Preventing Fascism: WWII & Now

Rage against fascism is a good thing. It has to be integrated into moral codes, and institutions. The question arises of how the outbreak of fascism could have been indigenously avoided in the 1930s. After all, we are evolving into a similar situation: an ever deepening socio-economic crisis. Crises call for fascism, always.

Paradoxically, I will argue that, for a republic to be sustainable, anti-fascism has to be imprinted directly and explictly in an intrinsically fascist institution, the military.

Military men have to be imprinted with the notion that all and any order contradicting Republican law ought to be refused (except perhaps for a reason involving a combat situation directly, to be followed by an inquest; drone presidents don’t qualify as combat directly).

Fascism, as the Romans, who conceptualized it, defined it, was the socio-political principle that gave the Republic strength: tie together the weak rods of the individuals around an axe to get immense power of enforcement (justice) and destruction (war). In modern times, the French Republic, explicitly, and the USA  (watch the American eagle clutching a fasces of arrows!) proudly exhibit the notion, which is central to all and any Republic.

Fascism allows weak primates to cling together, act as a super organism. being able to form armies, they conquered the wastes (even Bonobos act this way, and form troops up to 200 individuals, no doubt keeping leopards away).

Thus fascist is an enabling instinct. Fascism is the difference between monkeys as squirrels, and monkeys as world conquerors. Fascists go to the stars, individualists stay in the trees and bushes.

The formation of any troop or army is an application of the fascist principle. Thus the importance of fascism for Rome: for its first four centuries, the Roman republic was continually involved in wars upon which its on-going existence depended, and became the ancient world’s ultimate war machine.

Yet, the fascist instinct can be misused: watch young people going hysterical about the local sport team. That looks innocuous, but countless dictators, in the past, used that madness of young, ignorant, enraged crowds to evil ends.

The three most significant fascisms involved in WWII were the Soviet, Nazi and Imperial Japanese. They had much in common, as proven by the fact that, by 1939, they were military allies (and even earlier, officially, as the “Axis“; or secretly with the USSR).

Of the three the most hopeless, because the most engrained, was Soviet fascism. In the 1930s, Stalin was busy killing most of his army’s upper echelons, after deporting the Tartars from Crimea and dispossessing millions of farmers. He put to work ten million slaves, digging impressive canals.

Stalin’s main opponent had been Trotsky, ex-head of the Red Army. Trotsky was in an awkward position to resist his ex-colleague’s red terror, as he had, himself, been its enforcer in chief previously. besides, the founder, and theoretician of the whole thing, Lenin himself, had made the apology of fascism with his “dictatorship of the proletariat“. By 1939, the USSR had made mass murderous fascism into its fundamental organizational scheme (differently from the Tsarist plutocracy, which had been paying more than lip service to democracy!).

In comparison, Japan and Germany were new to that game.

Thus, if there was a hope to avoid WWII, it had to be with Japan and Germany. Both regimes were, superficially, militaristic. However, both they nearly imploded. Why? Because, in both cases, military men saw the light of truth, and tried to act accordingly.

World War One had been launched by the top half dozen ‘Prussian’ military men, in an on and off conspiracy with the Kaiser. The four top “Prussian General Staff” generals plotted, in 1912, to launch a war against France and Russia, because they thought they could still win it (but not so in the future; they enlisted the reluctant admirals). The result was a giant failure of Germany and civilization. Although the military generation commanding and launching WWI never saw the light, and, indeed, supported Nazism, it was not so for the commanders who followed (and had seen the war from the trenches).

Meanwhile the fascist imperial Japanese military had gone from success to success for more than a generation, defeating the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans. Its leadership became an oligarchy drunk on victory, a typical case of hubris gone completely crazy.

Young officers of lesser rank felt this. They attempted a coup in 1937. It was drowned in blood, and the military dictatorship became worse than ever.

In Germany, it was the exact opposite: the Nazis had hypnotized, and imprinted youth. Yet, the entire upper reaches of the German military had done some serious studies, and drawn their own lessons from WWI. Top german military men were lethally opposed to Hitler. They plotted loud and clear, to overthrow him. They even invited American embassy personnel, just below ambassador rank, to be witness to their reunions. However, they were anxious to justify themselves, relative to the population.

Field Marshalls, and the successive chiefs of the entire armed forces, generals Beck and Halder made the mistake to reach out to the perfidious Anglo-Saxons. The German military wanted them to declare publicly that the Anglo-Saxons would stand with the French Republic against Hitler. The upper military would have then arrested, or killed Hitler and all the top Nazis, and justify themselves to the German nation by saying the Nazis were going to destroy Germany. Because there was no way Germany would win against the exact same coalition of Allies as in World War One.

Instead, of course, the Anglo-Saxons leaders… revealed to the Chancellor-President of Germany, Adolf his name, what was planned. So strong were the plotters, though, that all what Hitler could do was to fire general Beck from his top job. Beck was replaced by Halder, himself respectful of Beck. However the anti-Hitler plotting abated, as the USA seemed determined to support the Third Reich (de facto) and Britain and France let Hitler have his successes. Hitler was condemned to work, for years, conducting a world war, collaborating with his own would-assassin, Halder.

There were many plots against Hitler. All failed, mostly due to happenstance, or too much striving for perfection. Meanwhile the Nazi state grew ever stronger: the SS grew to nearly one million. When finally a full coup was engaged in July 1944, Hitler survived a bomb, and a handful of generals, trying to cover their participation in the coup, went the wrong way at the wrong moment.

The repression was ferocious: Colonel Count Von Stauffenberg had planted the bomb, he was executed the same day. His elder brother, revived many times, was tortured to death. Officially an unbelievable 4,980 were executed (yes, not a typo, nearly five thousands, most of them German army personnel).

Nowadays, the German military venerates the anti-Hitler plotters. It has in its military code that “Innere Führung”  (inner guidance) which pledges to defend the Republic and the People.

The best way to fight tyrannical fascism is for the army to thoroughly understand that its own intrinsic fascism has meaning only, and only as, guardian of the Republic, not as a devotee to particular individuals or classes. (Indeed the Roman republic went down when the army’s role went from protecting the republic to personality cult.)

So, to prevent political fascism, one has to incorporate the republican constitution in the military code.

This is no utopia. German military history demonstrates it. The German Military Code (or law) in World War Two said that military men and police could not be ordered to massacre civilians (as had happened in the first few days of World War One). Still, massacres were ordered. However, in about 150 cases, orders were disobeyed, on the ground that the Code forbid it.

None of the cases was prosecuted. The Nazis were terrified that military judges would support those who had disobeyed unlawful orders. and that a lawful disobedience, by then well advertized, would spread through the army.

Better: by 1944, an ex-fanatical Nazi such as Feld Marshall Rommel, was actively prosecuting those who had ordered massacres of civilians in France.

So, of course, if the German republic and German Volk had been included in the military pledge (as it is now!), Nazism would simply never have happened. (Instead Hitler, in degenerate Roman general style, had instituted a pledge to himself!)

One crucial juncture in the ascent of Nazism: when Doctor H. Schacht, head of the central bank, engineered German hyper inflation in 1923, so as not to replace the telegraph poles that had been destroyed all over France by the retreating German army.  Later Schacht, an agent of the top USA banker JP Morgan, became finance and economy minister in the so called Weimar republic, and pushed to bring Hitler to power.

Interestingly, recently, in 2013, the head of the German central bank used lies by Harvard professors to justify the ferocious starving of the European economy, instituted by shutting down necessary government spending (all the money having gone to bankers). Do them German central bankers ever learn?

The Harvard professors mercenaries were, and are, paid by billionaires such as Pete Peterson, and the “foundations” they finance. The modern equivalent of JP Morgan.

Is history repeating itself? Will the Bundeswehr have to realize that, when the head of the German central bank, 90 years later, holds exactly, once again, the discourse ordered by plutocrats from across the Atlantic, the security of the German Volk is compromised?

***

Patrice Ayme

Strikes Against Civilization

Dramatis Personae: Obama, Tyranosopher, and assorted characters meet in hell to discuss Obama’s “Signature Strikes”, the bombing by killer robots, of crowds of unknown people, on the chance an enemy would die.

***

 Obama, face contorted by contradictory emotions, affects not to understand the strikes in Boston: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?… We will determine what happened. We will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had.”

 Tyranosopher: The deepest association is with the breakdown of the spirit of the State of Law. In the West, now, as it happened 2,000 years ago, the spirit of republican law, equality, has broken down. Galla Placidia, made the “association” that counts.

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

 Galla reigned as a Roman empress, for more than three times as long as you will be president, and in much more trying times. She was acutely aware that the notion of State of Law was the fundamental bedrock of the State, and wrote eloquently about it.

 She explained that it is the Law, not individuals, who should reign. Equal law. Thus the law should apply absolutely, even to the absolute sovereign. The embodiment of the enforcement of this is the International Criminal Court.

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

 Brainy Salafist: Obama, you have shown us the way. Killing civilians, you know nothing about, calling assassination of the innocent fighting terrorism. Hiding perfidiously, but ineffectually, behind the CIA to commit acts of wars against Pakistan, as the sedate New York Times’ editorial board pointed out in April 2013. 

 While you, in your unfathomable stupidly, advertized worldwide that you approved every single strike, as if you were anxious to be the first ever Nobel Peace laureate prosecuted for war crimes.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. That makes me infallible. Plus we the leaders of the USA have been careful to refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court.

 Brainy Salafist: Thus you, Obama, are just a mafioso leveraging “A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood“ (New York Times, April 2013 again). These “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” your National Security adviser and now CIA head, Brennan, obliquely confirmed their existence in front of the Senate. Many of your associates, Obama’s associates, have confirmed the existence of an association, the Assassination Panel at the White House. So we, the Salafists, imitate you, and kill people we know nothing about. Thanks for teaching us. We call it fighting terrorism too.

 Tyranosopher: Yes, an official assassination panel is something unparalleled in the history of all and any known states. Yet, after the Boston bombing you, Obama, declared that any bombing of civilians was an act of terror. But that’s what your “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” are all about. 

 Obama: I was shocked  when I became president, and I found out about “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing”. But that’s the only game in town, and I am a team player. It works. We killed thousands of terrorists, using them.

 Tyranosopher: Try to pay attention to your own sick sport semantics. It’s not a game. Killing people does not make you player in a team. You were right to be shocked. Now you are shocking.

 Napoleon, Corsican dictator: “Even in war, moral power is to physical as three parts in one.” “Signature Strikes” bomb the USA’s moral power. The more you use them, the weaker you get. Your “Signature Strikes” are an anti-American strategy.

  Brainy Salafist: Obama you told us terror is the way. We want to be like you when we grow up. We want to do hundreds of “Signature Strikes“, on your territory, as you did, on ours, the House of Peace.

 Tyranosopher: Mr. President, I am afraid Salafists have been associating with the own past behavior of the USA, “Signature Strikes” its latest symbol. This is what a full enquiry would reveal.

 The notion of military-industrial complex was introduced by Eisenhower, as the greatest danger for the USA. At the height of the Cold War! Now we have something worse, the notion of enemy-industrial complex. It looks as if some in the government of the USA consider that to make sure of having enemies is the best way to have an industry.

 Obama: I did not start the violence in the Middle East.

 Tyranosopher: You sure did not. Arguably, from his own declarations, Muhammad started it, for the present period, in the sense that he revealed to his followers that the Persian-Babylonian-Zoroasthrian and Greco-Roman empires were exhausted, and could collapse if struck vigorously, hence allowing the Arabs to re-instigate the raiding they had been deprived of for more than a millennium.

 Young Salafist: Watch it, Tyranosopher, don’t you insult the Prophet! The Prophet is all I dream about, all the time, wet or not.

 Tyranosopher: You know very well, Young Salafist brimming with uncontrolled hormones, that this is what the fundamental Muslim texts say. Muhammad’s analysis was astute. The Greco-Roman and Persian empires were culprit each in their own way, of the tremendous war they made to each other, and they were on their knees. Muhammad’s hatred of the Jews grew from the Christians’ hatred of the Jews.

 By the way, if I want to insult long dead characters, I have the right to do so, according to my own religion.

 Young Salafist: You don’t have a religion, you believe in nothing, you insult everybody, even your friend Obama.

 Tyranosopher: Quite the opposite, I am helping everybody, by telling the truth. I believe in truth, and I believe in desperately searching for truth. That makes me a follower of the second most fundamental religion of man. And I subscribe to the first one, too, love.

 The truth is that Muhammad came from a prominent family in Mecca, but differently from the rest of them, was an analphabet. Somebody less charitable than me may think that had to do with his tough youth, and attending neurological problems he may have suffered from, PBUH! 

 Young Salafist: Spare me the sarcasm. Peace Be Upon Him, that man I dream about all the time.

 Tyranosopher: Are you gay? I find you rather sad. In any case, Muhammad gave too much of a military mien to Islam. But then, he had to, or Islam would not be on the map. After all, it’s the Roman military dictatorship, that decided to put Christianity, or, more exactly “Orthodox Catholicism”, on the map, and in command. They did so in a disastrous way. Later, the Franks found the right way: use the Church, to impose… progressive secularism.

 Obama: Can you guys come back to the subject at hand? Why such violence? Why couldn’t they all just play basket ball? That’s what I did, look where I am!

 Tyranosopher: Don’t worry the reservoir of potential Salafists inside the USA is a small fraction of that it is in a country such as France. One will hold them back with the idea of the republic, not by taking their rights away, even before judging them.

 You, Obama, could afford to not take your studies seriously. You were the missing link. Your life experience was, from the start, out of the ordinary. You lived in a mansion in Indonesia, with servants’ quarters. You went to the top private school in Hawai’i, Punahou. You also went to Harvard, same as your father, and, because your father had been there (“legacy admission“). Harvard is where the leaders are selected, and the spider web of worldwide leaders is set-up. Most recent USA presidents came from the Ivy League. Aka the Evil League.

 Even the guy who organized Pearl Harbor, the head of the imperial navy, admiral Yamamoto, went to Harvard. Speak of a guy who “studied here”! And let me exceptionally not mention the Nazis.

 It’s not about smarts, but about connections with wealth, as an owner, look at the Bushes, Kennedys, or… as a servant. For compliance, look at Bill Clinton, who did exactly what Goldman-Sachs told him to do, in a Faustian contract. Clinton went to Yale, still Ivy League.

 The contract made him swear. But he did what he was told to do, namely to deregulate finance in a way never seen before in the history of civilization. The total devolution of the public to the private. OK, something like that happened to the republic in Florence, when it turned into “The Prince”, plutocracy, basically a few private banks. (But then notice that Italy fell off civilization for several centuries.) So now here we are, neo-feudalism coalescing.

 Harvard plays into a form of violence. Its connection with various bloody dictators were left unpunished, even unpublished. In economics, many of its professors have published academic papers claiming that transferring more assets to rich people was what the Harvard doctors recommended (allusion to austerity propaganda from famous Harvard professors: Reinhart. Rogoff, Alesina, Ardagna).

 Under the guise of fair, balanced, learned, equal opportunity, extremely stealthy methods of vicious exploitation have been invented. They are different from those denounced in the past, in the period from 1648 (year of parliamentary revolutions in England and Paris, La Fondre) until Proudhon, Marx, etc.

 Obama: Once again Tyranosopher you are drifting through an immense historical landscape that seems to have nothing to do with the Jihadists in our midst.

 Tyranosopher: The most important connections are the ones that have not been made explicit yet, because they are deeper.

 As I was saying, the USA outsmarted the Western European powers, partly deliberately, partly by serendipity, in a sort of selection of the most effective behaviors, however devious. Devious support, by the USA, for the worst of Islam was crucial, in the rise of the present day Jihadism.

 Young Jihadist: See, Obama, you are devious, even though you don’t know about it.

 Tyranosopher: A preferred devious method, has been the traditional one of dividing to conquer. To enact these divisions, support was given to extremely violent enemies of “American” values. Including various fascists, in particular the Soviets, the Nazis, and violently regressive Islamists. Those enemies of the USA turned out to be its best tools. 

 Such fascist embodiments are unsustainable, making them valuable. The mess they create leads to divisions, hence easy pickings. Since 1945, contrarily to the cautious policies of Britain and France, Roosevelt’s USA threw its mighty support to Salafists, starting with the Saudis. (For comparison, the Brits annihilated the fiercest Wahhabist army, not even two decades prior; most of the 9/11 highjackers were Saudis.)

 CIA support was given to Khomeini’s followers, in 1953, and still later to Pakistani Fundamentalists, then to bin Laden (and the SIA), etc.. Thus we see it was more than a plot. It was a plotted strategy, that unfolded over 60 years (the support of Bush II for various Muslim extremists in Iraq was a continuation of that strategy: let the museums and archeological sites be looted, help the fanatics, bury the secularists).

 This strategy is coming to an end for diverse reasons. Terror by drones the way practiced presently by the Obama administration tries to extend it, but it is not sustainable. However, it’s causing, long term, tremendous civilizational damage. The West is losing credibility.

 Obama: “Civilizational damage”? What kind of weird notion is this?

 Tyranosopher: Civilizational standards are not just what make a civilization worth defending. They constitute a fundamental military asset, as Nap said. Civilizational standards are how the Athenians won at Marathon, or Salamis against the immense might of the giant Persian empire. On the verso, uncowed Sparta vanished from history, because its civilization was racist and plutocratic, something that leads to unrecoverable stupidity, among other problems.

 The drone program may have killed only a few thousand people, but the bombing of civilization itself it wrought is unequalled. (Although it may still be reverted at this point, should one be contrite enough about it.)

 Faisal Shahzad, USA citizen of Pakistani origin: “I entered a 2010 guilty plea, to try to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and I justify targeting civilians by telling the judge, ‘When the drones hit, they don’t see children’.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I say this all the time. Pay attention. I am not your average terrorist.

 Tyranosopher: You call the ones you killed, terrorists. Just like in Vietnam. However, the law says that people are innocent, until proven to be terrorists. So you do not respect the most fundamental pre-condition to law, namely that punishment never precedes conviction.

 We know for example that a 16 year old USA born citizen was killed on a beach in a USA drone attack (apparently with a number of other teens), in one of the “Signature Strikes”.  Such an assassination, in the name of civilization, is the signature of a failed civilization. For such a crime, in old republican Rome, you would have been executed the “old fashion way“. (The one Roman president Nero was condemned to by the Senate.)

 Where are the excuses for that, killing boys having fun on a beach? Where is the enquiry? Or do you, Obama, president of the USA, consider, justify and order, killing teens on beaches on the other side of the planet? Explain to me why this is not much worse than the worse pedophilia?

 Obama: As I always say, I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I am not a terrorist, by definition, but the very definition of respectability. Fear me.

 Young Salafist: If we killed you, Obama, you, and your followers would not be as respected. However we will not kill you, because you are our best agent. We kill for the Greatest Religion on Earth, in the name of the one and only God. We are not stuck in one nation, our house is the House of the rising Sun, the House Of Peace, the Ummah. My universal God is better than your national god. Watch me and other martyrs die for it.

  Obama: You can’t kill me, I am invincible. Wherever I go, there is an army protecting me. Same for my family. Taxpayers will support me and my family forever, making me forever invincible. As they did with other great USA leaders.

 Tyranosopher: Our Salafist friend here is correct, Greatest Religion beats “Greatest Nation”.  Mr. President, you are too fond of calling the USA “the greatest notion of Earth”. This does not serve the country well. Not at all.

 Obama, laughing: Nation, not notion. Keep your words cogent.

 Tyranosopher: Calling the USA “the greatest nation on Earth” is not just a ridiculous notion. It is also extremely dangerous. There is a plethora of examples in history about the extreme lethality of nationalistic hubris. Athens went down that road to hell.

 Obama: I will remember you for the next drone kill list. See who is lethal.

 Tyranosopher: You feel lethal, as a child, but supreme thoughts kill better. All you are doing, is messing up civilization. Killing crowds, just because some enemies may be there, is the end of any pretense to civilized behavior. Flaunting it, is an attitude that aggravates the practice. 

 The USA is not the first democracy proclaiming, urbi et orbi, that it had a right to kill innocent civilians. It never ended well. it’s a philosophical red line. When a civilization crosses it, it dies. Such a murderous hubris was the proximal cause of Athens’ downfall.

 “Signature strikes” the killing of civilians associated by mere physical proximity, is as low a notion as humanity ever got. You do not even pretend to hate them, or that you want to eat them.

 In the hierarchy of anti-civilizational values, “Signature Strikes” are lower than torture, because torture comes from giving some value to the person one tortures. One values the knowledge that person may have, or one appreciates the pain one inflicts to them, or one values theirmind enough to break it.

 Signature strikes are lower than hate crimes. Signature strikes are lower than even cannibalism. Signature strikes are all about smitting people utterly, as if they were insects.

 Signature strikes makes the president of the USA in a devil Picasso, signing horror with pride of office. It’s beyond terrorism. It enrages people worldwide so much, it does not even bring terror. It only brings horror for the absence of values you embody. It deserves a new name, horrorism. 

 American historian of the racist type: Tyranosopher, I would hate to call you naïve. Yet, face the facts: in WWII, we imprisoned citizens of the USA of second and third generation, if they had some Japanese ancestors. It was brutal. But the reputation of the USA as a brutal power serves the USA well. If, centuries ago, the European colons in North America had not killed nearly all the Natives, the USA would be like Bolivia or Peru. Look even at Mexico: by 1600CE, there were basically only a million natives left. Too many. Now Mexico is like half Indian.

 Tyranosopher: I am not naïve, just the opposite, you are. What worked before, to establish an empire, against naïve Neolithic Natives, can have the exact opposite effect, trying to grab resources from the rest of the world. each “Signature Strike” may kill one hater of the West, and create ten thousands. Better get your anti-missiles working well against Pakistani ICBMs…

 Herodotus, Greek historian: A more general problem is that, by deciding who, among citizens of the USA, would live or die, at your own whim, Obama, you have made yourself, symbollically and practically, into what the Greeks called a tyrannos, a tyrant. As I said of the Athenians under tyranny: …”they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master…” To establish new wisdom as Tyranosopher does, one has to be unique. But when a politician reigns as one, that’s a tyrant.

  Obama: Signatures strikes are effective. They show the power of the USA. Not only we can do it physically, but we have the moral strength to do it.

  Tyranosopher: Tyrannies are always short term effective. You do not know what “moral” means. It means: “sustainable”. A traditional war, although with supersonic bombers, drones and smart bombs, as the French republic does in Mali, is indefinitively sustainable, fair and square. But the French fight warriors, on the battlefield. They are not killing crowds of unknown people, not fighting anybody. That earns them respect, even from their enemies.

  Whereas Carthage, long a top civilization, was undone by its immoral morality, killing innocent children. You are making the USA into a modern Carthage.

  Obama: Carthage was defeated by Roman armies, not morals.

  Tyranosopher: Conventional wisdom, the seduction of the superficial, that’s what you want to overcome. Instruct yourself, young man, lest you came to be known as Obabad. The Greeks called barbararians ba-ba, because they thought like children. You add badness to the mix. Obabad.

 The planned annihilation of Carthage in a Third Punic war, was hotly debated in the Roman Senate. Many, including the imperator put in command of the destroying army, were fully aware that Rome was crossing a philosophical red line. That transgression could, and even would, bring Rome’s destruction. This was said explicitly at the time (source: Polybius). The tough-as-diamond Roman imperator cried, as he saw the great metropolis burn under the extermination assault of his crack legions. he knew Rome was sealing her fate.

  Yet, it was foreordained. The fact that Carthage had sacrificed children to the fire made the difference, in the minds of the Roman senators and the military. It was the excuse that allowed to forget the real reason for wanting the annihilation of Carthage.

  You, Obama, sacrifice children to the fire, including the occasional, highly symbolic American child. Killing other people’s children, on the other side of the earth, does not make it any less so.

  Don’t deny.

  If you insist to deny that you are flaunting child killing as a new bedrock for civilization, then make full light about who, among your drone people, decided to kill that 16 year old American born boy, and how. And if it was a honest mistake, so to speak, let’s confront it. Only then can you talk to history with an honest face.

***

Patrice Ayme

Indebted To Lies Plutocracy Is

A vast scandal is unfolding in economics. Its repercussions are horrendous: in conjunction with what i already denounced in “Indebted To Lies” (February 12, 2013), all you read about debt is false. As Paul Krugman puts it cogently in “The Excel Depression“: “Did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?”

Krugman is way too nice. There was not just a coding “error”. The deliberate malfeasance I expose below is no error.

(Notice that Krugman seems to be oozing towards admitting that we have (an excel…lent?) depression not just a lesser one; soon he will have to call the unfolding disaster a Greater Depression, just as I do!)

Harvard: We Lie, Therefore We Thrive

Notice the understatement of the Wall Street Journal (“are not as clearly linked“), in their own caption above: there is little relation between growth and debt load. And this, even in the malevolently selected countries of the extremely influential R-R paper (to be trashed below).

Also notice the biased title of the WSJ, which contradicts the essence of what follows it: the WSJ staff knows readers have little time, and, at a glance, will extract from the graph (that they will most probably not carefully examine), that “debt is a burden“. Whereas the graph says the exact opposite: debt is little burden. But the WSJ staff knows what their masters want them to say: in with the austerity, out with the economy, and the People it supports. The WSj staff has to eat and pay rent. Of these little manipulations, little minds are made.

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HARVARD CROOKS LONG GUIDED THE WORLD INTO THE ABYSS:

To destroy plutocracy, one needs to destroy first the Evil League that provides it with respectability.

A famously very connected Harvard graduate and plutocrat, Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, was one of the early supporters of Hitler. His grandfather had carried Lincoln’s coffin. The Sedgwick family is part of plutocratic central in the USA. To this day (naturally in various forms of acting).

A composer and pianist, ”Putzi” Sedgwick-Hanfstaengl wrote the songs the Nazis used, modifying his own Harvard songs. The scared and wounded Nazi leader took refuge at the home of this very wealthy American, after the failed putsch of Fall 1923. Hitler was in love with Hanfstaengl’s American wife. She prevented Hitler’s suicide, when Bavarian police came to arrest the Nazi “Guide“.

Hanfstaengl was connected by friendship to the Roosevelts, and many other influential plutocrats, themselves connected to everybody who mattered in the USA. Top Nazis came to believe, correctly, that the plutocratically controlled USA would never attack them (and so the Nazis had to declare war to the USA themselves when they found in Moscow that they would lose the war, anyway! When you have got to go, you may as well do so in a blaze of glory!)

This Harvard connection explains why the USA considered the French republic, rather than the Nazi dictatorship, its enemy after 1933. The result was World War Two, Auschwitz, Yalta, the pact with the Wahhabists, etc. As many gifts to those worthies supporting Harvard. Evil: the gift that keeps on giving to plutocrats.

Is the Ivy League resembling the Evil League, more than anything else?

***

HARVARD CROOKS STILL GUIDE THE WORLD TO OBLIVION:

I have long insisted that “plutocratic universities” are propaganda outfits for their masters. Harvard University is blatant that way, a cesspool of theoretical justifications for civilizational abuse. For all to see: one of its professors came with the ridiculous “Clash of Civilizations“, an astoundingly uninformed, but highly influential work, a sort of modern justification for “Mein Kampf“. It goes a long way to explain the support of American “neoconservatives” for Fundamentalist Wahhabism.

Larry Summers (Harvard’s president), insisted, as Clinton’s Treasury Sec., that the most valuable investment known to man would be the financial derivative. And the full power of the state was harnessed to make it so. Ever since the economy has become derivative, indeed (size real world economy: 50 trillions, not even a tenth of financial derivatives alone, 80% of it through fiscal havens).

Thanks to the Clintonians (or should I call them Goldmanians?), financiers have been taxed a maximum of 15% ever since.

I am happy to report another deleterious piece of mass mind control from Harvard, with huge consequences. In 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (R-R) released a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their “main result is that… for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP … average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” The Harvard guys professed that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate.

The work of the Harvard worthies was used, worldwide, as the main argument to engage austerity programs all over. Just when People had to be put to work, they were told they were furloughed. Never minds if people died from all the austerity (say by arriving at hospitals that had stopped providing care, from lack of funds, as happened in Portugal).

Never mind that the austerity was not applied to the hyper rich and banksters (now both richer than ever).

What else? The Harvard economists cheated. And it was deliberate, because they did so several times, and in different ways.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that their programming “mistake” was really a mistake, because, independently of that, they also massaged the data in what is obvious academic malfeasance (for example equating 19 years of solid British growth, in spite of debt above 90%, with one year of New Zealand growth, and similar biased monstrosities).

Another tactic: they deliberately misinterpreted facts (when GIs were demobilized, an economic disruption due to this was misinterpreted, by the Harvard profs, as a problem caused by debt; showing they are ignorant, or vicious, or both). 

Second problem? It should have been obvious that the Harvard professors’ work was completely wrong (Paul Krugman wants to “Blame the Pundits Too“; I concur).

***

PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD SAYS: OBVIOUSLY WRONG IN ONE CASE IS ENOUGH

To prove a theory is wrong, it’s enough to have ONE spectacular counter-example. Obviously a lot of economies grew tremendously in spite of high debt loads in the past. It happened to the USA after World War Two. Same for most European economies.

This happened in particular during the “thirty glorious years” of unabated economic expansion. Then the ruling theory, all over the West, was that growth in infrastructure, knowledge (CERN, going to the Moon, etc.), social progress (retirement, mandatory vacations), education (GI Bill, free education, all the way to universities, even in California) had primacy over all other economic aims. Inflation and debt were put in the service of these goals.

Thus it was clear that the RR fact finding was actually fact denying.

A further step in proving an old system of thought is wrong is when a simpler, more plausible theory offers itself. It does not matter the details are not in. Not only do we have counter-examples to the debt-is-bad theory, but it’s easy to build a theory of why and when debt is good.

Debt, per se, is not a problem. As long as one can reimburse it. Thus the problem is what the debt is used for. Any debt that comes due, after a very profitable investment it enabled, allows to reimburse it, is obviously an economic positive.

So why the debt phobia? Why is Obama using debt phobia to throw Social Security below the exponential train?

Right now the debt phobia is just a Trojan Horse to divert the debate way from what the plutocrats do not want to talk about. Rising the taxes on those who have most of the money and power.

***

STOP FINANCING THE RICH, INVEST IN A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY FOR THE PEOPLE:

As debt became enormous in World War II, taxes on the wealthy, in the USA, were brought up to 94%. Truman lowered them down a bit, but then president Eisenhower, a republican, brought the top tax margin rate back up to 92.5%. Ike explained he did this to reimburse the debt. Meanwhile Ike launched and financed the Interstate Freeway System. The idea: to build all over the USA a system of autobahn (just like in Germany), free to the public, would improve the economy. That was proved correct a hundred times over.

Raising the tax on the most wealthy to 92.5% would have done wonder. Obama could have financed the construction of highly profitable 250 mph (400 km/h) high speed trains in several place where it would have been profitable to do so (for example the North East and California). Or simply to build power lines out of a few places where cheap sustainable is produced or producible. (In Spring, the North West USA produces potentially more electricity from hydro that it can use and export.)

The case of Europe is similar. Taxes there are higher than in the USA, but the land is poorer and smaller (the population density is  about four times that of the USA, with fewer resources). Thus public spending in Europe ought to be even higher. For example in the matter of energy. The switch to sustainable energy, as it is done today, is proving too costly under existing technology (this is very clear in Britain, where energy costs have doubled since 2006, and in Germany where they threaten to do the same soon).

So considerably more research on new energy should be made by Europe. Instead research and education budgets are coming short of what’s needed.

***

GREAT DEPRESSION? PLEASE DEFAULT OUT OF THE OLD STUFF, & BORROW FOR THE FUTURE:

European “conservative” leaders will whine they don’t have the money to sustain their socio-economy. Of course, those neofascists and their plutocratic employers have the money, for themselves. And as far as the states are concerned, to get money, it could not be simpler: borrow. Interest rates are at record lows.

Borrow until what? Until so much economic activity explodes that money is very much in demand, and interest rates perk up. The interest rates will follow the economy. It’s mechanical.

The Netherlands just recognized this, three days ago. Not a coincidence that the great debt paper of the Harvard crooks had just crashed and burned. The Netherlands changed policy on austerity, this week, breaking spectacularly with Germany.

The Low Countries decided to forgo the austerity drive. The center-right government decided to deliberately AUGMENT its deficit by 10%, above what the EMU bylaws require. Instead of bringing their deficit below 3% of GDP (as mandated by European Monetary Union rules), they will keep it at 3.3% by refusing to make some cuts.

On April 5, Portugal’s Constitutional Court said that plans to trim public employee wages and retiree pensions—while not touching the income of other groups—violated the constitutional principle of equality. It also overturned a planned tax on unemployment benefits.

Do you really want to make Europe richer, you the “conservatives” admirers of Wall Street, infeodated to international plutocracy? Crack down on the wealthy. Not just wealthy individuals, but wealthy corporations. In particular, Europe should stop financing the corporations of the USA, the core of the plutocratic system. I am not just talking about having them pay tax (this they don’t do, allowing them to kill and devour small businesses, throughout the West… Although the BRICS do not allow them to play this game!).

On the his last day as president, Hoover signed the “Buy American Act of 1933“. That said that the government of the USA would buy only American. In the service of free trade, it was mandatory that the European governments will keep on buying American. All is fair in exploitation and spoliation. (In case the Europeans could still sell something to the USA, president Reagan (Ray-Gun?) had a reinforcement passed in 1983, the imaginatively, and revealingly named “Buy America Act“.)

That “Buy American Act” outrage to free trade was instituted 80 years ago. Meanwhile American plutocracy has kept on preaching the opposite. The European leaders do not seem to have noticed. Why? Are they paid not to notice, just like Harvard economists Carmen were paid, to bear power into the further destruction of the democracies? Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff were paid, through monies, career, honors, and reputation to claim that one cures depression by starving the economy of money.

Same for their European colleagues: paid through monies, career, honors, and reputation to claim that one cures depression by starving the economy of money, and… not to notice the “Buy America(n)” Acts.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Notes: The University of Massachusetts found a more honest version of the Rogoff-Reinhart’s paper would revise the average growth estimate for the highest-debt countries to 2.2%—or a percentage point lower than for countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of between 60% and 90%.

The head of the German Central Bank used the Rogoff-Reinhart’s claim that countries with more than 90% debt/GDP had negative growth, this pack of lies, as recently as February 2013, to justify curing depression with the hunger strike of austerity.

P/S: A faithful commenter on this site, Dominique Deux, reminded me of  “the “internal error” at the IMF which completely underestimated the negative effects of austerity measures. The IMF has recognized the mistake but its recommendations, and more importantly the policies they supposedly inspire, never wavered. I safely predict this new instance of cooked up “data” will have the same lack of consequences. Dogma trumps reality.”

It’s not just dogma, it’s first impression authored with great authority that imprints the weak minded. weak minded by purpose, of course.

Times Praises Mind Control

RULE THE MINDS, & YOU SHALL RULE THE WORLD.

Abstract: The New York Times deliberately avoids to call a duck a duck if it quacks inside the government. This strategy is revealed, explicitly, by the New York Times itself. The New York Times, by its own admission,  deliberately misinforms the public, as it judges what semantics to use, in the service of what it perceives as being the White House’s best legal strategy.

***

How can large modern societies veer towards mass murder? Why did 80 million Germans goose-step behind the Kaiser, and then Hitler, to fight the world and achieve barbarian domination? I have the simplest explanation: mind control of the masses by cruel masters through carefully contrived emotional, semantic, logical and data input.

Germany 1938. Seeing What You See: Bad For Worship

["Bird Hell" detail; by German Max Beckman, 1938. Obviously A Parody Of Hitlerland.]

Hannah Arendt, a suspect thinker, came instead with a convoluted theory (in the second edition of her “Totalitarianism”  book, in 1958). She suggested that “individual isolation and loneliness” are preconditions for totalitarian domination. Speak about pop psychology.

Was Hannah saying that the several hundred million people who embraced totalitarianism, in Europe alone, were isolated and lonely? Is that why they gathered in vast herds? When 50,000 Brownshirts paraded together, were they isolated and lonely? Were the comrades of the Politburo standing with Stalin isolated and lonely? An obviously stupid theory. It’s the exact opposite that is true.

Arendt’s fancy was actually contradicted by an explicit study of Columbia University’s Theodore Abel, published in 1938. The study “Why Hitler Came In Power” showed that the characteristic 1931-1932 Nazi supporter was employed, but not educated. The supporter’s mentality, far from being isolated and lonely, was shared by the Nazi herd. Nazi supporters were enraged by the World War One defeat, the Versailles Treaty, and all and any revolutionary movements contesting the old plutocracy.

In other words, Nazi supporters had their minds programmed expertly by the very class that caused World War One, and their own suffering.

Arendt’s weird considerations sound like excuses (for herself, for her lover Heidegger?).

To find the truth, it’s better to read Nietzsche’s broadsides against the German herd, or Hitler’s detailed explanation on how to make the multitudes goosestep, spiritually speaking. Hitler explains that the way to lead the folk (“Volk”) where it does not want to go is by using “big lies“. Nietzsche explains that Germans were in love with the instincts of the herd, and cultivated them by choice first, a will to baseness, and then because they did not know any better, that’s what they became. That’s why Nietzsche broke with his (ex) friend and fellow musician, Richard Wagner.

Now fast forward to Twentieth First Century USA. The New York Times, the ‘newspaper of record’ practices, of its own gloating admission, semantic mind control.

***

LET’S CALL EVERYTHING EMBARASSING DIFFERENTLY:

Wonders Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times “Public Editor“, about her own paper: “If it’s torture, why call it a “harsh interrogation technique”? If it’s premeditated assassination, why call it a “targeted killing”? And if a suspected terrorist has been locked up at Guantánamo Bay for more than a decade, why call him a “detainee”?”

Funny she has to ask that. Recent leaks from inside the CIA showed that CIA officials therein were afraid of International Warrants of Arrest against them in the future. So they did what bandits have always done, when they don’t fear summary execution. They switched from torture to assassination (assassinated people don’t tell tales to the International Criminal Court).

Ms. Sullivan went to ask Mr. Shane, a national security reporter in the Washington NYT bureau, and Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards of the New York Times, to respond to some of these issues.

Mr. Shane addressed the question on “targeted killings,” noting that editors and reporters have discussed it repeatedly. He wrote:

“Assassination” is banned by executive order, but for decades that has been interpreted by successive administrations as prohibiting the killing of political figures, not suspected terrorists. Certainly most of those killed are not political figures, though arguably some might be. Were we to use “assassination” routinely about drone shots, it would suggest that the administration is deliberately violating the executive order, which is not the case. This administration, like others, just doesn’t think the executive order applies…“Murder,” of course, is a specific crime described in United States law with a bunch of elements, including illegality, so it would certainly not be straight news reporting to say President Obama was “murdering” people.

So, basically “assassination” is banned by decree, so “is not the case” and murder is illegal, so it’s not “straight news“. Thus Mr. Shane opines that: 

“This leaves “targeted killing,” which I think is far from a euphemism. It denotes exactly what’s happening: American drone operators aim at people on the ground and fire missiles at them. I think it’s a pretty good term for what’s happening, if a bit clinical.”

Clinical? The CIA is a hospital, and drones, presumably, scalpels? By that token whenever somebody shoots at children, it’s “targeted killing”, not murder! Indeed, an “operator” aims at children on the ground, and fires. Mr. Shane added that he had only one serious qualm about the term: it’s not “what’s happening”.  

Indeed, that, he said, was expressed by an administration official: “It’s not the targeted killings I object to — it’s the untargeted killings.” The official “was talking about so-called ‘signature strikes’ that target suspected militants based on their appearance, location, weapons and so on, not their identities, which are unknown; and also about mistaken strikes that kill civilians.”

“Mistaken strikes”? What’s mistaken about exploding a home one knows harbor women and children, in the alleged hope to get some potential terrorist, potentially inside?

In any case, Mr. Shane calls, from his own admission, “untargeted killings” and “signature strikes” by their opposites, “targeted killings”. In other words, black will be white, as long as it would be illegal, were it black.

Such are the standards at the New York Times. One can be barbarian because one is cruel. One can also be a barbarian, because one does not know how to use words. This is where the word barbarian comes from. The Greeks viewed those who could not talk well as saying: ba ba ba ba… (Notice I avoids any mention of the babama who wants to exponentiate Social Security out of existence, in an effort of remarkable restraint.)

Finally one can be a barbarian, because one views as valid a proposition and its negation. Mr. Shane seems affected by these three versions of barbarity: cruelty, at a loss for words, and self contradiction.

***

TORTURE HAS LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS, WE CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT:

On the matter of “detainee,” Mr. Corbett called it “a legitimate concern” and agreed that the term might not be ideal. He said that it, not prisoner, was used because those being held “are in such an unusual situation – they are not serving a prison term, they are in an unusual status of limbo.”

They are not serving a prison term, but they are in prison. This is the New York Times, thinking.

The debate over the word “torture,” he said, has similar implications to the one Mr. Shane described with assassination. “The word torture, aside from its common sense meaning, has specific legal meaning and ramifications,” Mr. Corbett said. “Part of the debate is on that very point.”

Which point? What Mr. Corbett is saying is that the debate is about not torture per se, but about the “legal meaning and ramifications” of torture. Does that mean that the New York Times cannot talk about “torture“, because it has “legal ramifications” for its client?

The New York Times wants to “avoid making a legal judgment in the middle of a debate,” he added. The New York Times shall not judge before its time. We are not talking about “news” anymore, here. We are talking about judgment, once the debate, thus the news, are over.

***

NEW YORK TIMES AS A PROPAGANDA OUTFIT:

The most notorious failure of the media of the USA was when Nazi’s barbarity was not revealed to the public to the extent it deserved, in a timely manner. That’s how Hitler got on a joy ride for as long as he did.

The New York Times re-tweeted all the talking points of the Bush administration in the march to the Iraq war in 2002-2003. For years, if I sent a comment mentioning Mr. Bin Laden had been recruited and trained by the CIA and the SIA, my comment was immediately censored (I did this deliberately, just to experiment with the lemmings at the Times).  

What the authorities in Washington wanted, and it was amplified by the Main Stream media, is to make the folks believe that the Involvement of the USA in the Middle East started with a treacherous, mass murdering attack on 9/11. (My spouse worked for a firm that had offices in one of the collapsed towers, by the way, but moved just weeks before, so I’m not belittling 9/11, even on the personal level!)

In truth, 9/11 was a consequence of Washington’s policies more than that of some god crazed maniacs. And the consequences were highly predictable: after all the same trick of crashing a jumbo jet had been tried on Paris a few years earlier. Does that mean Washington never heard of Paris?

The first way to fight criminals, is to reveal, and then denounce their apparent, or suspected crimes. If there is a murder in the street, one does not call it a “targeted killing” especially if one knows that it is actually “untargeted” or a “signature strike”.

Also torture is the deliberate infliction of pain. It’s simple. Torture was stopped by European powers in the Middle Ages, because police techniques of interrogation had become more effective (and could be used legally, whereas torture could not… by law).

To stop barbarians in the modern world, the first thing to do is to uncover and denounce them. This is the job of journalism. The New York Times refuses to do this job. Instead it imagines it has another job, that of a legal authority. It also has the jobs of judge, and White House advocate. Not only it does all these things, which contradicts journalism, but it does it consciously, and deliberately.

Nazism was made possible because enough journalists and editors in the Anglo-Saxon world refused to report what the Nazis were doing. If they had, public opinion in the Anglo-Saxon world would have turned, and the collaboration with Hitler would have been declared unlawful, and then German general would have made an anti-Nazi coup.

So this is serious stuff.

And it’s still serious today. Obama basically proposed to do away with Social Security, by exponentiating out of it (more on that in another essay). What does the New York Times really know, and think about this? How come the reactions in the media have been so mild? How come not seeing what’s plain to see?

***

CIVILIZATION WITHOUT BRAINS CAN’T BE CONCEIVED, LET ALONE DEFENDED:

And so it goes. People are programmed by their (mental) environment. A devious mental environment makes for devious people. A base mental environment makes for base people. A false mental environment makes for small people. A mental environment where people learn to be only excited by trivialities makes for trivial minds.

Nietzsche condemned Christianity as a slave religion, while pointing out that the European aristocracy, while outwardly breathing Christianism, actually practiced the opposite. Nietzsche also noted that the strength of Greece came from keeping a balance between two completely opposed mentalities, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.  

Vast minds with vast personalities are more powerful than those who know only a few. When man domesticated an animal, the animals’ behavior registry got sharply reduced. A wolf is capable of much more behaviors than a dog. Domesticated animals are tools.

Tyrants rule over people because they have turned those people into low dimension minds with fewer emotions, and fewer thoughts, and less ability to form them, just like dogs relative to wolves. Ruling over weak minds is not just easier, it’s the only way. It’s also why democracy, which is more clever, keeps on defeating fascism.

Indeed a mental universe where people demand that ducks be called ducks is more powerful than one where they are not named. Intelligence is about discernment. Thus, the proper labels.

Mental freedom without mental power is only illusion.

The New York Times grandly proclaims the slogan “All News That Are fit To Print” on its front page. As pointed out above, the New York Times does not like to talk about it “while a debate is going on“.

New York Times, tell me: if “torture”, “murder”, “assassination” are not fit to print, what is fit to print?

***

Patrice Ayme

Pacifism Is Easy, Peace Harder

I knew I was going to get flak for advocating no more concession to the 29 year old hereditary king of North Korea, while making clear that crushing his tyranny was worth a war.

In the last few years, outrages of North Korea have included sinking a South Korean ship and submitting South Koreans to an artillery barrage, killing dozens. The worst offense: violating UN Security Council orders about NOT becoming a nuclear ICBM armed state. This is the densest problem. Contemplate the Plutonium ring below:

Eleven centimeters (4″) across. Explosive power: more than 100,000 tons TNT.

Yes, if it could be made magically into a ball, around five centimeters in diameter, this innocent looking ring, with neutron reflectors all around, would explode with the power of 100,000 tons of TNT. It baffles the mind. (In a so called thermonuclear bomb, much of the power can come from fission efficiently boosted by thermonuclear tricks.) 

Plutonium is the densest naturally occurring element. Plutonium is pyrophoric: it spontaneously ignites when exposed to moist air. Mr Kim Jong Un has just officially restarted one of his Plutonium making machines.

Using a Plutonium bomb as match, one can release enormous amounts of power rather easily from a mix of other elements such as deuterium, tritium, lithium deuteride and Uranium 238. (The tricks are pretty much known by all: fill the void at the center with deuterium-tritium gas,  compress lithium deuteride  around a fissionable core, within a Uranium temper, with extremely hard radiation, etc.)

Some commenters suggested I was a war monger, “over the top“. My answer:

Sorry if I left the impression that I believed Kim Jong Un was a “new Hitler”. That is not what I tried to say. My main point was otherwise subtle. It was about worldwide moods. I could have been more direct.

Kim will have 300 nuclear tipped ICBMs in ten years or so. Then what? Democracies will want to keep the overwhelming military advantage over North Korea they have now, to make sure they will not be attacked. So Japan may have 6,000 nuclear tipped rockets, South Korea, 3,000. The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty will be out of the window. China will try to have even more nukes than Korea and Japan put together.

And if you think that 100 million Vietnamese will not get nuclear armed if China is crawling with nukes, you don’t know military history. And part of India is presently occupied by China, the South China Sea is claimed by many powers, etc. Fortress USA will be projecting forward its defense lines, as it is, correctly, already doing, making China uncomfortable.

In other words, considering all the local animosities about who owns what islet in the region, nuclear war of all against all will pretty much be insured, should North Korea become a bit more of a nuclear armed power (say when it can annihilate Tokyo, as it is basically capable of doing already).

What will one say then? Those who talked about it should not have been “over the top“? (A precedent exists: Nietzsche, for condemning loud and clear what came to be known as “Nazism”, 50 years later, was himself called a Nazi, when he was in truth the enemy of the herd instinct especially around what would become the main themes of Nazism.)

Around 300 nukes in ten years for Kim Jung Un, I say. Some will sneer that I am exaggerating. Well, they need a course in (recent) physics. OK, let’s go.

***

NUCLEAR ENERGY GENESIS:

In January 1938, when, and because, war with Adolf Hitler seemed unavoidable, young Nobel Laureate Irene Curie explained to the French Ministre de la Guerre that immensely powerful nuclear bombs could be made. France hid immediately all patents related to nuclear energy.

Irene Curie had found that neutrons made Uranium 235 nuclei fission in a nuclear chain reaction. When slowed by heavy water. In June 1940, the French heavy water was loaded on a cargo ship, with some prominent nuclear physicists involved in the bomb program. The French army sank the ship during a Nazi air attack. The Nazis were satisfied.

Little did they know that everything and everybody had  been transferred secretly to another cargo ship.  The program was transferred soon to the USA. It was discovered that, one could slow down the neurons using only Boron and graphite. By nuclear transmutation (Irene’s Nobel discovery), an element could be created in nuclear reactors, Plutonium.

If one gathers enough Plutonium (isotopes 239, 240, 241) or Uranium 235 in one place, the fissioning of nuclei will create more than one neutron in the average, and thus generate ever more neurons: that’s the chain reaction, Irene’s discovery (deliberately falsely attributed to Otto Hahn by the enemies of France, and friends of sexism).

Assemble lots of this material together quickly, and a giant explosion will result. How quickly to assemble Pu239 or U235 was the trick question.

It was quickly discovered that Plutonium (especially Pu240) creates so many neutrons that the nuclear chain reaction starts too fast, before the entire material can be exposed to a full chain reaction, resulting in a fizzle.

***

NEW NUKE ARM RACE, THANKS TO CHEAP HEU:

Because Plutonium so readily explodes, a Plutonium bomb requires the implosion of a sphere of Plutonium. To realize that, in turn, requires very complicated math, and specialized very fast electronics, to fabricate lenses of high explosives and slow explosives shock waves to concentrate the Plutonium in a tight ball so suddenly that the entire material can bathe in the neutrons it generates all over before it predetonates in a sub-volume.

Uranium 235 is less reactive, so one has much more time to assemble a super critical mass. A simple gun, where a mass of U235 is fired deep into another U235 mass will do. This is EXTREMELY EASY to do.

However, producing enough U235 by separating it from naturally occurring U238/233 mix was an extremely time, space, energy, capital, and effort consuming process.

One made a gas, Uranium hexafluoride, and then passed it through thousands of filters, progressively leaving the U238 behind. The plants were gigantic, as big as a kilometer across, and used giant amounts of electricity.

Fabricating Plutonium in nuclear reactors by transmutation was much easier. It was much simpler, and cheaper to extract Plutonium from nuclear reactors, where it is made from the sort of nuclear transmutation process demonstrated by Irene Curie.

This is why nuclear bombs were made with imploding Plutonium spheres since 1945. Yet, the engineering looked so far-fetched, that the U.S. military required a test of the design before using it (@ Alamagordo).

Indeed, the military wanted to make sure that the first bomb used against Japan worked. The military wanted shock and awe, not  apathetic fizzle. So the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an Uranium gun device. Even the military was sure that it would certainly work: the Hiroshima bomb was a prototype.

Uranium 235 was too expensive to make to waste it in bombs. It was much more economical to enrich natural Uranium with the U235 isotope, by a few percent, then use that in nuclear reactors and make Plutonium there. 

Nowadays, though, things are changing. This process of ENRICHMENT has become much easier with ultracentrifuges. Ultracentrifuged gas containing more of the denser U238 tends to stick to the outside. Enrichment promises to get even easier with an even newer process, laser separation.

One knows laser enrichment works, because the USA loud and clear announced to the world it was building such a plant. Talk about talking too much.

If one can produce lots of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), cheaply, one does not need Plutonium to make bombs.

The next mystery is how rich needs to be the mix U238/U235 to make a bomb? 98% certainly works. But what about 50-50? Nobody knows. I fear that it works (using thermonuclear tricks one can fission usually placid U238; making thus not just a “H bomb” of a sort, up to megatons powerful, but also a very dirty one)…

We have therefore attained an extremely dangerous situation with the proliferation of nukes. Billions of pacifists praying the other way will not change that. The giant plants of old fashion enrichment were easy to spot. Small underground chambers with lasers will be nearly impossible to spot and destroy.

***

ANTI-WAR JIHAD REQUIRED:

One thing the Qur’an got right is that the concept of Jihad is part of core humanism. Jihad means ”struggle, contest, effort,” from the infinitive of jahada “he waged war, he applied himself to.”

Kim Jong Un commands the fourth largest army in the world. However its power is quickly waning. But for the nukes.

Kim’s differences with Hitler are many: Kim was always pampered, a man of wealth, taste and vast appetite, an hereditary plutocrat, Hitler was dirt poor, and shot at by the French for four years. Kim is an overweight smoker, Hitler was a lean vegetarian, who neither drank, nor smoked. Kim has a charming wife, whereas Hitler got married at the last hour (OK, last 5 hours). Hitler was also in his forties when he got to responsibilities. Whereas Kim Jong Un is only 29 year old. Kim Jong Un also does not have a racist agenda, to my knowledge.

I was not making an analogy between Kim and Hitler, but between the way this crisis ought to be treated and the way the Hitler problem was treated… All too late. Now, of course, to this day, some are whining about the cruelty of Britain and France, coming to the rescue of Poland. Such people fondly remember Nazism. They are frequently found in the USA, a country where, when the mother of Obama got married to a Kenyan, such a depravity was unlawful in many states.

If France and Britain had not intervened, not only would the Nazis have killed all the Jews, and many other minorities, but also they would have killed all the Poles, maybe all the Slaves, etc.  The Nazis did organized the holocaust of the Poles, even setting up Auschwitz for them. But the pressures of the world war distracted the Nazis from that task, and, in spite of a good start in 1939-1940, they killed only six millions Poles in the end.

The racist, fascist MOOD that arose in Europe, starting before 1914, was not barred until August 1939. Nietzsche pointed out that crazy militaristic racist fascism was well started in Germany by 1880. There was, especially in the 1930s, an infection of fascism, worldwide. Japan, Germany, Spain, among others, fell to fascism in the 1930s. In the USA, the country nearly did fall into fascism, and then its plutocrats took command in lots of countries, including Italy, Germany and Spain.

Ultimately, fascism had to blocked, with ultimate violence. This is what Poland, France and Britain did in August 1939. They refused to give another inch to Hitler.

Right now we are facing the potential rise of something similar. The rise of a MOOD OF NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL. Worldwide. That was my main point. To pretend that I said: Hitler = Kim, frankly is a smokescreen masking my main idea.

If Kim Jong Un is not struck down, nuclear blackmail will be rewarded. Other fascist regimes will be inspired. China, right now, is opposed to what North Korea is doing.

Said Xi, the new Chinese president, April 6 2013: “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains. While pursuing its own interests, a country should accommodate the legitimate interests of others.”

Yet, if leaders see that nuclear blackmail is rewarded, some are bound to feel that it works.

Kim Jung Un is a typical plutocrat: he speaks several languages, and has two billion dollars stashed in Swiss banks alone.

He thinks he knows his fellow plutocrats well, just as Hitler did. Hitler had been told by his hyper wealthy advisers that democracies would never find the will to block him. He came to believe that deeply. There is little doubt that Kim Jung Un believes something similar.

The worldwide plutocracy has actually NO interest to a full blown war with North Korea. Be it only because, when the mood of blowing up a few plutocrats has been adopted, it may prove persistent, and they may be the next ones to be blown. Something like that happened after WWII in Europe, and the USA.

Indeed, a full blown (world, or not) war would probably lead to a great equalitarian wave, as happened, in Europe or the USA, after WWII.

The question of tax avoiding hyper rich corporations and individuals is indeed related. it can only come from those to whom jihad is natural. 

After World War Two eleven million GIs required to be served. The government could not argue with the 7% of the population, the war ready young men, who had just been trained to kill, in the name of civilization. So taxes on the hyper rich were brought up to 92.5% in the following decade. In the USA.

This why, when Roman plutocracy grew, it tended to employ foreign troops. They were unlikely to require a revolution at home, and if they did, it did not matter, as their home was out there. 

The Romans used to say that, if you want peace, prepare for war (Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum). But the truth is even worse. When maximizing peace, do not prioritize the minimization of war.

Nobody said life was not tough. But there is nothing like it.

***

Patrice Ayme

North Korea: CRUSH INFAMY!

In a few words: Killing lethal moods swiftly is the only way to survival for a civilization increasingly surrounded by ever more deadly dangers. One way, or another, the North Korean regime has to be disposed off. Quick. No half measures will do. Against a power crazy, cornered nuclear beast, any moderation will contend in vain. All the democracies have to understand this, and act accordingly.

*** 

Abstract. War is Homo’s most fateful behavior. Goodness often cannot do without it. Man has evolved partly intrinsically bad, because not only is the planet finite, implying war, but forceful progress, ferociously defended, has always been the only way out of wanton fangs and claws. The law was invented to sheperd new technology away from new bestiality. Better beasts against lower beasties, that is the dirty work enlightenment has to go through, just as one washes clothes, from time to time. 

ICBM Trajectories To Hawai’i, West USA On Map

In war, leaders turn into gods, deciding who may, or will, die. Men become death. Yet, in the better cases, war can kill the worst moods, not just other men. With North Korea, such is the case.

With many times more population than the Earth can sustain, dawn may rise on an age of war as never seen before. Unless more advanced discipline, that is, more law, and much more futuristic technology, allow to master the demographic situation. Good discipline is when our better angels are enforcing it. Good technology is when anti-ballistic missiles missiles are reigning, rather than what they are supposed to intercept. 

In this context, if a pretext arises to annihilate North Korean fascism, by force, it should be jumped on. Sometimes blatant usage of force is good. Many are the very strong reasons for this. To start with, North Korean fascism has crossed all the philosophical red lines.

It’s the first time a regime begs for food, by threatening Armageddon. Your food, or your life.

It’s not a question of advocating the first good world war around the corner, but a case of precisely the opposite, of desperately clinging to a greater notion of planetary peace. And not just in the context of Korea, but of the entire planet. The age of war will certainly arise, should the mood of aggression be encouraged by brainless pacifists.

One wants to avoid the contagion of having countries around the world believe that nuclear fascism worked, because democracy left it not just unpunished, but rewarded.

That mood, that fascism had been left unpunished, or even rewarded, is precisely why allies of democracy in World War One, such as Russia, Japan or Italy turned to fascism after WWI. They observed that German war criminals, culprit of a deliberately planning a World War of wanton aggression for August 1914, had not been punished. And that some of them thrived (Schacht).

(In truth the Kaiser, and its top generals, should have tried for various outrageous war crimes, not by coincidence the same crimes that made the Nazis’ fame later. Correctly tried, he Kaisers and his co-conspirators would have been hanged. Not coincidentally that would also have had the positive side effect to remove criminals such as Luddendorff, Schacht or Hidenburg, who were top Nazis, one way or another: the former two chaperoned Hitler, the third nominated him.)

Repeating the performance with nuclear weapons ever more widely available, would have even more dreadful consequences.

It is timely for the USA to remember that it is the betrayal, by the USA, of its parents, France and Britain, and humanity in general, that enabled Hitler to score from 1936 until his armies froze in the suburbs of Moscow in December 1941. The pseudo-pacifists, intrinsic collaborators of evil as they are, should be especially reminded of this. And the following corollary:

Those who know history are condemned not to repeat it. 

(Fortunately Obama knows history better than the plutocratically tainted Franklin Roosevelt.)

In 2013, the USA can count on the formidable strategic deterrent of the European Union spearheaded by France and Britain. But the USA better be ready to go the whole way, right away with its East Asia allies. The question is whether democracies such as South Korea and Japan will win, rather than the fascist  regime principle, in a nuclear context. Should the USA be reluctant to smash North Korea, it would favor the latter rather than the former.

(This, unfortunately is a possibility: the Chinese plutocracy is little more, nowadays, than an antenna, a subsidiary, of the one centered around Harvard and Wall Street; major USA plutocrats would not want their main tool, the People’s Republic of China, broken, and that tool has been cooperating with North Korea since the “communist” era of the early 1950s.)

History, logic and wisdom show that the first line of defense is to inform North Korea that the only concession worth making, is to consent to engage it in total war. There again the situation faced with Hitler is enlightening. In some important ways the present situation is worse. Tolerating North Korea is not just tolerating fascism and plutocracy over democracy, it’s also tolerating nuclear blackmail for planetary guidance over the most basic common sense.

***

THE HEAVY RESPONSIBILITY OF THE USA IN THE 1930s:

The situation with North Korea is clearer than it has ever been with any extremely lethal fascist regime in the past. The regime has to be changed, using force, one way or another. In the soft version, North Koreans, faced with annihilation, do it themselves. So the world democratic leadership should make clear to the NORTH KOREAN MILITARY THAT THEY WILL BE TERMINATED, should they not get rid of the terrorizing dictatorship that they let themselves be guided by.

That solution, execution, and a coup, did not happen with Hitler. But it could have. It nearly did. It certainly would have happened if the Anglo-Saxon part of the West (plus Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden) had not been collaborating with Hitler (each in its own way).

More specifically, German marshalls and generals could not figure out, all too long, on which side Great Britain, and especially the USA, were. Each time Great Britain or the USA made a new deal or concession with Hitler, Hitler’s top generals, who were GRIMLY DETERMINED TO GET RID OF HITLER, were undercut. The German generals wanted to appear as the saviors of Germany, not the ones undermining the great National-Socialist German Workers’ revolution (to give the Nazi party its full name).

One should avoid that same slippery slope with North Korea (Clinton, Bill, the guy who brought us the reign of financial derivatives, and too big to jail bankers, cut deals with North Korea; so here we are, facing nuclear strikes!). It should be made clear to the world’s united fascists, that, threatened with (nuclear!) terror, the democracies will ALWAYS ANNIHILATE regimes playing that sort of “games”

“Nuclear threats are not a game,” Ban, the UN secretary general, a Korean,  in connection with N.Korea’s nuclear blackmail  said at a news conference in Andorra on April 2, 2013. “Aggressive rhetoric and military posturing… could lead down a path that nobody should want to follow.” My main argument is that rewarding this, is an even worse path.

Although the primary culprits of Nazism were the crazy Germans of the 1930s, themselves, of course, enormous manipulations of public opinion by Anglo-Saxon plutocrats caused the apparition, in Great Britain and the USA, of a mindset collaborating with Nazism. That mindeset was re-amplified back in Germany as Germans, and especially the Nazis, could appreciate all the help from the USA the Nazi party, and then regime, was getting.

Anti-French feeling, prominent with the London financier and economist Keynes, rose in that context; the French republic became the explanation of all that was bad in Germany, as far as much of the Americans elite was concerned (it goes on to this day, in a remarkable case of mental inertia).

World War Two killed 75 millions, 3% of the world population. Could it have been (mostly) avoided? Yes. Is there an application to the situation with North Korea? Yes.

In 1939, the USA, entangled with Nazi Germany through its plutocrats, passed a law calling its parents, France and Britain, “belligerent countries” (because France, followed by its reluctant poodle Britain, had attacked Hitler).

As it turned out, France and Britain were right to attack Hitler. However, in the first ten months of the war, more than 95% of the fighting against the Nazis was made exclusively by the Poles and the French. On May 10 1940, France had 110 divisions engaged against Hitler’s 160 divisions. Britain had only ten divisions (plus one tank brigade). (Various traitors such as Belgium and the Netherlands found themselves arttacked by Hitler, mostly put off balance the French military, so, instead of helping France, helped efficiently in her demise.)

Carefully forgotten by official history, the most significant contributions of the USA to the war effort in 1939, helped Adolf Hitler. OK, not a thesis to make friends with! Friends trespass, truth stays.

***  

NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL OUGHT NOT TO BECOME THE NEW PARADIGM:

President Obama, contrarily to Franklin Roosevelt, was not born and raised in the plutocracy, and knows history much better (Roosevelt’s unexplained, long term anger against France, and his urge to cut Europe into small pieces, is a testimony to his lack of a sense of history; in the fullness of time, for the USA to undercut the beautiful civilization out of which it sprang, is self destroying).

Moreover, differently from 1939, when Hitler looked like a distant asset of the USA, this time the USA is on the frontline. A president of the USA will not be able to claim surprise as with Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. The North Korean military has just announced that it has been authorized by Mr. Fatso to conduct nuclear strikes on the USA.

North Korea’s 2013 nuclear threats were apparently to get “concessions”. Nuclear blackmail is a new mood on the world scene, a new mood in history. A CASUS BELLI, PER SE. No nation has ever engaged in idle nuclear threats before (nuclear dissuasion is an entirely different thing). On the face of it, nuclear blackmail is a new form of terrorism. Nuclear terrorism.

It’s not because a regime is led by obviously crazed maniacs, that it should not be taken seriously. In 1939, the USA did not take Hitler, seriously. The USA did not stand with its parents, France and Britain, or even democracy, civilization, or common sense, and basic humanity, against fascist thugs. Quite the opposite.

***

WHY THE NORTH KOREAN DICTATOR IS CRAZY, AND WHY HE WON’T STOP, UNTIL DESTROYED:

Hitler had good reasons to be angry and desperate in 1945. The Nazi dictator had actually the means to kill millions in 1945, using jet bombers (that flew too fast to be intercepted) and huge storage of nerve gas. Hitler did not even contemplate the possibility. Whereas the insane Mr. Kim poses in front of  map that says he plans to kill dozens of millions or so. Mr. Kim is not too worried; he is obviously not even on a diet. He is an old hand at terror as the way to the best life, the only life he knows.

The present North Korean dictator spent nearly ten years in rich boarding schools in Switzerland. Many say that would make him somebody one can trust. Quite the opposite. Mr. Kim knows that it is terror that brought him (and his father before him), the ultimate plutocratic lifestyle: buying anything, getting away with anything (not just mass murder).

Hoping that Mr. Kim is one of us, a frequent reaction with common people I interviewed, because he has always lived like the ultimate plutocrat shows how brainwashed We the People has become. Plutocrats are not like us!

To believe that just because plutocrats are spoiled they will always be keen to not make waves, is similar to the reasoning of the 1930s that Von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, had got to be reasonable in the end, because he was an extremely rich wine merchant, with a vast, luxurious apartment in central London, where he entertained the British oligarchy. Hitler himself, not just the British high society, believed this.

Von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg, for the part he played in setting up the conditions for World War Two, by misleading a lot of people. It’s clear that, should missiles start flying, the young Mr. Kim’s responsibility will be much greater than that of von Ribbentrop. In other words, Mr. Kim is a potential criminal of the highest order. Already making nuclear war threats put him off the scale. That he had a privileged youth, thanks to the murder of thousands, if not millions, makes him even more so.

Mr. Kim was born and raised in a world of terror, where terror is the friend that kept on giving to him. What he knows at this point is that many North Koreans want him dead, and all too many of his own generals are wondering why this brat, half their age, gives them dangerous orders. Apparently there was already at least one assassination attempt.

By the time France and Britain declared war to Hitler, there had been no less than 24 (two dozen) known assassinations attempts against  Adolf Hitler (including some by SA and SS, some all the way up in the army command, all the way to Generalfeldmarschall, and higher!). Those assassinations attempts motivated Hitler to further an ever more outrageous, ever more dangerous situation, in the hope of activating the fascist instinct that makes people group up brainlessly behind their leader in case of lethal threat.

The top Nazis were in the usual position that top plutocrats always find themselves in, when they have got too far. When their devotion to the Dark Side has brought them far enough, the safest course, the only course, is to get ever worse. 

Mr. Kim, the North Korean dictator, sees two alternatives: on one side being arrested, tortured, jailed, tried or assassinated, and, on the other side, playing nuclear war games. With the hopes that he can score big that way (say through concession by the West, as he used to get from Clinton, Bill, Lewinsky Maximus). As his father did before him.

Then, after his hoped-for abject concesssions from the West, Mr. Kim would appear to be Mr. Indispensable, saver, if not father, of his nation. That is why Mr. Kim will never stop, because the only hope he has, to survive, is to instill in us enough horror, that we submit abjectedly, ever more. At some point, that will mean actually launching a nuclear tipped missile, unless Mr. Kim is physically neutralized first.

***

KILL NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL NOW:

Looking forward, nuclear blackmail should be viewed as a war crime. If one makes a death threats against, say, the president of the USA, it’s legally punishable. The same should a fortiori be true when one makes threats against millions of people.

Any regime that engages in nuclear blackmail ought to be discontinued. Taking North Korea out, would incite leaders who do not think very well in Iran or Pakistan, let alone Beijing, or Moscow, and the individuals attending to them, to think more carefully in the future. It’s a question of annihilating a mood that feels nuclear blackmail works. That mood will grow, lest it’s killed in its North Korean egg.

If that mood grows, the situation will become very hard to control. One of the problems in 1939-1940, is that the French republic found itself at war with no less than five hostile countries or gangs rendered crazed by fascist thugs: the Nazis, the Italian fascists, the murderous Soviets, the Japanese imperial machine, and (most of) the American plutocracy (the latter pulling everybody’s strings directly, but for the Japanese, who, nevertheless, through the formal machinery of the Axis, were submitted to their influence; after all Yamaoto studied at… Harvard, just as one of Hitler’s earliest (1921) sponsors).

Although France could have handled just one of these enemies with 99% probability of winning, with so many enemies together collaborating suddenly, the Republic was at the mercy of a shove by a combination of high command incompetency, fate and betrayal. As happened. (One of the many nefarious consequences being the Holocaust of more than 50 millions.)

Right now, the West can smash the North Korean dictatorship completely, and easily. Others who want to help the infamy in North Korea are welcome to stand on the battle field, and be smashed too. We may as well have it now, on the time and place of our own choosing.

Tomorrow will be something else. There is no doubt that, if Mr. Putin sees that North Korea is getting concessions, he will become even more aggressive than he already is. On the other hand, if he contemplates every single palace of Mr. Kim reduced to ashes, he will reconsider his present drift towards ever more aggression and tyranny.

Indeed, after the Troika was very firm on Cyprus’ mobsters’ activities, the Kremlin backed off. If the Troika had been impressed by the threats of Medvedev and Putin, we would still be giving respect to gangsters (instead, Cyprus’ justice is now turning against the politicians and oligarchs it suspects got paid by the Russian mob).

***

TO ENCOURAGE A COUP, NO CONCESSION WHATSOEVER:

Democracies have to make junior, or more moral military in a fascist regime realize that they better not collaborate.

The first way to take a fascist regime out is to make very clear that anybody contributing to such a regime will be tried for war crimes, and that the regime, should it engage in outrageous threats, confirmed by aggression, will be taken out. To back up that threat, it has to be real.

One should not repeat what happened with Hitler. The top German brass had contacted the British government to ask it to declare that Britain would stand with France and declare war, should the Nazis engage in one more provocation. The idea was that then the German generals, headed by Beck, the head of the army, would make a coup, and justify it to the German Volk by observing that Hitler’s march to a war with France and Britain, would destroy Germany.

A similar situation happened a bit earlier in Japan: junior officers tried a coup against the top military-plutocratic brass. Strong support by the West against those officers may have been effective. In any case it may have make top officers such as USA educated Yamamoto (head of the Navy) think twice. 

Instead of making the declaration the German generals asked for, British traitors told everything to Hitler. That made all subsequent coup attempts much more difficult. It is certain that, should Britain have clearly declared in 1938 that it would go to war against Hitler with France, Beck would have got rid of the Nazis (they were easy to eliminate for the army in 1938).

In North Korea, as in Nazi Germany, millions of rather well meaning naïve idiots are the main support of the regime. One has to show them that their leaders bring them doom and gloom, and only doom and gloom. And never, ever, the smallest positive thing.

***

SHOULD ONE FAIL TO ACT…

A most significant difference, at this point, between the 30 year old fatso in Pyongyang and Hitler, is that Hitler never had a nuclear weapons program. The Nazis had been told by their ignorant scientists (Hahn, Heisenberg, etc.) that nuclear bombs were not possible. (France had started her bomb program in January 1938, Japan did have three nuclear programs, the main one in (occupied) North Korea.)

Another difference is that, six years into his reign, Hitler was at war with Poland, and the French and British empires. The North Korean dynasty is in its third generation, and it’s getting ever more absurd, crazy, and lethal

The scared and scary brat in North Korea may have 300 weaponized, miniaturized nukes, and perfectly working ICBMs, in ten years. Then what? Dozens of millions dead? 

In ten years, the nuclear brat in Korea will be more scared than ever, more crazy and lethal than ever, and would believe, should he succeed in his present maneuvers, that ever more blackmail will be ever more profitable. By then he may have more allies (contemplate Putin’s unstable, phantasmagoric and childish mind).

Moods are important. Mussolini was Hitler’s determined enemy, before he realized, that, after all, they were fellow fascists. Stalin, and his cabinet of Soviet comrades just as phantasmagorically, went the other way, from German generals, and Hitler’s best friend and fan (!), to their most determined enemies.

The German slip, from imperial fascism in July 1914, to racial mass murdering fascism by 1933, was greatly due to the mood that whoever the Nazis and their fellow travelers thought counted in the USA, and Britain, was with them, against France (and then against the Jews).

Once the fascist instinct has taken over an entire population, said population has to be defeated as the large single minded idiotic monster it has become. The Nazis were still fighting like mad men in April 1945, when most of Germany was covered by foreign armies. Units were formed of German kamikaze pilots to ram their planes against Allied bombers. The first suicide collision brought down two American superfortresses… So do not doubt an instant that many a North Korean officer is foaming at the mouth to visit nuclear fire on all the cities of the USA (among other places).

The West should not be afraid to impose a new mood now, because not only its survival, but the fate of the biosphere depends upon taking the toughest decisions, and very soon.  The new mood should be that the West will not hesitate, as Voltaire ordered, to crush infamy. Especially when it has to do with saving reason.

China and Russia have to face the fact that their own creature, North Korea, is threatening to engage in nuclear war. That is their responsibility. This is not something that happened in the 1950s. 

President Truman fired Mac Arthur, because he said that Mac Arthur “wouldn’t respect the authority of the President”. It had nothing to do with nuclear war. Had North Korea be endowed with the capability of waging nuclear war, and threatened the USA with nuclear strikes in the 1950s, Truman would certainly have unleashed Mac Arthur all the way to Stalin’s Moscow. 

Hitler had not even threatened France and Britain when the two democracies gave him an ultimatum on September 1, 1939. Why did France and Britain engaged in a world war? Crush infamy! At least, this time, and in a striking contrast with what happened in 1939, the USA can be sure that, should nuclear war be engaged in Asia, it can count on its parents to help keep Mr. Putin in check, manu militari.

Voltaire felt very strongly about his metaprinciple: Écrasons l’infâme (“Let’s crush infamy“). So strongly that he signed his letters with Ecr. L’inf. (Cru. inf.)

***

Ecr. L’inf., Patrice Ayme

Euro Derangement Syndrome

Abstract: Paul Krugman’s campaign against the European currency is reaching new heights of absurdity. In his frenzy, he now advocates catastrophe, any catastrophe, ”to exit from the euro“.

***

Paul Krugman passes in the USA for the “conscience of a liberal”. He is now recommending to invest in the future, insisting that debt for jobs or education is no sin, as I was doing several years ago.

However, Krugman has also Euro derangement syndrome. Paul Krugman wants Greece to become like Argentina. More specifically he recommends that Greece follow the disastrous sequence of events that started in 2001 in Argentina.

That, especially for an economist, is astounding. In 2002, Argentina defaulted and inflation reached 40%. Only during the month of April 2002, inflation in Argentina was in the double digits. In four weeks, prices officially augmented by more than 10%. This is what Krugman recommends for, would have liked to happen to, Greece, Cyprus… Anything, anybody, whatever, to break the Euro. Euro derangement syndrome.

As we will see, Argentina’s economic situation, upon a severe collapse of the financial system was much better than that of Greece, or Cyprus would be. Argentina has everything, including a giant, extremely fertile territory,  extending from the tropics to sub-polar Patagonia. Argentina was once the second richest country in the world, per capita.

However, Argentina is generally recognized by everybody, even economists, to have become a basket case. And that, for political reasons. Political mismanagement was so acute it extended to the economy.

Greece was also mismanaged: there was a civil war after World War Two, between Greek communists, and Anglo-American forces (who already knew what was best for Greece; that ugly war killed more than 158,000 officially, and was accompanied by the adoption/kidnapping of Greek children from internment camps to the USA).

Later a dictatorship of colonels, generaly viewed as put in place by the American secret services (following the orders of Wall Street, a place located few miles from Krugman’s mansion).

Greece was admitted to the European Union, as long as it became a democracy, first. Thus it escaped direct USA management (and tyranny, I avoided the pleonasm). It was a great success. Probably left many an American plutocrat frustrated.

But Wall Street did not forget its old Hellenistic dominion. Goldman-Sacks cooked up the numbers used for the admission of Greece to the Eurozone.  Goldman’s cooked numbers were believed at the Eurostat (the statistic arm of the EU). Maybe because Wall Street has agents throughout the European machinery (Mario Monti, ex Italian PM, and Mario draghi, head of the ECB were partners at Goldman-Sacks).

Of course Wall Street has agents, or should we say brains? all over the (plutocratic) universities of the USA. Such as Princeton, Harvard… Here is Krugman in the integrality of a March 28, 2013, blog post of his:

“What’s the Greek for Corralito?

It’s now three years since I suggested a possible route to Greek exit from the euro: a banking crisis, followed by sharp limits on bank withdrawals similar to Argentina’s 2001 corralito, and then — with the panic argument against exit removed — reintroduction of a domestic currency.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Despite intense suffering, the Greek political elite’s commitment to the euro has proved incredibly strong. My analysis of the economics wasn’t wrong, but my political guesstimates were off.

Still, Cyprus is now following the first part of the script. And let me ask again: what, exactly, is the point of remaining on the euro? The convenience and efficiency of a single currency is gone; meanwhile, the future for Cyprus on the euro is one of years of grinding deflation and catastrophic austerity. Is the hope of someday, somehow restoring the status quo ante enough to justify all of this?”

Corralito meant to corral Argentines, as if they were hoofed animals to be domesticated. After being corraled, those fierce stallions, the Argentines, rioted violently. As I said, inflation was 40% in 2002, and GDP per head fell 20% in the three years following the corralito. But that’s what Krugman;s professional advice is. Why? A hint:

Amazingly, the corralito ended up being good business for some American banks. They negotiated with their accomplices in the Argentine government to receive compensation bonds for the “missing” money, which had never really left their banks, only moving from one branch to another. These American banks made richer by the corralito have their world headquarters a few miles from Krugman’s mansion.

Krugman does not seem to have noticed that banks in Cyprus were bankrupt. The situation was exactly that defined by the word: bankrupt. The banks were ruptured. They had to close. They closed for 12 days.

Why, how did the banks reopen on March 28, 2013, on the same day Krugman wrote the note above? Obviously, Krugman does not know. He shows no inkling that he knows, or understand, what happens. In Krugman’s mind, Europe is only a malevolent force.

Banks reopened in Cyprus, because the European Central Bank sent to Cyprus huge shipping containers full of Euro bank notes. That was ONE point of remaining on the Euro: having a currency. Krugman cannot know this, because he sees no point at being on the euro, that’s his metaprinciple, his fundamental emotion that rules over all his logic and data gathering.

Curiously, Krugman seems to be unaware of this basic fact. That the money was shipped by the ECB. Maybe he is unaware that in a free market economy, one needs a currency?

If Cyprus switched suddenly to its own currency, Cypriot debt would explode, the worth of Cyprus would be cut by half, or more, inflation on food and fuel would reach instantaneously 50%. The catastrophe would be immense.

As other texts of Krugman reveal, the Princeton Nobel Laureate is only aware of the first fact, the debt explosion thing, and it thoroughly confuses him. The other facts, which are much more important, although they are more fundamentally economic, he has no idea of, nor does he seem to care.

Krugman does not seem to realize that one can default on debt, but not on fuel, and, one cannot, a fortiori, default on food!

Krugman wants Cyprus to be like Argentina, but does not realize Cyprus imports French wheat, whereas Argentina’s economy turned around after 2002, greatly thanks to massive exportation of extremely expensive soybean to the People’s Republic of China. Details, details untended, and before you know it, the devil is attendance. Argentina is not only completely self sufficient on food, but it’s one of the world’s greatest agricultural exporter. Cyprus is not self sufficient in any of the economics fundamentals, by a long shot.

I will follow quickly with an in depth essay to justify what I just wrote, in more excruciating details, and explore why it is that Krugman has… What, gone crazy? Or is it simply ugly American imperialism, Wall Street style, at its best? Is it simply because, bottom line, Krugman lives richly off a system that has Wall Street as its skeletton?

A system of imperialism and exploitation, so thorough that it pervades the heart, so much so, that the mind goes crazy?

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Is Argentina doing well now? Officially, Argentina has now 10% inflation (but non-governmental evaluations puts it at 25%). The evidence that Argentina is not doing well economically extends to the mental. Argentina is deeply disturbed. So deeply disturbed that it does not mind to flaunt its threatening obsession by islands initially settled by the French (“Malouines” from Saint Malo), 500 kilometers away from the closest Argentinean coast.

 Paul Krugman, does not seem anymore afraid to flaunt his nationalistic obsession than Argentinean leaders are. I like and approve many of the economic policies of president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. But one has to understand she had to put them in place after generations of mismanagement in Argentina. To have similar policies in Europe could only be the consequence of disasters that have not happened. And will not, because the economic disasters in Argentina were the product of dictatorship. And also of the influence of the Chicago Boys. Are the Princeton Boys any better?

Note 2: There was actually a campaign out there, probably orchestrated by the likes of Goldman-Sacks, complete with doctored graphs, that present ”Krugman’s” ideas above.  See the article in “Capital.gr” in 2011. Shall we see Krugman as part of this campaign? Tell us it’s not true, Paul…

Truth Is Hell: Iraq, etc.

TRUTH DIGGING CONSISTS IN UNMASKING EVILS:

Abstract: I celebrate the Iraq invasion my way, pointing out some of the devils, or evils traditionally ignored. The lack of learning after the disastrous Iraqi crusade is directly due to the persistence, in the USA, of the power structure that brought the war. The war itself was a giant red herring to hide much worse, the collusion between Washington and some of its worst creatures.

A red herring that between 2003 and 2007, killed more than a million Iraqi. A red herring that caused morality in the USA to collapse, and stay collapsed, every day that the war criminals are not prosecuted (interestingly many major French politicians are on trial in France for unlawful activities in Iraq… for much lesser alleged crimes than the ones Bush and company would be charged with).

Often devils (O’Connor, Saint Louis, Joan of Arc) are still viewed honorably.

With Saint Louis, the Dark Side overwhelmed any other side. Contrarily to his reputation. [In the Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 76 meters high, that he had built in 33 months.]

This failure to perceive devils for what they are is a consequence of the same cognitive-moral failure that brought us Bush, and his adulation by the sheeple. A lack of attention to the details, where devils lurk. Ever since there were evil beasts, and they wore camouflage, precisely because they were evil.

Democracy only survives if a truth machine, elucidating all hidden devils. If the devil is in the details, only the devil knows the truth. Truth should strive to go where evil lurks.

***

WITHOUT CORRECT DETAILS, HISTORY IS JUST THE HOUSE OF DEVILS:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Said Edmund Burke, who added: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Sounds good. Yet in Burke’s mind, his version of history called to invade France, destroy the Constitutional government there, and  replace it by the Ancient Regime of time honored plutocrats and theocrats. Never mind that king Louis XVI himself had spent all his long reign trying to make plutocrats pay. The alternative was default. So Louis called for a revolution.

Burke yearned for the likes of Saint Louis. Somebody who kills in good faith.

Saint Outside, Devil Inside.

Saint Louis was a co-patron of the Order of Saint Francis. By modern standards, he would have been caged immediately (see below). Nice to see the present pope being unaware of these intricacies. So he was with the Argentinean dictator Videla who he used to feed.

Never mind that Louis XVI himself, as king, had initiated, condoned, and literally signed on the French Revolution. Burke’s murderous policy was implemented, bringing the death of millions, in France alone. And many times that, over all of Europe. Armies roamed from Lisbon to Moscow.

In the end, Human Rights won, which revolted Burke so much, that he thought moral to risk killing much of Europe for it (as France was three times england, and as the government there was constitutional, to call for an invasion was to call for devastation throughtout Europe, as, indeed, happened).

Unfortunately for Burke and his followers, Human Rights are now the core of the charter of the United Nations. That god who Burke had the presumption to help, is in full retreat, except in the most desolate places (that will include the vacuity of many an American youth’s mind).

Burke was a hero to crypto-fascists such as Hayek and Friedman, who provided the “intellectual” justification for atrocious dictatorships from Chili to Argentina, all the way up to Mexico, just as Heidegger provided it for Nazism. Hayek, Friedman and their ilk, actually provided the ideology  for the new plutocratic order we are enjoying nowadays, all the way to Moscow, Cyprus and Dubai. (More on these forsaken pirates havens in another essay soon.)

So Burke lives to this day, in very many places, including the red hot anti-French hate among a significant part of the Wall Street journal readership (I’m a subscriber, so in a good position to judge.)

In a similar vein, the famous elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, started his mesmerizing work, “Mein Kampf” with pages of (anti-French pseudo-) history. Same idea as Burke: hit on human rights hard, right away. Only then did the fascist Guide switch to the ethological description of Jews in Vienna.

By April 1945, and 70 million dead later, the Guide conceded he had been misguided all along about the Germans and the Slavs.

So it’s not just enough to remember history, it’s important to know history, that is the facts as they really happened. History is about the details, and the devils therein, all of them. Leave none unturned.

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PLUTOCRACIES USE THOSE POOR DEVILS, MERCENARIES:

In “Marches Of Folly“, an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman asks: “Did we learn anything from Iraq?”.

“Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.”

Let me comment  here right away on Krugman’s “somehow”. “Somehow” is the crux. A quick historical reminder helps to understand the madness that gripped the USA.

A similar situation happened after the Second Punic War. Carthage’s own mercenaries revolted, and attacked Carthage. Carthage defeated them with great difficulty.

Why did Carthage employ armies of mercenaries? Because it was a plutocracy. At that time, the Roman republic was a rather direct democracy. So Rome could bring up armies of citizens, who were fighting for themselves. Self motivation made Roman soldiers much more determined than any of their paid adversaries.

The lesson of that disaster was that Carthage had to become much more democratic. Ironically, considerably enriched by conquests all over, plutocracy simultaneously took Rome over (and that was going to lead to the crash of Greco-Roman civilization).

How does this relate to the “somehow”? Very simple.

Carter, the very Christian president, had launched war, secretly, against Afghanistan. Although he had entire armies of goons at his disposal, the Geneva Fourth Convention violator in Washington needed more, to attack an entire country. Using a mercenary army raised by the Saudi plutocrats was the solution implemented in 1979.

Al Qaeda was initially an organization created by the CIA and the Saudi Intelligence Agency: they literally went to fetch the young Osama Bin laden in Turkey. As he was very pious, the bellicose side of the Qur’an could be manipulated to guide him, by making him believe he was as good as anyone to interpret the sacred texts. Then the godless goons taught Al Qaeda how to conduct asymmetric warfare against the Afghan republic (attack schools, not the military).

The entire political, plutocratic and propaganda class of the USA was immersed in all this. And it worked well for 15 years, until, well, just as with Carthage, the mercenaries understood they were being played, and underpaid. Then they turned against the hands that had taught them. The result: an asymmetric war between the gigantic army manipulated by Washington and the mercenary force. And then 9/11.

By then the Washington establishment had to admit everything, namely that, since 1945, it had instrumentalized Salafist Islam, in Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, etc. Or then it had to deny everything, and be more in power than ever. It just had to tell a good story, and stick to it. The story was that on 9/11, the sky was very blue, and then planes came out of nowhere…

Just charging bin Laden presented the inconvenience that some were bound to dig, and ask how bin laden appeared on the scene. It was best to go charge an enormous red herring first, with the largest imaginable lies possible ( a technique used and explained by no less than the German Chancellor above). The very size of the lies would have distracting properties, all by their absurdity.  So Powell went to the UN with kindergarten drawings.

How does one disguise all this mess? Under which carpet does one hide it? Well, war against Saddam Hussein. (It also had the advantage of destabilizing the Middle East, and that is to Israel’s colonizing advantage.)

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PLUTO PROFITS FROM WAR, ANY WAR:

Here is Krugman again: “Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.”

Counter-intuitively, many of the war party of the USA love a bigger and more influential Teheran:  with a bit of luck, Teheran will do like Saddam, feel overconfident, and offer a casus belli. Then full war against Iran could be joined. However, of course, not all wars can be won. Overall, although it may not look like it to the clueless, the war against Iraq was a defeat for the USA.

The USA has a lot of false friends in the Middle East. The SIA is feeding Al Nusra, a Syrian Salafist army in Syria, and something will have to be done about that, and soon.

Krugman again: “So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.”

Why would they look as if they learned something? That would mean they went, somehow, through something untoward, that something adverse happened, to THEM. It certainly did not happen to them; they are richer, and more domineering than ever. Fortunes were made. Not far from New York, a war profiteer built for himself a sort of Versailles. Don’t expect to see this sort of data points, or giant architecture, appear in USA Main Stream Media (it was on French TV).

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ATROCIOUS WAR CRIMINALITY IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN:

The USA invaded Iraq. Now it has completely lost that war. 4,500 USA soldiers died, and more than that in allied soldiers and mercenaries. Dozens of thousands of other soldiers were gravely wounded and millions got psychologically damaged by suffering, or inflicting extreme violence.

After the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a naive decision parroted by many other Americans around the country: he enlisted in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who killed nearly 3,000 men, women and children. Little did he know that those enemies were in Washington, where the war had been fully engaged July 3, 1979. Little did he know that these enemies were just American mercenary forces. As a good vacuous American youth, he was unaware that his own government had already caused the death of three millions, not three thousands, in Afghanistan.

Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan — where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated — but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by resistance fighters. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again. For the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks, and now intent to die by withdrawing treatment. Neofascists should not worry: Young will not count as an Iraq war casualty.

From Young’s letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Young goes on to attack the “cowardice” of Bush and Cheney for avoiding military service themselves, and to encourage them to “stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”

(Read Young’s entire letter here.)

Not to worry: plutocracy is also a mood, where all values are inverted. Greed is viewed in more regards than altruism. As far as Bush and Cheney are concerned, Tomas Young is just a loser, with not enough brains to make the correct investment.

It goes without saying that international law ought to be brought to bear on all war criminals. Justice is not just about trying Serbs and Africans. Plutocrats should qualify too.

One of the USA’s main axes of exploitation, since 1945, has been to instrumentalize Salafist Islam. That was initially used against Britain, France, and even Israel (times change…) The difference between now and 60 years ago, is that many of the Salafists have realized they have been played (and first of all the Iranians; OK, technically the term “Salafist”, the “old ones” does not usually qualify Shiites, but I am generalizing, for semantic convenience!)

The hostility of the USA against the French republic during the Franco-Algerian civil war made a bad situation irreversibly worse:

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ONGOING FRANCO-ALGERIA DRAMA:

51 years ago, on March 19, 1962, the Evian Accords finalized the transfer of power from the French Republic to the (“Algerian”) FNL (Front National de Liberation). Officially, this was a good thing, a step forward, the flow of history. In truth, it was basically a transfer of power from one terrorist organization, to another.

That was a disaster for the populations concerned. About 15% of the people living in Algeria fled, living everything behind, and many committed suicide. Algeria has known dictatorship ever since, first from the FNL, then from the military. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the following decades, at the hands of terrorists (from official Algerian numbers).

There is no doubt that the French state behaved extremely badly in Algeria, starting in 1945. Before that, it was just behaving badly. There is also no doubt that the FNL was an extremely nasty terrorist organization.

So there is nothing good to celebrate there. And the mayor of Perpignan, a major French city had the courage to recognize this simple fact today, that a very bad thing happened on March 19, 1962. The mayor ordered to bring down the French flags, and circled them with black.

Truth always start with an emotional admission. Even in mathematics, or science.

The politically correct emotion about the Evian Accords has been, for 51 years, that they were good, and necessary, however grim it was to sign them. They went with history. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The French republic’s abuses in Algeria were not wiped out clean by another 51 years of abuse, starting with abusing truth.  

Confronted to that sort of past, in Algeria or Iraq, where reality is viewed as unbearable, there is only one principle worth having first. Namely that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, can prevent nasty outcomes. Especially those lies festering to this day.

Because, of course, the basic reasons for the Franco-Algerian civil war, are festering to this day, just on a grander scale. And now, the USA, instead of pulling nasty (Salafist) strings from the shadows (against France, BTW), is now on the frontlines (with France, happily).

The main reason why Germany is, finally, doing so well nowadays, is that a lot of the truth finally came out about some very bad ways German minds used to consider politically correct to operate under, while knowing no others.

***

WITH SAINTS LIKE THAT, WHO NEEDS DEVILS?

Not that only Germany has to be freed from simplistic, hence devil laden history. It’s not just that the American Founding fathers were slave masters. By contemporary standards, Saint Louis was a vicious criminal, and, at best, would have been interned as an insane maniac (he had declared, in writing, that nothing could be more pleasing to him than planting a knife into a non believer’s gut, and then playing around with the blade, once so inserted; why the Catholic church considers such a creep a saint rests on the fact that Catholics are not familiar with the lives of their most famous saints… and of course, that the church hierarchy is deeply evil).

Speaking of saints, the most revered Joan of Arc was a peace breaker. Paris and London had come to terms, and decided to reunify the kingdom (Treaty of Troyes). The king of England reigned over France. Unfortunately, he died within 2 months. His infant son was supposed to reign upon his majority. Wise people in England and France knew that this was an excellent arrangement, because, France being much bigger than England in all ways, there was no risk she would be gobbled up by England (contrarily to misrepresentations ever since). End of the 100 years war.

But then Jeanne, or rather the forces behind her (Yolande of Aragon) , from the south (Armagnac, Bourguignons, etc.) stepped in.

Jeanne restarted the Franco-French(-English) civil war. This time London and Paris were on the same side. Jeanne had quite a difficult time seizing Paris. Why such a divisive theocratic war monger is admired to this day is no mystery. Once Bush was selected, I mean when Charles VII had been unconstitutionally made king, there was no turning back. Jeanne d’Arc had to be made into a saint, or at least the judgments against her thrown out.

So will say it was better that England and France kept fighting each other for another 4 centuries: war is a force that gives us meaning. Perhaps. However, it’s neither wise, nor glorious not to teach in detail the reality of what happened. What happened is that Joan of Arc is another Christian “saint” who killed millions, and whose message, bloody sword in hand, voices from god in her head telling her war was all we needed, for no rational reason, is really not something one anyone wise would want to promote.

History is sometimes made by rats. As the famous sayingobservation has it, a rat gnawing through a dike can drown a nation. Now to this list of most creative creatures, we can add Sandra O’Connor, a so called “Justice”. Not only she has no notion of history, or justification, but that most fundamental human instinct, regret, central to learning anything important, has been extinguished in her. Her excuse? She is a “Westerner”. (Is that supposed to mean she has a gun instead of a head?)

Speaking of handing the presidency to plutocrat Bush, the vacuous Sandra reverted to a three year old persona. Said she: “There’s no point in my, at this point, saying I regret some decision I made. I’m not going to do that.”

Another bratty behaviour she may want to consider is to stop breathing and turning all blue until wiser people take pity. The Sandra girl by ordering to NOT recount Florida, gave the presidency to plutocrat Bush. The one who won the popular vote by two million, and also won Florida, Al Gore, was given a Nobel Prize instead of the presidency of the USA, to calm his nerves!

The point, O’Connor baby, is that, by saying that you regret your unconstitutional demolition of democracy, you would turn your back to Pluto, and join humanity. At least, symbolically speaking. That’s better than nothing. And better than staying forever, in the judgment of history, not just somebody who should never have existed, a one person democracy destroyer, but someone who persists into not even regretting her badness, contrarily to, say, Darth Vader.

It’s astounding one has to spell such an elementary truth to a big time Supreme Court “Justice”. Why are people such as these next to god? (Answer: because their very mediocrity insures that they will do the bidding of the plutocratic order.)

As the Romans knew, but O’Connor, and most of the truly bad soldiers of evil, do not want to admit: Errare Humanum Est, Perseverare Diabolicum! (Error Is Human, Persevering Diabolical!)

Going for the truth, and yanking it out of the entanglements where it lurks is always hellish in character. After all, woe onto those through whom scandal arrives.

Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Hell, it’s the others.” (L’enfer, c’est les autres): that was a neologism, an unusual way of using “autres”. It is mistranslated as “Hell is other people”, a different idea.

More generally, hell comes with the full reality that requires us to understand we would become obsolete, lest we change our minds. It may be painful to visit hell, but that’s where the hardest truths are lurking. Being ultimately good means turning hell into heavens.

***

Patrice Ayme

De Par Dieu: World Plutocrats Unite

The richest Greeks are buying the most expensive apartments in Berlin and London. “Shameful” says the president of the European parliament. The president of EU parliament, Martin Schultz, a German SPD member, calls attention to the breakdown of Greek society, with the poorest dying of lack of food and health care, while the richest and mightiest Greeks do not pay taxes (but the Germans and the French certainly do to back-up the European Central Bank Quantitative Easing, and various direct loans to Greece).

One week in December 2012, French actor Depardieu established residency in Belgium. Belgium is a country very friendly to plutocrats. The world’s fourth richest man, Arnault, another Frenchman, owner of all sorts of luxury brands, established residency there last year. The day Arnault announced it, there was a demonstration below the windows of his private residence. By thousands of enraged Belgians.

Reason? Plutocrats are spared taxes on capital gains and inheritance in Belgium. This is only normal: after all this plutocratic status is enjoyed by members of the Royal Belgian family, who are corrupt, and inherited this disposition, free of taxation.

Yet, someone has to pay for the state. Salaried Belgians pay some of the highest taxes on income in the world. This is directly related to others paying nothing: the hyper rich don’t pay taxes, because salaried persons pay them on their behalf. Such a system can perdure. After all, the plutocrats did not pay taxes in Europe for more than a millennium. They called themselves “the best who rule” (aristocrats).

This lack of taxation in the upper reaches brought ever more powers to the powerful. In the end, even when the king and government of France used everything in their arsenal to make the wealthiest pay taxes, they failed.

That unbalance at the top is why all of Europe underwent a succession of serious revolutions, among which those of the Netherlands (16 C, and a 75 year war against Spain) England (three revolutions and civil wars in the 17 C), the North American colony (1776-1791 + Secession War 1860-65), France (1789-1792 + 1830 + 1848 + 1871), Russia (1917), Germany (1918).

Perhaps suddenly aware of this problematic Belgian situation, Depardieu met in a private dinner the Czar of All Russias, Vladimir Putin in his gigantic palace (with TV, microphones and interpreters present, recording the very familiar tone). That was in Sotchi, a ski resort on the south side of the Caucasus. Sotchi and Putin have been officially celebrated by international sport authorities. A bit as Hitler organized the 1936 Olympic Games, in Berlin, to celebrate Nazism, Putin is organizing the next winter Olympic games, to celebrate Putinism, a crow’s flight from where he is waged heavy war in Georgia, and exerts mighty military occupations of many a country of the Caucasus.

Pontificates Depardieu: “Ceux qui disent du mal du president Putin ne sont jamais sortis de chez eux, ils sont restes en arriere depuis lontemps” (“Those who say bad things about president Putin never got out, they stayed stuck in the past for a long time”). Sorry that we confuse Stalin and Putin. Both are ending the same.

Putin gave Depardieu Russian nationality, and a Russian passport. Such is the power of the Czar. “Czar” is a deformation of “Caesar”. But Caesar could not make an alien into a Roman citizen overnight. Putin has more powers.

Depardieu has been protesting high taxes in France. His father was a French Communist Party member. Depardieu himself was a truant, delinquent and drunkard, who left school at 15. He was saved by the French movie industry, which is heavily subsidized by the French state, hence French taxes. Depardieu is a first class ingrate.

Now Depardieu, who made perhaps half a billion dollars in France alone is peeing on France. Literally so. Not only does he drive the wrong way on one way streets while cameras are rolling, but he actually peed in a plane, and not in the toilet.

Hey, who needs France when you can sing with the daughter of the dictator of Uzbekistan, do business with the Castro brothers, cheer for the dictator of Chechnya, enjoy payments throughout the dictatorships of Eastern Europe?

5403 French cheaters, a few thousands Germans, 1831 Italians, according to Eurostat, have become Russian citizens in 2010. Most of them are wealthy tax evaders. Rushing to take advantage of the Russian 13% flat tax rate on income and capital gains, a dream come true for plutocrats. Ironically the 13% rate was instituted to induce wealthy Russians to pay taxes. It is understood that it will be phased out in the future. Putin recently said that, as in France, taxes on luxury items ought to be introduced soon.

Depardieu was offered by Czar Putin a vast terrain to build a mansion, a car, and a job of minister of culture. As a quasi billionaire, Depardieu is happy to accept these free gifts from the Russian people. His residence will be next to where the Pussy Riot protesters are imprisoned. He immediately left Russia for Switzerland to encounter the head of the international soccer association to promote Russia for some world cup.

And yet, the glorious Depardieu vacation in Sotchi and Switzerland could not be all what it could. Not only is Depardieu obviously too obese to ski, but he has a justice convocation on Tuesday, 2 days after getting Stalinist citizenship.

French justice ordered Depardieu to appear in Paris regarding a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol. He actually got into an accident, with nearly four times above the legal alcohol limit. Here is the Dark Side reappearing again.

Depardieu used to be the darling of the French left (when that was profitable to both parties). Now he has become satanic for all to see. How come? This is a particular example of the genesis of the plutocratic effect, in the case of one individual’s psychology. The same happens to entire classes of individuals.

Basically, the persons affected get seduced by the Dark Side, and then so thoroughly enjoy it, that they want more, ever more. Being a leader, and enjoying the leadership status is one of the main component of the Dark Side. Nietzsche used to call that the Will to Power, and deify it (an idea Hitler followed single-mindedly).

The Will to Power is old, very old. It is even older than when it made baboon style, war-like primate societies possible, by perfecting fascism into a world conquering superior psychobiology. So it is completely ingrained in human psychology.

But there are many ways to lead. The ultimate leadership being, of course intellectual, as this is what the species is. Yet all forms of leadership call onto the Dark Side. Hence the fierce battles in academia. Hence the nomination of Stalin and Hitler to the Nobel Peace Prize. All humans confusedly sense that, without the Dark Side, nothing of consequence ever gets done (as Mahatma Gandhi, or Barack Obama, found out). The unfolding of the exact reasons of why this happens is quite elaborate.

One of these reasons: the Dark Side makes tribalism possible. Tribalism is central to humanity: it evolved from it. Tribalism makes human institutions possible. Including science, medical associations, or dignified philosophical societies.

Some will scoff: and how do I dare seize the noblest human institutions, and tie them to the Dark Side? But look at the Catholic church, or whichever Muslim hierarchy: in the fullness of history, although peace is their mouthpiece, they caused, directly, the death of dozens of millions of dead, and more than a millennium of terror.

And the case of Gandhi is famous: he brandished non violence against the British, while infuriating the Muslims, thus causing the partition of the subcontinent, leading to maybe ten million dead, while waiting for the great Indian subcontinent thermonuclear war.

By the way, Martin Schultz, a perfect anglophone and francophone, may well be elected head of the European Commission by the European Parliament after the next European elections. And why not? Listening to him, in French, one has more the impression of listening to a Frenchman more than when listening to Sarkozy the American, or Depardieu the Stalinist.

What is sure is that the European parliament will elect the next head of the European Commission, as per the Lisbon Treaty.

So why the English Europhobia? Very simple: up to 15% of English (in contrast to British) GDP is from financial services. And more than that is directly tied to plutocracy, if one includes English tabloids (controlled by the likes of Murdoch, a newspaper heir initially from Perth, Australia, in the lineage Maxwell, a scientific publishing tycoon, riding the public purse). One now knows that PM Blair got brainwashed into the Iraq War. And why not? left to himself, Blair was nothing. Murdoch was an empire, a sort of monarch who already told PM Thatcher what was up and what was down.

Instead, Blair was a good boy, as PM John Major had been before him. Major became a major at major USA based hedge funds. Blair “retired” and made 50 million dollars in just one year.

So now, exposed to continual disinformation, the majority of British stupidly attribute their problems to the European Union. Verily, their problems are not caused by the EU. Great Britain barely belongs to it; it has opted out of mostly all European institutions. it is not the EU that explains why Italian industrial production is vastly superior to the British one. It is rather finance supreme.

Britain blocks European construction at every turn. 25 countries have engaged the European Monetary system, three more are associated to it, 17 countries belong outright to the Eurozone. However, British vetoes block European construction, including that of a banking union. While everybody can see that a private banking speculation crisis caused the European financial crisis (the states got dragged into it while trying to save the private banks with public money).

Britain is like Depardieu: rendered grossly insane by the plutocratic phenomenon. meanwhile in the USA, health insurers are starting to crank up their rates by up to 22% in 2013. Poor Obama found a fancy name for his health care: the AFFORDABLE Care Act. However, in his naivety, he forgot about cost control of those he entrusted with the care of Americans as the farmer entrust the hens to the wolves (a well known method in Hawai’i). When I write “naivety”, I am charitable. A more ominous explanation is that Obama played golf with the wrong people.

Something that happens to people who live in big mansions paid by taxpayers, surrounded by armies of bodyguards, and they believe their minds extent to the end of the universe.

Satan is very crafty, and very cruel. Therein his strength and virtue. It’s the only god some deserve.

On January first 2013, the French government decided unilaterally to tax those of the 5,400 French citizens who pay very low taxes in Switzerland while earning their living in France. Excellent. The Swiss authorities are livid: after all the Canton de Vaud (capital: Lausanne) alone makes 300 million dollars from such tax evaders. No more free ride, no more living like a vampire, sucking French blood, Suisse!

Not that this new found will to resist tax evasion by the wealthy exclusively French. The USA has put increasing pressure on Switzerland, encouraging Italy, Germany and France to do the same. (This is one of the rare sectors where Obama has acted as a real democrat instead of a playing as dead as a plutocratic carpet.)

PM Cameron, the lazy and cowardly Europhobe, did something like this in Jersey, an island tax haven, a few Weeks earlier. He insisted that some Brits in London who insisted to pay (no) tax in Jersey, ought to be taxed in the UK (that can be up to 50%).

Some Jerseyists (?) spoke of independence (from Britain). A problem easy to solve by sending a few Royal marines, or French gendarmes. Who do these parasites think they are?

Why can Belgium or Switzerland, and many other banana haven countries afford low taxes? Why does France (or Britain or the USA) have high taxes? Well, very simple; in 1939, there were only four large modern armies in the world: Hitler’s, Japan’s, Stalin’s, and France’s. Only one democracy, and three dictatorships were well armed. We know what happened next: more than 70 million dead, nearly 5% of mankind.

The situation has not really changed. If we reverted to the military situation of 1939, with only the French republic with a serious army, the result would be quickly the same.

This is in no way surprising. The Roman legions were withdrawn from Britannia, Germania, and Gallia, for budgetary reasons in 400 CE. It is not that the economy was collapsing. The plutocrats were refusing to pay enough taxes to keep the dozen legions concerned.

The Roman state left the Franks in charge of defending much of Western Europe. Although the Franks were initially successful in Germania, they then ran out of luck, and massive invasions followed within six years. Then, and only then got the land ravaged in Britannia, Germania, Gallia, Iberia, and 4 years later, in Italia itself, and soon enough, Africa when the vandals made it there.

Thus one has to conclude that taxes are not just about fairness, and preventing the plutocratic effect. They are also about preserving the appearance of a republic.

France, the USA, Britain, Germany, and Italy have used increasing force to combat tax evasion and thus plutocracy, in recent years. They should not hesitate to use maximum force. After all the military force of France is about a billion times greater than that of Switzerland.

It is not just a question of defending democracy, or civilization. It is a question of not being dominated by the Dark Side. Without the rule of love supreme, humanity cannot go on. It’s love who has to tell the Dark Side what to do, and not the converse. Therein true goodness and wisdom.
***
Patrice Ayme

Beat Beast Eats Middle East?

“The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas could yet be an unlikely foundation for peace” (pontificates idiotically The Economist’s “Old battles, new Middle East“). More prosaically, anti-missile systems were tested.  Iron Dome intercepted 425+ Gaza missiles.

There cannot be peace in the Middle East, as long as Islam is the dominant system of mood. Islam started as an anti-Jewish machine: Muhammad turned against his hosts, who had inspired him, and massacred an entire tribe in mostly Jewish Yathrib (thereafter to be called Medina, the second most sacred city in Islam).

Faithfully following Roman and Roman Catholic genocidal fascism, Islam put its foot on Jerusalem’s bloodied face, insulting it as the third most sacred city in Islam:

Dome Of The Rock Mosque Squats Obnoxiously On Jewish Temple Mont

In 1217 CE, Spanish Rabbi Judah al-Harizi found the sight of the Muslim fortifications on the Jewish Temple Mount profoundly disturbing. “What torment to see our holy courts converted into an alien temple!”

Jerusalem had been the capital of various Jewish states for about 2,000 years. 2,000 years prior to the invention of Islam.

Islam has no less than two mosques on top of the most sacred place of Judaism. Those mosques were built (late 8th C), 13 (yes, thirteen) centuries after the destruction of the first Jewish temple by the Babylonians. It’s worse than rising mosques on top of a razed Notre Dame, while calling Paris the fourth most sacred city in Islam.

Muhammad is supposed to have taken flight from there, the Jewish Temple mount, in an apparent imitation of the thoroughly undocumented Christ (many turkeys fly from the same spot). The vampire gorged on blood takes flight from the neck of its victim.

Islam was also an anti-Western war machine, and, as long as it functions as a dominant mode of thinking of Middle Earth, and the West has not been defeated, there will be war. We have plenty of (sacred) statements in the Hadith about attacking the West deliberately. Bukhari is the second most authoritative source in Islam after the Qur’an:

“He heard the Prophet saying, ‘Paradise is granted to the first batch of my followers who will undertake a naval expedition.’ The Prophet then said, ‘The first army amongst my followers who will invade Caesar’s City will be forgiven their sins.’” [Bukhari:V4B52N175]

So much for Islam being a religion of peace. Muslims sieged Constantinople three times: 674-678 CE, 717-718 CE, and 1453 CE.

On August 28, 846 CE an Arab army invaded Rome by surprise, and took over the Vatican. Yes, the Muslims succeeded where Hannibal had failed. One never talks about it, prefering to call attention to Hannibal and the Crusades, always (an obvious bias in context building!). This attack on Rome was no joke: the Frankish army holding north-west Rome and the Vatican was killed to the last man. The Muslims in and around Rome were repelled after hard fighting over several months, by Frankish relief armies.

Arab invasions rolled over Europe for 1,000 years, coming not far from Paris more than once, sieging Vienna, twice, occupying Saint Tropez, much of Provence, Switzerland, Greece, much of Italy, for decades, sometimes centuries… Exerting their obnoxious oppression all along (non Muslims were strongly discriminated against, in many ways, and had to submit, lest they would be summarily executed; marks on clothing akin to the Nazis’ yellow star had to be worn by the non Muslims; Muslim warriors could grab maidens and decide that was a “battlefield marriage” [institutionalized rape] but non Muslims men could not marry a Muslim, something true to this day, etc.). 

“The Prophet said, ‘Khosrau will be ruined. There won’t be a Persian King after him. Caesar will be ruined. There will be no Caesar after him. You will spend their treasures in Allah’s Cause.’ He proclaimed, ‘War is deceit.’“ [Bukhari:V4B52N267] 

“Umar [the Second Caliph] sent Muslims to great countries to fight pagans. He said, ‘I intend to invade Persia and Rome.’ So, he ordered us to go to [the Persian King] Khosrau. When we reached the enemy, Khosrau’s representative came out with 40,000 warriors, saying, ‘Talk to me! Who are you?’ Mughira replied, ‘We are Arabs; we led a hard, miserable, disastrous life. We used to worship trees and stones. While we were in this state, our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, ordered us to fight you till you worship Allah Alone or pay us the Jizyah tribute tax in submission. Our Prophet has informed us that our Lord says: ‘Whoever amongst us is killed as a martyr shall go to Paradise to lead such a luxurious life as he has never seen, and whoever survives shall become your master.’” [Bukhari:V4B53N386] 

It’s all about the luxurious life: be a martyr, and luxury is yours, you greedy murderous ones! It’s not me parodying Islam saying this. It’s the most sacred texts of Islam defining Islam thus. Notice the quotes are long, their contexts clear. But we have to be careful: nowadays, just describing the Prophet, as he is described in the Qur’an and the Hadith, is viewed as a grave insult against the prophet, even if all and any Muslim scholars know these very things are the basics of the Islamist faith. In other words, Islamist “scholars” view Islam as an insult against islam, as long as it is described by non Muslims.

For all the pillow talk about peace in the Middle East, Islam is the pachyderm from hell breathing over the bed in the room above the whispering lovers. The Middle East has not yet been separated from its local, plutocratic friendly, superstition, Islam. Islam, as it is, truly, not as it is hoped to be by pseudo-progressives who have made a business model from mouthing wishful thinking, as a form of soft intellectual fascism.

Let’s all read the Qur’an, line by line. It’s only 80,000 words, everybody, even pseudo-progressives, with their tiny brains, could do it. Maybe too busy self caressing pseudo-progressives are?

What do we see in the Qur’an? A repetitive litany of lethal or abusive orders (from God, no less!) many victimizing people who are accused of misinterpreting God, such as the Jews, Christians, ill defined “unbelievers”, etc.

Apparently unsatisfied with murderously intolerant fanaticism, the Qur’an is clearly not friendly to democracy. Allah wants the faithful to obey whoever detains power: “O Ye Who Believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Sura 4; verse 59).”

Thus the Qur’an makes fascism part of worship. No wonder all leaders in Islamist countries become dictators (even Erdogan in Turkey is trying his best).

Thus Islam or democracy and peace? That is the question in the Middle East, still stuck in theocracy, 13 centuries and going strong.

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WHEN EUROPE WAS UNDER THE SPELL OF WOULD BE CHILD ASSASSIN ABRAHAM, IT WAS NOT PRETTY EITHER: 

Superstition going crazy is not confined to the Middle East. Europe has know two phases of murderous insane superstitionism. The first religious madness put an end to Romanitas, an ill fated, all too restrictive society that could survive only by ever augmenting its fascism, while fragmenting into mini tyrannies from local plutocrats.

Diseased Romanitas was replaced by the more advanced Frankish philosophy which included in the power structure of society Jews, Pagans, women, all sorts of Germans, Romans, and even the ex-slaves.

The ugly oppression of the Abrahamic religion went into an eclipse that lasted six centuries. (Nothing symbolized it better than the nationalization of the church by Charles Martel around 730 CE!)

However, the Crusades allowed Abraham to rise its ugly snout again. The cult of a child molester does the plutocratic mood wonders. One Crusade, in France, killed one million. One million French. Or more. For five or six centuries plutocrats, hiding behind Abraham’s throat cutting ways, were at each others’ throats.

The Europe was torn by terrible religious wars over a century centered on 1600 CE. France had no less than eight religious wars at the end of the 16th Century.

Some of these wars caused the death of more than 30% of the population. Before weapons of mass destruction. Finally central governments won the struggle, and took over, re-birthing (re-naissance) the Roman style command and control.

The religious murderous madness was stopped when religion got defanged, and rigorously separated from the state, while the Republic became the ruling religion. Not yet the case in the Middle East… Except for Israel (paradoxically).

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CLASH OF A SUPERSTITION WITH CIVILIZATION:

Make no mistake: between Israel and the Arabs, at this point, it is still a religious war. No peace is possible as long as temple based terrorism lurks above.

The Economist, in an orgasm of naivety, urges Obama to do something about Israel and Palestine. But what to do against superstition and fanaticism? It’s a philosopher’s task. The best one can expect from Obama is Machiavellism. And we are getting some.

Obama is right to not squander his time splitting superstitious hair in a finer way than the fanatical participants already do. Obama got involved, sure. Obama very wisely decided that the USA would finance most of the Iron Dome (in exchange for a technology transfer!). It was wise. Iron Dome, and the coming David Sling will do more to calm down fascism, than soothing words of debasing appeasement.

Once democracy, the people, rules, there will be peace. But the people has existed for a million years, and the Republic is its basic religion, its basic atavism. No objective observer can say it is compatible with burning people for all the litany of reasons found in the Qur’an.

Seven centuries ago, in Egypt, interpreting the Qur’an literally was punished with imprisonment. Time to reboot that, if peace is really what one is after.

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QUR’AN BAD, BIBLE WORSE: SO?

The Economist published my comment above. The anonymous L6QjhvJGVk in reply to Tyranosopher Nov 23rd, came up with a number of interesting quotes of the Bible. Said he: “Although I am not religious (as an agnostic), the Koran is very mild compared to the Bible.”

Right, L6QjhvJGVk, but the Bible does not have more than a billion fanatical followers, today. Literal Bible reading is mostly a problem confined to places in Russia, the USA and Israel. One can spit all day long on the Bible, and burn it with gusto. All that will happen is that one will not be taken seriously. But in Muslim lands, it’s quite the opposite, one is taken all too seriously. Doing symbolic violence to the Qur’an hate book may get you executed. Once somebody was condemned to death, in a Muslim country, for having said something unbecoming about Jesus (!), a prophet of Islam.

Even in countries such as France, supposedly philosophically enlightened, there is a dangerous confusion between criticizing a religion, and racial hatred (are the somewhat Christianophobic, such as me, hating the Christian race?). This legal confusion has had very practical, very disastrous consequences. It enabled the growth of Muslim Fundamentalism of the lethal type, because criticizing the Qur’an, arguably a hate book if there ever has been one, has been equated to racism. Thus Quranic violence was made into something sacred.

It is a bit of a paradox that it is honorable to kill bin Laden, but not to trash his ideas! In contrast, I believe that the best way to kill inferior ideas is with superior ideas.

L6QjhvJGVk Bible and Jewish quotes are reproduced in the comments (however, within them L6QjhvJGVk exhibits plain anti-Judaism, Nazi style, as he evokes a word Hitler used, “genetic” in derogatory relation to the Jews, showing an emotional anti-Jew slant).

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Left and Right. in reply to L6QjhvJGVk Nov 23rd, 09:23 observed:

“There is no comparison [between following the Bible and being submitted to the Qur'an]. The Bible is advisory and there are no penalties to deny or question it. Islam requires a total belief in the whole of the Koran as directly written by Allah. To question it or to deny it is apostasy the penalty for which is death. This can tend to remove the chance to discuss things rationally. The poor performance, educationally, socially and economically of Muslims is, I believe hindered by the absolving of personal responsibility with the need to suffix every statement with Inshallah, if God wills it, in my experience he seldom does. My Muslin dentist tells me the world in 6000 years old, as stated in the Koran – well this could explain the dearth of Nobel Scientific awards to Muslims. Oh for the enlightenment!”

I agree 100% with Left and Right. Except that the Roman emperors, even before Theodosius, imposed Catholic terror (loosely based on the New Testament).  

The reason for constant Muslim civil wars of the worst type is precisely that to question the other believer’s interpretation of the Qur’an or to deny it is apostasy, as far as the other believer is concerned, the penalty for which is death. Hence the total intolerance of Muslim: just draw a guy with a turban, call it Muhammad, see what happens. You may not have time to put it below foot. Thus the Dome of the Rock’s location is a well understood insult.

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Attendant Lord in reply to L6QjhvJGVk Nov 23rd:

“You overlook that the portions of these religious books that reflect values from another time are dead as a doornail in Judaism and in Israel, a modern state with modern values, and alive and well under Islamist states, whose leadership believes that it should all be kept alive, just as it was written.”

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Thank you L6QjhvJGVk, for rolling out barbarity from the Bible, there are never enough rivers of obnoxious data flowing to nourish the humanistic, progressive ocean!

The Abrahamic religion has to be crushed always. A state came up with the following law: “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” Those who disagree are to be sent to jail 12 months. That’s the law since before 2006, when the Supreme Court of that state refused to consider its constitutionality. So it is in Kentucky, USA.

If the Abrahamists, with their psycho god, are not crushed there, they will grow under the sign of the beast, and eat civilization up, as they did in the East. As when Bush brandished Qur’an and Bible to bring the true faith to Iraq (in his self described “crusade“).

Islamism is just a variant, an heresy of Judaism, somewhat desertified, somewhat Christianized, somewhat modernized. So if the Bible is really bad, it’s only natural that the Qur’an would be so too. Since the latter mostly apes the former.

(The holly Qur’an can be innovative, though: Apparently Muhammad conceived of stem cells, demonstrating how wise he was! Qur’an Surah 4, Verse 56: “Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our verses – We will drive them into a Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment again. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted in Might and Wise.”)

As a self declared follower of the Abrahamic religion, the Prophet venerated the Bible, and his beef with the Jews was that they did not follow the Bible rigorously enough.

That the Bible was grotesquely dangerous, and immoral, interpreted literally has been known since the birth of Christianity.

Wrote Augustine: Title of Book III, Chapter 5 of his famous City of God”. “It Is A Wretched Slavery Which Takes The Figurative Expressions of Scripture in A Literal Sense.”

In spite of this, Augustine was the first theoretician of the dispersal of the Jews out of Israel, thus causing their departure, followed by their subsequent return…

Of course Augustine (around 400 CE) was following emperor Hadrian’s decrees against the Jews, like the dog follows his master. After the second Jewish revolt, in 132 CE, the Romans defeated the Jewish army in 135 CE.

Thereupon, Jerusalem, the capital of he Jews, was turned into a Greco-Roman city called Aelia Capitolina. A temple of Jupiter was built on top of the Jewish Temple, razed by the Romans.

Thus the idea of putting the enormous Dome of the Rock in place of the Temple is a Roman fascist idea that has become sacred to Muslims! In other words, of Rome, Muslims worship the worst. Another troubling fact, is that the Temple Mount is also considered to be Mount Zion. does that mean that, by worshipping the Dome of the Rock (roughly the oldest mosque), Muslims are Zionists? In some sense?

Emperor Hadrian forbid to the Jews to live in Jerusalem. Hadrian changed the country’s name from Judea to Syria Palestina. United Nations, version 135 CE.

However, these atrocious facts over which the otherwise much esteemed Hadrian presided, got to be known, and taken for what they were, in the fullness of time: genocide.
By 1948 CE, the United Nations, a sort of modernized Rome (before the Roman Republic became an outright imperium), decided to undo the horror visited by Hadrian, and more or less enforced ever since.

Actually the UN followed a Roman precedent. Emperor Julian, philosopher and critique of the monstrosity of the rule of Catholicism, had ordered the RECONSTRUCTION of the Jewish Temple in 360 CE (earthquakes, and Christian fanaticism, including the assassination of Julian, prevented the work to proceed!)

So here we are. In the last seven years, the Palestinians have fired nearly 7,000 rockets at Israel, killing 51 Israelis, and losing nearly 3,200 of their own. “Israel is gaining time… cutting the grass“, as Israelis put it. The time Israel did not have in 132-135 CE.

History never dies. Only armies do.

Why don’t Muslims eat pigs?  The first order explanation, like for most things Muslim is that, so it was in the Bible, and Muslims follow the Bible, when in doubt. More sophisticated was Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher under the Caliphate, physician to Saladin in the Twelfth Century. He understood the dietary laws chiefly as keeping the body healthy. The meat of the forbidden animals, birds, and fish was indigestible, according to Maimonides. However this does not apply to pork, he observed. But pigs are more dirty than human latrines, so had to be avoided, he obviated.

A beauty of Islam is that it has no centralized authority as far as what it truly says. As the Qur’an is very small, it has been supplemented by all sorts of books and gossip, the Sunnah and Hadith being the most prominent. Muslims tend to kill each other, because they differ about the authors of Hadith who are viewed as reputable. Or by how seriously they take this and that gossip (= “reputable authority“, a frequently used notion in Islam scholarship).

On top of that, local traditions have their own little stories. Once I asked a knowledgeable woman in Africa, a Muslim religious authority, why Muslims did not eat pigs.

She told me a story I have never come across again. She told me that once Muhammad and his army, in a forest, got very thirsty. Then they saw a pig. They followed it until it reached water. Thereafter, a grateful Muhammad ordered his followers to give pigs a chance.

The surrealism of it all left me speechless. So some black Africans hold that Muslims follow the one who followed the pig? It’s unlikely that blindly following the One who followed the pig will give peace a chance, because he gave pigs a chance. The fascist instinct, that is, following The One, in this case a long dead analphabet raider, blindly, is exactly the opposite of peace, pigs or no pigs. 

Yesterday’s god, like yesterday’s history, is senile, incoherent, repetitive, and dangerous. Time to break the cycle. Otherwise, there is an Iron Dome to show you.
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Patrice Ayme