Month: April 2013

Maggie and Winnie

On: By: Tony Papard

thatcherchurchill

The two British Prime Ministers who were given big funerals are Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. A full State funeral for Winnie, and a big ceremonial funeral (one step down from a State funeral at her own wish) for Maggie. Ironically, these are two of the most controversial Prime Ministers of the 20th Century.

Winston Churchill once suggested machine gunning striking miners during the General Strike, he was in favor of letting Mahatma Gandhi die when he went on hunger strike for Indian independence, Churchill praised Mussolini’s fascism and even went so far as to call the Italian dictator a ‘Roman genius’, and he was the wartime Prime Minister who authorized the terror bombing of Axis cities killing many totally innocent civilians. In other words, he was a war criminal.

In the closing stages of the Second World War, which Britain got involved in after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Churchill sat with Stalin and the American President and between them they carved up Europe, handing Poland, Czechoslovakia and a number of other Central and Eastern countries over to the Soviet sphere of influence, thus betraying the Poles by allowing them to exchange the foreign dictator Hitler for the foreign dictator Stalin. He also agreed boundary changes for Poland which was regarded as a betrayal. By contrast countries like Finland and later Austria (the latter being Hitler’s birthplace and annexed by Germany) were granted neutrality. No such attempt was made to guarantee neutrality for countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Thatcher has similar credentials. Devastating mining communities by closing the pits, taking on the striking miners and greatly weakening the trade union movement, selling off social housing, introducing the controversial Community Charge (Poll Tax), ordering the sinking of the Argentinean ship the ‘Belgrano’ with great loss of life as it was sailing away from the ‘exclusion zone’ during the Falklands/Malvinas war (Tam Dalyell, the former Scottish MP, called her a ‘murderess’ for this war crime), calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist while praising the fascist dictator General Pinochet as the savior of ‘democracy’ in Chile, and as Ken Livingstone has remarked, basically causing all the problems we face in Britain today including the banking crisis, the horrors and chaos of privatization of our utilities and transport systems, and the acute housing shortage, especially in social housing.

Two extreme rightwing politicians who at one stage praised fascist dictators, who were responsible for war crimes, who attacked the poor and and those striking for their livelihoods, and who were hypocritical about their stance on Communism.

Both claiming to be anti-Communist, Winston Churchill crying crocodile tears over the ‘Iron Curtain’ which had descended over many Central and Eastern European capitals – a thing he agreed to at the end-of-the-war conferences between the Allies. Maggie Thatcher opposing the reunification of Germany after the Wall was torn down and preferring East Germany to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Like all of us, these two politicians will learn the effect of their actions and policies in the afterlife and hopefully eventually learn from them.

However, why huge, expensive funerals for such controversial Prime Ministers? Many other former PMs have had private or much less elaborate funerals. Maggie’s huge, expensive affair will surely incite counter-demonstrations.

The fact is all political figures are controversial to some extent, and this includes the Queen and royal family. So any expensive State or ceremonial funerals around such figures will be controversial. No doubt this is unavoidable in some cases, such as when the Head of State dies. But to single out two of the most controversial Prime Ministers for very expensive, elaborate funerals seems, to me, quite unnecessary and a backlash is to be expected.

Psychic Mediums

On: By: Tony Papard

I’m referring here to the mediums who go around concert halls giving readings to packed houses, and who may also do a few private readings. Some have been featured on TV programs, in Britain with the legal requirement to describe these shows as ‘for entertainment only’.

Hard-line debunkers, describing themselves  as ‘skeptics’, say there is no such thing as an afterlife, and that all these mediums are doing ‘cold reading’, or resort to some sort of trickery such as plants in the audience, or somehow research their subject beforehand.

Of course there are good and bad mediums, as in all professions, but most at the top of their profession are extremely accurate and their knowledge cannot be dismissed as ‘cold reading’. Only mediums who give very general readings could be accused of this, or who say things which are quite obvious. For instance, it is a good bet that anyone elderly will have a father, mother, father-in-law or mother-in-law in Spirit, and the fall-back if all these fail is to say ‘well it’s a mother vibration’ or a ‘father vibration’ and say it must be a grandmother or grandfather.

This is all bad mediumship, as is the constant recital of common names like John or Mary which everyone must identify with, or to just say ‘A name beginning with J’.

On the other hand, there are some excellent mediums who are so accurate much of the time it could not possibly be ‘cold reading’. Mediums like Colin Fry, Tony Stockwell and Sally Morgan.

There are few mediums, past and present, who have not been accused of fraud at some time. Many have been investigated by scientists in the past and found to have real powers. It is true that some physical mediums (those who work with materializations, Direct Voice and ectoplasm or some other form of Spirit energy) have resorted to trickery when their powers fail them. One particular physical medium in the past said to investigators to watch her carefully or she would cheat. Both Colin Fry (when he worked as ‘Lincoln’) and Sally Morgan have been accused of cheating. Colin has given an explanation of what happened in an early display of physical mediumship, blaming the deception on a mischievous spirit while he was in a deep trance. Sally Morgan’s accusers had a story which just didn’t stand up, that she was fed information through headphones. First of all, no medium would do this and risk the message through the headphones being overheard by the audience, and secondly it doesn’t explain how the person supposedly relaying this information would have got it in the first place.

If it were possible to research people in the audience before a show with hundreds of thousands in the audience, then the medium would memorize the facts, not have them relayed over headphones. In most cases the accurate information given could not possibly be researched beforehand.

The possibility of ‘plants’ in the audience is also a non-starter. These people would have to be paid to do this deception, and there would have to be a lot of them. It is perfectly obvious they could get a lot more money by selling their story of this deception to the Press than by continually going to psychic shows and getting money in dribs and drabs as ‘plants’.

The fact is there are many very accurate real afterlife communications which come from great mental mediums. This is the term used for those who relay messages from the dead using clairaudience, clairvoyance or clairsensitivity rather than physical mediums who usually work in the dark and using ectoplasm and other Spirit energy are able to manifest voices and complete or partial materializations of the departed.

There is obviously more scope for trickery in any form of mediumship which takes place in the dark, but these too have been thoroughly investigated by some fo the most famous scientists like Sir William Crookes and others, including the lengthy Scole experiments of the 1990s which produced remarkable physical phenomena, testified as genuine by many scientists and even a magician who investigated them and said no trickery could possibly have been involved.

I personally received a very accurate message from Colin Fry in a packed Fairfield Hall in Croydon some years ago. He gave my grandmother’s first name, that she was in good health and of advanced age till an accident accelerated the aging process and she passed to Spirit, then went on to describe how my mother’s kitchen had been badly renovated with cheap materials, and how I had stood a hot pan on the working surface and damaged it. He then went on to say that the damage had been covered up with something and that it was on the left as you entered the kitchen. I defy anyone to say this detailed information could have been ‘cold reading’, and as none of it had been written down at the time, it could not have been researched beforehand.

The  afterlife is real, and there is communication with Spirits in the afterlife dimensions. Get over it! Quite apart from all forms of mediumship, NDEs (Near Death Experiences) are conclusive evidence that we survive death, especially when so many accurately describe everything that went on around them while clinically dead.

A real skeptic is one who keeps an open mind, and distinguises fraudsters from the real thing. Those who debunk all evidence of the afterlife by being very selective with the evidence are not skeptics at all, they are hard-nosed debunkers who ignore or dismiss all evidence which doesn’t support their materialist views.