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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.)

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Ecr. L’inf., Patrice Ayme

Lincoln, CO2, Oblabla, etc.

REALITY HAS AN ANTI-AMERICAN BIAS:
I don’t know much about Lincoln or the Secession War. Although I confess that I certainly know more that American college graduates. While I admit that this is nothing glorious, it’s enough to say plenty, in a grand American tradition of knowing it all, that I will denigrate, later in this essay.

Propelled by the momentum acquired by watching the excellent “Django Unchained”, I went on with doing my duty, and watching “Lincoln”. This movie frenzy started with “Life of Pi” watched with my three year old daughter. She is familiar with natural food procurement processes unfolding in nature documentaries. So she did not mind that the tiger killed the hyena. What scared her more were the waves, a healthy fear to have.

No Dark Side, No Humanity. A Paradox.

I heard that Obama liked the “Life of Pi”, while he did not like as much the Spielberg movie, “Lincoln”. I could guess why: “Lincoln” the movie had got to be boring for those not anxious to boast that they are intellectually inclined. The movies reminded me of a shallow version of one of my own essays, spread over three hours.

The movie depicts the last 4 months or so in Lincoln’s life. The Confederacy is running out of steam and men. The Civil War is finishing, but the mass dying on the battlefields is in no way abating. A butchery without compare in the history of the West. Lincoln is trying to use the momentum of his re-election and battlefield victories to abolish slavery. (As it was, slavery was finally outlawed after Lincoln’s assassination, in December 1865.)

Contemporary citizens of the USA can only find that picture uncomfortable. Is that all what the great USA was about? Buying people? what sort of city on the hill was that? what sort of example for humanity? And it was a scandal not being able to buy people anymore? Was slavery the greatest cause worth dying for?

The movies is thus somewhat anti-American, as it shows too much reality, the incredible trash that political life was in the USA at the time. OK, sorry about discriminating against that particular period. it’s still trashy today, one could even say trashier than ever. After all, courtesans in Washington are trying to kill the planet.

I saw a picture of Obama shooting a gun today (OK, that was an appropriate gun, so gigantic it was not conducive to mass shooting). Apparently to show he still loved guns, in spite of all the little children dying, pierced with bullets. Is this was the presidential moral fiber has come down to? Salute the shooting of the children by the shooting of the guns? Should have Lincoln tried to seduce his opposition too? Will I have dreams of Lincoln passing by, pulled by with powerful black men chained to his chariot, he whips softly?

If Obama had been in the White House instead of Lincoln, in 1865, would he have had photographers immortalize him, whipping up a slave, to show to the slave lobby that he, Obama loved slaves too?

Obama could point out that gun totting Americans shooting down gun totting Americans is not as big a problem as Americans buying Americans. Right. Especially in Washington: is it not the essence of the place?

However Americans shooting down their own families (according to statistics, that’s the most marking activities of those with guns) is only a psychological hook: something very small, very hard, with lots of consequences.

If Americans are obsessive about shooting other Americans, should we be surprised that they don’t mind thinking exactly what they masters told them to think, and shooting the biosphere down too? Something about the rage inside rather that the speech outside. A complementary principle. obama is often too subtle by half, and gets played instead of being the one playing.

Strictly from statistics, the USA is the only developed country where most of the war dead happened during a Civil War (the losses were close to one million, the latest scholarship shows: about 3% of the population).

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HIS DARK SIDE WAS BIGGER THAN YOURS:
“Lincoln” the movies, shows that Lincoln, the president, had to buy his way out of slavery. Lincoln used whatever it took. Big difference with the not-doing-anything-much president.

Obama and his plutocratic demoncratic Congress (yes: demon-cratic) did not put much pressure on banks, health providers and corporations. According to Obama, these problems do not compare with slavery.

But Obama is wrong. Slavery was a joke. A very very very bad joke, but still a joke. They might as well have sold human meat at the market. Actually that’s what they did. But it went against the flow of civilization. The Romans themselves would have been shocked by American racism. American slavery was that weird. That full of hatred and greed.

The problem with the present atmospheric crisis is that it is doing judo with civilization; it’s using the very momentum of civilization, to trip it. The present crisis goes with the flow, and was never seen before.

The worst scandal being the USA-led total absence of any serious efforts to stop the climate catastrophe.

In all these things Obama did not exert presidential powers, contrarily to what many of his predecessors did, and Lincoln did, first of all. Obama was opposed within his own party on cap and trade, and, instead of threatening to destroy his opponents, small hurtful piece by small hurtful piece, he made clear he did not want to fight.

A commander in chief who can’t fight? A commander in chief who thinks it is wiser to not engage in battle? What a bizarre notion. It’s the symptom of someone who did not read the job’s description.

I suspect that Obama, who tries to ride Lincoln as he were a horse, has reason to feel diminished by the 16th president. Obama goes around writing on official documents, that he is black. And Obama went all out to kill Bin Laden. And Obama went all too much out ordering extrajudicial killings and drone madness. True. But all this is Mickey Mouse style Dark Side.

The real, the glorious Dark Side is about shock and awe, not popularity, but fear, and justice. The real Dark Side, the useful Dark Side, the honorable Dark Side, is about doing what is necessary for the highest moral purposes. All has, always will be.

Obama’s Mickey Mouse Dark Side is a smokescreen that should not fool those who are real tough. When he had to be really tough with financiers, corporations, the fossil fuel lobbies, gun lobby, military (Afghanistan), and the for profit health care lobby Obama just meowed, and purred.

In other words, when Obama had to be real tough to the modern slave masters, he just folded. Lincoln did not fold. That’s why he has a big statue in Washington standing in a silent judgment on those of his successors who just aspire to free rent, girls, bodyguards, and lots of money, a la Bill Clinton, the president of the Degenerate State of America.

(Or Utterly Stupid America? It’s Clinton and his minions who empowered financiers, by diverting most money creation towards financial derivatives, and the likes of Enron. To this day, the fact that the Demoncratic Party is full of Romneys escapes the little minds.)

Lincoln had to use the Dark Side, for the triumph of goodness, big time, because George Washington had not had the moral courage to do his job. Lincoln went, well, all out. This is mentioned in the movies during an exchange Lincoln has with the commander of the US Army Ulysses Grant (himself president later).
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SLAVERY IS NOT EASY TO QUIT:
Lincoln, as president, using his considerable war powers, had made an Emancipation Declaration, January 1, 1863. It freed the slaves over which the Union had no power (!)

The Emancipation was not a law passed by Congress. But by Lincoln’s personal “war powers” as a modern Caesar.

Caesar himself indeed used similar war powers during the Roman civil war, as Consul, and, or, elected Dictator; that’s where this is all coming from, through the Franks, and, in particular, through Consul Clovis who had to knock some sense in his Franks, that, from now on, the fascist Roman model of war would rule (incident of the Vase de Soisson!).

As Lincoln explains in the movie, that Emancipation Declaration was full of contradiction, because it recognized slaves as property confiscated from the enemy. Except Lincoln did not want to recognize the South’s rebels as enemy, as that would recognize them as an independent nation. Nor did Lincoln want to recognize slaves as property, because, when the war was over, logically the owners would be able to recover their property.

So Lincoln wanted to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the USA, which recognized explicitly that people could not be owned, or forced to work, except if they had been convicted of a crime through due process. In other words, no more slavery.

Some claimed that the amendment would entice the Confederacy to fight to the bitter end. But that was nothing the military could not fix. The bitter end was at hand, thanks to Sherman’s March to the Sea. The best way to handle terrorists is to destroy them, as president Hollande pointed out, in connection with Mali.

The various quandaries encountered in abrogating slavery were nothing new. Bathilde, an English slave, escaped an abusive plutocrat, who had her recaptured. But she caught the eye of the Prince, who bought her, freed her, married her, and engrossed her. Then he became king and promptly died.

The Franks, as all Germans, had arisen, long ago as independent farmers, and hated slavery. However they encountered Greco-Roman civilization, more advanced in many ways, but also pervaded by fascism, slavery and militarism. The Germans learned from their Roman masters, but both their implementation of fascism and slavery was unenthusiastic. However the Gallo-Roman aristocracy had become entangled with the Christian Church, who claimed to be very good, although Christ never said (supposing he really said anything at all), against slavery.

But there it was, a queen of the Franks, who had been a rebellious slave, a few years before. Her government and the regency council agreed to do away with slavery. But Bathilde had it less easy than Lincoln: there was no civil war with enslaving rebels. Bathilde’s government could not just expropriate bishops. Bishops, being scions of the plutocracy, had often armies of slaves.

So Bathilde had to be subtle. She outlawed SLAVE TRADING within the Merovingian empire. That was as good as outlawing the slave trade outright. That was in 658 CE.
This prohibition was later extended to the even more gigantic Carolingian empire that surfaced within a generation. (That Venice made lots of money trading non Frankish slaves with the Islamists is irrelevant, except in that it created a conceptual pattern that would allow to authorize slavery in the colonies.)

Fast forward 1207 years, it’s 1865, and the USA, institutionally, militarily and historically a Franco-British colony, is trying to finally outlaw slavery, as Lafayette had urged relentlessly his good friend George Washington to do. Lafayette was a French military man, and he knew all too well what a monstrosity slavery was.

All over Europe, but for the vast areas controlled by the Muslim Turks, and the wilds of Russia, thanks to Bathilde, slavery was unlawful.

Lafayette entreaties were unsuccessful. Washington congratulated his friend about his humanity, but obstinately refused to do anything positive. Jefferson (3rd president and a babble box) was pretty much the same.

Arrives Lincoln. Lincoln, you see, is courageous. Instead of going around with armies of bodyguards, he goes around pretty much unprotected.
President Hollande made a visite éclaire to Timbuktu, 5 days after the sacred city fell to the French Guerre Éclaire. (Contrarily to Anglo-Saxon-Wall Street French bashing legend, it’s French generals who invented the concept of Blitzkrieg, and cleverly published it, in 1932, teaching Nazis something!).

Hollande’s visit was courageous. So did Lincoln’s 15 battlefield visits during the Civil War, oceans of bodies still writhing on the ground, a general holding a pistol cocked up, just behind him, lest one of the Confederate soldiers was not completely dead.

Armies of bodyguards is no new trick. One of Caesar’s generals used to always go around with such an army, Caesar contemptfully observed in his memoirs. The fact that the underling survived (with wounds) an assassination attempt, did not impress Caesar very much.

Caesar himself refused even the accompaniment of Marc Anthony, a superlative special force brute, to go to the Senate, although he had been warned of an assassination plot that day. What was Caesar’s point? Well, he did not run a dictatorship, he governed with the approbation of the Populus (funny for someone who had made himself “dictator for life”, but the word “dictator” became pejorative only after Caesar’s assassination!). In the Senate, pierced by dozens of knife wounds, Caesar found out that he did not govern with the assent of the plutocrats.

Lincoln did not run a dictatorship, either. He wanted to make that very clear. At the battle of Appomatox, the army of the chief of the Confederate Army, Lee was surrounded on three sides. After 700 casualties, Lee surrendered. 29,000 Confederate soldiers were paroled. Lincoln wanted, and had ordered, generalized forgiveness.

Caesar and Lincoln died, when they were still on the verge of attempting great things (Caesar by putting an end to the Persian-German problem in one stroke, Abraham Lincoln by freeing colored people from all those other chains that still held them, such as no right to vote, or no right to marry out of their “race”, etc.)
***

THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW SHOULD LEARN, INSTEAD OF BARKING OUT ORDERS:
Are there lessons, within Lincoln wondrous adventure, to be drawn for the world today?

Something striking about the USA, is the tendency to give lessons to everybody, as if the USA invented civilization. Now, OK, slavery was still lawful in Turkey in 1865. But there was no slavery in most states, worldwide. In 1865. The USA was a glaring exception. Can one be that primitive, and still give lessons about how to live, as the USA does to the planet, year after year? Yes, sure, Jihadists do that every day.

What is striking, in the politics of the USA is the absence of towering intellectual figures dominating the debate. No Montaigne, no Montesquieu, no Voltaire, there. Instead, mongrels are disputing in front an electorate of the gullible what god wanted, while filling up their pockets.
In Antiquity, even a fascist philosopher such as Aristotle had to make excuses to justify slavery. He knew he had to. That was from a tiny city, Athens. In the gigantic USA of 1865, no philosopher dominates the landscape, except, well, for the philosopher president, Lincoln himself. A philosopher among mice is still a philosopher, I guess.

Aristotle whined they, his kind, the slave masters, had no machines, so they needed slaves. However that means Aristotle had the concept of machine. Aristotle knew that there were machines… The Greeks had just made no effort to develop them, and the Romans were going to become even more lazy.

Because there were machines: slavery just looked more convenient, thus machines were not deployed.
***

IT’S WORSE TO ENSLAVE THE PLANET THAN TO ENSLAVE MAN:
Just like now. But now is worse. Combining the oxygen we breathe with 450 million years of poisonous, flammable rocks and rotten fluids, looks more convenient to the monsters who lead us to oblivion, than deploying the new energy sources we have at the ready. While there is still time.

Slavery was convenient, until Bathilde outlawed it. Then there was no choice. The machines that had been waiting in the wings were deployed., and animals were bioengineered. It took Papin 1,000 years more to introduce a perfectly functioning steam boat, but Papin’s steam engine was the logical evolution of centuries of metal works and engineering. The Cathedrals could be constructed only because of hydraulic hammers, to bend the enormous steel girders.

In another gloomy perspective Dr. Chu, the Energy Secretary a Nobel Prize winner in physics resigned. Under Chu a form of Cobertism was practiced: encouraging some industries by direct financing, That’s one pillar, but, to make something a stable sustainable switch, two more pillars were needed: making fossil fuels pay for their true cost (in other words a carbon tax, thus making better energy sustainable), and massive fundamental research.
Quoting Michelangelo, Chu said: “‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.’”
President Washington obstinately refused to see that slavery was a mortal moral danger. He had set his mark too low. Similarly, when Obama, as the biosphere faces the worst crisis in 65 million years, informs us that problems in the USA are not as severe as in Lincoln’s times, he sets his eyes too low, somewhere by his feet.
Chu pointed out that burning fossils and their gases is economically viable in some sense: “Our ability to find and extract fossil fuels continues to improve, and economically recoverable reser-voirs around the world are likely to keep pace with the rising demand for decades. As the saying goes, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions.”
Our ability to find and kill innocent victims continues to improve, too. But that does not mean we should do it. The Slave Age in the USA did not end because it ran out of slaves, but because a better solution was imposed onto the slave masters, by force. Lincoln was force. Slavery was outlawed.

Combining all our oxygen with fossilized carbon should also be outlawed. An Emancipation Declaration of oxygen, using war powers, should be made.

Chu used the old tried and true: “There is an ancient Native American saying: “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” A few short decades later, we don’t want our children to ask, “What were our parents thinking? Didn’t they care about us?””

The Natives did not inherit the air from their ancestors, either. Air is the fundamental human right, a right that cannot be let to expire for a minute.

So it’s not just about the poorest and the unborn. There is much more than that. It’s about us, too. Why did Lincoln destroy slavery? Lincoln destroyed slavery, not because he was “black”, and not to save his children (one of his sons died in the unCivil War).

No, much more simply, Lincoln destroyed slavery because Lincoln was a good man and he found slavery abhorrent.

Show me what you hate, and I will tell you how good you are.

It’s worse to enslave the planet than to enslave man. Make a note of it. Too bad there is no Lincoln around today to save the planet, but only the greedy to lead the needy.
***
Patrice Ayme

USA Attack Against Afghanistan

[A little reminder!]
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, CAUSED WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
National fables can be the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. One such fable is that the USA was attacked on 9/11 by forces it had nothing to do with.

The conflict in Afghanistan killed three millions Afghans, while wounding and displacing much more civilians than that. This conflict was instigated by the USA’s CIA, through its agents in Pakistan instrumentalizing Islam. The conflict took a worse turn when the White House of demonocrat President Jimmie The Very Pious Carter put its full weight behind it:

The following interview of Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, was never published in the USA:

Question of Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, Obama’s Defense Secretary, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secret until now, is completely different. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: NONSENSE!
***

Thus the USA did attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The CIA and its Saudi equivalent got the good idea of recruiting a god crazy scion of Saudi Arabia’s second plutocratic family, Bin Laden. It was a good choice: Bin Laden was also an engineer and a manager, he quickly organized a powerful army of fanatics well financed by friendly plutocrats. The CIA suggested to attack soft targets, such as schools, and the tactic was highly effective.

After 2001, the USA installed in Afghanistan a theocracy (as a holy book is the basis of its constitution).
Theocracy comes naturally to the USA. On January 21 a benediction was given on the steps of the capitol as part of Obama’s election. In a discourse that the worst of the Taliban no doubt applauded, Rev. Luis Leon informed us that “without the blessing of god” we would be abominable monsters. It was fascinating to see the leadership of the USA bowing to the Reverend’s horrible declarations.

The situation in the Republique du Mali is completely different: it’s a secular state which called the United Nations to intervene, and the UNSC agreed, unanimously. The French Republic is just implementing that resolution.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
For seeing the war of the USA against Afghanistan in a wider context; http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

Obama Unchained?

Abstract: Kneading a violent, but, sadly, factual movie of Tarantino with Obama in an explosive conceptual mixture…

Quentin Tarantino, in his best movie so far, explores how slavery worked in the USA. It exposes slavery as not just a grotesque paradigm of plutocracy, but also its essence.

The violence of slavery in the South was deliberately engineered to appear as insane and as terrorizing as possible. There was a deep reason for the apparent insanity. Insanity sometimes has its reasons that reasonable reason can’t reach.

(The reason for this is synonymous to the incompleteness theorems of metamathematics: the space of all reasons is bent, just as the cosmological universe is, and has an event horizon, for closely apparented…reasons.)

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes

Insane violence, just as in Mali, where terrorists have destroyed hundreds of mosques (!) named to the collective patrimony of humanity by the United Nations, destroyed extremely old books, cut feet, hands, raping children [witnesses say], making “battlefield brides” from 10 year old girls, recruited 12 year old boys as soldiers, etc. And for the same… reason.

Confronted to such a degree of maniac violence, reasonable people tend to, well, reasonably submit, as the terrorists hoped, to start with. So criminal madness, made to look as mad as could be, is the force multiplier of ultimate oppression. A secondary enabler, in the particular case of the American South, was the American justice system, which pretty much rested on arbitrariness and ultra-violence, in an uneasy balance of evil with outlaws and slave masters.

Tarantino shows that the only way to advance out of the deepest infamy is to explode compromises, not to say compromission. President Lincoln was forced to draw the same conclusion.

The case of American slavery reached grotesque violence. Even greater, but righteous, violence was the only way to deal with it. This is the lesson of history. (The Civil War killed nearly a million, about 3% of the population.)

In Mali overrun by satanic terrorists, negotiating with those fanatics who value no life, not even their own, means to reconquer the country, using maximum force. Nothing short of this will do. Wisdom means using maximum force against those using maximum evil.

President Hollande said:”On me demande quoi faire avec les terroristes.[Short pause, as if the question was eerie]
Bien, LES DETRUIRE!” [Looking around bewildered, as if he could not believe he was asked to profer such an evidence.] (“I am asked what to do with the terrorists? Well, DESTROY THEM!”)

Destruction is how to deal with evil. Nothing else will do. Waiting too long with DESTROYING Hitler and his Nazis, just made it worse. And so it is always, with any genuine evil. the fact pacifists refuses to understand this makes them into evil collaborators, cowardly, but, even more fundamentally, plain lazy. Too lazy for brainwork.

Half of the word “plutocracy” is made of “evil”, let me insist to those who are overlooking the notion. Tarantino made a movie about plutocracy in action. That is, evil in action.

Obama, was, of course, elected to do away with plutocracy, but that aspect of his mandate long eluded him… even if it means violating his campaign promises (which were so compatible with my views in 2007-2008). (OK, now that he is on top of the crab heap, it’s much harder to do. Power does that; half of my family stopped talking to me, lest I indispose Obama, or the miserable crab heap below…)

In a tax deal, Obama just augmented taxes on salaried people, even some earning very little, but mostly eschewed taxing plutocrats & their corporations. A move in the wrong direction?

Will Obama emulate the fictional hero, Django, and unchain himself in more ways than one? The medical jury is out. The latest symptoms of Obamania are that the desire to be perceived by the masters as the only adult in the room, an infantile syndrome that Tarantino fingers extensively as fundamental to what made slavery possible, is still alive and well in Obama’s brain. Sad, oh so sad.

I advocated that for guns, Obama should open fire on the gun maniacs. He seems to be doing just this.
For the debt ceiling, what about emulating President Eisenhower, proclaim an emergency, and raise the tax on multimillionaires to 92%? There sure is a much worse emergency now.

We surely do not want that, when historians look at Obama’s reign, they just think: 1858 (explanation below). And, certainly, that’s not what Obama want, either? Time to get unchained!
***

SLAVERY WAS SYMBIOTIC WITH INSANE VIOLENCE, & THAT WAS DELIBERATE:
“Django Unchained”, is an excellent movie by Quentin Tarantino. Excellent, but mean, cruel, somewhat demented. The movie is addressing a set of facts, slavery in the USA. Mean, cruel, completely demented facts. Ingrained, set in stone. A galaxy of evil. That complete dementia enabled slavery’s nature, and nothing short of that would have done it. Tarantino is just depicting an insanity that was.

An insanity that was perfectly self sustainable. If the North had not destroyed the South, that evil was perfectly sustainable, it could have lasted 1,000 years.

We have an even worse dementia nowadays, when the leaders of the world, with their empty minds, believe that there is nothing wrong with burning 400 million years of accumulated carbon. Maybe they can personally profit, but their memories will not. Someday, no doubt, after 70% of humanity had to evacuate their homes from the rising acidic ocean, they will be viewed as the worst monsters history ever produced. Their names will live in infamy, long after Hitler’s name is forgotten.

Some have told me, in light of the primary school mass murder by a war weapon, that it was a sin to even mention such things, because, you know, they are so terrible. This exact reaction is what made Auschwitz possible: Hitler’s Germans did not want to talk about terrible things.
Web sites have even censored me for mentioning the gun problem! As if me, who has never touched a gun, was somehow culprit of atrocity by explicating, and condemning, the machinery behind the atrocity. Similarly, Tarantino is getting accused of guns and slavery, for showing both in action.

This confusion between fact and fiction irks me, and also irks Quentin Tarantino. And rightly so. Those who conflate critique and practice should get their heads examined.
The confusion between act, and practice, on one side, and fiction and analysis on the other, is how philosophers such as Sade or Nietzsche, and actually, pretty much all philosophers, have been identified with what they detected, analyzed, and condemned.

Carefully entertaining confusion between message and messenger is a tool of oppressors. The very first thing about the brain, is that the brain massages the message, while becoming a messenger of whatever it kneaded inside.

Conflating incoming data and brainwork on said data denies the very nature of the brain, and imposes crushing, self oppressing stupidity.

Back to “Django Unchained”. The movie is the occasion of making important points about civilization:

1) civilization comes and goes. The movie opens with two cow boy types mounted on horses brandishing big guns, while half dozen characters stumble between the riders, shuffling like hobbled penguins, all day long, and then deep in the freezing night of Texas. They are black slaves, their chaffed and bruised ankles, chained together. The grotesque spectacle is long depicted, as it is telling of the cruelty of slave traders. Slave traders were allowed by law over much of the USA in 1858.

2) when civilization goes, the degeneracy that follows hides below a veneer of the opposite of what it is.

The enslaving South was in the habit of fancying itself as somewhat French in taste. Masters called each others “cavaliers” (French for “riders”), and affected French manners. (A modern equivalent is Hitler, always talking about peace, and posing himself and Germany as victims; in truth the opposite of what was happening.)

As Tarantino points out, the upper society of the South did not know any French. It was offended to be reminded of this fact. Hiding behind a French veneer was how to fake civilization, when that enslaving society was just the opposite.

Under Merovingian queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, in 658 CE, slave trading had been outlawed in the gigantic Merovingian empire.

The slave trading depicted in “Django” happened exactly 1,200 years later. In other world, the upper society of the Southern USA was primitive, and offensive… By Merovingian standards!

Revealingly, I have met the same sort of character in the present day Silicon Valley. They waxed lyrical about French cheeses and wines, while flaunting their French ways, until, well, I hinted that the real thing, the real French culture, was about rationality, emotional, or not, first. Then, they hated me, without any limit, the exact effect Tarantino warns about in his movie. Over the decades, I had the dubious pleasure to experience this effect with 90% of the upper society people in the Bay Area who know where France is located.

Let me say in passing that, whereas the movie is fiction, the ambiance it describes in the enslaving South is not so. The World Socialist Website found the movie “miserable… pointless and stupid”. But, unfortunately and revealingly, that is just how it was in the USA then.

The ambiance depicted by Tarantino is a historical fact, and that is why the Secession War turned into the bloodiest civil war in the history of Western Civilization. Yes, plutocrats owned and whipped “niggers” and, to this day of today, if one has a drop of African blood, in the USA, one is black, that is “niger” in Latin. And yes, the oppressed themselves cooperate with that scheme, to this day of today, when they dutifully call themselves “niger” (“black”), when they are multiethnic, as much of humanity is.

Tarantino has no time to give a lecture on why the south fancied itself as French, precisely because it was the exact opposite of the spirit of France. But it is a historical fact that it did. However Tarantino gives an explicit pointer that this pseudo-French veneer is both fraudulent, and very important (and this pseudo French dashing incited arrogant Southern plutocrats to launch the Secession War):
The second main character in Django Unchained, a charming (and humanitarian!) bounty hunter, endowed with the power of law, points out to Mr. Candie, a plutocrat played by Leonardo DiCaprio, after seeing a black slave being torn by dogs:

“You name our main fighters after Alexandre Dumas’ characters, but Dumas would not have approved what you did today, to give a black man to dogs… You see, Dumas was black.”Candie has nothing to say to this. That Dumas, the very epitome of the Cavalier Spirit, was black would have been shattering to those who believed in racially justified slavery, had they known of the fact. And the truth is even worse: Dumas’s father, a mulatto, was one of the top general of France, and one of the most dashing “cavalier” who ever was.

3) Plutocrats of the South of the USA believed that their immense brutality and disregard for human life, including their own, would always allow themselves to dominate. This illusion was shattered with the tremendous cavalry charges of the Secession War. Top Southern generals, full of bullets, draining of their blood, kept on riding proudly as their boots filled with blood, giving orders. But, ultimately, they died. And the likes of them was never seen again.

4) Tarantino got somehow accused of the Newton primary school shooting, on the ground that Quentin depicts violence, so he is bad, and the shooting was bad. That, of course, is logic worthy of slightly unbalanced two years old, who can’t distinguish contemplation from participation.

Tarantino movies have long dialogues to expose this sort of demented, quirky two year old logic, upon which our world rests. Those who don’t like to think in depth find these dialogues deeply upsetting, because that is precisely how they think.

The great decisions to make war in Iraq and Afghanistan rested on two year old logic. And there may be hell to pay about them, because, not only were perfect defeats engineered at enormous cost, but the triumph of two year old logic was elevated for all to see. The problem with the latter, is that it can then be used by terrorists, or even other states (North Korea, China?).

Actually Pakistan, in its preceding attack against India used two year old logic for all to see. (To paraphrase: “We have nukes, so we know India will not attack us, whatever we do, so we may as well do whatever we want.”; this plutocratic logic will be unbounded, until the day comes when India prefers to risk nuclear war).

Another class of demented logic is the pseudo expertise, from complicated argument resting on imaginary data. We see a lot of this with today’s economic experts (“austerity was a panacea,” they said, until it bled the economy to death…)

In “Django Unchained”, Di Caprio makes a beautiful demonstration of demented pseudo-expertise, as he gives a lesson of phrenology. Phrenology was a 19 C pseudo science that explained the mind by looking at the geometry of skulls. There is nothing to it, it’s nearly completely false (I say nearly, because the Incas had found out that, by compressing foreheads tremendously they could create humanoid killing robots).

What DiCaprio wants to demonstrate, is that Africans are submissive and non creative. The rest of the movie is about demonstrating, with facts, the exact opposite. Django becomes immensely creative, and totally rebellious, as he proceeds to annihilate the entire estate of Mr. Candie.

It did not start this way. Initially Django is playing an Obama like character, silent, guarded, keeping to himself, somewhat motivated first by not making waves. Then he reveals himself to put justice above anything else, even his own safety (or that of his family, that is, his wife).

So is Mr. Tarantino saying that Obama could turn into somebody re-establishing justice? Is Tarantino hoping that Obama is going to turn into a real life Django? I sure hope so.

Fat chance? Obama seems still affected by playing the part of the Stephen character in “Django Unchained”. If I were president, at this point, I would drive the plutocrats crazy (French cooperation would be automatic, and other important European leaders would follow; the rest of the world could be forced into squeezing out plutocrats, or join Depardieu in Siberia, to be used as Mr. Putin’s carpet).

Yet, forcing the Plutos into submission is not what Obama is doing. He speaks as if he were, but… Obama solved the fiscal cliff by rising the taxes of people making less than 100,000 when he repelled the repel of the payroll tax. Also those with income of a few hundred thousand dollars (barely enough, say, in the Silicon Valley to buy a two bedroom house) saw their taxes augmenting by 10%.
But what of the true rich, the real plutocrats? Those who are not on salary, and can claim, through tricks, that they have no taxable income? Nada. They go on as before, using all the tricks that allow them to pay very little tax, or not at all.

I worked massively for the first Obama campaign for two years. I spent a huge amount of time and money (compensated by smiley photos with dear friend Obama).

Yet, by the time of Obama’s victory, in 2008, a pattern came in full evidence, and I wrote about it on my site, even then. The pattern was to talk one way, and act the opposite, at least in finance and economics. Thus, strangely, I have felt terrible for more than four years, as I contemplate the duplicity of the leaders, and the naivety of the masses bleating their approval of the shepherd.

So there was the fiscal cliff. It was proclaimed to be a victory of the People because taxes were raised on salaried income, and the payroll tax was cranked back up. Guess what? Plutocrats don’t have salaries and they are not on someone’s payroll.
And guess a bit more: all the tax evasion mechanisms of plutocrats and corporations were left intact.
Obama foams at the mouth about China manipulating its currency. But that’s not the problem with “China”.
“China” is just a Trojan Horse used by (mostly USA based) plutocracy.

On a $600 iphone, only ten (10) dollars go to China. But then Apple washes, cleans and rinses its giant profits through various tax havens (such as the British Virgin Islands), and the plutocrats, with various other tricks, such as borrowing instead of earning, escape taxation further. In the end, said plutocrats, now mimicking wise men, advise Obama to go on with his boy, Lew, and the USA becomes a generalized heaven for plutocrats. Thanks to havens the USA is becoming a heaven for plantation owners, satanic style.
Do you think the big donors who sat with Michelle Obama last year for the State Of The Union pay tax? No they don’t. Yet, every year they become richer, and thus more influential.

When he announced the “fiscal cliff” “compromise”, President Obama claimed that upper-income Americans would be paying their fair share. But he failed to fulfill a campaign promise to change part of the tax code that benefits some of the richest people in the country.

Some of the wealthiest Americans – such as private equity managers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists – will continue to enjoy the tax code that allows them to avoid paying billions in taxes.
As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it:”In the Bay Area alone, employees of top money firms donated $6.7 million to federal candidates and political committees during the 2012 election cycle.
An analysis was performed for The Chronicle by MapLight, a nonprofit that analyzes the effects of money and politics… said Daniel G. Newman, president and co-founder of MapLight. “Millions in political contributions brought billions of tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in America.”

More than four years ago, Obama promised that he would end the practice of taxing carried interest as capital gains instead of as regular income. Such a change could raise an estimated $13 billion to $20 billion over the next decade, and impact 36,000 to 65,000 people.
But Obama failed to live up to his 2008 promise, according to the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact.com who recently rated it a “broken promise” of his first term.

What is even more worrisome is the would be nomination of Jack Lew as Sec. of the Treasury. Lew has an atrocious track record, as he was one of the instigators, under Clinton, of the deregulation of the financial derivatives. That diverted money creation to the exclusive profit of the bankers themselves, violating their fiduciary mission (which is to create money FOR the real economy, instead or for just themselves).
Lew is connected in a major way to worldwide plutocracy, that he served as director of wealth management at Citi. No less.

Lew got enormous bonuses, even after his bank had (just) been bailed out by the public.
Those are the people blocking the taxes (on them, plutocrats) which would alleviate the deficit. Remember that president Eisenhower, a republican, brought up the tax on millionaires to 92%. He did this, Ike said at the time, extinguish the World War Two debt. Why can’t Obama ask the hyper rich to pay 50% tax? I understand he cannot be as much of a leftist as Ike, but why not go half way?

Obama not only does not propose to do this. Not only did he augment taxes for the working stiff. But he left all the tax avoiding tricks of the plutocrats intact, those tricks that guarantee the blossoming of plutocracy at an exponential rate.
What’s the computation here?

Well, most often, plutocracy grows so fast that it overwhelms the resistance of the majority of the People, and it then rules without sharing much. This is what happened to Rome, what happened in all of Europe during the Middle Ages, etc.

In 2008, the USA voted for Obama, because it thought he would turn into Django Unchained. Instead Obama became all too friendly to the likes of Mr. Candie (Di Caprio).

Mr. Candie’s faithful servant, Stephen, is played, with great subtlety, by Samuel Johnson. Stephen has completely turned to the Dark Side, although he believes he serves good (“Candie never killed a nigger” he says, when enjoying knees shattered by Django’s bullets). Although black like charcoal, Stephen is whiter than the whites about white supremacy. Obama’s soothing words about having achieved tax fairness, just because he is taxing more salaried people reminds us of the sort of hypocrisy and non factuality with a straight face those who collaborate with the Dark Side are expert in.
One of the main property of Hades-Pluto is invisibility. A tradition pursued throughout the Middle Ages, when Satan was called “Le Malin”, “The Crafty One”. This means that the disguise of reality is fundamental to the Dark Side. Not only does it allow to mislead the innocent, but also to excuse, and enable the guilty.

We The People of the USA needed a Django in 2008. Some say we got a Stephen. Somebody who can sit in the rich back room, talking peer to peer with the plutocrat, thinking he does good by changing things as little as possible, as plutocrats get to know and appreciate him.
The Civil War started a couple of years after “Django”. The immediate reason is that the South seceded and fired on Federal forces, as any history book will say.

However why that happened has to do with a collective psychology in the South, that embraced Armageddon in an orgasm of hubris. That, in turn happened for reasons that have to do with plutocracy growing exponentially. An exponential growth of plutocracy is not just a blossom of riches and power, in ever fewer hands, but also, consequently, a blossom of madness. Plutocracy refuses their humanity to most, hence puts into question the human nature of those who undergo it.

Alexander (so called The Great) was very bold in battle. No wonder: he had adopted Oriental metaphysics. once he got hurt and blood flowed from his body. “Is that the blood of a god?” he wondered. his Greek companions laughed. No wonder Alexander became ever closer to the Persian (ex-)Royal family.
It is not just because excess makes mad, that plutocracy makes people mad. But the crazier the plutocracy, the crazier the justifications for it to keep on rolling up. If one is Stalin, and one kills millions of peasants, a lot of comrades and generals, one may as well keep on going, lest a new opposition gets empower, and that’s also why Mao got ever crazier. The “100 Flowers” were followed by the even nuttier “Cultural Revolution” the latter allowed to get rid of the opposition the former had created.

As readers can see I take seriously my general definition of “plutocracy”: a leader fond of the Dark Side is a plutocrat, and that goes all the way down to Mr. Candie and all his attendants and family. That’s why Django shoots Candie’s sister, in spite, but rather, because of her impeccable education and sensitivity (it’s a low dimensional sensitivity: it does not extent to “colored people”). So Django insists that proper goodbyes be given, before he cold bloodedly gives he r the hot lead she deserves in her midriff, as it is clear to him that polite formalism is all the depth these people have, and thus that superficial formalism is an enabler that should also be executed.

The hubris is explained by the necessity to be ever more cruel, brutal and arrogant as plutocracy augments, and singularizes itself. It becomes the pleasure of getting away with those sins, and even inverting all values, and exhibiting them as virtues. This mechanism shows that hubris is intimately related to the Dark Side.
The American South lived a collective madness. A madness so great, it could not have been conceived before; the Romans had slaves, but Roman slavery, although just as bad as American slavery, was not founded on the (crazy) concept of race.

Rome’s Severian dynasty was founded by Septimus Severus, a Libyan of Libyan descent from a Libyan senatorial family, who rose to supreme military command in Illyricum, before he re-established order to Rome with his legions (by stopping the chronic coup and circus of the Praetorian Guard).
The paradoxical result of the South’s hubris crisis was that, at the very end of the Civil War, slavery got outlawed.

So will Obama become Django, and unchains himself? Executive orders about the gun insanity in the present day USA is a good start. OK, the weapons of war madness is not as bad as the plutocratic insanity, but, as I explained in a previous essay, they are related.
And overall, they are supremely related by the metaprinciple of insanity being honored, unchallenged by reason, as if it is the supreme politeness to learn to respect it, no questions asked 9this politeness to insanity is one thing Tarantino targeted in his movie, as I explained).

Obama should go Django and start shooting liberally executive orders to explode the existing order. What does he have to fear? Nothing.

In the alternative, if Obama does nothing, and just sells himself like Clinton, let me tell him what’s going to happen. Plutocracy will not blossom for long. It will lead soon to disasters so great that today’s leaders will end worse than Dante ever imagined.
Ultimate wisdom for the human species is ultimate fighting, because only ultimate morality gives ultimate reason, thus terminal domination.

Such is the paradox of humanity. Love blossoms out of blood, when peace comes too short to allow a decent, comfortable enough existence.
***
Patrice Ayme

***

ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

AWE FOR INDUSTRY
INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINES & MEASURES INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS

Some pontificate that we are experiencing the “third industrial revolution”.

This erroneous naivety, rich in lessons, beholds a lack of measure, and a lack of history. As I explain why, I will introduce the INDUSTRIAL INDEX, which rests on the concept of energy and AWE, ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY, which rests on humanly effective energy usage.

Together both energy related concepts allow to found rigorously the notions such as industry, progress, even revolution, and the dismal science, economy.

Athena Parthenos: lots of energy to build, metal therein.

Economy has been dismal, because it had no scientific foundation. Energy gives that foundation to economics. While generalizing… physics.

Verily, there have been many “industrial revolutions” before. Scholars of antiquity call them “ages”, instead of “revolutions”. A tradition.

Going from the Bronze Age to the age of (carbon reinforced) iron (steel) was a change of “age”. (Trojan War Greece fell to the iron equipped Dorians, launching the Greek Dark Ages.) To make bronze, one had to bring together copper and tin, sometimes from very far away. To make iron, one had to reach temperatures higher than any naturally occuring fire. Those new metals were all about new, and more intense, energy management.

One needs to define “industry” and one needs to define a measure for “revolution”. I will do both. Defining industry depends upon a measure of industry, and this is the same measure that defines revolution. So I will do the measure first. (See note on measure.)
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INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINED:
A woman, with her bare hands, can do only that much. But if she drives a bus, she can do much more. Much more what? Much more work, in the exact physical sense of “work”. In physics, work is force time the distance along which said force acts. It’s equivalent to energy. (See work note)

An obvious question is how would industry be defined? Very simple: by work. A human, au naturel, can do only that much work. Industry does much more.

The concept of industry comes, through the French from the Latin “industria” “diligence, activity, zeal” itself from the old Indo-European roots “in”, or “indu” and struere (building, giving structure).

A measure of industry is how much work a human can do, or does, or depends upon,
or commands, in the average. To evaluate the industrial measure of a society, one sums up energy potential or realized, over the entire society.

To get an index, divide that generalized energy by the total population.

This is intuitively satisfying: the index equates the increased mastery of energy with increased industry. As energy is the most important notion in modern physics, this new economic theory fits smoothly with modern physics.

We need a name. I will use II, for Industrial Index.

How to measure the II varies according to societies. A herdsman will a flock of sheep brought in more calorie than his colleague running after wild mountain goats. In this case the relevant II springs from the difference of how much calories is produced (including by milking the goats) versus how much is expended (including training dogs, building fences, or making arrow heads…)

The Neolithic revolutions of herding and agriculture brought tremendous jumps in II. The first dams were built apparently in present day Yemen, then solidly connected to the rest of Middle Earth by a wetter climate, and Jawa in Jordan, 3000 BCE. By irrigating vast lands, a dam does automatically what would be a lot of work for people carrying the water by hand, so it brings lots of energy (jump in II), and in the service of mankind (thus an equal jump in II(AWE) see below).

An industrial revolution occurs when II jumps. II will jump when significantly more powerful science or technology is introduced or deployed (for example the science of breeding less dangerous almond trees or boars). It took 2,000 years to deploy the technology of the steam engine, from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the Frenchman Papin (who made a steam powered boat, outright!).

The size of revolutions can be compared across the ages, using the ratio: II(before revolution)/II (after revolution).

For example the steam engine allowed to jump from the maximal power of a dozen horses to ten times that, an II jump of ten. Advanced coal based steam power plants reached at most 100,000 horsepower (around 100 megawatts). A nuclear fission U235 reactor ten times that. So going from fossil fuel to nuclear represented another II jump of ten. (But that jump has mostly failed because the military based nuclear technology partly deployed was found to be insuffiencently safe enough.)
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ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINED:
An objection could be that this first order definition of II does not take into account, waste. However neither does GDP. GDP is notorious to augment with waste, so some countries have higher GDPs, just because they are tremendously more wasteful (what the Swiss and the French do does not differ much from what Canadians, or Americans do, under the same latitude; however Canadians and Americans need three times more CO2 to do it, a tremendous waste).

I have an answer to the problem of waste too. To remedy this, a notion, AWE, Absolute Worth Energy, does NOT consider the energy spent, but only the energy of the effect one is looking for by the activity that this energy deplyment intents to serve.

This II(AWE) is computed otherwise just as the II. A measure of the efficiency of a civilization is the quotient:
II(AWE)/II.

Examples: a traffic jam has zero AWE, but a Light Emitting Diode has an AWE close to 100% (as close to 100% of the LED output is used… as long as there is someone to enjoy the light of its energy output).
When a plane’s flight’s AWE is the energy of transporting people and goods, on that flight, NOT the energy spent to transport them (pretty much equal to fossil fuel spent + cost of training, flying, repairing, etc.)
It becomes a bit delicate when one determines the AWE of a PhD (but it can be done, using modern computers).
***

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS THROUGHOUT THE LAST 10,000 YEARS:
The Mayan civilization rested upon a tremendous irrigation system with reservoirs and canals. The largest canal, about 100 meter wide and more than 100 kilometers long, can be seen from space. So there was such a thing as Mayan industry. However, the American civilizations were violently destroyed, and contributed even less than East Eurasian civilizations to the present One world Civilization (the east’s greatest contribution, besides its very existence, may have been Chinese black powder).

Ultimately, civilization has been mostly the work of the Middle Earth. It makes civilization pretty much in one locale. The successive revolutions that articulated the civilizational mainstream all happened there, knew about each other, and are thus easy to compare.

The first industrial revolution was the invention of cities, the second one that of herding (or the other way around), the third one was intensive agriculture of engineered crops, the fourth revolution was writing (6,000 years ago). The fifth the political system (Sumer, 5,500 years ago), arriving simultaneously with copper-tin alloys, that is bronze. As tin and copper were often not found in the same place, they had to be transported by massive shipping (Crete, 4,000 years ago). Shipping was crucial for Western Eurasia, which, by the time of Carthage, enjoyed a trade system, shipping enabled, extending from the British isles to India, and even Black Africa; for example tin was shipped from Britain, and salted fish, from Black Africa).

There is no doubt that Rome had industry. The first Roman fleet, 200 warships copied from Carthage, was constructed in a few months, while the crews were trained in the dirt to move oars and obey commands (Carthage promptly sank that first attempt.) Rome had an enormous industry and economy.
But did Rome see an industrial revolution? Well the Industrial Index jumped. Roman dams are still in use today. Yet, the Greco-Roman empire mostly cheated. It split the population in two: the free, and the slaves. The Industrial Index and the II(AWE) applied mostly to the free.
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ARE THE INDUSTRIAL INDEX AND THE II(AWE) PERTINENT TODAY?
Extremely. There are, or ought to be, two industrial revolutions in full swing, one of intelligence, axed on II(AWE), the other of energy, axed on II. The first is still in infancy, the other, in trouble.

The present Artificial intelligence revolution is blossoming, but, like an infant learning to crawl, it is far from fully capable yet. Its potential to augment II(AWE) is very far from fulfilled. That will happen when all the tasks requiring NON CREATIVE and NON CONSCIOUS intelligence can be done by robots. No more driving; the car will do it for you. No more cooking; the kitchen will serve you what to eat. Etc.

What about the energy revolution? It’s somewhat in regress. Although so called “sustainable” energies are developed, they stay an epiphenomenon, and will stay so, as long as they cannot replace base energy. The USA has decided to go the other way, full blast, burning the planet for its own profit, encouraging China and India to do the same with coal.

The new energy source was, of course, nuclear energy which has energy density greater by a factor of one million. A succession of red herrings have mentally unbalanced civilization about nuclear energy, and this is having the disastrous consequence that the biosphere is in the process of quick irreversible destruction. Nuclear waste fades to nothing dangerous after a while. But not so for the poisoning by coal combustion, which permeates the biosphere with eternal contaminants such as arsenic and mercury. Or CO2, that will stick around for millennia.

The Industrial Index is actually in danger of collapse. How? Because the population is augmenting fast (II is obtained by dividing total energy commanded by the number of people), while the catastrophic consequences of fossil fuels burning have reached a tipping point. So energy production may have to shrink. Better AWE (such as more efficient planes, high speed electric trains, photovoltaic electricity) may compensate for this enough. Or not.
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SO WHAT TO DO? II AND II(AWE) NEED TO GO UP.
To get out of the deepening depression the world is entering, we need a jump in Industrial Index. Why? For the same reason as imperial Rome needed one: the resources accessible with deployed technology are getting exhausted (the case of Rome, and also our case). Solution: new technology, with a higher II, thus capable with greater energy to reach further resources (say bottom of the ocean nodules or Helium3 on the Moon).

Otherwise we can do like the Romans and wait until we don’t even have the resources to conduct war. By the way, India and China have understood this, and their policies are axed around augmenting the Industrial Index. Whereas, stupidly, in the West some have claimed we have reached the “post-industrial age”. Apparently that means that the factories are in China.

We are also experiencing a problem that Rome did not have, namely the collapse of the biosphere.

A greater II means a greater massive energy source. There is one, and only one. It’s energy intensity is a million times greater than fossil fuels.
So start a crash program to make high temperatures (hence high efficiency) thorium reactors (the radioactive waste of that energy type is neglectable). They would give massive amounts of clean base energy.
India and China have them, but the West has more capital and expertise at the ready. Maybe Japan can show the way? (Japan needs energy but not 1950 tech Uranium 235/Plutonium plants, which are too polluting and dangerous.)

By all means, pursue sustainable energy. But, as it is, for a huge variety of reasons, it stays a sideshow, or an invitation to disaster: watch Germany go coal crazy.
***

THE USA THINKS IT’S CRAZY LIKE A FOX, TO OPT FOR CATASTROPHE, JUST AS IN 1939:
Already in 2008, and before, I explained that “Energy Is the Foundation Of Economy”, and I introduced AWE.

That the USA has chosen a catastrophic energy policy goes according to American historical know-how. War has been good to the American Anglo-Saxon colony. Four centuries of war have brought unending success. The bigger the war, the bigger the success.

India, China, Japan, Europe and even Iran know differently. They know that there are wars that bring extermination rather than satisfaction. The Mongols hesitated to destroy China, and replace it by a steppe (Genghis Khan’s generals had the souls of geoengineers!). Just like Sparta saved Athens at the last moment, so did Genghis with Northern China. Iran and Iraq were not that lucky.

The present leadership of USA believes it will always be lucky, and war is a friend, so the more CO2, mercury, arsenic, coal, oil, gas, and rising, acid, lifeless seas, the better. Well, the Greco-Romans went down that road before. All the way down. In the end, they licked obsequiously the toes of the Franks for the next 15 centuries. That was not so bad, but this time is different; the planet is at stake.

If the USA were truly wise, it would opt to increase the Industrial Index instead of military know-how. The former implies the latter, but not conversely.

This is so true that even the U.S. Navy got it, and tried to conduct war exercises in 2012, using algae fuel. That fuel augments the II, because it produces energy from sun and air. It also sucks the CO2 out of said air (so plants making algae fuel could be fossil fuel plants’ best friend! algae fuel is basically the only method of Carbon Capture that could work significantly). The U.S. Congress, more controlled by plutocracy than the U.S. Navy is, was furious, and tried to block the Navy’s efforts. Funny how everything connects.

The military has long been partial to a higher Industrial Index. The first ‘automobiles’, in the Eighteenth Century, were commissioned by the French military. Earlier than that Middle Ages gunners found that Aristotelitian ballistics were false (physicists abstracted that generations later).

Even earlier Constantinople was saved “Gregian Fire” a long range flame throwing system based on fossil fuels. Gregian Fire allowed the Greco-Romans to beat back Muslim fleets for three centuries, sometimes burning up to 2,000 ships in one battle below Constantinople’s fortifications.
Meanwhile in France three full scale Muslim Arab, Berber and Syrian invasions were beaten back in 30 years, because the Franks succeeded to establish a slight industrial edge, using a number of techniques, from better steel to gigantic war horses, to a nationalization of the Church (to pay for the largest and better trained army since the heydays of Rome).

Plutocracy does not like revolutions, industrial, economic or political: they are all related, all having to do with ideas. All what the plutocrats want is to rule. And the way for them to do that, 2,000 years ago, or now, is by paying no taxes. That the world needs an industrial revolution and a paradigm breaking jump in II(AWE) is of no use to them, just the opposite. What’s good for the world, is not good to those who find their call in other people’s misery.

Ultimately, the industrious disposition of a society depends upon the psychology of its leadership. In a real democracy, that should be that of the People, but “representative” “democracy” often represents the People in name only. And industry is not the call of plutocracy, quite the opposite.

Carnegie himself, the USA’s first billionaire, pointed that out, and advocated, in writing, 50% tax on the rich’s income. Carnegie said that it was so that the rich pay back the society that allowed them to become rich in the first place. Carnegie also advocated confiscatory taxes on inheriting wealth, because, he said, the children of the hyper rich, per their psychological upbringing, are adverse to industry.

So why can’t “democrats” in the USA at least preach the way Carnegie did? Because they are “democrats” in name only?

***
Patrice Ayme
***
Work Note: apparently more sophisticated definitions just integrate work, as defined as above exactly, but infinitesimally, along paths.

Measure Note: I am using the word measure in the mathematical analysis sense. So I have equipped civilization, progress, industry and even technology with two measures: II and the more sophisticated II(AWE).
(I chose Industrial Index II, and not Industrial Coefficient to avoid a confusion with IC, Integrated Circuits, a good example of jumping II; besides, II is indeed an index, not a coefficient.)

Why USA Is Gunning For Guns

Abstract: DOES THE USA HAVE HUMANITY AT THE POINT OF A GUN? The obsession 70% of Americans have with shooting other Americans is the most violent violation of Civil Rights imaginable. That’s why they want it. The will to shoot others is worse than the will to enslave them. Who would profit from such a mentality? How did it come about? Why is the pro-gun obsession progressing in the USA, in parallel with the progression of plutocracy?

This essay explains why plutocracy pushes guns onto society. It opens new perspectives sure to make the nasty scream, and reveal who, among us, deep down inside, overflow with nastiness at heart. It may shame the majority whose action enables child killers (see teachers financing Assault Rifles makers).

Guns in the USA against all and any reason, but the most abject, is not just an Americano-American problem. Life at the point of a gun imposes, in the world’s leading nation, a mentality of privileging violence over reason, and hatred over empathy. That mentality, in turn, is forced onto the rest of the planet (say from movies, universities, opinion, diplomacy).

The Grossest Propaganda Works the Best

Most legislators in the USA are millionaires, and that’s not from their salary! But by doing exactly what their plutocratic masters want them to do. And one fundamental lesson to legislate is: France Bad, Guns Good.
[See note.]
The gun mentality plays the central role in the greenhouse-acid seas disaster: no nation has been so keen to block meaningful action as the USA. The most influential right fanatics who insist upon making the USA into a gun society are those who want plutocracy and maximal fossil fuel burning. Everybody is afraid of them. Letting them shoot their way through civilization, the most basic humanity, and common sense, is not how matters will improve on this planet. (But, of course, making things worse is exactly what they want, and that’s why they caress their warm guns.)

Those who have little time can read my main thesis immediately following (the rest of the 5,000 words of the essay just buttress that main thesis by going into the nitty-gritty, including the direct implication of plutocrats):
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Main Thesis:
GUNS ARE NOT JUST ABOUT SHOOTING PEOPLE, BUT ALSO ABOUT SHOOTING DOWN LOVE, REASON, By, And While Embracing The Very Mood That Enables Cruel & Violent Masters To Reign:

Possessing guns to kill people with, is about imposing one’s own violence as the ultimate arbitrage. Many Americans claim to view this as the ultimate expression of the American sense of freedom. Call it the freedom to inflict carnage.
The mood dominating the present USA depends upon commoners accepting violence as an overriding principle, and guns symbolize that. Instead of trying to understand things, the way Europeans have learned to do, not knowing enough to know any better is erected as definitive, glorious, all-American.
So right from the start gun advocates are tied in to the worst of man, the Darkest Side, when thoughts are only directed towards murder. Getting them out of that spiral of horror means giving them the courage, and knowledge to recognize that they have made a pact with the devil: their souls, against the orgasmic feeling a warm gun give them. They represent, they have made into an idolatry, the worst of man.

Moreover, gun fanatics succumb that way, not because they are free, but precisely because they are slaves, not because they are courageous, but because they are cowards.
The preceding is not insulting, but objectively descriptive. Insults claim what is not. An accurate depiction is not an insult.
If I describe a garbage pile, that I am contemplating, it’s not an insult. If I describe an angel as a garbage pile, it’s an insult, to the angel, and to reason.
By turning innocent little children regularly into garbage, the gun advocates of America are insulting humanity, as they claim to have the freedom to make holes into children. All the more as gun fanatics cover it all by holier than thou inanities. This essay will come up will plenty of reasons to justify the preceding, turning what precedes not into insults, but into faithful representation of what is.

A plutocracy is not a civil society. Thus, to have a plutocracy, one needs, first, to have a society that is not civil. Guns help to achieve this lack of civility indispensable to plutocracy. This is why the plutocracy insures, through the mass media enough mind control to make sure that, in the USA, people attack each other like rats in cage, with the biggest weapons they can find.

Through its control of mass media, and unending repetition, of the same lies and idiocies, the plutocrats have made the citizens of the USA believe half a dozen absurdities about gun ownership. The result is exactly what the plutocrats wanted: a society where everybody is afraid of everybody, and where the most basic human right, the right to life, is violated. Once the most basic civil and human right is violated, other violations shall easily follow. Such as having the richest and nastiest pay no, or very little taxes. Yes, my point is that the gun problem is just one aspect, part and parcel, one more way to help enable plutocracy.

More subtle, the trite idiot thoughts supporting massive gun usage have made people deeply stupid. The cowards blurt:”We have to defend ourselves!” and grab a gun. Never mind if children get killed. It sounds good to them, so they believe in it, all the more since the rest of them also bleat that way. However, statistics and observations contradict the argument that they have guns to defend themselves. Actually they have guns to kill themselves. Not only are they sadists, but they are also suicidal narcissistic masochists. (The lunatic at the primary school still had hundreds of rounds, but as the police closed in, he killed himself, proving the point that his fundamental mission was to take out his despicably low life. This is typical.)

In the USA, keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one. Never mind! They believe in it! It’s all about faith! Gun and God! Gun is god, and bullets make the only points they can understand.
Gun ownership is not about reason, it’s all about the opposite. Gun ownership is about violating reason: the more one says guns are for defense, and the less true it is, the better! Thus the little minds learn that reason is irrelevant, that what their masters, the plutocrats they venerate, told them, is dominant.

Thus, symbolically, Civil and Human Rights, and reason itself, are exhibited as secondary to what gun fanatics have been told to believe in, namely their right to murder. And they have been told that, again and again and again, by big money, all over the media they control, by the wealthy ones who devise the American discourse. That is all what the plutocrats want their commoners to believe.

Conclusion: A guns totting society is scared, divided, prone to violence against itself, stupid, and, having no time or inclination to establish a class consciousness, cannot organize itself against cruel abuse, as it is too busy dodging bullets. What a better place to establish plutocracy, which is vigilantism writ enormous, for the benefit of the few? And if small people are small vigilantes, is not it natural that the plutocrats employ armies of lobbyists and politicians, let alone body guards and private enclaves, to, well, defend themselves, too?
It goes without saying that the internal violence of the USA comes out externally, and that is why the USA has sabotaged all efforts against heat trapping industrial gases, in the last 30 years.

Interestingly, the same situation exactly, of violence unchained, brought down the Late Roman empire, when plutocracy mutated into the feudal order. Not a coincidence.
Now for the details.
***
Patrice Ayme

WWII Details Worth Examining

MUCH OF UNEXAMINED WWII IS RELEVANT TODAY

[And It is Not An Accident That They Are Carefully Unexamined!]

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Abstract: World War Two, Nazism, everything, and everybody connected to them make for an unending source of lessons in many realms. Some of these truths are eternal, they were taught by history many times before. Nazism was made possible by not knowing, or deliberately ignoring, or, even, cynically exploiting, many of these lessons, with evil purpose.

Certainly Julius Caesar, happening on the scene in 1936, would have known what to do. He had seen even worse before. But Caesar was at the head of the Populares. He was both a plutocrat, if there ever was one, and somebody who wanted to rise above that condition, for the good of the People, not to say civilization (that’s why he was assassinated by plutocratic senators).

Why were the lessons of history forgotten, and new ones not guessed in time, to prevent World War Two? Well, the reason to forget is still in force nowadays.

The establishment breathes, sleeps, dines, or exchanges business, so close together, that it feels that it is better not to examine all the forces behind Hitler, lest they still feed it today.

To avoid talking about that reason, all those connected to the establishment go around, as if they were deaf, blind, mute, mental retards whining that the catastrophes (“Shoah” in Hebrew) of fascism, holocausts, Nazism, World War Two were incomprehensible.

Those connected to the establishment are (implicitly) paid, by their association with the powers which overlord, to claim that WWII viciousness cannot be understood.

But could it be as simple as… the fractional reserve system? OK, that’s not simple, and very obscure to the commons.

What is the establishment made of? Not just people, but of a whole mental universe. First of all the establishment of ideas and moods that allows the reign of the principle of plutocracy.

Certainly in a political system where public money creation, that is power, is privately controlled, while harnessing the power of the state, (that is what the fractional reserve system we have does), is a plutocracy, in the strictest, most classical sense of the term.

The secret never to be thoroughly examined in WWII is that the most prominent elements of the plutocracy were genitors and allies of the fascist powers (although both sides, plutocrats and fascists, claimed to be enemies, to hide their true nature from the mystified populace). For doing this, they exploited some tricks, and those tricks are still in use nowadays.

As long as that dirty secret stays buried, so does the true nature of plutocracy and how it relates to the present civilization: it’s not just about the rule of money, and money being the only power. Plutocracy is also about believing that hell is the only heaven worth having. 

I present here just a few of WWII unexpected avalanches of causes and connections. [This post is partly an answer to one of the commenters who contributes to this site, Old Geezer Pilot, and it does not have the pretention of being more than a jumble of little known facts.]

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CLEAR & PRESENT ABUSE FROM INCOMPLETE, OR FALSE HISTORY:

Wall Street glued six major German chemical companies to make IG Farben, a giant monopoly. Great profit would come from going around American anti-monopoly laws passed by Teddy Roosevelt. In general, most of the individuals and firms which became prominent in Germany after World War One were entangled with industrialists and financiers of the USA.

This was just an instance of the sort of interference in the German socio-economy that arose from the other side of the Atlantic. There many others.

For example Dr. Schacht (PhD, 1899) was a pawn of Mr. JP Morgan (founder of the bank JP Morgan, and so mighty he personally put an end to a Wall Street crash in 1907). Schacht became Germany’s most important finance official after WWI (although he had been sacked for corruption by his commanding general during the occupation of Belgium). Schacht engineered the German hyper inflation of 1923, as part of a devious campaign to not compensate for the enormous deliberate damage inflicted on France, from the flooding of mines to the dynamiting of the Coucy castle, the largest Middle Age castle, with the highest dungeon ( French volunteers are still rebuilding it, albeit they barely started to make a dent on that field of stones).

The First World War happened on French soil, invaded by the fascist Prussian army, and the destruction occurred there, but Germany somehow contrived to pose as a victim of big bad France, and the concept of repairing what it had broken. This (absurd)  lesson is taken for granted by many an Anglo-Saxon pseudo intellectual, and is an essential part of the anti-French sentiment in the USA. Even Hitler was not that anti-French.

Dr. H. Schacht later engineered, in the 1930s, the coming to power of Adolf Hitler.

Some, who don’t follow the news, will feel I am rehashing history long gone, and not worth studying.

However, in 2012, German opinion makers systematically warned against providing enough money for the European economy, by brandishing the threat of the hyperinflation that Germany experienced in the 1920s, and conflating it with the Great Depression of the 1930s. As Paul Krugman rightfully pointed out, that was mixing two completely different phenomena from two completely different decades.

The only thing in common between the 1920s, the 1930s and the 2010s has been a common lamentable success by the most influential German opinion makers to persuade the German people that black is white, cold is hot, and criminal insanity is the highest expression of wisdom.

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WHY THE NAZIS HATED FRANCE:

The First World War was a conspiracy from four German generals, dragging two admirals, the Kaiser (depending upon his highly variable mood), and the acolyte of USA president Wilson, House. Although traitors to civilization such as Bertrand Russell wanted Germany to win (something about the Anglo-Saxon race, same as Col. House), the British recovered their inner French, and allowed France to win.

At the battle of the Marne of early September 1914, multiple counterattacks by French army corps between or around German army corps, nearly cut-off the main German armies.

The BEF, British Expeditionary Force, ten divisions, was helpful to the more than 100 French divisions engaged (although the BEF had to whipped into shape, as it had started to flee way south of Paris). However, the BEF was not decisive. The Germans retreated desperately, and the front lines stayed blocked for four years afterwards, until the Second Battle of the Marne (when Germany tried all out, punched in a vacuum, as French intelligence had anticipated the blow, followed by a French artillery propped counterattack, which led Germany’s commander to inform the Kaiser that Germany had lost the war).

Hitler was in the midst of it all. His company got killed by the French. Ultimately he was gazed, by the French and suffered a nervous breakdown. Gas had been a German idea, but the French and British caught up on it. Thus Hitler’s hatred of France. After World War One, Germany was smarting from its defeat at the hands of the French Republic, half in size in population (when not counting the French empire).

Once, after the German defeat, a British general was having tea with the top German general, and the German complained they should not have lost the war, but for little problems like the insurrection in Germany, and the fact the treacherous French army had cut-off the food supply of Germany in the south. Amused, the British general struck an ironical tone:“In other words, you would not have lost the war, if you had not been stabbed in the back!”

Ludendorff ran away with the notion. He was one of the founders of the Nazi party (at the time when the Bavarian police was paying Hitler to… spy on the Nazi party!) Another thing the Nazis ran away with was Keynes’ outrageous paper, “The Economic Consequences Of Peace”, where Keynes argued that having liberated Eastern Europe from the German boot was a horrible thing, tied in with the deeply manipulative and nefarious French mentality, which put liberty above profit.

That Keynes is still admired by pseudo Jewish pseudo liberals such as Paul Krugman means that, even among the brightest, some are finding history too hard and complicated for their taste. (Not that I disagree with Keynes in all ways, far from it; but I find his influence on human events nefarious enough to avoid naming anything positive in his glory.)

In any case, the end result was that German fascism had been defeated, but not crushed. Clemenceau (much reviled by Keynes) declared in 1919:“Mark my words. Within twenty years, the Boches will attack us again.” Clemenceau was entirely right (but for the fact that it was the French republic which attacked that time; “Boches” is a derogative for Germans).

A consequence is that German fascists were obsessed by defeating France. Hitler starts “Mein Kampf” ranting against the French, the real enemy. Then, and only then, pages later, he criticizes the Jews. Observing a man dressed all in black, like a crow, Hitler observes:“I asked myself, is that a Jew? Then I realized that this was the wrong question. The right question was: ‘Is this a German?’”

[I am quoting from memory. Nobody can accuse me not to know the classics!]

***

EVERYBODY HELPED GERMAN RACIAL FASCISM, BUT FOR THE HATED FRENCH:

France was the greatest military power after November 11, 1918. The French Republic to impose her views fully about what to do next. France insured the freedom of Eastern Europe, liberating several nations, but she was unable to insure her own safety in the West, as the USA opposed this in all sorts of ways (even promising to implement the French idea of the SDN, the Societe des Nations, and then sabotaging it later).

The natural frontier of France is exactly what it was under the Roman empire: the Rhine. The other natural limes was the Danube; in between there was a gap; that gap caused plenty of problem to the Roman army, an hemorrhage that lasted four centuries.

Another natural solution was to conquer “All Men” (Allemagne). That is exactly what the Franks under Clovis embarked on after defeating the Goths.

After Germany’s naked aggression in 1914, which killed more than ten million in Europe alone, the positioning of the French army on the Rhine would have been only natural. (After 1947, France would make to Germany an offer it could not resist: unify and salute; the euro is a means to further the unification).     

However, as far as the USA plutocracy was concerned, France and its enormous empire were juicy targets, as they had been in 1914 (when an alliance was proposed by “Colonel” Wilson, special envoy of USA president Wilson, to the Kaiser). And so were all European empires.

Fascist European regimes supported by American plutocrats were going to be the way the European democracies would be destroyed, and USA rule, after 1945, implemented. OK, there may not have been a central gnome committee underground, the way Obama has a death panel. But I do believe that equivalent ideas were broached in parties. After all, that’s what Manhattan is for. (What else?)

German fascists were fully cooperative, with the machinations of USA based plutocrats, because they did not take the USA seriously. After all, when Jews such as the Warburgs cooperated with Hitler, it could only be viewed as hilarious (certainly Texaco and its oil amused Hitler a lot).

France had limited the German army to 100,000 with the Versailles Treaty, and severely limited the size and nature of heavy German weapons, from tanks to submarines, to battleships. So the (fascist) Germans, to turn around the restrictions of the Treaty, secretly collaborated with a number of countries to develop such weapons. Sweden, Portugal, the USSR, Great Britain, and of course the USA, would be major collaborators in this effort.

The French government, in the late 1920s, warned the German Weimar government that, should this stealth rearmament go on, France would intervene severely.    

Amazingly, Churchill warned France that he would unleash the Royal Air Force on France, if France attacked Germany. That was in 1929. It was also a total violation of one century of entente cordiale, implicit or explicit.

This, meticulously ignored fact, puts a lot of matters in a different light:

1) Churchill was not what he built himself up to be, later. It’s not that Churchill was anti-French the way many USA citizens are nowadays. Far from it. Churchill was a francophile, and spoke excellent French, to the point he used it later during governmental functions. But Churchill also admired, and misunderstood, racial German fascism… Until 1939-1940 (a time when he gave bad advice about the Royal Air Force, which PM Chamberlain did not follow, thankfully). Churchill was also half American and had USA envy, and thus did not understand what American plutocracy was up to (he thought he belonged to that pantheon, and it was OK… Until the war told him it was not OK).

2) France failure to attack Nazi Germany before September 1, 1939 came precisely from the fact its main democratic allies, Great Britain and the USA, were deeply pro-fascism (and mainly pro-German fascism). Being anti-French was a convenient excuse, a seduction of greed (there were all these empires to grab). After January 1933, that pro racial fascism mood turned to a strong pro-Nazi sentiment in the UK and the USA. 

The UK was actively pro-Nazi until 1936. Great Britain allied itself with France firmly only in 1939, when the Spanish republic fell to Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The USA was mostly pro-Nazi and anti French until 1940.

Although the French Republic got help through the USA “cash and carry” in 1940, pro-Nazi policies in the USA were still active until August 1942, when Prescott Bush was told to stop managing Hitler’s greatest military corporation; IBM’s Watson, among other USA plutocrats, did not stop, though, to help the Nazis, even then! The attitude of the USA varied according to the different actors, considerably. For example, subordinates of Eisenhower told him that the French armored thrust towards Paris was a “difficult task” and that he should help it, even if the French infuriated him (Ike consented to join the Fourth Infantry division).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, German generals and their tanks were training… in the Soviet Union. This explains why German generals were so confident, in 1941, that they would crush the USSR. (They were clearly six weeks short, at least to conquer Moscow, and that would have cut-off Leningrad too.)

In 1935, a complex treaty was signed between the United Kingdom and Hitler. The Third Reich could violate the Versailles treaty, the Brits agreed, and build much more capital ships than allowed under it. In counterpart, a complex trading system was implemented between the British empire and the Reich.

France was aghast. The German ambassador confided to his American colleague Dodd that he feared assassination. Both used to take strolls together in the Tiergarten (zoo), to avoid the omnipresent microphones and spies…inside their embassies (or even inside Dodd’s family!). Finally Roosevelt had the Nazi skeptic Dodd, a University of Chicago historian, replaced by a man friendlier to Nazis and American plutocrats. 

***

WHY DID HITLER ATTACK RUSSIA?

Because it was his plan all along (as Old Geezer Pilot pointed out in the comments). Hitler had been conditioned by old Germanic lore, and at best, wanted to make slaves from the Slavs.

In the Middle Ages the Teutonic Knights judiciously found out that the Middle East was too hot for comfort, and that it would be smarter to pursue the work of extending the (Roman!) empire through Pagan lands, as Karl Der Grosse (Carlus magnus, Charlemagne) had done, a work actually started by the Franks a full millennium earlier.

Clovis’ dad, Childeric, was a Roman imperator, another little known fact: he was found buried in imperial purple in the 17C; unfortunately a fire in the Louvre museum around 1830  destroyed the Childeric’s ensigns of power; like Caesar, the Franks thought that the way to protect Gallia was by conquering all of Germania.

The Teutonic knights conquered East Prussia before being defeated, centuries later, by a Lithuanian-Polish coalition. Hence the old Prussian hatred against Poland.  

In 1914, the entire German army had been thrown through Belgium, against France. Eight divisions were supposed to hold Eastern Prussia. After a few weeks, a few reinforcements had to be sent. Ultimately, by 1917, the Germans had Russia on its knees, and the Soviets made an humiliating peace treaty which conceded a huge amount of land to Germany. One can, in a way, argue that Lenin was a German imperial agent! (He had been, with all his entourage, transported from Switzerland to Russia, through Germany, during the war.)

In the minds of all too many Germans, and cockroaches such as Hitler, the Russians were easy to defeat, that had been thoroughly established in WWI, and German generals coming back from the USSR confirmed its primitivism.

On the other hand, Hitler and all the Nazis expected defeat at the hands of France, Britain, and the USA, should those democracies unite again. That is why they were much encouraged by the hostility of the British and USA government against the French republic. Even then, the Nazis thought of attacking France no earlier than 1944. That’s how long the Nazis thought they needed to be ready.

Instead France attacked in 1939, and was defeated, momentarily, in 1940. Hitler found himself at war when he was not ready at all, and it quickly showed.

The defeat of France in May-June 1940 caused heavy Nazi losses, and the strategic disaster that Britain joined France in total war. In June 1940, a drafted French army sacrificing itself, allowed the British professional army to evacuate at Dunkirk (more than 300,000 soldiers escaped the encirclement).

Hitler, and Mussolini, depended upon the American plutocrats for oil, and that was as reassuring as being fed by sharks, I must admit. Hitler attacked Poland mostly for the oil (although he was screaming about Dantzig). Unfortunately the pernicious Stalin moved into Poland too, claiming he was helping his buddy Adolf… And grabbed the oil, first.

So what next? Hitler had persuaded the German generals he could be trusted, because Germany would never engage deliberately in a two front war, again. That is what Germany had done in 1914. So Hitler told his generals he would not attack the despised democracies. The Treaty of 1935 with Great Britain gave him a green light to attack to the east, he thought, and the wealthy Von Ribbentrop, with his large expensive apartment in London, assured him that British plutocrats were with him, and against the French Republic. 

Still the top German generals could see Hitler was nuts. In spite of their training as obedient dogs, they conspired to get rid of Hitler. They contacted the British government to ask it to say that, should Hitler pursue his aggressive antics, Britain would join France and declare war. Instead, traitors in the British government informed Hitler that his generals were plotting against him.

In 1939, France cut the Gordian knot, and declared war, and Hitlerland found itself in a war against Britain and France. In 1940, the German Air Force suffered enormous losses during the battles of France and Britain (thousands of planes and pilots). Earlier, the German fleet had been devastated during the Norwegian campaign against Norway, France and Britain (destroyed German capital ships can still be admired in fjords).

So Hitler told his generals that they had no choice. Britain, at this point, could not be defeated. They had to destroy the USSR first, precisely to avoid a two front war.

That was without counting on “Bomber Harris“, and the long range heavy bomber fleet that Britain had been using for more than six months already. Bomber Harris would quickly open a second front.

Hitler would end up, or rather, down, with three million men (only) fighting in Russia, while a full million manned the 88mm guns inside Germany to shoot at British bombers. Also an enormous part of the Luftwaffe was assigned to air defense over Germany. Part of the result was that, by November 1940, the Brits conducted raids on Berlin (following the earlier French example). By December 1941, Hitler would lose air supremacy in the Battle Of Moscow. It was so cold, only Russian planes were flying, and shooting at half frozen German troops in their summer attire.

***

WHY DID THE NAZI INVASION OF RUSSIA FAIL?

Because, by June 23, 1941, fascism had plenty of enemies, and weakened by wounds.

Mussolini attacked Albania, and then Greece. Greece counterattacked magnificently, and was pushing the fascists back into the sea, through Albania. Mussolini high pitch screams to high heavens, like the sexist little girl he was, enticed the Nazis to intervene. They threatened Yugoslavia which was in the way (Yugoslavia was another product from the French liberation of the German slaves known as Slavs, another country that, according to Keynes, the French had created in their malevolence). Encouraged by the allies, the Slavs said no, and the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, which would keep them busy with guerilla until 1945. So did Greece, their next target. Finally the Nazis got most of their paratroops to win, and die, in Crete.

The Nazis were idiots who did not know history. If they had, they would have heard of king Pyrrhus, who after winning yet another victory against the Roman army, concluded that “one more victory like that, and we will be completely defeated“.

The Nazi invasion of Russia happened six weeks late, and with smaller forces than anticipated (because of the enormous casualties in France, up to 200,000 there, added to what was lost in the Yugoslav-Greek-Crete campaign… plus all those shootings in the German sky against British Lancasters).

The gods of war, which had been so much on the Nazi side in the battle of France, were now against it. First, as general Guderian noticed, the Soviets had been learning the Nazi tactics of circling around. So the Nazi losses were heavy.

Record rains in October-November stopped the panzers, in the mud, which froze a few weeks after, in the coldest cold since Napoleon came that way. The panzer generals could see the gold bulbs of the Kremlin. Moscow had been evacuated, and its defense were tenuous. But Stalin had not fled, and the blocking sections of the NKVD, very active.

Yet Japan, ally to the Third Reich, decided to attack the USA, and target Indonesian oil, instead of attacking north, the USSR. Stalin immediately sent his 270,000 Siberian troop army to Moscow. It was expert at the coldest of cold. It counterattacked on skis among frozen Germans, by late December 1941.

***

VICIOUS MOODS ARE ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN:

Why did Germany attack again, twenty years after the entire world allied itself with France, and it had been completely vanquished? Mental inertia had a lot to do with it, plus lack of imagination. Why did it elect Hitler? Well, Hitler squeaked in electorally, he barely made it. But important people such as Schacht were pulling the strings, and the likes of countless racist plutocrats such as Henry Ford doing what it took (Ford had Hitler on payroll, just as the Bavarian police did).

As I said above, there were important manipulations of the public mind by the wealthiest. Moreover a vicious cultural mood had been created in Germany for generations. Nietzsche shouted about it ferociously, book after book. A mood of Deutschland Uber Alles rotted Germany. A mood that involved hubris. Hubris, called hybris by the Greeks, was the most reviled of moods. Moods have lots of inertia inside individuals and (thus) cultures. All the more since vicious moods are generally supported by thick mats of lies.

The hubristic mood of German superiority got wounded in 1914-1918. That angry bear bred with the racist attitude towards the Jews which Nietzsche had excoriated when it dawned. Germanoid madness received a severe blow in 1945. But only the full truth will vaporize it fully. As some declarations during the recent banking crisis showed, some of the infuriating Germanoid moods are still, unbelievably, alive.

The German Vice Chancellor, Roesler, racially a Vietnamese, declared many times in 2012 that Greece ought to be kicked out of the euro. On the face of it, it’s outrageous: a primate from another country, especially if endowed with a big title, does not have any right to declare that another independent country ought to be expelled from its own currency. Roesler wants to show to all that he is really a good German, the old fashion way, spiting Greece and the gifts it brought.

So it is often with politicians who do not truly belong: they want to show they are true patriots, and overdo it. The disaster known as Sarkozy is an example. The Corsican bandit Napoleon another. Even Louis XIV fits the bill (because of the Fronde). Hitler, an Austrian (and a… Jew, according to some other top Nazis). No, I will not say that a half Kenyan could not prosecute a white bankster, lest he not be admired as a true patriot…

The truth is that the average Greek nowadays has about as much to do with the European banking crisis than the average European Jew had to do with the Great Depression.

The rise of Nazism was endowed with a succession of satanic miracles. Many of them were engineered by worldwide plutocrats, others were pure accidents, especially since Nazi behavior was outside of the expected norms (something Hitler played as a violin). But the moods that enabled it were no accident.

The Greater Depression the world is presently facing is, deep down, a worse situation that the 1930s. In the 1930s, great powers were playing an imperial game. The USA, in particular, felt it ought to be the leader, and had the power to impose that. So it did, by letting its plutocrats run wild, and make their own international politics, supported by the Congress. Surely, if the USA had joined France and Great Britain in 1939, there would have been no Auschwitz. If nothing else, German generals would have implemented a coup, or even a strike against the Nazis. Instead the Ethyl Corporation of America sent lead tetraethyl in enough quantity (hundreds of tons) to keep Hitler’s Air Force flying, while France and Poland had more than 100 divisions engaged in combat. That was extremely high treason, not just of democracy, but civilization itself.

The Poles fought desperately, because they wanted to live. The Nazis wanted to kill them all, it was not just about killing the Jews. Not yet.  

There will be no justice about what happened with Nazism, as long as a full light is not brought to bear on these events, plus the cover-up ever since about who and what supported Nazism, and the impact they both had on the continuation of the plutocratic mood, we and the biosphere, are enjoying today.

The situation is worse nowadays, greatly because those nefarious mysteries of the past were not explored, but allowed to fester. A mood of unexamined civilization was allowed to thrive. If too many feel that it may not be worth living, much may happen all too soon.

***

Patrice Ayme

Energy Question For The USA

THE AGE OF OIL PRODUCED THE AMERICAN CENTURY. NOW WHAT?

No Vision, No Mission, No Energy

***

Another editorial of Paul Krugman firing volleys at republican “paranoia” for accusing Obama of driving up oil prices. As he observes in “Paranoia Strikes Deeper“: …“the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.”

American households tend to borrow as much as they can. Thus, when oil prices increase markedly, Americans have to cut in crucial budgets, such as house payments. I said at the time that it would lead to a peak in housing prices, and it did.

Why such a drastic influence of oil prices on the economy of the USA? Because Americans, except in a few places such as New York, commute by private car to work. So Americans have to feed the car, if they want to feed themselves.

It was not this way a century ago, or so. At the time public transportation systems using electric tramways and trains were found all over, even in Los Angeles. Car companies put an end to that outrage in the late fifties by buying, and then destroying, all the public transportation system they could put their greedy hands on.  Fossil fuel plutocrats were delighted.

But let’s set aside Krugman’s fake indignation. He is smart enough to know that Romney will do what Romney needs to do to win the Obama, I mean, the election. Waxing lyrical about Romney doing as Obama, does not beat going lyrical about sunrise.

Gasoline prices in the USA are way down in real dollars to what they used to be, decades ago. And so is the gas tax. This means that, far from adapting to the gathering multiply pronged world ecological and energy crisis, the USA has gone the other way, denying there is any crisis. “What? Me worry?” That’s got to be anti-American indeed.

Now real blooded Americans are all into strip searches and the death panel at the White House.

In Europe, gas prices are more than twice that of the USA, thanks to heavy taxes (stations in France have sported two euros a liter, that is 8 euros per gallon, or more than $10.50).

This means that far from being down and out, Europe is efficient enough to operate at that high price level. It also means that Europe is much more motivated than the USA to get much more efficient. In other words, high gasoline prices in Europe are a safety margin. The high prices force the European free market to adapt to a situation that the free market of the USA will encounter someday. Adaptation takes decades: new energies take in the average, historically speaking 50 years to become dominant. Same, one would guess, for energy efficiencies.

Basically, if oil prices doubled from here, gasoline prices would double in the USA. Whereas, even if the Europeans decided to keep the same high taxes, gasoline prices would only augment by 50%. And, in the much more efficient European economy, with plenty of public electric transportation available, the noxious effects on the European economy would be much less than one would expect from a 50% oil price rise. 

The world gets 55 × 1018 joules of useful energy from 475 × 1018 joules of primary energy produced by fossil fuels, biomass and nuclear power plants. That tremendous inefficiency (less than 13%!)  needs to be corrected. It will be, if, and only if, prices are kept high. Thus energy taxes are necessary to adapt to the looming penury.

Why looming penury? Because the reserves of other fossil fuels may have been vastly overestimated (by a factor of 5 in the case of coal). Various fossil fuel lobbies have interest to over-estimate the reserves (because it keeps the world addicted, as they present their industry as a long range solution, which it is not).

Looking at the raw production numbers, as exhibited below in the graphs paints a completely different story: production from existing fields is going down dramatically (at 5% rate, per year).

In other words we are in the treachorous waters between the catastrophe of CO2 poisoning and the disaster of running out of energy to burn.

The unavoidable rise of fuel prices will be less grave in Europe than in the USA, because many Europeans would opt for the available electric based public transportation system (the combination of much more efficient electric motors and central generation is much more efficient than distributing oil to put in SUVs all over, as done in the USA; SUVs, because there are too many holes in the asphalt. A problem partly related to high oil prices!).

Yet, the increase of the cost of imported oil corresponds exactly to the Italian deficit ($55 billion). Although that deficit increase had many causes, oil price increase was by far the most important. And the same for other Southern European countries. So the rise of oil prices was the barrel that broke the back of European debt.

In the USA, ten out of 11 post WWII recessions followed oil price spikes. Why are American minds so closed up to the looming strangulation of their economy by oil? Because the fossil fuel plutocracy is on a rampage in the USA. It uses a red hot propaganda to persuade the vast American public of undifferentiated sheep that there is no CO2 ecological crisis, and no energy crisis. (Although the latest polls indicate that two thirds of the public, in a splendid turn-around, believe that there is indeed a man-made climate change crisis; never mind that the New York Times had the latest tornado rampage, with 40 dead, presented as discreetly as possible.)

Why are the fossil plutocrats hysterical? Well we are past Peak Cheap Oil. Moreover, the “majors“, the world’s largest oil companies, have been pushed out of more and more countries, and replaced by national oil companies. Desperate, the majors have gone for riskier and riskier drilling in the deep ocean. Now Chevron, and Transocean, after a 4 day leak off Brazil, see prosecutors asking for lengthy prison sentences and enormous fines.  

Most of these oil companies are American, so they have pushed for fracking (destroying the underground with poisons to extract fossil fuels). Superficially, it works: USA imports of fossil fuels went quickly from 60% down to 40%.

However, that did not make a dent in the world price situation, because the demand keeps rising, but the world, overall, is PAST PEAK OIL (as I have long argued and the Nature article alluded to below confirmed, using the obvious argument found in the graphs).

So, basically, American fracking finances Chinese oil consumption. Here are some graphs extracted from Nature and the USA government:

 

 

[From James Murray and David King in Nature, 26 Jan 2012, vol 481, p. 435.]

 

When the horrid sun of diminishing resources rises over the parched American oil desert, while fracking reveals itself to be an unfathomable catastrophe, the howling is going to be very great, and one more reason for a depression will blossom.

Much of the USA’s superiority, in the last 150 years, has come from abundant and cheap oil. First in the North-East, then down to Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, California. Compare with Western Europe, which had basically no oil.

Oil was not just a question of cheap, convenient energy. Oil has, short of nuclear energy, the highest energy density of any material (OK, nuclear energy is millions of time more energy dense).

Oil gave the USA enormous diplomatic and conspiratorial leverage. American oil plutocrats helped Lenin and Stalin develop their colossal fields in the Caucasus and Caspian. One of those plutocrats, Harriman, son of a railroad magnate, and brother of another Harriman, was one of the main operators of the democratic party. Let alone banker to Hitler. He was decorated both by Stalin, and by Hitler. He then went on as U.S. ambassador to major European capitals, and stayed one the main operators of the government of the USA for decades. “Democrats” have long been impure.

Interestingly, I searched the Internet for a document mentioning Harriman’s Stalino-Hitlerian decorations, but could not find it (I have seen the pictures in the past). All I could read is how much Harriman resisted Stalin each time they met, and that was all the time (a total lie that Harriman resisted Hitler, or Stalin: Harriman was an accomplice of Stalin, and helped give him half of Europe, in exchange for manganese and other stuff. But now Internet agents are obviously paid to reconstruct a truth where American plutocrats look good,  knights in shining armor, fighting Stalin or Hitler, each time they met for tea, dinner, lunch, breakfast, and interminable conferences, for years on end, decade after decade).

A famous example of the clout oil provided the USA with: Texaco fueled Hitler’s conquest of the Spanish republic (this one is hard to hide, because the U.S. Congress slapped Texaco with a symbolic fine, well after the deed was done). That used to amuse Hitler a lot (Hitler gave elaborated reasons to his worried supporters for being in bed with American plutocrats; as the Nazi Party was officially socialist, and anti-plutocratic, that awkward situation may have led him to declare war to the USA on December 11, 1941, to ward off the German generals’ argument that he was just a little corporal in above his head).

Another example: Mussolini was hanged from an American gas station in Milan. Italian communists hanged him from his sponsors’ works.

The fueling of the fascists by American fossil fuel companies helped bring the American Century to the world in general, and Europe in particular. Without Stalin and American plutocratic oil, Hitler’s Panzers could not have moved in 1939 or 1940.

The dignified Elie Wiesel, instead of crying crocodiles tears, wondering how such a thing as Auschwitz was possible, should ask how and why the Nazi extermination machine was fuelled by American plutocrats, and how come he, himself, never talks about that.

Wiesel got the Nobel Peace Prize, just as Jimmy Carter (who launched the American attack on Afghanistan). Was it for disinformation? (And how come waging war in Afghanistan is a big plus for the Peace Prize? Is it related to the same mood which made Sweden help Hitler before and during WWII, and never having a serious look at that, ever since? I know the prize is ostensibly given by Norwegians.)

Wikipedia is big on the notion of “weasel words“, and rightly so. Deeper than that is what I would call weasel logic. And ever deeper, weasel worlds. To talk about Hitler without ever wondering who his sponsors were, and what they were after, is to live in a weasel world.

I like Elie Wiesel personally. Yet, just as I like Krugman, Obama, and countless others, such as the infamous Jean-Paul Sartre, he likes power even more than truth. OK, It is unfair to put Sartre, who really espoused the most abject terrorism, with the others… As long as individuals prefer power to truth, the spontaneous generation of infamy is insured.

Total oil sales, per day are about 100 million barrels (in truth the cap is lower, see graph above), at, say $100, so ten billion dollars a day, 3.6 trillion a year. The USA uses about 25% of that. Some have incorporated the price of the part of the gigantic American war machine and (what are truly) bribes to feudal warlords insuring Western access to the oil fields, and found a much higher cost up to $11 a gallon.

Ultimately, and pretty soon, in 2016, specialists expect oil prices to explode up, from the exhaustion of the existing oil fields. Then what?

Moreover, in 2016, the dependence upon OPEC, or, more exactly Arab regimes, is going to become much greater than now. What’s the plan of the USA? Extend ever more the security state, and go occupy the Middle East with a one million men army? To occupy, or not to occupy, that is the question.

Is it time for a better plan? And yes, any better plan will require consumers to pay higher energy prices. As consumers apparently want the army to procure the oil, they ought to pay for it.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Flying cost at least ten times more in CO2 creation than taking a train. And jet fuel is not taxed, at least until the carbon plan of the European Union starts charging next year, in 2013. In spite of the screaming from the USA and its proxies: it’s funny how attached to subsidies American society can be.

Note 2: Refusing to pay for necessary military expenses through taxation and mobilization, was a big factor in the downfall of the Roman Principate.

The Principate then tried to accomplish defense on the cheap, by using more and more mercenaries. Many of these mercenaries or their children and descendants were poorly integrated in Roman republican culture (say emperors Diocletian or Constantine, let alone Stilicho the Vandal, a century later), so they established the Dominate, itself a negation of the Roman republic. Amusingly the Western Franks, those salt water (“Salian“) Franks remembered the Roman republic better than all these imports from the savage East… who could not remember it, they, and their ancestors, having never known it.

Guess what? The USA’s army presently employs 300,000 “private contractors” (aka, mercenaries). Curiously, in that case, it’s not so much to save money, than to extract more money from the system (but that’s another story). Still, it will have the same effect.

CIVILIZATION IS COMPARISON

CIVILIZATION IS ABOUT SUPERIORITY, INTRINSICALLY.

Civilization: Best. Alternative: Frequent. Devolution, Followed By Extermination. To Avoid That: Nurturing Superior Thoughts.

***

Abstract: The Politically Correct say: Everything is relative, thus to be respected equally. Their nose twitch, their eyelids go spastic, as they mumble their nihilistic absurdity. To recover their composure, they head to the closest Chinese goods store, to look at the newest toys.

Why is China so domineering? Because today’s China is vastly superior to yesterday’s China. China is fostering civilization, while others in the West, just indulge in the drug of consumption, a variant of exploitation.

This essay is mostly a flurry of (partly) analyzed further examples around the concept of civilization, some of them Politically Incorrect, I am happy to admit.

Civilization has a reverse, devolution (in the originally biological sense of degeneration). Yet, devolution is frequent in history, so it is an obvious menace.

The most famous devolution was the Greco-Roman one, and some day sophisticated computer models wil reproduce it. In my approach, that devolution originated with deep philosophical factors, which found their culmination in the civilization-incompatible fascist Christian stupidity of the Late Empire (the historian Gibbon followed emperor Julian in denouncing Christianism as the cause of the Greco-Roman degeneracy; unfortunately, that philosopher-emperor was savagely killed during an ill conceived war in Iraq). 

Greco-Roman devolution was propelled by plutocracy, tax avoidance, theocracy, and their accompanying anti-intellectualism and superstitious obscurantism. 

All this, I claim, was made possible by a fundamental anti-intellectualism. In other words, Christianism was an accident waiting to happen. Anti-intellectualism made the reign of fascism and plutocracy unavoidable, and Christianism was the fruit of its disgusting entrails. Amen.

All this degeneracy has many elements in common with what is going on presently with a lot of the West, led by the plutocracy of the USA. As the reign of money in elections, and SanctorumSantorum in the hearts of the haggard demonstrate.

Just look at Afghanistan since president Carter attacked in 1979. The problem is not so much that murderous war, but the headless buffoonery covering-up the reality of what happened. Many in the West really believe that 9/11 was an aggression out of the blue by the savages, and know nothing about the west having created the savages to start with. The real problem is the loss of touch with reality; that is, fundamentally why the Greco-Roman empire went down. That, in turn, was orchestrated by the plutocratic class which had hijacked Rome (to some extent a conspiracy of happenstance, see below).

The Greco-Roman imperial devolution led to a collapse of the global economy. (The city of Rome, long the world largest urbs, went from  population above a million to… just one, said a witness!)

Civilization, traditions, deconstruction, and devolution all relate with each other, sometimes constructively, sometimes destructively. Just as a biological cell is continuously deconstructing and reconstructing, if it is alive, same for civilization.

The healthy disrespect one should have for the errors of the past, and obsolete rituals is one of the engines of civilization: taking pleasure in criticizing what should not have be. Otherwise traditions, thus, the past, dominate. However the past is generally dead, because inasmuch as men may try to cling to it, ecology is always dynamic, be it only because of the pressure human techno-economy puts on it.

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COLLAPSE OF GRECO-ROMANS: ALL ABOUT ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:

Basically everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, and more, when Rome went down. A world nearly as complex as the one we have now, crashed. Dozens of reasons to explain the collapse of the empire have been suggested, from lead to Huns.

My interpretation is that the fundamental flaw was that the mental system used by the Romans was too homely to the plutocratic principle. Roman society was too cruel, too anti-intellectual, and, just so, that allowed plutocracy to take control over the democratic principle. Slavery was like an enzyme… After Spartacus’ rebellion, just on one via leading to Rome, 6,000 slaves squirmed, crucified, for all to think about. That was Roman style thinking.

An illustration is found in the philosophical triumvirate of Cicero, Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The former two, long opposed, came to appreciate each other, in the last year before Caesar’s assassination. Cicero had tirelessly fought to save the republic. Caesar had expanded it, ruthlessly. Caesar, an intellectual, and immensely talented writer, could appreciate Cicero, another intellectual, and immensely talented writer. Two giants, as gigantic as any Roman would ever be.

However, after the deed, the third one, Caesar’s chief of staff, killed Cicero, and nailed his hands to the Senate. Marcus Antonius viewed intellectuality as adverse. And not enough Romans were intellectual enough to reject Marcus-Antonius’ beastly brutality. Actually the assassins of Caesar did not have a plan, either: they were no intellectuals. This lack of a plan kept on characterizing the empire, tumbling forward for many centuries to come.

The overall anti-intellectual mood of the general Roman population made the rule of brutes, the apology of plutocracy possible, and, even, honorable. Ultimately the victory of the cult of wanting to kill the child to please the boss (Abraham), displaced the reverence for story of the babies fed by the she-wolf. The rage of the plutocrat (“God”) had displaced love for babies vanquishing natural ferocity (as the she-wolf depicts).

During the next six (!) centuries of the Roman empire, countless intellectuals were killed, for the crime of having thought too much.

In striking contrast, for the first millennium of the empire of the Franks (and  successor fragments thereof: Francia, Germania, Italia, Britannia, etc.), no intellectuals were killed, for being intellectuals. One has to wait for the so-called Renaissance for the instructive spectacle of French philosophers being burned alive on top of their books (something that really happened). It’s not that the Franks were sweet to each other, far from it. No polity had so much deadly ferocity between rulers.

The most formidable of Frankish empresses, having reigned, on and off for 50 years, or so, was paraded naked on top of a camel, and tortured to death over three days. Just an example. But the Franks respected intellectuals. The Carolingians had the top philosophers as advisers, friends, or prime ministers (some coming from the British Isles, such as Erigenus and Alcuin).

Thus the Renaissance was the renaissance of… Christian horror, and burning of intellectuals and their books, after a hiatus of 1,000 years. This was a real problem, Paradoxically, this recurrence of deadly superstitious terror led to invent the concept of civilization (a notion now denied again by the uncouth).

The Romans did not have the concept of civilization, and from this absence, they died.  

***

CIVILIZATION: THE PHOENIX BORN FROM THE WARS OF RELIGION:

Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Well, the unexamined history is not worth repeating.

As I have explained, civilization is a process, an augmentation of civility. The word was coined in France, as the country came out of seven religious war in quick succession (each of these wars has a name). The French religious wars were greatly the product of foreign intervention, as Philip II of Spain, went on a rampage to control the world, using Catholic terror as an instrument. However the invention and denomination of the concept of civilization coincided with the Edict of Nantes (1598 CE) for very good reason.

France was sick and tired of religious hatred, that is why the concept of civilization was invented, and gained purchase in the next 4 centuries. A provision of the Edict even insured safety of Protestants from the Inquisition, ABROAD. So doing, French nationality superseded religious appurtenance. “This crucifies me,” protested Pope Clement VIII. Well, good, let me bring more nails.

Let’s notice in passing that the Franks already had the notion that belonging to a civilization was more important than obeying a religion: they viewed themselves not as Christians, Jews, or, for that matter, Muslims, but as “Europeans”. Thus one sees that there was a devolution in the millennium following 600 CE. In 600 CE, pretty much everybody north of the Goths in Iberia, and the Longobardi in Italy, was a Frank (even if a Jewish camel driver of Syrian origin; yes, there were camels in Francia…). However, when Europe was ravaged by religious wars in the period 1100 CE to 1700 CE,  that was forgotten.

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THEOCRACY AS AN INVENTION OF PLUTOCRACY:

The religious wars started top down: the emperor back in Constantinople asked for help (against the invading Turks), the Pope called for organizing a jihad (OK, 10,000 Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem had been massacred in just one assault…), and the Frankish nobles delivered. Yet the first killed by the crusading mob were German Jews.

Later the genocide against the Cathars was even more top down, as the southern populations, even when Catholic, supported the Cathars. In that case, the Pope, irked by the assassination of his fascist legate, called to the help of the French king and his nobles.

Lesson: devolution happens, and it can be engineered, top down, by the plutocrats who profits from it. The French king captured the giant County of Toulouse, which covered two-thirds of the old Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis. None of this was accidental: the Roman republican tradition was strong in Narbonensis. Catharism (the “katharos”, the “pure”, in other words, puritans), a deeply anti-Catholic, anti-plutocratic ideology was embraced in Languedoc, because people there wanted to go back to the republic. The County of Toulouse was a federal republic in disguise. (And the story did not end here, as the English, thus American parliamentary system originated in Toulouse, through Monfort!)

The Edict of Nantes was submitted to the Parlements the same year, 1598, when Philip II croaked (the Parlement of Rouen signed it only in 1609: thus parlements can block civilization, as Louis XVI would experience, 175 years later, or the 21 C Americans, every day…).

The fascist, fanatical emperor Philip II, in his forties, wrecked by cancer, could not be moved anymore, because of the pain. But emperors are made to be served, so a hole was made in his mattress, allowing him to evacuate waste he had been so keen to produce.

Meanwhile, France evacuated the fanatical spirit Philip II had done so much to foster, and decided to enjoy civilization instead. Henri IV, the “green gallant“, who had never seen a girl he did not like all too much, between two assassination attempts, promised a chicken in every pot, once a week, and ordered his main war marshal to order the economy around, just as he ordered armies before.

The Duc de Sully proceeded with an economic stimulus program of national industrialization, a distant transmogrified descendant of the one decided by Athens’ National assembly in 489 CE, when she equipped herself with a 200 trireme war fleet (ravaging the ecology of Attica in the process). Rome imitated Athens during her wars with Carthage, thereafter enjoying the fruit of military-industrial complex for 7 centuries thereafter. Similarly the Italian republics of the Middle Ages financed their armies with creative financial engineering, mixing lending, plutocracy, and the military in semi harmonious wholes (complete with the occasional default).

However, what was new with Sully and Henri IV, which had never been done before, is that, to go with the brand new concept of civilization, came the concept of deliberately engineering the economy to profit the people, top down. (The New Deal of Roosevelt was a direct imitation of Henri IV, complete with the chicken in every pot…)

It would take two more generations for France to defeat Spain completely, somewhere in Germany, meanwhile creating the independent Netherlands. (Not that the Dutch were grateful; as the typical teenager who turns against the parent, the Netherlands, tried very hard to compete with France, after conquering England!)

Philip II, by the way, was the son of the French born, and highly philosophical Charles V. This demonstrates the ravaging influence of terroristic mental systems: as the son of Charles was exposed to the mood of the Inquisition, he became its most fervent promoter, even launching entire armadas to massacre the French colonies in the Carolinas. (Or why Americans don’t speak French!)

Philip’s father, Charles, obviously had less influence on him than the mood of Catholic terror which gripped Spain (and would subsequently make this most advanced civilization sputter for centuries, all the way into the intervention of the church into the war against the republic which started in 1936).

It’s no accident that plutocratization augments in collaboration with superstition and the disintegration of civilization. As happened when the Greco-Roman empire disintegrated just as a space shuttle with a hole in its heat shield, going way too fast loses pieces here and there, before completely dislocating.

***

RELIGION THERE IS ALWAYS, AND BREAKING IT DOWN, HEALTHY:

The question of the nature of the gods is intimately tied to the question of what is meant by being “intelligent”.

Socrates was tried, in part, for having offended the gods, a capital offense, just as in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamist republic nowadays.

Basically Socrates found the Athenian state, and its gods, stupid, and reciprocally. In the end, the offense-of-the-gods charge was dropped, and Socrates was condemned to death on the more relevant charge of “corrupting the youth.”

Indeed, many of Socrates students, lovers and boyfriends played the most prominent role in the defeat of Athens, and ruled the city-state as dictators, after throwing out democracy.

Denigrating stupid and vicious mental systems is an absolute good. This is how civilization progresses, for the best: by autophagy of obsolete structures.

It turns out that exercise activates autophagy in cells, and thus they get rid of broken organelles and old components, getting younger and more performing. See:  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/exercise-cells-biologically-young/story?id=9211419 (Initially Italian research confirmed in other places, such as Texas).

The progression of civilization is not just an absolute good, it’s an absolute necessity. Just as the inner components of cells decay in time, so does any socio-economy. As the genus Homo modifies the environment, ravaging what was, the behavior of Homo has to change, and become more subtle in the understanding of nature it encompasses.

An excellent example: the Mayan civilization. The environment changed, in great part because of the impact of Mayan civilization. We know the Mayas ran out of their main construction wood, having destroyed the resource. This made much expensive the upkeep of their civilization. And then there was a long drought (minus 25% or 40%). At this point, we do not know if the drought was induced in part by the Mayas themselves. However, I would dare say that seems likely, and an obvious mechanism would have been deforestation (which we know happen, from the disappearance of the main construction wood).

Some will scoff, and suggest I come down from my big Mayan horse. However it has been suggested that the climate warmed up, at the end of the neolithic through a human induced greenhouse, from too much methane scatologically emanating from the august derrieres of millions of cattle, which would have been otherwise eaten by lions, had Homo Sapiens not been around… 

If that is confirmed, the drought of the Middle Earth emanated from human agents, and then so does the apparition of the hydraulic dictatorships, and then, ultimately the terribly dictatorial and divisive Abrahamist religion, and its various sects. (Reminder: two of the variants of Abrahamism, the Israeli and Iranian one are busy proposing us to join them in a nuclear war, at this point, because they have the same nasty god.)

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NO GOOD WITHOUT EVIL:

Good cannot take out evil. Saint Francis of Assisi talked nicely to birds, but he could not have talked to Hitler, or, for that matter, to so called “Saint” Louis, and steer them away from evil. Only a better, stronger evil can take out more weaker, more stupid, obsolete evil.

In World War Two, 80 millions crazed out Germans were taught the correct philosophy by heavy bombing of their cities. Kant was no help, just the opposite.

By the way, the question often comes up of whether religion is restricted to those who admire Abraham for accepting to kill a child. But German nationalism, just as Stalinism, were religions too. I would refute, though that Nazism and Stalinism were “secular” religions, because secularism means living in one’s age, and returning to tribalism, as Nazism had it, was several millennia off.

And why was Stalinism not secular, either?

Simply because it denied democracy. Just denying the private possession of capital, and reserving it to the state, is a denial of democracy. (Of course Stalin’s violations of democracy went much further than that, and included the denial of justice and life!)

Tribalism has been long denied, as it should be. The Greco-Roman world, and its associated Celto-German and Goth-Scythian worlds constituted an enormous globalization involving the Mediterranean world and Western Europe.

The Greco-Romano-Celto-German globalization, 21 centuries ago, was first an optimal economic area. Expensive Roman wine was exchanged for slaves 9among other things). As an author laughed then, a Roman could get a servant in Gaul, for a drink!

Excahnges made Northern Europe so rich that it covered itself with what Caesar called “opida”, cities, often fortified mountain tops, where commerce and industry were conducted (some had more than 7 kilometers of ramparts; as they were built in wood, nowadays only the earthworks are left).

Denigrating religions which abuse, and sexually torture children has always been an absolute good. And a long tradition of the West. It was the main moral argument, and, thus, the main military strength, of the Romans versus Carthage. The Romans occupied the moral heights, thus Carthage was defeated.

When Muhammad preached what Allah told him, many of his orders had to do with treating girls better than they had been in the savage Arabian deserts: don’t kill them after birth, and if captured, don’t hesitate to make love to them, instead of treating them only as slaves to be sold. Thus spoke Muhammad. That superior moral position, one of many in Islam, made the Arabs righteous, hence hard to beat (especially as Christianity had made the Romans soft in the head, as Hitler pointed out! Now that I have quoted Hitler favorably, I am going to work harder to find something positive to say about Santorum…).

By denigrating and destroying religions which promoted the killing of children, civilization has progressed, for the best. The Romans used absolute, total war, killing a large part of the Carthaginian and Celtic population to do so. The descendants of the massacred faithful of the Punic and Celtic religion agreed with the Romans, though.

The sexual torture of children by mutilating their sexual parts is itself part of a brutalization of man by man, a preliminary to war. If you want brutal warriors, brutalize them as children. The Incas compressed the brains of their future super fighters, as children, to turn them into robotic brutes.

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OF THE DIRTY PRIMITIVISM OF SOME ABRAHAMIST SECTS:

Recently it came to light that most French slaughterhouses practiced the ritual killing of animals according to Judaism and its parrot, Islamism. That method consists in cutting the throat of the animal, ear to ear, slicing open both the windpipe and the esophagus. As a dedicated butcher, the god of Abraham, pays attention to spill as much blood as possible, so the animal is alive, as its heart pumps blood out of the enormous opening in its throat.

A problem of course is that the bacteria in the gut of the animal spill with the blood, as the animal, apparently disgusted by the torture ordered by god, tends to throw up (just like Santorum, but to throw up, Santorum needs just to read president Kennedy).  

To avoid the mixing of bacteria with the meat, the European Union has a strict procedure:

1) The animal is stunned, by being hit on the head with a spring loaded hammer.

2) The unconscious animal is hung by the hind legs, and two small incisions are made in the jugular veins and carotids, through which blood drains. Meanwhile, the lower esophagus is exposed and tied up tight by an elastic, preventing the content of the rumen to be vomited out.

3) The still unconscious animal dies, its rumen tied off. The viscera, full of bacteria, are evacuated, still intact in their pouches, after being further tied off. Great attention is paid to not poke through them.

Thus, the Halal (= “lawful“) and Kosher method, by mixing animal vomit with meat, is intrinsically unhygienic.

Another point is that torturing to death conscious animals is against European Union law. However, some religious ritual killings are allowed. All I can say, is that we are lucky that the Aztecs were defeated, and do not have nuclear weapons, as the Jews do. otherwise the ritual killing of terrorists would happen on the great pyramid, according to the sacred religious ritual of tearing their hearts out, and presenting it to the sacrificial victim.

The French Prime Minister, Fillon, pointed out that “we are in a modern country, there are traditions which are ancestral traditions, which do not correspond to much anymore, whereas in the past they corresponded to hygiene problems… One could think about it.” This is a word for word translation faithful to what he said and not the biased transliterations seen in places such as the Jerusalem Post.

Hearing that, the ritualists went ballistic.

France harbors the largest ritualist communities of Jews (600,000) and Muslims (millions). Most people of Jewish and Muslim descent in France, are, of course practicing the national religion of France, secularism (“laïcité“, with arguing replacing praying, many times an hour), arguing  character).

Some will say: let them be, let’s be tolerant…

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TOLERANCE, BY DEFINITION, HAS LIMITS:

But tolerance is just that, no more. In Latin, it means to endure, to bear… Moreover, flouting one’s weird non secular quirks can definitively backfire, when they are in minority.

There is no doubt that, should the Jews not have practiced circumcision, it would have been much harder for the Nazis to catch them. Flouting one’s superstition for all to see can clearly make one into a target. In the Netherlands the Jews were registered, so more than 95% were exterminated (about 120,000 in absolute numbers). In France, it is against the law to register people according to the sect they may, or not belong to. Conclusion: only a small minority, mostly foreign Jews were killed by the Nazis in France (only 75,000 assassinated out of may be a million, between French Jews and  refugee Jews who the USA had rejected).

And what I am saying has a very practical consequence: Israel would be well advised to not be too arrogant and loudly visible… As an attack against Iran would surely make it. I say this as a friend of democratic Israel (should there be such a thing), and  someone who would surely would remove the Iranian theocracy in a puff of smoke, were I a fairy.

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FLAUNTING ONE’S DIFFERENCE IS NOT INNOCENT, WHEN IT HAS A TRIBAL CHARACTER:

In an apparently completely different note, one learns a lot from details. After a Very High Speed train crash, the minister of transport was photographed on the crash site with a hyper expensive Swiss watch. Then a blogger found that most “People” Republic of China officials had Cartier $6500 or Rolex $13000 watches, and the like. Authorities promptly closed the offending site. Right now one expensive Swiss watch out of two is sold in the PRC.

What’s the connection with sexual mutilations of children? Symbols. People wear ultra expensive watches to flaunt their power, their success, to other plutocrats, or the lower rabble. Doing so makes power, or even plutocracy honorable. That is why nobles in Europe around 1500 CE wore immensely expensive clothing (sometimes worth many millions).

Flaunting riches just does not say: we have it, and you do not, but also: it’s good that some have it all, and the others who have nearly nothing.

Similarly, circumcision and other tribal scars and mutilations say: we belong to such and such elected people, and you don’t. Not nice, and it can backfire. After the Arabs took control of half of the Roman empire, and all of Persia, they requested Jews and Christian to wear marks on their clothing, as befitted lower beings. From discriminating against to being treated as a vermin, there is just more of the same…

Human beings are super chimpanzees. Chimpanzees know very well that they have mostly one enemy, and that is the next group of chimps, over there. They hate them nearly as much as they hate leopards. Man has long known the same, and it’s all over human culture. It’s actually the main message of the Bible. Man has mostly one enemy, and that enemy belongs to the other tribe, whatever the other tribe is. Thus, any tribal signal is potentially offensive.

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TRADITIONS AS RESERVOIRS OF TRIBAL VIOLENCE:

Collectivities may or may not have civilization (the process of becoming more civil), but they always have traditions, and even libraries of traditions. As tribal aspects dominate traditions, those libraries are not innocent.

Let me give an example. In the 1930s Thousands of Egyptian women could be observed bathing on the beaches with scant clothing. Egypt was then occupied by the fierce British imperialists, imposing the female flesh onto the Believers, who did not believe that much anymore. Fast forward 80 years and now Egyptian TV channels have been colonized by the money of the theocratic plutocrats of Saudi Arabia, who have a vital interest to turn Egypt into an extension of their vast realm. So now one can observe there people who look exactly like bin Laden reading the news. Their Arabic dress has nothing to do with Egyptian tradition, but everything to do with Saudi tradition.

Meanwhile many Egyptian women are covered with tents, and those who do not, tend to get attacked, much more than they used to. Sexism on the march, and Aisha, a strong anti-sexist and partisan of a “secular Caliphate”, both an adversary of Uthman (Third Caliph) and a general fighting step-son Ali (Fourth Caliph) would say: “I told you so!”.

One often hear that all civilizations are equivalent, but not rarely hear that all devolutions are equivalent.

Moods can become traditions. So it’s important to combat those moods camping as traditions. One case was the slave trade, which founded many a fortune in the Americas, and Europe. It’s justly condemned, and assuredly does not have too many partisans… in the Americas and Europe. Yet, one has forgotten an important aspect of it: the European traders who acquired the slaves did not hunt them in Africa. Africans hunted Africans to enslave them.

This is important, because the moods and traditions that made slavery such an important aspect of the African socio-economy have not been explored, as it has been taken for granted that Americans and Europeans were responsible for the enslavement of Africans, and it is Politically Correct to sing song about the lack of civilization of Europe. Whereas the problem was just an aspect of plutocracy, not Eurocracy.

As African traditions were left, unexamined, some of them have festered anew, especially after European imperial control was removed (so called “decolonization”, a funny word, since most African countries did not have European “colons”, in the technical sense of the Latin “coloni”). Recently, though, some people of African descent, genetic or cultural, such as yours truly, have become aware of the problem with the hypocritical whining of all too many black men.

Verily, the cure for hypocrisy is hypercrisy. Instead of criticizing less (“hypo”) than deserved, one criticizes more (“Hyper“) than deserved. That’s what philosophers do.

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AMERICAN GENOCIDE AS CRIMINAL IMPERIUM, UNEXAMINED

An example of national hypocrisy was the massacre of American natives by the American government after the Secession War. Gold in the Black Hills of dakota had been found, after the california gold rush had exhausted itself. At some point, before the famous battle of Little Big Horn, no less than four American generals heading four American armies converged on innocent Indian populations (one of them being the famously flamboyant general Custer). The goal was to kill them.

An example was the Nez Perce’. They had never killed anybody, but an American army chased men, women and children for weeks in the mountainous wilderness, before cornering them, after a pursuit of 2,000 kilometers, in the Bears Paw Mountains, 40 kilometers away from safety in Canada, and massacring them. Survivors were imprisoned. A New York Times editorial at the time (1877 CE) condemned the aggression: “On our part, the war was in its origin and motive nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime.”

The fundamental reason for such massacres was the will from Washington to impose its imperium (To use the appropriate terminology, which is Roman)… But what for? Pure rapine. There was no fig leaf, as when Caesar intervened in Gaul because the Helvetii had decided to migrate en masse to South West Gaul (58 BCE).

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EXAMINING DETAILED MOTIVATIONS FOR ABOMINATION:

Americans have failed to examine carefully the connection between rapine and Imperium in the USA. Let me explain with a further comparison.  The devil is in the details. The abomination is in the motivation.

Napoleon was a grotesque dictator, who, like his nephew later, stole the republic to satisfy his ridiculous ambition, of the sort one associates with a toddler who wants if all, whatever it is. His attempt to re-enslave Haiti was deeply against the spirit of 1789, and inhumanly retrograde.

However, Napoleon’s career started following the blossoming of his military genius after an aggression of various plutocrats, Prussian, English and Austrian against the French republic.

So French Imperium in the revolutionary wars started as a defense mechanism. When that defense became imperial in nature, the true Jesus of our civilization, Sade warned against it. Sade was right, but it is understandable when a defense turns into an offense.

What is troubling in the American case is that naked aggression of the genocidal type was committed in the name of the exploitation principle. And, because it has not been harshly criticized at the institutional level, that mood has been left unscathed. It was fully in evidence in the aggressions against Afghanistan (1979 and earlier, covertly), or Iraq (1990s and after 2003).

Imperium meant absolute command and control, all the way to the death penalty, police, judge and executioner in one, the consular way, the modern application of which has been defended by the French republic (remember the French ultimatum to Hitler, September1, 1939). The imprium is now the doctrine of the government of the USA, as Attorney General Holder just explained.

The Romans distinguished Romanitas and Imperium; the technical deliquescence of the empire occurred when, greatly due to the hypocritical Christian terror, the Imperium was outsourced to Goths and Germans.

Ultimately, the civilization of the West survived because the Franks grabbed the Imperium principle, and applied it to the Goths, the Alemanni, the Angli and Saxons, the Pope and his fanatics, the Longobardi, the Muslims, the Avars, the Vikings, etc.

There is little doubt that (co-)emperor Commodus dropped the imperium ball when he succeeded his father Marcus Aurelius.

OK, fast forward to the Afghan war, started by the USA officially on July 3, 1979… The reason why Europeans such as the French are skeptical about the Afghan war has to do with the fact that they drew more careful and thorough notions about past wars.

Imperium is crucial, but it has to be applied well. It was criminal against the Nez Perce’, and it is criminal in Afghanistan, but it was appropriate in Libya, or Ivory Coast. It was also entirely appropriate to chase the Ottoman empire out of most of the Middle East and North Africa, from Iraq to Arabia, all the way to Algeria. Why?

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NO EMPIRE, NO CIVILIZATION:

Empires are serious things. The Alemanni had invaded the hard-to-defend gap in the Roman Limes between the Rhine and the Danube. They suffered several defeats at the hands of Roman emperors, the last by Gratianus (which gave the name Gratianopolis, hence the modern city of “Grenoble“). A century later, imperator Clovis conquered the Alemanni in 496 CE.

In 746, the Caroligian king Carloman  (de facto co-emperor of the Occidental Roman empire) ended an uprising by summarily executing all Alemannic nobility at the blood court at Cannstatt. He was using the same imperator characteristic of Roman consuls, French presidents, and now Obama…The Alemanni, “Alles Men”, in French: Allemands, never tried that trick again for 1,000 years! In the following century, Alamannia was ruled by Frankish dukes, before being solidly melded in the tripartite arrangement of  the treaty of Verdun (843 CE).

That does not mean that it is sufficient to establish an empire to establish a civilization, as the Mongols demonstrated more than once (on the third attempt, Ginghis Khan did introduce elements of more advanced civilization, such as free trade of goods, men and ideas, and superstitious freedom, Mongol-Nestorian inspired; on the fourth try, the Mongols used their version of Islam: they had discovered that empire worked best, if connected to a civilization, not just an army).

The Ottoman empire blocked not just printing, but civilization itself, although blocking printing was a big part of blocking civilization.

Revealingly, the “Thousand And One Night” were published  in Paris first, and so was a lot of what has become the “Orientalist” cultural framework. Paradoxically, France defended better some of the old traditions of middle earth as a cultural heritage (after all, that is what Rome was expert at doing: not very strong intellectually on their own, the Romans, like the Arabs later, gleaned what they could.)

Brutalizing rituals, such as sexual mutilations of male and female children and the subjugation of women, can, and ought, to be the object of secular jihad. Freeing the women, that’s also freeing the children they educate, and the men some of them will grow into.

It turns out that by the age of six months, babies understand a tremendous amount of language. Unborn babies even learn to distinguish languages.  Thus the argument of desert dweller that women ought to educate children until age seven, and then men take over their sons’ upbringing, is conducive to devolution. Obviously dumb mothers will educate children to be stupid too. Uneducated, sequestered, enfeebled women cannot be as brainy as if they were fully endowed with all capabilities, as both logic and experiences on rats demonstrate.

Making women into morons was clearly antinomic to Muhammad’s life and opinions. However it was imposed by Uthman and his ilk. Maybe instead of Mohammedans , one should talk about Uthmanists?

There is no civilization without a careful examination of the situation. it’s not just, as Socrates said, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is that the unexamined life calls for extermination.

One of the better example of that is the manipulation of minds that the fossil fuel plutocracy has engineered in the USA, thanks to exerting enormous money, that is power, to bend the spirits in the way the wanted.

The result, of course, is a gigantic amount of “fracking“. anybody who studied a bit the Roman empire would know that this is a mistake. OK, the Romans did not burn fossil fuels for energy, but they made equivalent mistakes… Mistakes that the Europeans (or, as the Muslims, said, the Franks) exerted deadly force not to make during the Middle Ages’ ecological crisis.

The Europeans compared what they had before to what they had now, and compared that to what they ought to have, and what they could do, and what it would bring. The most basic industry, the one that made warmth, cooking and construction possible, was blocked where it was necessary to spare nature the ravages of man. Civilization was saved. It is all the more remarkable since very bad wars soon occurred, plus the Black Plague, and a massive depopulation (the sort of combination of factors that many feel brought down the Greco-Romans).

Yet, the European Middle Age civilization did not miss a beat, and ket on civilizing itself at an accelerated pace. Why? Because the principles of comparing and civilizing were in command of European culture (the Inquisition tried its migthiest to stop that, but those efforts were crushed by the armed forces of the English and French sovereigns, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and the French Henris being most prominent that way).

Compare, then civilize. The modern variant of the oldest definition of the genus Homo: I compare, therefore I think.

***

Patrice Ayme

RATS & CRATS

TO SURVIVE, CIVILIZATION HAS TO FIGHT RATS AND CRATS.

Abstract: Europe long suffered from the exactions of the hyper wealthy, various plutocrats such as kings, dukes, princes or sultans, or, more generally, all those who lust after power to the detriment of the rest.

I give examples extracted from (a small part of) what happened in the late Seventeenth Century, just in (part of, mostly) Eastern Europe. And the irony of it all. While showing that the evil organization of (say) the Ottoman empire, or more generally, of wrath wrecked Europe was such, because many profited from it, Satanic style.

“Kratia” in Greek means power, rule, sway… Hence demo-kratia, the rule of the People, and Pluto-kratia, the rule of Pluto, and his obsession with underground wealth, underground emotions, the invisible hand.

So stupid many economists are, at least around New York or London, that they laud loudly the “invisible hand”.

In their ignorance and depravity, they wallop so much, that they have no idea that invisibility was viewed by the Greeks, 3,000 years ago, as one of the Lord of Hell’s most terrible attributes.

And sure enough, if Auschwitz had been visible, it would not have happened. Think about that, Lords of Finance, if you can! Sorry, I forgot for an instant, that one sees best with the heart, and you have none!

Now the world suffers from 600 trillions dollars of invisible derivatives, 450 trillions of them weighing on the bond market, agitated by well orchestrated panics, so that the rich who organize them, can get ever richer, from the toils of taxpayers, and the ruin of savers, retirees, the unemployed, the sick. “Shadow Banking” is supposed to be glorious…When actually it should be a cause for incarceration.

In Egypt, the army keeps on going as overlord, with the invisible American hand feeding it, instructing it, organizing it…

In the Nineteenth Century, Nietzsche claimed that men were mostly driven by the “Will to Power” (and that it was healthy).

A century earlier, Sade had insisted that political leaders, in particular, were psychopaths, lusting so much for power, that inflicting pain on others was their main driver. Louis XVI put him in the Bastille (big mistake, as it turned out in July 1789!)

Perfect illustrations of the Marquis de Sade’s theory soon blossomed in abundance, with vengeful plutocrats trying to burn all of Europe, demented revolutionary leaders cutting heads by the thousands, and Napoleon’s childish ambition to spill as much blood as possible; those tyrans and crats all had this in common that they hated Sade. They imprisoned him for decades, and Robespierre’s gang scheduled his execution for having saved thousands of lives from the terror. (The ambition of Robespierre’s gangsters got cut short, with their necks, sparing Sade, just in time!)

Of course, humans are motivated by more than the Dark Side’s Will, Violence, and Power. Be it only because of the Light Side, of love, empathy, curiosity, even poetry, and singing, which make even more of a driver of human behavior. And we have names for them: lover, empath, inquirer, questioner, investigator, poet, singer, etc. Just as we have now names for sadists and brutes. (“Sadist” though is a neologism introduced thanks to Sade’s provocative revelations!)

In all and any case, nobody proposed to name those who, among humans are obsessed with the infliction of their will upon others. No name for the power-hungry, the over-ambitious, those who lust for power, the Genghis Khans, the Alexanders, the Caesars, the Napoleons and Hitlers, Rothschilds, Clintons, and DSKs. This is all the stranger, because a noun naturally offers itself!

Thus I proposed a neologism: CRATS, for those so greedy for power that they forget other human values. (Krugman promptly used it in his blog without proper attribution, after I mentioned it in his blog’s comments; I do not belong to the power circle of those worthy of quotation, as I am not a Very Serious Person.)

“Crat” has also the advantage of fusionning two concepts: c, for conspiracy, or cretin, and “rats” for an all too social animal which seems mostly motivated by food, and inspiring to those who lead us into oblivion.

Crats, like rats, have always existed, and have always tried to devour civilization. That’s what they do. To prevent the devouring of civilization, Neolithic men invented cats (against rats), and taxes (against crats). Modern politicians though, inculcated in their subjects the complete disdain for this lesson.

However there is an example of a spur of civilization which evolved, thanks to crats. Colonial English America thrived from civilizational devolution: if English colonial Americans had taken care of the Indians as French Jesuits did, in Canada, the colonials would not have got as rich, as fast as they did.  

This is an important point that Professor Niall Ferguson miss in his white wash “Civilization” book (November 2011). Ferguson  celebrates the attribution of Indian property to whites in North America, that is, to the European invaders. He finds that most wise. In contrast, Ferguson recognizes that there were plenty of Indians left in South America, and that Spain limited immigration to South and Central America, precisely because of this, the abundance of the natives. And Ferguson deplores that!

Thus naughty boy Niall does not realize, in his Harvard induced murderous superiority haze, that he is showing his hand. His hand is not invisible anymore, he should be more careful. What Ferguson is actually saying, for all to see, is that holocausts are the superior economic model. That was Hitler’s point, entirely. But Hitler did not teach at Harvard, that was his mistake (although some Harvard songs were adapted into famous Nazi songs by some of the individuals who connected the university and the party!)

And of course holocausts are much superior economically for those who survive them, especially if they are the perpetrators, and they thrive.

OK, the perpetrators of the American holocaust are long dead in the case of the English American colony. But the ideology of GREED AS SUPERLATIVE is still very much alive. Killing it, is what the world revolt is all about. So Niall should find sonmething else to celebrate, it would be only prudent.

The USA embraced plutocratic civilizational devolution as a metaprinciple of “progress”, and access to riches. The exact sort of “progress” Krugman embraces: divide the world, divide Europe, and then New York, what he boasts is the “greatest city in the world“, will conquer. He was a child a few miles north, he thrives a few miles south: alleluia!

American intellectuals of the powerful type, such as Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, perceive a weakness in Europe, and, as good servants of the plutocratic system they suck from, they are on the attack against the European project, telling us that the gods of Anglo-Saxon finance will forever rule, thus hoping we will lay down our mental weapons, and surrender. But, far from it, here is more ammunition to fight what Voltaire used to call “infamy”.

And what is the modern European project? The wise victory of the mind over fate, from knowing more, the very definition of Homo Sapiens. In particular the victory of mind over wealth. The victory of mind over the military, fascist, plutocratic system, as deployed in, say, Egypt. That system which replaced three important European leaders by agents of Goldman Sachs, in two weeks. The victory over the biased accounting the likes of Krugman venerates.

Krugman tells us that accounting his way, is the most worthy thing. Not only he does not know how, and what to count, but, tell me, Krugman, how much is Auschwitz worth? Is it because Americans were doing accounting their way, that they sent to Nazi Germany’s Air Force crucial war supplies in 1939, to enable it to fly, while France and Poland were already in combat against Nazi Germany? Is it why Poland and France fell, and dozens of millions died? Accounting by American plutocrats, for their own benefit?

***

***

BARBARIANS AT THE GATES OF EUROPE:

During the summer of 1683, the Turkish army besieged Vienna. It was allied with the Khan of Crimea and its 40,000 horsemen cavalry. Everyday of the two months assault, the formidable Ottoman war drums beat ominously. The constant rolling was not mean to just destabilize psychologically the Austrian capital. It was conceived to make difficult for the Europeans to localize where exactly the slaves of the sultan were digging their tunnels and covered trenches.

A vast underground battle between 5,000 experienced Ottoman sappers and defending “moles” was punctuated with large explosions when Turkish mines exploded under the successive fortification rings of the European capital. The last and most formidable mine was detected in the last hours of the final battle, as the Turks tried desperately to blow up the main Austrian fort. It was defused by Austrian “moles”, at the last moment. Elite Turkish troops and janissaries had been held back for that moment after the giant bomb exploded. It never came.

The Turks are an interesting example of the importance of ideology. The old Indo-European (not Semitic!) world of Turkic nomadic bands was transformed by the war religion of Islam, about a millennium ago. It allowed them to conquer quickly a vast empire, and they headed west. In a generation or two, they had the Roman empire on the ropes (Byzantium called itself Roman, because that is what it was, although it spoke Greek). The Romans then called the Franks to the rescue (the Franks were all the more willing to settle the problem militarily as recently 10,000 pilgrims to Jerusalem had been massacred, in one swoop).

But it did not work; the ravenous Turkish military established a gigantic empire, which covered Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa, Anatolia, Eastern Europe. By far the most important reason why the European counter-attack did not work is that the Europeans were very divided. (The same situation happened with the Muslims to the south: Frankish knights, allied to the Mongols were an irresistible force, so the Pope and the French king outlawed the Franco-Mongol alliance with the greatest threats, after the fall of Baghdad and Damascus! If not for that, Islam would probably have become an archeological curiosity…)

In 1204, the Frankish army conquered and sacked Constantinople, in a final, savage conclusion to their nine centuries old domineering military role in Rome, deep down inside hostile to Christianity, which they viewed as all too anti-German, anti-progress, and no fun, if not kept in check by secular power.   

The European divisions endured. The Turkish high command was good at exploiting them. Or let’s say that European adventurers found to their advantage to ally themselves with Turkish fascist imperialism. During the final siege of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, not only the Turkish shock troops were made of dozens of thousands of indoctrinated, fanaticized enslaved Christian boys, the Janissaries, but the giant “Turkish” guns were made by Hungarian engineers. Moreover, France was treacherously allied to the Sultan, one reason why the relief army failed to materialized. The ancient hostility between the Franks and the “Orthodox Catholic” church had reached its bitter end (Venice and other terminal allies of Constantinople was a client republic of Charlemagne, not Constantinople).

The Janissaries were an interesting institution, typical of a fascist order: Christian families who sold their boys thus got a social promotion and riches. With Janissaries, the Sultans thus had at their disposals a force which owed them everything: so revolution could not come from the real Muslim population. Indeed the anti-Islamist, pro-European revolution in Turkey followed quickly the elimination of the Janissaries in the 19C.

When the situation got grave enough, the Europeans cooperated enough to get the Turkish off their back. The Europeans came together at the siege of Vienna, with the alliance of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After 12 hours of battle, at 17 hour (5 pm), the Polish king ordered, and led, the largest cavalry charge in history. 20,000 horsemen galloped down a mountain. Simultaneously, the Viennese garrison made a sortie. The Turks were finished.

***

WHEN CRATS RULED, SO DID WAR:

Prince Eugene of Savoy‘s reconquered Hungary and some of the Balkan lands within the following years. “Prinz Eugen” is also the name of the famous Nazi battle cruiser crammed with advanced technology, which became later a U.S. Navy ship (at least three of its master technologies were thoroughly copied by the Americans). Prince Eugene de Savoy (old French for modern “Savoie”) was born in Paris in 1663. After chasing the Turks off a bit, a peace was concluded (1699). Europeans were free to fight each other. Prinz eugen then fought with Malborough against members of his own family, for example the elector Emanuel of Bavaria.

Tellingly that prince/prinz signed his name: “Eugenio von Savoy”. An Italo-Germano-French signature! At the village of Blindheim (in English: “Blenheim”), Marlborough and Prince Eugen fought against the combined Bavarian and French armies. 240 years later, a descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, namely the British Prime Minister Churchill (an Anglo-American), sent Bristol Blenheim bombers to sink the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen.

It sounds funny, but, in the great European wars, up to half of the population died. Many wars lasted centuries. Prominent individuals were on both sides of the same war. Do we want more of this European war circus? Well, Wall Street does. Because the more the Europeans are divided, the more the financial pirates of Wall Street reign. The long memory of the Europeans for the exactions of the hyper wealthy is nothing Wall Street wants to hear more of.

Thus it’s useful to change the conversation with distorted history. American intellectuals such as Krugman and Ferguson live off Wall Street (whether they are conscious of it or not). While playing the roles of critiques, they help the pluriharmonic melodious chorus which allow the likes of Obama to claim total confusion, and support the mighty.

***

PLUTOPHILES NEVER RUN OF ADMIRATION FOR PREDATION:

Another weekend, and another blast by the servants of American plutocracy against Europe. In the Wall Street Journal, Niall Ferguson, the Scottish born plutophile history professor at Harvard informs us that Ireland, will asked to join the United Kingdom, in a “Reunited Kingdom“. Ferguson boy probably does not know that the latest measure of inflation in Great Britain is 5.9%. That means: near catastrophe (and I love inflation at 4%!). By the way I am reading his book “Civilization”. The usual thing: history started when Great Britain was created. That would be after the Dutch invasion, and the submission of Scotland, after 1700 CE. By then the American English colony was de facto independent, and had invented racially discriminating slavery. Indeed, a unique contribution. by killing lots of Indians and enslaving lots of Africans growing lots of tobaco, English colonists had become the world’s richest tribe.

But Ferguson does not tell you what I just said. Instead he tells you it’s all about British genius, just like when Newton discovered the Law of Universal Attraction. That is the Anglo-Saxon propaganda at its best. Actually Newton himself, more honest than Ferguson (who, as an historian should check history before proclaiming it!), asserted that  Bullialdus, a French priest and lawyer, found it first. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli suggested first the balance between centrifugal force and gravitational attraction. But you see, Bullialdus is French, thus he does not count, because he is not endowed by Anglo-Saxon genius. Even worse for Borelli: he was the son of a Spanish soldier and a Napolitan woman, races which according to Ferguson, do not have the Anglo-Saxon genius so obvious at Goldman Sachs.

***

CRATS’ DEVIOUS VIEW OF HISTORY:

That may be also why Ferguson has the history of the Anglo-Saxons starting so recently: before that the so called Anglo-Saxons were actually French lords, so that’s best forgotten. Edward III “Long Shanks”, conqueror of Scotland, initiator of the half a millennium long “100 years war” was French on both sides, and the grandson of the formidable  Philippe Le Bel.

Of course the only reason why the tiny Netherlands became so powerful was that, in a 150 years long war or so, Spain was defeated by France, and lost the low countries (which was only justice, as the Franks came from said Low Countries! And for centuries, France, England and the Netherlands had formed a triangle of commerce). Of course Spain owned the Netherlands, because Charles of Bourgogne did so, as part of his middle of the Imperium Francorum inheritance, and he had been elected king of Spain.

Charles V spoke perfectly five languages, but his birth language was French, as was that of his great enemy Francois Premier, born a few “lieux” away.

Thus in the end, much of the terrible wars between 1300 CE and 1815 CE were all about French fighting French.  It is normal: France was the largest single piece of the Imperium Francorum, and the later had not been formally dissolved. Instead it went on, at some point as more than 1,000 pieces…

This would go on: after the fascist, or, as he put it himself, “poorly advised” Louis XIV, kicked out millions of Protestants from France, many fled to Switzerland (where they started watch making), some to the Netherlands, or South Africa (where they made wine). many also were welcomed with open arms by Frederick the Great of Prussia (this explains why so many Nazi generals had French names).

In 1945, most French and Germans had come to the conclusion that, whatever was next, it would include definitive peace between France and Germany. The seventy five years of war between France and Germany (1870-1945) had shown that they had more to gain being together, than fighting against each other.

Those who knew history real well knew that the Franco-German wars had started with growing apart.

A lot of this had been propelled by the arrogance of Parisians. In 358 CE, shortly after the name of Lutetia had been changed for Paris (name of the local tribe, the Parisii), the Parisians and the crack Franco-Gallo-Roman troops elected by acclamation Caesar Julianus as Augustus. Julianus demurred for a while, but then accepted the nomination. He had no choice.

The emperor Constantius II, anxious to separate the Caesar from the empire’s best troops, had decided they would be moved to Mesopotamia. Instead, the Parisians rebelled. Julianus took control of the entire empire, and proceeded to de-Christianize the Roman empire (Julianus’ view of Christianism was even worse than that of Nietzsche, 14 centuries later, and fit well wit those of the Franks). Julianus was hit by a lance in Mesopotamia, the Franks took power directly, a century later. Frankish troops would be allied to the Mongols to seize Baghdad, and Damascus, a millennium later.

Forever after electing Julianus, Paris acquired a dangerous attitude. No wonder Carlus Magnus made his capital in Aachen. Throughout the Middle Ages, Paris was by far the largest city in Europe. By the Eleventh Century, Abelard had gone beyond Aristotle, and Paris had a university, by the Twelfth Century, Paris invented the so called “Gothic style“, then actually known as Opus Francigenum.

Actually one of the Franks present at the inauguration of the first Gothic cathedral, with typical Parisian spite, called it “Gothic” as that was the ultimate insult for a Frank (the Goths had been exterminated 450 years earlier, in a combined Franco-Roman-Muslim effort).

***

FRANCO-GERMAN REUNIFICATION:

One has made a big deal of the reunification of Germany. But that is small potatoes relative to the reunification which is really needed, that of West and East Francia. That is, Francia and Germania (to use roman rather than Frankish terminology).

The six year long Second World War (1939-1945), the last bout of fighting between France and Germany, coming at the end of 75 years of hostilities, demonstrated to all French and Germans that a thorough rethink of the situation was needed. Obsolete nationalism had become clearly counter-productive for all to see. The Nazis, supreme irony, had demonstrated this to themselves, at their entire dismayed dissatisfaction.

During WWII, Hitler himself, to his rage, had to collaborate with French industrialists. He whined to his cabinet that, once Germany won the war, it would be in the grasp of French civilian industry. But Speer told him that was there was no choice. Hitler’s top, most fanatical generals, once brought to France to occupy and terrorize, generally turned around, and worked against their evil master. Marshall Rommel, a fanatic, mass murdering Nazi in 1940, was pretty much the exact opposite four years later, after getting command in France.

Thus Hitler put in command of Paris the SS “butcher of Sevastopol”, who had, during the siege of Sevastopol, exterminated Jews (as he admitted in a secret recording made by the British August 29, 1945).

Hitler’s order from 23 August 1944: “The city must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete debris.” Hitler phoned Von Cholztizt in a rage, screaming, “Brennt Paris?” (“Is Paris burning?”) [An account confirmed by Col. General Jodl, Hitler's chief of staff, who added that Hitler asked the question many times, and wanted independent confirmation.]

Instead Von Choltitz and the 17,000 German soldiers under his command surrendered to French general Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque, commanding the Second Armored French division, which had rushed to Paris through successive Nazi defense rings, and to the Resistance leader Henri Rol-Tanguy at the Gare Montparnasse on 25 August 1944. The Germans had suffered 3,200 dead in combat with the resistance in Paris’ streets, and resistance leaders persuaded Von Choltitz of the uselessness, and immorality, of pursuing the fight, and burning the capital to a crisp as he had been ordered to do.

In 1948, after careful thinking, Robert Schuman proposed that “Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe.” French and German political leaders united the energetic and steel production of France and Germany. This actually extended work made in the same spirit in the early 1930s (which would have prevented WWII, had it come to fruition).

In 1951, the Treaty of Paris extended the European Steel and Coal Community to the Benelux and Italy.

Why the extension?

Well, France and Germany together united form a superpower which cannot be beaten, so it has to be joined. Superpower? France and German GDP, together, is four times that of Russia (and Franco-German GDP does not rest on the viscous prop oil and gas, as Russia’s does, but, instead on genuine human genius!) For other European countries it is not as if Franco-Germania were sitting on the other side of a vast ocean: if you are a European country, Franco-Germania is next door. Overall, Western Europe is the size of the North East of the USA. Just ask the Swiss how much they have to obey when France and Germany bare their fangs.

Moreover, the other powers, say Italy or the Benelux, were clearly lose parts of France, or Germany. Often of both. In other words, those other countries were created mostly to weaken one, or the other (For example, modern Italy had been pretty much created by the idealistic Napoleon III, who had a long history of conspiring with Italian independentists, as he was truly a Swiss… Piedmont, as its name, and its Savoy cross indicates, has more to do with France, than with Rome…)

So now here we are. American intellectuals are very well paid to demolish the European Union, and to distract from plutocratic Wall Street. Meanwhile in Egypt, the army is firing on protesters, using American weapons and cartridges. The government of the USA gives billions a year to the Egyptian military. The crackdown in Egypt was subsequent to the shooting, and killing by University of California police in Berkeley of a student at the business school, while Occupy Wall Street protests were going on outside.

Why does not Krugman attack that? Instead he deplores that accounting does not reign and that European countries are not fighting each other through competitive devaluations:

***

 

KRUGMAN’ DREADFUL SONG ABOUT EUROPE:

Paul Krugman, the Europhobe, is in great shape, his masters in what he calls the “greatest city in the world” will reward him well. In “Boring Cruel Euro Romantics” (Nov 20, 2011) he pontificates imprudently that:

I like technocrats — technocrats are friends of mine. And we need technical expertise to deal with our economic woes.

But our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers — boring, cruel romantics — pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.

I guess among “ideologues and wishful thinkers“ are philosophers, like yours truly, who believe in the victory of the mind and enlightenment over the viciousness of Pluto. Indeed, who does Krugman want to “puncture“?

“these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency… — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals.

Let’s start with the creation of the euro. If you think that this was a project driven by careful calculation of costs and benefits, you have been misinformed.

The truth is that Europe’s march toward a common currency was, from the beginning, a dubious project on any objective economic analysis. The continent’s economies were too disparate to function smoothly with one-size-fits-all monetary policy…”

Just like the Nazis used to claim that the Jews were cruel, Krugman claims “impractical romantics“, those who want European unification, are both boring and cruel. Well, it can only mean that they do not use expert torturers. In the Middle Ages, torturing was the most appreciated spectacle. nothing boring about it. Maybe we could torture some boring American academics with our contempt, to start with.

***

SAVING BANKS IS DIFFERENT FROM SAVING CURRENCIES:

Bravo, Krugman, Bravo! Listening to Krugman you have the impression the euro, as a currency, is a disaster. It needs to be “saved”. The Economist”, and the rest of the financial propaganda systematically claim that the euro needs to be saved. So how come it’s 40% overvalued over the dollar?

Krugman is called an economist, but apparently, he cannot distinguish between a currency and banks. He apparently wants them to be the same. Does that mean American economists are even more incompetent than the realm they built, or is it actually a Freudian slip?

Verily, the so called euro crisis has nothing to do with the euro, or with romance. Whatever the admirers of New York and its financial system say. Europe was born in war. Dozens of millions have died in an holocaust, and the survivors drew some important conclusions which can only have escaped the American society, which ate on both sides of the manger.

The USA, in the entire war lost about 415,000 people, nearly all of them soldiers. French controlled territories lost about two millions, only a third of it, soldiers (don’t expect to find this statistics in USA propaganda). True, for a while (1942-1944), after the defeat of 1940, the million man French army fighting was out of Africa (several of my relatives were in it).

Other European countries had much greater losses. Poland lost six million. Germany lost ten million (OK, they started it, as they chose to be led by Nazi marionettes, with plutocrats pulling the strings). The USSR lost not far from thirty million (OK, they did not have to be led by a Georgian gangster).

To avoid conflicts, it’s important to know who is really pulling the strings.

There is a crisis in Europe, but it’s not a euro crisis. The German ratio of national debt/GDP is 83%. The British and especially Spanish one are lower. France has a ratio of 87%. The USA thrones with a national debt/GDP ratio of 104%.

OK, that’s not all: one has to look at personal debt, etc. It’s bad in Spain. One also has to look at the instantaneous current account deficit: it is nearly as good in Italy as it is Germany, but it is really bad in the UK and the USA (around 12%).

***

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!

The crisis has everything to do with the privatization of public money, as I explained many times before. It was in the air of the times, the era of privatization of everything: Your Money Or Your Life!

Thanks to Milton Friedman and another 13 American “Nobel” prizes, most of them from Chicago (a place of dubious fumes such as mafia, Daley, Obama, and “French” IMF director Lagarde). The doctrine of Milton and his ilk, is the simplest and the oldest of the enemies of civilization: Greed Is All You Need.

Currency is the essence of the state, short of military force. Privatizing currency, made the oligarchy on top ever more powerful, because it made, at the outset, that oligarchy into the state itself. that made it into an instant plutocracy.
Plutocracies can be most resilient. Look at Egypt: since the late forties, when it set up a coup, the Egyptian military has reigned. Cynics in Europe suspect the dictator Mubarak (ex-general commanding the Air Force, like Pinochet in Chili), is still in power. What is sure is that his right hand man, another general, is in power, plotting with the Islamists (who he uses as a justification for his iron rule).

We have seen plutocracy before: it ended up with highway men all over the ex-Roman empire, asking for your money, or your life. And behind high walls, sat the great lords, with their private armies.

So a conspiracy of crats, plutocracy, brought the Late Roman empire where it finished, and us where we are. Crats just want power, nothing else matters to them. They select other crats.

Obama, in his memoirs, say that what is important, in life, is navigation. The grand Vizier would have said the same. Thus the rule of law was very weak in the Ottoman empire. The Grand Vizier travelled with his personal fortune. He had it on board when the Ottoman fleet was tremendously crushed at the battle of Lepanto.  
All and any financial transaction ought to be revealed, regulated, and taxed. Those who cheat should go to jail and have their property confiscated, as pertains gangsters of the highest and most dreadful order.
That European banks, and Shadow banks are in the world financial spider sucking on blood, there is no doubt. That they behaved as if they were our overlords, no doubt either. However the three buffoons nominated recently, Draghi, head of the european Central Bank, super Mario (-nette), parachuted head of Italy, and whatever his name in Greece, were all Goldman Sachs officer, one of the major the spider nests.
So the present austerity is not about saving the euro at all. The euro is strong, all too strong. No, it’s all about paying rent to the banks, until all freedom is gone, except that of the ultra rich, it’s all about a new feudal order.
I will not answer the ill informed anti-European rant about European states being so disparate that they cannot have a common currency. France and Germany decided to become united in 1948. Together, they are at least half the economic power of the USA. Other states on their doorsteps can hardly ignore them. a truck driver, on one shift can cross half a dozen countries, and so on and so forth. I do understand though, that those who think, as Paul does that New York is the “greatest city in the world”, probably thing that, by necessity, Wall Street is the greatest street in the world.
France and Germany want to put an end to the domination of Wall Street. The euro will survive, big banks too big to fail, and big enough to flail us all, should be killed, and the American university-plutocratic complex will be exposed for what it is.

***

WHEN WASHINGTON WANTED TO OCCUPY FRANCE:

In 1944, the Americans intended to treat France, exactly just as if France were Nazi Germany. The AMGOT administration for France had been planned by the American Chief of Staff, Marshall. A fake French currency had been printed. Hundreds of American collaborators had been trained to take over the French administration. France was to be occupied. Indefinitely. By the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories.

The American hegemony failed, because the trained, combat experienced French army was actually much bigger than the American army… in 1944 (it’s always the same American divisions which did all the fighting, whereas the French had completely replaced their experience and ferocious African army, by a new one). At most the Americans had 65 divisions in Europe. In any case the relationship between the French government and Washington was execrable. The French played the pivotal role in the failure of the Nazi offensive in the Ardennes: the panicked American command ordered the evacuation of Alsace (as Hitler thought would happen). But the French refused. That allowed Patton (who also believed that Washington was full of traitors) to throw his Third Army, the best tank army of the USA, north (as his right flank was covered by the French, who had surrendered just two and a half centimeters to the enraged Nazis).

In any case, AMGOT explains clearly why the USA, as a government, refused to help France and Britain in 1940, after hurting them in 1939 (and for several years before that). As far as all too many in Washington were concerned, France was an enemy, and Nazism a tool against that enemy.

A war gets engaged first by propagandists. Europeans have to understand Washington will keep on supporting the banks. So maybe they should stop collaborating.

Why not let the too-big-to-fail banks fail? Is it not what austerity ought to mean? (By failing I mean, while protecting small savers’ deposits, of course!) Then banks, helped by ferocious re-regulating, could stay small enough to help the People, rather than help themselves.

Massive default of the culprits, punishment and recovery of stolen hundreds of billions is a pre-condition to a new, and better financial order. Austerity ought to start at the top. Reintroduce Eisenhower’s 90% upper margin tax rate!

And please resist Krugman’s Europhobic ranting… Just as the Nazis, in a tradition going all the way back to the proto-Nazi philosopher Herder, Krugman exaggerates the “disparity” of the different European nations. Why does not Krugman tell us too that the Jews were too different? Why does not he tell us that Jews and Muslims, or Protestants, for that matter, were too disparate to function smoothly with one-size-fits-all monetary policy? Because he would sound too much like a proto-Nazi?

The Nazis, to a great extent, were manipulated by their American corporate sponsors. They also had German sponsors, but Wall Street overlorded over them (for example, Wall Street created IG Farben, among others; of course Wikipedia will not tell you that; I suspect that paid cleansers take out, or displace, a lot of the serious evidence in the Internet about the connection between Wall Street and Nazism; some pieces are left here and there).

What were the American plutocratic sponsors of Nazism about? Always more power to themselves, getting others to make their dirty work. Yes, some of the most important ones, like the Warburgs, were Jews. American culture, after grabbing an entire continent for itself, could only want to grab others.

As far as the other side of the culture which brought Auschwitz, one does not have to go very far. The ex astronomer Kant was, with Frederick the Great and Herder part of an infernal trio. Kant defined the Enlightenment, just as Krugman defines Europe. In his essay. “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant eructs that:

“Only one who is himself enlightened…and has a numerous and well-disciplined army to assure public peace, can say:’ Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey’ A republic could not dare say such a thing… A lower degree of civil freedom, on the contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend himself to his full capacity.”

Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering parroted this sort of thought many times during their reign.

Kant was a very good astronomer, but, as a proto-Nazi philosopher, he was superlative. As a historian he was a zero, because he obviously did not know the history of the Roman republic, a place where steely obedience triumphed, and where fascism was harnessed for the better, and for justice, in the interest of the many. Republican fascism: “All for one, one for all” became the symbol of the Roman, and latter the French republic.

But fascism as defended by Kant, was just in the service of his master, “one who is himself enlightened…and has a numerous and well-disciplined army”.

The rule of the one: the Greeks called that tyranny; that is what the word means. So Kant was also an etymological zero, or extremely dishonest, as he chose to forget what tyranny was. Kant’s call, just as that of Krugman, is that of division. All and any country at each other’s throats, in the hope that his own, with a “numerous and well-disciplined army” will win.

After all both Kant and Krugman lived of what they praise. Indeed economic war of countries against countries through devaluation is the essence of Krugman’s message. One may wonder how much of Krugman’s so called “New Trade Theory” is little more than a fig leaf over the vast worldwide conspiracy, plutocracy its name, which strangles civilization, and the biosphere itself, a galaxy of conniving crats around the globe, immune to reason but for more obsessive power to themselves.

Krugman may still learn. A few of the basics above he learned in the last 12 months. Ferguson is a more complex case. He is less short sighted than Krugman, but neither his mind nor his eyes, nor memory, go far enough. Kant will not learn anymore, and he had nothing major to say which was good. It remains to kill him in other people’s minds.

Kant has much to do with what became the “German problem”. As Eichmann testified in Jerusalem.

What was the “German problem”? It was the Prussian hallucination that Frederick the Great approach to civilization could triumph. It was very similar to the English American colonial approach. In truth, it was an even more dreadful devolution than the American one, because not only it was out to spoil the Indians, but it mistook Europeans for Indians. As so many influential Germans brandish the most selfish and idiotically short sighted reasons for not supporting the rest of Europe Germany profited so much from, one can only conclude that some more philosophical work needs to be done.

Qaddafi used to call the freedom fighters who wanted him out of power,”rats”. But he spent his last moments of freedom in a sewer. Thus that crat was caught as a rat. More generally, one suspects that human institutions, which are all power structures, to be full of crafty crats in the most powerful positions. Thus the outraged/indignes/Occupy Wall Street are right to insist on absolute democracy. Crats there always will be. Mitigating them is of the essence for the survival of civilization.

Civilization is hard work. But first, civilization is superior mental work. Nothing that sheer brutality can buy. Greed is not enough to animate a civilization.

Civilization, and, more generally, the human spirit, has always incarnated  the triumph of ever more sophisticated minds over the “objective economic analysis” of rats, crats, and other crocs.

Si Vis Civilisationem, Cave Kratos.

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Patrice Ayme