Ages of Enlightenment

		Frontispiece
		Prologue
	Chapter I	Voltaire and the Encyclopedists
	Chapter II	The Hegelians
	Chapter III	Heaven on Earth
	Chapter IV	Empire of the Czars
	Chapter V	Llano Estacado
	Chapter VI	Dawn of the New Age
	Chapter VII	Man of Steel
	Chapter VIII	Wolves are Closing In
	Chapter IX	Stalin and Roosevelt
	Chapter X	Shifting Alliances
	Chapter XI	Cold War
	Chapter XII	Lost Empire
	Chapter XIII	Apre le Deluge
	Chapter XIV	Paper Centerfolds
		Postscript

The Cold War

One of the episodes of the Cold war was the Chernobyl meltdown (April 25, 1986). It was never properly investigated, as the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, at that time in power only about a year, blamed the meltdown on the previous administration and 'malaise' of the Soviet society he wanted to reform with his perestroika. He announced the meltdown as follows:
 
All of you know that there has been an incredible misfortune -- the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It has painfully affected the Soviet people, and shocked the international community. For the first time we confront the real force of nuclear energy, out of control.
 
Western media repeated Gorbachev's interpretation of this meltdown as an 'accident,' and obscured the 'qui bono' question with verbiage about the environmental impact of this catastrophe. At that time Gorbachev still did not know that this event will be a significant factor in the fall of his government that preceded the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
 
Increasing doubts  Years later, Russian people began to grasp the impact of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and realized who likely benefited from it. Also, with the passage of time, the naive belief of Russian people in the benevolence of the United States, nurtured for decades by the Cold War propaganda, had to face the reality of the Bush I, and later Bush II foreign policies, abnegating on assurances given and treaties concluded with the Gorbachev administration prior to withdrawal of Soviet armies from the Eastern Europe. About that time, articles about the possibility that Chernobyl 'accident' was staged by foreign secret service agencies started to emerge in the Russian press (Sovietskaya Rossiya, June 16, 1992, April 25, 1996, Za Ruskoe Delo 6, 38, 1996, Trud, April 26, 1995) and elsewhere, recently reappearing on Pravda.ru (February, 2004) . These allegations were based on observations that, under scrutiny,

"It is unlikely that the sequence of events that led to the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor could have been accidental" and that "Technicians which disconnected the safety mechanisms of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, Alexandrov, Feinberg, Sagdeev, Zaslavsky, are now living in comfort abroad."

While the second allegation might have been a happenstance, perusing the sequence of events that led to the Chernobyl nuclear explosion leaves one with a doubt that these events could have been unintentional or accidental.

Soviet TU-144

Technologies with hidden malfunctions  In the late 1960's Western intelligence agencies started to sabotage the Soviet Union's economy through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions. On June 3, 1973, Russia's supersonic rival to Concorde, the TU-144, crashed during the air show at the Le Bourget airport. Pilot of the Tupolev's supersonic plane Mikhail Kozlov and his five crew died in the crash. The wreckage of the plane which looked so like the British-French machine that it was dubbed Concordski hit the village of Goussainville, killing eight persons. Unknown to the public at that time, the French intelligence agency sent a Mirage III jet on a collision course with the TU-144. To avoid collision, the pilot of the Soviet aircraft took an evasive action during which his airplane with the built-in construction flaw, broke apart in midair. The press, as in the numerous other staged "accidents," blamed the crash on the pilot error.

Anyone who passed the Imperial Examinations could become a Mandarin with a single exception of actors ...

The Ronald Reagan's initiative  In 1982, US president Ronald Reagan officially approved the covert transfers of technologies that contained hidden malfunctions, including computer software, to the Soviet Union (Washington Post, February 26, 2004). This program, among other "accidents," triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline. Thomas Reed, former member of the National Security Council, Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and a Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy described this episode in his (2004, Presidio Press) book At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. His narrative is complemented by the Gus Weiss (1996) article The farewell dossier, published in now declassified CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, 39, 5. Also, two years prior to the Chernobyl disaster, a US computer software consulting agency won the contract on the upgrade of Chernobyl’s nuclear plant software. We might as well to add in passim that in China, before 1911, anyone who passed the Imperial Examinations could become a Mandarin with a single exception of actors, as the nature of their profession is to pretend and to deceive.

Disinformation On July 25, 1986 New York Times published Serge Schmemann's Chernobyl Fallout: Apocalyptic Tale where he claims that a 'prominent Russian writer' said that Chernobyl means wormwood. This led some to believe that the Chernobyl's nuclear plant meltdown was predicted in the Biblical Revelation 8:10-11, abstracted as 'the third angel sounded and there fell into water a great meteorite called Wormwood. Many people died drinking this bitter-tasting poisoned water.'  Chernobyl (chornyi, black + [byl]inka a blade of grass, a herb) was likely named after some 'black herb' growing at that locale. While a 'black herb' could be translated into English as wormwood, the linguistic controversy that developed around this issue markedly added to the plethora of disinformation surrounding the nuclear meltdown of the Chernobyl power plant, diverting attention from the relevant issues into the trivia. Serge Schmemann is son of Alexander Schmemann, a collaborator of 30 years of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), an organization which receives its funds from the US Congress passed through CIA. After the fall of the Soviet Union, this organization started to broadcast to Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, prior to military invasions of these countries. Recently, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty/ started its Persian service beamed at Iran. Surrounded by concrete barricades and circled by armored vehicles, it is now located in Prague, Bohemia (Czech Republic).

Notes

Chernobyl and the Nevada test site. The overwhelming attention the media paid to Chernobyl nuclear incident can be contrasted with the virtual media blackout on the nuclear contamination of the American Southwest from more than four decades of the above-the-ground testing of the nuclear bombs on the Nevada Test Site. The fallout clouds from these over 400 nuclear explosions floated across the American Southwest.

Comparisons of radiation level released at Chernobyl with radiation level of the Hiroshima bomb vary substantially, a reasonable estimate is that the Chernobyl radioactive release was equivalent to ten Hiroshima atomic bombs.

The aftermath of these nuclear explosions is described by Carole Gallagher (1993, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press) in her book American Ground Zero. Carole Gallagher spent several years interviewing people who live in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, including Native Americans, farmers, ranchers, professors, housewives, soldiers and artists. What they had in common were

Her testimony is seconded by Richard L. Miller's (1999, Two-Sixty Press) Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing, supplemented by maps tracing the bomb clouds, with listings of the communities affected most by the tests. Although the initial radiation from a nuclear explosion is short-lived, the residues of nuclear explosions stay in soil and atmosphere for long periods of time, varying from weeks to centuries.

Things as they really are Wormwood is used in the manufacture of absinthe. Freely available only in few countries, notably Bohemia, absinthe was banned in the United States and throughout the world. However, around the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in France, this emerald green liqueur was the favorite of the bohemian crowd. Indeed, for many Impressionists painters, a shot of the absinthe was as essential as the paintbrush and canvas. Oscar Wilde said about the absinthe