journalism – Heresy Central

Did Thomas Merton Have a Love Child?

2023-05-032023-05-03 David Martin

The late writer and peace activist, Jim Forest, was a good friend and regular correspondent with the notable Catholic spiritual and political leader, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton, in fact, dedicated his 1968 book, Faith and Violence, to the Jesuit priest and anti-Vietnam War activist, Phil Berrigan, and to his fellow activist, Forest. Forest’s 2008 book, Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton, is, for the most part, an excellent introduction to the life and works of Merton. It is a revised and expanded version of the book with the same title published in 1991, which was itself an expansion upon the much smaller Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biography published in 1979. The 2008 incarnation continues to be…

Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

2023-02-232023-02-24 David Martin

Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what has become of America, It’s impossible to be all three. It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February 14, 2023. The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation. The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50thanniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S. military’s Vietnam War theater…

Black Like Whom? Mystery Man, John Howard Griffin

2023-02-062023-02-09 David Martin

In our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, we identified John Howard Griffin as one of four key people responsible for cementing in the public mind the belief that the great Catholic monk and public intellectual, Thomas Merton, had died from accidental electrocution. The other three were Merton’s abbot at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, Flavian Burns, Merton’s secretary there, Brother Patrick Hart, and Merton’s authorized biographer, Michael Mott. For the recently published Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, we have delved more deeply into Griffin’s background. The Texas-born journalist and author John Howard Griffin, is known almost exclusively for his 1961 book, Black Like Me. It is…

The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

2023-01-312023-02-04 David Martin

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand? That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968. One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time. Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there. America’s…

We Pulled the Plug on the Shah

2022-07-152022-07-15 David Martin

When I first wrote on this subject seven years ago, the title was in the form of a question, “Did We Pull the Plug on the Shah?” With the help of a fairly recent but very obscure book by the American expatriate living in England, Arlene Lois Johnson, The Shah of Iran: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: Victim of His Times I have accumulated enough additional information to write the title of this brief essay as a declarative statement. The book was published in the United Kingdom by News Source, Incorporated. No date is provided, but Johnson tells me that it came out in 2018. The book is apparently not available on Amazon, and I couldn’t get it to come up with…

Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

2022-06-252022-06-25 David Martin

I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998. There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed. No changes were made in the original entries. The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days. It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription. Take…

Video on 9/11 Removed from YouTube as “Hate Speech”

2022-04-222022-07-09 David Martin

If for some reason you should find yourself at the Internet site with this URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7ojSe-wqg&t=21s, what you will find there is not a YouTube video, but a black rectangle bearing this message in white, in the manner of chalk on a blackboard: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech. Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.” Below that, in purple, is a “Learn more” click-on. Doing that, you get: Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes: Age Caste Disability Ethnicity Gender Identity and Expression Nationality Race Immigration Status Religion Sex/Gender Sexual Orientation Victims…

American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

2022-03-232022-03-26 David Martin

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article. It was right there on my AOL News. Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

Important Assassination Movie Quashed

2022-03-042022-03-25 David Martin

Sometimes, not all “accidents” are accidental. (statement on the screen before the opening credits) Released for public viewing in October of 2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already garnered 28 awards and seven additional nominations. A 1962 movie with a similar title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best known and popular of all time. This one, Lawrence: After Arabia, deals not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner. Lawrence was just 46 years old. Just as Oliver…

“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

2022-01-282022-01-28 David Martin

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice. He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music. Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more. The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

The Early Thai Reports, the Press, and the Abbey on Thomas Merton’s Death

2021-12-152021-12-15 David Martin

by David Martin and Hugh Turley The Trappist monk Thomas Merton might well have been the most significant Roman Catholic thinker and writer of the 20th century. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold over 600,000 copies in its original hardcover edition and, in one version or another, has remained continuously in print. Its Kindle edition as of this writing has 803 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Merton was a prolific writer. The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, lists 106 books that he authored, 42 of which were published before his mysterious violent death on December 10, 1968, while he was attending a monastic conference near Bangkok, Thailand.…

Finding David: An American Wife Betrayed by Her Government

2021-12-102022-08-15 David Martin

Joseph Stalin supposedly once said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” A great deal has been written about the shameless and utterly unforgivable abandonment of American POWs in the wake of the Vietnam War—although, thanks to the American news media, few people are aware of it—but, up to now, no writing that we are aware of quite captures the tragedy and, yes, the outrage of this cold and heartless policy so much as Carol Hrdlicka’s recent book, Finding David: An American Wife Betrayed by Her Government. The book is an autobiography, taking us to Carol’s early years growing up in the Mountain West, being swept off her feet as a 16…

Untruths in Forrestal Book Review

2021-09-232022-01-04 David Martin

The latest reviewer of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, one “Robert Buckley,” (kin to William F.?) en route to giving it just two stars—compared to the 4.5 out of 5 average of 205 customer reviews—has the following to say on Amazon.com: I agree with the other commenters who said that the book needs a good editor. There’s too much information of doubtful relevance. Martin makes a pretty good case that the Zionists had a motive to kill Forrestal, but as any lawyer knows, motive by itself does not prove a case. There must be other evidence. Martin, for example, fails to give us any suggestion of how the “murder” could actually have been carried out. Forrestal was in…

Google, Tool of the Deep State

2021-06-252022-08-01 David Martin

Was Vince Foster’s Murder over Pedophilia? The work on this article began when I recently stumbled across a quite well-made video on YouTube by an outfit called Traditionalist Tolkienist. It had been up since February of 2020, and if you can believe YouTube’s viewer count, very few people had watched it up to that point. I began to wonder how the excellent video had remained so obscure for more than a year, so, as a first step, I did a search using the default search engine for my Mac computer, which happens to be Google, for the video’s title, “Vince Foster: The Deep State’s Worst Murder Cover-up.” At this point, you’ll have to take my word for it, but…

Ken Starr’s Contempt for Your Intelligence

2021-04-262021-08-11 David Martin

In memoriam: Patrick J. Knowlton, 12/19/1954 – 4/21/2021 A great American Imagine if some two decades later one of the lawyers who was primarily responsible for the Warren Commission Report were to write a book accentuating the report’s virtues and attacking its many critics. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because just such a book was written by David Belin, whose articles used to show up with some regularity in the mainstream media doing just that. Now, a very similar book has come out that does the same thing with regard to the death of Bill Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. One of its revelations is that its author is a former colleague and apparent…

Bought Journalists: The Case of Udo Ulfkotte

2021-02-172021-01-24 James Tracy

MHB Report German author and newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte has been among the few prestigious mainstream journalists to tell the public that it’s being lied to by a large majority journalists and news organizations, most of which manipulate readerships for bribes and professional one-upmanship. Ulfkotte’s mea culpa was titled Bought Journalists, a German best-seller translated into nine languages, the English translation of which had to overcome unusual hurdles before finally coming to fruition.

JFK, Mass Media, and the Origins of ‘Conspiracy Theory’

2019-10-102019-12-08 James Tracy

By James F. Tracy (Originally posted at MemoryHoleBlog on November 22, 2018) Prefatory Note on Censorship in Academe This study was written in 2013-14 as part of my academic research as Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. I have had numerous papers addressing news coverage of historical events published in academic journals over the past two decades. However, this was the first attempt to offer a scholarly treatment of a research object related to a conspiracy–how the news media “framed” New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination inquiry. When I presented the paper at the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal Conference in 2014 the panel respondent congratulated me on what he deemed…

YouTube’s Complete Corruption Revealed

2019-05-262022-04-21 David Martin

In July of last year, we published an article entitled, “YouTube Censorship Really Hits Home.” In that article, we told of our discovery that some of our song parodies had been taken down from YouTube. I had collaborated first with the Cheverly Brothers to set four political parodies of Everly Brothers’ songs to music and then with Gary King, the video maker for Jim Fetzer, to make them into videos. Those videos turned out to be collateral damage in the taking down of Fetzer’s video channel by YouTube. Something good came out of the experience, though. Fetzer, as described in the article, had turned to the independent video platform, 153News, to carry his video channel. King had used his own…

The Charlottesville Operation

2018-08-142021-06-01 David Martin

(Editorial note: This in-depth article, which first appeared nearly a year ago on Dave Martin’s site is timely once again, since the media has been running a lot of pieces commemorating the first anniversary of this bogus event. Also, listen to Dave’s interview from Kevin Barrett’s radio show.) It was May of 1970 and my wife and I, both graduate students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, had joined hundreds of other people, most of whom were students, in an enormous march around Chapel Hill in protest of the shooting of demonstrators at Kent State University and incursion into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. As we were marching toward Franklin Street, the main drag in the town,…