Authoritarian Subterfuge and a litany of fraud

Fraud on a truly massive, major scale, for social manipulation and control, clearly goes back well over 500 years, but most detail has been lost, if ever recorded. Religion, myth and legend go way back, but may not be demonstrable as intentionally manipulative fraud. To an some extent they were, but there may have been exculpatory factors; we can give some benefit of doubt. Did a Yellow Emperor totally change society through dozens of new insights and inventions? No, there’s no real evidence of that, no more than northern and southern Chinese constitute a homogenous society – yet both have widely been taken as fact, especially by Chinese, for whom the legend has real meaning. The Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine “Roman” Empire weren’t truly “Roman” but we similarly ignore that. Neither the Crusades nor Knights Templar were quite as pretended, the Kingdom of Prester John didn’t exist, and Ramkamhaeng of Sukotai, alleged architect of Siam, didn’t conquer the Malay Isthmus as claimed, and still taught in Thai schools. Sometimes historical details and uncontroversial references are difficult to obtain, sometimes nationalistic and religious fancies interfere.
A fraud, according to my old paperback dictionary (Longman’s) is “a person who pretends or claims to be what he is not” but I consider it to refer also to a person who tries to convince others of the veracity of things he knows to not be so. Christopher Columbus (Christobal Colon) was a pushy, manipulative, willfully misinformed failure to complete what he had purportedly set out to do, and became so mad with arrogant pretention as to pretend to be what he clearly was not, but was he a fraud? I don’t think so. Just blindered by ambition, greed and insecurities. Similar distinctions may be necessary elsewhere.
Surely fortune-telling goes way back into pre-history. Art forgery dates back over 2000 years, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ appeared in 1903 and soon after that Rasputin rose to fame, in 1906 acting as a healer for the Tsar’s family, especially for heir apparent, who suffered hemophilia. Rasputin, who let food rot in his beard and bragged about not changing his underwear for over six months, preached that without sin, one couldn’t repent and reach redemption. A group of women he called his “little ladies” often bathed him and, according to Rasputin’s daughter, worshiped his penis. He might well be seen as a fraud, but when bribed to keep boys out of the army, did so.

Chaucer having written in a precursor to English language as used here, the works attributed to Shakespeare constitute the basis for English literature and justify its fame. But were they produced by a commoner, son of a glover and actor of little acclaim? I doubt that the plays and poems were the work of a single mind, but that’s beside the point, which is that the works were used to suggest something untrue. Something the point to which is hardly obnoxious to me, viz that commoners can be as smart as royals, but which implies that one can rise further above limitations much more than one actually can.
In his 1589 book “The Arte of English Poesie” George Puttenham explained, “I know very many notable gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and… suffered it to be published without their own names to it: as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned.” Then also that there’re “Noblemen… who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford.” Francis Meres said in 1598 that Oxford (aka De Vere) was one of the best writers of comedy. He composed, directed and acted in plays contemporaneously with William Shakespeare, managed an acting troupe called “Oxford’s Boys” and was a leaseholder of the Blackfriars Theatre, a rival to The Globe.
Tom Regnier, an appellate lawyer in Florida and once president of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, explains, “In a 1578 Latin oration, Gabriel Harvey said of Oxford, “Vultus tela vibrat,” which translates as “Thy Countenance Shakes Spears.” This may have been an inspiration for the later use of “Shakespeare” as a pseudonym. Pseudonyms were so common in the Elizabethan Era (called a “Golden Age” of pseudonyms) that almost every writer used one at one time or another. “Shakespeare,” as a pen name, would be a reference to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and poetry, who is often depicted shaking a spear. His proficiency at tournaments, and coat of arms featuring a lion brandishing a spear, got De Vere nicknamed “Spear-shaker”; pseudonyms were used by writers as offending authorities could subject an author to punishment. Also, for nobles, it was considered beneath their dignity to publish poetry, deemed frivolous, or plays for public theatres, scandalous places where thievery, prostitution and gambling occurred.” De Vere used the pseudonym Shakespeare to avoid breaking a voluntary but common convention against nobles publishing poetry or plays, and to evade consequences of therefrom.
There’s lots and lots more, and a raging controversy among academics, many of whom have ‘vested interests’ and ulterior motivations for their stances. To me, the authorship of the Shakespeare Folio is much like the Yellow Emperor.

Continuing on, just a century ago people were learning of “the most important equation ever” – one purporting to show an equivalency, or at least contingent &/or dependent relationship, between energy and matter. It involves, though, squaring what that cannot be squared: a rate. You cannot square 5 miles per hour, although you can square 5. Although most folk never thought of that, some surely did, and somehow seem to have found reason to keep quiet about it.
You can square an integer, or a fraction, but not an imaginary number, and not a rate. Not a frequency, speed, velocity, price or value per whatever, or weights and measures. You can square a pound by squaring the numeral one, but not the concept pound. Three feet squared seems to be nine feet, but really is a square of three feet per side, or nine squares of one square foot. The foot is not squared, only a distance becomes a square, a length a size of different order and dimension. Yet in common usage 3²=9, a line of three units becoming a line of 9 units. This is why Euclid still needs to be taught; too bad it isn’t! 5²=5x5=25 but 5 mph times 5 mph has no meaning – it isn’t even a line of 25 mph...
The ‘c’ in the famous equation purportedly about relativity is for a constant, the one universal constant Einstein felt sure of (or thought he could be sure of, anyway). Now seconds and meters are defined in terms of light speed, creating a circular argument… but physicists have come to agree that light speed does indeed vary, although maybe not within a vacuum here on Earth (if there indeed can actually be one). But since we don’t know what units ‘e’ (for energy) or ‘m’ (for mass) are in, the precision assumed in the ‘c²’ is pointless, superfluous, facile, extraneous and pretentious anyway! It only means mass times a really large number, which mass could already be if defined in units small enough. And what is 4 lbs x 50 mph? It’s the same as mass times that famous but somewhat nebulous speed number.
Would we have had the idea of relativity without Einstein? In fact, we did. Without Einstein, special relativity would have emerged at about the same time. To learn more about this, look up Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, James Clerk Maxwell, Max von Laue, Fritz Hasmörhl ("E=3/8mc²"), Max Abraham ("EO=3/4mc²"), S. Toliver Preston, Jules Herni Poincaré, and Olinto De Pretto. These guys were overthinking something new, trying to use a new tool they couldn’t really grasp. Scientists should do experiments more than imaginary math!
Mass and energy can be seen as functions of each other, but we create huge explosions by “splitting the atom” utilizing substances that release radiation, not with lead, iron, copper, silver or gold. I’m not sure one CAN release the energy from lead, but I’m hardly a chemist. I’ve sure started to wonder about modern physics, though, especially after encountering Michio Kaku’s “thoughts” on string theory.
A century ago people understood the famous equation to be profound, difficult to understand except by the exceptionally smart, and so either gave it great deference without much thought, or tried to use it to exhibit their own superior smarts. But it really doesn’t seem, to me, anyway, to say more than that more wood on a fire produces more heat from said fire.
Pavlov and Mendel seemed profound too but if their insights truly exceeded what had been common knowledge among many farmers for millennia, that’s escaped my small comprehension.
The speed of light is the distance it travels in a unit of time – a second, a minute, maybe a year. But does a light-year involve a year of 365 or 366 days? Sorry, being a bit fatuous here, but somehow Einstein decided time slows down at great speeds, and purportedly that has been demonstrated. I’m not at all sure but that what has been demonstrated is only that processes slow, but what I want to point to is that, if a minute of time in an object traveling at close to the speed of light differs from a minute where movement (relative to what?) is slower, than the “rate” of travel of light would be affected too.
Other quibbles can be made about measuring energy, or mass. We hardly fully understand either, but CAN know that there’s no energy without matter it acts upon, no matter until observed and acted upon. As Billy Idol sang, “Nothing is pure in this world” – certainly not the upper echelon calling the shots in our disintegrating world.
The speed of light is said to be a constant; light travels leaves speeding trains at exactly the same rate as t from an immobile signal shack beside the tracks, but supposedly contracts within objects (trains, airplanes or flying saucers) traveling really fast, like close to the speed of light... But the speed of light, measured in units of time, changes when said unit of time changes relative to speed…? It’s one or the other, can’t be both. An unchanging constant, or not. No more can there be a “first three seconds after the Big Bang” – it’s linguistic hocus-pocus. No outside reference means no time periods. Except, apparently, in modern physics that you and I simply aren’t smart enough to understand.
I wonder if the whole thing wasn’t just a set-up, to convince the vast majority that there is a tiny minority far smarter than they. We DO know that there IS a tiny minority that DOES keep secrets and utilize extensive deception. Shake-spear making things more egalitarian seems replaced by Einsteinean elitism, despite the intentions of either.

I find it interesting how popular pictures of elderly Einstein have been while we don’t see ones of him young and handsome as when he first presented that equation. As he began to age, self-absorbed and selfish Albert Einstein began a romantic affair with his cousin Elsa, in 1912. His first marriage collapsed 2 years later with divorce finalized in 1919. Albert then immediately married Elsa, his cousin on both sides, also recently divorced and also with kids. They’d spent their childhood together; their mothers were sisters and fathers cousins. Wife Mileva, similar to Albert in being moody and brooding, had been involved in his work, and may have been essential to it. When she and their children left, Albert sickened, but Elsa nursed him back to health. They got engaged but Albert thought to marry her 20 year old daughter Ilse, who was working as his secretary, instead. Albert was often absentminded, so Elsa sorted his schedule, handled reporters and business affairs, and allowed Albert to be open about his extramarital affairs, even with his “Russian spy lover,” Margarita. Much later, Albert preferred to spend his time with Kurt Gödel, despite Gödel’s increasing disintegration and insanity. Gödel’s Proof puts an interesting slant on modern physics, but that’s another story.

John Dee (1527 – 1609), an early notable fraud, coined the term “British Empire” and investigated hermetic magic, angel summoning and divination as facets of transcendent ‘divine’ forms underlying the visible world, his ‘pure verities’. He claimed occult knowledge of treasure, but also endorsed study of Euclid. He worked with Edward Kelley (then going under the name of Edward Talbot to disguise his conviction for ‘coining’, i.e. counterfeiting) as angels laboriously dictated several books to him through Kelley, in a special ‘angelic or Enochian language’ (anticipating Joseph Smith – killed by a mob in Illinois in 1844 - and Mormonism). In 1587, during a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley informed Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men there to share all their possessions, including their wives; this caused Dee anguish, but he obeyed, and his wife conceived… Dee laid claim to North America by citing the discovery of Newfound Land in 1494 by Robert Thorn, with also the claim that Madog ab Owain Gwynedd had discovered America, that Brutus of Britain and King Arthur as well as Madog had conquered lands in the Americas, and that therefore their heir Elizabeth I of England had a priority claim there. Meanwhile Elizabeth I enjoyed attending plays despite the low esteem in which entertainments of that order were then held.

Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen, “the baron of lies” (1720–1797) was a real person who became a fictional character through the writings of con-artist Rudolf Erich Raspe. In his 1785 book “Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia” Raspe adapted outrageous tales of military activities in Russia that the real-life Münchhausen had told at dinner parties. Raspe never acknowledged his authorship of the work, which was only established posthumously. The stories include episodes of riding on a cannonball, fighting a forty-foot crocodile, and traveling to the Moon, but contain an undercurrent of social satire. Many of the stories are derived from older sources, including Heinrich Bebel’s ‘Facetiæ’ (1508) and Samuel Gotthold Lange’s ‘Deliciæ Academicæ’ (1765). Eventually the book was revised with new stories added, as ‘Gulliver Revived, or the Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages, and Adventures of Baron Munikhouson, commonly pronounced Munchausen’, then even more material was added; in 1792 a ‘Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ was published. Eventually there were eight editions, and Munchausen Syndrome became the term for using imaginary illness to gain attention.

Through the late 19th and early 20th century Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil ran a variety of scams, including conning Benito Mussollini out of $2 million by selling him phony rights to mining lands in Colorado. In the 1960s, Frank Abagnale, subject of the movie ‘Catch Me If You Can’, made a living faking identities and passing bad checks.
The Smoothest Con Man That Ever Lived, “Count” Victor Lustig sold a “money box” to folk he got to believe it capable of printing perfect $100 bills; police reports say some New York gamblers paid $46,000. Lustig ‘sold’ the Eiffel Tower to an unsuspecting scrap-metal dealer, then began the process to do it again. He duped some of the wealthiest and most dangerous mobsters - including Al Capone, who never discovered he’d been swindled.
In India, a con-man calling himself Natwarlal used a variety of disguises, forgeries and over 50 other aliases to sell the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and the Parliament House of India.
George C. Parker (1860 – 1936), one of the most successful con men in the history of the US, known for his surprisingly successful attempts to ‘sell’ the Brooklyn Bridge (leading to the phrase, “and if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you”), also sold other public property, including Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty, usually to new immigrants. He also sold several successful shows and plays, of which he had no legal ownership. Police repeatedly removed victims of his from Brooklyn Bridge as they tried to operate toll booths.
In 1968, London Bridge was sold to American oil tycoon Robert P McCulloch for $2,460,000 (twice what had been expected). In 2010, Daniel Horwendill, Utah-based head of investment group Banquovius, offered US$200million (£133million) for the 116-year-old Tower Bridge, once a neighbor to London Bridge, but apparently that fell through.
Other frauds: Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi, Bernie Maddoff. Enron, lots of politicians and preachers, the architects of WTC 9-11 (if you don’t know by now, they were quite close to W Shrubb), deconstructionists, string theory advocates, Maybe Freud but certainly many counselors and psychiatrists, propagandists, hate-radio bull-shitters, advertisers, drug manufacturers, and maybe the eccentric Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, who argued that the main attribute of a successful historian was imagination!
Wikipedia, not known for fraud ‘though some can be found there, reports, “In 1973, Trevor-Roper was invited to visit Switzerland to examine a manuscript entitled Decadence Mandchoue written by the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944) in a mixture of English, French, Latin and Chinese that had been in the custody of Dr Reinhard Hoeppli, a Swiss diplomat who was the Swiss consul in Beijing during World War II. Hoeppli, who been given Decadence Mandchoue in 1943 by his friend Backhouse, had been unable to publish it owing to its sexually explicit content. But by 1973 looser censorship and the rise of the gay rights movement meant a publisher was willing to release Decadence Mandchoue to the market. However, before doing so they wanted Trevor-Roper, who as a former MI6 officer was an expert on clandestine affairs, to examine some of the more outlandish claims contained in the text.
“For an example, Backhouse claimed in Decadence Mandchoue that the wives and daughters of British diplomats in Beijing had trained their dogs and tamed foxes to perform cunnilingus on them, which the fascistic Backhouse used as evidence of British "decadence", which in turn explained why he was supporting Germany and Japan in the Second World War. Trevor-Roper regarded Decadence Mandchoue with considerable distaste calling the manuscript "pornographic" and "obscene" as Backhouse related in graphic detail sexual encounters he claimed to have had with the French poet Paul Verlaine, the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, the Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, the British Prime Minister Lord Rosebery and the Empress Dowager Cixi of China whom the openly gay Backhouse had maintained had forced herself on him.
“Backhouse also claimed to have been the friend of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.”
Backhouse, a well- known author and perhaps linguistic genius, was supposedly fluent in Mandarin, Mongolian, Manchu, Russian and Japanese, as well as the usual European languages plus Greek and Latin. His linguistic abilities were used by most of the interested parties in the scramble for China. His “Decadence Mandchoue” (Manchu decadence) switches between English, French, Chinese (both ideograms and Wade Giles Romanization), Latin, Greek, some Italian, some German, and some Russian; embedded within it are quotations from Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, Confucius, Mencius, Chuangtzu, The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Book of Changes, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Buddhist sutras, and references to classical and modern European and Chinese history. Sometimes the references are in quotations, sometimes they’re part of the fabric of the syntax, in borrowed phrases (from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tagore, etc.).
Okay, but I suspect fluency and an incredible memory to hardly be co-incident. True fluency requires involvement that Backhouse didn’t have in Mongolian, or in the intricacies of polite Japanese manners; I suspect his capacity was over-rated by folk who had insufficient avenues for adequately assessing it (which certainly wouldn’t be a first). Seems to me his stunning literary memory was at least somewhat in lieu of intimate, sharing and growing relationships. I’ve not seen his books, only read Trevor-Roper’s decades ago, and so have insufficient avenue for adequately assessing, but ‘Decadence Mandchoue’ sure sounds interesting).
In 1976 Hugh Trevor-Roper, aka Lord Dacre, had his account of Backhouse’s life, ‘The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse’ published, and supposedly exposed him as one of the most accomplished con men and hoaxers of the early 20th century. But was Edmund ever a hermit? Only in the sense that Backhouse stopped associating with foreigners. There’s no record of what he was doing for most of his time in Beijing. There’s no solid evidence that he didn’t have a full social life and wide circle of friends and acquaintances - among the Chinese, who of course were invisible to many foreigners. Sir Edmund’s linguistic gifts and cultural awareness far exceeded Trevor-Roper’s; he surely retained some British attitudes and sensibilities, but no locals were ever interviewed about that. Backhouse wrote ‘Decadence Mandchoue’ while in a hospitable bed, with no access to reference works or library, but quoted in nine different languages - from memory.
Edmund’s Quaker parents were also nobles, despite that you can’t be both. His whole life involved pretense; had he truly become acculturated to being Chinese, he’d have had visitors in hospital distracting him from writing ‘Decadence Mandchoue’ but he was able to get it done despite being on his deathbed, and not just because it was wartime and people involved elsewhere. He sympathized with the Japanese, as surely did no Chinese.

Trevor-Roper disparaged Backhouse’s use of ideograms as being to no meaningful purpose, only an inconvenience. He shows no knowledge of Chinese culture or what attracted Backhouse to it, just reiterates how the foreign community in Beijing saw Backhouse: as a prankster and mad mischief maker. He didn’t go to China to research (as would have been difficult, but not impossible), and acknowledges no Chinese sources.
Backhouse’s ethics, such as they were, were self-serving, as with many creative people, without whom our world would seem poorer. In the end, Backhouse may have given more than he took; he certainly celebrated beauty, indulgence and imagination.
Trevor-Roper, a relentless and unscrupulous social climber, was of the class of person who thinks that homosexuals are abnormal, always repressed by their very nature, but good people, nonetheless. Trevor-Roper’s judgment is colored by unstated prejudices, both sexual and class. Trevor-Roper’s brother was openly gay; maybe both were effete.
Was the one calling the other fraud in important ways more the fraud then the one he tried to put so shame? Maybe the ‘historian’ and the ‘linguist’ were equals. I’m sure many will prefer to see the mansplaining I attempt here as more ill-intentioned than anything Einstein did, but there is no equivalency. I merely hope to undermine unearned cocky confidence in a rapidly deteriorating social system. We are NOT superior, no matter how much we pretend, no matter how good we see some ‘Shakespeare’ plays, no matter how powerful our weapons, and no matter how imperfect others. Others have pretended too, but “Western” society has pretended far too much for far too long. We are all imperfect, and lacking. Surely there’s a closely connected relationship between the predatory hypocrisy and pederasty of priests, preachers and politicos in so many 2019 headlines, and the libertine hedonism of the artsy-fartsy for so long now, but it’s far easier to condemn those who betray than those who merely share in indulgences. It does seem that both sets tend to see themselves as superior – which they are not.

Some frauds are charlatans, cheats, swindlers intending only personal gain, but some, in their wisdom, try to influence society as a whole. Knowing of the herd instinct and how, in ways more profound and powerful than mob mentality, society integrates towards conformity, socialization demands acceptance of the irrational, and how much language and learning determine attitudes and preferences, how there are prevalent moods and how there’s even emotional weather, wanna-be movers and shakers like Huge-trevor Roper (sorry, I’m sure that was uncalled for) attempt use of various forms of conditioning, indoctrination and behavior modification to instill mindsets and viewpoints as convenient to helping restore authoritarian society from the twin perils of egalitarian democracy and communism.

Timothy McVeigh and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, David Koresh and the ‘Branch Dravidian’ compound in Waco TX, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the 1921 aerial bombing of Tulsa OK and the 1985 aerial bombing of the MOVE headquarters and neighbors in Philadelphia PA, the McFarlane affair, aka the Iran-Contra scandal, Eugene Hasenfus, GMOs, the 2008 $700 billion big bank bailout, WellsFargo corruption, big tobacco payoffs to doctors to deny the cancer connection Hillary Clinton and Libya, weapons of mass destruction and big media Iraq invasion redactions, US manipulative interference in Ukraine, lies about Crimea and Syria, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, Supreme Court appointments, persecutions of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Pvt. Manning, Leonard Peltier, Joe Hill, Joseph McCarthy's hunt for communists… it’s a long, long, depressing list.