Strikes Against Civilization

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

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

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

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

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

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

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Don’t deny.

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

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Patrice Ayme

Swiss Fight Pluto!

Abstract: The Swiss People, in defiance to the Swiss plutocracy and its attached mob of greedy sycophants, has struck a blow against the extremely wealthy, self perpetuating class of those who rule corporations in defiance of their owners.

Most of these owners are (very) small investors. So this blow for ownership is actually a blow against one of the pillars of plutocracy. That pillar uses corporations to steal other people’s money in a particularly blatant way.

How? By creating what I long called the CEO CLASS the entanglement of corporate boards with executive power in corporations (See the essay of November 2008 on Reforming World Finance). Here is the graph of CEOs compensations versus average salary, USA. (It’s a French translation, because the Berkeley original has magically disappeared from the WWW!)

Rise CEO Class. Jump Under Clinton!

USA CEO salaries are the two top curves, with their logarithmic scale on the left. The (lamentable) average USA salary (not indexed by inflation) crawls on the bottom, with its scale on the right. Source: Anti-Plutocratic French site.

CEO payments climbed up to about 500 times that of the workers in top companies in the USA, but only 15 times in France, 12 times in Germany.

[Interestingly, I searched for days this graph in USA search engines; although of USA origin, Professor Saez, UCB, it is (not so) mysteriously unavailable in USA search engines; a friend suggested I look at Google.France, and there was plenty there! Clearly the USA plutocrats cleaned the World Wide Web carefully, so that their English bound sheeple read only appropriate information! Nothing like the happy bleating of the sheep to fill a sheperd's heart.] 

The entanglement of CEOs and the corporate boards supposed to watch over them, is reminiscent of, and probably inspired by, the entanglement of political and business power in the USA. That public-private entanglement dates from the early 20C: think of JP Morgan intervening in the 1907 crash, or think of the diversion of German property towards USA plutocrats after 1918 (don’t worry, the building were all the giving of seized German property was given to USA plutocrats burned down around 1922, erasing the tracks of grand thievery…).

A behavior that is widely admired in the USA, that of the towering CEO with an astronomical salary bestowed on him or her by a board of co-conspirators, is now criminalized in Switzerland. Such CEO and director thugs will be punished by a mandatory confiscation of 6 years of income, plus three years in prison.

In the USA, CEOs and their boards are immensely admired. The connected ones sit on corporate boards at an early age, to be paid extravagant sums of money, while doing nothing, but allowing CEOs and their minions to steal all the companies profits, from small shareholders, and workers.

Thus, Americans will now know that, by admiring CEO and boards, the American way, they are admiring what Europeans are increasingly viewing as criminals, and criminal boards of directors. OK, as slave masters long admired, I guess they have trained hard, and they will not suffer anguish that way.

Yet, one can hope that this criminalization of a motive of admiration should help with a worldwide readjustments of values.

So far, so good. But there is a twist. Why is it that mutual funds of the USA have supported so much the CEO class and its interlocked boards? Worldwide?

Well, the CEO class part of a larger conspiracy with the financial sector, where the real money is made. It is my pleasure to give some pointers. Those pointers, in turn, will allow to criminalize further said vaster conspiracy.

Meanwhile, all democracies should pass laws similar to the one Swiss representatives are now constitutionally obliged to pass. It is, of course, a consequence of Switzerland having a higher democratic index than any other country that explains that such a popular initiative was taken there. It’s clearly not a case of a country being run by rabid leftists.

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EVIL IN A FEW WORDS, & ITS IMPLEMENTATION BY CORPORATIONS:
Evil triumphs when good people do not fight it. Why? Because the default state of humanity is strife. This is the point rabid pacifists keep on missing, it’s also the point Obama made in Stockholm, when he got his Nobel. It has been well known since there are men, and they think.

Nothing personal: because of its domination, the genus Homo evolved to control itself, quite bit as wolves do, by killing each other. The Romans abstracted this as: Homo Homini Lupo, Man Wolf Of Man (more than 2,000 years ago). Just like wolves, only more so, because we dominate more.

All species need to be kept in check, and the check of man is man.

But how does man fight man? Like all other social animals, by mobbing, or tribal fighting. So tribal effects have to be watched severely. The most famous tribes are the 200 or so nations and territories more or less represented at the United Nations. But there are other tribes, all over. The most ubiquitous being corporations. (What is meant by “corporations” varies in time, nations and space, but the tribal effect is what unifies them.)

The founders, and early presidents of the USA, so called “Founding Fathers” were fully aware of this.

As president and thinker in chief Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.”

The “example” is that of England (as the rest of the text makes clear). This is taken from a letter to George Logan, Nov. 12th, 1816. There’s a PDF file with scanned images of an edition of Jefferson’s works at this address.
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WHY THE SWISS CRACK DOWN ON THE CEO MAFIA:
It is no coincidence that Switzerland, the most democratic country, was the first to ask We The People, in a referendum, what they think about the feudal class that is taking over, armed with neofascist ideology.

The answer, delivered March 3, 2013, is that 68% of the Swiss believes that the conspiracy of thieves that has come to dominate civilization, should be forcefully terminated.

Superficially, Switzerland is doing better than ever. GDP expanded in 2012. GDP per capita is nearly twice that of the USA (at nominal rates, not cheating PPP). But these good numbers and nice surroundings mask the fact that the wealthy have been doing incredibly better, while the plebs has lost ground. Most Swiss cannot afford to own there, to start with. Two-thirds of them rent (whereas 55% of French next door own their homes 100%). That way they are like the inhabitants of most “rich” cities of the West in that they can’t afford to live where they work.

An increasing inflow of tax avoiding and tax mitigating plutocrats makes the Swiss increasingly conscious of a feudalization of the country. For instance, most of the world oil trading is conducted out of Geneva, now that London is proving less tax friendly to the world’s richest sharks. That makes Swiss property values skyrocket, and also make average Swiss, like average Belgians, hold the tax bag.

Yet Switzerland is less subjugated by its elite than other “representative democracies”.

This has to do with history. Other places were typically founded by large imperial machines (France, Britain, Germany, USA, Ex British colonies, Portugal, Spain, Spanish colonies, Italy, Russia, Netherlands), and, or slave societies (Spanish colonies, Brazil, USA, Russia). Some countries may look small now, but degenerated from empires. The Netherlands even conquered England; Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden ran empires (Sweden thought it owned Ukraine and Russia for a millennium). The present Swedish regime was founded by Napoleon, etc…

Instead Switzerland started as a rebellion against the family that would run the “Holly Roman German Empire” for centuries. The birth of Switzerland was fundamentally an anti-plutocratic rebellion. Same in the USA, sure, but only that other revolution minded plutocrat, Louis XVI of France, made in possible (in more ways than one). The Swiss revolt was indigenous.

Any initiative signed by 100,000 people can be presented as a referendum in Switzerland.

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SWISS CRACK-DOWN ON CEO CLASS:

Initiator of the “Rip-off Initiative” Thomas Minder is an entrepreneur industrialist, and right wing politician, who nearly lost his company when Swissair went bankrupt (from obscure financial maneuvers). In recent years, Mr. Minder observed that the world was put on its knees in the service of financiers. This is exactly the point demonstrators were making in Portugal this week.

As Portuguese demonstrators said, why should they sacrifice because infinitely rich bankers cheated? Or went mad? Or conspired with other rich fat cats to rob common people? Why is it that Portuguese people without money now have to pay to use the public hospital, when those who have caused the disaster keep on flying in private jets, shuttling among their mansions, worldwide?

As I said already more than 5 years ago, there is a CEO class. CEOs sit on each others’ board, and attribute each others’ salaries. OK, they are often more crafty, and use agents: relatives, or protégés. It is particularly clear in the USA, where it’s all about who you know really well: see the Summers-Clinton-Summer-Google-Facebook Ms. Sandberg (just a small example).

And it’s even more than a CEO class.

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CEO CLASS AS A MULTIPLIER:

The CEO Class can be instrumentalized to divest power to talent that will serve plutocracy well.

A lot of people of power are able to transfer quickly and efficiently power to their children, or people they know will serve their children faithfully. It’s happening everywhere, especially in the USA.

Suddenly all powerful young people rise in the USA to seats on corporate boards: thus they are made to integrate the CEO Class, board side. Careful inquests always show connections with the powers that be. See Geithner, head of New York Fed, then tax cheating Treasury secretary, ah, but the son of Geithner (Geithner’s father was a Ford Foundation director who met with Obama’s mother… All and any connection with the painting behind Hitler in his Munich office will not be made, recommended an angel that passed by, dripping with finance…). Geithner was successfully vetted at Kissinger Associates, a plotting organization to connect plutocrats, corrupt politicians and other worldwide tyrants. He was put under the wings of Rubin and Summers (like Facebook’s billionaire woman, the genius feminist Sheryl Sandberg). Geithner was prepared to serve his masters well.

The CEO-boards Class systems enable the plutocratic machine to put large amounts of power to servile critters. This  is how ‘black’ women of the Rice class, such as Rice, Susan and Rice, Condoleezza, were all powerful by the age of 30 (the former a member of the National Security council, thanks to dad, a treasury director, the second on prestigious CEO boards all over, and a supertanker was named after her, because her masters at Stanford had determined she would serve her masters in the Dark Side well… still does: she is a towering member of the CEO class in 2013). Not that I have anything against blacks or “blacks”…

“Are they worth it?” Asked The Economist. While knowing very well the answer was no. One thing the extravagant growth of the CEO Class did not grow is corporate profits:

CEO Class Rising, Everything Else Lagging

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WANT DEMOCRACY? CUT POWER IN TINY BITS, DISTRIBUTE WIDELY:

Minder’s “Rip-off Initiative” was designed to prevent bosses from receiving huge bonuses by decision of a CEO class. So it makes it harder to congeal a CEO class: board members should serve only a single year.

This, by the way, is something to meditate in a more general way… In the Roman republic, the judicial, military, economic and political executive was incarnated by the Consuls. They served just one year (although they could be elected again: Marius was elected Consul 7 times!). And even in that year, ultimate power switched from one to the other, every month.

Republican Romans knew how fragile the Res (Thing) Publica was. Don’t laugh. The Roman republic, in full, lasted five centuries. Still the world’s record.

Now what we have is, what would have been called in the times of Julius Caesar, (elected) kings. The immense powers the president of the USA are perfectly ridiculous, especially when, as Obama, he does not use them. (An apparent worshipper of Satan, complete with devilish smirks, such as G. W. Bush, did not have such reservations: such a creature never will, by definition!)

Minder’s anti-plutocratic initiative says that companies cannot decide to give their executives “golden parachutes”. Salaries of board members, and companies’ executives will have to be approved by the companies’ owners. That is, by the shareholders. That, by itself, of course, is not enough, because the plutocratic web is entangled in all power structures, and sucks the substantific marrow.

When Novartis gave 71 million Francs ($77 million) to its CEO, Vasella, to the fury of the very numerous small Swiss shareholders of Novartis. The small shareholders could not do anything as most of Novartis’ shares are held by plutocratic institutions, which are part and party to the plutocratic phenomenon.

What plutocratic institutions accomplice to the CEO Class and the financial rip-off sector, am I alluding to? A lot of them are mutual funds in the USA. Or funds for retirement funds. Those used to give rich returns, but, in recent decades, they have faltered. Why? How come? well it’s part and parcel of the worldwide take-over by rich money managers. It may sound strange that they strive towards subpar performance: it’s an apparent violation of the free market principle.
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WHY MUTUAL FUNDS MANAGERS CONSPIRE WITH THE CEO MAFIA:
The naïve free market principle says that, when a mutual fund has subpar performance, the shareholder should move to another fund. Yes, sure, but what if they are all subpar? What if there is a conspiracy? Because, clearly that is what has been systematically going for like 20 years.

The funds are losing money right and left because the function of fund managers has become mostly to transfer money to the financial fat sharks of the plutocratic class. You know the ones they share the caviar toasts with. Thus small shareholders and retirees, present and future, make richer, ever more, the richest people in the world.

There is actually a closed circuit similar to that between Washington and private corporations and partnerships. Individuals operate as public fund managers for a few years, wasting a lot of investors’ money, and then they become “wealth managers”, “private bankers”, “hedge fund managers”, entangle themselves with the CEO class, and politicians, to make the really big bucks, extracting money from the public, including the public mutual funds for little people… or small shareholders of corporations such as Novartis. Don’t ask me for references: plutocratic universities such as Harvard, Stanford, are not too keen to study the subject, as those who profit from it, are their bread and butter.

Conspiracies to distribute People’s money to friends are all over the so called “representative democracies”. Why should not giant government spending be controlled by the People more directly? It can be done in… Switzerland.
***

SWISS DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE GIANT CORRUPTION IN AEROSPACE, F35 STYLE:
Plutocracy is encountering serious difficulties in Switzerland. Besides the “rip-off” initiative above, here is another example.

Some of the Swiss elite, probably paid under the table, had conspired to buy “Grippens“. The Grippen is an excellent plane made in Sweden. But the Swiss Air Force would prefer the superlative, stealthy Rafale, the world’s best omnirole fighter bomber, from the country next door.

The Swiss are going to be asked their opinion… about purchasing the Grippen. It’s pretty clear that, thanks to outfits such as this site, enough of them will know that they are been rolled in the flour, spending billions on underperforming planes (that actually does not exist in the version proposed to Switzerland). So they will vote against the Grippen.

Not so in the USA, And other countries where the people is supposed to pay hundreds of billions to purchase an entirely useless plane, the F35 Lightning II.

The F35 is already the world’s most expensive military project, ever, anywhere. Yet the plane is military incapable, and will stay so. The entire project is flawed (this kind of passive stealth does NOT work, the plane’s range, speed, acceleration, g loads, weapons capacity are puny).

The great peoples of the great democracies such as the USA, Great Britain, etc. are not consulted about whether they want to keep on going with that F35 corruption. The total program cost already more than 400 billion dollars with not one single plane that could go to war. It’s expected to end up costing about a trillion dollars with planes no better performing than the Vietnam war F105… And just as detectable.

But so far, while People go starving in several countries involved in F35 corruption (including in the USA’s Silicon Valley, where hundreds of thousands are on “food stamps”), nobody is exhibiting very much indignation.

***

PLUTOCRACY IS A SEVERE PROBLEM, IT SHOULD DEALT WITH SEVERELY:

The Swiss referendum forces the Swiss Parliament to draft a law giving shareholders the right to hold a binding vote on all compensation for company executives and directors. The law will also ban signing and leaving bonuses for senior managers and push greater corporate transparency. As said above, criminals will be punishmed by the confiscation of 6 years of income, and three years jail.

The Swiss have just struck a severe blow at the plutocrats, exposing them for the conspiring, manipulative thieves they are. Other European countries will be encouraged to follow, including Germany and Britain (in both countries laws on executive compensation are being elaborated, the German law may come up for a vote as soon as next week). The French Socialists will come back with a 75% tax law, that will pass muster with the French Constitutional Court…

The European Union in preparing a law cracking down on bankers’ bonuses. Great Britain is desperately trying to block it, as it will apply there, inside the very the den of thieves, too. But Great Britain will be overruled. It just revealing itself to be ruled by money. Plutocracy in fact, not just from crowned celebrities.

To have kings is bad. To have money as king, is worse.

It is high time that countries that call themselves democracies be as democratic as Switzerland. It would be a good start towards a more intelligent civilization.
***
Patrice Ayme

Let Pluto Be Are No Words Of Wisdom

 

IF IT’S TOO HOT TO KEEP COOL, SIMMER!

I received personal messages telling me I was too mean to Obama.

And the well leaks, straight from the underground, an appropriate image for the Obama presidency. Underground is where Pluto thrives. Pluto is the ultimate savvy businessman, and he is friendly.

All my critiques about Obama are constructive, and thus friendly, too. I have criticized his choice of advisers, some being the worst of the worse, and even his choice of emotions, or logics, let alone knowledge.

Declarations such as on June 8, 2010 on NBC’s “Today” show, when he informed us that:

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick.”

… Reveal that, even to pick up a fight in the schoolyard, as if, somehow, it were his role, Obama needs a committee of experts. Such comments tend to show his emotional system as coming short, a trait further accentuated by his preferred emotion, frustration. I got so frustrated by Obama’s alleged frustration, that I wrote an essay on frustration, coming soon.

Frustration is the top kill of all emotions. It matters. One thinks with emotion, and Obama, in the imperfect democratic system we have, is the leader. He thinks for us, his decisions can bring Armageddon. Or, at least turn the Gulf of Mexico into a vast lake of bitumen, something genuinely black, brought to you by the serious people, in the oligarchy.

Obama ought to have put the US army in charge of the leaking oil well, on day one. He did not. Even what I view as the risky cutting of the riser was decided by BP alone, with a cheering audience from the White House (Dr. Chu Chu, a Nobel, but not necessarily the most noble at all times). A bend riser slowed the flow down, cut, it augments, and no seal will long resist the vibrations (which could bust the whole BOP). Of course, the oil could be ultimately recovered by a sort of funnel, but, to say the least, plans could have been explained: it’s a public, not private problem, at this point, and the People have a right to know. 

Obama is a man who wanted to become everybody’s daddy, and now he is. Maybe that was presumptuous on his part, but he desperately wanted the job, and millions helped him, including the author, believing what he let us hope, believing what he led us to hope. We have a right, and a duty, to criticize daddy back. Such is the fundament of representative democracy, imperfect as it is, to ponder how and why Obama thinks. And that means what and why he emotes.

Obama has been immensely wrong about the financial crisis, as he paid the owners and corrupt managers of the bank holding companies, under the pretense of keeping the economy going, as if those “savvy businessmen”, as he put it, had not just ruined it. Obama literally called Mr. Jamie Dimon "savvy", and his "friend", apparently because Mr. Dimon implemented CDOs, one of the main derivatives which ruined the world.

Thus the financial thieves were given back what they had stolen before, and the People was asked to pay the thieves, and told pontifically that so it had to be. And this, as if the People had not just paid for the banks, and thus, logically and capitalistically, ought to own them. Obama just pursued faithfully Bush’s policies there, even keeping his crew (Bernanke, Geithner).

Obama, has been abysmally wrong about Afghanistan, even refuting the foundations, not just of Western Civilization, but even of the State of Law, by doing so, the way he did. In that too, he just pursued Bush’s demolition work of 4,000 years of progress. Bush’s grandfather was one of Hitler’s most important collaborators (!), it was family business. What is Obama’s excuse?

The mental blaze of philosophy against these civilization class outrages will go on, as long as Obama does not change policies. If he did not want this scrutiny, he ought to have stayed a private person, something no politician can be, in representative democracy.

The very limelight on the leaders of any democracy allows us to practice psychological dissection and deconstruction on those individuals who have decided to come to the fore, and lead. Thus the president is not just master and commander, but guinea pig and lab rat, as events are brutally visited on his mind, and he scurries about.

Pericles, Athens elected leader, was advised by some of those who were viewed as the best philosophers, in his time. His funeral oration stays a monument of democratic and open society glorification, to this day. Pericles did not advocate the abrogation of the State of Law, and Pericles did not work for an oligarchy. However, Pericles and his philosophical advisers, made huge mistakes with hubris and a lack of respect for the principle of precaution. Those mistakes may have set civilization back by a millennium.

Pericles’ mistakes were subtle. Many of the mistakes made by American oligarchy presently, are not subtle at all. Now, of course, one could say that the European oligarchies are making the same mistakes too, for example in asking the People to sacrifice for the rescue the plutocratic banking system we have presently. True, but the USA is leading this grotesque show.

The banking system, as it is, is funded by the public, in several ways. Thus it is a public institution. However, most of its profits go to a very small elite, which is in bed with the elected ‘representative" elite, itself bought and selected by the plutocrats in various ways. That system is now so biased in favor of these elites it ruins not only the standards of living, but even the environment (CO2 problem, Gulf of Bitumen, formerly of Mexico, perpetual wars eroding everything, etc.)

(I have supported Obama massively, in all ways, costing me treasure, time, and energy, getting personally nothing in return but dedicated antagonism, and the satisfaction of thinking well done. And I would do part of this again. It was a particular pleasure to see how a whiff of power corrupts absolutely those with a weak mental constitution.)

But that does not mean that, when I see Obama turning Western civilization upside down, as he did all too long in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, or in finance, or with health care, I should stay silent as an oyster in love.

PA

P/S: What happened with Athens? It lost the war with Sparta, but, in spite of horrendous mistakes (Syracuse expedition, also caused by hubris), ultimately the defeat was caused by Persia. Persia financed the Spartan fleet. So Pluto and its subterranean ways grew. Pluto is a mood, an anti-ethical, anti-progress mood.  As it grows, democracy shrinks. Next Thebes beat Sparta, but Macedonian fascism rolled over Greece, and Alexander annihilated Thebes, doing to it, what fascism had failed to do to Athens. Plutocratically, and somewhat democratically armed, Alexander swept all the way to Persia, eliminating a greater evil than himself. However, the point was that Pluto’s influence had grown enormously, and would favor the rise of the Roman republic, a lesser evil, before it got contaminated too, and so on… The good side of Christianity, that of unconditional love, would roll Pluto back later, helped by the fundamentally rebelliously democratic spirit of the Franks.

Constitutionally Weak USA?

 

IS WHAT WAS NOT FORMALLY CONSTITUTED REALLY THERE?

A lot of the famed “Constitution” of the USA is not really a “Constitution” at all. It is actually tradition, not constitution.

In democracies, “Constitutions” are established by Constituting Assemblies elected by the People. In other words, the People rules what Constitution it wants, through a process in which it is represented.

France and the USA did this in 1789, a few weeks apart. The difference is that the Constitution of the French republic was found grossly inadequate, in the meantime, and has been extensively modified since, and is modified, to this day. In the USA, a few amendments were passed, the rest was changed informally. Imagine the Wright brothers’ airplane, with a few new pieces, here and there, now flying 310 millions.

A lot of the machinery of the USA is extra Constitutional. For example, the most important activity of the US Supreme Court, to act as a sort of Constitutional Court, was not formally instated by the Constitution of the USA. This role was just informally grabbed by enterprising judges, in some way, at some point, in the nineteenth century. Thus that Constitutional watchdog role is not really there. Hence oftentimes, Supreme Court justices grandly declare that they cannot “legislate from the bench”. In other words, no organization is defending the Constitution, in the USA.

The filibuster rule in the Senate is an example of another of these ad hoc rules. 60 votes, out of 100, are needed to pass anything. Why not 99 votes? Why not, indeed: the filibuster rule is not in the Constitution. Why is it there? Well, because there is not much of a separation between Money and State in the USA.

Wyoming has 570,000 inhabitants, California more than 37 millions. Each has two senators. This has become a living dream for the plutocracy, which can easily purchase a few otherwise impoverished senators, and control everything at little relative cost.

Overall, the USA has the oldest, most obsolete Constitution, probably adequate only for the tentative state with a few hundred of thousands voters it started with, 200 years ago, when the aim of the USA was to conquer vast swathes of the Americas. Now the age of conquest is over, and the age of wisdom calls for a more regulated republic, differently constituted.

By contrast, the European Union has a sort of rolling constitution, continually morphing. Also European citizens are protected by a variety of fully endowed Constitutional and Supreme Courts. Thus, in Europe, those high courts can defend individuals to the point of forcing the states to change their ways. They have the constitutional backbone to do it.

Most countries change their constitutions, fast, because the world is changing, fast. Not that the USA is not changing. It is. But the Constitutional stasis forces most of these changes to be extra-Constitutional

An example: Bush institutes torture, Obama forbids it: the monarch decides of all, according to his good pleasure. But what happened to the rule of law, and the rule of the People? What happened to the Constitution? Was torture legal, or was it unlawful? Was it Constitutional? Is Obama’s Bagram black prison in Afghanistan, and its equivalent in Iraq, Constitutional? Who, or rather, what, is defending the Constitution?

***

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; LOUIS XI AND THE USA:

Bush institutes torture, Obama forbids it: the monarch decides of all, according to his good pleasure.

France had such a practice of government for centuries, in Medieval times. The king would say: “I decided this and the other thing, car tel est mon bon plaisir!” (…because such is my good pleasure!)

In truth, there were strong limits to the power of kings, at least in France and its ex-vassal England. The king in England, the Duke of Normandy, ruled in the name of a direct covenant with the People, and strong French kings always used that same argument. (After claiming, for six centuries or so, that they were elected).

Both English and French kings were ruled by the Salic law, Roman law, the principle of the state of law (coming from a Roman Augusta), besides a few add-ons in England, and the entire contraption under the watchful eye of Parliaments and the councils of the kingdoms. This is not just a picturesque perspective: Louis IX (“Saint Louis”), hated Jews and unbelievers, and wanted “to plant swords in their bellies” (as he poetically put it). But he could not do anything much, practically, because he was blocked by the law (Hitler, later, changed the law).

By 1700 though, torture was forbidden in England, and could not have been instituted by the monarch. Even earlier, the French monarch could not have decided to torture on his own: judges, and parliaments decided of such things. The latest French monarch to use forms of torture on his own volition, by putting some of his enemies, who were serious enemies of the state, into cages, acquired a bad reputation, to this day.

This king, Louis XI, the “Prudent and Universal Spider” weakened the great lords, with the support of the People. So he was an excellent king, who, among other things, protected the Protestants from the rabid Catholics who harassed them. Louis XI, though earned a lot of disrepute because of a few cages. Louis XI the Prudent

King of France

Louis XI wearing his Order of Saint Michael

The point is that Louis XI died on 30 August, 1483. And that no king of France behaved that way since (and it was with just a handful of convicts of the most dangerous type, dangerous enemies of the state, not little criminals, rogue CIA agents, such as Osama bin Laden). That American presidents, with little apparent reason, would behave the same, without a Constitutional framework, is troubling, and a testimony of the weakness of the present Constitution of the USA.

***

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com

***

P/S: Is the Constitution of the USA only adequate for a small city? 38,818 individuals voted in the first presidential election of the USA, in 1788. Yes, less than 40,000 voters. In 2008, Los Angeles had 200 times more denizens.

***

DELIBERATELY VIOLATING THE LAW.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION VIOLATED THE LAW, AND IT WAS OBVIOUS, BUT NOT THAT BLATANT.
***

By refusing to close insolvent banks, the Obama administration is violating an important law, the “Prompt Corrective Action Law” [US Code, Title 12, Chapter 16, sec 1831]. That law, in particular, mandates explicitly to minimize the cost to the FDIC (hence the “prompt” closure of “undercapitalized” banks). The law defines in detail what “undercapitalization” means, and mandates the “appropriate Federal banking agencies” to find it out (because if a bank defaults, the FDIC is left holding the bag). They have a limit of ninety days. By the way, unrestricted bonuses are unlawful too, it is explicitly mentioned, and so on.

In other words Obama and Geithner have been debating the law, as if they had a choice. Geithner, in particular, because he has been in an oversight role forever, should be subject to prosecution, for having deliberately ignored and violated the law (having failed “to resolve the problems of insured depository institutions at the least possible long-term loss to the deposit insurance fund” in spite of “Prompt corrective action required”).

Now the Geithner plan is providing welfare for hedge funds, and their associated corrupt banks. Geithner calls that the PPIP. The PPIP works better, in its generic case with a positive outcome for the insolvent banks and greedy hedge funds, when the FDIC maximizes its losses. The PPIP also violates the ‘Prompt Corrective Action Law” (Sec. 1831), and its spirit.

The way it works is this: an agent can borrow from the FDIC, and then it can buy worthless assets with the funds it has borrowed. Next, it could then walk away, since the Geithner loan is “nonrecourse”. “Nonrecourse” means that if the agent defaults, no part of the loan can be recovered by seizing some collateral of the agent. The agent does not need any collateral. The agent can buy something for a billion dollars one day, and then walk out the next day, no question asked by anyone.

The agent can be anything: Geithner just has to like the agent (so it’s the Paulson plan in disguise, except the funds are much greater; the arbitrariness is the same, though: it’s all about the love and esteem that the Treasury Secretary has for the potential agent). The agent could be a corrupt, insolvent bank, or a greedy desperate hedge or a corrupt insolvent private equity fund (there are some of the later holding a lot of worthless real estate, such as one the columnist Thomas Friedman has invested in, explaining his constant, glowing propaganda for the Geithner plan). Then agents could exchange each others’ bids, and favors. It would be perfectly legal, as far as Geithner is concerned (not as far as the Constitution is concerned, because the equality clause would be violated).
***

Bill Moyers interviewed WILLIAM K. BLACK, Senior Regulator for the Savings and Loans crisis under Reagan and Bush Senior, a criminologist, law, economics and business professor [April 5, 2009].

WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn’t matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, “You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you’re covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn’t work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue.” And the Japanese call it the lost decade. That was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It’s working just as well as it did in Japan.

BILL MOYERS: “Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?”

WILLIAM K. BLACK, Senior Regulator for the Savings and Loans crisis: “Absolutely.”

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits. And we won’t rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it’s foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives.”
***

There is an easy way to prevent panic: in France all deposits are insured by the government, in any bank, whatever the amount. But this is not the way chosen by Summers and Geithner. Potential panic is thus just a pretext for them: the USA could do like France, and no panic would be imaginable. Now the cynical motives are in plain sight: Summers got eight million dollars, just like year, in 2008, from the very people he wants to give two trillion dollars to, in 2009. Maybe the adjective is venal, not cynical.

What does PPIP stands for? According to Geithner, Public Private Investment Plan. According to me, Public Pays for Impudent Plutocrats. Interestingly, the size of PPIP is supposed to blossom to two trillion dollars, the exact size of the hedge fund “industry”. Does that mean the hedge fund “industry” is broke too, and has to be fully recapitalized by taxpayers, lest the ultra rich would not be ultra rich anymore?
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.com/
http://tyranosopher.blogspot.com/

 

Addendum: 747 banks were nationalized (“put in receivership”) during the S&L crisis (the average bank was kept in government custody for three to four months; bad assets were yanked out, and put in the RTC).

TORTURE QUESTIONED.

Abstract: We analyze torture by learning from history, and even animals. We use the most severe definition of torture, to shred the reigning, obscuring hypocrisy. By our definition, some forms of torture are unfortunately necessary, others should be totally discouraged. Some forms of torture are more “human” than other practices that have not been questioned as much (and debates about torture have been organized to hide much more troubling practices). The historical argument against torture-to-extract-information is valid: civilization has made extracting information by torture relatively inefficient and very counterproductive (that was known in the Middle Ages, and apparently in republican Rome!). This is particularly the case when fighting homicidal martyrs. They want to be tortured, so they can torture too. We should not extend to them that invitation, and give them that pleasure.

Torture so as to extract information, should stay completely unconstitutional, contrarily to the Bush administration’s practice. This official prohibition is a showcase of a general will to improve morality, that the top civilization should maintain as long as possible. But ticking time bomb scenarios will always occur, in urban counterinsurgency, and people should remember that secret services are secret for good reasons (one of them being that you do not want to know what they are doing).

Inflicting pain as a vengeance or to terrorize miscreants is another form of torture entirely. That sort of torture is still practiced massively, because civilization needs repression (many legal sanctions involve suffering, and, in this essay, we call that torture, by logical coherence). Pseudo naive occupiers like the USA should remember that occupying someone’s else country, per se, is mass torture. (Sometimes such torture can be justified, as the occupations of Germany and Japan in 1945 were; sometimes not, and then it is unjustifiable mass torture).

In general torture avoidance should be viewed as a challenge, one of the engines of improving civilization: how can we improve people by persuading and modifying behaviors rather than using brute force and horror, treating people as vicious beasts?
***

DEFINITION OF TORTURE:
There is no better illustration of the devolution of the USA than the attempt to make torture legal. A few years back, the Bush administration and its employee, UC Berkeley professor, John Yoo, bellowed that torture was necessary. In their stupidity, they tried to make it a new constitutional right, the Right to Torture. Never mind that torture is forbidden by international law.

We will thereafter use the most general definition of torture we can think of: TORTURE IS ANY SEVERE PAIN OR SUFFERING INTENTIONALLY INFLICTED ON A PERSON (this toughens up the UN definition). Our reason for being so general is that major infliction of pain and suffering is often allowed, on the ground that it is not torture (according to the United Nations). In our sense, carpet bombing of German cities by the RAF during WWII was torture. Similarly the demolition of terrorists’ houses by Israel is torture. But, from our point of view, torture does not have to be avoided at all and any cost. There are worse things than inflicting torture. For example one could inflict death. Or lose civilization outright.
***

NO POTENTIAL SEVERE PUNISHMENT, NO CIVILIZATION:
With our severe definition of torture, clearly torture has been central to civilization. Just as the threat of being shot may hold back some criminals, the threat of torture-as-punishment can work wonders to instill the respect of the law. All major civilizations used deliberate, severe punishment. The USA has several millions people deprived of freedom, many thousands on so called “death row” awaiting execution. China executed criminals with the method of the 1,000 cuts all the way into the twentieth century (photographic documentation of this activity exists). The Roman republic used torture extensively. Just as some firms specialized in the capture of escaped slaves, other Roman firms specialized in providing with private torture. In Rome torture was viewed as entertainment, and particularly ingeniously cruel methods of executions were devised. With sometimes a large proportion of the population in slavery, Rome had to maintain legal terror: “Dura lex, sed lex” (The law is hard, but it’s the law). On the positive side, under Roman terror, a quarter of mankind lived in a state of law. The enforcement of law is the core of what makes civilization possible.

The modern, “politically correct”, attitude, relative to such horrors as Roman crucifixion, is to disregard the Roman experience as irrelevant to our times. But such is not the case. It was torture that made Roman law tough. And thus effective. Oh, by the way, torture could not be used against Roman citizens. It was a terrible offense, very severely punished.

***

HOW THE CHRISTIAN SUPPRESSION OF SEVERE PUNISHMENT CONTRIBUTED TO THE DARK AGES:
The Christian catastrophe called the “Dark Ages” demonstrated the importance of punishment. First, of course, the Christians burned all the books, killed all the intellectuals, and killed all the non “Catholic Orthodox”, except for a few Jews. But still some of the old order had resisted. So the Christians changed tactics. Maybe tired and bored after all of these exertions, they proclaimed loud and clear they did not want to live in the world anymore. According to Augustine’, there were two cities, one on the ground (bad), and one in the clouds (good). Eight hundred years earlier, Aristophane had used that imagery in a comedy to make fun of Athens’ colonization policies. But Augustine was not joking: Christians wanted the world destroyed in a process called the Apocalypse (then, and only then, their superhero, God and son of God, would come back). To destroy the world more thoroughly, the Christians decided to destroy law enforcement.

So super rich Christian bishops decided it was non Christian to torture or kill bandits and the like. This way they would make sure that whatever was left of society would crash and burn. Criminality became highly profitable and so high that the society of the later Roman empire totally broke down. For a while, the bishops, who formed a governing plutocracy, did not mind; they were living off their vast estates, fed by armies of slaves, protected by armies of mercenaries. But, in the end, it became unbearable, the hypocritical campaign of the bishops against torture and legal violence aggravated the collapse of civilization. Even the bishops understood that morality needed a sword. They found it in the double bladed giant battle ax of the Pagan Franks.
***

THE FRANKISH RENAISSANCE, OR THE FEROCITY OF CIVILIZATION:
When the Franks took power, they reestablished severe punishment, in other words, torture. An example: counterfeit currency had been a very severe problem of the later Roman empire (it created huge inflation and destruction of the respect for the state). Frankish justice solved this difficulty by instituting a standard punishment for this offense: slowly boiling the counterfeiters alive. The Franks were men of wealth and taste, so, sometimes, the boiling was in wine.

Interestingly, once the Muslims had been thrown out, and the frontiers pushed way back into Eastern Europe, the Imperium Francorum, the empire of the Francs, became very quiet (until the next waves of invasion). Severe punishment worked.

The European Middle Ages kept on going along those lines. Respect for the law was encouraged by imposing punishments as severe as those of Rome. This had nothing to do with “Dark Ages” and fascism, quite the opposite. The more ferocious the repression of the ultimate crimes, the more advanced the society. A few examples:

A fanatical Catholic (paid by the eminent fascist, the Spanish emperor Philip II) assassinated William (“The Silent”) of Orange, founder of the republic of the Netherlands. The assassin was executed by “execrable” tortures over several days (1584 CE). As the Dutch republic gained ascendency, the first powerful republic since Rome, it became ever more severe, following the republican Roman legal model, sometimes more ferociously. Corrupt Dutch officials were separated from their entire skin, before leaving this world, giving them time to fully recognize the disposable nature of their superficial ways. Something similar happened in 1610 CE, after the assassination of the good King Henri IV of France (a Protestant turned Catholic that had put an end to the religious wars, and instituted deep social reforms). The assassin, the giant Ravaillac, resisted quartering, the horses got exhausted, so the public came forth, and succeeded, all pulling together, where the animals had failed. (According to the contemporary UN, such examples do not constitute torture, since they were fully legal executions).

Thus LOCAL morally correct posturing is not necessarily GLOBALLY correct moral posturing. Many people, such as many Christian bishops around 400 CE, or people who take positions of principle against severe punishment, do not examine carefully enough the fact that “homo homini lupus est” (man is a wolf for man) as the Roman playwright Plautus put it shortly after the Second Punic War (~ 200 BCE).

***

TORTURE IS DOING WELL:
Let’s come back to the present for a moment. According to Amnesty International, 75% of states use torture. Now it is true that, in some circumstances, torture can be very effective, be it to extract information quick, or for punishment on the side.

Torture is much more ubiquitous than is generally believed. The advancement of technology has allowed for the advancement of torture. New forms of torture have appeared (not just electricity, but sleep deprivation, various forms of exposure, from cold to loud noises, to uncomfortable positions, all very delicately controlled). Using them allows modern torturers to claim they are not torturing because the new forms of torture are not on the official list of recognized historical tortures. Many states can now imprison people in an extra judicial way for more than a few days if they are suspected of terrorism (this assists the police, but sometimes suffering maybe the real objective).
***

GOOD TORTURE, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE POLITICS:
Terrorist networks have been dismantled by torture. Torture was used as an efficient counter insurrection technique by French paratroopers in the Battle of Algiers. With time very limited to find the next bomb maker, once one had been caught, and with very soft (non fanatical) culprits (who typically transported bomb elements), torture allowed to expose terrorist cells before senior terrorists could flee. This is a general observation; if police catches someone with a hidden ticking time bomb somewhere, and they know that the bomber will probably not resist to torture, they may be derelict not to use it. The police is indeed faced with a choice between violating one law protecting the criminal, and civilization, and an other law, somewhat opposite, protecting the innocent, and civilization. Not a nice choice, and a good reason for the legal systems to close their eyes SOMETIMES.

On the negative side, though, the usage of torture by the French military became an excuse by the general French opinion (that did not want to have anything to do with Algeria!) to turn against attempts of preserving some sort of French-Algerian commonwealth (although the Algerian population had voted massively for it in a referendum!).

So the public opinion struggle was lost by the very methods that won the military struggle. This case was thoroughly studied by the Pentagon and Israel. The Pentagon used torture lightly in Iraq, keeping the French example in mind. Israel uses a careful mix of scrupulous law abiding with extremely severe punishment akin to torture by association (such as the immediate demolition of terrorists’ houses). But the Israeli tactics make sense, to insure the survival of Israel. The family of the assassin of William of Orange was ennobled by the fascist Philippe II of Burgundy and Spain, and became instantaneously rich. Having the family dwelling demolished, probably makes the Qur’an theses about going to heavens by killing, significantly less attractive. Whereas the Dutch republic had an immensely powerful ally in France, also perpetually fighting Spain and Burgundy, Israel does not have anybody (sending weapons and money is one thing, sending soldiers, another).
***

WHY SHOULD TORTURE BE MADE ILLEGAL?
At first sight, it’s an argument that is hard to make. The present world is, globally, at peace, but in no small measure because of the IMPLICIT TERROR exerted by the five permanent member states of the United Nation Security Council. Each of them have the means of killing hundreds of millions of people, and have exhibited, as an alliance during WWII, their readiness to use the most severe methods to crush the enemy, without consideration for the squeamish side. So peace, quiet, and civilization are blossoming, but under the threat that any significant deviation will be corrected by Armageddon. The USA has declared it reserves for itself the right of first use of nuclear weapons. France has explicitly announced that, besides this, she reserves the right of replying to mass terrorism with nukes (so like the Israelis with the demolition of the houses, but on a somewhat more exalted scale). Iran took that French warning personally, for some reason. Russia, China and Israel don’t need to issue warnings (Israel is loudly deploying a second (nuclear) strike capability).

But of course the point is that, when fighting for survival, democracies will do whatever it takes (some French politicians called for a cease fire in June 1940, because France was fighting at the same time Nazi Germany, the USSR, and, basically, the USA; it was a bit too much, even for the French, so they decided to take a vacation from it all, while the USA figured out who it was that they wanted to be allied with). THE ULTIMATE MORALITY IS THAT OF SURVIVAL (Iran should contemplate this as it bellows for the destruction of Israel; Indeed, Israel may have noticed one of the lessons of Nazism: bellowing criminal idiots should be taken seriously in a timely manner).

So democracies or civilizations (China) fighting for survival NEED TO BE ATROCIOUS sometimes. But that means that if they are not fighting for survival, they do not need to be atrocious. Being more advanced in their human interactions than the (less democratic and less civilized) rest of the planet, they need to keep their moral superiority, so they have a good reason to eschew the unsophisticated tortures more primitive places have to use.
***

WHY THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES WAS LESS TORTUROUS THAN ISLAM:
As we said there are two main types of governmental torture: torture to enforce the law, and torture to extract information. The first sort of torture can be more or less extensive, depending how demanding and twisted the law is. For example Allah encouraged slavery and torture (as confirmed by reading a non watered down version of the Qur’an). These are situations that are unnatural to animals, and the more unnatural, the more severe the violence. So there were laws in North Africa, up to the nineteenth century, to punish severely slaves who tried to escape. Impaling was standard. It’s severe torture: the condemned could survive days.

When the Turkish army marched into Europe, it was helped by impaling. After seeing victims squirm around a pole, the public was much more outwardly respectful of anything Turkish. This non sense stopped when Vlad (“the Impaler”) started to use impaling just as well, and various tortures, to discourage Turkish invaders and their collaborators. The Turkish army was thrown out by its own methods.

In eight century Spain (revered by bin Laden), many people who had converted to Islam by convenience tried to convert back to Catholicism, once they figured out that Islam was not nice (at the time Catholicism, broken by the Franks, was totally relax). Many were executed by horrible means, such as crucifixion upside down (the official line of some Islamist scholars, to this day, is that those Christians wanted to be tortured). In Islam, being an apostate (somebody one feels is renouncing Islam) is subject to the death penalty (the idea, as most things Islamist, comes from old Judaism). By contrast in Carolingian Francia, people could convert back and forth into whatever. Christians would become Jews, and thousands of Muslims were quietly left to do whatever (we know there were huge numbers of these, from blood and genetic analyses).
***

WHY THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES QUIT TORTURE TO EXTRACT INFORMATION:
To understand what is wrong with using torture, for extracting information, one should look at what happened during the Middle Ages. By 1300 CE, the kingdom of France had the best torturers who ever were. The information they obtained were confirmed in excess of 90%.

Nevertheless, a suspect’s statements under torture could NOT be used in judicial discovery; any admission had to be reconfirmed in front of the judge, without torture being applied. Justice knew people would say whatever to get the torture to stop, and that whatever was useless in serious judicial proceedings. So, as far as justice was concerned, torture was a loss of time. Moreover it corrupted the image justice wanted to give of itself. When Joan of Arc was interrogated (1431), the judges decided to avoid using any torture to make the judicial process more believable.

By 1600 CE, though, the ratio of confirmation under judicial inquiry of facts admitted under torture had fallen close to zero. The tortures had become too nice to persuade hard core criminals to talk.

But what did torture in was that the judges did not need the hints torture would provide with. Why? Simply because, by 1300 CE, under Philippe IV, Le Bel, the modern police state had been created, with methods of inquiry and arrest much more advanced than the best imperial Rome ever had (examples: the Templar monks were arrested all over at the same exact time; when the French judicial system decided to arrest the Pope, it sent a commando to Rome). Torture-to-extract-information had become irrelevant.
***

DOES TORTURE WORK WITH MARTYRS?
Well, it sure does: few things real martyrs love as much as torture. That is why one has to laugh when the Bushmen thought torture would cure Islamist fascism. It is said all over the Qur’an that the best way to insure the good graces of Allah (the great fascist in the sky) is to kill and suffer in His name. So, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the main architect of 9/11″, was approached with a wet towel for his “water boarding”, if he was the genuine thing, all he probably regretted was the absence of something more spectacular, like red hot pincers. Ever since the  Bush administration had been busy to proclaim that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed talked really a lot after being “water boarded”, thus arguing torture worked.

That sounded strange: history is full of serious terrorists who resisted splendidly to terrible tortures (the assassin of William of Orange stayed calm over the days of terrible tortures he endured). As it turned out, this was more than strange, it was disinformation: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed succumbed not to torture, but to the sort of friendly interviewing methods already used during Joan of Arc’s trial.

Hard core terrorists have determined that their moral cause is so important that pain can be inflicted to the totally innocent (it’s the same moral reasoning that allowed carpet and nuclear bombings by the democratic allies over German and Japanese, or French cities during WWII). Terrorism overrides basic instincts. To make such people give valuable information, one has to taunt the moral gymnastics they have indulged in first. Those moral contortions are central to their cause, and they will defend, hence expose them, as they desperately try to justify themselves. That, in turn, is bound to reveal the mental networks behind them.
***

Conclusion: TO KILL TORTURE, LOOK AT IT IN THE FACE.

Animals come equipped with ethics. Hungry monkeys, or even rats would refuse to eat (at least for a while) if another of their fellow got shocked with electricity, each time they went for a bite. Morality is not just human, it’s deeper than that. Monkeys don’t need the rewards of God to be good. So man is not THE moral animal. All social advanced animals are moral.

Animals actually come equipped with a hierarchy of ethical systems. In ultimate circumstances, they switch to the morality of survival. Not necessarily the survival of the individual; it’s often the survival of the group. Human beings are different in degree; their switch to the group survival mode is much more ferocious. When a human being is fully persuaded of total moral righteousness, NO PAIN IS HIGH ENOUGH (this comes from humans being the most carnivorous of primates, so they ally primate care with predatory ferocity). There are examples of Roman officers calmly putting one of their own fists in a brazier until it got totally consumed, to impress enemies with their moral superiority.

The ultimate human group is civilization itself. For its survival, it’s crucial to produce ever more gentle human beings, because the technology of mass destruction is getting ever better (the ultimate one at this point being the greenhouse weapon). In that sense, it would be better if everyone acted to completely avoid deliberately inflicting pain and suffering on people. This is not an option, though, so all what’s left, as usual, is to mitigate.

Carefully observing what one is doing, and the others are doing, is a first step.

It would seem that people who let practice carpet bombing on children in their name, to fill up their truck with oil, are in a difficult situation, arguing for the immorality of bothering a terrorist with pliers. Still, many people who did not object that much against the “shock and awe” destruction of Iraq, are shrill about torture. In other words, when it’s deemed advantageous to them to use lethal cruelty and massive mayhem on millions, it’s OK. Then, in a nice ethical pirouette, to proclaim to the world they are good people nevertheless, they squeal when, “the main architect of 9/11″, is approached with a wet towel. In other words, a lot of the left (including the democrats) are hiding behind words and carefully nurtured obsessions, what they are truly doing. As soon as they allowed the invasion of Iraq, and, unbelievably, its destruction, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, American people allowed mass torture to be used in their name, and for their wasteful way of life.

The torture question is difficult. Still, one wants civilization to progress. The police state replaced torture, but it cannot work with too primitive a population (that is why Rome allowed torture of the presumably more primitive slaves, but not of citizens). That goes inside countries, but also between countries. Civilization has to cling to the official line, and the practice, of doing as little torture as possible. It is unlawful for a pilot to crash a plane. Nevertheless, sometimes, a pilot, having encountered some technical difficulty, may have to crash it, because that’s the best option left.

Torture is sometimes unavoidable, but it should be officially discouraged always, and should not be allowed to hide in plain sight, by calling it by other names. If people deny that what is happening is happening, one cannot change it.

Posturing is fun, but it’s not moral.
***

Patrice Ayme.

www.patriceayme.com/

Technical Addenda:
1) According to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, torture is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” to extract information. Torture, so defined, exclude lawful punishment (so slowly burning alive at the stake is OK, if decided by judicial process, according to the UN). The definition used by the UN also forgets that, people (are made to) love to hurt people (that happens in conflicts, but also out of the blue, from raw psychobiology unchained). That is why we used the more general definition above. It gives logical coherence.

2) Why did the USA revert to torture? Why such a reversion to the past? Because, in the last few years, the US mood has been to go back, clinging to the hope of reliving the past, the future slipping out of reach of the “American Dream” … As soon as the USA threatened to destroy Iraq, it was engaging in torture. Abu Graib and Guantanamo are just minuscule, but telling, details.

3) The American reversal to the past is general. In June 2008, the US Supreme Court found that US citizens had a Constitutional Right to shoot each other (guns are mostly used to kill family members). New York has had a ban on guns for nearly a century. But never mind, it’s morning in America. The Supreme Court decision was the first on the subject in seventy years. Reverting to the distant past has become fashionable in the USA, in a desperate attempt to believe that the “American Dream” and its associated benevolent plutocracy, make the world all it could be.  Thus California hopes to soon be the state with the lowest educational budget per child, of the entire 50 states (now it’s only 49th).

ULTIMATE CRIME DIRECTORATE NEEDED FOR THE UN.

RESPECTING THE LAW, RATHER THAN “MULTICULTURALISM”.

Abstract: to prevent another Hitler, discourage despots around the world, and avoid adventures such as democracies invading other countries because of they are “addicted to oil” (as Bush himself put it about the USA), the most urgent reform for the United Nations should be to set up an “Ultimate Crime Directorate”. Such a directorate, composed of elected individuals dedicated to the law (not countries dedicated to self serving multiculturalism) would be fair, balanced, impervious to daily politics, professional, and effective than the rest of the United Nations.
***

For most of the world’s population to keep on going optimally, we need an international police to keep governments honest enough.

Hitler was stopped by war, not negotiation (that was tried first, with the Munich Treaty). If France had not aggressively stood in Hitler’s way, the Nazis would have been able to start their war when they intended to be ready, five years later (around 1944).

The Nazis’ plan was to exterminate many races. Exterminating the Jews was just a little warm-up. The Slavs and Africans were next. Germans with some black ancestry were sterilized already. Meanwhile the Nazis were buying off time, collaborating with powerful Anglo-Saxon plutocrats on their racist plan to “make space” for their private enjoyment.

If Zimbabwe’s Mugabe was the leader of a powerful technological country such as Pakistan or China, we would have again a world war situation (but facing forces armed with nukes). This is the clearest, greatest danger. Weapons of Mass Destruction are getting easier and easier to make, so, we need to make potential Hitlers completely impossible, by installing a system to cut them down in a timely manner.

As everyone knows, the French army lost a crucial battle, ten months after France declared war to Hitler, so the war lasted another five years, and killed another sixty million people; none of this would have happened if the United nations had got its act together in a timely manner).

The reason for negotiating with Hitler was to back him off in a moral corner. Before the police can be sent, the police needs to know it’s righteous (inside democratic countries the judicial system interprets the law to make sure of that).

So we need to make sure the UN can have MORAL AUTHORITY (which it was deprived of during the Bush attack on, and demolition of, Iraq).

To determine the moral facts, before acting, we need to set up an ULTIMATE CRIME DIRECTORATE at the United Nations, with a strictly advisory role to the Security Council and the General Assembly.

The ULTIMATE CRIME DIRECTORATE  would mitigate bias in the UN, and accusations or expectations of, and making excuses for, alleged bias. In the present system, despots hide behind a philosophical theory called “multiculturalism”, according to which all cultures are equally respectable.

“Multiculturalism” was invented by a German philosopher named Herder, who used it against the Enlightenment. Multiculturalism led straight to Nazism. It is the reigning paradigm at the United Nations (and very practical laws come out of it).

The Nazis claimed that  their  violations of human rights were justified by reasons traditional in Germany. In recent years the Islamists, and the countries in which they reign, have used exactly the same line of reasoning (for example they claim it’s traditional to take care of women by keeping them inside the house).

Multiculturalism allows despots to hide behind “politically correct” (or is that “politically coward”?) people who often change the conversation, and make unfounded racist accusations whenever more courageous moral activists complain about gross violations of basic human rights.

The Ultimate Crime Directorate would discourage the ‘multicultural’ cop-out. The Ultimate Crime Directorate could grow from the UN Human Rights Council (the UNHRC created in 2006, to replace its predecessor, that had elected the country of Libya to watch over human rights!). But the members of the UNHRC are states, instead of a commission of professionals aware and respectful of the spirit of international law (those professionals should be elected as the Secretary General is).

The present intrusion of states in advising what human rights should be put the wolves in charge of the chickens (as any of the Founding Fathers of the USA would point out), under the guise of “multiculturalism”.

“Multiculturalism” abusively replaces International Law in the present setup (maybe multiculturalism should face the truth and be called multidespotism instead).

When all the moral, politically correct lenifying discourse is done, and death comes knocking at the door, all what’s left is the morality of survival. Sheep turn into lions.

Many Jews had done nothing to fight back against the Nazis when they could have (because they had been living their daily lives according to their politico-religious correctness, a form of passivity on steroids). But the same Jews who had done nothing against Hitler, but looking the other way, would always fight each other viciously for air in the gas chambers (as related by fellow Jews in charge of gassing them).

This demonstrates that, when life is clearly coming to its end, people forget all their moral codes, and will do anything for survival (in particular a fascist group in power will fight to death if its survival is at stake).

So, ultimately, not resisting Hitler did not come from a superior moral fiber, but a form of mental cowardice (have others do the fighting, like the French), and idiotic shortsightedness (it’s good to be a sheep).

The same brainless, amoral behavior has long been in evidence when dealing with Iran, Pakistan, or US “neoconservatives” (who should be tried at the very least for what they did to Iraq after occupying it!).

There has been a shortage of righteousness, and that induced a failure of timely prevention.

The primacy of the survival instinct has other consequences. If a big time Hitler character occurred in the future, civilization would go out of the window on a planetary scale: the morality of survival would make sure of that. Zimbabwe is a baby demonstration of how wrong things can go, and we have to learn, as a planet, to prevent, or extinguish such deviations. We do not have 200 years. It is true that civilization has demonstrated in the past that it can flow in reverse for millennia. But not next time.

The technological and resource situation is such that, if we hit the iceberg, we would not be able to go back anymore than the Titanic.

The concept of “ultimate crime” would be more general than that of “crime against mankind” (used since Nuremberg). It would cover anti-democratic measures (such as abusive control of the media). By the time the Nazis engaged in crimes against mankind, they had spent years being extremely anti-democratic, an indispensable preliminary that allowed them, in turn, to indoctrinate millions of young fanatical inhuman robots.

So we need an Ultimate Crime Directorate to reestablish the planetary primacy of law over local tradition (generally fascist, because the past was more friendly to fascism).  Being ONLY CONSULTATIVE will give the Ultimate Crime Directorate greater moral authority. The Roman Senate had only a “consultative” role (in theory). Each such advice, truly a “consultation”, a “Senatus Consultum” was established by vote. The Senate’s powerful influence lasted more than 1,000 years, more than twice longer than the republic itself.

***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com
http://patriceayme.com/index.html

***

Postscript explaining why an Ultimate Crime Directorate could have avoided the collapse of the Roman republic:

The Ultimate Crime Directorate would have functioned as an ultimate examination system, finding out that what did not look like a crime actually was one, because it violated the spirit of the law. It was what the Roman Senate, or the People needed but did not quite have. The Senate (from “senex”, a board of old men), had thrown out the old Roman monarchy and installed the republic in 510 BCE. The Senate resisted all, from the empire to the Christian dark ages. The Senate actually grew in influence later, under the Barbarians, a full millennium after its birth. Unfortunately the Ostrogoth despot Theodoric made the mistake (he said so himself later) to arrest and kill the Senatus Princeps (president), the famous philosopher Boethius (who wrote the “Consolation of Philosophy” while waiting for his gory execution in 525 CE). Nevertheless, the Senate went on into the seventh century, and was back in business by the tenth (trying to change back Rome into a republic).

The Senate’s shortcoming in the examination of ultimate crimes was crucial in the collapse of the Roman republic into plutocracy and then fascism. It was not an easy mistake to avoid: eighty Senators died in combat, in just one day, at the battle of Cannae (216 BCE), so the Senate was depleted after the Second Punic War. A plutocracy of war profiteers who had stayed safely behind the fortified walls of the cities became dominant (hopefully this is not happening with the USA in Iraq). Three generations later that militarized plutocracy destroyed Carthage, a free republic in Spain, Corinth, and subjugated Greece. Civil wars were next. All this could have been avoided if the Senate, or the People (“populus”) had been able to define, and expose carefully, in a timely manner, the human, republican and democratic rights who had been violated by the profiteers during the war against Hannibal. Instead the Gracchi brothers were reduced to improvise and to try to weaken the Senate (by then colonized by the profiteers) by declaring “senatus consultum ULTIMA” unconstitutional. Of course, the Gracchi were accused in turn of violating the Constitution…
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