Scientific Method

                                                                                                                                              B-H

What is the scientific method?

On a daily basis we are flooded with media statements about what “scientists think about …well, basically everything and anything.

The impression is given that if scientists say so, it is undeniable truth.

We have tests of it in years of Covid and day by day this statement of mine is less and less controversial.

I mean most of us, until a certain point believed that explanations given to us by certain groups and individuals were final and even questioning them was backward and certainly unscientific.

But I don’t want to talk about Covid. Maybe sometime in the future.

What I want to talk about is the perception of science and science itself.

Of course, this is my and only my view…unless someone wants to share it.

Let’s start with a basic definition.

I will quote from Wikipedia only at the beginning of the article, but everyone is welcome to visit and read the rest of it.

“The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific method for additional detail.) It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; the testability of hypotheses, experimental and the measurement-based statistical testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises.”

Love this definition. Especially the part where it says that our “cognitive assumption can distort how one interprets the observation”.

But what if many and not one is under the spell of cognitive assumption? What if bias is a fundamental byproduct of the world view, and any seemingly contradictory idea is not allowed to penetrate the mind presuming itself as independent and unbiased?

What if scientific observation cannot be objectively interpreted?

What if the peer review system is compromised and those who participate share the world view skewing cognitive powers into cognitive assumptions?

What if people engaged in research, livelihood depend on conforming into narrative?

What if narrative is a self-serving tool to maintain conscience dormant?

What if “science” becomes a “beautiful idea of design without Desinger”?

I will not answer those questions one by one, but instead will present a few examples where Proven scientific observation contradicts so called scientific hypothesis. No number of people or peer review can convince me about something which is proven by using scientific method as impossible.

Let’s start with the entropy.

Again, beginning of the article from Wikipedia:

“Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, sociology, weather science, climate change, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication.”

Everything made out of matter falls apart. From biological forms to single atoms becoming overtime sub-particles of energy.

That is in closed as well as in open systems.

The only scenario where matter becomes more complex is the process of life and due to the life process.

Once the force of life departs from the organism, entropy begins.

Over time, what was once a living organism becomes simple matter and ultimately energy.

I will not shlep you true equations and mathematics, it is not my level.

There are plenty of mathematicians and physicists explaining the issue. Some of them are capable of doing it for the layman as me, where it could be understood and paralleled with empirical observation.

Entropy is what we observe in life, this is what we observe in the laboratory.

Yet, in the galaxy far far away, we are told, something opposite is happening.

Cosmic dust forms the celestial bodies. Molecules spontaneously congregate to form planets, stars and galaxies.

This is how the world has become.

Can it be observed?

Well, certainly we observe that the world exists. Therefore, if it doesn’t exist in its form forever as it is believed for the last few decades again, there must be force in the universe causing the simple to become complex.

What we observe is only the opposite process. That’s right, that’s where the leap of faith is coming into play.

We observe ‘complex’ falling into ‘simple’, yet we are told to accept the idea that somehow ‘simple’ becomes ‘complex’ by a spontaneous process of unknown source and laws.

Convenient. As long as we can say that design designed itself without Designer.

Any other suggestion is a tabu.

Isn’t tabu a religious term though?

Another example:

“Pasteur was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. Under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, his experiment demonstrated that in sterilized and sealed flasks, nothing ever developed; conversely, in sterilized but open flasks, microorganisms could grow.”(Wikipedia)

In other words – abiogenesis is impossible.

Louis Pasteur – Great mind, great scientist, great in saving lives of millions of people using vaccines and medical inventions without which people were dying in young age from multiple diseases.

It was him who discovered methods to save those lives. It happened by using scientific methods.

One of his great achievements was proving behind any shadow of doubt, that life doesn’t generate spontaneously from inorganic matter.

No peer review is needed for this, by now, axiom. Done. No one with a healthy mind would deny this truth. Not because it is a matter of opinion or belief but precisely it is a proven fact of nature.

Yet it is told to us that in our close galaxy, in fact on our planet, life began precisely in the way disproved by Pasteur’s experiments and science since.

Again, science shows one thing, but “scientific hypothesis” tells us something opposite.

And now a story from my favored anti Darwinian mathematician – David Berlinski. But before the story I will quote from another book – “The Origin of Speeches” by Isaac E. Mozeson:

“Any studies considered anti-Darwinian will guarantee no tenure or employment according to the strict code of Academic Freedom.”

To learn more about “academic freedom” please google “David Berlinski”.

Now the promised story by David Berlinski – from “The Deniable Darwin”

“Postscript: On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote IMAGINE THIS STORY BEING told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe. His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irish-man James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote." I raise my eyebrows. Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer. "The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo." Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket. "Asyou know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576." I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed. "Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Ho yo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Un-able to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text hut, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Po;- Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the nineteenth century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined." I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your under-standing, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?" "Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."

I love this story written by a mathematician and told by a famous writer.

No one would believe it is true. No scientific method needed or used. Just plain observation and simple analysis. We KNOW that this story CAN NOT be true.

Yet, mathematically speaking, the DNA of Ameba is millions of times more complex than all of those wonderful works of literature, but we are being told that DNA code wrote itself and by serious of mistakes in process of slow transformation become Darwin and his believers.

O woe to me, man of no faith!

I just can’t.

Is not that I need a Designer in the equation of life. Life is screaming His Name and His love!

 

Now we will talk a little bit about history.

Unlike Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and even Biology, History is as my wife calls it more research than science.

Indeed, the only conclusions based on partial observation which History is, cannot be treated the same way as science per se.

Jewish people are observers of history, preservers of history and significant actors of history.

Our sages received and developed tools of strict preservation of what they received from previous generations. They admit that some of the content was lost in the turbulence of the Jewish history, but this is precisely why in many crucial moments of this history, the Law and its context i.e. history, was preserved in the written form.

Jews used the alphabet earlier than any other nation in the world.

But this again is not what is being said by people who dress themselves in the attires of science.

Comes Gretz and Wellhausen, and with desiring eyes and thirsty ears they are welcomed with every idiocy printed with their names undersigned.

And then, they have thousands of imitators and followers.

Needless to say, most of them possess limited skills in Hebrew language and methodology.

Not to mention ideological bias.

Bias. Why does it all come to bias?

Why in all those subjects there is seemingly one underlying ideology?

Why it seems to be that big part of what is considered to be a science which undeniably enriched humanity as Pasteur himself is responsible for saving and extending lives of millions if not billions of people; why so many scientists spending so much time trying to disprove Jewish history and worldview, or at least weaken it or compromise?

Who decided and when and why, that science must be atheistic?

Like acceptance of the idea of Creation by the Creator would make penicillin or smartphone impossible to be invented.

Science and scientific method were not atheistic from its beginnings in 17^th century, it became so only in the second half of 18 century. This historical fact alone shows that exclusion of Creation from “science” has nothing to do with Science. It was ideological bias rather which caused the ongoing war of “science” against Creation.

But why?

I think I found the answer.

I think it is quite obvious, if you are honest to your heart.

And no, I will not conclude this essay with my own conviction which anyhow may be apparent.

I will leave by giving you freedom of your own analysis.

Jews in Ghetto

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       B-H

A few days ago, on May 16 this year or 25^th of Iyar, or 40^th day of Sfira count, I turned 57. My Hebrew birthday was just a day after my astronomical, i.e. when earth was more or less in the same position on its orbit around the sun when on the day when I was born.

While I was scrolling down the Polish newspaper as I usually do to acquire information possibly from many sources and perspectives, I saw an article commemorating the last day of the Warsaw Ghetto.

There were few pictures from the infamous chronicle of Jurgen Stroop, nazi officer responsible for Ghetto liquidation, as well as a reminder of basic facts about Ghetto itself and uprising by remaining inhabitants of the Ghetto.

Most of the pictures are known, not to say iconic in historiography of the Holocaust and WWII.

Including a picture which I saw many times before, a group of Hassidic Jews standing in the front of the nazi soldiers.

I saw this picture in the books, in press articles and film documentaries, what I didn’t know, or I didn't comprehend was the fact that this picture was made on, or just before May 16 1943.

It struck my entire being. Thoughts about these Yiden were holding on to me longer than day, almost obsessive thoughts.

Hasisdic Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto at the very time of its last days. When the entire population of the initial almost half million Jews congregated or rather gripped in a small part of the city of Warszawa, was gone.

Three hundred thousand of them trough gas chambers and body burning stoves and pits of Treblinka death camp. One of the major branches of nazi death industrial complex.

I think I described my discovery of Holocaust in my book, but since it is unavailable, I will shortly describe it now.

Growing up in seventies Poland was a childhood bliss.

We were not taught or told about the large Jewish population sharing the same land for over a thousand years, probably from the time before Poland joined Europe by accepting Christianity as any official religion in year 966. I was born exactly 1000 years later.

For some half of this time Jews constituted 8 to 10% of the entire Polish population.

Considering that 70 or 75 percent of this population were serfs or de facto slaves, 10 was rather significant. Significant economically and culturally.

We didn’t learn those facts in history or any other lessons. We didn’t know about it at all, not my generation.

WWII was a fresh and traumatic memory for the nation. Almost every family lost someone in the war, or somebody was wounded or enslaved by nazis.

In my personal case, my maternal grandfather was shot in the chest, but the bullet stuck in the thick ID booklet in the pocket. He was showing us the picture of mother Mary which he was carrying in this booklet, with some confused message since he was a believing member of communist party and self-declared atheist.

My paternal grandfather was killed with his two brothers in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

We didn’t know that there was a specific group of people living with us, which experienced the opposite statistic. If one of the members of the family survived the War, it would have been a phenomenon.

If there were more than one member or even siblings or married couple, it was a miracle.

I was 19 years old when I learned about Holocaust.

For a few years I was already a student of the Bible, at the same age I also became a member of the council of my religious denomination, the youngest clergyman in the country.

At the time I knew already that the nation of the Bible was sharing the land with a population considering itself indigenous, Slavic Polls.

I didn’t know how this coexistence ended.

In 1985, French filmmaker Claude Lanzman made a documentary “Shoah”.

His final version was 9 hours long.

Polish state TV disclosed two hours of experts from the film in order to show that the film is anti-Polish for in hours of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, collaborators and heroes, there were some parts of the documentary indicating collaboration of some Polish individuals or groups with German nazis.

The Polish nation is still struggling with this topic, and I will not digress there in this essay.

The whole 9 hours of the film was shown in a few bigger cities for the journalists with clear intention. Since they were not independent journalists publishing in Poland in the papers of political underground, it was expected from them that after seeing the full documentary they would uphold the narrative of hate towards the Polish nation. Hate generated by Jewish influence groups.

I got the ticket and went to see it myself. I was obviously not a journalist, and I don’t remember what trick I used to get this ticket. But after three days of projection in the journalist club, me and then my fiancé, we were only teenagers in the country which got awareness of horrors which happened on this land, horrors unprecedented in the history of the planet.

People smarter and more eloquent than me already wrote why this particular event spikes out from all the bloodshed, killing, suffering and tears of millions of people, annihilated by other creatures seemingly looking like themselves.

Never before, a nation which was at the time the most advanced scientifically, culturally, philosophically, theologically, decided and executed the idea of building a death industry with its accounting, transportation, laboratories and killing devices. Never before human ingenuity was used so efficiently in the process of killing other people.

Most of them Jewish.

For thousands of years being a Jew was a submission to the word of Torah, to the Sinaitic revelation.

The level of observance was different in different times and in different groups of Jews.

But some two hundred years ago, a new ideology began to dominate the thought of European intelligentsia, the ideology of “nation”.

It may be a noble idea to be connected by genes, language and common land perhaps. But this is not what makes our people a nation. If we think that what connects us is blood, culture and perhaps land, it comes up on us the way we think.

Yes, I know, I digressed…

It was a “Shoah” documentary which opened the topic of the Jews in Poland.

For another few years Poland was under communist regime and censorship, but the conversation became more public.

In the few following years Jews were rediscovered as a part of Polish history, and it was not a negative rediscovery.

The younger generation of Polls was more ready to accept part of the guilt of sometimes open collaboration of some people but more often unthreatened inaction of the vast majority. When I was already living in the US, nationalist movement reemerged in some mild and sometimes even extreme forms. Curiously allying itself with the Israeli government and Zionist ideology.

But back then, in the second half of 80thies some books on Jewish topics were printed.

Holocaust was definitely not the issue which directed me towards my few years later decision to become a Jew.

That process began way earlier, and my sole desire was to connect to Supreme One. Relationship by means as it was described and expressed in His Revelation.

But discovering the fact and the magnitude of the Holocaust, especially the fact that it happened in the land of my youth and ancestry, could not be ignored by any intellectually curious and sensitive person.

I read everything on the topic. I read everything on the topic of the Warsaw Ghetto. Warsaw was not my city, but I was familiar with her.

I think the first book on the Ghetto topic was the diary of Henryk Makower, doctor of the Ghetto Jewish Police. After that, every memoir, diary, interview and finally the chronicle of the Ghetto by Jurgen Stroop. The last one was without the pictures or if there were pictures, I don’t remember them.

Most of the material was written by non-practicing Jews including Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Ghetto uprising still living in Poland until his death in 2009.

I studied the maps and timelines. Got all what was available but only a small part of that reality of the Ghetto as it is impossible to grasp the horror of what happened there.

Then came the Ghetto picture album. One picture says more than a thousand words. And there were hundreds of pictures. Many of them made by Nazis themselves, many of them part of antisemitic propaganda shown to German and other populations to justify ghetto enclosures.

The walls always need justification, bridges are self-explanatory.

It was clear to me, it was clear to many professional historians and sociologists, Nazis have a plan and that plan was based on social philosophy – We are all animals – Jews too.

The Jewish claim of an angelic, spiritual component of human beings must be proven wrong.

Jewish claim of communication from and with the Supreme must be shattered.

Darwin provided the initial tools to eliminate the idea of the Supreme Creator and Designer.

From the very beginning it was openly declared that Darwin provided humanity with “beautiful idea of design without the Designer”.

Existence of the Jews was the last obstacle on the path of achieving the route to freedom without guilt and moral obligation. As it is written in “Main Kampf”, Jews caused two scars on humanity – One on the male organ, indicating moral purity, and one in the form of conscience – where underprivileged, week, pure and sick must be helped and not eliminated from existence or at least from the view.

Nazi propaganda was trying to prove just that. We are just a higher form of randomly developed animals, the fittest or stronger prevails and dominates, ultimately eliminating the week. This is the law of nature, and elimination of the parasitic element is the only right thing to do.

Jews are not only animals like us but to prove that we are the supreme race, it is necessary to eliminate them and their ideology from the conscience of mankind.

Numerous propaganda films were made in order to prove nazi ideology right, and Jews deserving their end. One of them was shut in May of 1942. Just two months after the Van Zee conference where nazi establishment decided about Endlosung – the final solution – killing all the Jews.

The Nazi filmmakers came to the Warsaw Ghetto to document the inhumanity of its inhabitants.

I will not go into many details of the film, but the movie was showing people in the Ghetto as immoral and animalistic in their behavior. Some of the takes were staged and some were documenting moral degradation which actually happened within the walls of Ghetto.

If you deny humans breathing, in order to survive that human will do or say anything to gasp some air.

You can rename that torture and call it “enhanced interrogation technique” but it doesn’t change the fact that denying basic instinct of breathing makes person act against rational part of human nature.

Nazis used our second instinct of life, our need for food.

Using a cruel method of denying food for the Ghetto population, they were able to stage horrible scenes for their propaganda film which in any other time Jews would rather deny themselves life than succumb to behavior opposing thousands of years shaped conscience.

Nazis succeeded, or that’s what they thought so.

Other inhabitants of Ghetto were justifying their fall for witnessing horrors of daily survival and death there. Ghetto can indeed undermine if not totally destroy the awareness of being a human or a Jew.

Film was made in May when Gas chambers were already under construction in Treblinka and other places. The transports from Ghetto began on Tisha beAv, 22 July of 1942.

Through the summer some three hundred thousand of Jews were transported to Treblinka.

Adolf Eichmann Y-SH, was responsible for the logistics of transportations.

In their vicious perfidy, Nazis seceded the task of organizing the quotas of people by the Judenrat, Ghetto government.

The Head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow, swallowed a cyanide pill upon learning what was required from him.

His successor was already more collaborative.

In the very first wave of transports, all the “unproductive “element of society were sent to gas chambers. All the sick, week, old, to young to work and what we call “kley Koidesh”

Members of the Yeshivos, faculty and students, rabbis, true leaders of the nation and their wives and children.

If any of them was able to prove that he could be productive or have usable skill, survived a little bit longer, as long as the Third Reich needed him.

A handful of them didn’t register with Judenrat and consequently did not receive food rations.

It was calculated by the Ghetto organizers that food ration was not sufficient for survival, without them the unregistered Jew was entering the realm of impossibility, in some cases for a few years.

By the beginning of Fall of 1942, officially 35000 Jews were still in the Ghetto. They were slave workers of the “shops” manufacturing for the Nazi military.

However, there are estimates that an additional 20 to 25 thousand of Jews were “illegals” in the Ghetto.

They survived another Winter and a few months of Spring.

I’m familiar with the “smuggling economy” during the time when the Ghetto was still inhabited by most of the prisoners. But organizing food for those “illegal’ Jews, when the Ghetto was limited in its territory and almost empty, was nothing less than superhuman effort in order to provide, to share the food with them.

On April 19, the first day of Passover, the Ghetto Uprising began.

I will not analyze or share my thoughts on the fact of the uprising itself as it is out of the scope of what I want to point out in this essay.

I started this writing with the picture, and I will end with the picture.

The same group of the holy Tzadikim, nothing less than Maluchim - angels in human form, showing once more to the forces of evil, that those forces can never uproot the Toira from the people of Toira.

Those who for years hid, preserved who they were in conditions of hell.

Those who at the risk of their own lives, provided those Talmidei Chachamim with sustenance.

There are dark places in human history, there are dark times.

It disturbs my being every time when I think about those places and times.

So much evil…

But the Warsaw Ghetto in a sense is the darkest of them.

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno…these places as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Armenia, Cambodia, Ruanda…the list is endless; those places and times signifies physical murder of humans by other humans.

Ghetto, its dehumanization and demoralization signify something else.

It was attempted to uproot Divine from the human, to reduce angelic Potential to physics or chemistry, surely to biology of what the perpetrators imagined of what human is.

The Nazis in the picture see angels and they are not bowing.

Perhaps it requires first to be at least a human to recognize Divine.

Religious Jews captured by the SS during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The original German caption reads: "Jewish rabbis."

From left to right are Rabbi Lipa Kaplan, Eliyahu Levin (son of Rabbi Hersh Henoch of Bedzin), Mendel Alter (son of Rabbi Nechemya Alter); Yankel Levin (son of Rabbi Mottel Levin of Lodz and grandson of the rabbi of Bedzin), unknown and Rabbi Heschel Rappaport, a Gerer Chassid and mentor to young Chassidim.

Photo Credit

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

 

https://jewishaction.com/holocaust/the-warsaw-ghetto-an-eyewitness-account/

Gorbatchev

                                                                                                                        B-H

Mikhail Gorbachev has many zchusim but there is one more which can be added to the list. If not for my desire to write chesped for him my above essays would still sit in the folder of my computer.

Last time, I think, I wrote chespaidim on political figures, for Vaclav Havel and Kim Ir Sen who departed on the same week.

I have no illusions; I don’t think there is anybody these days waiting for my essays or being curious what Matys Weiser thinks about events. It was maybe the case 10 or so years ago when I was really active, and not only on this blog. Today I still write occasionally but many times it ages unread in the folders of my computer for months or years.

So now I have this strong impulse to deal with a significant period of my life due to the passing of the ex-leader of the Soviet Union, once I opened my blog, there are some more material to be published. And I think those essays are much more important than one which I’m going to share now. Enjoy.

I grew up in communist Poland in 70’s and 80’s.

The world at first was pretty stagnant around me for the first 10 years of my life. Or rather at the age of 4, I was not aware of political events taking place in the Polish dockyards. 41 people were killed, over 1,000 injured in strikes against the government. The Polish government of Party Leader Gomulka collapsed as the result of riots and strikes. 10 years under the First Secretary of Polish United Labor Party (Communists) Edward Gierek began.

I have said many times in my writings that my political awareness awaked in 1976, when I was 10 years old. Another wave of social unrest took place in Poland. I was old enough to understand that the ruling party may be united but not to the benefit of the exploited working class. Just the opposite: Communist elites installed themselves as the owners of means of production, running basically what Prof. Noam Chomsky calls “State Capitalism”.

Then in 1980 Gierek’s government was changed in an unprecedented wave of strikes and as a result of the formation of an independent workers union “Solidarnosc” or Solidarity.

18 months later the Polish army was deployed on Polish streets. A State of War was declared by Communists in Poland against its own population. A year and half, when for the first time in generations people could breathe freedom, was ending with the tanks on the streets of the cities and forcibly entering factories on strike.

The Solidarity opposition was arrested, or a few managed to go to hiding, some of them for years.

I was 15 then but had my share in participating and even organizing some small-scale protests.

Then my spiritual evolution began and few years later my participation in politics ended and interest in it dwindled.

One thing was constant during all those years of my growth – Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin.

It is impossible for someone growing up in that part of Europe under Soviet influence not to remember his bushy eyebrows, slower and slower speeches and multiple microphones which we firmly believed were serving him with oxygen as he barely stood at the podium towards his older years. Of course, his age and deteriorating health were topic of an endless number of jokes, as humor is the strongest defensive weapon for a conquered or controlled population.

He passed away or was murdered at the order of the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who replaced him as the head of the country. It didn’t change much for the rest of inhabitants of 12 time zones from Vladivostok to the Laba River. Andropov was old himself and by taking the position of the leader of the Communist party he preserved the system for another few years between himself and the Stalinist Konstantin Chernenko.

When Chernenko passed away in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as the head of the Communist party in the Soviet Union and as such the de facto head of the country.

He was considered to be a reformist within the Soviet Communist party, but at the time, no one, not even Gorbachev himself, dreamed that reforms would permanently end the Soviet system in just few years.

Because this is what happened just a little bit over a year after beginning of Gorbachev’s tenure:

At 21:02 the evening of 28 April, a 20-second announcement was read in the TV news program Vremya: "There has been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the nuclear reactors was damaged. The effects of the accident are being remedied. Assistance has been provided for any affected people. An investigative commission has been set up.”

At the time, I was serving a 2-year term as a janitor in the military hospital due to the my refusal to be drafted into the army. Working in the pediatric clinic I was preparing a mixture of berry juice and iodine to prevent the possible development of cancer as our territory was also affected by the nuclear cloud.

I don’t know what Tversky’s did here or in heaven if anything, but cracks had opened in one of the most restrictive empires in the history of the mankind, cracks which began to crumble in Polish stockyard but were patched by brute force in 1981 and 82 with the tanks on the streets., Those patches could not survive the nuclear explosion in the town of Chernobyl.

Communists were still trying to hide the real size of the catastrophe but soon the era of Glasnost, openness, began as the reformist Gorbachev understood that not this and not anything after the Chernobyl fallout could be hidden anymore.

Perestroika, reconstruction, was another Russian word heard in the background of the events of Chernobyl.

What supposed to be little more than cosmetic changes in the Soviet system, because of Chernobyl, Glasnost, and another wave of strikes in Poland, Gorbachev initiated what ended in total collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet system.

In spring of 1988 workers in Poland strike again. They issued their usual call for social democratic changes with an additional demand to release the opposition members from jail.

In early summer, Polish Communists reached out to some opposition leaders in the country through the mediation of the Catholic Church,

In the fall of the same year, the Round Table was convened and negotiations ended in early spring of the following year with a partial return to Democracy and a free market economy.

This time neither the Polish Opposition nor the Polish Communists were afraid of “brotherly” intervention from “beloved” nation in the East.

On 4^th of June 1989 the first partially free election took place in the Communist block with the result of filling all allowed spots in Polish parliament by the members of Solidarity movement.

Communists understood that they had no legitimacy representing the population not only of Poland but of other countries of the Soviet bloc, including the Soviet Union itself.

Gorbachev, who from reforms turned to supervisor of the dismantling an empire guilty of the taking of tens of millions of human lives.

The day of the Polish election was also the day when the Communist party of China decided to smash protesters in Tiananmen square, many of them burned alive with flame throwers.

Would Gorbachev choose the Chinese path of defending the system?

In the past Communist regimes didn’t hesitate to invade countries or even carpet bomb their own villages for refusing to give up their land to the Communists. The starvation of millions of Ukrainians was within the pattern of their understanding of the Marxist “dictature of the Proletariat”.

But he didn’t.

He managed to release country by country and republic by republic to take their own path for the future.

And it wasn’t only because of the weakness of the crumbling economy. Empires in such situations are worse, more dangerous for their populations than those disassembling in a peaceful manner. In fact, I can’t really recall any instance of an Empire being dismantled without the cost of significant loss of population in civil wars, independence wars or the collapse of the administration.

Living as young man under the Communist system, as all citizens of my country, we didn’t expect the system to end in our lifetime, much less almost without the spill of human blood in “Communist proportions”.

But it ended.

Mikhail Gorbachev is hated by many Russians. We are witnessing an attempt to restore at least partially the Russian empire. But for all the nations previously conquered and controlled by the Tzar or the First Secretary of the Party, Gorbachev will remain a hero.

Hashem should bring more rulers as him in the path to complete Geula leading to the days of Mashiych Tzidkayni.