Many years ago I ran across a book which was the prototype for American mystery stories. The book was written by a British author, Willkie Collins, and published in 1860! It is a classic and still available in paperback form. The plot wanders on endlessly page after page, but it is fascinating in that Walter, the hero, is seeking the whereabouts of the woman he loves, Marion, The Woman in White, who has been kidnapped and held prisoner.
Eventually the reader will discover, as does Walter, she is held a prisoner by the villain, Count Fosco, to control her wealth. Not only that, but through the power of chemistry she is kept in a state of disorientation so that she often appears quite mad.
During Walter’s lengthy search he finds a man who confides in him about a secret society which plants people into an innocent society, although the “mole” is not innocent. Walter’s informant has sworn fealty to the society so that whenever he is asked to perform whatever task the society may need, anything from assassinating the head of the government on down the line to lesser crimes against the targeted society, he has to do it or die himself!
Now this book was only published about a dozen years after Marx’s Manifesto hit the streets, so it doesn’t really seem as if the secret society of Collins’ Woman in White, could be the Communist Party, but more as if the CP patterned their organization on the plot of the book.
Years later and now years ago, a counterspy in the CPUSA gave me a copy of a book, The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, and told me this book was given to every recruit to the Party as part of their indoctrination. I read it, of course, with some interest, as the supposed author was a witness before a Senate Committee on hearings into the source of the book which the Committee had authoritative information was actually written by the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) and given to the author to bring to the States. He denied it vehemently, of course, because the book blames all the blood curdling events perpetrated in the Soviet Union on the long-gone Leon Trotsky and friends. One of the chief crimes was “murder with a guarantee.” as described by a chapter of that name.
The so-called perpetrator was Yagoda, a man who served for years in Stalin’s service, who suddenly was charged with originating the concepts which made it possible to get rid of Soviet enemies but make it look like suicide or accident! This particularly applied to men in Stalin’s service who might develop some physical ailment. They were to visit some medical doctor to be given prescriptions for the problem, but the prescribed medication would be the opposite of what was actually needed, so under the care of a medic, they would actually be made much worse until they died – of natural causes!
The Trotskyites settled in Paris upon fleeing Moscow when the battle for control of the USSR ended in Stalin’s supremacy in 1924. Leon Trotsky’s son headed the anti-Stalinist Reds who gathered around him –they were still communists, you know. But anyway, Lev Sedov (the son’s name) had an emergency appendectomy and had to be taken to the hospital. He was apparently recovering nicely but was later seen walking in the hall and speaking in Russian with a doctor . Suddenly his health took a turn for the worse and subsequently Sedov died. Trotsky in Mexico swore his son was murdered, poisoned probably, but there was no way to prove it! Murder with a guarantee indeed.
So a hospital can be a scary place for a known anti-communist, which is why I often wondered by people such as Senator Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur would ever go to Walter Reed Army Hospital, no matter how good the facilities!
Many, many years ago now, just after the Minute Women participated in a battle in California to keep a very, very leftwing professor out of UCLA, someone suggested I should go there when I became ill with a strange disease. At the time I was the Chairman of the California Division of the Minute Women. Of course, in astonishment I looked at the friend who suggested it, “You want me to go to a facility like that where I don’t know anyone and yet they very well could know me?”
Years earlier I had been attacked by a local newspaper who sent reporters out to interview me at a friend’s house. Her kitchen had a wall made of stark white tile, against which the reporter backed us both up to photograph us. The picture never did appear in the paper but not long after, I began to find people in the local chain grocery giving me the once-over and following me around, as did my friend Gerry. So then to go to a hospital where I didn’t know anyone and throw myself on their mercy was a tad too much!
Back to Walter and Marion, however. When he finally unveils the villain, Count Fosco, the Italian Count delivers a speech to Walter which is quite a classic, and remember it was written prior to 1860, in which the Count declares how fortunate we are the chemists are such mild-mannered people because with a few grains of a chemical they could/can change the course of history!
I wondered where this concept came to Collins then a whole century earlier, and tried to learn as well the “secret society” to which Fosco belonged which was never named. It might have been the Alta Venditta in Italy, or more likely, the Illuminati (1776) which continues to this day I am told. I don’t know.
I’ll transcribe Fosco’s speech for you one of these days! It’s a corker, and goes along with the toxic poisons in our food, okayed to be there by the FDA. Several years ago the total I was told was 10,000 chemicals in the food for which no one knew the effects of these products on the liver which is the organ given the task of cleaning the blood of impurities. Is there any wonder we are all candidates for Obamacare when you add those impurities to the foods we eat which have been stripped of all that made them good in the first place? To be continued……………
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