Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans
Explosive New 9/11 Revelations and Explanations
Published on August 24, 2004 By Nereids Poseidon In Current Events
Alex Jones Interviews Col. Donn de Grand-Pre, U.S. Army (ret.)

AJ: He put on a symposium a few years ago that made headlines in major newspapers, in Portugal. We had one of those articles posted. And it says,

"Portugal-based investigative journalist has presented The News, with the version of the September 11th attacks that has to-date failed to attract the attention of the international press. The report, compiled by the independent inquiry into the September 11th World Trade Center attack, warns the American public that the government's official version of the events does not stand up to scrutiny."

And the man who put this on was Col. Donn de Grand , who's an American in a 72-hour non-stop symposium, deliberation by a group of military and civilian pilots under the chairmanship of Col. Donn de Grand. After deliberating non-stop for 72-hours, has concluded the flight crews of the four passenger airliners involved in the September 11th tragedy had no control over their aircraft.

They get into how the globalists clearly carried it out. Now, this was two years ago, folks. A very cutting edge... Now the mainstream foreign press has addressed it. And most Europeans believe the U.S. government carried it out. A lot of Americans are now waking up. And talking to this trailblazer, cutting-edge pioneer, Col. Donn de Grand. It's an honor, sir, to have you on the show.

DGP: Hey, Alex, it's good to be aboard.

AJ: We are going to break here in about a minute and a-half. Give folks your bio. Tell us about Col. Donn de Grand.

DGP: Well, you've got part of the name correct. It's a hyphened word, the last name is Grand-Pre.

AJ: Yes, it's Col. Donn de Grand-Pre. That's how I addressed you this morning on the website.

DGP: That's alright.

AJ: The Portugal newspaper just says Col. Don de Grand, so....

DGP: That's okay. I've talked to these guys and they're good and they almost got it correct. I'll give you a quick bio. I entered the military in 1944 as an 18-year-old radio operator, morse code. And I was sent to Burma and China. I was attached to the detachment 101 which was OSS and I operated out of Burma. Then later on in Kunming, China, along with such notable people as a tall, skinny gal by the name of Julia Child. She has since put on a little weight and now she's doing television commercials, I guess. But I came back on active duty in 1950 as a commissioned officer, infantry airborne. And I got involved in the Korean fracas for a year-and-a-half until I was wounded. Then I was shipped home for two-years while I recuperated. And then I came back in.....

AJ: I'll tell you what, Col. Donn de Grand-Pre, let's stay right there. Let's recap when we get back and go through the rest of your bio. And then launch into this amazing symposium that you put on two-years ago and why you did it in Portugal. So stay with us. His first interview in over a year and we are honored to have Col. Donn de Grand-Pre.

BREAK

AJ: We are talking to Col. Donn de Grand-Pre and we have a news article about an incredible symposium he put on two years ago in Portugal, covered by a front-page newspaper and magazine ' Portugal's other major papers. And a lot of key info came out ' very cutting edge. And this is his first interview since he had a stroke a little over a year ago. It's great to have the Colonel on the show. So, he got into OSS right at the end of World War II, then went into Korea for a year and a half, was wounded, with the airborne. And that's where we left off, Colonel. Please continue with your bio.

DGP: Okay, Alex. Actually I went to work then for Sec. Def. Bob McNamara. He hired me as the chief arms negotiator for the Middle East. And we conducted our business there. We were known as the super salesmen in ISA, International Security Affairs. And over a ten-year period, we sold over a hundred billion dollars worth of military equipment to all comers. And then, you mentioned the interview in Portugal. I didn't actually go to Portugal but on 11 September, actually it was 12 September, I wrote to my friend Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time. He was transited out. And he was replaced by Gen. Richard, what the heck was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs' The name escapes me. He was a four-star Air Force General. And, Myers, I guess, was the name. At any rate, I called together from 16 to 19 September, in the Pentagon area, not in the Pentagon, a group of military, civilian and general aviation pilots. And for three days, we kicked around what actually happened on 11 September. And then the investigator journalists covered that and it was reported in the Portugal news and very accurate. I have the report in front of me and it is quite involved but if you have some questions, fire away, Alex.

AJ: Well, now you got these military officers together and that's the only place I ever saw it get reported on, was on here in Portugal ' it talked about the symposium. Of course, I read one of your fine books and we'll talk about that as well a little bit later on in the show and take some calls. But, what was laid out, what I saw in the four-page article, two years ago, has turned out to be very accurate. Tell us about the military officers, the pilots, the civilian pilots that were there and the conclusions that you came to in the 72-hour non-stop meeting. Please go over that for us.

DGP: Okay, Alex, the group of pilots and they will remain anonymous were a wonderful mix of commercial, military and civilian pilots. At any rate, after three days, the decisions were unanimous. And I wrote my 24-page report up and submitted it to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And that report ultimately got into the hands of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on 23 January, 2002. The General was U.S. Marine Corp General by the name Peter Pace. And I got a telephone call, 5 March, from one of his horse holders, who is a Colonel Air Force type. He informed me that Gen. Peter Pace had gotten the twenty-four pages and that he and his Sec. had no comment at this time but he used the old Marine Corp lingo, "Semper Fi" or Always Faithful, and we let it go at that. Later on I continued my correspondence with the Vice Chairman and most recently, I got a letter 8 November, 2003 from Peter Pace, to me, carrying on not only about the investigation but about the three books that I have written since that time.

AJ: Now, Colonel, going over your report and the, I guess the committee meeting that you guys had to play out what you believe really happened. Now as more evidence has come out, it shows that that's clearly exactly what happened. Now, they are using 911 to turn this country into a total police state. I mean how do you see us turning this around?

DGP: The turning around is not going to be that easy. I look at the final paragraph of this report. And here is what the final paragraph said. "So far the mainstream American news media has failed to publish or broadcast any details regarding the independent inquiry. Similarly, the White House whilst having received a copy of the report has remained silent on its findings." While we know that a copy, first of all I have to back up a little. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had 500 copies of this 24-page report made and sent out, including, to the White House. And I have to say it was including Pres. Bush. So they got a copy of the report.

AJ: That was Myers at the time.

DGP: That is correct.

AJ: And so, he sent out 500 copies, that would mean that he believed it.

DGP: I'm quite sure that he believed in it. I think that he still believes in it. You can understand the difficulties. The civilian administration, of course, won't recognize it as such.

AJ: How did you find out that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs sent this out?

DGP: I got a telephone call and I think the date was 5 March 2002, stating that at the time, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had no comment but he used the Marine Corp lingo 'Semper Fi', Semper Fidelity 'always faithful'. And that triggered in me further memos and I traded memos with Gen. Peter Pace and Dick Myers and they continued on until November of last year.

AJ: Well that had to be upsetting to Mr. Rumsfeld to have all these, hundreds of your reports flying around the Pentagon.

DGP: (laughs) Yeah, you see there's a definite cleavage between the military of the Pentagon and the civilian hierarchy - and never the twain shall meet.

AJ: Well, there was an article right after 'that you talk about' in mid-2002 in the Washington Times saying the morale in the Pentagon had never been lower. And you would think it would be high right after 911 and getting together to fight the enemy. But it said that the officers didn't believe in the "mission" or in the intelligence.

DGP: That is correct. That came out of the Washington Times and I can verify that from Col. Dick Schultz, who is a friend of mine in the Joint Chiefs. Morale was not only low but he said some of the troops are ready to mutiny. If it wasn't for the fact that the government, the civilian hierarchy, has control over retirements, they would probably be blood in the streets by now.

AJ: There was also an article where they panicked in the Washington Times, it was also in the Washington Post, they panicked and flew the officers on jets to luxury vacations and had these focus groups. It even talked about a possible mutiny. People were just totally distraught. What would make them become distraught overnight in the Pentagon?

DGP: It wasn't an overnight thing. You see, as I outline in book 1, and I carry that on in book 2, as well as book 3, we were on the verge of a military coup d'etat. And this was long in the planning and even after the 78 days of bombing Kosovo, it became critical. And we were close to a coup d'etat at that time. In my survey of the reports and the pilots who worked with that, a coup was a possibility. In fact, a coup d'etat was pulled on the morning of September 11th. Only it was an administrative or what we call a cold coup d'etat.

AJ: Or reverse coup d'etat.

DGP: Yes, in fact....

AJ: A counter revolutionary junta.

DGP: Well that is correct. And as we delved into that, we found that the culprits, including Rumsfeld, were part of a neocon group that had been planning this thing for literally years prior to September 11th.

AJ: Absolutely, Colonel, it's just amazing picking your brain. We are going to break here. In talking to your this morning, I was proud to know that you've been a listener to this show for a while.

DGP: Well, I've had a single side band short wave set for about 4 years and I listened variously to Alex Jones, particularly up until about 2-years ago, and as a result of the events of September 11th, I did have a stoke. I'm fully recovered. As I told Alex, I went riding my favorite quarter horse this morning. So I'm back and ready for anything.

AJ: Well that's wonderful Colonel. Okay, we'll break and come back with the Colonel and get into all of this ' and later get to your calls, too. So please, stay with us.

BREAK

AJ: We'll take some of your calls for Col. Donn de Grand-Pre coming up in the next segment. He's done a lot of great work. I've only read one of his books. Donn, tell us about some of your books, what they cover and how folks can get a copy.

DGP: Okay, I've got three books out, Alex, under the title, "Barbarians Inside the Gates." Book 1 was "The Serpent's Sting," Book 2 is "The Viper's Venom," Book 3 which just came out is "The Rattler's Revenge." And I'd like to quote from Book 2, which came out October of 2002. There is a very important paragraph there. It says, "The trigger for the 911 activity was the imminent and unstoppable world-wide financial collapse which can only be prevented temporarily by a major war, perhaps to become known as World War III. To bring it off one more time, martial law will probably be imposed in the United States."

AJ: And now we've seen Gen. Eberhart say that that's the next step. Tommy Franks said that's the next step. Are those now chilling statements?

DGP: Yes, they are. This next step will be preceded by what I write up in book 1 ' "The Serpent's Sting." I wrote of a coming coup d'etat. And this was written in the year 2000. And sure as blazes, it's coming. And it will be preceded by these kinds of things as enunciated by Tommy Franks, among others. So we are in a world of hurt, Alex.

AJ: Now, by a coup d'etat, you mean another intensification of a reverse coup d'etat to keep the people from fighting against the New World Order or do you mean the type that Bill Clinton successfully stopped in his administration?

DGP: Well, I'm talking about the administrative coup d'etat that came off September 11th.

AJ: You're talking about an intensification of the elite in a coup d'etat against America.

DGP: That is correct.

AJ: Well, I mean, it's ongoing. They are federalizing everything, they are militarizing everything, they're engaging in the classic takeover, are they not?

DGP: Yes, there are. And from this, Alex, and I bring this out very clearly in book 3, the only way we can stop it is with the classic counter-coup d'etat where the military steps in. And under the aegis of the military itself, disengaging or disemboweling the civilian hierarchy and taking over and re-running or re-organizing the federal government.

AJ: Now the problem is they've got so many CFR minions in the Pentagon. We know that Clinton had some officers terminated and, in their office, shot multiple times and the rest of it. We know that that happened but the question is how many of the high level officers are on the globalist team?

DGP: I can only say several of the highest level are members now of the Council on Foreign Relations. The important thing to consider is how many of them are sincere in their beliefs as enunciated by the CFR. I believe there are several sleepers and I believe I know some of them personally who are three and four-star generals. They are members of the CFR but "their heart belongs to Jesus," if I can use that expression because they are true Semper Fidelity people. Some of them happen to be Marines. And I'm counting on them to do the right thing. And I bring this out in book 3.

AJ: Absolutely and we'll tell people how they can get those books. I mean I want to carry them but Colonel, your experience in the military, your experience in the intelligence agencies, there's also the danger though obviously in any military movement of that nature that it could be self-serving as well, and set up its own form of wickedness.

DGP: Yes, that's plausible, that's correct. I don't believe it will happen in exactly that fashion. And the thing about a coup d'etat and a counter-coup d'etat is you never know when it's going to happen. You never know exactly who is involved. This is a plus for any planners of a counter-coup d'etat.

AJ: Well, this is certainly dividing the wheat from the chaff. How many people, and we'll get the answer to the question when we get back from your feelers in the Pentagon, how many people in there now know that an element of the global system, a crime syndicate, carried out 91, I mean, only an idiot would know, would think they didn't but the point is, this has got to be accelerating the division. And I want to get your take on the pulse of that and we'll take calls when we get back. Stay with us.

BREAK

AJ: We are talking to Col. Donn de Grand-Pre and he worked in many of the levels of the U.S. military and has put out some really important information. Two years ago, he put out a report in a meeting in a 72-hour deliberation, a group of military and civilian U.S. pilots under the chairmanship of Col. Donn de Grand-Pre. After deliberating non-stop for 72-hours has concluded that the flight crews of the four passenger airliners involved in the September 11th tragedy had no control over the aircraft. And they get into how the military industrial complex clearly, that is elements of it, were in control of this. Colonel, we are going to go to some calls here in a minutes after you cover some other issues with us. But, understand this, my question of what percentage of the officers, period, in the military do you think have finally woken up to the true magnitude of what's going on?

DGP: Well, I'm in personal contact at least on a weekly basis with the Joint Chiefs and other select people. My computation is that 70% of us are with us. That's the higher ranking military, field grade officers, etc. and even the first three grades of the enlisted ' 70% are with us.

AJ: Well, they've had questionnaires, you know, a decade ago, will you fire on U.S. citizens under UN control if the president says so ' and, you know, 74% say no to that. Okay, then how are the globalists getting away with this?

DGP: Sheer [Garbled] bluff and we can thank many of the neocons who are now in power in the Defense Dept. particularly. They get away with it because they try it out and see if anybody will salute the flag and that's the way it goes.

AJ: So basically, they wrap their un-American agenda in a flag and the general public buys it so the military has to sit there and take it.

DGP: They do, yes, and I think those days are coming to an end. The military ain't going to take it any longer.

AJ: How did the military ever get convinced to use depleted uranium in areas where there is going to be troops?

DGP: To put what Alex?

AJ: Well, yeah, the military gets treated like dog meat. You've got the depleted uranium, Colonel, where they spray the depleted uranium everywhere where the troops breathe it at 1900 times safe levels. How can the Pentagon put up with that?

DGP: Well, the DU rounds are over-played, first of all. They aren't that potent and secondarily, we must consider that weapons of mass destruction have already been used by some of the opposition in the period February of 1991. Weapons of mass destruction, including low-yield nuclear weapons.

AJ: Okay, can you break that down for us?

DGP: Well, I break it down in the time frame that we had satellite images of rounds or missiles being fired from the Negev desert toward Baghdad. That's 600 miles distance. And six or eight of the rounds came in. That was February of 1991.

AJ: Are you saying that the Israelis used miniaturized nuclear weapons?

DGP: Yes sir. That's what I'm saying, in plain English.

AJ: Well I remember, I know they bragged that they had a lot of really sophisticated miniaturized nuclear weapons, of the little mini-frogs, or whatever. But and I know there were these giant mushroom clouds on the news. They'd say, "Oh, that's not a nuke. That's just a weapons depot." But you are saying that it is common knowledge at the Pentagon that Israel was firing nuclear weapons at Iraq?

DGP: That is correct.

AJ: Oh, so that's where all this high-level radiation is emanating from?

DGP: That is correct. And I have verification of that. I think it's in book 2. And I think it will stand up in most scrutiny.

AJ: Well, I know your work on September 11th certainly has. Do you think the globalists are going to have the will to carry out another massive attack here in the U.S. to try to get control back over the population and get their agenda back on track? Or do you think they've calculated, computed as you said, that that will blow up in their face because so many people now know who the real terrorists are?

DGP: That's a two-prong question, Alex. I think it deserves a studied answer. The only thing I can say is I'm not sure how it will turn out. But it is very dangerous.

AJ: From watching the globalists, I think they had a plan, they are still following a plan but I think they are shook-up. I think, from the evidence, in fact I know from the evidence, that a lot of things they planned haven't gone according to schedule and so they don't know what to do right now.

DGP: This is correct. I think it's personified in the persona of the Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They almost got him in Baghdad when they fired the salvo, one night, of weaponry and they scared Paul Wolfowitz off. He's ready to resign or get the hell out.

AJ: You think that was U.S. forces doing that?

DGP: I believe it. It was very well planned again and ..

AJ: Yeah, only U.S. forces would know that he would be there. Yeah.

DGP: That is correct. And the precision of those weapons that came into the hotel. There were eleven rounds in all and I can speak from authenticity that they scared the hell out of Paul Wolfowitz. And probably, C. Paul Bremer, or whatever his name is.

AJ: Why does the Pentagon hate Wolfowitz?

DGP: Wolfowitz has been in this game since 1974. I was still on active duty when I met him in 1974 and he was coming on strong even then. And along with him, Richard Perle and a couple of the others who are now known as neoconservatives.

AJ: Now Perle had the nickname as the crazy and the prince of darkness. Is that correct?

DGP: That is correct.

AJ: Why was he known as the prince of darkness?

DGP: I can't answer that directly. He was a snake to begin with but nothing was ever straight forward as far as Richard Perle was concerned. I introduced book 3 two quotes stating that Richard Perle is a madman. And it goes on from there.

AJ: Well he is a madman. He was at a press dinner last year and, again, giggling and laughing about how we are going to have World War III, we are going to nuke everyone, ha, ha, ha. And then he goes, "Isn't that impressive" and started grabbing on some women. I mean, he's a complete lunatic.

DGP: That is correct. Richard Perle's days are numbered. I don't know if he realizes it but so many of these so-called neocons, you'll notice now, that they are very quiet indeed. They are not really surfacing anymore, including Dick Cheney.

AJ: Yeah, why is Dick Cheney been literally hiding under a bunker?

DGP: He's been hiding under a bunker most of the time since September 11th.

AJ: And, by the way, it has come out that he took control of NORAD and was saying something in the U.S. ultra-secret bunkers, that he was on loud-speakers ordering people to follow his orders. He had to physically take control of something, from my sources, it was the fact that they were going to go ahead and shoot the aircraft down. That's what I've got from lawyers who represent military officers. We know he was in control through even during the hijackings, the supposed hijackings. What do you know about that?

DGP: Well, not too much really. I can't speak to that because it's hypothetical and what I try to stick to are the cold hard facts.

AJ: Well, Colonel, we know he did take control of the bunkers. I just don't know what he said, according to ABC News but according to my sources which have been very accurate, he was ordering a stand down.

DGP: Yes, I can believe it but again, it's supposition and I still haven't been able to figure out what makes Dick Cheney tick.

AJ: So, well then why is he hiding in a bunker? Why is he at the Naval Observatory in a bunker most of the time?

DGP: I think that that is what he considers to be the safest place at the moment. He's basically a coward and this too will come out. I feel that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, both of them, their days are numbered.

AJ: Okay, so politically more and more corruption coming out, more and more of their criminal activities coming out, serious issues. Colonel, how do folks get your books, the three-part series?

DGP: Okay, the book is easy to come by. My incomparable daughter Doneva is the publisher of these books and they are turning out top-grade, library quality books. Books 1, 2, and 3 ' "Barbarians Inside the Gates." They can be obtained by writing to post office box 1124, Madison, Virginia 22727. And send it in care of Grand-Pre Publishing, Ltd. And for the price of $30, you can get book 1. $30 again is book 2. And then for book 3 that just came out and it's a big book, 608 pages, we've had to up the price to $45.

AJ: Alright, these are thick books, jam-packed and the address is PO 1124, Madison, Virginia. And that zip code again'

DGP: 22727.

AJ: Alright and does that $30 include the shipping?

DGP: No, it really doesn't. For the books and we send them all out priority special handling, that's runs $3.85 a book.

AJ: Okay, got you. Alright we'll give that out again a little bit later. So let's go ahead and take some calls.

[SKIPPED SEGMENT]

AJ: All right, 8 minutes, 30 seconds into this third hour. Again I'm Alex Jones, your host. We'll have our guest with us for another twenty-five minutes or so, then I'm going to get into this big stack of news that we have not detailed yet. Believe me it's all very important. Our guest is Col. Donn de Grand-Pre. Honored to have him on the show. He's the author of a three-part series of books, "Barbarians Inside the Gates." And real quick, John in New York, you had a question about 9/11.

John: It's not a question. I want to make a comment. I was in the Air Force. My career field was radar operations and I was assigned to the Air Defense Command. The airliners turned around at Erie, Pennsylvania and were off-course for approximately one-hour, at the wrong altitude, at the wrong speed, without radio contact and it is absolutely insane for anybody to believe that could have happened unless people were told to stand down.

AJ: Well, Payne Stewart, in 18 minutes had five F-16s around him in the middle of no where. In the most sensitive air corridor in the world, the eastern coast there, D.C./ New York, with these four planes all over the map. And they know there's been hijackings and Dick Cheney's in control. Everything's standing down and ....

John: The fighters that were stationed in Virginia, just across the border from Washington, D.C., could have been flying at bust speed, which is max speed, they could have intercepted those planes in 15 minutes and saved all that tragedy. And the second airplane was 15 minutes behind the first airplane. So to think they didn't do anything about the second one makes it even more ludicrous. So, terrific guest; terrific show. Thanks for taking my call.

AJ: All right, and again, we don't even do this justice to focus on one area. I mean we've got all the public officials being told not to go to New York, the insider trading by the CIA, the Bushes protecting the bin Ladens. Colonel, do you want to comment on that?

DGP: Well, what I was trying to get through here, John has done a beautiful job of laying it all out here on 911. What I want to carry away is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs himself has agreed, there were no hijackers. There were no cell phone calls. Everybody aboard that aircraft, pilots and crew, were unconscious within 8 to 18 minutes after take-off. And you can take it from there. I've got it covered in books 2 and 3, what actually happened.

AJ: So, they're knocked out and then the remote control takes place and the rest is history.

DGP: Yeah, there was remote control and .. yes.

AJ: By the way, people don't believe they have that. Kennedy's oldest son, JFK's big brother, died in a chase plane with remote controlling in a bomber loaded with explosives as a drone in 1944.

DGP: That is correct.

AJ: So this very old technology, folks. And for people that are in total denial, it's ridiculous. Let's go ahead and talk to Wayne in Virginia. Wayne, thanks for holding, go ahead.

Wayne: Yes sir, thank you. I have a two-part question. The first part is Colonel..ah.

AJ: Donn de Grand-Pre

Wayne: de Grand-Pre. I'm sorry sir, I stumbled over your name. Could you play the instructor with us ground-pounders for a little while and tell us why, from an airmanship point of view, the maneuvers the aircraft performed were just inexplicable and bordering on the impossible from a pilot's point of view?

DGP: Yes, let me get that real quick for Wayne from Virginia. These planes were being piloted by remote control, probably an AWACs aircraft taking over that airplane or airplanes or drones, unmanned drones. And flying them at 5 and 8 G-force that no pilot could withstand. So, in short, and if you read books 2 and 3, you will discover how and why this came about.

Wayne: The second part of my question is after 911, our Congressman from down here, Randy Forbes spoke at a Veterans' Foreign Wars Hall about how close he was to the Bush and Rumsfeld cabal and how before 911 he had a briefing at the White House where they were told they were expecting something big from Afghanistan. And he also in his discussion, there were about 200 or 300 people there, it is recorded on film. And my notes are very clear on this. He also said they were following other aircraft out over the ocean. Do you have any knowledge of that? That is something that I have not heard discussed at all about 911.

DGP: No, but this comes under speculation now. And I'm telling you that we are knowledgeably speculating. Those aircraft carrying crew and passengers went over the Atlantic and that was all she wrote.

[Crosstalk]

AJ: Yeah, you remote control the original planes out, then your loaded up drones attack. And the biggest and oldest newspaper in Spain just came out, three weeks ago, and they looked at the bottom of one of those jets and there's some type of giant belly attachment. It's clearly a modified aircraft.

Wayne: Can I ask one final question?

AJ: Yes.

Wayne: That your line of discussion here, the Colonel in the past few minutes, has just opened up. You said earlier that you expected when push comes to shove that this 70% of general and field grade officers are going to say that's it. Well the enterprise that we are discussing here of taking regularly scheduled civilian airlines out and ditching them in the ocean and putting in their places aerial bombs....

AJ: Yeah, that is push coming to shove.

Wayne: That is it. Why aren't these people coming forward now'

AJ: Let me say this. We know because, folks I don't want to give too much detail out. I've talked to lawyers. I've talked to them. We know hundreds of high level officers have leaked everything we are now learning about today. So, I think that this caught a lot of people unawares. Colonel, do you want to comment on that?

DGP: Well, the only thing I can say is that let's consider that second aircraft that hit the World Trade Center. It did have a control device on the belly of the 757. That aircraft was unmanned and went in and blew up as a diversion. And something else happened. This was a sideshow.

AJ: I understand but going back to, we know they had bombs in the buildings, it's now admitted, but going back to what the caller said, your saying these elements in the military when push came to shove are going to stand up. Well, I would say that 911 was the globalists pushing. So, where's the shove? That's his question.

DGP: Well this will come. It's going to be in the form of a counter-coup d'tat. You understand that a coup d'tat was pulled on September 11th by the civilian hierarchy. [crosstalk] Say again?

Wayne: God grant that it would come soon.

DGP: Well, we, we, yes it probably will.

Wayne: They are talking about going into Syria now.

DGP: Don't believe it. There is a new ballgame there and I can't go into it right now. But Syria is going to be something else entirely involving NATO forces. And I can't go into that much right now.

AJ: Okay, thanks for the call, Wayne. Let's talk to Diane in South Carolina. Diane, go ahead.

Diane: Hi, before I asked my question. Please ask Don de Grand-Pre, Sir, to give us a phone number so we can contact him. And I have read the first book. It is awesome. It's like reading history and just watching everything unfold.

AJ: Yeah, he wrote about it in 2000 and then it happens a year later.

Diane: So, here's my question. On Thursday of last week in the Courier in South Carolina, they had a small article on the Russians who are now doing this World War III practice.

AJ: Yeah, the Russians are doing nuclear attack drills on us ' our little buddies, you know.

Diane: Okay, they had in there about a maneuverable nuclear-tipped weapon for offensive purposes.....

AJ: Yeah, they say they've got a missile that nothing can stop...

Diane: It's an airplane that goes five times the speed of sound. This was in the paper.

AJ: Well, they've had that for a while. You want to comment on that?

Diane: And my question is how is the foreign military in the United States vs. our military going to respond? And it looks like Russia is making some moves now. What do you think about Russia?

AJ: Yeah Colonel, that's a good question. I have all the articles, I have the documents they really are trying to integrate foreign and East German, Czech Republic, others into our military. How is that going?

DGP: It's probably going. I can't give you detail. You are bordering on certain elements that I can't talk about. But we have to consider the Russian aspect of these weapons as being in essence propaganda. We have the same type of unmanned aircraft drones, etc. that will fly 5 times the speed of sound.

AJ: They will do a lot more than that.

DGP: Yeah, but Diane let's not worry too much about the Russians.

Diane: Well, is there a non-gravitational type airplane or something?

AJ: No, they've got regular propulsion air. .. look, look Ma'am, they claim the SR 71 Blackbird in flight in '55, in service in '59, was the fastest jet in the world. It is not and it cruises at mach 3. Okay, I mean they got jets that will just.....

Diane: I know we are way behind what they are telling us. What I'm thinking....

AJ: Do you want to comment on that?

Diane: And ask him to give out his number for us, too.

DGP: Let me give you a home phone where you can contact me at Grand Pre Publishing Ltd. at 540-547-2996. And that's my home phone. It's a private phone and you can call me anytime.

AJ: Okay, now we know that you had a stroke a few years ago worrying about this so much. So folks, don't bug him too much. Hey, I feel like I'm going to have one everyday worrying about this.

DGP: I can handle just about anything including this 15-year old gelding that I was riding this morning.

AJ: Okay, well that's good sir. We'll be right back. We'll take more calls.

BREAK

AJ: All right folks. Here's the deal, we are going to take 5 more calls for our guest. Then let our guest go. I really appreciate him coming on. Then I'm going to cover a bunch of news that we haven't really detailed yet. It's very, very important and recap some top stories as well. Diane had asked your phone number and if you want to give it out, that's fine. Folks, if you want to talk to the Colonel, it's 540-547-2996. And before he leaves us in the next segment, we'll give you the mailing address again to get the books. Let's talk to John in Tennessee. John, you are on the air, go ahead.

John: Colonel, did a cruise missile hit the Pentagon or a Global Hawk or a drone business jet?

DGP: You are talking about what hit the Pentagon, right John? It was a cruise missile. It could have been a Global Hawk. It was not a commercial aircraft.

AJ: That's what the eye-witnesses said and the evidence shows. And do people realize that this was staged at the Pentagon? I mean obviously it's in an area that's under renovation and then all this happens. Do people at the Pentagon? are they still buying the official story, Colonel?

DGP: Well, I can't speak for the rest of them but I'm certainly not buying that. And I think I've got the full story in book 3. And that's it. It was a diversionary hit for strategic reasons and it didn't matter whether it was a pilotless drone or a Global Hawk missile. It wasn't a commercial aircraft.

AJ: It's the most surveilled area in the world but no video of it. Witnesses said they saw a small aircraft.

DGP: No, they did not. We have [garbled] a video that purports to show a firing of a launch probably from a Global Hawk or an unmanned aircraft missile but it certainly wasn't a commercial aircraft.

John: And was United Airlines Flight 93 shot down in Pennsylvania by a U.S. or NATO pilot and was that what was supposed to hit the Pentagon?

DGP: No, that was hit at 10:00 hours. It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard. I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93.

John: Was it shot down because the airline pilots actually regained control of the hijacked auto-pilot or was that to replace the unmanned drone that was shot down?

DGP: No, it was the aircraft, you see, had totally unconscious people on board. There were no hijackers. At 9:35, the Happy Hooligans, the Air Guard flying the F-16s were ordered to take that plane out. And they took it out from 9:35 to 10:00.

John: Were there any refueling jets involved in that operation?

AJ: Hold on a second, John. The question is why would they deviate from the plan of flying it into the Capitol? Why did the globalists decide to go ahead and shoot the plane down?

DGP: There had been an adjustment to the controls, probably by an AWACs aircraft flying overhead, again, remote control. And it was on a course for either the Capitol or the White House. And at this stage, you don't know. The Happy Hooligans came in and took care of it.

AJ: Do you think they were not following orders?

DGP: Who, the Happy Hooligans?

AJ: Well, yeah, you've got Cheney running around, we've got the stand down taking place.

DGP: Well, this is correct, but you see the Adj. General of the State of North Dakota gave the command to take it out. And, by God, they took it out. And I've got the full story in the book.

AJ: That's a good thing they did that. You said you talked to the pilot. Think about this folks. Imagine what Bush would have gotten if he would have had that plane fly into the Capitol? Imagine the police state we would be in right now.

DGP: Yes, yes, yes, indeed.

AJ: And so you had to have the diversionary blast at the Pentagon so no one would get suspicious and think it was a military coup.

DGP: Perhaps, perhaps.

AJ: John, does that answer your question?

John: Was there any refueling tankers used by the North Dakota Air Guard and what tanker wing was used?

DGP: I don't know about the aircraft itself. I don't know about refueling. They came off base in Langley and it was just a few minutes out from Langley to the intercept over Pennsylvania. It was just a matter of minutes.

AJ: Colonel, how did you get in touch with the pilot who shot the plane down?

DGP: It turned out to be an old friend of mine from the Air National Guard and this is my home state of North Dakota. And I attended the ceremony in North Dakota and watched the Adj. General [garbled] the pilot being decorated a year later for this activity that happened on 911 with Flight 93.

BREAK

AJ: Welcome back. We are about to go back to the Colonel and his amazing revelation of the North Dakota National Guard that had been moved to Langley Virginia a few months before 911. And then went in there and shot down that Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. He says he's talked to the pilot. His info checks out. I've been researching what he's been doing for years. Before we go back to our guest and 4 final calls from Scott and June and Warren and Greg, and we'll go to you quick too, because we've got a bunch of news we need to get to.

[Skipped segment]

Colonel, before we take these four final calls, go over that a little bit slower for folks. That's a big deal. You talked to the pilot, a friend of yours, who shot down Flight 93 that was going for the Capitol or the White House. And go over that for folks.

DGP: Okay, quick rundown. They were out of Hector Field, Fargo, North Dakota. A bunch, this 119 Fighter Group and they are called the Happy Hooligans. They are probably the best interceptors that we have in the country. They were moved to Langley Air Force Base from Hector Field down to Southern Virginia. And when the klaxon horn went off at 9:35, those two pilots put down their coffee and shot into their aircraft and took off. They didn't know where they were going initially but by 10:00 hours, they had rendezvoused over Southern Pennsylvania. That's about 250 miles in just a matter of minutes and engaged 93 with two side-winder missiles. And they accomplished their objective. Now Hector Field, I use to fly out of Hector Field some time ago. I know most of those pilots. I could name names. I know the National Guard Adj. General. And they were decorated about a year later and I have the full write up of that story in my book.

AJ: Yeah and it's just ignored by the media. I have that article, too. And later, well okay, it was a missile, well there wasn't "Let's Roll." It's all made-up theatre for the public and we buy it like a bunch of saps.

DGP: That is correct.

AJ: It's incredible. Let's go ahead and talk to Scott in Florida. Scott, go ahead.

Scott: Hi, how you doing?

AJ: Fine.

Scott: Earlier in the show, you mentioned that both Cheney and Wolfowitz might be in some trouble. I was wondering if they'd been serving the real rulers of the world, the thirteen families or whatever they are, and been dutifully pushing the agenda for world government....

AJ: Yeah, obviously they are just minions, [crosstalk] policy wonk puppets, so you're saying.....

Scott: If they've been doing a good job for them, why are they in danger vs. a Powell or Rice or Bush, or all they all in danger?

AJ: Or in danger of Rockefeller?

Scott: Right.

DGP: Cheney is closest to the action. He was probably most involved in all of the details of September 11th and he'll be one of the first to fall. So I predict, I predict that Cheney will be out of here inside of, well prior to the election.

Scott: Is that because he knows exactly what happened or because ...

DGP: Yes, he knows exactly what happened.

Scott: You have to eliminate all those people.

DGP: Several, yes.

AJ: Now, again...

Scott: Wouldn't that serve as a warning to anybody who would serve them in the future?

DGP: Perhaps but these guys can only understand one ingredient and that is force. And that's why it has to emanate from the military. And military force in the persona of military tribunals will takeover. And Cheney, as I reiterate, is toast.

AJ: But they are the ones who are creating the tribunals. I will say this. Gen. Rick Bacchus, over a year ago, Rhode Island native, the head of Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, he resigned and said, "I'm not going to torture innocent people." Now that hardly got any press. We have two-star generals quitting. We have a lot of people not going along with this already.

DGP: And there will be a lot more, Alex.

AJ: Pardon me?

DGP: There will be a lot more people either resigning or retiring. And yet it's going to come out and there will be military tribunals.




Comments
on Aug 24, 2004
bleh. Cheap way to draw people to read your conspiracy theory post. Even the most lame wackos avoid LaRouche now, he's so 1980's...

P.S. is any of this yours? It generally isn't kosher to just cut/paste work from other sources.
on Aug 25, 2004
Here's your opportunity to learn about the Conspiratorial Nature of History, and how all events of historical significance have been planned and engineered. Here's what an astute politician said, 9 months before the tragic events of 9/11:

"A new Middle East war of the general type and implications indicated, will occur or not, whether or not certain specified incidents materialize. It will occur only if the combination of the Israeli government and certain Anglo-American circles wish to have it occur. If they should wish it to occur, the incidents to 'explain' that occurrence, will be arranged, just as the Hitler regime concocted the incidents used as pretext for the invasion of Poland.

"Contrary to widespread childish opinion, most of the important things that happen in the world, happen because powerful forces intend them to happen, not because of some so-called 'sociological' or other merely statistical coincidence of the types reported for the popular edification of the easily deluded. The new Bush administration wishes to settle accounts with Iraq, in memory of the passions of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former U.S. President George Bush. As long as that remains a prevalent Anglo-American intention, a new Middle East war, bigger than any yet seen, is more or less inevitable under presently reigning global influences, whether or not any significant number of Israeli or Islamic leaders wish it to occur."

Lyndon Larouche, January 27, 2001 - larouchepub.com

Wise words indeed.



You can continue to believe the fairy tale of the 'War on Terror' if it makes you sleep better at night (and if your sense of credulity can stand the burden!) Or you can go back to your controlled TV news, pretend this problem doesn’t exist, and let Messrs. Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings do your thinking for you while the world destroys itself thanks to the influence of a corrupt few.

Or, you can muster the moral and intellectual courage to free your mind from bondage and face the ugly truth for what it is. You can join the 'extremists' and make a commitment to share the horrible truth with others, or, you can smirk, roll your eyes, and 'pooh-pooh' everything you’ll read here.

The choice is yours. History and posterity will judge your actions accordingly. To borrow a line from Maximus, hero of the film Gladiator: "What we do in life, echoes in eternity."


on Aug 25, 2004
Larouche isn't hard to find out about. I have been aware of him since my mid-teens. Having watched the ideological train wreck of his career, I think I'll just join in with the "Zionist" plot, thanks.
on Aug 26, 2004
"With Heaven's aid I have conquered for you a huge empire. But my life was too short to achieve the conquest of the world. That task is left for you."
-CHINGIS KHAN, to his sons at the end of his life.

"If the great, the military leaders and the leaders of the many descendants of the ruler who will be born in the future, should not adhere strictly to the Yasa, then the power of the state will be shattered and come to an end, no matter how they then seek Genghis Khan, they shall not find him."
-CHINGIS KHAN, discussing "the fall of the states" as ignorance to his Yasa.


THE REDISCOVERY OF EUROPE

When I was a small boy and was taught history — very badly, of course, as nearly everyone in England is — I used to think of history as a sort of long scroll with thick black lines ruled across it at intervals. Each of these lines marked the end of what was called a ‘period’, and you were given to understand that what came afterwards was completely different from what had gone before. It was almost like a clock striking. For instance, in 1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main. There was another very thick black line drawn at the year 1700. After that it was the Eighteenth Century, and people suddenly stopped being Cavaliers and Roundheads and became extra-ordinarily elegant gentlemen in knee breeches and three-cornered hats. They all powdered their hair, took snuff and talked in exactly balanced sentences, which seemed all the more stilted because for some reason I didn’t understand they pronounced most of their S’s as F’s. The whole of history was like that in my mind — a series of completely different periods changing abruptly at the end of a century, or at any rate at some sharply defined date.

Now in fact these abrupt transitions don’t happen, either in politics, manners or literature. Each age lives on into the next — it must do so, because there are innumerable human lives spanning every gap. And yet there are such things as periods. We feel our own age to be deeply different from, for instance, the early Victorian period, and an eighteenth-century sceptic like Gibbon would have felt himself to be among savages if you had suddenly thrust him into the Middle Ages. Every now and again something happens — no doubt it’s ultimately traceable to changes in industrial technique, though the connexion isn’t always obvious — and the whole spirit and tempo of life changes, and people acquire a new outlook which reflects itself in their political behaviour, their manners, their architecture, their literature and everything else. No one could write a poem like Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ today, for instance, and no one could have written Shakespeare’s lyrics in the age of Gray. These things belong in different periods. And though, of course, those black lines across the page of history are an illusion, there are times when the transition is quite rapid, sometimes rapid enough for it to be possible to give it a fairly accurate date. One can say without grossly over-simplifying, ‘About such and such a year, such and such a style of literature began.’ If I were asked for the starting-point modern literature — and the fact that we still call it ‘modern’ shows that this particular period isn’t finished yet — I should put it at 1917, the year in which T. S. Eliot published his poem ‘Prufrock’. At any rate that date isn’t more than five years out. It is certain that about the end of the last war the literary climate changed, the typical writer came to be quite a different person, and the best books of the subsequent period seemed to exist in a different world from the best books of only four or five years before.

To illustrate what I mean, I ask you to compare in your mind two poems, which haven’t any connexion with one another, but which will do for purposes of comparison because each is entirely typical of its period. Compare, for instance, one of Eliot’s characteristic earlier poems with a poem of Rupert Brooke, who was, I should say, the most admired English poet in the years before 1914. Perhaps the most representative of Brooke’s poems are his patriotic ones, written in the early days of the war. A good one is the sonnet beginning

‘If I should die, think only this of me:
‘That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England’

Now read side by side with this one of Eliots’s Sweeney poems; for example, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ — you know,

‘The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate’

As I say, these poems have no connexion in theme or anything else, but it’s possible in a way to compare them, because each is representative of its own time and each seemed a good poem when it was written. The second still seems a good poem now.

Not only the technique but the whole spirit, the implied outlook on life, the intellectual paraphernalia of these poems are abysmally different. Between the young English man with a public-school and university background, going out enthusiastically to die for his country with his head full of English lanes, wild roses and what not, and the rather faded cosmopolitan American, getting glimpses of eternity in some slightly squalid restaurant in the Latin Quarter of Paris, there is a huge gulf. That might be only an individual difference, but the point is that you come upon rather the same kind of difference, a difference that raises the same comparisons, if you read side by side almost any two characteristic writers of the two periods. It’s the same with the novelists as with the poets — Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis on the one side, and Wells Bennett and Galsworthy on the other, for instance. The newer writers are immensely less prolific than the older ones, more scrupulous, more interested in technique, less optimistic and, in general, less confident in their attitude to life. But more than that, you have all the time the feeling that their intellectual and aesthetic background is different, rather as you do when you compare a nineteenth-century French writer such as, say, Flaubert with a nineteenth-century English writer like Dickens. The Frenchman seems enormously more sophisticated than the Englishman, though he isn’t necessarily a better writer because of that. But let me go back a bit and consider what English literature was like in the days before 1914.

The giants of that time were Thomas Hardy — who, however, had stopped writing novels some time earlier — Shaw, Wells, Kipling, Bennett, Galsworthy and, somewhat different from the others — not an Englishman, remember, but a Pole who chose to write in English — Joseph Conrad. There were A. E. Houseman (A Shropshire Lad), and the various Georgian poets, Rupert Brooke and the others. There were also the innumerable comic writers, Sir James Barrie, W. W. Jacobs, Barry Pain and many others. If you read all those writers I’ve just mentioned, you would get a not misleading picture of the English mind before 1914. There were other literary tendencies at work, there were various Irish writers, for instance, and in a quite different vein, much nearer to our own time, there was the American novelist Henry James, but the main stream was the one I’ve indicated. But what is the common denominator between writers who are individually as far apart as Bernard Shaw and A. E. Housman, or Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells? I think the basic fact about nearly all English writers of that time is their complete unawareness of anything outside the contemporary English scene. Some are better writers than others, some are politically conscious and some aren’t, but they are all alike in being untouched by any European influence. This is true even of novelists like Bennett and Galsworthy, who derived in a very superficial sense from French and perhaps Russian models. All of these writers have a background of ordinary, respectable, middle-class English life, and a half-conscious belief that this kind of life will go on for ever, getting more humane and more enlightened all the time. Some of them, like Hardy and Houseman, are pessimistic in outlook, but they all at least believe that what is called progress would be desirable if it were possible. Also — a thing that generally goes with lack of aesthetic sensibility — they are all uninterested in the past, at any rate the remote past. It is very rare to find in a writer of that time anything we should now regard as a sense of history. Even Thomas Hardy, when he attempts a huge poetic drama based on the Napoleonic wars — The Dynasts, it’s called — sees it all from the angle of a patriotic school textbook. Still more, they’re all aesthetically uninterested in the past. Arnold Bennett for instance, wrote a great deal of literary criticism, and it’s clear that he is almost unable to see any merit in any book earlier than the nineteenth century, and indeed hasn’t much interest in any writer other than his contemporaries. To Bernard Shaw most of the past is simply a mess which ought to be swept away in the name of progress, hygiene, efficiency and what-not. H. G. Wells, though later on he was to write a history of the world, looks at the past with the same sort of surprised disgust as a civilized man contemplating a tribe of cannibals. All of these people, whether they liked their own age or not, at least thought it was better than what had gone before, and took the literary standards of their own time for granted. The basis of all Bernard Shaw’s attacks on Shakespeare wasn’t an enlightened member of the Fabian Society. If any of these writers had been told that the writers immediately subsequent to them would hark back to the English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the French poets of the mid-nineteenth century and to the philosophers of the Middle Ages, they would have thought it a kind of dilettantism.

But now look at the writers who begin to attract notice — some of them had begun writing rather earlier, of course — immediately after the last war: Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Huxley, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis. Your first impression of them, compared with the others — this is true even of Lawrence — is that something has been punctured. To begin with, the notion of progress has gone by the board. They don’t any longer believe that men are getting better and better by having lower mortality rates, more effective birth control, better plumbing, more aeroplanes and faster motor cars. Nearly all of them are homesick for the remote past, or some period of the past, from D. H. Lawrence’s ancient Etruscans onwards. All of them are politically reactionary, or at best are uninterested in politics. None of them cares twopence about the various hole-and-corner reforms which had seemed important to their predecessors, such as female suffrage, temperance reform, birth control or prevention of cruelty to animals. All of them are more friendly, or at least less hostile, towards the Christian churches than the previous generation had been. And nearly all of them seem to be aesthetically alive in a way that hardly any English writer since the Romantic Revival had been.

Now, one can best illustrate what I have been saying by means of individual examples, that is, by comparing outstanding books of more of less comparable type in the two periods. As a first example, compare H. G.Wells’s short stories — there’s a large number of them collected together under the title of The Country of the Blind — with D. H. Lawrence’s short stories, such as those in England, my England and The Prussian Officer.

This isn’t an unfair comparison, since each of these writers was at his best, or somewhere near his best, in the short story, and each of them was expressing a new vision of life which had a great effect on the young of his generation. The ultimate subject-matter of H. G. Wells’s stories is, first of all, scientific discovery, and beyond that the petty snobberies and tragi-comedies of contemporary English life, especially lower-middle-class life. His basic ‘message’, to use an expression I don’t like, is that Science can solve all the ills that humanity is heir to, but that man is at present too blind to see the possibility of his own powers. The alternation between ambitious Utopian themes and light comedy, almost in the W.W. Jacobs vein, is very marked in Wells’s work. He writes about journeys to the moon and to the bottom of the sea, and also he writes about small shopkeepers dodging bankruptcy and fighting to keep their end up in the frightful snobbery of provincial towns. The connecting link is Wells’s belief in Science. He is saying all the time, if only that small shopkeeper could acquire a scientific outlook, his troubles would be ended. And of course he believes that this is going to happen, probably in the quite near future. A few more million pounds for scientific research, a few ore generations scientifically educated, a few more superstitions shovelled into the dustbin, and the job is done. Now, if you turn to Lawrence’s stories, you don’t find this belief in Science — rather a hostility towards it, if anything — and you don’t find any marked interest in the future, certainly not in a rationalized hedonistic future of the kind that Wells deals in. You don’t even find the notion that the small shopkeeper, or any of the other victims of our society, would be better off if he were better educated. What you do find is a persistent implication that man has thrown away his birthright by becoming civilized. The ultimate subject-matter of nearly all Lawrence’s books is the failure of contemporary men, especially in the English-speaking countries, to live their lives intensely enough. Naturally he fixes first on their sexual lives, and it is a fact that most of Lawrence’s books centre round sex. But he isn’t, as in sometimes supposed, demanding more of what people call sexual liberty. He is completely disillusioned about that, and he hates the so-called sophistication of bohemian intellectuals just as much as he hates the puritanism of the middle class. What he is saying is simply that modern men aren’t fully alive, whether they fail through too narrow standards or through not having any. Granted that they can be fully alive, he doesn’t much care what social or political or economic system they live under. He takes the structure of existing society, with its class distinctions and so on, almost for granted in his stories, and doesn’t show any very urgent wish to change it. All he asks is that men shall live more simply, nearer to the earth, with more sense of the magic of things like vegetation, fire, water, sex, blood, than they can in a world of celluloid and concrete where the gramophones never stop playing. He imagines — quite likely he is wrong — that savages or primitive peoples live more intensely than civilized men, and he builds up a mythical figure who is not far from being the Noble savage over again. Finally, he projects these virtues on to the Etruscans, an ancient pre-Roman people who lived in northern Italy and about whom we don’t, in fact, know anything. From the point of view of H. G.Wells all this abandonment of Science and Progress, this actual wish to revert to the primitive, is simply heresy and nonsense. And yet one must admit that whether Lawrence’s view of life is true or whether it is perverted, it is at least an advance on the Science worship of H. G.Wells or the shallow Fabian progressivism of writers like Bernard Shaw. It is an advance in the sense that it results from seeing through the other attitude and not from falling short of it. Partly that was the effect of the war of 1914-18, which succeeded in debunking both Science, Progress and civilized man. Progress had finally ended in the biggest massacre in history. Science was something that created bombing planes and poison gas, civilized man, as it turned out, was ready to behave worse than any savage when the pinch came. But Lawrence’s discontent with modern machine civilization would have been the same, no doubt, if the war of 1914-18 had never happened.

Now I want to make another comparison, between James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses, and John Galsworthy’s, at any rate, very large novel sequence The Forsyte Saga. This time it isn’t a fair comparison, in effect it’s a comparison between a good book and a bad one, and it also isn’t quite correct chronologically, because the later parts of The Forsyte Saga were written in the nineteen-twenties. But the parts of it that anyone is likely to remember were written about 1910, and for my purpose the comparison is relevant, because both Joyce and Galsworthy are making efforts to cover an enormous canvas and get the spirit and social history of a whole epoch between the covers of a single book. The Man of Property may not seem to us now a very profound criticism of society, but it seemed so to its contemporaries, as you can see by what they wrote about it.

Joyce wrote Ulysses in the seven years between 1914 and 1921, working away all through the war, to which he probably paid little or no attention, and earning a miserable living as a teacher of languages in Italy and Switzerland. He was quite ready to work seven years in poverty and complete obscurity so as to get his great book on to paper. But what is it that was so urgently important for him to express? Parts of Ulysses aren’t very easily intelligible, but from the book as a whole you get two main impressions. The first is that Joyce is interested to the point of obsession with technique. This has been one of the main characteristics of modern literature, though more recently it has been a diminishing one. You get a parallel development in the plastic arts, painters, and even sculptors, being more and more interested in the material they work in, in the brush-marks of a picture, for instance, as against its design, let alone its subject-matter. Joyce is interested in mere words, the sounds and associations of words, even the pattern of words on the paper, in a way that wasn’t the case with any of the preceding generation of writers, except to some extent the Polish-English writer, Joseph Conrad. With Joyce you are back to the conception of style, of fine writing, or poetic writing, perhaps even to purple passages. A writer like Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, would have said as a matter of course that the sole use of words is to express exact meanings as shortly as possible. And apart from this technical obsession, the other main theme of Ulysses is the squalor, even the meaninglessness of modern life after the triumph of the machine and the collapse of religious belief. Joyce — an Irishman, remember, and it’s worth noting that the best English writers during the nineteen-twenties were in many cases not Englishmen — is writing as a Catholic who has lost his faith but has retained the mental framework which he acquired in his Catholic childhood and boyhood. Ulysses, which is a very long novel, is a description of the events of a single day, as seen mostly through the eyes of an out-at-elbow Jewish commercial traveller. At the time when the book came out there was a great outcry and Joyce was accused of deliberately exploiting the sordid, but as a matter of fact, considering what everyday human life is like when you contemplate it in detail, it doesn’t seem that he overdid either the squalor or the silliness of the day’s events. What you do feel all through, however, is the conviction from which Joyce can’t escape, that the whole of this modern world which he is describing has no meaning in it now that the teachings of the Church are no longer credible. He is yearning after the religious faith which the two or three generations preceding him had had to fight against in the name of religious liberty. But finally the main interest of the book is technical. Quite a considerable proportion of it consists of pastiche or parody — parodies of everything from the Irish legends of the Bronze Age down to contemporary newspaper reports. And one can see there that, like all the characteristic writers of his time, Joyce doesn’t derive from the English nineteenth-century writers but from Europe and from the remoter past. Part of his mind is in the Bronze Age, another part in the England of Elizabeth. The twentieth century, with its hygiene and its motor-cars, doesn’t particularly appeal to him.

Now look again at Galsworthy’s book, The Forsyte Saga, and you see how comparatively narrow its range is. I have said already that his isn’t a fair comparison, and indeed from a strictly literary point of view it’s a ridiculous one, but it will do as an illustration, in the sense that both books are intended to give a comprehensive picture of existing society. Well, the thing that strikes one about Galsworthy is that though he’s trying to be iconoclastic, he has been utterly unable to move his mind outside the wealthy bourgeois society he is attacking. With only slight modifications he takes all its values for granted. All he conceives to be wrong is that human beings are a little too inhumane, a little too fond of money, and aesthetically not quite sensitive enough. When he sets out to depict what he conceives as the desirable type of human being, it turns out to be simply a cultivated, humanitarian version of the upper-middle-class rentier, the sort of person who in those days used to haunt picture galleries in Italy and subscribe heavily to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And this fact — the fact that Galsworthy hasn’t any really deep aversion to the social types he thinks he is attacking — gives you the clue to his weakness. It is, that he has no contact with anything outside contemporary English society. He may think he doesn’t like it, but he is part of it. Its money and security, the ring of battleships that separated it from Europe, have been too much for him. At the bottom of this heart he despises foreigners, just as much as any illiterate businessman in Manchester. The feelings you have with Joyce or Eliot, or even Lawrence, that they have got the whole of human history inside their heads and can look outwards from their own place and time towards Europe and the past, isn’t to be found in Galsworthy or in any characteristic English writer in the period before 1914.

Finally, one more brief comparison. Compare almost any of H. G. Wells’s Utopia books, for instance A Modern Utopia, or The Dream, or Men Like Gods, with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Again it’s rather the same contrast, the contrast between the over-confident and the deflated, between the man who believes innocently in Progress and the man who happens to have been born later and has therefore lived to see that Progress, as it was conceived in the early days of the aeroplane, is just as much of a swindle as reaction.

The obvious explanation of this sharp difference between the dominant writers before and after the war of 1914-18 is the war itself. Some such development would have happened in any case as the insufficiency of modern materialistic civilization revealed itself, but the war speeded that process, partly by showing how very shallow the veneer of civilization is, partly by making England less prosperous and therefore less isolated. After 1918 you couldn’t live in such a narrow and padded world as you did when Britannia ruled not only the waves but also the markets. One effect of the ghastly history of the last twenty years has been to make a great deal of ancient literature seem much more modern. A lot that has happened in Germany since the rise of Hitler might have come straight out of the later volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Recently I saw Shakespeare’s King John acted — the first time I had seen it, because it is a play which isn’t acted very often. When I had read it as a boy it seemed to me archaic, something dug out of a history book and not having anything to do with our own time. Well, when I saw it acted, what with its intrigues and doublecrossings, non-aggression pacts, quislings, people changing sides in the middle of a battle, and what-not, it seemed to me extraordinarily up to date. And it was rather the same thing that happened in the literary development between 1910 and 1920. The prevailing temper of the time gave a new reality to all sorts of themes which had seemed out of date and puerile when Bernard Shaw and his Fabians were — so they thought — turning the world into a sort of super garden city. Themes like revenge, patriotism, exile, persecution, race hatred, religious faith, loyalty, leader worship, suddenly seemed real again. Tamerlane and Genghis Khan seem credible figures now, and Machiavelli seems a serious thinker, as they didn’t in 1910. We have got out of a backwater and back into history. I haven’t any unqualified admiration for the writers of the early nineteen-twenties, the writers among whom Eliot and Joyce are chief names. Those followed them have to undo a great deal of what they did. Their revulsion from a shallow conception of progress drove them politically in the wrong direction, and it isn’t an accident that Ezra Pound, for instance, is now shouting antisemitism on the Rome radio. But one must concede that their writings are more grown-up, and have a wider scope, than what went immediately before them. They broke the cultural circle in which England had existed for something like a century. They re-established contact with Europe, and they brought back the sense of history and the possibility of tragedy. On that basis all subsequent English literature that matters twopence has rested, and the development that Eliot and the others started back in the closing years of the last war, has not yet run its course.

The Rediscovery of Europe - George Orwell
First published: 'Listener', March 19, 1942.
(broadcast on the BBC Eastern Service: March 10, 1942)