587 words

Since our last update, on June 17th, the Counter-Currents 2015 Summer fundraiser has been quietly chugging away collecting 76 donations totaling $2,911.84 in amounts ranging from $5 to $250, including a number of new monthly donations, which are a huge help. This is a very strong show of support, and I very much appreciate it.

Our total is now $11,696.12. We are thus $108,634.88 (there’s that number again!) from our goal of $120,331. I want to thank all of our donors thus far for your generous support.

But there’s also bad news: not long after our last update, I received word that our third most generous donor to date, who had given substantially to our last two fundraisers, died unexpectedly. I would like to say much more about him, of course, and put his generosity in context. But I cannot out of respect for his privacy. Thus I can only speak about him in relation to Counter-Currents, a project that was dear to his heart. He had planned to pledge a matching grant for later on in this fundraiser but died before he could do it, which means that we have a greater struggle than before ahead of us.

In addition, just this past week, I learned that he died without a will. So his plans to remember Counter-Currents after his death have come to naught.

Also last week, I learned of the death of my friend Beryl Cheetham in Germany. Beryl wanted to make sure that her historically valuable correspondence with Savitri Devi and others, as well as her photographs taken at places like the Narford and Costwolds Camps in 1961 and 1962, would be preserved after her death by her friends (myself included). Beryl did make out a will, but unfortunately a copy has not yet been found.

In 2010, when Savitri Devi’s friend Miriam Hirn died, her much larger collection of Savitri Devi letters and photographs and the bulk of Savitri’s personal library simply disappeared. Either she died without a will or made no provisions to preserve these items in her will. In either case, it was an irreplaceable loss to history.

These three stories underscore the necessity of making out a will and filing it appropriately if one wishes to pass on one’s money or historically valuable documents. To that end, please take a look at the article on “Majority Estate Planning.”

All men die, thus the measure of our success is not what we manage to gain in our lifetimes, but what we manage to pass on, the impact we make on the future. If you want your values to live on after you, find those who will carry them forward and remember them in your will.

If you have not made a donation to our Summer fundraiser yet, now is a good time. You can make two different types of donations:

• A single donation of any size.
• A recurring donation of any size.

Recurring donations are particularly helpful, since they allow us better to predict and plan for the future. We have several levels for recurring donations. Please visit our Donations page for more information.

We can also customize the amount of a monthly donation.

There are several ways to make one-time donations:

• The easiest is with PayPal. Just use the following button:

• You can send check, money order, or credit card payment by mail. Just print out our donation form in Word or PDF.
• You can make a secure credit card donation direct from our Donation page.

Please give generously!

Thank you for your loyal readership and support.

Greg Johnson