Internal Investigation Reveals Massive Child Sex Abuse Cover-Up at the BBC

 via The AntiMedia

United Kingdom — Few will be surprised at more allegations of the U.K. establishment exonerating itself for turning a blind eye to sexual abuse cases. New reports have revealed that serious failings at the BBC allowed TV presenters Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall to sexually abuse almost 100 people undetected for decades.

After results emerged from an allegedly impartial investigation commissioned by the BBC, accusations of a cover-up are rife together with claims that, once again, the establishment has investigated and protected itself.

In October 2012, revelations that well-known TV personality and charity fundraiser, Sir James Savile, who died in 2011, was a prolific sex offender shook Britain. Some of Savile’s sex crimes were said to have taken place in connection with his work for the BBC.

Another TV presenter, Stuart Hall, was jailed in 2013 after admitting to indecently assaulting 13 girls — one as young as nine — between 1967 and 1985. In a foul slap in the face to his victims, the sexual predator was released from prison in December after serving just half of his sentence.

Savile’s youngest victim was eight years old

Results of the 1,000-page, Dame Janet Smith Review have now been published in full on the BBC‘s website. In what is being called the most expensive whitewash ever, the £6.5 million investigation into both men’s sexual misconduct also examined the culture and practices within the BBC during the Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall years.

Focusing on the departments they worked in during the 1970s and 1980s, the Review has contacted over 800 people. It claims to have interviewed over 380 witnesses in the Savile investigation and 100 in the Hall investigation. Over 70 victims of Savile were identified — including eight who were raped — as well as 21 victims of Hall.

Published on Thursday, the Review accuses BBC staff of missing opportunities to stop Savile dating back to the late 1960s. Dame Smith blamed a culture of fear for preventing allegations from coming to light, and said staff were reluctant to speak to managers in a culture she referred to as “deeply deferential.”

The Review claims that although BBC employees were aware of sexual assault complaints against the late Jimmy Savile, they did nothing to stop him. Despite the findings, the BBC has been cleared of responsibility after the former court judge found no evidence that senior managers “ever found out about any specific complaint relating to Mr. Savile’s inappropriate sexual conduct.”

On Thursday, presenter Tony Blackburn became the latest casualty of the cover-up and was fired for allegedly failing to fully cooperate with the Savile inquiry. According to the BBC, Blackburn was sacked because he “fell short” of the standards expected of someone providing evidence to a BBC inquiry.

While some are calling Blackburn a scapegoat and a smokescreen, the radio DJ accused the BBC of hanging him out to dry:

“Given Dame Janet Smith’s concerns of a culture of fear in coming forward at the BBC, the fact that I have been scapegoated for giving my honest account and best recollections of those events 45 years ago — which I felt was a whitewash — what whistleblower at the BBC would ever come forward when they see the way they have hung me out to dry.

Sadly today’s news agenda should have been about the survivors of abuse carried out within the BBC but, by sacking me, they have managed to take the focus off those who have suffered so much.”

Watermusic

Carl Jung on being "Alone."

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you; therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you. The touchstone is being alone with oneself. This is the way. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 330.

Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.

To the extent that he does live in reality the whole range of his particular life, the individual is . . . an alchemical retort, in which the elements present in the collective are melted down and refashioned to form a new synthesis, which is then offered to the collective. But the predigestion of evil which he carried out as part of the process of assimilating his shadow makes him, at the same time, an agent for the immunization of the collective. An individual's shadow is invariably bound up with the collective shadow of his group, and as he digests his own evil, a fragment of the collective evil is invariably co-digested at the same time. ~Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, p. 130.

The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one's] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 32.

[The philosophers] called their stone animate because, at the final operations, by virtue of the power of this most noble fiery mystery, a dark red liquid, like blood, sweats out drop by drop from their material and their vessel. And for this reason they have prophesied that in the last days a most pure [or genuine] man, through whom the world will be freed, will come to earth and will sweat bloody drops of a rosy or red hue, whereby the world will be redeemed from its Fall. In like manner, too, the blood of their stone will free the leprous metals a ~and also men from their diseases. . . . and that is the reason why the stone is called animate.

For in the blood of this stone is hidden its soul. . . . For a like reason they have called it their microcosm, because it contains the similitude of all things of this word, and therefore again they say that it is animate, as Plato calls the macrocosm animate. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 381.

Since the stone represents the homo totus, it is only logical for Dorn to speak of the "putissimus homo" [most true man] when discussing the arcane substance and its bloody sweat, for this is what it is all about. He is the arcanum, and the stone and its parallel or prefiguration is Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. This "most pure" or "most true'' man must be no other than what he is, just as "argentum putum" is unalloyed silver; he must be entirely man, a man who knows and possesses everything human and is not adulterated by any influence or admixture from without. This man will appear on earth only "in the last days." He cannot be Christ, for Christ by his blood has already redeemed the world from the consequences of the Fall. . . . On no account is it a question here of a future Christ and salvator microcosmi, but rather of the alchemical servator cosmi (preserver of the cosmos), representing the still unconscious idea of the whole and complete man, who shall bring about what the sacrificial death of Christ has obviously left unfinished, namely the deliverance of the world from evil. Like Christ he will sweat a redeeming blood, but . . . it is "rose-colored"; not natural or ordinary blood, but symbolic blood, a psychic substance, the manifestation of a certain kind of Eros which unifies the individual as well as the multitude in the sign of the rose and makes them whole. ~Gerhard Dorn, Quoted in Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 390.

As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. I cannot presume to pass judgment on his final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion-be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion-ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12: Page 32.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.

What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.

Existentialist Psychologist Viktor Frankl Explains How to Find Meaning in Life, No Matter What Challenges You Face

Free will often seems like nothing more than a cruel illusion. We don’t get to choose the times, places, and circumstances of our birth, nor do we have much control over the state of our states, regions, or nations. Even the few who can design conditions such that they are always secure and comfortable find themselves unavoidably subject to what Buddhists call the “divine messengers” of sickness, aging, and death. Biology may not be destiny, but it is a force more powerful than many of our best intentions. And though most of us in the West have the privilege of living far away from war zones, millions across the world face extremities we can only imagine, and to which we are not immune by any stretch

Among all of the psychologists, philosophers, and religious figures who have wrestled with these universal truths about the human condition, perhaps none has been put to the test quite like neurologist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, but lost his mother, father, brother, and first wife to the camps. While imprisoned, he faced what he described as “an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself.” After his camp was liberated in 1945, Frankl published an extraordinary book about his experiences: Man’s Search for Meaning, “a strangely hopeful book,” writes Matthew Scully at First Things, “still a staple on the self-help shelves” though it is “inescapably a book about death.” The book has seen dozens of editions in dozens of languages and ranks 9th on a list of most influential books.

Frankl’s thesis echoes those of many sages, from Buddhists to Stoics to his 20th century Existentialist contemporaries: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Not only did he find hope and meaning in the midst of terrible suffering, but after his unimaginable loss, he “remarried, wrote another twenty-five books, founded a school of psychotherapy, built an institute bearing his name in Vienna,” and generally lived a long, happy life. How? The interview above will give you some idea. Frankl maintains that we always have some freedom of choice, “in spite of the worst conditions,” and therefore always have the ability to seek for meaning. “People are free,” says Frankl, no matter their level of oppression, and are responsible “for making someone or something out of themselves.”

Frankl’s primary achievement as a psychotherapist was to found the school of “logotherapy,” a successor to Freudian psychoanalysis and Adlerian individual psychology. Drawing on Existentialist philosophy (Frankl’s book was published in Germany with the alternate title From Concentration Camp to Existentialism)—but turning away from an obsession with the Absurd—his approach, writes his institute, “is based on three philosophical and psychological concepts… Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.”

You can hear how Frankl works these principles into his philosophy in the fascinating interview, as well as in the short clip above from an earlier lecture, in which he rails against a crude and ultimately unfulfilling form of meaning-making: the pursuit of wealth. Even us materialistic Americans, renowned for our greed, Frankl notes with good humor, respond to surveys in overwhelming numbers saying our greatest desire is to find meaning and purpose in life. Like no other secular voice, Frankl was confident that we could do so, in spite of life’s seeming chaos, through—as he explains above—a kind of idealism that brings us closer to reality.