The Jew of Linz - Kimberley Cornish

I first heard about this book in 1999 through Mark Piper who informed me that Wittgenstein went to the same school as Hitler for a period of time. Wittgenstein was always my favourite philosopher though not so much for his work but for his life which I came to learn about through the book Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius that my drug dealer and friend of mine who studied Philosophy under Ray Monk (the author of the book) at Southampton University loaned me.

The Jew of Linz digs deep into the astonishing coincidence that Wittgenstein attended the same school as Hitler. The first question it answered for me was how could the son of one of Europe's most fabulously wealthy families attend a school of the middle-class Hitler? The answer is Ludwig's father sent him there and it's obvious to me that it was to toughen him up as he stammered and was homosexual, as were two other of his four brothers, three of whom committed suicide.

Kimberley Cornish's main assertion is that Wittgenstein and Hitler had an interaction that triggered Hitler's quote unquote antisemitism (most Palestinians are Semites, most Jews aren't) despite Hitler also having Jewish blood. Hitler made many references to this unidentified Jewish interaction throughout his life, and I think Cornish proves it. Furthermore, Cornish goes on to make an astonishingly robust claim that Wittgenstein was a Soviet spy recruiter involved with the Cambridge Five.

The book starts off great but then wanders off into a long investigation into the crossover between Hitlerian/Nazi metaphysics and Wittgenstein's Theory of Mind. This is the kind of meaningless philosophy that the controllers have misdirected great minds into and which can be most informed with the simple act of inhaling DMT and which holocaust huffers like Kimberley will never do, demonstrating they're pseudo philosophers who can't explain the dental clinics, maternity wards, theatre and orchestra groups at Auschwitz as well as ignorant of the unity consciousness experience provided by entheogens.

I'm fairly sure there's quite a bit more to the Hitler/Wittgenstein story we're unaware of, but Kimberley has made great strides into the topic. I'm reselling the book on ebay if you want it for a few pounds.

The Heart of Darkness - Pol Pot's Car For Sale

Update: International Herald Tribune

Update two: The Car is being sold here

One of the things I love most about Cambodia is that on each visit I see new growth. I don't mean the X.X% GDP growth that will choke us all in good time anyway if we don't rewire the economy, I mean the kind of growth that means the kids look a little cleaner, and a little less grubby. I guess it's the kind of growth that is really a reversal of growth in some ways, as a diminishing number of children are seen running around wearing shabby rags as clothing.

On my first visit, my driver called Elephant, took me around the killing fields and the notorious Tuol Sleng prison which was a school before it became a dark horror story of a torture concentration camp, a place where the Khmer kids were more barbourous than any of the adults could ever be, where they thought up the most ingenious ways to cause pain and suffering to the prisoners of the Khmer Rouge regime, which really only came to power because there was a hell of a shit fight going on in that part of the world through Vietnam and another war on something terrorful for safety. I'll never forget when I asked Elephant if he had lost any family members, how dispassionate he was retelling the story where his brother was killed by the Khmer Rouge after he stole a car to run away from the commune. He was caught, bound and immobilised before being run over in the same car he had taken. Stories like that are two a penny a Cambodia and few people want to think about the bad old days.

Anyway I could go on about how 300 kilometres or more north of the capital Phnom Penh lies the temple Angkor Wat, which in my mind is profoundly mysterious to the history of civilisation with it's Indian architecture dedicated to the God Vishnu, and how much fun I had hiring a motorcycle trials bike and generally just whizzing around on my own, playing with M16 guns and grenades on a range, and partying hard in the Heart of Darkness, but maybe that stuff isn't really interesting but it was a part of my life that I look back on fondly. Or maybe it was the butterflies that flew over the burial pits in the killing fields, on a beautiful day as I reflected on the whole thing that gave me a lot to think about.

One of the oddities of that period was the discovery by a friend of mine that Pol Pot's stretch Limo (Don't all agrarian economy Marxist tyrants run around in stretch Limos?) was being used to ship melons to the market in the capital. I felt at the time it was wrong to profit from that vehicle but like those kids who not only look cleaner on each visit but also have no recollection of that insane time, I think time has moved on. I'm particularly pleased that a portion of the profits now that it is on sale will go towards a charity. You know who you are if you are reading this but the bigger the chunk that goes towards the growth of Cambodia the better the Karma. What goes around comes around.