“The Oz Factors” is a book which reveals the 12 common denominators of civilization that prevent mankind for discovering workable solutions to the problems of life. The Oz Factors was written by Lawrence R. Spencer and published in 1999.
Our humanity has long since been exceeded by the power of the wicked witches of science and government to destroy all life with nuclear weapons, alter our DNA and control our minds with psychotropic drugs and our lives with media lies.
Our thoughts and conjectures about life and the universe are often based on assumptions, unproven theories, hearsay, rumors and misinformation. Decisions we make in life may be based on ancient attitudes and archaic practices.
There are 12 common denominators that prevent observation, understanding, and workable solutions to problems of existence. How do each of these ‘Oz Factors’ influence our history, science, philosophy, our lives and our future?
We can chose our own Yellow Brick Road. We can pull back the curtain of rhetoric and dogma. We can build a better Emerald City for ourselves and our children.
“On the other side of reality is your own imagination, your personal perceptions, viewpoints, dreams, hopes, desires, and creations, which comprise Your Own Universe…. YOU.”
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An Excerpt from Chapter 5 of the book “THE OZ FACTORS” by Lawrence R. Spencer
THE LOGIC OF FLYING MONKEYS
“Silence, whippersnapper! The beneficent Oz has every intention of granting your requests. But first you must prove yourselves worthy by performing a very small task. Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West!”–The Great and Powerful Oz in ‘The Wizard of Oz’
“But if we do that, we’ll have to kill her to get it … “–The Tin Man
“Bring me her broomstick and I’ll grant your requests! Now, go!”–The Great and Powerful Oz
“But what if she kills us first?”–The Lion
“I said GO!”–The Great and Powerful Oz
A–REMEMBER THE RUBY SLIPPERS!
The admonition Glinda gives to Dorothy about the Ruby Slippers is worth remembering: “Remember, never let those Ruby slippers off your feet for a moment, or you’ll be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch of the West.”
Wicked Witches are an obvious source of danger, but how about the “great and powerful” leaders who are supposed to guide and protect us? How often have such men proven to be good leaders? What kind of “Ruby Slippers” do we have in real life to protect ourselves from the Great and Powerful Oz?
Dorothy and her friends, like most of the people of planet Earth, wish there were an Emerald City with a wise and wonderful wizard to care for and protect them behind the safe and secure walls where everyone enjoys opulent prosperity and lives happily ever after.
As they run across the poppy field toward the Emerald City, a chorus of angelic voices sings of the promise of a utopian life beyond the glistening green gates:
“You’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night. Step into the sun, step into the light. Keep straight ahead for the most glorious rays on the face of the Earth or the stars. Hold on to your breath, hold on to your heart, hold on to your hope. March up to the gate and let it open … ”
If these promises were true, the Emerald City would be Utopia and its leader might be called a “benevolent dictator”. What’s so great about a benevolent dictator?
A political leader or god, theoretically, is supposed to be a wise, powerful and caring father figure with no vested interest other than to protect and propagate the highest, most survival interests of the people under his care. This leader’s job would minimally include:
1/ Defense of the people against enemy attacks with minimal destruction to their homeland.
2/ Justice, fairly administered.
3/ Order maintained throughout the land.
4/ Prosperity, longevity and peace as the routine state of affairs.
5/ Natural resources managed to benefit the greatest good for the greatest number of beings, which would include ALL life forms.
6/ Crime punished and production rewarded.
With such a ruler, a sparkling, majestic, Emerald City full of happy, productive beings, who really could sing, “that’s how we laugh the day away in the merry old Land of Oz,” might actually be possible.
However, the Wizard of Oz is not a benevolent dictator after all. As we finally learn at the end of the movie, the closest thing to a benevolent dictator in the Land of Oz is Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, who is a tough defender of the Munchkins against the evil antics of the Wicked Witch sisters.
Glinda is what every Earthling could ever hope for in a leader. She is impervious to attack. She handles the threats against Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West with a curt, “Oh, rubbish! You have no power here! Be gone, before someone drops a house on you, too!” And, she saves Dorothy from the inept balloon bumbling of the Wizard of Oz who betrays his promise to get her safely back to Kansas.
Glinda, the ever-watchful guardian, is always there when there is trouble, floating in and out in her flying bubble, breaking the evil spells of the Wicked Witch with an impromptu snowstorm.
Glinda is always cheerful, never has a hair out of place and seems to have a workable solution for every problem.
In the end, it is Glinda who finally guides Dorothy back to Kansas with just the right balance of insightful prompting, allowing Dorothy to use her own ability to create her own universe. In short, Glinda is the perfect leader.
However, much to our dismay and disappointment, the political scam of Professor Marvel, who masquerades as a “Wizard” in Oz, is much more typical of the kind of devious and incompetent rulers we have on Earth.
B–GREEN-COLORED GLASSES MAKE THE POWERFUL LOOK GREAT
“I am Oz, the great and powerful! Who are you?”–The Wizard in ‘The Wizard of Oz’
“If you please, I am Dorothy, the small and meek.”–Dorothy
“SILENCE!”–The Wizard
In the original book by L Frank Baum, ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’, the Wizard created the illusion of Emerald City with a stupid trick–he simply gave all the native inhabitants a pair of glasses with green-colored lenses! One would think that the citizens of this Emerald City would laugh at such an absurd control tactic and just throw the bum out. After all, they were getting along quite well before the Wizard ever showed up!
The sad situation in the real world, is that so many people voluntarily wear green-colored glasses and agree that everything they see is rosy!
It could be said that we create the government we get.
The history of Earth is littered with the ruins of civilizations that never achieved anywhere near a Utopian existence and were devastated for want of benevolent leaders like Glinda. There have certainly been enough dictators, but most of them have been nothing more than self-serving, thieving, war-mongering maniacs.
The most glorified and venerated leaders in history are often those who have been the least benevolent and the most destructive to life, property and sanity.
As with all politicians, Dorothy and her traveling buddies find out too late that the Wizard has been grossly misrepresented as a trustworthy leader. He can’t deliver on the promises he makes, so in order to save himself from political scandal he sends Dorothy off to do battle with the enemies of the Emerald City: the Wicked Witch and her Flying Monkey minions. He puts up a clever facade of political slogans, threats, rhetoric, costumes and technical trickery to cover his own cowardice and incompetence. He even keeps his balloon hidden nearby so he can make a quick getaway when the Wicked Witch shows up. He’s just another bombastic, political, side-show huckster from Kansas looking for a free ride on the backs of the citizens of Emerald City. He behaves in much the same way as many Earth politicians and militarists who, by birth, bribery or back-stabbing, have gained positions of power throughout our less than glorious history.
Why does it take a dog like Toto to pull back the all-too-obvious curtain of pretense behind which political and military leaders hide?
Being a dog, Toto can smell the cowardly Wizard behind the curtain. But more importantly, he is free of the vested interests that make humans vulnerable to politicians.
The same old, timeworn Yellow Brick Road has been trod by nearly every “leader” in the battered history of planet Earth. Taxation, slavery, “voluntary donations” and other forms of legalized theft have been the stock in trade of politicians and priests throughout the ages. Of course, all of this financial coercion is made possible through the use, or threat, of military force.
What keeps humankind from banding together to overthrow, or to just simply ignore, the perpetual scam of politics?
Perhaps, like the “lobster syndrome”, the condition does not improve because people are too busy dragging each other down into the boiling caldron of economic necessity. They do not have enough time or attention to notice that they are all about to be cooked alive and eaten up by the politicians who got them into the hot water in the first place! (Not to mention the bankers who own the fuel, the stove, the cooking pots and the water!)
Thousands of years of such insanity has convinced us that politics and military coercion are the normal way of life. Consequently, Homo sapiens logic has long dictated that the use of force is the only guarantee of survival. Brawn is better than brains! Wisdom is for wimps! Might makes right!
The use of force, however, usually has two nasty side effects, among others: death and destruction.
1/ SEEING REASON
“Oh, please give me back my dog!”–Dorothy
“Certainly–certainly–when you give me those slippers.”–The Wicked Witch
“But the Good Witch of the North told me not to.”–Dorothy
“Very well. Throw that basket in the river and drown him.”–The Wicked Witch
“No! No! No! Here, you can have your old slippers–but give me Toto!”–Dorothy
“That’s a good little girl. I knew you’d see reason!”–The Wicked Witch in ‘The Wizard of Oz’
The Logic of Force mandates that “seeing reason” is the same as “knowing what’s good for you”. When one relies on the use of force, rather than wisdom, quantity is more important than quality. Bigger is Better. Big Business. Big Guns. Big Tits. Big Box Office. The physical universe is viewed as something to be conquered by force. The only god worth worshipping is gold. The only goal worth achieving is the accumulation of gold, strength and power. The Yellow Brick Road, we are indoctrinated to believe from birth, is paved with gold. Yet, when we die, we can’t take it with us.
Supposedly, the god or gods in the afterlife do not judge you by how much gold you have. However, the priests of Earth, who want you to think that they intercede with the god(s) on your behalf, will judge you according to how much of your gold you give to them!
The heroes of civilization, at least in the eyes of historians, are the men who most exemplify the “logic of force”.
The traditional role of the politicians of Earth is exemplified by the song the Cowardly Lion sings: “If I were King of the Forest, not queen, not duke, not prince, my regal robes of the forest would be satin: not cotton, not chintz. I’d command each thing, be it fish or fowl, with a woof and a woof, and a royal growl. As I click my heels all the trees would kneel and the mountains bow and the bulls cow-tow and the sparrow would take wing. If I, if I, were King. Each rabbit would show respect to me, the chipmunks genuflect to me. Then my tail would lash, I would show compash for every underling! If I, if I were King, just King.”
Regal robes, indeed! The Lion won’t settle for fabric of the peasantry. He doesn’t want cotton or chintz–he wants satin! And he wants red velvet carpeting rolled out in front of him and a golden crown placed on his head. And of course, a jewel-studded scepter! But, most of all, he wants homage and subjugation from his underlings.
It’s a canned formula from one historical period to the next. Earth is strewn with the ruins of artfully sculpted architectural monuments, statuary and tombs that have been built and dedicated by some self-aggrandizing warrior-politician. Politicians or warrior-kings enlist the aid of the best artists, poets, architects, songwriters and performers that taxes and plunder can buy to spell out G-L-O-R-Y for themselves.
Politicians convince people to buy propaganda campaigns for self-serving vested interests using aesthetics to cover up the grim, dismal truth: they are sending the peasants off to kill and steal from each other so they (the politicians) can make a profit for themselves from the plunder. Just like the Wizard of Oz sending Dorothy on a quest to bring back the broomstick of the Wicked Witch. He didn’t have the guts to go and get it himself!
Like Professor Marvel posing as the Great and Powerful Oz, many of the most famous leaders in history hid themselves behind a curtain of aesthetic lies. When Toto pulls back the curtain, what kind of man hides behind the illusion?”
(Ancient Mongolian Proverb: Resistance and Immortality are futile!)
“I can cause accidents, too! — The Wicked Witch of the West in ‘The Wizard of Oz’
In 1216 AD, Mohammed II was the Sultan (king) of the opulent city of Samarkand which ruled the trade routes to the Far East from Russia and Europe. Samarkand was about 375 miles southeast of the Aral Sea. This wealthy, culturally sophisticated metropolis, surrounded by canals and decorated throughout with fountains and shade trees, housed more than 500,000 citizens. Within the city walls every house had a garden. Factories wove silver lame, silk and cotton cloth. Outside the city, farmers cultivated sprawling fields. They exported melons encased in lead boxes packed with snow.
Mohammed lived amid the splendor of his treasures and palace harem. His Royal Highness rode with his courtiers on hunting excursions dressed in cloth made of gold. Tame cheetahs clung to the hand-crafted saddles behind him. Such opulence was paramount to that of any Earthly civilization.
A brief treaty was maintained between the Sultan and the distant Mongolian Empire which lasted several years. The truce had been originated by messengers from the Khan, ruler of the Mongol hordes, who offered so many gold ingots and nuggets as a gift to establish trade relations that even Mohammed II was impressed. Along with the gold, the Mongol messengers delivered a letter inscribed with a seal in which Ghengis Kahn proclaimed himself, “God in heaven, the Kah Khan, the power of God on Earth. The Seal of the Emperor of Mankind”.
Within a few years, the flame of the Khan’s lust for westerly conquest burned the fabric of the treaty. Forewarned, the citizens of Samarkand had been expected to withstand a siege against the invading horde for as long as an entire year. Yet, they became terrified by rumors from neighboring cities which had seen the Mongolian hordes overwhelm the larger army of Mohammed II. The destruction of the Sultan’s armies served as a warning to others. As a result, the citizens of Samarkand surrendered the glorious city to the Mongol troops after only five days.
Such victories in war were business as usual for the Khan. To Ghengis Khan, the life-long training his army of penniless, nomad horseback sheepherders, was designed to teach his warriors the essential concepts of battle. For the Kahn, a successful army had to be able to maintain all the principles of military science that the Mongol army exemplified:
1/ planned objectives
2/ offensive position
3/ unity of command
4/ capacity to concentrate force
5/ ability to maneuver
6/ economy of force
7/ element of surprise
8/ security within the ranks
9/ strategic retreat
10/ tactical simplicity.
One of the Khan’s favored training exercises for his army was called the “Great Hunt”. The exercise started at the beginning of winter and lasted three months. Flags were set to mark the assembly points for each tumen (a division of 10,000 soldiers) along a starting line 80 miles wide. Several hundred miles ahead of that line, another flag was placed to mark the finish line. At a signal from the Khan the entire line advanced forward on the sturdy backs of their small, but infamous ponies, herding all wild game before them. These same ponies, broken and trained from birth to serve the hunter, would carry the Mongol tribes across the known world and back again.
As weeks passed the advancing army, arrayed in full battle armament, pressed a growing throng of wild animals ahead of themselves. As the army advanced toward the finishing flag, the outer wings of the force rode ahead more quickly and formed a circle, surrounding thousands of animals and predatory beasts alike within the arena of horsemen. The commanding officer of the army rode behind, giving orders and directions to the hunters, using the same chain of command, communications signals and military strategy they would use later against human enemies in battle.
Throughout the hunt it was forbidden to kill any animal. Both a soldier and his superior officer were severely punished if even one deer, boar, rabbit, pheasant, lion and tiger and bear (oh my!) were allowed to escape from the ring of equestrian warriors.
The precision communication skills and unity of command required to carry out the cooperative action of tens of thousands of cavalry, spread across such great distances, using only flags by day and torches by night, depended on the skill and stamina of each individual soldier/hunter. In order to maintain the constant vigil required to prevent the escape of any single animal from the circle, half the army slept, fully clothed and ready for action, while the rest kept watch by campfire light.
The Great Hunt concluded with the Khan himself entering the manmade arena to make his choice and be the first to kill one of the animals. After this, the officers and soldiers showed off their skill with weapons in personal combat against the entrapped animals. Some men fought singled-handedly against a desperate pack of wolves with only a dagger.
During the march, as in battle, each soldier was armed with a composite bow made of bone and wood. These bows were more powerful than any other in the world, and were used to shoot an arsenal of arrows specially tipped for every purpose: long range, short range, three-foot armor piercing, whistling signal arrow, incendiary and grenade tipped arrows. Each soldier could shoot accurately and reload while standing in the saddle stirrups on his horse at full gallop.
On the march, during wartime, each soldier led his own herd of three remounts. He could ride at speed for days at a time, eating in the saddle and if need be, pause briefly to slit the leg of his weakest horse, drinking its blood for nourishment. According to the writings of Marco Polo, an Italian traveler who lived in the camp of the Khan in Mongolia for many years, messengers would often ride between 200 and 300 miles a day!
The soldier, raised in a land of eternal harshness (104 degrees F in summer and minus 40 F degrees in winter) had no vested interest other than to obey, without question, the orders of his superior officer.
This sort of harsh training, coordinated action and individual skill, combined with superior weapons, was the raw material from which the Khan crafted one of the most unprecedented and fiercest armies in history. His ruthless genius for military organization and strategy remains unparalleled.
These nomads never developed technology or produced any manufactured good or mined any minerals. They depended utterly upon murder and theft from settled societies for swords, armor, silk, gold and silver.
When the armies of Ghengis Khan were directed toward the conquest of Europe, they faced nearly insurmountable barriers to their ambition: scorching deserts, rivers, frozen mountains, thousands of miles of barren plains, heavily fortified city walls and greatly superior numbers of enemy soldiers.
Yet the local European mercenary armies, who gave themselves important sounding names, like Teutonic Knights, Knights Templar and Hospitallers–the flower of European military power–were overwhelmed in every single engagement by the smaller Mongol forces who out-fought, out-maneuvered and out-thought the disorganized and undisciplined Europeans.
The rampant superstition of the Christian European culture compounded the catastrophic conquest, as the hordes swept through Russia and Europe like a brilliantly planned and executed swarm of flying monkeys. Rumors spread of diabolical atrocities committed by inhuman monstrosities–creatures with the head of a horse, possessing supernatural power–that devoured their victims.
In fact, the carnage was horrific, but only the population of those cities who actively resisted, were killed. On average, those who did not resist were spared and for the most part mercy was given to selected groups, such as women, who were set aside to be raped before they were sent into slavery. Craftsmen, merchants, scribes, artisans, clerics, administrators and selected officers were sent back to the Mongol homeland and put to work. The Mongol had no use for farmers, whom they considered to be less valuable than horses. Yet, with uncharacteristic benevolence, the Mongols were tolerant of the religious practices of the vanquished.
For those who resisted him, Ghengis Khan had a simple, two-part philosophy. The first part concerned the joy of conquest. He said, “The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”
He expressed the second part of his philosophy while preaching to the doomed citizens of Bukhara from the walls of the city shortly before they, and the city itself, were slashed and burned from the face of the Earth by his soldiers. The Khan informed them that they themselves were responsible for the mass extinction they were about to suffer, saying, “I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, He would not have sent a punishment like me.”
The relatively few citizens who were not slain were used as human shields against the arrows of the enemy marching ahead of his army.
In towns that resisted conquest, every man, women, child and domestic animal was slaughtered. The heads of their victims were sometimes stacked in three pyramids: a pile each for men, women and children. These mountains of skulls served as a gruesomely effective warning to would-be dissidents.
Some towns were disassembled stone by stone and the ground laced with salt so as to never bear crops again.
The overwhelming stench of decaying dead bodies within such vanquished towns often drove the Mongols away from their encampments outside the walls.
In spite of their grim terror tactics, the hordes of the Khan usually preferred not to slaughter the innocent and routinely granted mercy to those cities that surrendered. Apparently a very large percentage of the cities approached by the hordes chose to surrender without the slightest resistance. Clever thinking!
Chroniclers of the age variously estimated the total slaughter of Europeans by the Mongols at no less than 1,600,000 and possibly as many as 2,400,000. In the destruction of the region of Nishapur alone, the death toll is supposed to have reached 1,747,000. No one knows for sure, since the Mongols couldn’t write and few others lived to tell about it!
In the eyes of the vanquished, the Mongols may as well have come from Mars. The Mongols were a race that emerged from a land of which the ignorant, self-centered Europeans had never heard. For all the Europeans knew about Mongolians, the hordes could have just as easily fallen out of the sky in a farmhouse from Kansas.
In March of 1227 AD, the Khan suffered internal injuries after falling from his horse on a hunting excursion. The suffering and eventual death of the Khan five months later was kept secret from his army until after the siege of a capital city had been successfully completed. On word of his death, the army flooded into the city and slaughtered every living creature. Anyone who met the funeral procession along the road back to the Mongol capital was instantly killed so that they might serve their master in the next life.
The body of Ghengis Khan lay in state for three months before being buried together with a sacrificial entourage of forty jeweled slave girls and a fourth of his finest horses. A thousand horsemen rode over the burial site to disguise the ground. The burial place remains a secret to this day.
Superior speed, skill, conviction, training, tactics, weapons and organization of the alien Mongol army struck Europe with as much impact as an invading force of hostile aliens might be imagined to strike our own civilization.
The armies of the Khan traveled at more than twice the speed of an enemy army. They uniformly defeated armies more than twice their own size. This factor is an ingredient in the success of any forceful activity, whether it is in the field of war, sports or business. The modern, mechanized tank warfare used by Patton and Rommel against one another during World War II were simple applications of the military art form perfected by the master tactician whom they both diligently studied: Subedei, the leading field general of the Khan.
The illiterate, nomad horse soldier of the Golden Hordes had everything to gain and nothing to lose by going to war. War was his only means through which to escape from a miserable, dismal, impoverished life back home in the frozen steppes of Mongolia. To the common soldier, the logic of war practiced and perfected by Ghengis Khan could be distilled into two very simple and obvious truths that proved, for the Mongolians, to be workable solutions:
1/ WAR equals SURVIVAL.
2/ SPEED times FORCE equals POWER.
Power, as in the strength of an army, is proportionate to the number of soldiers, multiplied by their speed–a basic law of the physical universe. (Al Einstein later wrote a mathematical formula for it: E equals MC squared.)
The sons of Ghengis Khan’s first wife (he had more than 400 wives in all) who inherited the empire that covered one-third of the surface of Earth, never suffered the megalomania of their father. They were all strictly team players.
The dominion of the Khan clan did not crumble immediately upon his death with internal dispute as did the empire of Alexander. It endured for 200 years. This was longer than many international unions which were forged through conquest, yet only a short-term victory in the over-all scheme of things.
In spite of the appalling devastation wrought by the hordes of Ghengis Khan, the real, lasting conquest of Europe did not begin until 1344 AD. Slaughter, inflicted by the merciless armies of the Khan, seems like a minor scratch compared to the holocaust that followed.
It all began rather innocently when a band of Mongol soldiers laid siege to a small, fortified trading post on the shores of the Black Sea. A group of Italian merchants had taken refuge there and held out for two years. The squalid conditions of the siege precipitated an outbreak of the plague in the Mongol encampment. Due to the extent of their own casualties, the horde had to abandon the siege, but not before catapulting a few dead bodies–a sort of human time bomb–over the walls into the fortress.
After the horde left, the surviving Italian merchants boarded a ship bound for Genoa, Italy. A few days after the ship docked, the Black Death began to sweep across Europe. Meanwhile, the horde, on their return trip home, carried the plague eastward to Russia, India and China. In all, it is estimated that at least one out of every four Europeans died–more than 24 million people.
In England and France so many soldiers died that a truce was declared in the beloved war between the two countries–too few soldiers left to make a decent war!
Petrach, the French writer, wrote in 1348 that future generations would be incredulous and unable to comprehend the number of empty houses, abandoned towns, the squalid silence of the countryside littered with corpses and innumerable ships adrift at sea with no living crews to man them.
The Khans molded a nation of nomads with the disciplinary artistry of a potter using his wheel to sculpt a vase of steel. However, even fine art, precise in every detail, is inevitably broken. As with all things in this tenuous universe, even a vase of polished steel eventually returns to dust. The Black Death spawned by the Golden Horde caused, by documented estimates of death tolls, a series of the greatest disasters in human history –the “Punishment of God” indeed!”
— Excerpt from THE OZ FACTORS, by Lawrence R. Spencer
