suspended. Why? Because who cares about them? "They're all terrorists." Ah, but then all these really weird powers are in place and the normal rules of the game are off. That is the true beginning, the elimination of basic rights: the ones you never hear of, such as Habeus Corpus. Or the ones you do, such as elections. Habeus corpus is the right of a person to demand to know why they are being imprisoned. It used to exist in Germany before the Holocaust, and it used to exist in the United States, before last week, when a law supposedly directed at "terrorists" took that right away, little noticed by the public and the media. But at the heart of it all is cruelty. Cruelty is existent in the world, like bacteria. But it grows better under certain conditions, fuelled by its fertilizers, intolerance and hatred. It is said that a picture paints so many words. All the images in the world don't quite sum up Auschwitz like this letter scribbled on a scrap of paper by a man about to have his life taken for nothing: Farewell, my most beloved wife, my dearest Lolunia, and my mother. I am about to leave this world. I am going to be sent to the ovens on the 30th at 7 o'clock in the evening. I have been sentenced to death as a bandit. This is cool. http://www.samtsai.com/p318 Saturday, September 2, 2006 | Moon enters Capricorn. Sun squares Ixion. Mercury is biquintile Chiron. "Chiron's function is to raise awareness. Or rather, to raise awareness at all costs. This is why it gets a bad reputation; quite often we don't like to have our awareness raised, we don't like what we see when this happens, and most of all we don't like what sometimes must occur in order to get our attention. Too often we deny what is calling for our attention until we get sick or hurt. But Chiron is persistent. Under the influence of Chiron, anything necessary will happen, in graduating degrees of extreme, until we offer our attention to something." -- Eric Francis, Planet Waves Weekly, June 18, 2004 http://planetwavesweekly.com/drdc8/current/040618.html Friday, September 1, 2006 | Moon is in Sagittarius. Sun squares Chaos, and is conjunct Mercury. Venus makes a trine to Pluto. "When Pluto says it's time to get moving, we do it because that's just what happens; the concrete falls away; steel melts; one is free, or a little more free, anyway. But sometimes, in actual fact, the prison walls fall down and you escape walking, not even running. " -- Eric Francis, Planet Waves Weekly, Monday, Sept. 9, 2005 http://planetwavesweekly.com/drdc8/Monday/bdRept/050919.html Friday, Sept. 1, 2006 | Astrology Questions & Answers IT IS Friday morning here in Brussels and my routine for this time of the week is to enter corrections into the new edition of Planet Waves that have come in from Rachael in LA, give the piece one last edit, write the birthday report and work with Anatoly in the Ukraine doing the layout -- and then get it out to our readers. So I'm going to keep my comments here short today, except for one thing. Because I read my mail and am generally an aware person, I know the role that Planet Waves plays in many people's lives. The letters that come in -- posted at our Feedback link above -- are so passionate and grateful that I am aware of a not only large, but deep and sincere base of support out in the world (no, I did not post the "who cares about Pluto" hate mail, we can only pity the fools). My impression why that energy comes back to us is because it's clear that Planet Waves is working for a better world, in a time when doing just that is so necessary. And it's clear that we're encouraging everyone else to do the same. Those of us involved with the project have somehow been spared the sour cynicism that grips both media and much of our society, and we feel, correctly or not, that we can make a difference. Before I introduce a new area of Planet Waves, really, the continuation of one of our most successful projects in a new and exciting format, I'm here to ask you to put your money where your love is and subscribe to Planet Waves. It's not like subscriptions cost a lot (they're free, if you need, and even a short-term subscription is just two dollars a week) -- and it's not like you don't get a lot back; you and everyone else, that is, because our subscribers support the whole project, including the open access side of the site. There's nobody working on this project, which is truly a global community service project, who holds back on the gifts they feel then can offer. Yes, sometimes I have to do a little encouraging that they really have something worth sharing, and usually it's obvious once they begin. I was talking last evening with someone named Nicola in Switzerland, who will be assisting with the 2007 annual edition, to which I will soon be devoting my attention. She's been a longtime subscriber; I did her chart a year ago; and now she's going to help coordinate the writing of those besides myself for the annual -- coordinating the work of some of my dearest friends. She recalled a recent conversation with a co-worker whom she had pointed to Planet Waves but who did not understand why she should subscribe, because so much is available free. "It's about integrity," was the answer she got. Good response, really. Integrity says you don't just take from an ecological system: you do your part to support it back. One thing I do all day is coordinate the efforts of kind and talented people, so that you will have the benefit of the work. So, while we think nothing of supporting the ecological systems of your personal world and the wider community, I am aware that these days that's a revolutionary idea. Integrity also means integration -- including yourself in something you care about, weaving together a stronger world with you as part of it, keeping loving ideas moving across the communication networks, and making help available where it's needed. For us, your subscription is only partly about the money -- because our scholarship program (comp subscriptions) is, in our minds, an important part of what we do: make sure that economic concerns don't break the fragile threads of communication. Making sure that everyone feels included who wants to be. This is our affirmation that people are worth more than their money. Trust me: if doing this were about the money, I would do something else. If it were about the money, I would plaster Planet Waves with ads. Or I would dump 2,000 of my articles into a database and sell them back to you. Then there was the person who said to me, in all sincerity, that she held off on subscribing because doing so would mean committing to her own personal truth -- and she was not ready to do that. She said it would mean giving up the last vestige of the lie she had been living, and she just did not have it in her, until, eventually, one day she clicked and signed up. She could read Planet Waves, but signing up meant she was really serious about the ideas here. My old therapist Joe Trussso once told me to treat everyone as if they were in a life or death struggle -- now I know what he meant. So there you have it. If you're a regular visitor to this site, please click on the subscribe link and sign up. Do your part, and then take another step and participate in the world of ideas you see here, even if just a little. Today, without my prompting, two to four people would sign up -- let's add you and make it three to five. If you don't have the cash, call our toll-free number and ask for a comp; it's simple. As for the new project: Astrology Secrets Revealed, the Q & A originally started on Cainer.com, has taken up residence of here, as a forum. Readers are invited to submit astrology questions and other concerns and there are five of us who will be responding: Chelsea, Paloma, Ursula, Deirdre and myself. Someone named Rachael (who also goes by Phred) will be proofreading the site (she'd worked on Astrology Secrets Revealed for almost its entire duration), so if you see name in "last edited by" -- that’s why. The page link is here and the email address is on the homepage. It's easy to remember the site: http://asr.planetwaves.net/ Skip the www and just use "asr." Note, our direct participation community forum, where anyone can discuss astrology or anything else, can be found at the bottom of the site index, on the main homepage. My friends -- we are here for you. Please do your little part and be here for us. Thank you. e From the Horoscope Archives Archives 2006: January 7 to July 6 | July 14 to August 6 |