suicide

Flick Friday: To Hell With The Kaiser! 1918

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Moving Picture World Image
Image Credit: Moving Picture World
Source: Archive Image
Author: Metro Pictures/Screen Classics, Inc.

One-hundred, five years, ago, today…the silent black & white, comedy-drama To Hell With The Kaiser! was released. Written by June Mathis and directed by George Irving, it starred Lawrence Grant (as The Kaiser/actor Robert Graubel), Olive Tell, Betty Howe, John Sunderland, Earl Schenck (as the Crown Prince), Mabel Wright, Frank Currier, Karl Dane and Walter P. Lewis as Satan.

Following the death of his father, Frederick III of Germany, Wilhelm Hohenzollern becomes the German Kaiser and forms a pact with the devil that, he will conquer the globe in exchange for his soul. During the Kaiser’s invasion of Belgium, the Crown Prince enters a church and rapes Ruth Monroe, the daughter of an American inventor who has perfected a noiseless communications device. When the professor denounces the Crown Prince, he immediately is shot, whereupon his other daughter Alice vows to obtain revenge. While Alice’s sweetheart, Winslow Dodge, fights with the Americans as an aviator, she arranges to meet the Crown Prince through her friend Robert Graubel, an actor who impersonates the Kaiser at public functions. With her father’s wireless [device], Alice informs Winslow of the Kaiser’s whereabouts and, as he captures the German emperor, she kills the Crown Prince. Now a prisoner, the Kaiser drowns himself and wakes up in Hell, where Satan abdicates in his favor, saying that the Kaiser’s tortures are more fiendish than any he ever devised.

IMDb Storyline

IMDb Amazon Image Two
Image Credit: Rainfall Website (Web Archive)
Lobby Poster
IMDb & Amazon

Lawrence Grant, who spent his lengthy career playing odious villains, appeared in the dual role of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his look-alike, German actor Robert Graubel. Terrified of being assassinated, the Kaiser hires Graubel to impersonate him at various political functions. In the film, the Kaiser achieves military success through an infernal pact with Satan. Once this is established, the film concentrates on the seemingly endless tally of misdeeds perpetrated by the Kaiser during his quarter-century reign over Germany. His “partner in crime” is the Crown Prince […], who thinks nothing of casually raping convent girls and gunning down protesting nuns. The Crown Prince’s latest conquest is Ruth Monroe […], the daughter of an American inventor. When Ruth’s father protests this outrage, he is brutally murdered, whereupon Ruth’s sister Alice […] vows revenge. Using her father’s newest invention, a wireless machine whose coded messages cannot be intercepted, Alice directs a battalion of planes to bomb the small German village where the Kaiser is hiding. Captured by the Allies, the Kaiser is ignominiously dumped in a POW camp but, not before enduring a well-aimed sock on the jaw from a pugnacious dough-boy. In despair, the Kaiser commits suicide and sends his soul to hell. In hell, the devil […] gives up his throne, confessing that the Kaiser is far more sinister than he could ever hope to be.

Wikipedia Plot

[On June 8, 1918], Motography ran a Screen Classics press release explaining that To Hell With The Kaiser “reveals the machinations of Europe’s military monster before and during the war, his contempt for Americans […], his elaborate plans to crush France, […] destroy Russia, […] partition the world, […] his [order] to employ deadly gases in the war, the true circumstances under which he ordered the sinking of the Lusitania, the raiding of hospitals […].” Years before the war, Mr. Grant’s physical likeness to the German ruler was noted by a high official of the Kaiser’s court and a proposition was made for Grant to play the Kaiser in a dramatization […]. The war broke out before discussions went any further.

Actor John Sunderland, playing American pilot Winslow Dodge, was himself “an aviator who has seen service in Belgium.”

[It] had been released in the press that Kaiser Wilhelm II had half a dozen doubles who were employed to pose for him in various parts of the country, where there might be danger of assassination, while the real Kaiser, himself, remained safe behind this cloak.

To Hell With The Kaiser opened in New York City at the Broadway Theatre on June 30, 1918, immediately after it had emerged from the cutting and editing rooms […].

The film turned out to be an effective propaganda tool […]. Not only has the picture been shown in munitions plants and training camps […] but, this power has now been demonstrated in a new way…to convert conscientious objectors.

The National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) included this film on its list of Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films as of February 2021.

AFI History

I found the building of this post fascinating. What started out as a simple movie post, turned into a history lesson. It’s a shame that it is lost. There are photographs of still pictures on IMDb. ~Vic

Chris Thomas: Back To Basics

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A Forum Blog Post From: The Chris Thomas Files

Back To Basics Image One
Image Credit: ageucate.com

Change is upon us. The problem is that most of us are too busy fire-fighting our lives that we have difficulty sorting out just how we are changing. In order to understand ourselves and, our place within this change, we need to return to some of the basic truths of who and what we are. In this way, we will be better able to steer our way to the future. As humans, we are used to thinking of ourselves as physical bodies with some kind of extra bit we call a soul but, this is a false impression. What we really are is a soul that is 100 million years old and our soul has built for itself many physical bodies over the course of human history. As each of our many lifetimes has ended, we have merged with our higher soul aspect to review our successes and failures in the physical life we have just ended. With that process of review completed, we then plan our next physical life.

Everyone who is alive on Earth has undergone this process many times, with each successive lifetime planned to provide […] new experiences, as well as to re-live some of our past failures, in order that we complete the lesson our soul chose to learn. In this way, each new physical life is lived as a mixture of clearing out past failures, lessons we did not learn, as well as learning from the new experiences our next life will provide us with. Nobody directs the actions our souls take. Every action is chosen with full and free choice. It is how we, the physical body, react to our soul’s choices, as we encounter them in life, that determines how straight forwards our lives are. If we stray from our soul’s chosen path, we receive hints from our higher self in the guise of an illness. We return to our chosen path and the symptoms heal themselves.

All of the main choices we are faced with in life are chosen by our higher selves before we are re-born into our new bodies as babies. Babies and children are souls of the same age as we are, they just inhabit younger bodies until they become adults. Who our parents are, who our siblings are, the country we are born into, our way of life, our means of earning an income, who our lovers will be…all of the main aspects of our new lives are worked out before we are born.

Soul Image Two
Image Credit: moonhippiemystic.wordpress.com &
lucas2012infos.wordpress.com

This is something that we really have forgotten about. Everything we do in life, our way of life, our nationality, is all pre-determined BEFORE we are born. It is very easy to become distracted by the plight of those who live in other countries as we often compare their way of life with ours. If we consider that they have less than we in the west do, we become concerned. In doing this, we are making a judgement on the lives those others are living and who are we to make judgements in this way? The old Native American saying is something we really need to pay attention to: “Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their moccasins.”

This is not to say that we should not be compassionate or that we should not care. What we should be doing is finding a balance. Having spent thirty years working with people’s health problems, there have been many times where it was very tempting to step over the line and try to take on the problems my clients were having in their lives but, I had to draw back. No matter how much I might have wanted to cross that line, the reality is that, the situations that had arisen in my client’s lives were as a result of their soul’s choices and all that I could ever do was to help them understand the choices that they were faced with whilst doing everything I could to heal their ailments.

As we undergo this process of change, we become more and more aware of the plight of others and it becomes increasingly tempting to try to step in and solve their problems for them or allow the compassion we feel to distract us from sorting out our own problems. What we need to do is to find the correct balance. To give an example: The farmers in India have been under huge pressures by the [GMO] companies to only grow [GMO] crops. The Indian government, and banks, increased that pressure by insisting that bank loans to buy seeds were only granted to farmers who agreed to plant [GMO] crops. Traditional seeds (non-GMO) are 10,000 times cheaper than [GMO] seeds but, faced with bank and government pressure, Indian farmers planted [GMO] instead of traditional crops. Consistently, the [GMO] crops failed or produced much lower yields whilst at the same time requiring 300 percent more water and, huge quantities of herbicides and insecticides. Many thousands of farmers became bankrupt and committed suicide by drinking pesticides. But, by people in Europe rejecting [GMO] products, the pressure has now come off the farmers and they are able to re-plant using their traditional seeds. This is where balance lies. [By] rejecting to buy [GMO] products, we in the west have helped to save the lives of Indian farmers and improve their lives, immeasurably. This is compassion in action. We are not physically able to step in and alter the lives of these farmers, no matter how much we might want to but, by forcing the [GMO] companies to cut back on their crops, lives have been saved and livelihoods saved.

We need to remember to think before we act.

© Chris Thomas 2011

[Original Posting/One Vibration Forum Blog Post/April 20, 2011/Defunct]
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Throwback Thursday: Waco Siege 1993

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Branch Davidian Compound Image One
Photo Credit: wacotrib.com
Rod Aydelotte with the Waco Tribune-Herald
Branch Davidian Compound during 1993 siege.
Sheet says: “God help us. We want the press.”

Twenty-six years ago, today, at 9:45 am CST, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) attempted to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons, and possible methamphetamine manufacture (brings in military assistance due to the War on Drugs), to the Branch Davidians religious group at the Mount Carmel Center in Axtell, Texas. The raid did not go well. The ATF was unable to get into the compound after a two-hour battle that claimed the lives of four ATF agents and five Branch Davidians. Sixteen more agents were wounded. A ceasefire was called until another branch member attempted to re-enter the compound six hours later and was gunned down.

The ATF made contact with David Koresh (Vernon Wayne Howell) inside and, the FBI moved in and took over the operation. Early on, 25 FBI negotiators nearly had Koresh agreeing to the Davidians leaving peacefully in exchange for a recorded message of his being released via radio. After the recording was aired, Koresh changed his mind and, stated that ‘God’ had told him to stay and wait. Despite the reversal, nineteen children were released and, interviewed regarding alleged physical and sexual abuse. Koresh gave phone interviews to the local media until the FBI cut all communication.

Branch Davidian Complex Image Two
Photo Credit: rollingstone.com

The stand-off lasted 51 days, culminating in a deadly fire on April 19. Seventy-six Branch Davidian members died. Autopsies revealed some died due to collapsed concrete walls, others by gun shots (either self-inflicted or consensual execution) and, there was one stabbing. Autopsy photographs of some children seemed to indicate cyanide poisoning.

The raid was criticized extensively. A slew of controversies emerged. There was no meth lab and no evidence of child abuse. Despite the Danforth Report, the whitewash of bureaucratic misconduct fueled resentment. The Oklahoma City Bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the Waco fire.

Trial
Civil Suits
British Citizen Survivors

Nothing remains of the buildings, today, other than concrete foundation components, as the entire site was bulldozed two weeks after the end of the siege. Only a small chapel, built years after the siege, stands on the site.