Three Times Art Changed The Course of World History
THE LIFE THAT I HAVE — Leo Marks
The son of an antiquarian bookseller, Leo Marks was the cult screenwriter whose controversial movies paved the foundation for the modern day slasher film.
But during the war Leo Marks put a boyhood passion for cryptography into practice, devising codes for resistance movements to pass messages in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Before Marks got involved, resistance fighters often used famous poems as the keys for breaking transposition cyphers. This worked because the poems were easy for fighters to memorize, but the system had a massive defect.
If a poem was published, the enemy had access to it too… especially if it was well known. If the Nazis got their hands on an encrypted message, they just had to figure out which poem was being used and the code could be cracked.
To get around this Marks started to write his own poems. The poems had to be memorized flawlessly by the members of the resistance, or else they the coded messages they were the key to could not be deciphered.
The most famous of Leo Marks’ poem codes is ‘The Life That I Have’. It was composed on Christmas Eve 1943, originally in memory of Marks’ girlfriend Ruth who had died in a plane crash not long before.
In his autobiography Marks writes that at the time the poem was “a message to her [Ruth] which I’d failed to deliver when I’d had the chance”.
But the work took on new significance a year later, when it was given to resistance hero Violette Szabo.
According to Marks, Szabo was having trouble using her original choice of key — a variation on a French nursery rhyme — when he assigned the new poem to her without revealing himself to be its author.
In the 1958 movie based on Szabo’s heroic exploits and eventual execution at the hands of the Nazi authorities, the poem is attributed to Szabo’s husband.
The whole story of the code poems, the work of the Special Operations Executive and Leo Marks’ work in cryptography only came out long after the war was ended.
This deceptively simple poem played its small part in liberating Europe from Nazi aggression.
During the war it carried messages to the resistance fighters, who worked for liberation behind enemy lines. Now it encodes within it the memory of their sacrifice, bravery and hope for humanity in the face of atrocity.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
In the words of Brett Easton Ellis “Sometimes It Gets Worse”. This strange little book certainly did change the world, but not for the better.
First published in Russia in 1903, it went through multiple editions and was translated in many languages in the first years of the 20th century.
Founder of the Ford Motor Company, industrialist Henry Ford, was so impressed by the work he paid for half a million copies to be printed, which he distributed at his own expense.
In the 1930s it was used by German schoolteachers to teach students the justifications for Nazi anti-Semitism.
But this notorious forgery has a history more murky and complex that the conspiracy it claims to expose.
The Protocols are supposedly the record of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders, at which their plans for world domination through manipulation of the global financial systems are laid out. Strangely for a secret meeting, it was well minuted… presumably by an evil admin sent by a temping agency specializing in staffing for shadowy cabals.
