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Month: January 2020

The Other British Forrestal?

David Martin

Chapter Six of The Assassination of James Forrestal is entitled, “Britain’s Forrestal.” The title character is Ernest Bevin, who was Foreign Secretary in the British Labour government from 1945 to 1951. Bevin, like Forrestal, won the enmity of the Zionists by resisting their ambitions in Palestine. Zionist terrorists attempted to assassinate him with letter bombs in 1946 when Britain still held the Mandate for Palestine, governing control over the region that it had been granted by the League of Nations in 1920. Since Bevin was the leading opponent of the Zionists in the British government at the time, and since they attempted to kill him, the parallels between him and Forrestal would appear to be obvious. However, there are two…

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An Enemy of the Thomas Merton Society

David Martin

I still remember vividly my excitement a half century ago when I discovered Henrik Ibsen’s great play, An Enemy of the People, in a collection of Ibsen’s complete works that I had bought the year of my graduation from college. I had never before encountered such a great depiction of one of the major shortcomings of the human race, our tendency to reject the truth when strong vested interests are tied up in falsehood, and there it was, condensed into dramatic form that one could take in in a little more than an hour. In a nutshell, the principal protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, a medical doctor in a small Norwegian town, through his research has discovered that beyond a shadow of…

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Bill Clinton, Hero

David Martin

Just as most people don’t know that a small, relatively new Caribbean island nation has named the highest point to be found there, Mount Obama, I did not know until very recently that a small, even newer country in the Balkans had named a major street in its capital city, Pristina, after Bill Clinton. They have even erected a heroic-looking statue to the man on that boulevard, with a gigantic portrait of him identified as the 42nd president of the United States topping a large American flag, cut off to fit the blank wall of a building right behind the statue. Above the portrait is a large silhouette of the country honoring him. There is also a huge building-side photo…

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