Preventing Fascism: WWII & Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Strikes Against Civilization

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

***

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

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

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

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

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

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Don’t deny.

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Pacifism Is Easy, Peace Harder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

NUCLEAR ENERGY GENESIS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

NEW NUKE ARM RACE, THANKS TO CHEAP HEU:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

ANTI-WAR JIHAD REQUIRED:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

North Korea: CRUSH INFAMY!

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

*** 

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

ICBM Trajectories To Hawai’i, West USA On Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those who know history are condemned not to repeat it. 

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

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

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

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

***

THE HEAVY RESPONSIBILITY OF THE USA IN THE 1930s:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***  

NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL OUGHT NOT TO BECOME THE NEW PARADIGM:

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

KILL NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL NOW:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

TO ENCOURAGE A COUP, NO CONCESSION WHATSOEVER:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

SHOULD ONE FAIL TO ACT…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Ecr. L’inf., Patrice Ayme

Mali: USA Ought To Fuel France

Abstract: If there is one lesson that morally upright people in the USA should draw from World War Two, it’s the following. When the French Republic asks for military help, the USA ought to salute briskly and respectfully ask:”How much?” After all, a son such as Uncle Sam, should not leave his mother in distress.

This correct attitude is directly applicable to the situation in Mali and the Sahara right now. Mali is not Afghanistan. Afghanistan was an error, an irrelevant sideshow that the USA imposed on itself by (unlawfully, and secretly) messing up that forlorn country in the 1970s. (9/11 was an infortunate blow-back, after the conflict deliberately instigated by the USA, brought the death of millions of Afghans.)

The war in Africa is completely different from that error in Afghanistan. Africa is of extreme strategic importance. Africa is an enormous continent, it has enormous resources, a vast and extremely varied population. It is part of the geographical, cultural and historical center of the human world. It is contiguous to Europe. Africa has been neglected too long.

It’s clear where the Dark Side is, in this war. France had the right reflex by punching back hard as soon as the terrorists crossed the cease-fire line. France needs a bit more equipment to fuel her fighter planes optimally, as they patrol a giant territory.

Mirages Above Mali

No fuel, no war.

But it’s not just the USA. If there is one lesson that democracies should draw from World War Two, it’s that France should not fight infamy alone (with insufficient British help). At the very least, all European countries should join in.

How? As the French combat units reconquer vast swathes of territory, Malian troops in their wake are left to police the immensity. Their resentment against Tuaregs and Arabs is showing up; other Western countries’ soldiers could help the Malians and other Black Africans keep in touch with the philosophically, and strategically, correct attitude
***
Idiocies are arguments that keep coming back to the fore first, among the poorly educated.

An (idiotic) slogan that keeps coming back is used by Johnnie Carson, who heads the Africa bureau at Obama’s State Department. Mr. Carson observes that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) “has not demonstrated the capability to threaten U.S. interests outside of West or North Africa, and it has not threatened to attack the U.S. homeland.”

That specious reasoning was evoked by several historically uneducated Obama administration officials to refuse air refueling requests from the French Republic. Let me explain the importance.

The French fighter-bombers have to patrol and intervene in an area larger than Texas, and some have to do so from bases thousands of miles away. It’s a bit as if they patrolled Texas from British Columbia. So the need for air refueling of bomb laden French supersonic bombers is acute! Although the French have air refueling capability, they don’t have enough to do the mission comfortably.
The enemy is not a hop and skip away, as it is the case in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is at most 200 miles away from gigantic, fortress like, NATO air bases covering entire landscapes. (See technical note about Rafales and Mirages.)

Let’s go back to the pathetic reasoning of Johnie Carson with his weasel words and total lack of moral perspective:”[The terrorists] have not demonstrated threat to U.S. interests… not threatened to attack the U.S. homeland.” ??? Is not that the famous Washington reasoning used in 1940 about the Nazis? Is Johnie Carson trying to emulate the comedian Johnny Carson by poking fun at the Holocaust?

Right. Auschwitz was built by the Nazis, starting on 21 February 1940. Auschwitz did not demonstrate the capability to threaten U.S. interests outside of West or North Africa, and it did not threaten to attack the U.S. homeland.
So, I guess, that is why Washington did not do anything about it.
Washington is apparently concerned if and only if, it is threatened. In other words, by its own admission, Washington is all about self interest, not civilization. This is exactly the opposite of the French credo. That explains the difference in behavior of France and the USA in 1939.

France declared war to Hitler September 3, 1939, because France had had enough of that terrorist. 40 French divisions tried to break through the Westwall (“Siegfried Line”) in the following days. The first British soldier arrived to help France within a month. The Canadians landed entire divisions by June 1940, nine month later. The proverbial Americans arrived on June 6, 1944, 57 months later, as part of D Day. Yes, fifty seven months later. The Americans were not the majority of the landing force on D Day.

According to Mr. Carson, as the Nazis did not demonstrate the capability to threaten U.S. interests, the USA, as a society and polity, may as well have helped Hitler in 1939. And this is exactly what was done diplomatically and through all sorts of American corporations. The same courtesy was extended to Mussolini (this did not escape the Italian resistance, which would return the favor by hanging Mussolini from an American, Esso gas station in Milan).

The Ethyl Corporation of America sent 500 tons of a crucial additive, lead tetraethyl, an anti-knock compound, so the Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) could stay in the air, and keep on fighting the French (the Luftwaffe would go on, to lose 36% of its power during the Battle of France in May-June 1940). Meanwhile, the Congress of the USA passed an anti-French, anti-British law. President Roosevelt regretfully signed it into law.

As the Nazis had not demonstrated the capability to threaten U.S. interests, nor threatened to attack the U.S. homeland, the USA rejected the French demands for military help in 1940. The exact reasoning still used by Mr. Carson.

Waiting fifty seven months to help one’s parent is no moral rush. Yes, because without France there would have been no USA to start with, so France gave birth to the USA. (Although, in part because the USA defaulted on the multi-trillion dollar debt to France, this fact is not advertized.)

Waiting fifty seven months to help civilization is no moral rush.
Waiting fifty seven months to help humanity is no moral rush.

(OK, I am been a bit unfair, here, as the USA saw prior combat in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy; but, precisely, in that case, after the French had broken through the Hitler Line, south of Rome, the USA stabbed in the back general Juin; instead of giving Juin more divisions to rush into Austria, as juin had requested, the American command did the exact opposite, making sure the French could not rush towards Austria, thus extending the war by a year, and making sure half of Europe could be given to Roosevelt’s comrade Joseph Stalin!)

Adolf Hitler declared war TO the USA, on December 11, 1941. The USA found itself at war, with Nazi Germany in 1942, contrarily to Washington’s plans, which were to do nothing bellicose in 1942. As that was in Washington’s best interest.

This attitude of the USA was, and is, not excusable. It reflects a military and cultural tradition born in the woods of North America. The USA was born, fighting Neolithic Indians. Later, even the war of the South against the North was a sure thing: most of the industrial basis of the USA was in the North, and the craziness of the “cavaliers” of the South could only bring their death, as it did.

So the tradition of the diplomatic service in the USA is not aware that war is serious business, and can turn into completely unexpected ways. Several of the major battles of WWII, when re-enacted in (computer aided) war games, nearly never turn the way they did happen. Thus it is best, not to play with war. Thus the Pentagon, aware as it is of these facts, will naturally disagree with State, and want to help the French hard and early, because the Pentagon knows that’s how democracies win wars: by being big, open, with clear war objectives, and being fully in one’s right. (In other words the exact opposite of the weasel war started by Carter’s CIA in Afghanistan in the 1970s.)

The Second World is full of totally unexpected turns of events, which went one way, but could have turned the other. For example if the Ethyl Corporation of America had not sent Lead Tetraethyl to the Nazis, the Luftwaffe would have been grounded, the French and British would have had mastery of the skies… Grounded the Luftwaffe was in front of Moscow in December 1941: it was so cold, only Soviet planes were in the air. The Nazis were not lubricated enough… They suffered their first strategic defeat.

I could go on like this, with a list of unexpected, and hard to expect, events of the Second World War. As it was, to win the war, the USA had just to join France and Britain in September 1939, and declare war to the Nazis. German generals would have done the rest, declare a national emergency, explain that the Nazis were endangering Germany, and destroy them.
There was an official plot that way, organized by Beck, the Wehrmacht chief. However the ambiguous attitude of some leaders of the USA and the UK undermined Beck (who was then betrayed by some of the Anglo-saxons he had asked to help; the plan was finally activated only in 1944… Way too late.)

Sufficient to say that the French army, having underestimated the Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu, found themselves encircled by an enemy that had, unexpectedly, dragged big guns through the jungle. The French asked the Americans for air support. Eisenhower refused. Conclusion: a “Communist” dictatorship, truly a form of communal plutocracy took control of half of the country, and the USA was involved in a 20 year war in Vietnam (which it took that long to lose)

The present situation in Mali was greatly caused by from the USA. The USA trained five units of the Malian army, and four of them defected to the invaders, with their brand new weapons and newfound skills.

The French (counter-)attack followed, within hours, the attempt to seize the rest of Mali: 50 French special forces dropped on the ground next to Konna, were supposed to help planes find their targets. They found themselves in combat as the Malian army retreated.

Within days of the French intervention with massive bombing, the Tuaregs, having reconsidered the situation in the light of new evidence, proclaimed that they were switching their allegiance to France. Even the American neoconservative historian Robert Kaplan is rallying. He said. “I have a new philosophy: If the French are ready to go, we should go”

This is indeed wise: ever since the Romans put the Franks in charge of defending much of their empire, and ever since the Merovingians outlawed slavery, armed human rights has been a sort of main business model of France… And it’s hard to imagine how it could be otherwise with a democratic republic (even islands such as Britain and the USa had to subscribe, to some extent, to that philosophy).
I personally think that the Tuaregs should be (somewhat) independent. De Gaulle, who did not know Africa, and could not care less, gave Tuareg territory to all the countries around at independence. But the Tuaregs have a very old civilization, that had an alphabet more than 1,600 years before Arabic appeared from their common root.

Naturally that would not please the neighboring countries (the Kurds have the same problem: they, too were at home, 2,000 years before the Turks showed up in the neighborhood.

All matter to negotiation. After all, South Sudan was created, as it should have been (making Azawad independent is very similar problem, in reverse!)

Meanwhile, please help provide those tankers to fuel the French Air Force. (Otherwise I will have to remind us who fueled the Nazi Air Force when the latter ferried the rebel army of general Franco into Spain, in 1936…)
***
Patrice Ayme

Obama Unchained?

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

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

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

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

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

French War In Mali

Finally! Friday January 11, 2013, Paris, Élysée: “Mali is confronting an aggression of terrorist elements coming from the North, with a brutality and fanaticism that the entire world knows” said the French president “I have therefore, in the name of France answered the demand of help from the Mali president, which is supported by the Western African countries. In consequence, the French armed forces have brought this afternoon their support to Malian units to fight against those terrorist elements.”

And, presto, France is at war again. This is the second military intervention of France in Africa, in one week. (The preceding one stopped an insurrection in the Central African Republic.)
And at least the FOURTH major French combat intervention in two years (Ivory Coast, Libya).

French Strike Mali [From Terrorist Video]

For those who are naive in these matters, historically, in the fullness of time, France is the primary military interventionist in the world. Ever. This started when the Roman empire put the Franks in charge of defending Germania and Gallia in 400 CE. After some initial difficulties that caused the fall of the Occidental part of the empire, the Franks annhilated the Huns, the Goths, the Lombards and various other critters. (The Franks also intervened in Britannia for centuries afterwards, before conquering the whole thing in 1066 CE).

The nations French military intervention created constitute the essential of the West: Germany (starting in 500 CE), much of Europe (by 800 CE), all the way to Eastern Europe, and including Catalonia and the reconquista of Spain (Charlemagne), England (1066), the reconquest of much of the Mediterranean from the Muslim invaders (South Italy, Sicily, etc.)… even the Netherlands is, to a great extent, a French creation (a 75 year war part of a 120 year French war against Spain)… And finally, of course, the USA.

Without gigantic French help, and even… incitation, the American rebels would have all been hanged by the authorities, end of the story. Nearly all their cartridges were even made in France. Even while being created, the USA defaulted, and refused to pay back even a cent to the French Treasury for the enormously expensive war that had given birth to it. Thus default presided at the birth of the USA. (Louis XVI was advised to follow suit, and default too; but he refused, as he was hell bent on making nobles pay taxes, something that the National Assembly of 1789 finally imposed!)

That’s one problem with war. When made out of principle, it can only pay back with principle. But that does not mean it should not be made.

It’s not just that the Franks (or the Gauls before them) are slightly demented supermen in search of somebody to fight. The very position of France at the crossroads of the three main trade routes of Western Europe, since the Neolithic, condemned any people thriving there to be pretty aggressive and open minded. That is why the occupants of France may have changed quite a bit, but the mentality persists.

Frankish intervention led to the unification of Western Europe under the body of Roman law and the Roman language, and a version of civilization (and weaponization!) that they called Christianity. Achieving what they called in 800 CE “the Renovation of the Roman Empire”. The Franks, were Germans who civilized Rome, while learning the proper way of making war, a state, and a melting pot, from the Romans.

War is inseparable from democracy, be it just because plutocracy hates democracy. Plutocracy tends to blossom all over, all the time, and one of its main variant is “theocracy”, where (mass) criminal acts are ordered by god(s).

The French government declared that the invaders of Mali are “terrorist” and “criminal”. Differently from December 31, 406 CE, when the Vandals, Alans and various others crossed the frozen Rhine by surprise, France was not surprised that the terrorists decided to invade the rest of Mali, in the hope that the international community would take months to get organized after Susan Rice lifted her veto against France at the UN, and the Security Council voted to allow armed intervention as needed.

The French Air Force has already conducted bombing missions. This is excellent. In the West Africa of my childhood, one had to fear only spiders, horribly poisonous snakes, crocodiles and furry predators. The danger presented by man was inexistent.

Western Africa was way safer than Europe. Shockingly, once, a taxicab driver got killed for his money. That had never happened before. It turned out, and it was pretty telling that, a young French tourist had done it.

Black Muslim faith was not distinguishable from Western secularism in most ways, and was distinctly more progressive in some important ways (having to do with socialism, nudity, and… even the position of women in society).

The “Muslim” faith of the fanatics in the middle of the Middle Earth is a “different religion from mine” declared Abou Diouf, a Wolof Muslim, ex-president of Senegal (and General Secretary of the 70 nations strong francophonie).

Of course such a version of Islam, islam with a progressive, human, civilized face, is intolerable to a lot of bad actors.

Wahhabism, the faith of Saudi Arabia, is perfectly compatible with terrorism, gangsterism, drug trafficking, and, first of all, extreme concentration of wealth (in other words, the exact opposite of Senegalese style Islam). Thus extremely well financed bad actors, armed by the feudal oil powers, tightly connected to Wall Street, of Arabia, keep on financing it. This constant war agaisnt a self made enemy, serves as a justification for the feudal, fascist regimes in the Middle East. That’s why they keep on secreting what we are supposed to fight.

The usual professional pseudo-leftist whiners are sure to surface and accuse France of having interests in Africa. Well, there is something to the notion of empire. Originally, it simply meant command, order.

Under the British Raj, there was no danger that the Muslim dominated regions would engage into a thermonuclear war with the rest of the subcontinent. Had the British Raj evolved as Canada, that would still be an impossibility.

Whereas, as it is, after Gandhi’s pathetic circus, the existence of that Pakistani theocracy (see the connection with plutocracy, above) which he contributed so much to create, does not just threaten India with a few hundreds of millions of dead, but also could ignite a world war.

The old argument of the French in Algeria was that they were back, as the successor state of Rome, after a hiatus imposed by Arab Muslim invaders. This was also the basic argument of Napoleon in Egypt. And there is something to it.

After all, Rome had African, and even Arab, emperors.

So how does this compare with Libya, Syria and Afghanistan?

Well Qaddafi was a horrible dictator, who even raped young girls industrially. he had a deal with those plutocrats, Blair and G.W. Bush. As long as he was in place, an atrocious plutocratic symbol was in place. The difference with North Korea is that, as Qaddafi found out, Libya was only an hour flight out of European bases. Similar reasons brought JFK to a tough line about nuclear capable missiles in Cuba.

Syria is a mess. The only correct line of the West is to draw lines for Assad not to cross, and support the secularist opposition (even with weapons)… while trying not to help the genuine Islamists supported by the feudal regimes.

I have been opposed to the war in Afghanistan for, among other things, strategic reasons. The first one is that, when democracy fights, democracy ought to be pure. In Afghanistan the USA has been as impure as possible, and that had direct strategic consequences leading to the unavoidable defeat we are now experiencing.

During its great war with Sparta, Athens was not ethically pure, far from it, and that is why she was ultimately defeated by a coalition of enraged city states (led by Sparta, financed by Persia). Athens was impure because Athens used the defense funds of the Delian League to build itself pretty buildings still observable today, because Athens destroyed an entire island, Milo, just to show it was a superpower, and because Athens attacked Syracuse, there again, just because she could, as an undefeatable superpower. Athens aggravated her case by boasting of her great democracy and Open Society, while practicing the opposite for all to see.

(Analogies with the present USA, while regrettable, are not a coincidence, and fully intended.)

When the French Republic gave an ultimatum to Hitler, on September 1, 1939, the Republic had been ethically pure (Britain, that France dragged behind, had been much less pure, and its compromising with Hitler had a direct effect on its military preparedness, which was so insufficient, as to leave mostly France fighting, by a ratio of 1 to 20 in soldiers deployed!)

The first big mistake in Afghanistan is actually that the USA attacked the REPUBLIC of Afghanistan in the 1970s. It would seem that the USA (or some influential people in the USA) were after the mineral wealth that the republic of Afghanistan intended to develop with French (and probably Soviet) help.

A dirty war resulted, with the likes of the CIA instrumentalizing the likes of Bin Laden. Then there was 9/11. The West invaded Afghanistan, as was its right.

But then a tragic, and strategic mistake was done: that one of NOT enforcing a SECULARIST state in Afghanistan. Instead the west did what it should never do, put a theocratic republic, Iranian style, in power. Hence NATO fought for Wahhabism light. Thus the Afghans, including those in the army and police, got completely confused, and felt NATO ought to be supporting Fundamentalist Islam, and became crazy, observing otherwise.

Hence the famous “green on blue” and “green on green” attacks. It’s a hopeless situation, and too late to fix it. Better next time we invade Afghanistan from scratch.

Mali is completely different. Mali is a secularist republic. A natural ally of Western civilization, an emanation of it. Not supporting Mali would have extremely adverse consequences, because not just of its location, but because it would be not supporting civilization.

Fortunately precision bombing on armed columns have happened on Friday January 11. There is no doubt the terrorists were taken by surprise. Moderation in the support of civilization is no solution.
Patrice Ayme

CALLING 9/11

ENOUGH CHILDISH GAMES ALREADY!

Abstract: Some of what is below will shock Americans. But most people, worldwide, are aware of these facts, or are penetrated by the only mood compatible with these facts. If the USA wants to fight the world, it will not win, especially if it starts from a counterfactual logic.

I have documented this assault many times, for example in “Obama Commemorates 9/11 His Way.” But the USA, as a propaganda machine keeps on whining it was the very definition of innocence, and that an unfathomably cruel, unexplainable attack came to them on 9/11/01. Other nations which committed crimes, have explored them with more enthusiasm, in the last century. But of course, that was after the crimes stopped, and their instigators were put out of power.

The answer to 9/11 by the USA, turned into an attack on the world and civilization. It was entirely inappropriate. Many crimes against humankind were committed, in the name of vengeance, by the USA. “Dead Or Alive”, “If Not With US, Against Us!”, “Geneva Conventions Are Quaint” as Bush and his co-conspirators put it, and acted accordingly. Nearly none of these crimes were prosecuted (except for a few dimwit soldiers caught with video tapes).

The appropriate answer to 9/11 would have been a massive police action to redress a criminal act by a gang of a few people. It was certainly criminal, on the scale of an attack against human rights, to go destroy Iraq, a natural enemy of bin Laden, and make Americans so stupid that they would support that insanity enthusiastically. It was also criminal, on the scale of crimes against mankind, to create a mess in Afghanistan, and use the country mostly as a shooting gallery to test all sort of new weapons and justify a gargantuan military budget.

As it was, 9/11 could be viewed as a shameful attack for the modern apologists of socio-political Islam, which showed its true colors. However, 9/11 turned into something worse, and that was not the work of the Muslim Fundamentalists. 9/11 became an even more shameful event, a reply by the Western powers denying the superiority of Western civilization.

Let me explain. Attacking countless countries for no good reason, made, and is making, a bad situation much worse (the hyperlink I gave above is to Scientific American: we are talking about a scientific phenomenon here). The USA replied to a gang of criminals by war, a massive attack, ongoing, against hundreds of millions of people. A gang got criminal, a country outdid them, on an enormous scale.

(Yes, Iraq + Afghanistan + Pakistan is already well above 220 million people. And now war is made with robots, worldwide, just like in science fiction horror movies; the U.S. government conducts attacks with robots against entire countries, without even a semblance of democratic process, and its usage of thousands of non uniformed private mercenaries to do so is deeply troubling: the uniformed SS were judicially found to constitute a criminal organization after WWII).

When one dollar is spent in Afghanistan or Iraq, 85 cents is spent on the military-industrial complex in the USA. Much of the rest goes into corruption. A cause well worth dying for, indeed, and the American policy led to the death of millions. Is that what the Americans are celebrating on 9/11 when their leaders quote Allah’s psalms? Do I misunderstand something? 1,300 governmental organizations and 2,000 private companies are part of the state police in the USA (exercise: translate “state police” into German…) Of course it cost money, a trillion dollar a year, two-third of the primary budget of the USA, hence the American deficit.

Is the USA turning into old fashion Assyria? All military, no brainy?

Criminally insane societies have existed before, and only rarely do they succeed to transmogrify into higher, more sustainable types. Generally they get lethally entangled in their own lies, delusions and evil ways.

***

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ONE OF THE MANY TIMES WHEN A PRESIDENT OF THE USA PLOTTED WITH AL QAEDA OR ITS SPONSORS:

Interesting what you can watch on French TV: a long documentary from inside Al Qaeda, including extensive revealing interviews with bin Laden closest confident and bodyguard, Abu Jandal (that is, “Father of Death“), who considered bin Laden his uncle, and thus his father. Although he turned FBI informant in the meantime, his heart is still with Osama. He presently lives in Yemen. His heart is still with bin Laden, but he is wondering if it is all morally correct, and he remembers asking hard questions to bin Laden about the killing of hundreds of innocent Muslims, and wounding 5,000 Kenyans.

The most revealing part of the documentary was the interview of the CIA officer, Mike Scheuer, who directed the hunt against bin Laden under Clinton (and thereafter). From 1985 to 1992, Scheuer had worked in the jihad against the socialist regime in Afghanistan and its Soviet allies. He admits that bin Laden killed Russians, that was all what counted for most American officials, and so that was good enough to make him a close ally of the USA, as far as they were concerned.

Scheuer revealed to French TV that his team had localized bin Laden and top Saudi princes, in March 1999, in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. The Princes set-up a landing strip for their huge C130 planes. Out of them came immensely expensive carpets, a lavish camp, complete with huge tents and a 30 meters communication mast. Those worthies were hunting fauna with falcons in the desert.  At the time, bin Laden, having engaged in massive bombings against American embassies, was already American public enemy number one. The satellite showed exactly where bin Laden’s tent was, on the side, far away, with just one or two bodyguards, and his very regular comings and going to join the others in prayer and other events.

Scheuer asked Clinton for the authorization to strike, and Clinton did nothing, for a full month. The CIA became much more insistent, and suddenly the camp was evacuated in a hurry, between two passages of the satellite. A few days later, Saudi Arabia announced the purchase of eight billion dollars worth of F16s fighter planes. Mike Scheuer cooly said, on French TV, that Clinton warned the Saudi Crown Prince, through Richard Clarke.

Scheuer added that it “appeared obvious“  that the purchase came in exchange for the warning. Some would say that, in the USA, one does not need traitors: the president himself commits high treason. But that would be considered anti-American by many, so I will abstain from drawing such a conclusion publicly (I want to thank a partner at an international law firm for advising me about a typo in an earlier version of these remarks).

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THE USA AND 9/11: TIME TO CALL 911, & TREAT THE INSANITY:

Are the Middle Ages descending some more above New York? The Caliph went there, and spoke on September 11, 2011. The Caliph is a very serious person, venerated by all, at least formally so. The Caliph intoned psalm 46 of his sacred book:

“God is our refuge and strength! A very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear.” (Read more.) He will not fear, especially because he was talking behind armored glass. So it is in plutocracy: trust God, and back it up with brute force.

So it goes with Osama, or whatever the particular spelling of his name at this point. Hope you don’t fear my more advanced philosophy, oh primitive Caliph from before the Middle Ages!Philosophy goes through bullet proof glass.

“God is for us a refuge and a force!”  is how Osama talked, how Osama thought, and apparently it is still the way he talks, and the way he thinks. In other words, assassinate Osama, and he is still here, preaching with the same words, from the same book, in the name of God, refuge and force. Not only Osama was made into a martyr, but he talks louder than ever.

God as refuge and force: It is clearly the same idea, and the same sense of justice. Be dumb if you want, but philosophers will notice that you laud the very psychological mechanism, and the very same God which allowed 19 fanatics to crash planes into buildings. So do you disapprove of that act, crashing planes in the name of psalm 46, or do you keep on preaching that psalm, the reason for that act, as far as most, or all, of the 19 assassins were concerned?

Americans may revere Obama, as Egyptians used to revere Mubarak, and the Soviets, Stalin, and the jihadists, Osama. It’s not just in the USA that the established order is clinging to its metaphysics. In Morocco, Mohammed VI (yes, six!) has rolled forward a “new” constitution, but Islam is still what it is based on (besides having all the powers in the hands of that plutocrat, Mohammed VI). That means: women not to inherit as men do, among other things.

As Muhammad Atta and is 18 accomplices crashed their planes, no doubt they screamed in their heads: “God is for us a refuge and a force!” The force was with them! What is the difference with bin Bush and Bushama? Same language, same ideas. (“bin”, or “ben”, means “son”, I point out for those who don’t get the joke, that Bush was the son of Bush, himself the son of still another Bush, that one a pal of Adolf Hitler, another strident lover of “God”, and also of the Qur’an.) Of course, some will cynically observe that Muhammad Atta and his co-criminals killed much fewer people, and have carried war to just one country.

If one loves the reasoning and reject its products only when inconvenient, one ought to be the object of spite. At least from philosophers.

Stupidity has to be reinforced, in the USA, on every September 11. Upon stupidity does leadership as the Americans know it, strongly depends, with its force and its “God”.

Bin Laden was killed in the very center of the center of Pakistani military power. Yes, Pakistan and its Inter Service Intelligence, which the USA used already forty years ago, to attack Afghanistan. And Americans still don’t understand that they are manipulated, or, do not want to understand the various evil conspiracies that their own government set-up, because they are still persuaded they profit from it, and they can just hate the pawn, bin Laden who turned against them, so that hopefully no other pawn will turn again.

When the snake bites its own tail, has it learned anything? Apparently not, and the venom is going to its head.

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BUTTERFLIES KNOW BETTER:

Meanwhile I visited one of these new museums where one can walk through a rain forest, complete with live parrots, birds, and tropical butterflies, with my little 23 months old well of wisdom leading the way. At the bottom of that particular installation, there was only water, with enormous fishes, some up to 2 meters long. And pretty butterflies were flying all over. A friend saw a fish trying to swallow one.

Butterflies are all wings, antennas, and bellies.  Their heads are not prominent, they are barely visible. Still, none of the butterflies fell in the water. If we think about it, this is quite remarkable:  the only explanation is that butterflies make a theory that it would be very bad to fall in the water, so they don’t try it.

How come butterflies are so clever and American leaders are so stupid? The only plausible explanation is that American leaders are paid to be stupid, and are deliberately stupid, as when Obama insists that the USA was attacked out of the blue on 9/11, as if the USA had not been making war in Afghanistan for 21 years, and in Iraq for more than a decade, killing millions in various ways (many of them children).

But how come individual Americans do not see that they are falling in the drink? How come the butterflies themselves are more clever than Americans?

How come it’s only individual Arabs who are trying for spring? How come only individual Arabs have stopped listening to leaders who speak in the name of so called “god”?

It is well known that G. W. Bush intended to invade Iraq well before 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do, whatsoever, with 9/11, except as the later provided with a convenient excuse for invading the former, by telling all the needed lies, however enormous, just like the friend of the grandfather of Bush recommended to do.

The first meeting to plot the invasion of Iraq by the resident of the White House was on September 17, six days after 9/11. It is as if Bush needed 9/11, and was ready for it, his way. Does that explain the coolness Bush affected towards reports on his desk about Al Qaeda plotting an attack on the USA?

Reminder: no aerial defenses were ready in the USA, whatsoever, in anticipation of 9/11.

9/11 had been tried on Paris in 1994, seven years earlier, and was prevented by the usage of French lethal force. The French Air Force and missile forces had been ready for decades. Intervention times are in minutes, or even, when specifics attacks were feared, in seconds. Same in Israel, of course.

The USA is the land of conspiracies. There is a well paid plot against undermining those who think the climate is changing. Some climate scientists even get death threats. The reason? American fossil fuel plutocrats are used to kill to stay rich. If they are running out of Arabs to kill, they can always threaten to kill Americans.

In the USA, there is even a plot against the theory of evolution. As Obama says:”God is refuge and a force!” Stupidity is a force which gives plutocracy meaning.   

After the attack on a few buildings by a gang of criminals, the USA reacted by attacking many countries. It was entirely appropriate: it was more of the same criminal insanity which, precisely, led to 9/11.

Reminder: only a few thousand Americans have died from the Middle East war the USA engaged in, so far. By adding the dead on 9/11 plus the dead soldiers and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, one does not reach 10,000 Americans dead. Yet (but trust Obama to make it so). By contrast, ever since the USA attacked Afghanistan on July 3, 1979, yes, in 1979, the USA has visited 9/11 everyday on the Middle East, so to speak, or, at least once a month,  on millions of people.

The Americans may have the oil to burn, and 9/11 to celebrate, as they do, but Middle Easterners count their dead at the hands of the USA, by millions. Indeed. That is what Americans ought to try to understand.

Besides, the dead on 9/11 is not all the work of bin laden and his co-conspirators. The World Trade Center towers were very poorly designed: they collapsed from a fire. The Empire State Building was hit by a bomber decades earlier, and there was a very important fire, and the elevators fell down, their cables melted. But the architectural design of the 1930s, in distributed load bearing, was careful, and far from the silly tent like structure of the World Trade Center.

Why a tent like design for the WTC? Because the plutocrats attached a lot of importance to an open floor plan. Trading floors, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all about trading things one did not create oneself. Osama Bin Laden, a structural engineer, expected only the upper floors to burn, and the steel to melt:”It’s all we had hoped” said Bin Laden in a taped discussion. Bin Laden never expected the towers to come down (and he was the most optimistic of his fellow plotters; the others had no idea how vulnerable the New York skyline was; perhaps, had they know, they would have arranged things to strike a bit later, causing much more deaths, as up to 50,000 people worked in the towers… By the way my own spouse nearly worked for a few weeks in the WTC towers a few months earlier, and I did visit the WTC, so I am not completely disconnected from the whole thing in another universe.)

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CRIMINALLY INSANE SOCIETIES WITH DEEP SELF DESTRUCTIVE PATHOLOGIES HAVE FLOUNDERED BEFORE:

So the USA is becoming insane, quoting with approval the very idea it claims to be the victim of, psalm 46. In its latest “stimulus” proposal, Obama, the pseudo democrat, proposes tax cuts to the funding of Social Security and Medicare. He finds that stimulating, and it is the largest part of his “stimulus”, and also the only part which his bipartisan partner, the Tea Party, will pass. More insanity. Or maybe not: if he pleases his masters enough, Obama will vacation in Bali much more. What is truly insane is that the American People does not seem to notice the manipulations.

OK, Israel, a would be democracy without a constitution, is also going insane, thinking it can steal land and water forever, and nobody will notice, because it has some understandings with the dictators around. Meanwhile the dictators are going, and French diplomats are helping the Palestinians prepare their case for a state (which will open all sorts of help, finance and trade for them; it’s not all about annoying Israel).

Let’s step a little backward: how does insanity arise in nations (example Germany a century ago), or even in multinational empires (example Achaemenid Persia)?

Assyria was nation with its own language which founded a giant empire which reigned over many other nations. It lasted about a thousand years. It became ever more successful with successive waves of increasingly demented, or let’s say, over ambitious militarism. It even invaded and occupied distant Egypt. In the end, Mesopotamia to its south, and all the rebellious national powers, all around, revolted. They could not defeat the Assyrian army, so they destroyed the Assyrian population first, to starve the hated enemy. Nowadays very few people call themselves descendants of that Assyrian super power. Although there are still plenty of Egyptian, and they seem to remember that they come from a super power which lasted millennia, and which, differently from Assyria, founded its power more on the mind, and less on the fist. A lot of what is called Greek mathematics originated in Egypt, Egypt is a co-developer of the alphabet, and it had a very long and friendly close cooperation with Crete, Europe’s master civilization. Moreover, a lot of what is called Jewish civilization evolved in Egypt much earlier, including monotheism. Plus Egypt had some very powerful female Pharaos. Assyria stays only famous for terrorizing Egypt, and the entire world, with its military-industrial rampage.

Another example of deep insanity was Rome. Both the top Greek cities and Rome rested their socio-economy on slavery. Unsurprisingly, those enslaving republics turned into enslaving  plutocracy. It was a pathology: superior Crete did not rest on slavery and its associated exaggerated plutocracy. Neither did the Celto-Germans rested their social organization on slavery. And it is indeed how the Greco-Roman slave society finished: the Germans, namely the Franks, took over and outlawed slavery (Jesus Christ, a supporter of Caesar, had nothing against slavery, although he complained about the rich, and, one could say, plutocracy.) Thus evil Greco-Roman society transmogrified into a newer version of the advanced Western civilization, closer to the much older Cretan model.

The Aztecs practiced industrial cannibalism. That was their undoing: Cortez was able to recruit enormous native armies made of the potential dinners of the Aztecs. Without native help, the Aztecs would not have been defeated. Cannibalism was also the God, the refuge, the strength, of the Aztecs, as their economy would have been otherwise incapable of producing enough proteins to support an army of 250,000 professional killers (I mean: soldiers).

Nazism was another example of criminally insane society. As with the Aztecs, the insanity was central to their power: mass murdering racism allowed Hitler to provide his supporters with wealth. For a few years.

In all the preceding cases, the pathologies which affected them led to the destruction of the societies. Sometimes a pathological society reforms itself under a less virulent form. Stalinism provides an example, the North American English colony and its ensuing enslaving, genocidal racism, is another: both societies reformed themselves.

However cases such as Assyria show that a society can relapse under virulent form over centuries, until it gets finally destroyed. This sort of precedent is most troubling for the USA, which does not seem to have reached a sustainable morality, or even the proclivity to generate enough curiosity to elucidate the causality at work in what ails it so deeply.

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VENGEANCE MAY BE JUSTICE IN THE USA, BUT NOT IN CIVILIZATION:

A number of very deep mistakes, of the exploitative and hubristic type, led the USA to 9/11. Since then, even worse mistakes have been committed, by the USA, such as acting out of vengeance, rather than justice, throwing civilization to the war dogs, and showing no inclination to learn anything important, as the assassination of bin Laden by a small man, and the hysteria with which it was welcomed, showed.

When the president of a major country acts like a mafioso, a capo di capi, silencing an encumbering accomplice, a stray soldier, justice has a problem. Arresting criminals is important, be it only because we have to analyze their exact reasons, so that they can be addressed, and neutralized in the future.

One will never repeat enough the following. Operatives of the USA’s “intelligence” agencies taught bin Laden to terrorize by attacking civilian objectives (schools!), in Afghanistan. American “intelligence” operatives thought that was smart, just as the USA thought it was smart to create a war in Afghanistan. By July 1979, the American intervention in Afghanistan was direct (instead of just through Pakistani intelligence). Why cannot Americans focus on those facts? Because they can only vote for the bipartisan party, and his bipartisan president?

Reading the preceding, the reaction of normal, well educated Americans will be intense disgust against the misfit who wrote these lines. It does not matter if the message may be correct, it is just an anti-American insanity to utter it. Such insanity has to be rejected by upright Americans with the single mindedness of ancient Germans rejecting entirely the suggestion that something like Auschwitz could even exist. Not such an insane comparison: Amnesty International knows of 70,000 cases of individuals processed in American torture centers, worldwide, outside of any legal set-up. In truth, it’s most certainly hundreds of thousands who have been treated unlawfully.

Van Jones, the green energy Czar of Obama had to resign just because he signed a petition in 2004 asking to make a congressional commission about a possible role of the government of the USA in 9/11. It depends what “government” means, and what “role” meant.

Historically, it’s the USA which attacked Afghanistan in cold blood in 1979, causing the death of MILLIONS of Afghans. Historically, the USA and Saudi intelligence recruited the pious bin Laden and turned that son of a plutocratic family worth more than 40 billion dollars into a fierce jihadist attack dog. Historically too, outside of the USA, it is well known that the CIA had figured out that some particularly dangerous associates of bin Laden had moved to the USA, and did not tell the FBI (this was finally reported on “60 minutes” on 9/11/11, by Lara Logan, after the first version of this essay came out on Greenwitch Meridian Times!)

Islam, like its mentors, Christianity and Judaism, are war like terror religions. So that fanatics rediscovers this periodically is no wonder. Maybe it’s time to understand that the West rose higher, because Christ was just a device, a crowbar… for a higher purpose.

The worst thing for the highest civilization is to make a shrine to insanity, on the ground of multiculturalism. Multiculturalist respect was not extended to Aztecs, so why should we extend it to fanatics of other religions who also practice human sacrifices? Because 9/11 was just a big human sacrifice. Where the Celts would regularly burn 100 inside a mooing metallic bull, bin Laden and company burned 3,000, once. I love beautiful mosques and cathedrals. However I hate it when people are reduced to mooing.

Multiculturalism is intolerable, says transculturalism.

Disrespecting civilization destroying insanity ought to be a moral principle against demented interpretations of Americanism, or Islamism, or any ism of the lowest type. And the more millions practice them, the more disrespect we should flaunt for these inferior forms of intellectual fascism.

To put it clearly, if crudely: if the solution to the problem of cannibalism, or sacrifice, is to kill the cannibals, or human sacrificers, once and for all, so be it. This is basically what the Romans did with the Celts and Carthage.  To warm up, we can kill the respect directed to them. One should also kill all respect for those who have decided to devolve, as the USA did with the Patriot Act, torture, summary imprisonment, executions, and a thorough refusal to examine why their boy Osama, whom the CIA lovingly trained went berserk.

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 9/11: PRICE & PRETEXT FOR MORE PLUTOCRACY:

Why such stupid policy of replying to religiously inspired crime with global war? Well, just look at the budget of the military-’intelligence’-industrial complex: it became gigantic in the USA, leaving the rest of the planet, the economy, and common sense far behind. The pseudo democratic resident of the white House made the situation worse (his specialty).

Thus it turns out that stupidity was clever, from the point of view of military industrial devils and their plutocratic supports. The same applies for the assassination of bin Laden: it turned him into a martyr, into the one who had to be silenced, because he was so right (what else?). That, too, was very stupid, except, of course if the goal was to extend the war for decades to come. And so it is that as Osama is dead, Obama quotes exactly the psalm that Osama would have wanted to quote for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

The plutocracy loving government of the USA, by creating war situations all over, and then engage in combat, has created a mechanism to justify the enormous existence of the trillion dollar military-”intelligence”-industrial complex. Should one sees 9/11 part, in some sense of a vast conspiracy to keep the USA on a war footing? I expose, you decide. Remember Clinton tipping off the Saudi Crown Prince about the danger bin Laden was in, though. But, right, you won’t hear it on American TV. When a tree falls in a forest, and no American is there to hear it, it probably did not happen. It’s only when big towers fall in the niddle of New York that Americans notice something is up, or rather down. In other words, not kosher. Wait until Israel implodes. But I am getting ahead of the facts…

So what do we hear now? A French citizen has just claimed that he brought millions of dollars, in cash, from African presidents to Chirac (before he became president) and Villepin. Both men are going to sue, they have to, so we should learn more. Hopefully the rot, in Europe will not stink to the same high heavens.

The war between plutocracy and democracy is ongoing. Pluto manipulates underground, makes itself invisible, enlightenment and openness fight back, as the Babylonians knew this already so much, 4,000 years ago, that they made a religion out of it. Times to embrace that more advanced wisdom, and forget Osama-Obama’s psalm 46, and its Biblical sense of vengeance as justice.  

A good start would be to start an investigation upon the accusation of high treason proffered by one of the highest officers at the CIA against a former president of the USA. In a much older society such as France, investigation of former head of states is nearly routine. Actually Chirac is not just under investigation, but on trial, for corruption. Accusations against Bush and Clinton are much more serious.

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Patrice Ayme

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FORCE WORKS. An Intellectuals’ War. Syria Next?

PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT WAR IS ONLY WISHFUL THINKING.

Main Ideas: There is a new, fundamental human right: the right of ingerence. Thanks to the right of ingerence, the total human toll of the Libyan dictator’s assault against the People he terrorized, tortured and executed may not exceed 50,000 dead (hopefully).

The French “droit d’ingérence”, is a concept distinguished by philosopher Jean-François Revel in 1979 (his son is a top Buddhist monk). The droit d’ingérence was also advocated by Kouchner and the “Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders” (and rewarded by the Nobel Peace Prize).

The right of ingerence postulates that there is a right (“droit“) to interfere and intrude in some circumstances on behalf of human rights of others. Thus to fight, not in self defense, but altruistically. In a way, of course, it is inherent to the notion of a police force on behalf of justice, thus it is as old as the notion of police, and something which was necessary as soon as primates evolved, and descended from the trees (alpha males do a lot of policing in baboon troops).

Droit d’ingérence is a typical French attitude of making legitimate some forms of aggression of a state against another state, central to the (much unjustly decried) “Mission Civilisatrice”. 

When ingerence is most justified, it involves the survival of one’s own nation (as when the Romans intervened in Gaul against Celto-Germans under imperators such as Sextus, Marius and Caesar). Ingerence is also justified for insuring others’ freedom (as when the Roman republic intervened against Macedonia, partly to free Greece, or when France intervened against Britain to free its American colony, or when France and Britain declared war to Hitler for serially invading countries).

Nowadays, due to the relative shrinkage of the world, ingerence of democracy and survival of democracy are pretty much the same notions.

European fighter-bombers flew in less than an hour from places such as Sicily or Crete, in the European Union, to bomb fascist forces in Libya. Less than an hour is of course the flight time from North Korea to Washington, for a ballistic missile. Crushing the North Korean dictatorship will not, at some point, be just about ingerence, but about survival. I know that Bush said stuff like that, but he was not just lying, but also delusional (which is worse), because his motive was NOT from altruism, but from the Dark Side. So it was ingerence, all right, but he had no right.

Ingerence of democracy is also an occasion to teach democracy to those obdurately challenged by obscurantism. For example, student (of democracy) Russia can try to explain to us in the United Nations what is so good about Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, and why we should not apply sanctions. After Russia fails to justify itself, it will have learned something, about democracy, as it hopefully is doing in Libya.

The forces of democracy are reloading, but cannot rest. Ultimately, democracy will have to reign all over, for democracy to be safe, anywhere.

Some will insist: what is the difference between the right of ingerence (in defense of human rights, and that include life and freedom), and Bush’s vicious aggressions? Well, everything: Bush was playing humanist on TV. Actually he was himself the problem. His invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the American Constitution were all charged with the will to destroy. which makes sense, as his plutocratic pedigree extends over two generations.

Even more damaging are those who supported the Libyan dictator through all this, arguing, idiotically, that the West ‘s intervention against the self described “king of kings of Africa“was all for oil. The devil is, among other things, in the details.

It’s profitable to say progressive stuff, because it sounds good, or it’s all over a teleprompter, but it better be right, cogent, and relevant.The psychological grandparents of the same idiots argued that France fought Hitler because of the French empire, and the vainglorious French mentality, and for the sake of hopeless European quarrels. Thus 72 millions died, precisely because of that criminally stupid reasoning, grounded in crass ignorance. France was not about extermination camps, Hitler was.

80% of Libyan oil and gas already went to France and Italy, and the reserves  of Libya are the largest in Africa. So neither France, nor Italy, had any economic reason to disturb a system which served them well. Actually Italy was extremely reluctant to do so.

In truth the Libyan dictator was attacked for philosophical reasons, not at all for oil. The war started with the a number of professionals protesting in Benghazi, and then, after those pacific demonstrations were repressed in blood, immensely courageous rebels, typically young professionals and students, who came to defeat a large army with a mercenary army of top, highly paid, professional killers at its core .

Verily, the causal chain of events shows that it is philosophers, temporally led by yours truly, who were in the lead against Qaddafi. Reading the New York Times’ comments reveals many examples of poorly reconstructed Stalinists who are hysterical against human rights, in the guise of opposing “the West” alleged search for oil (which, as I said, it already got from the Libyan dictator; by the way, Sirya sends 95% of its oil to Europe).

I make no mystery that, for a civilization englued in delusional systems of thought, as was the Libyan dictatorship, the best way out is revolution. or more exactly, the only way out. Revolution can be gentle, and it is better, when it can be gentle. But, if the revolution cannot be gentle, the concepts of work and brutal force, as found in physics, have to be brought to bear.

Much of the so called Muslim civilization suffers from an historical dearth of genuine, thorough, secular revolution (secular means of the age, progress to what is known now). Hopefully the Libyan rising will change that. Sarkozy reminded the Libyan transition Council that he would not make their revolution on their behalf, and that the French did the 1789 Revolution on their own, as all real revolutions always are done.

Although, in the end, French help to the Libyan rebels was considerable, it did not reach the enormous help France provided to the American rebels during the American war of independence.

The American”revolution” was not really a revolution: they did not have to. If the Americans had made a real revolution, they would have freed the slaves; but they did not, because they did not have to, as the massive intervention of the French army and French navy did not force them to mobilize all their forces, physical and spiritual.

Philosophy, in truth, is about war. War against stupidity and the basest instincts, to start with. But, if need be, and it can, philosophy goes all the way.

This is how, overall, civilization progresses for the better. Some deny that there is such a thing as progress. As a forceful reminder for the clueless, in Pacific islands, where civilization had progressed less, it was often customary to eat people alive, over a period of weeks. OK, it was partly a technological problem, as there were no refrigerators, two centuries ago (and extensive salt and spices European Middle Age meat preservation technology was not known, either).

Of course, for philosophical reasons, the Romans had extinguished the man eating, and human sacrifices prone civilizations of the Mediterranean-European area. That the Romans were also predatory, is a secondary consideration. After conquest, the Roman rule was light, and fully assented to, in any case. Pax Romana was no myth… And now it is baaaack…

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Most countries in the West acted admirably in the overthrow of the bloody Libyan tyrant. It was NOT 1939 all over again, with France and Britain going at Hitler alone, while several democracies were supporting the dictator, Hitler, all the more efficiently, that it was not talked about it much. This time most countries in the West understood that they had a duty of ingerence, and a duty of solidarity to their fellow democracies, and human rights. An Arab country, Qatar, siege of the free TV Al Jazeera, very courageously aligned itself on its ally, the French republic.

All the West behaved well, with the alarming exception of Switzerland, which insisted to do a repeat of its pernicious role in 1939-45. Switzerland gets a mention from me as the most lamentable, hypocritical country in the world for 2011 (we can be fairly sure that no other country will be as mentally mediocre before 2012). In the end, even Russia and China helped against the Libyan dictator. But not Switzerland. Worse; that forsaken country pleaded for an inverted ethics reminiscent of Ireland crying about Hitler’s demise in May 1945.

Switzerland’s notable contribution to the Libyan war was to help the mass murdering dictator. Switzerland built, all over Libya, the sort of sophisticated underground fortifications Qaddafi and his clan presently enjoy, in common with the rats they often evoke spitefully. This Swiss attitude is all the more alarming, as, in many ways, Switzerland is the most democratic place in the world. So is it the mountain air, is it the fact the Swiss are just all too greedy peasants, or is it something about democracy? In any case, following the debate in Suisse, it’s clear the Swiss do not have a viable concept of civilization. My guess is that Switzerland got used to get way with greed, same as Bush style American plutocracy. Both got away, and became much richer, from enabling Nazism. And, whereas the very small fry was prosecuted, and still is, to the end of the Earth, the really big fishes, deeply ingrained criminal thought systems in Switzerland and the USA tied to the reigning plutocracy were left alone, and prosper to this day.

Two weeks before the liberation of Tripoli, La Suisse had an attack of madness, as it found, to its fake horror, that some a few pieces of Mickey Mouse Helvetic military equipment made their way to Libya’s freedom fighters, apparently through Qatar. Well, I salute Qatar. Let 50,000 die under the boot of a dictator it was just arming: no problem for Suisse. Let a contract be violated, perhaps, on a few thousands Francs of material, and Switzerland orders an inquiry.

If everybody acted as Switzerland, the few among us still surviving would say:”Heil Hitler!” I say this without meaning to be funny. During World War Two Switzerland served as rear base for the Nazis, viciously efficient. The U.S. Air Force had to bomb a major ball bearing factory in Switzerland, which provided the Nazis with precious ball bearings.

To this day, Switzerland has not presented excuses for its abject attitude relative to humankind during Nazism, and the recent evidence with Libya shows that it persists self righteously in its error, and fake neutralism (rhymes with racism and nationalism).

Intellectuals in Switzerland, should view as their primary duty to be scathing about Swiss attitudes regarding civilization and the dictators which ruin it. This being said, I love Switzerland. Precisely.

If not for the massive iron fist of NATO, Qaddafi would have celebrated his 42 years of reign on September 1. Gaddafi’s power rested on people  with so much blood on their hands, that they had nothing to lose, by drenching the desert with some more. The dictator’s power was also resting on thousands of mercenaries, some from Eastern Europe, some from black Africa, paid 10,000 euros, $15,000, a week.

Qaddafi used to be a hero of a delusional part of the left of the West, 40 years ago. Those wishful lunatics viewed Gaddafi as the successor of Nasser (as if Nasser was much to admire). Gaddafi was viewed as the captain who chased a king out (without spilling a drop of blood, meaning that the king’s army was not that ferocious that a simple captain could make a coup). Qaddafi nationalized much, directly into his own pocket. Superficial pseudo leftists overlooked those details: as many who are into superficiality, group identification provide them with a personality. Thus, in the guise of prostesting imperialism, they become themselves intellectual fascists, following brainlessly their thought leaders.

Gaddafi’s was a regime with officials one had to give a million dollars to, just to talk to them when trying to help the Libya they governed (my own father, representing a Western company, had to do make a personal check to the Libyan Prime Minister, of one million dollars, just to talk to him about conducting oil prospection).

The best wars are those started by a more progressive philosophy, and bold philosophers defending it in the court of public opinion. No Revolution, No Civilization.

The philosophical case for an armed intervention on behalf of the Libyan people against the (self promoted) colonel who had seized power 42 years ago was clear cut.

The strategy I advocated on March 8, was, in the end, followed against the Libyan bloody tyrant. France attacked March 20th, after getting the all clear from the United Nations. In the end, the UN mandate was tweaked, as special operations French, British and Italians teams operated on the ground. France, even to Britain’s alarm, and to impotent Russian anger, dropped weapons to the rebels in the Nafusah mountains, and then set up runways and sent heavy weapons, including tanks, through an aerial bridge in that Berber area (Berbers have their own ancient alphabet, which looks at least twice older than Arabic, and there is a revival of that civilization, crushed by the Arab invasion, all the way to Algeria and Morocco) .

A handful of philosophers such as Bernard-Henri Lévy (“BHL”, Jewish descent, born in Béni Saf, Algeria), Alain Finkielkraut (son of an Auschwitz Jewish deportee), and Alain Badiou (born in Rabat, Morocco), exerted pressure on Nicholas Sarkozy to not let the Libyan rebellion be smashed. I mention their place of origin, to point out that, like me, two of them call Africa home.

I have been often critical of BHL, but he was admirable in the Libyan crisis, taking great personal risks, as he often does. BHL has been influential in the French corridors of powers for more than 30 years now. Of course, being so practical a philosopher denies him some depth, but so was Demosthenes, say, with Athens, against Philippe (tyrant of Macedonia, father of the possible parricidal Alexander). Civilization needs all sorts of philosophers, some in the trenches, some at the edge of knowledge.

In France, because of a long, instructive, and often tragic history, political leaders know better than to oppose vociferous philosophers, if they want to leave a positive historical mark. Once, the police suggested to de Gaulle to arrest a mass agitating and protesting Sartre. De Gaulle replied haughtily, and correctly:”One does not arrest Voltaire.”

Well after I wrote my March 8 essay, BHL insisted that it was not too late to do something. Saif Al islam made clear declarations of intended extermination. At the last possible moment, responding to BHL’s fierce urgency, Sarkozy moved courageously, first with a diplomatic marathon, succeeding to hypnotize American, Russians and Chinese into assenting into an intervention in a timely manner. Years earlier, a French paratroop division had terminated the Rwandan holocaust, but after much of it had already happened. Two days after the UNSC vote, as a last minute conference about what to do occurred in Paris, the French president announced that he had unleashed supersonic bombers, and really very large precision guided bombs, to save the city of Benghazi. In all this, as usual, Britain knew better than disagreeing with her sister republic, and was very supportive.

It is often said that those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. However, those who know history are often rewarded if they listen to it. Retrospectively, the French republic should have moved unilaterally against the bloody tyrant Hitler, when the going was good, in spite of Anglo-Saxon, plutocratically minded opposition.

When Americans mention Qaddafi’s crimes, they always mention Pan Am 103, but never UTA 772 (the second French civil jumbo jet destroyed probably by Libyans). Of course, neither do Americans ever mention Qaddafi’s invasions of Chad, Tanzania, etc. Since the French don’t exist, apparently, nor do invaded Africans, perhaps they should just reciprocate… And ignore Americans in kind. All of this lack of knowledge goes a long way to explain the ignorant pseudo ethical position of all too many Americans. In general those who want to do something about the world, or not, ought to know something about it.

Another thing France learned from a very long history is that, sometimes she was on the very wrong side of history. It has been a big mistake for France not to have taken the side of the People in Algeria in 1945. If she had, there would have been no Algerian civil wars. (That, of course, will have been viewed as a catastrophe by many of the numerous enemies of Europe, France, and the Maghreb.)

On May 8, 1945, in Setif, Algeria, the day Nazi Germany capitulated, an Algerian demonstration of indigenes supported the Allied victory against the racist infamy. There were with many Allied flags, and just one, or two, proto-Algerian flags, green and white. Those two flags led to a (completely unjustified) repression by the authorities (at least one Algerian boy killed), which led to a counter-reaction (officially 103 dead “colons”), followed by a counter-massacre (officially 1020 dead Algerians). In a way, taking the side of the People in 2011 in Libya, is a distant compensation. It is also a indispensable buttressing of the budding democratization in Tunisia and Egypt, and a way to encourage reformers in Algeria and Morocco.

So, in 2011, the French republic took the side of the People in Libya. A lesson from Algeria, well learned. As I hinted above, it’s not about oil: French, British and American oil companies had perfect business arrangements with Kaddafi and his clan. Hence the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Gates, making excuses to not do anything against Qaddafi, on the ground that he was terrified of his air defenses. Either Gates was lying, incompetent, or the French much more advanced than the U.S. Air Force. Whatever it was, Libyan defenses proved 100% impotent against French aircraft, in spite of the fact that the French attacked against a 100% operative anti-aircraft system, as time was of the essence.

A recent poll showed that, when Americans were asked to name a scientist, 47% answered Einstein (dead for 56 years). Next, 23% answered:”I don’t know”. By contrast, people could probably give a long list of names of monkeys who can push a ball around. hey, they used to do this when they were three years old, and growing up beyond that is hard to do! Now, of course, people have no idea about what Einstein did, except that mass and energy are the same (it is not that simple, by the way). Even worse is their basic knowledge of science itself.

What is science? What is certain. So those who do not know science are certainly uncertain about some things which are certain. Even worse, they miss entire mental dimensions from which further scaffolding for the imagination can arise.

In physics, the definition of work is force times displacement. No displacement, no work. No force, no work. (Obvious joke: two reasons for Obama to have done no work. There was neither displacement, nor force…)

Physicists have thought hard for centuries to come up with that concept, that force times displacement is a worthy notion, best depicting work, and it… works. Such a notion is conceptually useful, and ought not to be confined to physics and engineering (as my Obama example demonstrates).

Many people who have studied many things, but no physics, are often struggling with notions that have finally been elucidated after centuries of efforts, and studies by top intellectuals, and are now so certain, tested and useful, that they have become part of science.

Unfortunately many standard philosophers have learned to worry exclusively about hermeneutics (although not the three philosophers mentioned above).  I would claim that this infection with hermeneutics is one of the reason of the disaffection of many young people, in the West, from all and any deep critique, and their bovine acceptance of the corrupt rule of their financial rulers.

What’s “hermeneutics“? It is the study and theory not of reality itself, but of interpretation. It’s like crazies studying what they think about the world, rather than making an effort to think about the world itself.

It comes from the Greek hermeneutikos “interpreting,” from hermeneuein “to interpret,” a derivative of Hermes, the divinity of speech, writing, and eloquence. When one walks next to a swamp in summer, it is valid to worry about mosquitoes. But that is not what many Academic philosophers would do, according to their obsession with hermeneutics. They would instead worry about how mosquitoes are interpreted. (Revel did not use these words or argumentation, but he argued that the confusion between physical reality and interpretation of text made most of modern philosophy an object of ridicule. So he came to the same conclusion as me.)

Speaking of mosquitoes… Weirdly, Obama, observing the end of Qaddafi’s clan claimed that “Freedom is stronger than the iron fist“. I guess, he has exerted his freedom of not bombing Gaddafi much (I had actually recommended that Obama just let France and Britain do the job, which was better for everybody). But the iron fist of the French Air force conducted around 4,000 strike missions. France also sent special forces, advisers, parachuted weapons, and finally build an aerial bridge to the Berber held Nafusah mountains just south west of Tripoli, to transfer heavy weapons to the rebels with her faithful accomplice, Qatar.

Verily, the war against Gaddafi would have failed without NATO’s… iron fist intervention. Overall, NATO conducted 20,000 sorties and 7,500 air strikes (few of them by American planes; in one slice of time, out of 1,000 NATO sorties, just three (3!) were American; however, the few American drones were very efficient at the end).

Verily, dozens of thousands would have been killed, without NATO’s iron fist. Freedom is best, no least because it comes with an iron fist. There is no contradiction, Obama, quite the opposite. The iron fist is a lesson that the ancient Greeks taught in the tremendous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea… And when freedom cannot use an iron fist, as in Afghanistan, it is precisely because it has fangs biting its conscience, because its cause is not just.

The dictators hellish columns of tanks, bristling with numerous giant mobile missile batteries the U.S. Secretary of defense had evoked to claim that one should leave Libya’s powerful arsenal alone were irresistibly advancing… They had reached the suburbs of Benghazi. Their complete destruction in a few minutes by undeterred French stealth bombers will stay one of the most spectacular tipping points in the history of warfare. A city was on the verge of being destroyed, as many were in the last century. Rwanda all over again, a few minutes away. And then a miracle from up high, as in the Bible…

Gaddafi’s dictatorship, often grotesque, using torture massively, would have kept on going. There is no reason it would not have gone on for centuries. Such as been the fate of the region, a stable pattern of anarchic, chaotic tyranny.

Indeed, this is the tragic history of Islam: dictators massaging the Qur’an fascist principle, Sura 4, verse 59: “O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” Actually, this deplorable slogan is word for word, a repetition of a much older Christian fascist principle, which had the same consequence: theocratic dictatorship, something Constantinople fell, in and out, for centuries, until it lost all control, in the 11C, as the Turks had just learn to massage the same ideas, to their immense profit.

The West veered away from the original version of Sura 4, verse 59 (I will quote the exact Christian text some other day; among other places, it is in Augustine’s élucubrations, or why to have faith in all the wrong reasons). How? Because the Franks were secularist in Christian sheep disguise. And they had more force, and more democratic assent, so they did what they wanted, in the area they governed, without having recourse to fascist mental tricks of the basest sort.

Speaking of tragedies, Dr. Saif Al Islam El Qaddafi, the son of the guide, was long felt to be, and long sounded as, a reformer. He was viewed as the hope one could believe would orient his father’s regime towards democracy. Hope all wanted to believe. Instead, he, the son of privilege, in spite of his sharp intelligence, became, when the rebellion started, very much the fulminating, crazed out, son of his father. Saif’s invectives, and orders to bloody mass murder, were instrumental in the hurried French airstrikes outside of Benghazi, and earned him a warrant of arrest by the International Criminal Court.

In any case, it was a jolly war. Nothing like being on the right side of war (yes, there is such a thing, and those indignant about the notion have it, only because there is such a thing!)

Many of the nations which ignominiously proclaimed themselves to be neutral until Hitler attacked them (Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway) this time intervened, and sent warplanes. Neutralism is another form of racism, so this was a welcome change.

As I have argued many times, one of the main cause of the French defeat in May 1940 against the Nazis was the desperate last minute help the French republic provided to countries which were neutral even after Hitler attacked them, and then asked France to rescue them.

The idiotic French attempt to provide hurried help to those who did not deserve it, disorganized completely the French Air Force and army. The seven armored divisions of the mobile armored reserve were rushed to the Netherlands, half of the French Air Force was not even in France when the Nazi tanks broke through. (By comparison, the Nazis had only a grand total of ten armored divisions, but they attacked next to Paris, while the French armored reserve was sent to the Netherlands.)

Interestingly, Sweden, which is, hypocritically, not even a member of NATO, sent 8 advanced Gripen fighter (then reduced to 5, with fewer restrictions).

Of course, readers will remember that Sweden fed Hitler with high grade iron, for years, so that the Nazi dictator could be stronger than Popeye. Sweden also graciously provided the Nazis with the 88mm gun, and its technology. The 88 was  the AA and anti tank weapon of choice of Hitler’s armies, throughout the war.  

France and Britain were not amused by Sweden’s friendship with Hitler, and the iron diet it all too graciously provided. The French Foreign Legion, having routed elite Nazi divisions in Northern Norway, was poised to cut Sweden in two, and grab the iron mines, when France started to fall, and the Legionnaires were recalled.

In other words, sixty years after their pathetic, greedy, deliberate, willing, abject, and extended collaboration with Nazism, even the Swedes have come to realize that it was high time to change philosophy. But, as I said, not yet so for the Swiss.

The same pattern has occurred in Syria, which was feared for Libya, or Egypt. And has happened in North Korea: hereditary dictatorship. The clever son of the bloody dictator, himself a British trained doctor, has become a full bloody dictator of his own.

Now what? Well, NATO is going to reload. Precision guided bombs are expensive. On the other hand they provide with quality, progressive employment: they push the highest tech, an intrinsic good, because only very high tech, of a type we do not have as yet, will allow us to steer seven billion people, soon to be ten billion, towards calmer shores, with not too degraded a biosphere. 

Some will wonder what I am talking about, and whether the fall of Qaddafi and his sons has rendered me mad with happiness. But the inlandsis, the icecaps, will melt. Oceans will rise seventy meters… That’s the worst case scenario, OK, but, unfortunately, the most probable, in the fullness of time.

How do we know this? Because it happened in the past. It’s like earthquakes in the eastern United States, or northern France; they have happened, up and above Richter 7 (50 times more powerful than the one of August 23, 2011), so they will happen again. Total melting happened, 100 million years ago. And now there is a reason for it to happen again. And very fast, as CO2 equivalent gases skyrocket.

Seas rising in a non linear fashion, as they already are, however discreetly, means billions of refugees. And heavy fighting for resources. And soon. In other words, massive war. Except if we find a technological way to avoid that, through a combination of CO2 capture and artificial icecaps (my latest crazy idea).

Eastern Antarctica is presently gathering snow because it has got warmer, and so it snows more on this driest of all deserts. Artificial glaciers have already been created in the Himalayas, to compensate increasing desertification. They provide people with water in summer, during the dry season. Storing water in glaciers will have to be expanded industrially, on real, and artificial mountains, many kilometers high. Why not a very high mountain range in Saudi Arabia? This is just a small example of the sort of tech we do not have, but we need, and right away. So pushing tech is useful. China just decided to launch a 20 year program for a liquid thorium reactor (cost at least 10 billion; France has also research programs in this area). What’s the Tea Party and its bipartisan president going to do? Brew tea?

On the way to these calmer shores, on the other side of the good will of a technological ocean, regimes hostile to democracy will have to be sunk. Or then they will have to lay really low, and make all sorts of provisional excuses, as China is learning to do.

Qaddafi had actually started a nuclear bomb program, with the help of Dr. Khan, the Pakistani renegade. Other Weapons of Mass Destruction are within the resources of most states (Libya had also tried the chemical avenue). So the states have to be forced to cooperate with democracy. I know Bush used that reasoning (which he did not invent), but that does not make it false. I also know that the notion of ingerence is not new. The philosopher Grotius talked about it (17C). More prosaically, Julius Caesar used it in his war in Gaul (he invaded to prevent the migration of a nation moving across to their fellows in the West as he disingenuously claimed it gravely disturbed other nations of Gaul; the pretext was false, but ultimately Gaul benefited from his bloody, monstrous invasion… because the Celtic theocracy was a not an optimal civilization, to put it mildly). The Romans used ingerence systematically. And it was not really a crime. After their initial ingerence, the Roman boot was very light. Plutocracy was a different problem, and it tended to fester locally… So many people will say that Rome died of corruption. but of course plutocracy is a corruption of civilization.

Nowadays, the right of ingerence has merged with the right to survival. An ongoing dictatorship in Syria is incompatible with a safe and sound Mediterranean. Some will say: what of Israel? Why don’t you want to invade that too? Well, it’s a different problem: Israel has a high democratic index (although not to the point of having a constitution, democratic or not! Yes, tellingly, there is no such a thing as an Israeli constitution, as the contradiction between Judaism and democracy could not be resolved!)

Israel does not treat the Palestinians according to the UN human rights charter, right, but it is not very clear what is its exact responsibility in that state of affairs, and how to remedy it without a global evolution of all mentalities concerned. The way to extinguish the Arabo-Israeli conflict is obviously through a Mediterranean Union, a southern extension of the European Union, doing for the Mediterranean what Europe has done for Europe, that is extinguishing obdurate hatred down to a manageable level. This can work if and only if all the regimes democratize first. If other states in the region democratize (and that means secularize), Israel will be forced to do the same (which would rather be ironical).

So what of Syria? Well, to each day its toil. In the end, triage has to be used: the worst offenders have to be eliminated first. At this point, as the Gaddafi clan crumbles, the next target is the Syrian dictatorship. However, the situation in Syria is not as bad as it had got in Libya (Qaddafi killed an order of magnitude more in 2011 before the Western intervention). So pressure there have to be increased, and last week’s Western sanctions have first to be generalized. Russia, in particular, has to be made to understand what it all means, and cooperate.

France won against the dictatorships in Ivory Coast and is winning in Libya, but approval by the United Nations was essential to both processes. The lack of unity among democracies is why, for several years, Hitler went from victory to victory.

Democracy is a war against the constant temptation of plutocracy: you know, that sort of temptation, spending one’s vacation among one’s fellow millionaires and billionaires, on one’s remote island, wasting median family income every few days, maddeningly claiming to be concerned by the “little guy”. 

In Ukraine the reigning president seems determined to break the past Prime minister. Yulia Tymoshenko is accused of “corruption or embezzlement of funds“. Representatives of international organizations, the European Union and the United States called this arrest a “political persecution of an opposition leader“.

There too, although no supersonic bombers need to be sent, force ought to be brought to bear, to insure human rights are respected. Using the justice system in the service of the basest instincts, is bad enough. When the justice system is targeted against people vested with popular authority, past or present, it is worse.

This was the major problem in the prosecution of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the official elected with the most representative votes in the world, as with the UN Secretary General, arrested at work, under diplomatic immunity in his plane, on unbelievable sexual charges, something one rather expects in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia (which used to be customary of this sort of legal persecution of the libidinous type, all the way to execution in some cases).

And what of Gandhi and its new age pop pacifism, in all this? Well Gandhi, a self declared admirer and friend of Hitler, as I have explained many times, was a complete fraud. Worse than that: he, indirectly, created Pakistan, and was the indirect cause of millions of dead.

Mandela, another British trained lawyer in South Africa (!), was not a fraud. Mandela used violence. And Mandela was right to do, because he had no better choice. In the end, Mandela got very few people killed, and the racist whites who jailed him also came to that conclusion, and they spoke to him, all the more since Mandela had learned Afrikaner in jail. Far from clinging to the identity of his origin, as Gandhi did, against the Muslims, Mandela crossed the cultural gap to his enemies. War is best fought in enemy territory, especially cultural war.

Only force can stop force. Sometimes physical force is opposed by pure mental force. But work is never about pushing one way, and pushing the other way, simultaneously. Only Obama seems to believe that. Force is never bipartisan, if it wants to go somewhere. To do work, force has to go somewhere. Too bad Obama did not study physics. It shows.

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Patrice Ayme

Forever War

BLACK HOLE IN AFGHANISTAN:

Obama spoke in his clipped style again, as if we were all on a nuclear submarine in combat, and our duty was clear. He is excellent at lofty rhetoric masking as little change as possible from one more disaster he seems to view as an acceptable status quo. That cool comfort with the unacceptable is the apparent trademark of his presidency. Some presidents fix disasters, others live with them. Hey, got the big jet to fly around, and I golf with whoever. Cool, no?

Bush II was the “decider” of thoroughly lamentable decisions, Clinton got rich by selling the country to plutocracy, Carter started the war in Afghanistan… much more of this, and soon Bush I and Reagan will appear to be leftist geniuses of probity and vision.

So let’s recapitulate: Obama claims that, by the end of 2012, he will have withdrawn from Afghanistan the troops he put in what he called the “surge”, as a good Bush parrot. However, he forgot to mention that he would have kept in the troops of the augmentation he put in, or rather the doubling of troops he put in, before his “surge”. How do you spell Pinochio?

The war in Afghanistan has lasted nearly ten years, making it the longest in the history of the USA (although the French and British records about waging a long war are not threatened for these nations, by a factor of at least 15…) Under Obama, the number of Western dead and casualties has nearly doubled. Many allies are in Afghanistan by solidarity with the USA, but their patience is getting thin. Canadians, for example, got huge losses in Afghanistan (as high as the USA in relative numbers). If the allies leave (as Canada may in 2011), the situation for the USA will get much worse.

When Obama got to the presidency, there were 34,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Now there are 101,000.

Obama is going to withdraw a token number of troops from Afghanistan, out of the 101,000. He speaks of 10,000 by year end. An equivalent number could resign from the official military, and get in the private military through the back door.

There are 90,000 private USA contractors in Afghanistan, in direct, or indirect military roles.  Outstanding contracts to the private army are 12 billion U.S. dollars. If one adds non USA NATO and non NATO troops, one gets around 250,000 invaders in Afghanistan, supposedly helping.  But actually barking incomprehensible orders, and you better obey them, if you are a native, because they will kill you with their huge weapons if you don’t, and feel good about their “duty” and “service”.

The number of professional Western killers “extraordinary men and women in uniform” (as Obama puts it) in Afghanistan went from 60,000 to around 250,000, under Obama’s exalted vision. Two years ago the official cost of the war in Afghanistan was 60 billion a year, now it is officially 120 billions, one billion every three days.  That does not count secret spending. And that is just for the USA. (All together just France, Britain, Italy and Germany have more than 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, hundreds have died.)

Sorry for crossing the words “professional killers“. What else are they doing there? According to official Pentagon statistics, HALF OF THE “EXTRAORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN IN UNIFORM” HAVE KILLED AN AFGHAN. Extraordinary, indeed. With allies like that, who needs death? Kill them all, Allah will recognize his own.

One should not confuse defending freedom, and defending fiefdom.

Afghanistan is the fief of the military industrial complex, and the electronics, advanced tech complex. Having a huge army in Afghanistan also profits the oil and gas industry, as armed forces of the West allows it to control Central Asia. It also allows to remind the Muslim Fundamentalists, otherwise employed by the West in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, who is really the boss, namely those who apply force for the heck of it in Afghanistan, just because they can.

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 AIDING AND ABETTING:

So what is the mission in Afghanistan? Assistance says Obama. Assistance of what? Assisting the Muslim fundamentalist regime in Kabul of the corrupt Karzai. Oh, yes, because the constitution of Afghanistan is all about the Qur’an. It is not a secular constitution, as, say, in Turkey (a constitutional, secular democratic republic). That turkey does not fly.

As David Brooks, a conservative editorialist at the NYT points out:”Discouraging reports about aid in Afghanistan should drive us to consider the deeper forces underlying societal instability. Hint: It’s not always about the material stuff.”

 Afghans hate the guts of the West. The fact that the constitution is Islamist makes it worse, encourages them to hate the secular, democratic West. Allah is neither secular, nor democratic.

Moreover the “aid” is not helping, because it short circuits the entire country, the people of Afghanistan, while making a show of helping them. Under the guise of efficiency, aid workers deal only with themselves. Thus, instead of helping Afghanistan, aid to Afghanistan is destroying Afghanistan.

A conference of experts at Wilton Park in Britain had to admit that there was a “surprisingly weak evidence base for the effectiveness of aid in promoting stabilization and security objectives” in Afghanistan.

Result: attacks of Afghan troops against Western coalition troops is at all time high. Yes Afghans in the Afghan military attack coalition troops supposed to help them, kill Western troops. As I already alluded to, the number of attacks and the dead they cause has never been higher.

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DEPREDATION OF WEST IN AFGHANISTAN WORSE THAN COLONIALISM?

Yes, one had to understand that the mission in Afghanistan is worse than colonialism. The private contracting and the aid are a metastatic cancer. The way they are done by the Crusaders (to use local semantics, unfortunately all too appropriate).

Old fashion “colonialism”, when it was most “successful” (say in India, Ceylon, Afrique Occidentale Francaise… Or for that matter British colonial America!) rested on having the natives themselves manage their own country. The colonial occupier gave only the general direction to the natives, who were empowered to do the job. This is not what is done in Afghanistan, let’s say it, once again.

Senegal was “conquered” with ten French officers, and 5,000 Senegalese soldiers. India was administered with as little as 1,500, and never more than 3,000, British civil servants (heading an immense government of hundreds of thousands of Indian civil servants).

It may be time to realize that the West and its allies are actively doing way worse than old fashion colonialism would ever do in Afghanistan. So what are we after? War for the sake of war? Behaving like crazed maniacs so everybody will leave us alone, because obviously the world is our oyster? Killing time by killing people?

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THE BLACK HOLE OF ETERNAL WAR:

Lunatics have proposed to limit the powers of Obama to wage war in Libya. But, mostly, the USA supports the logistics of the French and British in Libya (many French and British bombers are still not based forward, so they require huge air refueling; the French are planning to move their Rafale stealth bombers to Sicily, their Mirages are already in Crete; initially British Tornadoes, doing most of the British bombing, were based in Britain!) In Libya France and Britain fight a well defined dictator in their backyard, the situation is the same as when they got a United Nations mandate to intervene in Bosnia. (There too, the French had fired the first shots, although it pained the French military to attack their old allies the Serbs.)

Besides the oil and gas in Central Asia, and the implied threat on all regimes which would stop obeying the West, the USA is already engaged in an active war against Pakistan. Limiting Obama in Libya could lead to limit him in Pakistan.

Pakistan is another Islamist regime. With 200 thermonuclear warheads. Paid in part, those nukes, by terror specialist Bush! There Obama is not at fault, and he could argue that the Afghan war is now all about Pakistan. Although not at fault, it is not clear that his present strategy with Pakistan is the best (although it served Bin Laden), because it does not treat the fundamental problem.

The fundamental problem of Pakistan is its very reason for being in existence, is its Islamist constitution. Why do you need Al Qaeda, the base, when the basics of Islamism are already fundamentally the law? Say that a guy called Muhammad is a bunga bunga, and Pakistani judges in black robes will condemn you to death. When you add dozens of thermonuclear bombs to the mix, you get a country much more dangerous that Hitler’s Reich. Maybe we should talk about that aloud. Instead of sending robots to bomb them, as Obama, obeying the military industrial complexed, does unlawfully. 

So the Pakistani ISI surrendered Bin Laden to Obama. So what? A hamburger for the American eagle? Happy now? What about the nukes? This may all end with an eagle in every pot (Henri IV of France contented himself in 1600, with a hen in every pot).

The USA has fostered Islamism. Or rather rekindled it, starting with FDR, because it made it easier to extract oil and control, and cause trouble. Of course Islamism and modern weapons are a bad mix. So now the USA paradoxically supports Islamist regimes, while threatening or even fighting them.

Supporting what we combat is a recipe for eternal war. Of course that is the effect looked for by the afore mentioned suspects. The way those cynics see it, so much the better, because the forces of the West will stay at war, fully trained, with the best weapons, and a huge army in South Asia, on the doorstep of China, watching Russia from below.

Progressives should realize that Islam is a carefully entertained excuse in all this. Supporting the Islam which we combat under the label of “terrorism” is a recipe for eternal war. More exactly, supporting Islamist regimes is an evil contradiction for democratic secular states. That includes supporting Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, whatever the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends in the military are preparing in Egypt, etc.

Support cannot be withdrawn suddenly, of course, but a deliberate, official push should be made to de-Islamize ALL constitutions. And de-dictatorialize them. We are not in the 19C anymore. Their backyard is our backyard. Or rather, our potential battlefield next door. Think about it: our present world is basically the size of a naval battlefield of the early 20 C, considering the speed and capability of weapons today.

It would be wiser, and more peaceful, to battle ferociously with ideas, now, instead of waiting for bombs to explode, tomorrow.

Morocco, a country of 40 million,  is a striking example: the king, who has, in many ways more power than his dictatorial, blood covered dad, has introduced grandiloquently mostly cosmetic changes, leaving him still an absolute dictator, his son ready to lead in turn, when he reaches…18. France and the USA should not tolerate this, and order him to move apace towards a constitutional monarchy.

Now, of course, the plutocratic elements are interested to keep potential wars in reserve. So deeply rooted conflicts are carefully tendered and fostered. Just as with Hitler, democracies end up nourishing the enemy, proffering respects. The situation with China being is a case in point: what is the plan there? Make China, presently a dictatorship, so strong that it can go berserk about the South China Sea, Taiwan, or something else?

Time to go deep, and exit the Obama black hole of war more years. War guaranteed until 2014? When do we negotiate for real? Oh, I forgot, ending that war is not part of the true plan. With a bit of luck, the war will transmogrify some more…

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Patrice Ayme