THE FALL OF SPYDOM
CHAPTER SIX

The Urge for Holocausts

SPYDOM sponsors catastrophes. It claims that it must operate secretly because the world is being moved by secret forces. Whereupon the world DOES TEND to become moved by fast-breeding secret forces.

Fear® paranoid/reaction® terror® mutual/destruction: the more this process moves in secret galleries, the less the chance that an indifferent public will divert the unceasing flood.

Regard the role of secrecy in the two crazy American crises over Castro's Cuba: the Bay of Pigs episode, and the Nuclear Missile crisis of 1962. The C.I.A., with the knowledge and approval of President Kennedy, organized the first, composed of hundreds of secret decisions, culminating in the withdrawal of U.S. forces and abandonment of the Cuban exile brigade and denial of having sponsored the expedition.

In the second case, the C.I.A. and all other agencies of intelligence, lacked more than conjectures that the Soviets had nuclear warheads in Cuba. The Soviets had twenty of them, enough to destroy America's greatest cities, to create many Nagasakis and Hiroshimas. President Kennedy acted as if a preventive volley of U.S. missiles would teach the Soviet Union a bloody lesson and that would end the matter. Not until January 1989 was the U.S. intelligence folly revealed and then only by the Russians at a Glasnost-inspired conference. Two great blind beastly States readied for mutual destruction!

It is the fault of Planet Venus and the Goddess Venus and what they have done to mankind! They have bred paranoia and holocaust into us. Christoph Marx, the KGB, C.I.A., and the Bundespolizei were all caught in the Venus Spy-Trap. Let us not discuss myself.

Let me explain, I who am an expert of sorts on spies, traps, psychological warfare, and Venus, and still a free man, though perhaps not for long.

Thirty-eight years ago Christoph Marx was seized by the Venus passion. He read a book by my friend and Princeton neighbor, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, entitled Worlds in Collision, the thesis of which is that in early historical times the planet Venus was behaving as a comet and passed close to the Earth, enveloping the globe in a catastrophic storm of waters, gases, and hailstones; it excited earthquakes, volcanism, floods and hurricanes over vast regions.

All civilizations suffered heavy destruction. Tribes and nations went mad with fear and aggression. Religious cults fanatically devoted to Venus dominated the religious sphere.

This happened at the time of the Plagues of Egypt and the Hebrew Exodus led by Moses; indeed it was the cause of these events, as well as similar ones throughout the world.

Mankind was so terrorized that its collective mind went blank on the subject; that is, it developed a collective scatoma or amnesia from the fierce trauma. You know how this can occur on a personal level when a person is seized by a terrific physical or mental scare.

Modern natural science, with its uniformitarian and evolutionary darwinian views, is afflicted with the same amnesia as the rest of mankind. Characteristic symptoms of the amnesia are the refusal to look into oneself and the setting up of psychic resistances if the hidden memories are probed.

Further, the resistance to self-revelation and the consequent powerful pressure of the submerged memories provoke outward aggression in the form of religious sacrifices, political persecution, and wars.

Christoph became Immanuel's advocate, disciple, literary agent and adviser, and chosen instrument for enlightening and reforming society (especially Germany). The world, as the beneficiary of psychoanalytic insight, would at last become peaceful.

Not long after this relationship between the two men was established, Immanuel began to have second thoughts and to display the effects of family cross-pressures. The relationship that was begun with great hope and high purpose dissolved in animosity and stubbornness. Immanuel died. Marx carried on in the spirit of the original idea. He did his bit. I directed my own choir. And others played their roles.

I had no idea that it might end up in espionage.

Marx needed money. I did. We all did. Not money to keep body and soul together, but money to meet the continual expenses of books, magazines, lists, mailings, postage, typing, copying, graphics, supplies, research services, telephoning, computers, printers, modems, repairs and maintenance, baby sitters, travel to small and large conferences by boat, train, cab and car, airplane, rooming houses and hotels, food, fees, tips, charges, and publishing reports and reprints. Twenty thousand dollars a year would be only a modest expenditure for these needs.

There were no sources of support. The fields that we were trying individually and in sporadic cooperation to develop, and the theories we were examining in them, were vigorously attacked from all sides, or, worse, ignored.

It is early 1984, and Marx is saying in a letter to me -- not that he complained much about such things:

He was always skirting the edge of bankruptcy. Marx needed an Engels. We all did.

His wife Aglae, a highly attractive woman, who sold printing advertisements to support the family, and whose handsome children of an unprepossessing father could bear such remarkable names as Lancelot and Guenevere, Horatio and, well, yes, there was the occasion for the first Soviet contact, Clara.

Aglae complained to me, after separating from him, that he was always broke, and she was even a little angry at my looking for him through her, as if I were partly responsible for the state of the family's finances.

(And when I called her while he was a jailbird, she exclaimed that she had no idea where he was but he would be up to no good. Both of which statements are plausible.)

It was shortly afterwards, when his studious friend, Maude Mayer, an Egyptologist while at the same time avantgarde artist, was standing off from him, and he had been at odds with Selena, third of the group of remarkable women friends, that he asked me jokingly as we sat around my lunch table, did I know any wealthy American women who might want to marry a Swiss gentleman; he had heard that there was a market demand for such males by women who sought to qualify for Swiss residence. Perhaps a mariage de complaisance could be arranged.

I tugged my beard, twitched my mustache, raised my eyebrows, frowned, smiled, hemmed and hawed, cleared my throat and, having by then run down all my rich American female

friends without emerging with one willing and eligible, I replied, no, and said that a rich woman is rarely a bargain anyhow, no matter that it seems so on paper, a response that seems to please Philomena who regrets not being able to rain down gold upon me ("the shit of Uranus," some ancients called it).

But I shall continue to think about the matter, I ended, encouragingly. (Actually one out of four Swiss is exogamous.)

Venus is never far away.

Certainly Marx's preoccupation with Venus contributed to his financial problems and led him to think more cordially about his Russian connection than might otherwise have been the case. But the common expression in the spy racket, that you find a man with secrets and without money and there is your spy, is more false than true, let us say true a thousandth of the time if you take up all the people who have secrets and have money problems.

Money is one motive; sex, ideals, self-destructive urges, righteous indignation, and other motives and combinations thereof: all play a part in the formation of a spy. Even just falling into spydom, like knocking on the door of a bordello by mistake, and thinking, "Well, so long as I'm here anyhow, I might as well..."

The definition of secrets, such as a spy can be efficiently designated to pry into, turns out to be quite narrow, a slice of one per cent perhaps of the whole of intelligence respecting a putative foe or reserved friend.

That is what makes this case important: it tells you so much about real life espionage.

A secret is (1) what specifically you feel a need to know and (2) believe you do not know about the opposition and (3) believe will help you overcome him if you did know it. These conditions are severe, hard to meet, because much of the time (4) this secret is already at your elbow and you don't realize it, or (5) you would not recognize it if you saw it, and (6) you may be quite wrong as to what is important to know about the foe, and (7) you may almost always be sure that if you did discover the so-called secret the people to whom you turned it over wouldn't know what to do with it.

Furthermore, I point out to you what I sense is going on in the Venus case, that the glamour of dealing with an expert and with computers and with the marvelous-sounding words of Venus theory can serve not only to obfuscate the already endangered sanity of the would-be spy but also to suck in every party who involved himself, present company excepted of course.

Furthermore, if you were to rubber-stamp "secret" on ordinary toilet paper, people would believe that it contained a secret message. This Maxim #7, expressed mathematically as M + (FTS) = R2 = C3, predicts for a message of intrinsic value (M) an exponential rise in respect (R) and concern (C), as the form of the document (F), the media of transmission (T), and the security measures (S) assume the mythological shape of secrets, that is, official imprinting, heavy envelope, envelope inside envelope, hand delivery, sign-in by six parties, witnessed safe-deposit in a ten-ton safe, and armed guard standing by.

Thereupon, in the proportion that one is impressed by the secret that comes to hand, one remembers it; the label secret is a forceful mnemonic device, for your heart beats faster, your pulse quickens, your adrenalin excretes, your vitamin B complex rushes for all the synapses, and on top of cigarettes and coffee, traumatize your brain to mark well the secret.

You think better and remember better and you apply the secret, even though you might have found it out by yourself or had known it all the while.

The planet Venus is full of secrets, even now that it has been flown by and through and landed on by instrumented vehicles.

After having appeared in the eastern sky as Bright as the Sun and of the Same Apparent Size as the Sun and Moon, and after causing the Light of the Sun to be Transfigured by long Streams of Flame Crossing Each Other, "The Morning Star led the Battle having Climbed on the Shoulders of Leo."

This is the reading of what their Editor, F.W. Blass, had called "the insane finale" of the Sibylline Oracles by the famed Babylonian scholar, Xavier Kugler.

The Greek, the Egyptian, the Phrygian, the Babylonian, the Carthaginian and other Great Venus Goddesses are similarly portrayed.

Now again to fix the Sphinx.

We see that what began as the Constellation of Leo the Lion, was given, in the course of the catastrophic events a flaming (cometary) tail. Then (if you observe the most ancient artistic representations) Ishtar-Venus stood upon the Lion, in effigy as in oracle. Then the Goddess becomes the Head of the Lion and sprouts Wings, the coma of the Comet of rampaging Venus.

One cannot any longer hope to meet strange life forms on Planet Venus or even to settle there in "Paradise Valley". It is an inferno. But, as Marx says to me,

You see, Marx then taunted him, how much money could have been saved your government if they had read Velikovsky's evidence for believing that the temperature of Venus would be very high.

For the Planet gives signs of being a newcomer that has not lost the heat of its creation. In a book about the Cosmic Heretics that I published a decade ago, I listed the peculiarities of Venus:

1) Venus is young in mythology, as Athene springing from the head of Zeus, as the Eye of Wotan placed in the Fountain of Wisdom, as the Eye of Atum-Osiris carried down to destroy mankind by Hathor. 2) It reveals its hot youth by temperatures at the surface of some 900 degrees Fahrenheit. 3) The heat comes up rather than going down from the sky. 4) Planet Jupiter is amply sized to have exploded planet Venus in a modest nova. (The theory of Soviet Astronomer S.K.Vsekhsviatskii calls for this eruption.) The Jupiter Red Spot may be the actual source of Venus. 5) Venus enjoys a unique retrograde rotation, contrasting to the other planets. 6) Venus is locked into Earth (rather than the 104 times larger tidal force of the Sun) in two ways: at each inferior conjunction of 243.16 days it presents the same hemisphere to Earth; and its axis of rotation is perpendicular within one degree to the Earth's orbital plane (even while 3 degrees off its own orbital plane). 7) A redistribution of electrical charges in the solar system could bring about the several different movements that would be called for under our scenario. This theory was worked out by Ralph Juergens, Earl R. Milton, and me. 8) Compared with Earth, Venus' atmosphere contains 500 times more Argon-36, a gas believed necessarily to have been dissipated from the planets shortly after their birth. 9) Venus practically lacks a magnetic field (1/10,000 of the Earth's). 10) Venus has a comet-like tail that blows away from the Sun and is much longer than Earth's gaseous and dust tail. 11) Fires appear to be burning on the surface of Venus, which would indicate combustible gases such as methane and hydrocarbons. 12) The temperature of Venus may be cooling. 13) Since this is the thirteenth cross I might as well point out that the several types of cross found around the world, including the maltese and the swastika, appear to originate in connection with or in the line of divine descent that passes through the cult of Venus. By the time you've read this book, the U.S.S.S. "Magellan" will have been rounding planet Venus at several hundred kilometers altitude, its radar imagers piercing the dense clouds to map 90% of its surface, catching features the size of a football field -- if all goes well. We should get confirmation of the recency of Venus -- or more puzzles.

Chris Marx is aware of the evidence of the late hot character of Venus, and particularly of the religious penetration that exerts a profound unconscious influence upon the culture. He appreciates that much of what we know about Venus comes from the Soviet Union, and how American scientists (and the Russians and the rest) are likely to drop and lose footnotes when it comes to citing foreigners, especially from the Redlands, who are not in a position to promote their careers. He wanted the Russians to believe in his, Christoph Marx's interpretation of the evidence.

On the religious side, he will point out unhesitatingly that Chris is Christ, the anointed, hence the savior, in Greek, St. Christopher (a saintly Christ-bearer who had kept Jesus from wetting himself crossing a river) now officially denied ever to have existed by the Roman Catholic Church, crystal, Kris Kringle, St. Krysostom, cristae, chryso - (gold), etc.

The combination of Christoph and Marx is especially connotative, and must have provoked some ambivalence among the police and the communists as well. No true-blue Swiss businessman should be named Marx; no true-blue Russian should be called Christopher. How dared the Soviets select as a spy a person named Marx? For that matter, no one but a fiction-writer (me?) would come up with such a provocative moniker. Anything to sell one's books!

Nomen est Omen, we know, is a favorite expression of Marx and we can agree that a word carries its meaning in a sense much more profound than any extant dictionary provides. We can adopt it as Maxim #8.

Where does the name "Marx" come from? "It comes from Marcus, perhaps", offers my honorable frau. "Maybe."

"Ah, yes, also Alsace was called `Westmark' by imperialist Germans." "That's it! Westmark, Mark, marche, the frontier, marginal man, shades of my Professor Louis Wirth, espousing the concept of the `marginal stranger,' Marx." A great many people believe that Marx must be a Jewish name. Actually often it is not so. The present Marx' genealogy goes back to at least the early Eighteenth Century in the Black Forest Village of Brombach. No matter -- save that anti-semitism makes it matter. I should not be surprised if, in the wretched times of the Nazi threat, someone would try to guarantee that the child wouldn't be taken for a Jew. Short of conditioning him to behave as an anti-Semite, then, you can name him Christoph.

So Chris is a pure secularist, with memories, sensibilities, and a crop of ideas that partake of the religious (for, according to my

work, The Divine Succession, and despite Marx' strenuous arguments to the contrary, no human can be non-religious). But imagine! Can even a novelist invent this? Only non-Jews or communist "Jews" would marry Palestinians (we are back in the minds of the Police and the Russians). For the Russians support the Palestinians.

His daughter has married a Palestinian! A sweet guy, a hairdresser, Ephraim Maludin.

But the Westerners know. Know what?

Scratch a Palestinian and you discover a terrorist! The Swiss, you can believe it, are determined to be Champions du Monde when it comes to rooting out terrorism.

"What? They have divorced? Never mind. The truth of the matter has already been exposed."

Still, if the police had looked carefully, they would have discovered Marx to be pro-Israeli. But maybe that's why they did not like him. "You simply can't please some people," my Mother used to say.

Heavily weighing on our consciences today are the holocausts of the last generation, a generation still with us, thank you. The most extreme, the most ruthlessly executed, the most efficient, was committed by Germans working diligently under the orders of the Führer Adolf Hitler and his chief aide in the business, Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Nazi SS police and troops, which resulted in the extermination of some 6,000,000 people called Jews and probably another 6,000,000 others called by the Nazis communists, gypsies, terrorists, saboteurs, and ordinary Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, French, Dutch, Italians and other persons who got under foot. I do not speak here of the additional 20,000,000 dead -- soldiers and civilians -- of Europe alone, killed in the excruciating evolution of Germany's madness. In fact, Maxim #9 is in order: "Anyone not maddened about what the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945 must be insane."

The unity of Europe East and West could be well-founded on the masses of corpses of the Nazi evil empire. I for one, entering Dachau, could not distinguish one nationality from another in the heaps of naked dead.

It is believed by most psychologists and historians (shall we say 99.9%) that these crimes could not have been committed against a whole people and so many elements of other peoples, 99.99+% of whom were guilty of no offense on the statute books of civilized man -- unless there had been stirring in the recesses of the souls of a great many of the German people an urge to commit human holocaust, and that some millions of these were anxious to carry out their urges given an appropriate pretext and authority, and in fact some hundred thousand Germans were recruited willingly to undertake the Nazi holocausts, most of whom conveniently were killed or incapacitated under various extraneous circumstances of battle before being brought to trial.

Theories to explain a postulated German propensity to select out and discriminate and slaughter vast numbers of people originated strikingly in the Thirties even before the holocausts began. It was considered by scholars such as Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, Fred Schuman, and Sigmund Freud that the Germans might have become civilized (and Christianized) too recently and rapidly to have fully acquired the psychological armor of resistance against the pagan urges within them, and that they deeply and unconsciously resented the Judeo-Christian Mediterranean sources of their consciences and outward culture. My own opinion -- arrived at in the course of 1001 nights -- is that the Germans were all too successfully trained to believe in the Old Testament, led on by Martin Luther, himself an anti-Semite, you will recall, in which biblos, or Bible, genocide is on occasion ordered by Yahweh of the Hebrew leaders, Moses, Joshua, et al, who transmit the order to their followers, who carry it out dutifully in dread of themselves being smitten for default.

Hitler, Goebbels and all good Nazis scorned the Bible, to hear them talk, and they were sincere, but, deep down in their guts, festered the biblical formula for genocide, just as with Josef Stalin, the one-time seminary student.

So it happened that the Germans, best educated of any nation in modern science and technology, including the science of human organization, could manage to produce what other political and religious movements in history had often dreamed of, the annihilation of nebulously specified populations. I mention these theories so that you will know that the Holocaust Theory of Marx is not without serious antecedents, even though Marx himself was a Johnny-come-lately to the field and did not even know of these men I cite, who were my teachers, except Freud.

A point to remember here is that Germans read and listen, too, and they know these shameful theories about themselves. They also know, but often and perhaps rightly they are too embarrassed to speak up, that history does not begin or stop with the Germans.

It is simply wrong, that which a contemporary German theorist, Eberhard Jäckel, has said, "I affirm that the killing of the Jews by the Nazis was something unique, because never before had a State decided and announced by the authority of its responsible head that a particular human group must be exterminated in toto if at all possible, including the old, the women, the children, and the nursing infants." A large part of the human race from the beginning until now has had exactly this secret "policy" and would have carried it into effect if it could have done so.

History records also the genocidal and mass-killing practices of Comrade Stalin of the Soviet Union, assisted by thousands of comrades of the military, the courts and the secret police. Stalin and his minions executed part of the Soviet elite and even beforehand forced the death of masses of the masses. Long after many writers of the West, including myself, only in the first week of April 1988, has a Soviet historian finally been permitted publicly to announce a figure of ten millions of Soviet citizens "suppressed" by Stalin's gangs, and most outside observers have come up with larger figures, up to thirty millions!

And history moves on also to the countless genocidal massacres of most ancient tribes and empires, and more recently Czarist Russia, Old and New China, Japan, Turkey, Vietnam, Tasmania, Cambodia, etc. Nor is the Jewish Bible silent about such matters.

And history continues into the holocausts of the German, American, British and other airplane fleets, that have a legal, logical, and retaliatory justification (if you are buying such arguments these days); and again turns off at an oblique angle to the piecemeal and drawn-out genocide of the Indians of North and South America, of the Maori of New Zealand and the Melanesians of Australia.

When I was a boy, we read and heard, with no censorious contradiction, in many a book and "silent" movie, that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Is that not a pure genocidal motto? There was a riddle to the words, too, that made them appealing to youngsters.

And then straight back through the bloody paths of history to the wars of all against all and the original holocausts that were believed to have been perpetrated by the gods, in all justice, man figured out, since man was bad and the gods discovered this fact. And, of course, the circle closes when tribes and nations carry out, in their imitations of the gods, their obligations to the gods.

Is there life after death?

"Yes," the Soviet Communist Party seems to say. Else why would it be making such a great thing of the progressive rehabilitation of its murdered comrades as "good communists" complete with "restored to membership in the Party," fifty years after Stalin and his gangsters had killed them according to certain legal rites reminiscent of ancient human sacrifices.

Their names roll off my lips now just as they did in the Thirties when I was at University, Nikolai Voznessenski, T. Zakrjevskaia, Nikolai Boukharine, Ieronim Ouborevitch, Mikhail Toukhatchevski, not to mention B.M.Feldman, August Kork, and Robert Eideman, who don't roll so readily.

The dead will not give up, so long as history remains to be defigured, deciphered, rewritten, mangled, ordered, reordered, reciphered, refigured, and recycled.

But now you object.

"This is not belief in the After-Life!"

No?

"It is belief in eternal symbols, in living history, in perpetual dogmas and laws of nature, in worship of deathless Lenin and whoever else gets put for a time at least next to him and this has nothing to do with the worship of the Emperor Augustus of Rome as a god, or the rest of that tribe!"

I see. "History is the Soup of the Soul". Maxim #10.

In the days of the beginning of time, the gods brought holocausts of fire upon mankind and in consequence upon the whole globe and all the species, so attested the Druids, the Greeks, the Hebrews. the Scandinavians, the Toltecs, Persians, Hindus, Etruscans, Tupi, Aztecs, Ute, Algonquins, Peruvians, Yurucares, Mbocobi, Botocudos, Ojibway, Wyandot, and Dog-Rib Indians. That these are not lies, or children's fairy tales, but historical reports enveloped in myths would seem to be the proper scientific attitude to take these days.

I for myself assert that these ancient and modern holocausts occurred, but I dispute Chris Marx and behind him Velikovsky when they argue that it is the memory of these ancient and successive holocausts that drives the peoples of the world such as the Germans to initiate or support new holocausts.

No, I believe that man is a schizoid animal who is genetically disposed to this kind of behavior. He would think of behaving so even if the gods had not visited real catastrophes in primeval times.

He is constitutionally divided against himself and therefore prone to escape his internal dilemma by displacing his fearful sense of division upon some enemy.

Amnesia itself is not inherited and permanent. It happens in every generation through the medium of language and culture. I do believe that Marx has been coming around to this in his own mind as well.

However he will not agree with me that people who do in fact remember the history of catastrophe are also prone to make sacrifices, call on the Armageddon and Apocalypse, and fight for a Starry Truth.

That is, I claim that those very people who believe most literally in the catastrophes that mankind has suffered are likely themselves to be imprisoned, not liberated, in the toils of rite, penance, sacrifice, punition, the same bloody smear that the Nazis and Communists got themselves into while scorning the devout. I speak of the fundamentalists, the true believers in the stories of ancient catastrophes of flood, fire, and tempest.

On the other hand, I hasten to add, for I do not wish my theory to be misunderstood when this spy affair comes to court: the original holocausts of nature (not gods) were instrumental with their great radiation and electrical storms in changing hominid into the human and giving him his split mind that feared itself more than anything in the world and created the outside world and all the works of man out of this only partially manageable basic fear. The cleverest Ancients believed "In the beginning Fear created the Gods."

There, now you have it, and you can see why I would not agree with Velikovsky and Marx when they wished to bring the Germans to their senses by re-educating them to the sources of their madness, and, when that was done, to do the same with the Russians, the French, the Americans, the Japanese and so on around the world until everyone will be cured and the holocausts are ended for once and for all. Ball-cocks!

Another solution must be found. But don't ask me for it here, please!

What is happening, then, in Basle, Switzerland, is a contretemps, with Marx hoping somehow to interest the Russians in his scheme to pacify the Teutonic bloodiness. He thought that they might give him research funds to analyze language to uncover all the elements in it that trigger the human mind into mass murder; then, guided by his researches into the Venus holocaust syndrome, they might begin to establish the computer-based on-line systems that would send "clean" communication out in all fields of knowledge.

They could also conduct their campaign of education through a flood of literature -- articles, books, periodicals, hand-outs -- and by seminars, conferences, meetings, programs, lectures, orations, curricula and by means of all the other audio-visual and even psychic mind-blowing thought-projecting techniques. Or so I imagine.

Why do with ten thousand tanks what you can do with words -- the mad dream of the psychological warrior -- and for the good of the people concerned! And then turn the weapon against oneself and blow one's primordial brains out. Afterwards, Utopia. Whether Marx would agree or not (he would not), these, I say, are the logical and quite fantastic developments out of his ideas.

The Russians can also help him by giving him information which he is sure that they possess on the eccentric behavior of planet Venus.

He is convinced that he can thereupon turn his data guns against the scientific establishment and wipe them out. They will have to admit the youth of Venus, the catastrophes of the Earth, the amnesia of mankind, and the failure of the major paradigms of modern science.

Hopefully the Russian scientists will go along as his shock-troops instead of remaining the slavish followers of darwinism and lyellism.

He has some support from me here; I have noticed, and advised him so, that my own sources in the Soviet Union indicate an unusual receptivity to quantavolution theory.

There is something very Swiss in Marx' endeavor to convert the huge Soviet Republic to his Reconstruction of History. Imagine the Kremlin reviewing stand on the First of May, the many thousands of marching troops and rumbling tanks and missile trucks, and the onlooking masses. Imagine the dogmatic culture of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism spread over half the Earth and hundreds of millions of people. Imagine what force and energy it would take to convert their minds to his peculiar revolutionary modes of peace-making thought.

"Why not?" says Marx, the crazy romantic idealist of the grand tradition!

Were there not at least thirty persons among the ten billions who have ever lived who inspired multi-cultured cross-national mental and material revolutions -- Alexander, Kubla Khan, Julius Caesar, Jesus, Attila, Mahomet, Loyola, Napoleon, Bolivar, Marx, Lenin, Sun-Yat-Sen, Mao, et al?

Who dares begrudge Christoph his one chance in 300,000,000? After all, were we not all of us winners in an equally improbable contest, to reach Mama's egg before all the other 300,000,000 sibling-sperms that were ejaculated at the same instant?

The Russians are fascinated by Marx, but let us be realistic: they are as fascinated as a couple of busy spy chiefs, purchasing agents, major factotums of the diplomatic bureaucracy, shoppers for their wives and families and friends back home can allow themselves to be.

"Nobody has real time for anything important in a clock-watching world." (Maxim #11)

Marx knows it and he doesn't know it. He is a self-made thinker and therefore lacks the self-confidence of the institutional creation.

But he cages the dangerous idiocy of the conduct of nations, of those who govern nations. It takes but a second for him to connect the Venus explorations and the Leningrad holocaust as interrelated and of a single pattern.

They do not know the interconnections of the Universe, these despatchers of vehicles to far space.

No child should escape, poor thing, from grammar school -- even if thirty years old -- until she or he can answer the question: "Between any two items (these 2, x and y, for example) in the Universe, what is the connection?"

Thus Maxim #12: "Any two items in the universe are related." Thus the despatches: "That which escaped the fire was damaged by the water, pumped promiscuously by 25 machines according to antiquated rules."

Authentic Soviet news sources.

Nero, you innocents out there should know, was a delicate soul, a lyricist and actor of consequence, never mind his being a Caesar and Emperor of Rome and a muddafugga. If he played the viol while Rome was being set ablaze by treasonable Christians (the theory accepted under Roman law and what law has ever been better?), he twanged because he couldn't do anything better at the moment and to soothe his spirits.

What do the Leningrad Fire Brigades do this wintry March day when the great Library of Leningrad catches fire, that magnificent collection of non-xeroxed, unmicrofilmed, not microfiched, non-videod, electronically unmemorized by computer, works of past ages? They come and for eighteen hours pour water into the inferno of partially carbonized documents until millions of pages form a great glue. "A Chernobyl of culture!" the Soviet observers called it, 3,600,000 volumes damaged -- I mentioned the half-million destroyed.

Two great crimes -- where does fault become a crime? -- "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake," 1) not to make a copy, 2) not to fight fire intelligently. There were meanwhile Soviet vehicles in space that had little better to do than to watch the fires of Venus and the fires of Leningrad at unaffordable expense.

Twenty years of contact and the Soviets still could not make up their minds as to what exactly was involved with Marx and what they could do with his ideas. Marx himself was not clear on the matter, and I do not exclude that even if he were clear he would have resisted cooperation.

In Marx' ideas -- and nobody in the world will deny that I am precisely the person to say so -- was the potential for a tremendous psychological warfare campaign against the West, calling into existence and supporting ("Hear ye, hear ye, all communist cells!") a cult that would denounce and combat every effort on the part of the NATO nations to arm themselves materially and psychologically against the Redlands. For, every hand that brandished a weapon would be paralyzed for signifying a resurrection of World Destruction!

See now what a potentially powerful weapon it is, the idea of making the pre-conditioned, guilty-feeling Germans believe that they are held pitilessly in the grip of their ancient and continual obsession with Götterdämmerung!

The Russians meanwhile can grant, like the rest of us, that we shall have to climb onto the psychoanalytic couch also. But after the Germans.

And "after the Germans" means when the psychiatrists in question belong to the all-Soviet Congress of Psychology and Psychiatry. Or are Affiliate Members.

The stakes are high; his dedication is complete.

The Russians are uncertain but intelligently play out the game a little at a time. You cannot be Napoleon in the Soviet bureaucracy, no "on agit et puis on voit".

Still, if the Russian Embassy's discretionary fund were to go broke it would be in a good cause, and if the Kremlin agents had to replenish it by producing exciting materials from other people's data banks, Marx might be glad to oblige them in that connection, too.

Anyhow, this is what one might gather from knowing how his mind and their mind and everybody's sick mind, including my own, works.