Cultural Glimpse

Last week investigative journalist and author of twelve books Gerald Posner visited the Troy Public Library. I arrived early to the event and sat in the front row. A beautiful woman with exquisite jewelry sat nearby. The man behind me was asking her questions and I soon discovered her name is Trisha, and she was the author’s wife.

With a British accent, she talked about how she and her husband met thirty five years ago. She’s from England, he’s from San Francisco, and they met on a blind date in New York. He started out as an attorney, she was in fashion, he’s Catholic, she’s Jewish, but they work as a team. She helps do research for her husband’s books.

Posner’s work has received much controversy, and at one point, even death threats.

“Once someone sent us a dead fish and another time, a rat’s tail in the mail,” said Trisha. “I was very surprised. I never realized that at this day and age, this type of mentality exists.”

She adds that this has never, and never will, stop them from writing what intrigues them.

Posner’s first book, co-written with British journalist John Ware and published in 1986, was the biography of Mengele: The Complete Story. Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele’s particular obsession). After the war, he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life. Posner and Ware obtained exclusive access to 5,000 pages of Joseph Mengele’s diaries and personal papers for their book.

Another one of Posner’s books is Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk about Themselves and Their Fathers, which includes in-depth interviews with a dozen children of top Nazi officials.

Why America Slept exposes the frequent mistakes made by law enforcement and government agencies, and demonstrates how the failures to prevent 9/11 were tragically not an exception but typical.

In Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Secret Saudi-U.S. Connection, Posner provides an account of the “close” business and personal relationship between the House of Saud and the U.S. government, including discussions of “dirty bomb” technology and the financial and political maneuvering surrounding 9/11. Posner also asserts that the Saudis have built an elaborate doomsday scenario around their oil fields. The Saudis have denied this, and according to Posner, he and his wife, Trisha, have been banned from entering Saudi Arabia as a result of this book.

Posner’s most recent book is God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican is a 200 year history of Vatican finances and the Vatican Bank.

“For 1800 years, these were Pope Kings who had their own empire and lived a lavish lifestyle,” said Posner. “They lost it in the late 1800s and they got it back by Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, who gave them sovereignty in 1929. This changed everything.”

By World War II, the church created the Vatican Bank that operated “in the dark, in total secrecy.”

Posner explained how during this time, the Nazis collected a tax for the Vatican that amounted to 100 million dollars a year.

“Part of the silence from the Pope in World War II was financial,” he said.

In a review written in the Washington Post by Beth Kingsley, she states:

“Church leaders’ priorities were often questionable. Reluctant to publicly address the Holocaust, they did not hesitate to protest reports of nudism being practiced by the Germans. Prostitution worried them more than did death camps.”

This reminded me of the same-sex marriage laws that the world is focusing and refocusing on right now as hundreds of thousands of peoples are destroyed by the war in the Middle East that we have the power to put an end to.

Some people have called God’s Bankers anti-Catholic, but Posner says, “Now wait a minute, I’m Catholic. If you’re a devout Catholic it should not mean you cannot look at all sides of that topic. You can’t leave out the bad news with the good news. I can’t write about Germany and leave the Holocaust out. I can’t write about Henry VIII without writing about him having chopped his wife’s head off.”

It seems that anyone who is smart enough to want to question and research a topic, which we’re all encouraged to do since a very young age, is automatically called “anti this” and “anti that”.

“This book is not about God and it’s not about religion,” he said. “You can learn from it so it can be avoided in the future.”

That’s exactly what truth is all about, and why men and women risk their lives to defend the United States or immigrate to this country. The practice of free speech is a gift from God, and in realizing its importance, this country made it a First Amendment. Incredible amount of information is easily and readily available to us, yet most people will not bother investing their time in such matters, even though that’s one of the greatest ways to pay tribute to our veterans.