Names to remember

 How the Dead Souls of Venice Corrupted Science 

from ; Webster B Tarpley

ICLC Conference, September, 1994 

There is a cancer growing on world history – the cancer of oligarchism. Between 1200 A.D. and about 1600 A.D., the world center of gravity for the forces of

oligarchism was the oligarchy of Venice. Toward the end of that time, the Venetian oligarchy decided for various reasons to transfer its families, fortunes, and characteristic outlook to a new base of operations, which turned out to be the British Isles. The old program of a worldwide new Roman Empire with its capital in Venice was replaced by the new program of a worldwide new Roman Empire with its capital in London – what eventually came to be known as the British Empire. 

This was the metastasis of the cancer, the shift of the Venetian Party from the Adriatic to the banks of the Thames, and this has been the main project of the world oligarchy during the past five centuries. The Venetian Party, wherever it is, believes in epistemological warfare. The Venetian Party knows that ideas are more powerful weapons than guns, fleets, and bombs. In order to secure acceptance for their imperial ideas, the Venetian Party seeks to control the way people think. If you can control the way people think, say the Venetians, you can control the way they respond to events, no matter what those events may be. It is therefore vital to the Venetians to control philosophy and especially science, the area where human powers of hypothesis and creative reason become a force for improvements in the order of nature. The Venetian Party is implacably hostile to scientific discovery. Since the days of Aristotle, they have attempted to suffocate scientific discovery by using formalism and the fetishism of authoritative professional opinion. The Venetian Party has also created over the centuries a series of scientific frauds and hoaxes, which have been elevated to the status of incontrovertible and unchallengeable authorities. These have been used to usurp the rightful honor due to real scientists, whom the Venetians have done everything possible to destroy. 

We can identify the Venetian faction which has been responsible for the most important of these scientific and epistemological frauds. They can be called the “dead souls” faction, or perhaps the “no soul brothers” of Venetian intelligence. This is because their factional pedigree is based on the belief that human beings have no soul. Their factional creed is the idea that human beings have no creative mental powers, are incapable of forming hypotheses, and cannot make scientific discoveries. 

THREE GROUPS OF VENETIAN GAMEMASTERS 

We can approach these Venetian dead souls in three groups. First there is the group around Pietro Pomponazzi, Gasparo Contarini, and Francesco Zorzi, who were active in the first part of the 1500s. Second, there is the group of Paolo Sarpi and his right-hand man Fulgenzio Micanzio, the case officers for Galileo Galilei. This was the group that opposed Johannes Kepler in the early 1600s. Third, we have the group around Antonio Conti and Giammaria Ortes in the early 1700s. This was the group that created the Newton myth and modern materialism or utilitarianism and combated Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. These three groups of Venetian gamemasters are responsible for a great deal of the obscurantism and garbage that weighs like a nightmare on the brain of humanity today. These Venetian intelligence officials are the original atheists and materialists of the modern world, as reflected in the sympathy of Soviet writers for figures like Galileo, Newton, and Voltaire as ancestors of what was later called dialectical materialism. 

The leading figure of the first grouping in the early 1500s was Gasparo Contarini. In other locations we have told the story of how Contarini, for Venetian raisons d’état, set into motion the Protestant Reformation, including Martin Luther, King Henry VIII of England, Jean Calvin of Geneva, and the Italian crypto-Protestants known as gli Spirituali. At the same time, Contarini was the cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who masterminded the early phases of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Contarini was the personal protector of Ignatius of Loyola, and played a decisive role in establishing the Jesuit Order. Contarini also convoked the Council of Trent on an Aristotelian platform. 

It is with Pietro Pomponazzi that we see the explicit factional pedigree of the dead souls faction. Pomponazzi started from Aristotle, as the Venetian Party always does. Aristotle asserted that there is no

thought which is not mixed with sense impressions. This meant that there is no part of our mental life which is not contaminated by matter. For Pomponazzi, this proved that the soul does not exist, since it has no immaterial substance. Contarini warned Pomponazzi not to take this matter any further, but also remarked that the only time that the existence of the soul is really certain is when the person is already dead. For Contarini, as a practical matter, there is no empirical human soul that you can be aware of while you are still alive. 

Francesco Zorzi was the envoy of this group to Henry VIII, to whom he became the resident sex adviser. Zorzi illustrates the typical profile of a Venetian intelligence operative in the early 1500s: He was a Franciscan friar whose main occupation was black magic of the Rosicrucian variety. He was a conjurer, a necromancer, an apparitionist. Think of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and you have the portrait of Zorzi. Not exactly a role model for science nerds of any age. As the 1500s turned into the 1600s, this profile began to present serious drawbacks and limitations. 

SARPI AND GALILEO 

Until about 1600, the posture of the Venetian Party toward science was one of more or less open hostility, favoring black magic. But in the early 1600s, the group around Sarpi succeeded in changing their public profile from being the enemies of science to being the embodiment of the most advanced and sophisticated science. For several centuries after this, the Venetians would work inside the scientific community to take it over. They would claim to represent the highest expression of scientific values. In this way, they could institutionalize the dead hand of formalism and the fetishism of authority, so as to stifle the process of discovery. 

The chief of Venetian intelligence who made this possible was Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi and his friend Fulgenzio Micanzio were Servite monks. Sarpi was part of an important Venetian salon of the day, the Ridotti Morosini, which met for discussions in the palace of the Morosini family on the Grand Canal. The Morosini were the direct ideological heirs of Gasparo Contarini. The Morosini salon centered on a discussion of science, and it became the nucleus for the youthful faction of the Venetian oligarchy, the so-called Giovani, who became powerful after 1582. The Giovani favored a policy of cooperation with Holland, England, and France in conflicts with the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs and the papacy. The Vecchi, the oldies, serviced the Venetian networks on the Spanish and papal side, which were also quite extensive. 

We have told in other locations how Sarpi organized and unleashed the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe, using agents like Max von Thurn und Taxis, Christian von Anhalt, Christoph von Dona, and the Elector Palatine Frederick, the so-called Winter King. In this sense, Paolo Sarpi personally exterminated about one-third of the entire population of Europe, and about one-half of the population of Germany and surrounding areas. Sarpi also caused the assassination of King Henry IV of France when Henry opposed Sarpi’s designs and exposed him as an atheist. Paolo Sarpi, we see, is a worthy predecessor to Bertrand Russell. 

But Sarpi in his own time was considered an eminent mathematician. One contemporary wrote of him: “…I can say about him without any exaggeration whatsoever that no one in Europe excels him in the knowledge of [mathematical] sciences.” This is the view of Sarpi held by Galileo Galilei. 

Sarpi’s companions at the Ridotto Morosini during the 1590s included the influential mystic Giordano Bruno. Starting in 1592, there was also a professor of mathematics at the nearby University of Padua: Galileo Galilei, a native of Florence. Galileo taught mathematics in Padua from 1592 to 1610, and it was during his stay on Venetian territory that he became a celebrity. Galileo was a paid agent of Sarpi and, after Sarpi’s death, of Sarpi’s right-hand man Micanzio. There is a correspondence on scientific subjects between Sarpi and Galileo, including on magnetism, which was Sarpi’s favorite, because he

found it occult. Galileo proposed some of his first ideas on falling bodies to Sarpi, who enthused that Galileo had been born to solve the question of motion. 

Galileo’s fame was procured when he used a small telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus. He reported these sightings in his essay The Starry Messenger, which instantly made him the premier scientist in Europe and thus a very important agent of influence for the Venetian Party. This entire telescope operation had been devised by Paolo Sarpi. 

The first telescope had been built by Leonardo da Vinci about a hundred years before Galileo. Susan Welsh has called attention to the research of Domenico Argentieri on Leonardo’s optical manuscripts, which demonstrates that Leonardo’s telescope had a convex lens at one end and a concave lens at the 

other. Its magnifying power was rather weak, but it was a telescope. There are reports of a telescope made in Italy in 1590. By 1608, telescopes began to turn up in Holland, and Galileo says he was encouraged by reports of them to build his own telescope in 1609. 

Sarpi’s version of these events is more revealing. He wrote on March 16, 1610 that a telescope had been found in Holland two years before, therefore in spring 1608. “Once this was found,” wrote Sarpi, “our mathematician of Padua [Galileo] and some of our other people who are not ignorant of these arts began to use the telescope on celestial bodies, adjusting it and refining it for the purpose….” Notice: Galileo “and some of our other people.” It would appear that the observations were made not from Padua, but from Paolo Sarpi’s Servite monastery in Venice. Sarpi wrote about Galileo as “our mathematician,” saying that he had “frequently discussed with him at the time” about the results of the telescopic observations, and did not need to read what Galileo had written about them. 

In 1611, a Polish visitor to Venice, Rey, wrote that Galileo had not really been the inventor of the telescope, but that the “adviser, author, and director” of the telescope project had been Father Paolo Sarpi, “who is considered the greatest mathematician here.” 

In 1597, Johannes Kepler had sent a copy of his new book, Mysterium Cosmographicum, to Galileo. This was the work in which Kepler proposed the Platonic solids as the basis for understanding the harmonic ordering of the planetary orbits around the Sun. Galileo thereupon sent a letter to Kepler, explaining that he, too, was a follower of the Copernican or heliocentric view, but that he “had not dared” to come forward with this view because of fear, and preferred to sit on the whole business because of the climate of opinion. Kepler had written back urging Galileo to be confident and to go forward with the struggle for truth, offering to find publishers in Germany if the Italian climate were too oppressive. Galileo did not do this, and refused to comment in detail on Kepler’s book. According to Kepler’s biographer Max Caspar, in the following years Galileo used material from Kepler in his lectures, but without giving Kepler credit. 

Kepler and Galileo were in frequent contact for over 30 years. Kepler commented with benevolent interest – and with subtle polemics – about Galileo’s published works. But Galileo never commented systematically on Kepler’s laws. In 1609, Kepler published his Astronomia Nova, expounding his first and second laws of planetary motion – that the planets move in ellipses of which the Sun is one focus, and that the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times between themselves and the Sun as they revolve. In Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Great World Systems, published in 1533, Kepler is hardly mentioned, while the discussion centers on Copernicus, with his perfect circle orbits of the planets around the Sun, which had no hope of accounting for the observed positions of the planets. At the end, one of the characters says that he is surprised at Kepler for being so “puerile” as to attribute the tides to the attraction of the Moon. 

During the first years of the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII Barberini, Galileo was the semi-official scientist for the pope. But in 1631, when the Swedish Protestant army of Gustavus Adolphus fought its way through Germany, reached the Alps, and seemed ready to sweep down on Rome, Urban VIII

turned abruptly from a pro-French to a pro-Spanish policy. The Spanish ascendancy is the backdrop for the trial of Galileo carried out by the Dominicans with Jesuit support. Some years earlier, Sarpi had forecast that if Galileo went to Rome, the Jesuits and others were likely to “turn … the question of physics and astronomy into a theological question,” so as to condemn Galileo as “an excommunicated heretic” and force him to “recant all his views on this subject.” Sarpi in 1616 seemed to know very well what would happen more than 15 years later, well after his own death. It is evident that the scenario sketched here corresponded to Sarpi’s own long-term plan. For Galileo, the trial was one of the greatest public relations successes of all time. The gesture of repression against Galileo carried out by the Dominicans of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome established the equation Galileo=modern experimental science struggling against benighted obscurantism. That equation has stood ever since, and this tragic misunderstanding has had terrible consequences for human thought. Lost in the brouhaha about Galileo is the more relevant fact that Kepler had been condemned by the Inquisition more than a decade before. 

Sarpi’s philosophical and scientific writings were not published until after World War II. These are the Pensieri, or Thoughts, and the Arte di Ben Pensare, the Art of Thinking Well. Sarpi’s achievement for Venetian intelligence was to abstract the method of Aristotle from the mass of opinions expressed by Aristotle on this or that particular issue. In this way, sense certainty could be kept as the basis of scientific experiments, and Aristotle’s embarrassingly outdated views on certain natural phenomena could be jettisoned. This allowed the Venetians to preserve the essential Aristotle, while attacking exponents of the Aristotelian or Peripatetic school, such as the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano. These writings by Sarpi have not been translated, but they are the basis of everything written by Sir Francis Bacon. The Bacon-Hobbes menage was in close contact with Sarpi and Micanzio. Sarpi can also be found in Locke, who took almost 1,000 pages to write what Sarpi had put down in 30. 

In the Art of Thinking Well, Sarpi starts from sense perception and sense certainty. He suggests that an impression made on our sensory apparatus by outside objects has to be distinguished from those objects. Especially he points to tastes, odors, and sounds, which he thinks are a matter of our nervous system, not of outside reality. In a different category are ideas of quantity, size, and time, which are objective. In the same manuscript, Sarpi lists the immortality of the soul as one on a list of wrong ideas. Sarpi repeats the argument of Pomponazzi that since there is no knowledge without sensation, the soul dies with the body. Again, the trademark of the Venetian dead souls faction. 

Galileo’s epistemology comes straight from Sarpi. We can see this in Galileo’s 1623 essay Il Saggiatore, The Assayer. For Galileo, colors, tastes, sounds, smells, are mere words. They exist only for our bodies. Galileo makes the famous comparison of these to tickling. If you brush a feather over the soles of the feet or the armpits of a marble statue, you will not produce a tickle. But if you do this to a human being, you will cause that tickling sensation. So, Galileo says, it is time to get rid of ears, tongues, and noses, and go for shapes, numbers, and motions, and never odors, tastes, and sounds. From this he proceeds quickly to a reductionist theory of atoms, in which heat is explained as the effect a “fiery minims” of igneous atoms. Galileo’s epistemology is identical with that of Sarpi. This is what Galileo means when he denies Aristotle to say that the truth is written in the book of nature, and written in mathematical characters. Galileo was a reductionist. 

Sarpi died in 1623, and Galileo’s case officer became the Servite monk Fulgenzio Micanzio. After Galileo had been condemned, Micanzio reminded Galileo of the assignment he had received from Sarpi 20 years earlier: to write a treatise on motion. And by the way, added Micanzio, I have 258 pounds here for you. Later, Micanzio would procure Galileo a pension of 60 scudi per year from the coffers of the Venetian state. 

Galileo responded to Micanzio’s orders with the 1638 Discourses on Two New Sciences, Mechanics and Local Motion. Because Galileo had been condemned by the Inquisition, he could not be published

anywhere that papal authority was strong. Micanzio therefore arranged for Galileo’s book to be printed by the Dutch Elsevir press in Leyden. 

In 1634, Micanzio wrote to Galileo that he had been talking to an expert in science and philosophy – called a virtuoso in the parlance of the day – who had commented that although he did not deny Galileo’s scientific ability, “the things that you bring are not new, but are already in Kepler.” Indeed. Galileo wrote back that the correct answer to this virtuoso is that although Galileo and Kepler may sometimes seem to agree about certain astronomical phenomena, “my way of philosophizing is so different from his.” (Nov. 19, 1634). 

In letters written in 1640, Galileo threw further light on his own scientific method. Galileo complained that he had been misunderstood: “Against all the reason in the world, I am accused of impugning Peripatetic doctrine, whereas I profess and am certain of observing more religiously the Peripatetic – or, to put it better, Aristotelian – teachings than many others….” (Aug. 24, 1640). Galileo asserted that he had tried to study phenomena: “that in all natural effects assure me of their existence, their “an sit” [if it be], whereas I gain nothing from their how, their “quomodo.” (June 23, 1640). Some might try to dismiss these admissions as a distortion of Galileo’s outlook caused by the crackdown of which he was still a victim, but I would submit that this is the real Galileo talking. What Galileo is trying to express here is the same thing Isaac Newton meant with his infamous “hypotheses non fingo” [I do not fabricate hypotheses]. Which brings us to Newton.