Clara Rothe Postal Essays, 1869, St Thomas-Danish West Indies to Puerto Rico

Postal traffic in the Danish West Indies (since 1917 US Virgin Islands) between Charlotte Amalie (capital of St. Thomas), Cruz Bay (St. Jan) and St Croix was organised using a number of small ships and schooners. The most famous was “Vigilant”. This was originally a pirate ship, built in the 18th C. It was renamed and adapted for passenger and mail transport by the Danes and ploughed the waves from 1802 till 1928 (126 years) before disappearing in a local scrap yard.

St. Thomas was one of the busiest harbours in the West Indies with scores of forwarders.
It was therefore logical for the Danish administration to try adding transport capacity to the various routes. Clara Rothe was one such additional ship, and as can be seen on the stamps, she was both steam and sail driven. The earliest record for the ship is dated 1865.

Many forwarders and trading companies had their own stamps (e.g. Jezurun, Royal Mail Steam Company and Hapag), so there was nothing new in the thought of producing stamps for Clara Rothe, assuming she would create a profitable route for G. Nunez & Co’s mail service between St Thomas & Puerto Rico. The stamps were printed as essays, engraved and printed by M.Stern in Paris, 1869. However, they don’t seem to have been put to use for some reason, and if so, only for a very short time. I have found no record of genuinely cancelled stamps.

Most people therefore talk about the Clara Rothe “fakes”.
This is definitely a misconception.
The plan was genuine enough, conditions simply changed. Contrary to the habit of the Danish Post Company of destroying obsolete stamps, this never seemed to happen with the Clara Rothe essays. That’s one of the reasons they appear so controversial today.

The second reason was, as usual at the time, created by the brothers Spiro in Hamburg, who took advantage of the Nunez-enterprise and produced a range of Clara Rothe fakes.
They are quite easy to recognise:
1. The crown is pushed upwards so the ball is hidden by the St Thomas / Porto Rico banner
2. The ‘M’ in ‘Thomas’ is almost equally thick in both legs (the genuine stamp has a left leg almost like a thread)
3. The Danish flag is unclear
4. The ‘o’ in ‘Thomas’ is narrow, while the genuine ‘o’ is more pointed, thin and open
5. The vertical background stripes are uneven
6. The ship’s background is very ‘coarse’.
7. The smoke-stack is shorter
8. The drawing is of a generally bad quality
9. A genuine stamp is unlikely to be cancelled. Spiro always used incomplete and very inventive cancels, dots, an ‘o’, various stripes as in the GB colonial stamps or just a faint arc.

You can practise your Sherlock Holmes skills on these 3 stamps !

Danish Ex Muslim, Yahiya Hassan, facing racist charge

The following is copied from Robert Spencer's site, but it has been widely reported by Danish Newspapers and other internet sites.
The mentioned Danish Penal Code, paragraph 266b, is a controversioal clamp down on the freedom of speech.
Its intention was to protect minority religions or non-ethnic populations against bigotry, but the effect today is, that if you criticise Islam, you are almost certain to get a hefty fine or a prison sentence.
There are several examples of this having been done.
At the moment 2 muslims are accused under par. 266b for criticising - - - Islam!!!

It is simply becoming absurd andcertainly unjust.

Yahya Hassan grew up in a Muslim family and a Muslim environment. And now he is living with death threats.
Do Danish authorities really think he is an "ignorant Islamophobe"?
As Pamela Geller says, truth is the new hate speech.

"Danish Muslim Apostate Faces Hate Speech Charges," by Andrew Harrod for FrontPage Mag, January 2:
“Muslims love to take advantage of” free speech, Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan says, “and as soon as there is someone else saying something critical against them, they want to restrict it.”
In an action previously indicated by this writer, Hassan is now personally facing this double standard in Danish “hate speech” charges for his anti-Islam comments.

Following Danish-Iranian artist Firoozeh Bazrafkan’s conviction under Danish Penal Code Section 266b for condemning Islam as misogynist, a local Muslim Aarhus politician demanded a similar prosecution of Hassan.
His poetry says that "everybody in the ghettos like Vollsmose and Gellerup steal, don’t pay taxes and cheat themselves to pensions,” the Somali-Dane Mohamed Suleban stated after reporting Hassan to the police on November 27.
“Those are highly generalizing statements and they offend me and many other people.”
Authorities are currently considering Section 266b charges for, according to one English translation, any public “communication by which a group of persons are threatened, insulted or denigrated due to their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation.”

(There are probably 25+ ghettos in Denmark and they are increasingly running Sharia controlled power points inside the Danish state. In many cases neither police, bus drivers nor firemen dare enter these areas.)

The 18-year-old Hassan’s eponymous debut book contains about 150 poems, “many of which are severely critical of the religious environment he grew up in” according to Wall Street Journal reporters Clemens Bomsdorf and Ellen Emmerentze Jervell.
Written in all capital letters, Hassan’s poems treat “issues like the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, child abuse, and the interplay between violence and religion” with “[p]rofanity and vivid analogies.”
Yahya Hassan has sold 80,000 copies following an October 17 release in the comparatively small Danish market and is expected to exceed 100,000 copies by Christmas.

Hassan’s publisher Gyldendal reports that Danish poetry books are fortunate to sell 500 copies.
A recent book forum honored Hassan as the debut author of the year and an English translation of his poetry is underway.

Hassan first became prominent with an October 5 Danish newspaper interview entitled “I F**king Hate My Parents’ Generation.” In it he blamed poor Muslim parenting for the juvenile delinquency and social maladjustment experienced by many Danish Muslim youth such as Hassan himself. With more than 85,000 social media shares, the interview became the most shared Politiken article of the year.

Days thereafter Hassan recited from his “LANG DIGT” or “LONG POEM” before his book’s release on the Danish news program Deadline.
Extract:
“between the Friday prayers and the Ramadans/
you want to carry a knife in your pocket/
you want to go and ask people if they have a problem/
although the only problem is you.”

Such verses brought Hassan more death threats than any other previous Deadline guest.
Hassan has subsequently reported 27 Facebook threats against him, of which the police investigated six as serious and pressed charges in one case of a 15-year old boy.

A subsequent assault against Hassan occurred on November 18 in Copenhagen Central Station by a 24-year old Palestinian-Danish Muslim who had previously received a seven-year terrorism sentence.

Hassan now wears a bulletproof vest and receives protection from Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency PET at speaking engagements. A November 26 reading by Hassan from his book in a school in the Danish town of Odense, moreover, required an estimated one million kroner in security costs, more than the amount spent on a high-risk soccer game. Several hundred policemen had observed the school for two days before the event occurred with road checkpoints, a bomb sweep, and a five kilometer no-fly zone around the school.

Sweden lost, Norway disappearing, Denmark in danger zone

Den Korte Avis (The Brief Newspaper), Trykkefrihedsselskabet (The Society of Free Speech) and Jyllandsposten (a major Danish newspaper, well known from the Muhammed-cartoons), regularly write about the political landscape in Norway and Sweden.
Why?
Because the Norwegians and the Swedes can’t do it themselves.
Why?
Because if you protest against anything undertaken by their respective governments, you may lose both friends and job!
You don’t believe me?
Then read on.

Recently “Jyllandsposten” reviewed a book by the ethnologist Karl-Olov Arnst¬berg and the journalist Gun¬nar San¬de¬lin called “Immigration and Curfew" [my translation from “Indvandring og Moerklaegning”] describing everyday events such as asylum smuggling, immigration and crime, sharia law, the costs of immigration and the PC-elite’s use of the words 'racist' and ‘fascist’ to silence critical discussion of Islam and immigration. In Sweden it took 3 months to negotiate the content of a newspaper advertisement for the book due to PC wrangling, and no editor dared proceed with publishing. It was finally privately published and went straight to the top of the bestseller list.

So what’s going on here?
Alternative views on immigration, Islam and much else are not tolerated by the PC elite in Sweden, i.e. the ruling political parties.
Nevertheless it came as a surprise that the official response to the book and other critical articles came from leftist thug-groups. The Swedish daily, Expressen, and a rather murky group called ‘Researchgruppen’ set out to discover and publish the names of 6,200 readers and writers of various Internet news outlets which dared to contradict or criticise Sweden's official attitude to immigration and the multicultural society.
These sites, Avpixlat, Fria Tider, and Exponerat, i.e. De-Pixelated, Free Times and Divulged, are classed as "hate sites" by the PC elite, i.e. same meaning as in the UK: a site, that does not express the official multi-culti, middle class, leftist prick attitude as the PC-elite.
Researchgruppen, however, is best compared to UAF and AFA, (United Against Fascism, Anti Fascist Action): Hitler Jugend in attitude and action!
I can’t see much “left” in them – but so is the confusion of the political landscape.

It seems to me that the PC-elite now feel that they have lost the argument and therefore have no other choice than resorting to value statements such as "hate crime", “Racist”, Fascist” and "Islamophobia", in order to silence all contradictory views.

However, why do these so-called “leftists” always find it OK to use such Big Brother 1984-methods, when at the same time they are the harshest attackers of e.g. Edward Snowden?
What makes one right and the other wrong?

In my opinion nothing has changed in the past 100 years, since Mad Marx and the officially declared psychopath Lenin appeared on the scene.
When I worked for the Ministry of Defence in Denmark in the 70s, I was hung out by the very same leftist groups with details of myself published in a book about “traitors”!

Today silence rules when the Muslims in Sweden and Norway commit heinous crimes of terrorism and rape (verified, although with difficulty, in the statistical material in both countries).
Silence rules when the Jews of Malmoe have been expelled through violent PC-action and a Mayor, who finds it natural that the Jews “can just move to Israel”.
Silence rules when Norwegian and Swedish whistleblowers lose friends and jobs.
And official silence rules, when the UAF thugs break up meetings by societies that support the freedom to express oneself.
One can only guess what might happen when Researchgruppen publish the names and addresses of people, whose opinion they don’t like.

Kvaellsposten, a Swedish newspaper, actually dared report the case of Anders Dahlberg, a member of the Swedish Democratic Party and a National Guardsman. If these events are anything to go by, the future is bleak. Dahlberg had posted some comments under a pseudonym on a site characterised by Researchgruppen as a “Hate Site”, but they managed to find him and Dahlberg had a bomb thrown through his letterbox. Luckily nobody was hurt.
But Dahlberg was subsequently discharged from his position in the Swedish military!

Compare that to the recent assassination attempt on the Danish politician Lars Hedegaard and the aggression against the young poet, Yahiya Hassan. Hassan’s book with poems centred on dysfunctional Muslim immigrants has gone straight to the best seller top (over 100,000 sold in Denmark, where poetry books normally sells in only hundreds; now expected in an English edition).
Both he and Hedegaard now live with publicly paid police protection.
The joke is that Yahiya Hassan, from a Muslim family, has been accused of racism.
Laugh or cry?
Your choice – but it will probably stress the public prosecutor in Denmark beyond his limits.

Luckily they still write about such matters in Denmark, but strong powers also call for a literary curfew here.
And Sweden?
It’s too late – they’re lost as a free nation with a government that openly declares the death of the nation, open borders and with 1 million Muslim immigrants over the past 13 years.

If it were up to the OIC, not a single criticism about Muslims would see the light of day in the future.
As Voltaire said: “If you want to know who controls you, find out whom you can’t criticise”

The “Brave new world” has arrived.