From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Apr 13 2002 - 07:09:44 MDT
April 13th, 2002
The new, first-class mail (over 2 oz.) postage stamp is available now for US57 cents per. An image of it is posted at
http://www.orlingrabbe.com/homepage.html
just above a couple links to articles on Abraham ("White-Supremacist-Statist-Dictator") Lincoln, which may later roll into the
archives. When I saw this, I wasn't sure it was for real, so I went into a US Post Office to check it out for myself.
This stamp depicts an eagle (representing the State) holding a bundle of sticks (representing the people), called fasces, in its
claws. The fasces represents the 'unbreakable' collective power of the mob. I can still remember learning about this in my very
first year in a public, government-sponsored kindergarten (translation: "children's garden", where the twigs are supposed to be bent
and twisted into the appropriate forms).
The word "fasces" is Latin, it is the root word of Fascism. The Eagle-Gripping-Fasces was the symbol of Imperial Rome. I think it
was adopted by the military dictator Julius Ceasar after overthrowing the Republic. There is a nice depiction of it in the recent
film *Gladiator*, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, on the back of the Emperor's throne.
This symbol was revived in the early 1930's. This is a period I study intensively as a psychohistorian, as it is so similar to
the current period. There were two dictatorial empires back then that nearly simultaneously adopted this ancient symbol of a new
regime: the New-Deal USA and National Socialist (Nazi) Germany. A relic of that period can be found on the reverse of the US
Washington quarter, minted 1932-1998. Maybe you have one in your pocket. That coin was the only example of Eagle-Gripping-Fasces
extant in the US until now. The new design has a sort of Socialist-Realist quality about it, like something from the pre-Great
Patriotic War Soviet Union.
I am going to afix this stamp to a letter and mail it back with a dated cancellation, so I can have something to pass on to my
grandchildren- whatever they are- to tell them yes, there actually were semi-conscious beings back then, singing songs of freedom
and telling each other fairy tales about the Rule of Law.
-- Forrest Bishop Chairman, Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering www.iase.cc
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