Shackled, bleeding, raped: Palestinians describe abuse in Israel’s prisons . . . .

Paulo Kirk

Jun 14, 2026

Israel is the only state to have legalised torture through a ruling by its own Supreme Court. An expert who has documented these violations since 1983 says, “What the world knows today is less than 5% of what has actually occurred.” In Bodies of Evidence, an Al Jazeera original investigative documentary, we examine the use of sexual violence, torture, and degradation against Palestinian detainees, practices that rights groups and experts say have been systematically employed by Israeli military, intelligence, and prison authorities for decades. Contributors to the documentary include Francesca Albanese, Raji Sourani, Kifaya, Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Ben Marmarelli, Judge Cuno Tarfusser, and survivors whose identities are protected.

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Jew Jew York Yorker:4

The Jew Yorker NEVER ever fails:

Jew World a la Basketball: The Knicks really, truly won it all! David Remnick calls on fans to seize the joy. And Michael Luo reports on how a particular strand of Protestant faith became the biggest winner in the spiritual marketplace.

David Remnick has written a 7,000-word essay describing the “one state reality” in Israel/Palestine. The article appears in the November 17 issue of The New Yorker.

12 fucking Biblical Years ago: David Remnick undermines Israel’s one-state president

The opening page of the article features a gritty photo of Israel’s President, Rueven Rivlin, with an ominous caption about the demise of “talk” about the two-state solution. The evident purpose of the article is to discredit Rivlin and his prominent advocacy for a one-state solution, granting citizenship and equality for all.

Remnick warns that such talk is a fig-leaf for right wing one-state ideology that has no intention of granting equal rights of citizenship to Palestinians. The conclusion we are expected to draw, it appears, is that we should pay no attention to Rivlin and his crazy one-state talk.

Note that Remnick does not believe the Palestinians will ever have a truly sovereign state. Any two-state solution with a chance of working, he says, must include federal arrangements on security, water, cell phone coverage, sewage and other infrastructure, he says. Remnick does not spell it out here, but what this means is that in any two-state solution Palestinians will not have an army, will not have control over their water, and the IDF will continue to patrol the Jordan Valley and all of Palestine anytime they deem it necessary for security. The key feature of this “workable” two-state solution would be that Palestinians will not have the right to vote in Israel. It means the notion of a Jewish state, as distinguished from a shared power arrangement that protects both Jewish and Palestinian cultures, can remain intact.

Remnick scapegoats Rivlin as a false front for the Israeli nationalist right wing, but he praises him for “being nice” and curbing some of the racist vitriol and jingoism. Be a nice boy, just don’t talk about one state with equal citizenship and rights for all!

Here is a closer look at Remnick’s article: Sure, fuck the Jew Yorker Jew.

All Jews are black mambas. Oh, those calm, normal religious extremists: Since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (which it illegally annexed), and the Gaza Strip, successive Israeli governments have advanced annexation plans that would allow the application of Israeli governmental power over the greatest amount of Palestinian territory while keeping minimal Palestinian presence.

[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and members of the new Israeli government pose for a photo at the president’s house on 29 December 2022 in Jerusalem.]

Jew Yorker, where art thou?

Settler violence is reshaping religious Zionism

As Kahanist ideas gain ground, religious Zionism’s failure to confront settler violence is endangering both Israel’s future and the movement’s soul

Recently, several religious Zionist rabbis in Israel have taken to discussing settler violence publicly, which is important, since the previous position of many was to deny that it exists, label the perpetrators as “some troubled youth,” and other dismissive responses. When Rabbi Natan Slifkin had previously addressed this problem, there were voices in the religious Zionist community who shamefully called him a “Kapo” for stating the obvious, so it looks like we have made some progress. The reason this crisis can no longer be ignored are the weekly videos and images showing Jewish men with kippot, large beards, and pe’ot going into Palestinian villages, destroying property, stealing property, beating Palestinians, and behaving in ways that shock the conscience of any decent human being.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/t9q9PDBsDe8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

READING, Pa., Oct. 31 Daniel Burros, 28-year-old Ku Klux Klan leader of New York, apparently killed himself with a revolver this morning after the secret of his Jewish origin had been disclosed.

Burros, who had hidden the secret for years, was shot twice, in the chest and head, after he had read a report in The New York Times detailing his background. The police found him dead on the floor of the living room in the small apartment of the Grand Dragon of the Pennsylvania Klan. A 32-caliber revolver was six inches from his right heel. The police said the shooting was witnessed by the Grand Dragon, 25-year-old Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., the Grand Dragon’s girl friend, 21-year-old Regina Kupisziewski, and Frank W. Rotella Jr., King Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey. Police listed the death as “apparent suicide” after preliminary investigation showed it was physically possible for Burros first to have shot himself in the chest and then to have raised the revolver to his right temple and fired the second shot, which caused death instantly. A paraffin test of the hands of Burros and the three witnesses will be made, and an autopsy will be performed tomorrow. Detective Capt. Joseph Canfora of the Reading police said Burros apparently shot himself “as an aftermath of an article carried by The New York Times today.”

[George Lincoln Rockwell (center) with his followers, including Danny Burros (far right).]

The article reported that Burros, who had been chosen King Kleagle to lead an anti-Jewish, anti-Negro crusade by the United Klans of America in New York, had one secret that he desperately did not want known. The secret was that his parents were Jewish and that he himself had received a bar mitzvah, or confirmation. When he was confronted with the facts of his Jewish background last week he told the Times reporter: “I’ll have to retaliate, do you understand? If you publish that I’ll come and get you and I’ll kill you. I don’t care what happens. I’ll be ruined. This is all I’ve got to live for.” Frankhouser said that after reading The Times today, Burros repeated the threat, saying that he had to go to New York to “wipe out” the Times reporter who had disclosed his secret and that he would also “wipe out” the newspaper’s staff. According to the police, Burros, who had been staying at the Frankhouser apartment since Friday, went out about 9:30 A.M. this morning to buy The Times. He had expressed to Frankhouser and to Rotella deep anxiety over an article The Times was about to publish about him. But he did not tell them of his specific fear—the report that he was born of Jewish parents. When he returned just before

Continued on Page 52, Column 1/ Jewish-Born Klan Leader Is an Apparent Suicide / Continued From Page 1, Col. 6

10:30 A.M. to the little two- story frame house at 133 South Fourth Street he was in a state of extreme agitation, the police said. He was shouting and he slammed the front door with such violence that the building shook.

Rotella, according to the police, came downstairs to see what was wrong. He found Burros, a short, stocky man with a round sallow face, holding a copy of The Times and shouting: “This will destroy me!”

Rotella told the police that Burros brushed past him and ran upstairs to the living quarters over a barbershop. He kicked open the doors of a bureau and demolished a bedstead with murderous kicks that he learned, Frankhouser said, from a karate instructor.

Frankhouser told the police that Burros shouted that he was looking for a gun, that he found one on top of the bureau and that he shot himself before anyone could intervene.

Tonight, sitting in a barber chair of the shop his father operated before he became hospitalized by a recent illness, Frankhouser spoke with apparent frankness of his relations with Burros.

He said he never had any suspicion of Burros’s Jewish background. He said Burros had told him Friday of having been interviewed by a Times reporter, McCandlish Phillips.

Burros expressed fear of exposure, but Frankhouser said he never intimated the precise nature of the fear.

A Well-Kept Secret

“If Burros was really Jewish, it was the best-kept secret since the atom bomb,” Frankhouser said.

On Saturday morning, Burros went out to get a copy of The Times and was obviously relieved to see nothing about him in the paper, Frankhouser went on.

Burros seemed quite cheerful, Frankhouser said, and the three Klan leaders discussed plans for a big meeting to be held near Rising Sun, Md., next Sunday.

Frankhouser said Burros had asked him for a gun, expressing fear that a “truckload of niggers” might attack the house. Frankhouser said he gave Burros a gun, but took it from him Saturday because he felt Burros had been acting strangely.

“He had been talking about going to New York and wiping out The New York Times,” Frankhouser said.

He declared that there was no doubt in his mind that Burros shot himself because of the newspaper article.

“Man, it was the newspaper piece,” Frankhouser asserted. “Man, he came raving up the stairs like a madman.” Frankhouser said that the death weapon was not his, that it belonged to the house.

There were several guns in the house; Frankhouser said they were needed because of a mysterious shot fired into an upstairs window two weeks ago from a roof across the street.

One Pistol Left Out

But Frankhouser said he had “locked up” all the guns except “one lousy, stinking pistol” because he was concerned about Burros’s “wild talk.”

He said that pistol was wrapped in oil paper with a hunting knife.

Frankhouser declared that he had heard Burros make several threats to “wipe out” Mr. Phillips, the Times reporter, and the newspaper’s staff in general, but “I thought it was all so weird I paid little attention.”

Rotella, who himself was exposed in the New York newspapers last week as a Klan leader employed by the New York City Welfare Department as a case worker, said he tried to assure Burros that newspaper notoriety was not necessarily fatal.

Rotella has been suspended without pay by the Welfare Department and will be given a departmental hearing. “I intend to defend my civil rights,” he said tonight. “I think a white man has just as many civil rights as a Negro.”

Frankhouser said he had known Burros for five years and considered him “very obviously sincere.”

Regina Kupisziewski, Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., of Pennsylvania, center, and Frank W. Rotella Jr., of New Jersey, in Reading, Pa., after the fatal shooting of Daniel Burros yesterday. known Burros for five years and considered him “very obviously sincere.”

“Funny thing, he was more anti-Semitic than I am,” Frankhouser said. “He wrote a very Nazi-istic-type paper. I heard rumors that he was not Christian but an Odinist.” The Odinists are a Nordic supremacy sect.

“I’m a Protestant Christian,” Frankhouser said, “and I don’t believe the Klan should admit Jews per se. It’s okay to allow Catholics to join. But if you let Jews in, then you’ve lost Christianity. This is a Christian order. It would desecrate the religious aspect of the movement.”

According to Frankhouser, Burros had been given a “standard checkout” by the Klan when he became a Klan organizer. Burros took the Klan oath that he was a white gentile American, Frankhouser said.

The Klan was impressed by Burros’s role as an activist, particularly the part he had played in the White Tower riots in the Bronx, Frankhouser said. This was a reference to right-wing extremists who tried to break up picketing by civil rights demonstrators of the White Tower restaurant chain in protest against the chain’s employment policies.

“We took him at his face value,” Frankhouser said. He conceded that some Klansmen might have resented Burros’s attempt to hide his Jewish background, “but they’ll honor him anyway.”

“As far as I’m concerned, he had a tremendous record,” Frankhouser added. He asserted that the suicide of Burros would not hurt the Klan. “A man commits suicide,” he shrugged. “There are casualties in every war.’”

Frankhouser insisted that Burros was “nothing but a Pfc.” (private first class) in the Klan. But police said they found a card on Burros identifying him as King Kleagle of the New York Klan.

Record of Arrests

A native of Reading, Frankhouser has been arrested several times in connection with right-wing and segregationist demonstrations. He has been affiliated with the Klan since 1958. In that year he was arrested in Atlanta on charges of having assaulted an officer during a Klan-sponsored segregationist rally. He told the Atlanta police he was a member of the National States Rights party. He was arrested in Philadelphia in 1962 while he was handing out anti-Semitic, anti-Negro literature to Christmas crowds.

Tonight Frankhouser, who will be 26 on Thursday, denied he was now a member of the American Nazi party, as was Burros. Frankhouser said he formerly carried a “supporters card” and subsequently broke with Rockwell, commander of the American Nazi party. He said he had found Rockwell “completely ruthless.”

Last April, Frankhouser, who is said to be trained in judo, lost his left eye in a local tavern brawl. Three men, including two convicted racketeers, waived preliminary hearing on assault charges two weeks ago. The case is awaiting grand jury action.

Last Saturday, Frankhouser told the police that someone fired at him on the night of Oct. 21 while he was talking to friends in the second-floor apartment. The shot entered an open window and struck a plastic bowl where Frankhouser kept two pet turtles.

City detectives said they had found indications that the bullet was fired from a roof across the street, but no arrests have been made.

Studied the ‘Isms’

Sensitive to the fact that he is a high-school dropout, Frankhouser insisted tonight that he was well-read. “I’ve studied communism, socialism, fascism, all the isms, and democracy,” he said, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that my country is in danger, that it’s necessary to save the country from atheistic, godless tyranny.” He says he is not against all Jews-” only Zionists.” He believes that the April attack on him in the barroom was inspired by Zionists. He said he had served as a spy for the White Citizens Council in Virginia, attending “Communist and Negro meetings.” He declared that soon after the assassination of President Kennedy, he offered to give the Federal Bureau of Investigation photostats showing that the Socialist Workers Party had a “training group” with which Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin was “connected.”

Frankhouser said he served in the Army Infantry but never left the United States. He said he was a salesman, but refused to identify his employer.

Confirmed in Synagogue

Burros was the son of George Burros and the former Esther Sunshine, who were of Russian Jewish extraction. Burros’s 71-year-old father, a retired machine operator, has a heart ailment. Burros was born in the Bronx on March 5, 1937. The family now lives in Queens. Burros was bar mitzvahed, or confirmed, in an Orthodox synagogue in Queens when he reached the age of 13, the traditional coming of age in the Jewish faith. He had an intelligence quotient of 154, at Public School 121 in Richmond Hill, Queens, and at John Adams High School, he was an outstanding student. From about the age of 10, he said last week, he was interested in the extreme right wing and as a teenager, he was an apologist for German Nazism. He had wanted to go to the United States Military Academy, but, failing to be appointed, he joined the Army and became a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. He made 17 jumps. As a member of the 101st he was part of the contingent sent to Little Rock, Ark., during the school integration crisis in 1957. Seeing “white American girls” being “pushed by soldiers with bayonets” reinforced his right-wing fervor. The Army gave him a “general discharge under honorable conditions,” which rates below a regular honorable discharge and usually connotes good service but aberrant behavior or character traits. He served two years and seven months in the Army. Burros became a member of the American Nazi Party, headed by George Lincoln Rockwell, and lived at the party headquarters at Arlington, Va. Apparently, no one else in the party knew Burros was Jewish. Burros joined other right-wing or neo-Fascist groups, including the British National Party and the National Renaissance Party in New York. Before leaving the American Nazi party, he had been arrested and convicted four times in 1960 for using profane language, fighting and defacing the B’nai B’rith building in Washington. In New York in July 1964, he was convicted, along with several other members of the National Renaissance Party, of rioting, conspiring to circulate inflammatory literature, and criminal possession of firearms and a switchblade knife. He was sentenced to two years in jail, but was released a month later on a certificate of reasonable doubt pending appeal.

It’s a most confusing time to be in the U.S. military

Who knows why we fight?

Ltc. (ret.) William J. Astore served in the U.S. Air Force for 20 years, retiring in 2005.

He was a professor of history, and has written extensively for TomDispatch.com, Truthout, History News Network (HNN), Alternet, Salon, Antiwar.com, and Huffington Post among other sites. He is the author or co-author of three books: Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Early Modern World (2007, co-written with Dennis E. Showalter), Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (2005, with Showalter), and Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America (2001). His numerous articles focus on military history as well as the history of science, technology, and religion.

He earned a BS (with distinction) in mechanical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University (history of science and technology), and a D.Phil. (doctor of philosophy) from the University of Oxford (modern history). He has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

• Academic Professor: He spent six years teaching history to future officers at the U.S. Air Force Academy and also taught at the Naval Postgraduate School. [1, 2]
• Field-Grade Staff Officer: He spent significant time crafting strategic PowerPoint briefings for senior leadership at the Pentagon, particularly focusing on how various military units supported counter-terrorism operations following the events of 9/11.

Napalm and bunker busters and white phosphorus and cluster bombs and . . .

1. Fifth and Sixth-Generation Air Superiority

• Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor: Widely considered the premier air superiority fighter in existence, utilizing a combination of multi-spectral stealth, supercruise speed, and extreme maneuverability to eliminate threats before they even detect its presence. [1, 2, 3]
• Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II: Operates as the world’s most advanced network-connected fighter, acting as an airborne data hub that fuses battlefield intelligence across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains. [1]
• Boeing F-47 (Next-Gen): The emerging sixth-generation fighter program designed with multi-spectral stealth and built to act as a systems commander over autonomous collaborative combat drone wingmen at machine speeds. [1]

2. Global Penetrating Strike

• B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber: Possesses an unrefueled range of roughly 6,000 nautical miles, capable of bypassing highly sophisticated integrated air defense systems to deliver both massive conventional and nuclear payloads. [1]
• B-1B Lancer: A supersonic swing-wing bomber that holds numerous records for speed and payload, historically delivering up to 40 percent of total bomb tonnage in major coalition campaigns. [1]

3. Persistent Close Air Support & Interdiction

• AC-130J Ghostrider: Evaluated as the most lethal and innovative gunship in the world, providing unmatched close air support and force protection for ground forces.
• A-10 Thunderbolt II: Renowned for its extreme survivability, redundant flight systems, and devastating 30mm GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon designed for anti-armor and ground interdiction. [1, 2, 3, 4]

A fucking marble-mouthed Brit, no less:

Plato’s cave?

The Four Stages:

In Stage one, people live enchained inside the cave and are engrossed by what they immediately encounter. At this stage, human beings consider only the shadows cast by the artifacts as being the “unhidden” or the truth of things. This could be understood as our ‘enchainment’ to the material nature of things or to our technological devices in our modern day world. It is the stage where most human beings dwell.

At Stage Two, the chains are removed and the prisoner is “compelled” to “turn” and to look at the things that, before, were merely shadows to him or her. Although still within the cave, the person is “free” in a certain respect: they can move their heads in every direction and it is possible to see the very things that were carried along the roadway behind them. Before they looked only at shadows; now they are “a little nearer to what is”. The things offer themselves in a visible form in a certain way, namely, through the light of the man-made fire and they are no longer “hidden” by the shadows they project. When one’s gaze is freed from the captivity of the shadows, it becomes possible for the person who has been freed to enter into the area that is more “unhidden”. But the person will consider the shadows that they saw before as being more “unhidden” than what is being shown to them in the first “turning”. Why is this so?

The eyes are not accustomed to the light and the prisoner is initially blinded and confused. The first liberation is painful. The blinding does not allow the prisoner to see the fire itself and from understanding how its light illuminates the things and lets these things appear for the first time. That is why those who have been liberated cannot comprehend that what they previously saw were merely shadows. They “see” other things besides the shadows; but these things only appear in confusion to them. In contrast, the shadows appear much more sharply and because of this, the prisoner who has been freed thinks these shadows are more “unhidden”. The word aletheia or “truth” occurs again at this point in a comparative degree: the shadows are “more unhidden” than they were before. The prisoner feels that the more proper “truth” is to be found in the shadows because they are unable to recognize or “see” the shadows as shadows. The condition necessary for assessing the shadows as shadows is “freedom”. Removing the chains brings a sort of freedom, but it is not yet real freedom.

Stage Three: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and the Realm of True Freedom:

Real freedom is only attained at Stage Three. The prisoner is led out of the Cave and “into the open” where, as from a height, all things are “shown”. The “looks” that show what things are no longer appear as merely in the man-made and confusing glow of the fire. The things themselves appear in the “truth” and bindingness of their own appearance (both in themselves and to us). The “openness” outside of the Cave does not mean Sun’s light (Beauty, Truth, and Goodness). The light of the Sun is a metaphor for Love in the Cave and outside of the Cave. The “looks” that show what things are, the Ideas or the Forms, are the essence (the “whatness”) of what each individual thing/being shows itself as this or that. It is only through this “self-showing” that the appearing thing becomes visible and accessible to us as human beings.

The stance of “being in the world” at Stage Three is defined in terms of what is “unhidden” at this level. This “unhidden” is even more “unhidden” than the things illuminated by the man-made fire in distinction to the shadows. The “unhidden” that has been reached is the most “unhidden” of all. The light of the Sun grants to the things that are the ability of “self-showing”. Without such a “self-showing” of what they are through the Ideas and the Forms, any and all specific things—in fact, absolutely everything—would remain hidden. “The most unhidden” is called this because it is what appears in everything that appears, and it makes whatever appears be accessible in its appearance. But that which allows things to appear as what they really are is “the Good”, and it allows things to appear in their “Truth” (“unhiddenness”) and their “Beauty”. Beauty, Truth and Goodness are not man-made constructs or concepts, but are in fact “the standards” that allow all things to be seen for what they truly are and “bind” human beings to them in the Beauty of their “unhiddenness”. Understanding this ‘bindingness’ is necessary if one wishes to understand ‘fate’ as it is used in other sections of this blog. As human beings, we are bound to how the things “show” themselves in their “truth”.

For the prisoners inside of the Cave, to have been freed from the shadows to see the light of the fire and to see how things are shown in the firelight was a difficult task that proved too difficult for many prisoners. In their pain and confusion they returned to the shadows. Being freed into the openness outside of the Cave also requires endurance and effort. Being freed from the chains does not come about by the simple removal of the chains; and certainly freedom is not uncontrolled license to do what one wishes. Freedom consists in the continuous effort to accustom oneself to look upon the firm limits of the things that stand in their visible form. It is an understanding of the Necessity that is operable within all things. For Plato, this freedom is not an “active doing” but is more in the nature of “contemplation”, a “beholding” of what beauty, truth and goodness are. Authentic freedom is the steadiness of being oriented toward what appears in its visible form and which is most “unhidden” in this appearing. “Education” is a “turning toward” and a “turning around”. The fulfillment of the essence of “education” can only be achieved in the region of the most “unhidden” i.e. the truest, the most beautiful, and the goodness of what is.

Because the essence of “education” is this “turning around” and a “turning towards” and a “beholding” of what truth, beauty and goodness are, education remains a constant overcoming of “hiddenness” or untruth. Plato views education as the constant overcoming of the lack of education. The allegory continues, therefore, with the Fourth Stage.

Stage Four: The Cave, The Liberator and the Political:

The Fourth Stage involves the descent of the freed person back into the Cave, back to those who are still in the chains. The one who has been freed is required to lead those who are still in chains away from what is “unhidden” for them and to bring them face to face with the most unhidden. But because the liberator has been outside of the Cave, he no longer knows his way around inside of the Cave and he risks the dangers of succumbing to the overwhelming power of the kind of “truth” or “unhiddenness” that operates in the Cave by those who tend the Fire and those who are satisfied living with the shadows: those who believe that what is called reality in the Cave is the only reality. The liberator risks being put to death: the fate that befell Plato’s teacher, Socrates.

The return to the Cave and the battle waged within the Cave between the liberator and the prisoners who resist all liberation makes up Stage Four of the “allegory” and brings the story to an end. The word aletheia or “unhiddenness”, “truth” is no longer used at this stage. Nevertheless, the notion of what truth is creates the conditions of that area in the Cave that the freed person now visits. Now, in stages one and two there were two forms of “unhiddenness” that were operating: the unhiddenness of the shadows and the unhiddenness of the man-made fire. These two views of unhiddenness represent two factors essential to the unhidden or “truth”: not only does the “unhidden” render accessible whatever appears and keeps it revealed in its appearing, but it constantly overcomes a hiddenness of the hidden. The “unhidden” must be constantly “grasped” and “torn away from” hiddenness; it must be “stolen” from hiddenness. Originally for the Greeks, hiddenness was conceived as an act of “self-hiding”, and this “self-hiding” permeated the essence of what we call “reality” and being and it determined how beings were accessible and how beings “presented” themselves. (For example, as students you are constantly “annoyed” by having to look for what you have come to call the “hidden meaning” in your literature texts; and in a Greek way, this “stealing” or “grasping” the meaning of a text is a “wresting away” from the text the “truth” of the text so that the text will be “present” in its “reality”, in its “truth” i.e. not as some kind of “subjective” response to the text as an object. But this ‘wresting away’ requires that the text ‘give’ accessibility to you in its “presence” and that you are able to “see” that which the text “offers” to you, and “grasp” it, and take it away with you.)

Truth originally means that which has been wrested from hiddenness. Truth is a ‘wresting away’ in the form of ‘revealing’. The hiddenness is of various kinds: closing off, hiding away, disguising, covering over, masking, dissembling. Examples of these various kinds of hiddenness are motifs running throughout Shakespeare’s work, particularly Macbeth. According to the allegory, the “most unhidden” must be ‘wrested away’ from a base and stubborn hiding, and it is for this reason that the journey out of the Cave and into the open, into the light of the Sun is a life and death struggle. Stage Four gives us a glimpse into how “privation” (eros), or “need”—attaining the unhidden by wresting it away—belongs to the essence of truth. It is this “privation” or lack of and need of truth that gives concrete substance to what is most natural for human beings. For Socrates, when he speaks of justice and says that “It is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it” (Gorgias), the truth of this is given to him in the light (Love) that comes from the Sun (the Good) and it is the lack of and the need for this light which human beings desire (need) the most and that leads them to seek truth in its most unhidden. And this is why for Plato truth, beauty and goodness are One, but all three are a One and proceed from Goodness (and, as is mentioned in Stage Three, everything proceeds from Goodness). But how is this so?

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