Posts Tagged ‘France’

No Euro Crisis, No Debt Crisis.

April 9, 2013

No French Currency Crisis, Either. JUST PLUTOCRATIC DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.

American economists just discovered what the Euro is all about. Namely the Euro is the French currency. (Please applaud how much more clever they just got!). Professional economists could have known this long ago, if they did more than read each other. See my: Why Europe, Why The Euro.

French yields have improved dramatically. Why? It’s not just what American economists just learned that (Euro = France), because that was true ever since the European Currency Unit (more than 20 years ago).Yield Collapse In April Caused By Anti-Plutocratic Crack Down?

What has really occurred is that the cause of the present Greater Depression has been stumbled upon, for all to see. Moreover real remedies have started to be applied. (For the first time in this crisis that exploded in 2008.)

The French finance ministry took the lead in making plutocrats pay for their mess (at least in Cyprus; one has to start somewhere!). Good. But that was just a warm-up. Real reforms are now happening everyday.

And a miracle happened. Thanks to Jérôme Cahuzac, a bandit of plutocratic type who happened to be French budget minister, French and Swiss Justice are presently demonstrating how pervasive the plutocratic phenomenon and its entanglement with politicians and tax havens are. In the USA, of course, Jérôme would be just another wealthy politician, legal thoroughly, and cabinet minister. (See, Rice, Susan, for further edification; plutocracy is legal in the USA).

But France and Switzerland are supposed to be democracies, not plutocracies. The incoming consequences of discovering how huge tax evasion by the plutocracy is, are going to be huge. And are already showing up.

Indeed a corollary is that bond market participants know now that Europeans are going to realize that austerity is not just a sham, and a crime, but also a Transfer of Assets To Rich People (TARP!). The bond market understands that the collective consciousness is changing, and that real change on the way. For the better. Hence the collapse in yields.

In a society which does not revere plutocrats as “philanthropists” (as the USA pathetically does), austerity does not have a reason to be. Thus austerity ought to be discontinued, in Europe, the world’s largest economy. But austerity made the deficits worse. So, if tax evasion is mitigated, the economy can restart, and debt loads ought to stay manageable. Hence the bond rally in France. Now for some more details and perspectives.

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EURO = FRENCH INVENTION:

The Euro is, first of all, a French invention. President Mitterrand proposed to his good freund Kanzler Helmut Kohl to create the Euro, in a deal to support, in all ways, the reunification of Germany (including with French direct investment in East Germany).

Since the grotesque Second World War, all those who half think in Franco-Germania, decided that the one and only way to terminate the interminable, perfectly ridiculous Franco-German wars, was to reset the macropolitical clock back to 800 CE, when the Renovatio Imperium Romanorum extended from Catalonia to Poland. For about a millennium, there was just one currency in Europe. After that, there was war.
Paul Krugman in “France Has Its Own Currency Again” discovers the notion:

Joe Weisenthal draws our attention to a development that may surprise many people: French borrowing costs are plunging. (Don’t tell George Osborne — he thinks that low British rates are a unique personal achievement)…

But wait– wasn’t France supposed to be the next Italy, if not the next Greece?

Well, Joe has what I agree is the right explanation: markets have concluded that the ECB will not, cannot, let France run out of money; without France there is no euro left. So for France the ECB is unambiguously willing to play a proper lender of last resort function, providing liquidity.

And this means that in financial terms France has joined the club of advanced countries that have their own currencies and therefore can’t run out of money — a club all of whose members have very low borrowing costs, more or less independent of their debts and deficits.

Welcome to the club, France. Now, why are you doing all this austerity?”

[France is not doing that much austerity: she went into a full war in Mali, and the deficit is still going to be closer to 5% rather than 3%; that's less austere than the USA. Still, there is enormous waste in, and from, the French bureaucracy; a referendum to diminish the bureaucracy just failed in Alsace].

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WHY THE EURO IN A NUTSHELL:

So American economists, traders and speculators are suddenly realizing what was true all along, that the Euro is very much the French currency. Always has been.

Many Anglo-Saxon leaders are so much into the business of deriding anything French that they believe reality has an anti-French bias, in all things, except wine and cheese. Now that dear Paul Krugman and company self congratulate each other for having come across the obvious, so true for 30 years, let me point out that their slaps in the back do not explain the sudden drop in yields in April 2013.

Before I proceed to do that, let me re-iterate what I have long said.

The Euro is more than the French currency. The Euro is the Franco-German currency. Just like the French, the Germans, after May 1945, and even many of the Nazis themselves (for example Albert Speer) several years before that, came to understand that the only way to win a war against the other  was by total unification.

This is what makes the Euro not just unavoidable, but necessary. Once Franco-Germania (re-)unifies, a superpower is immediately created. Indeed, France and Germany, plus the crumbs in between (Benelux), represent more than 180 million people. To this one has to add other satellites: Northern Italy, Austria, Catalonia… Even Switzerland (Swiss Franc is, had to be, pegged to Euro). At this point, one talks about 250 million people, a power roughly comparable to the USA in most of the most significant long term characteristics, most of them living an average distance of 500 kilometers from Bale/Basel.

The fact the distances are so small is of the essence: one can drive through pieces of the largest of these countries with one car, in one day. The Euro is a driving necessity. Before I used to dread to travel from my Alpine home without the proper papers, currencies, etc. It’s as if I were in enemy territory within twenty minutes of setting behind the wheel. Now I am still at home around home, I am not fighting WWII all over again.

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SO WHY DID FRENCH YIELDS JUST COLLAPSE?

The yields were high because of two reasons:

1) speculators prefer high yields, so they made it so (remember that, thanks to unregulated and mostly secretive derivatives, they have tremendous leverage at their disposal).

2) some bond investors were genuinely afraid they would not get reimbursed by the governments they lent to. (Indeed, watch Stockton, California, file for bankruptcy; ah, not in Europe? Just a detail. Still a government of sorts.) High interest is a way to make sure they get their money back.

An indication of future inability of government to pay back is if said government has high debt and is running a primary deficit (mostly borrowing more to pay past debt). Most Western government ran high primary deficits after 2008, because they had to pay jobless people, and re-capitalize banks.

At least, that’s the conventional explanation. The truth is more subtle. in truth, banks were recapitalized with public money, instead of being recapitalized by finding the money that had apparently disappeared.

Take Cyprus: extravagantly high interest rates (5% to 9% were paid, for years, as world finance collapse). So a Russian Afghan drug runner having dropped his ill acquired wealth in the “Popular bank of Cyprus”, could have made 50% on his money in 5 years.

The way the crisis of 2008 was solved, French and German taxpayers should have saved his 50%. But this time the French and German finance ministers said NEIN. Instead the drug runner plutocrat was told to kiss “his” money bye bye. Next time he can go leave his money in Dubai. This was giant conceptual progress.

By the way, 96% of depositors in Cyprus’ banks recovered 100% of their saving (plus extravagant interests paid!). It’s only the fat cats who are being punished (and even then, mostly in 2 banks).

The old way to solve the financial corruption crisis was plutocratic, unfair, and just a way to extend the crisis, by going on with the transfer of capital from taxpayers (the poor) to the hyper wealthy (the plutocrats whining that their banks had gone bankrupt, because they just finished stealing them down to the last Dollar or Euro).

This is what I have been saying for years.

The old way just made the public deficits worse. “Austerity” was then introduced as a further boost for cutting money to the poor some more.

The “new” way adopted to solve the Cyprus crisis, make the plutocrats pay for the crisis they fabricated, instead of just augmenting the deficits some more (still the Europe gave 9 billion euros to Cyprus, augmenting public deficits by that much, and the IMF, one billion. So even USA taxpayer and beggars pitched in!)

There is nothing really “new” about this “new” way. Debtors going bankrupt were severely punished in the past. Now we are just going to forse them to regurgitate what they stole. Hopefully.

If plutocrats are going to regurgitate a bit, why not go the whole way? Then, it turns out, the deficits would completely disappear. Tax evasion to tax havens in the European Union is evaluated at more than a trillion euros. About half of the yearly budget of the USA.

Hence the following evidence, pointed out today by L’Humanite’, the Communist newspaper: austerity does not have to be. It would be enough to strike the tax evading plutocrats with austerity, as I have been claiming all along.

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THANK YOU Jérôme:

That’s why we all have to say thanks to Jérôme the bandit. You see Jérôme, was not just a successful plastic surgeon. Part of his business development involved not just having, with his wife, also a surgeon, a private clinic. No. Jérôme became a “socialist”, just like many wealthy people become “democrats” in the USA. You know, the sort of people the president sleeps in with, in the Silicon Valley (Silly Cone?).

As an MD, Jérôme was a natural big negotiator of health stuff with rich health care providers such as Novartis. Thus the bright, towering, energetic and good looking Jérôme was naturally part of the “socialist’ government in the 1980s. he negotiated many things with the likes of Novartis.

Under the table. Under Swiss tables, more exactly. That’s why, as baking secrecy was threatened in Switzerland in 2009, Jérôme tried to get a number of Swiss banks to transfer 15 million euros from Suisse towards the safer tax haven of Singapore. That was not easy, because the banks noticed he was a Member of the French Parliament. Jérôme had to falsify a finance ministry document.

Under Hollande, Jérôme became budget minister, making a giant noise on how he was going to find and punish those who engaged in fiscal evasion. Ironically, the full and enthusiastic cooperation of prosecutors in Geneva brought his case to light, with the amplification of the French Internet magazine “Mediapart“.

Now French Justice has charged Jérôme with “blanchiment de fraude fiscale” (laundering of fiscal fraud”).

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So let me repeat slowly: the reason for austerity is out. It turns out that French finances are actually excellent. And the finances of many other European countries are also excellent. This is why the yields are collapsing in France.

What has just been revealed to the masses is that the debt crisis was mostly about the hyper rich splurging with other people’s austerity. Make the hyper wealthy fraudsters regurgitate their stolen goods, and deficits disappear.

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Patrice Ayme

Mali: USA Ought To Fuel France

January 20, 2013

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

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
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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

Google Slave Master?

October 20, 2012

I disagreed strongly with G.W. Bush’s lies and folly in Iraq. Presto, my web site disappeared from USA search engines. I was ridiculed by Silicon Alley “friends”: information wants to be free, search engines were beyond any suspicion, did not care about ants such as me. Fast forward to 2012: Google hissed it will be “constrained” to “no longer reference French websites“. Admire the hypocrisy. So much for not manipulating searches. Here is the object of Google’s ire:

Google Slaying French Culture Minister: Brains & Style.

Aurélie Filippetti ministers to advanced culture.

“I’m a little surprised by the tone of this correspondence, which is akin to a threat. You do not deal with a democratically elected government through threats.” Warns the French Culture Minister.

What do Google guys know about democracy?

Aurélie Filippetti has (basically) a PhD in classical literature, published books translated in many languages, is  a Member of Parliament, and France’s Culture Minister. In France the culture ministry is traditionally very important. It covers, among others, the information technology ministry. Filippetti, the daughter of an emigrant miner, belongs to a class vastly superior to the mostly uneducated, unelected Silicon Valley filthy rich conspirators.

French newspaper publishers asked the government in September for a bill compelling search engines, to pay them each time a user reads an article by clicking through to their websites.

Let’s go the crux of the matter: Google makes money out of clicks (from advertizing revenue). Click to what? Authors. Are these authors Google employees? No, Google does not pay those authors. So Google is making profits from the work of others that it does not pay for.

Google makes money by using other people’s work, without compensation. When an owner does not pay people for the work that makes him rich, it’s slavery. It’s the first order definition of slavery.

Europe has seen that movie before. More than 1,000 years ago. Bathilde queen of the Franks, herself an ex-escaped slave, outlawed making a slave (“servus“) of any citizen of the Imperium Francorum (to be rebaptized 150 years later the “Renovated Roman Empire”).

Nevertheless, in the following centuries, many a freeman came “to be a slave” (“servire“) through force or necessity. Sometimes freeholders or allodial owners were intimidated into dependency by the greater physical or legal force of a local plutocrat or magnate. Crop failure, a war or brigandage left a farmer unable to survive on his own. A bargain was struck with a plutocrat, or mighty knight (lord of a manor, to pay for the very expensive weapons and training).

In exchange for protection from the knight, service was required, in cash, produce or with labor, or a combination thereof. These bargains were formalized in a ceremony known as “bondage” in which a serf placed his head in the lord’s hands, similar to the ceremony of homage where a vassal placed his hands between those of his overlord (or kissed his boot). Such people came to be known as “serfs”. “Serf” was a modification of the Latin word for slave, just like the condition of bondage was different, but also viewed as related to slavery. Being a serf was hereditary, but could be exited by staying away thirty days (during which time the lord could hunt down his recalcitrant serf).

England was about 20% slaves until 1066 CE, when the conquering Franks outlawed slavery.

The key enabling concept here is intimidation. Very rich persons intimidated the population into plutocracy. Very rich people, or great plutocratic institutions, had attributed themselves, without any constitutional basis, illegitimate powers, through the sheer power of intimidation. An unintimidated serf who fled to a city, taking the law in his own hands, was thereafter free.

Finally, central governments, unintimidated, grabbed back those illegitimate powers. It took a while, and the central government had to play dirty: Philippe IV Le Bel broke both the Templars and the Papacy shortly after 1300 CE, but it’s only with the mighty efforts of Louis XI and his daughter, the regent queen Anne de France, that France got definitively united as a country under an effective, all mighty national government, shortly before the official discovery of the Americas. (Thus inaugurating the archtypical modern nation-state.)

Google’s slave masters, apparently unaware of 30 centuries of rather ferocious history, are trying to intimidate the French Republic into submission. Not knowing, from full ignorance of the great classics, that few passions give more pleasure to the French and their Gallic ancestors than to put a shining armor on, condemn, and charge evil doers.

Here is a friend of mine, the USA born Amna Shiekh, giving us what all too many in Wall Street admiring circles will consider to be the obvious argument:

“The difference between these French people who are crying thievery and myself – I am GRATEFUL that Google provides a service allowing my websites to be found through keywords…. At no cost to me. My websites would have no chance of being found otherwise. There is a service being provided here. And if you don’t want to contribute to it, then don’t cry when it’s taken away? Very simple!”

Patrice Ayme: “Me me me me me me me me me, or, as Mick Jagger would have it in Gloom & Doom: meeeeeeeeeee is, indeed, the best explanation most people have found, under most circumstances. A generalization of me me me me me me, is us us us us us, also known as nationalism. Being GRATEFUL to the Lords is also most wise, for the commoners, and those who, like worms, like to burrow underground. Slave masters were, are, also providing a service, they always have been, always do. Many love to be punished, it makes them feel important.

Around 1800 CE, it has been evaluated that three quarters of humankind lived in some form of slavery.

The ubiquitousness of slavery explains much of the submitted, and impoverished state, most of the world was in, until recently. (By comparison the French Revolution of 1789 made most French allodial owners, that is, supreme sovereigns on their land… which is still not the case in Great Britain (all land is the Crown’s, all Brits are…vassals)… nor in the USA (“eminent domain” being rather relaxed there)).

Nobody is advocating doing without search engines. They existed well before Google. (And, besides having Sequoia Capital and their associates backing up Google, I do not see what Google brought to search that did not exist before). Because searches are manipulated, search engines are a matter of national security. The fact that an obviously plutocratic organization has achieved a world monopoly on searches is obviously a worry for democracy.

When Francia outlawed slavery, in 655 CE, it was to make the median individual more potent. Not because it was easy, but because it short-circuited plutocracy, the accumulation of ever greater wealth, be it through unfair means (Google, Buffet), or even by any means (hence the Frankish Salian law equalitarianism, preventing the growth of extreme power for the few).

Outlawing slavery reconstituted the mood and power of the early Roman republic, and allowed to rise huge republican armies when the so far undefeated Arab and Berber armies invaded France in 721 CE.

In democracy, humanity in full is in power. That makes democracy, all else been equal, the mightiest social organization in brains and war.

Plutocracy says only an oligarchy of individuals, emotions and ideas are in power. It’s a form of mutilation, parasitism, a malaria of the mind.

Humanity in full is more powerful, and that is why the Franks were able to break the “Germani”, the Arab Muslim invaders (721 CE-750 CE), the Avars, the Vikings, and, with their descendant regimes (such as England, or Spain)  conquer much of the world militarily, and all of it, philosophically (at least formally: even Al Assad leads a “republic”). Nowadays the main Frankish philosophical drive is basically the United Nations Charter. Outlawing slavery is its core.

Slavery is why the management of Greco-Roman civilization by the Greco-Romans failed, and why management transferred to the Franks, and their simple idea of synchronizing polity and humanity, by outlawing it.  (In other words, on a giant civilizational scale, what Obama failed to do on his teeny tiny scale, as he left the slavery inducing Wall Street of 2008 in power, throughout his fateful reign, and its symbols are Summers and Geithner… but I digress, although reckoning is at hand…)   

Amna Shiekh: “Yes, I do think the French who agree with you are crying me me me me me me me – though I don’t think it’s very effective. Maybe when we were five years old this tactic worked quite well….your slave master analogy doesn’t work either. Google isn’t providing a necessary means to live (food, shelter, safety, etc.) that forces me to agree with them…they are not offering something I cannot easily refuse….in other words, your analogy fails.”

Patrice Ayme: Living without the Internet (and its searches) is becoming increasingly impossible. So Google provides with a necessary service.

Google does not pay the people they use to make money, for their work. That’s the definition of slavery. You point out that you profit. Some, no doubt, profit. From slavery some always profited, otherwise slavery would not have come to be. In Rome, some companies specialized in catching escaped slaves, and others in torturing, or executing slaves. Such companies no doubt cried a river when the Franks made their work unlawful. It’s not because you can easily refuse to partake in murder, than murder should not be illegal.

Google whined that their business model was threatened with extinction if France went on with making them pay taxes. Well, too bad. If Google charged for air, and refused to pay taxes, it should be driven out of business too.  

French newspaper publishers asked the French government to intervene against Google in September. Newspapers, journalists, editorialists create ideas (hopefully).

But, fundamentally, Google creates… nothing independently of that substrate of ideas it helps search for, but did not create. (I know Google goes around with cars, taking pictures; but so doing is not creating ideas; if Google did not do it, volunteers certainly would do so, it’s very easy with modern technology.)

This is the general problem with the world economy right now: many manipulators have seized command, when they create nothing fundamental. They are like the Duchess of Cambridge, the Duchesse of Hypocrisy, going around, busy making their celebrity and parasitism fundamental, thanks to their symbiosis with a perverted established order of damnation, dragging not just civilization, but the entire biosphere, into oblivion.

Google leaders should have realized that, by being the world’s largest search engine, they had a moral duty, a fiduciary position, and it was only cautious corporate governance, to behave as an exemplary corporate world citizen. When Google threatened to boycott all and any French sites, it showed, not just its ugly nature, but the fact that it imagines itself as a dangerous, all powerful monopoly. Of course, it will become something of this sort, only if the French Republic let it do as it pleases (we do not expect anything from the White House, for the usual reasons, re-hashed by the end of this essay!). If France can bring down the crafty homicidal maniac Kadafi, its enormous army and secret services, plus connection with USA oil companies, she can cut Google down to size.

In 1936, Hitler decided to kill the Spanish republic, and the Nazi dictator carried by air the rebel Spanish Moroccan army (led by rogue general Franco) into Spain. He did this, thanks to oil from Texaco, a Texas based oil company (the fact were later determined by the Congress of the USA, Texaco got a symbolic fine, so they are a matter of official USA history).

By the way, this explains why the French Front Populaire, then in power, and led by Prime Minister Leon Blum, a Jew, was leery to intervene massively in Spain. Blum knew very well that plutocrats from the USA and their evil corporations were the enablers of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and that the French and Spanish Republics were under systematic attack by the united forces of plutocracy. (And that war is still going on, with different puppets, Karzai one of them… But the strings pulled from the same establishment and mood. A case in point being Harvard, still central now, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, making Nazi songs really inspiring.)

Nowadays, this sort of things ought to be meditated more carefully than ever: Hitler pretty much became all he could be, from the help of co-investing plutocratic corporations of the USA. To this day, IBM got away with graciously leasing to all Nazi extermination camps computers, servicing them everyday. The entire Shoah was driven by up to 10,000 computers managed directly by IBM New York, through Geneva. And that is just one case out of many crucial aids to Naziland.

Nowadays, as I said, three quarters of world finance is just the largest mafia the world has ever known. That Google thinks it can get giant profits from the sweat of real mental creators, without any compensation to them whatsoever is typical of the plutocratic mentality, namely everything for a few, in exchange for nothing, but insults.

Some will object that evil obsessed companies such as Google, or Apple made the success of the USA. Indeed: both companies have nearly a trillion dollars of market capitalization, more than the GDP of most countries. (I own a Mc Air, which works very nicely with its solid state drive; Steve Jobs honestly admitted that his company pretty much stole everybody in sight). OK. Fair enough: Apple is a technology integrator (by contrast with a real creator such as Intel). However, the real inventors have got to be rewarded. Neither Apple, nor Google are fundamental innovators (as, say, Intel, or the recent Nobel Laureates in physics and biology are). They are just playing some on TV.

A notorious case, long ago, was the neon tube: the real inventors were not rewarded. The fact that they were French is no excuse: by not rewarding real inventors, one discourages new and future real innovators.

Are vultures evil, do we need them in the real economy?  The sixth point of the 10-point corporate philosophy of Google says “You can make money without doing evil.” So why being evil then? To make much more money than society can sustain?

There are two more bones of contention between Google and the French republic: Google’s confidentiality policy, which the French governmental institution Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) considers violate French and European law. Basically Google buys and sells people’s lives, another way it behaves like a slave master.

When confronted to France, USA plutophiles generally scoff and evoke cheese eating surrender monkeys (exhibiting their ignorance of military history). However France is building the European Union as a French Republic amplification machine (Germany works best when getting orders from above).

In this particular case, organizations similar to CNIL in 29 other European countries (that’s more than half a billion citizens) have mandated the French CNIL to look into Google’s confidentiality policies.

The CNIL found that Google behavior MUST be modified (“doit etre modifie’”). The CNIL found that the selling and “finalities” of personal data could not be justified on security or legitimate Google grounds, or contract, or people’s consent. The Asia Pacific Privacy Authority and Canada are also supporting the CNIL. In other words, France is transmogrifying into the hard point of a worldwide Google modification effort. No wonder silicon minds are freaking out.

And not least: Google pays no tax on all the money it earns from French based companies.

As Sarkozy, the fired French president, not exactly a socialist, pointed out about Google:“It is not permissible that they realize a turnover of several billion euros in France without contributing to tax”.

Silicon dark alley types such as the young Google zillionaires and the old venture capital foxes behind them are not educated in the classical way. The human side of the economy escapes them totally, that’s how they made it. And they have this in common with crocodiles.

But how hard is it to understand? If you make billions in France, you have to pay tax in France. And yes, that could mean billions in taxes. And if you keep on not understanding this, the Republic will use force against you, it is as simple as that. Evil uses force, and only a greater force can dispose of evil.

And what evil is that? It’s not just Google’s hypocrisy shows with its slogan: Don’t be evil (We are in charge of that!), and its worldwide machinations, its tax avoidance. Google can fix all these things overnight. 

The problem is much larger, much older, than that. Why does the government of the USA close its collective eyes on this sort of behavior? Why is it that it is the French Republic which has to set straight an American corporation?

As Google’s anti-democratic threat makes pretty obvious, the same sort of plutocracy of the USA which, 80 years ago, was all fired up, and ready to help impose Adolf Hitler onto the world, is still viewed as an asset by Washington. Only the naive would believe that companies such as those which helped Hitler got away with so much, for so long, operated without a particularly Dark Will of a political nature behind them. The same will is still here, 80 years after its Hitlerian triumph. Generations pass away, systems of thought perdure.

Will is a mighty thing, especially when it’s all about grabbing territory. It’s fascinating to see Rome, rendered completely senile by centuries of plutocracy, still rabid about conquering the world, when it had lost all power to do so, in the Third Century. That’s when Rome made several full invasion of Mesopotamia, all the way to the Persian Gulf, and into North West Iran, all the way to the Caspian Sea. A full century after emperor Valerian had been captured (treacherously, during peace talks), his army destroyed, Julian (the emperor elected in and by Paris) was killed in Mesopotamia (with catastrophic consequences).

(Shades of Hitler moving decisively ghost armies around Berlin in April 1945.) The immense riches that people who are nothing (such as the pseudo “founders” of Google, Brin and Page), just because their company pays no taxes, is symptomatic of a system that uses corporations for building an empire, the way Rome used Christianity to expand further than its sword could reach.

So the will to let rogue corporations of the USA conduct their own foreign policy and exploitation of the world is still here, as it was in the 1920 s and 1930s, building up Nazism.

All the more as that method, to use criminal businessmen to leverage even greater criminality was extremely successful in connection with the Nazi adventure, and the Stalin venture, with its near fatal weakening of Europe, and the Muslim Fundamentalist venture, with its resource procurement, etc.

Thanks to the rogue corporation strategy, the USA went from a provincial power (a bit like Australia nowadays) to the world superpower, within a few years. No wonder the rogue corporation models keeps on being applied. All the way to Afghanistan…

A militarized plutocratic Rome kept on invading Mesopotamia, for two centuries, when it was not civilized enough, not republican, nor democratic enough, to cling to it. In a similar fashion, the USA has not comprehended that other nations and peoples are starting to understand exactly what’s going on. Obama’s soporific Cairo speech hypocritically celebrating Islam had a short shelf life.

While I get accused of metastatic conspiracy theorizing, let me smile through an article in a major Arabic newspaper, which “reveals” in depth one of my preferred obsession, and allegation, namely the entanglement between dark operators in Washington, and the worst Muslim Fundamentalism.

As I have explained over the years, that entanglement of evil dates all the way back to Adolf Hitler and its minions, and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what the article observes. Hopefully I will write something on this, while Obama and his Machiavellian sycophants cruise to their well deserved doom and gloom.

Tell the truth long enough, and sometimes it ends up setting evil on fire!

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Why the servus of the Romans came to be called “slaves”? Simple: it was illegal to enslave Franks (by 600 CE everybody was a “Frank”, and by 700 CE, they came to be called “Europeans”). But it was not illegal to enslave Slavs… Charlemagne let the Venitian Republic, a sort of subsidiary of the Renovated Roman Empire, engage, with her mighty fleet, in a prodigious slave trading to the Muslim empire of the Southern Mediterranean.

Independence From What?

July 4, 2012

INDEPENDENCE FROM THE TRIBAL INSTINCT WOULD BE A GOOD THING!

***

July 4th, anniversary of the Declaration Of Independence of the USA from the UK in 1776. Much change then, a slow sinking now. Deep thinking would be the way out, but that would require some effort.

Some deplore that the trust in the political system is gone. But that the trust is gone is actually a good thing. We cannot trust a system where a few lead hundreds of millions, if not billions. It was bound to lead to disaster. It did. And what we have seen so far is small potatoes. The best is yet to come. I am watching Actic ice everyday. Still tracking lower than the previous lowest.

Even if and when the few leaders come from the People, and especially if they come from the People, one should not trust. Because the less power where they come from, the greedier they are, and thus, the more eager to be bought. Watch Clinton, Bill: obviously in need of wider recognition always, as those who started so small, they feel small always, and so need to pile up the hundreds of millions, just to feel OK about themselves.

Within two weeks of the lifting of his presidential immunity, an armada of police, bailiffs and no less than three judges, descended on three places of residence and work of Nicholas Sarkozy. A good thing. Whereas Obama begs the hyper wealthy for money in full sight of the uncomprehending American people, it would be impossible anywhere else.

In France financing by the hyper wealthy under the table is frowned upon by the law. Judges suspect that Sarkozy got, under the table, what Obama gets in two hours every time he shows up in the mansions of Silicon Valley, to sit at the tables for all to see, and sleep in all beds… As long as the owner of the mansion forks the money, and brings all her, or his friends, and all these fork the money, too.

Two thousand years ago, any grouping of a few thousands Germans got enraged when someone would proclaim himself a king. Now people venerate a handfull who talk as if they could do all the thinking by themselves, and better, than billions.

Hence we are facing in the American (or French) revolution the reality of a vastly incomplete revolution: Athens, at her apex, had direct democracy (OK, no women, no slaves…). We don’t. Even the Roman republic, in spite of its mixed system, was more directly democratic than we presently are (this is not a poetic opinion: it can be quantified, according to how many people were represented by whom, how, and how long…)

Still, after 5 centuries, the Roman republic fell, to be replaced by the Roman plutocracy (aka ‘the empire”, or “Principate” as Augustus preferred to say…)

We have democratic institutions to help, true (such as a humanized, republicanized, and constitutionalized army). And these democratic institutions, missing in Athens, do, indeed, help. But they are not enough. Actually, it’s good to remember that these institutions started in Rome, with a very efficient administration, but that, once again, they were not enough.

The incapacity to stop the devastation of the biosphere, or the devastation caused by the rampaging financial sector, are proof enough that Pluto is taking over.

How bad is it? Very bad. We are experiencing a Greater Depression. Only appearances are doing better than in the 1930s, but some of the most important statistics are worse. See: Greater Depression.

The Greater Depression in Europe is so severe that the birth rate is severely collapsing. As a French thinker put it in the 19C: ‘demography is destiny’.

Therein the American Declaration Of Independence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Well, as it turned out, the frontier was soon extended to the ocean, and the “merciless Indian Savages” are now probably destroying the sea, with all its ages, genders, conditions…

This snippet of the declaration of independence is deeply disturbing, because it exhibits colossal insensitivity to Peoples who were just trying to survive to the destruction of their own world, while outrageously turning the tables on them, by claiming that they were undistinguished destroyers (while presumably the authors of the declaration were the distinguished destroyers). After all, it is cities such as Boston which paid money for scalps. A pattern was set in stone: accuse them of what you do, and call them savages. That mood has been much amplified today.

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was just a rebellion, not a Revolution. The Revolution, that is the new Constitution of the republic, was established in 1789, within months of its French equivalent (that was to establish a constitutional monarchy headed by that great revolutionary, Louis XVI). The French constitution gave the right of vote to all (men), and outlawed slavery. it went further than anything Antiquity had known. Not so clearly in the American one (which refused the right of vote to individuals without enough property, contrarily to Rome).

It is only from the astounding agitation, encouragement, and giant financial and military support of Louis XVI that the American rebellion succeeded. Otherwise, the USA would have been the southern extension of Canada… That would have had advantages: France and Britain would have stayed masters of the planet (together, as it was, they defeated both China and Russia in the 19C).

Fascism, Prussian style, with its racist component would not have had a chance to rise in a world dominated by France and Britain (be it only because the Rothschilds had a firm grip on both sides, let alone Germany, ha ha ha). There would have been no “French revolutionary” and “Napoleonic” wars. No WWI, no Auschwitz (as the enormous resources of UK + Canadized USA +France + Louisiana would have crushed fascism outright. A non racist Austro-Hungary would have been an example of multi-national state, etc…

The British Parliament narrowly approved the expulsion of France out of Canada, although at the time many in the Parliament screamed to high heavens that was a terrible mistake, that would lead to the creation of the USA. Indeed France quickly returned the favor with the creation of the USA. So now what? Everybody should urgently recap the foundations of civilization…

Civilization is not founded on the market as some of the deranged economists whose thoughts presently reign have tried to make us believe. Watch Obama setting up free market exchanges to solve the health care problem, as if it were the job of markets to care about care! But Obama learned by rote that markets solve all, so he has now profit for solving care. What’s next? Selling babies to those who pay more, because that’s got to mean that, since they profit more, they care more?

Civilization is not just founded on the free market profit motive. Look at the Higgs particle, the discovery of which was announced today in Geneva, at CERN.

CERN was founded, and persists, as one of these typically French gigantic state institutions to foster human understanding with lots of taxes. CERN the Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire has been a gigantic success, discovering a lot of new science, while establishing new technology.

The free market does not do it all! Brains are deeper!

The idea of such democratic institutions, as I said, directly spring from a mood inherited from Rome. But a difference is that Rome did not do research. Rome knew one had to have a society motivated by more than the profit motive. The republican and democratic motives were viewed as more important, and that is why Rome set a powerful army and administration.

But Rome had forgotten curiosity and to institutionalize the Will to Knowledge. Europe did not. There is only so much tribalism can do.

***

Patrice Ayme

Sarko In Sarcophagi!

May 5, 2012

ONE PLUTOPHILE DOWN? MORE TO GO!

***

Abstract: Hysteria against French socialism by plutophiles is exposed. The last, and by far most important section of the essay, shows that an economy rests on three superposed turtles. But the mightiest one, the only fundamental one, is the state. A state without a free market is a choice, a free market without a state is no choice. A free market has laws, and that means a state. Therein the error of Europe.  

***

HOLLANDE: FROM HOLLAND, THE ECONOMIST, FROM PINOCHET:

The French presidential election’s last stage is a confrontation between the plutophile Sarkozy and Mr. Hollande, for eleven years the head of the Socialist party, MP, mayor, and president of a region (the equivalent of an American state). The magazine The Economist got hysterical about the prospect of Hollande leading France, calling him “rather dangerous“. (The “rather” being added to sound British, somewhat detached, above the fray, a cover-up for hysteria.)

Verily, The Economist, like Milton Friedman, used to love Pinochet. That was not “rather criminal”, but definitively criminal. I have never dug up their utterances in Hitler’s times, but I am sure unsurprising surprises lay thereabout.

A lot of the British upper class, up to 1936, was pro-Hitler. After signing a shameful military-economic treaty with the Nazis in 1935, and, after seeing Hitler and Mussolini attack the Spanish republic, propelled by Texas oil, equipped by American plutocrats, Britain operated a U-turn (rather than having to operate U-boats later). If The Economist supported the business side then, it would have supported Mr. Hitler.

Many were afraid, including yours truly, that Mr. Hollande would be rather boring, but, apparently he can defend himself. I hope he bites Obama next week, or, at least signify to him haughtily that he was just elected on a clear mandate: get out of Afghanistan’s Islamist state.

One of Hollande’s dangerous suggestions is to foster the European Investment Bank (a PUBLIC bank, twice the size of the World Bank). The EIB can leverage itself enormously, to build infrastructure (and may have much more impact, that way, than, say, Citigroup, which 7 times the assets.)

Verily, what could be more dangerous than to make normal banking plutocrats irrelevant?

A London banker confided to me that bankers don’t lend to normal people and companies anymore. No need. Profits are with non society directed activities (as provided by Quantitative Easing and hedge funds). I asked him: why then banks should not be nationalized? He told me that, indeed, nationalization is what should be done, if one wanted to return to a normal economy.

Meanwhile The Economist claims that: “The Socialist who is likely to be the next French president would be bad for his country and Europe.” And why is that? The Economist presents a jumble of facts disconnected from sense:

“FRANCE IS half of the Franco-German motor that drives the European Union. It has been the swing country in the euro crisis, poised between a prudent north and spendthrift south, and between creditors and debtors. And it is big. If France were the next euro-zone country to get into trouble, the single currency’s very survival would be in doubt.”

And a jumble disconnected from plausible emotions. Imagining the anti-European plutophiles at The Economist waking up in the middle of the night screaming about the Euro, would not happen because they worry about its survival, but because they worry that the euro has swallowed the pound. As it will, someday.

I personally want France to DEFAULT on her debt. Actually I want all states to default, because the present financial system  is a gangrene, and like all good gangrenes, it has to be amputated.

(The financial transaction tax Hollande wants to implement would go a long way towards destroying much of the financial gangrene.) See:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/to-save-the-world-please-default/

However, I am fanatically pro-European, and I think deeper in socio-economic matters than The Economist. In truth the busy propagandists at The Economist know very well that the banking crisis has nothing to do with the principle of a single currency, but everything to do with the fact it was conceived as a SLAVE TO PLUTOCRACY.

Accusing the principle of a single currency, the euro, is a classical case of blaming the victim. But the economists at The Economist won’t say: their salaries depend upon not saying that.

In general, Western democracy is under attack from the fact the Western socio-economy has been made slave to plutocracy… Just as happened when the Roman republic got in trouble. Rome failed because the socialist policies proposed by the Gracchi were not adopted. The plutocrats killed the Gracchi and their supporters. Thousands of them.

Mr. Hollande is a chance to start the arduous task of extirpating the plutocratic gangrene. OK, Obama talked change too. But Obama’s change was about “change you can believe”. Indeed: none. Hollande proposes:”Le changement, c’est maintenant.” (“Change Now”.)  Hollande has 60 specific proposals, and several of the early ones are definitively anti-plutocratic.

Whereas Obama became quickly an extremely rich man, even before he wrote his first book, a typical “golden boy” story (or should I say black boy?), Hollande, seven years Obama’s senior, is no millionaire. Hollande has what he earned from salary, and not from fabulous book advances, American pre-payment style… The mark of huge money, very young, from nowhere, that’s the mark of Pluto. It’s all over those around Sarkozy (like his immensely rich and New York influential brother; I wonder if it has anything to do with a Sofitel hotel in New York…)

Hollande was a student at top rated ENA (where one enters only through a competitive examination, not through “legacy“, that means plutocracy, as one does at Harvard, this parody of an academic institution).

The Economist: “one thing seems certain: a French president [Hollande] so hostile to change would undermine Europe’s willingness to pursue the painful reforms it must eventually embrace for the euro to survive. That makes him a rather dangerous man.”

What seems certain to the crocodile, does not have to be so, for higher forms. The sort of euro that The Economist wants to survive, the plutocrats’euro, is the sort democrats ought to discontinue.

***

HOLLANDE CHANGE, SARKOZY, PLUTOCRACY:

Contrarily to what The Economist asserts, vague familiarity with the candidates’ programs shows that it is Sarkozy who wants to change nothing. And that it is Hollande, who proposes change. So the entire analysis of The Economist is built on a false premise. And why Sarko, a weak mind, belongs to his sarcophagi.

To this, a reader from Brazil, Felipe Coelho replied to Tyranosopher May 5th:

“Yes, Sarko did not change anything, breaking his electoral promises of leading France out of the State Capitalism model and releasing the energies of her society. Almost certainly Hollande can do a better job, even tiny steps will be better than nothing.

The problem is that both French Right and French Left love State Capitalism, for distinct reasons. In Brazil we have the same sort of consensus, selling Petrobras (the largest oil company) or Banco do Brazil (the largest bank), selling railways, ports or airports, ending the gigantic bureaucracy, all this is unthinkable. Instead of Louis XIV and Napoleon one has here the heritage of the State monopolies of the House of Avis XV century kings. The consequence for Brazil is the same, our growth during the last decade was ridiculous, equal to the average of Latin America. Brazil is the eternal country of the future. Cardoso made slight changes in that consensus and sold some mining, telephonic and electrical companies, but Lula did not dare/wish doing anything like that. Perhaps Hollande will, forced by circumstances, be more akin to Cardoso than to Lula. Let’s hope!”

My answer: Brazilian growth has actually been excellent. After going up by 50% in 15 years before 2006, it seems to be averaging 5% a year since. The first problem with Louis XIV and Napoleon, is that they were tyrants. (True they used French economic power, until they ruined it, but that’s besides the point.)  

Brazil has been mimicking not brainless, let’s throw money at the rabble, Keynesianism, but deliberate, let government intervene in free market, Colbertism. (China does the same.) See:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/colbert-good-keynes-not-so-smart/

More recently, Merkel practiced a sophisticated form of Colbertism. See:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/welfare-state-fares-well/

***

AN ECONOMY RESTS ON STATE, & FORCE; MONEY IS A LUXURY:

I do not believe that Sarkozy loves state capitalism. And the love of France for state capitalism is much exaggerated as an exclusively French passion. For example the French Post office is privatized, not so the American one.

In the USA many giant “private” companies are little more than wards of the state. Northrop is an example: it was able to sell subsonic bombers at two billion dollars apiece. Yes, two billions. Yes, subsonic: easy to catch. OK, they call those bombers ”stealth“: a marketing ploy. All combat aircraft are “stealth“. The truth is that the Northrop B2 was a subsidy program.

Same for the Raptor, F22, at 200 million dollars apiece: it was never engaged in combat. Not once in ten years. It can’t take the rain, or something. One was shot down by an old French Mirage, in mock combat. More humiliating than that, hard to do, and a question: how come the tremendous waste of taxpayer money? Is not the same done again with the F35? On an even larger scale?

Many of the private companies trying to make money out of space access, are heavily subsidized.

The entire “private” healthcare industry is ward of the state. At least half of its business is with the state (most with Medicare).

Sarkozy’s failure was trickle down economy. Be nice to the rich, the rich shall reward you well, say the naive, and they twitch.

Now Sarkozy insists that it was a “lie” and a “calumny” to say that it’s all what his policy amounted to. Not satisfied with the previous invectives, he called Hollande a “little calumniator” for suggesting as much.

The way I look at it:

1) the “free” market, private capitalism, is a playground set, regulated, protected by the state. It furthers economic activity by exciting the profit motive (having more than the other guy).

If the hormonal situation is such that having more is dwarfed by other motives, the free market is irrelevant. This is what happens in case of very serious, invasive, war. Brazil, to my knowledge, just as the USA, has never known such a war.

France, per her location at the crossroads of three major trade routes, in the middle of Western Europe, has known many such invasions. Even before the Huns, monstrously crushed in 451 CE. The invasions have modified the national character. When French children learn French history, they learn that, the state is not just the lender, but the savior of last resort.

2) State capitalism insures the safety of the state. It was always strong in France, following the greatest Roman tradition. The argument can easily be made that, because of a plutocratically induced collapse of the tax base, Rome got invaded so badly that the economy imploded. The Roman state collapsed first, and was unable to defend the People. Plutocracy is not just infamous, it is lethal: if it does not kill you outright, it will make sure to die with you.

The USA has also an enormous state capitalism. The weapon-making part of the American military-industrial complex is nominally private, but it’s the equivalent of Roman weapon manufacturing. Practically, the crucial state industry.

The free market is a luxury. State capitalism, the real thing.

3) There is even a higher, ultimate system. Economy is managing a house. Bottom line, an economy has nothing to do with money. Money, too, is a luxury.

Barter and mandates can do it all. Some of the greatest civilizations worked that way. Sparta showed the way. It refused to use a currency beyond iron. That idealistic society then helped Athens re-establish democracy (510 BCE).

Barter and mandates is how Athens built a fleet capable of resisting Persia, how the Roman republic rose, how Diocletian re-established the Roman empire. Barter and mandates is how the Inca empire functioned, it’s how president FDR stabilized the economy of the USA in the 1930s, and how the war effort, after 1941, re-established it.

Those who believe in money first could have looked at FDR’s budget in December 1941, and say that the USA could not afford one more aircraft carrier. Instead, the USA’s command economy built dozens of such carriers, and thousands of other ships, let alone more than 400,000 aircraft.

Right now the problem is that the state has been captured by banksters, and their servants. The solution is not to get out of that nightmare, with better dreams. It is to wake up, and use force to roll back that plutocratic tsunami. Starting with destroying its ideology is how it will be done. Hollande’s 75% taxation above one million euro income is a good start to strike terror in those who believe too much in the Golden Calf.

Right now the problem is not too much state, it’s not enough democratic state.

***

Patrice Ayme

Anti-French Racism In The USA.

April 13, 2011

SOME LIES ABOUT FRANCE & ISLAM, EXPOSED & EXPLAINED.

***

Overview: France passed an anti face mask law. Loud screaming in the USA from the usual suspects. Why their acreams are unjustified, and what’s hiding behind them when one drops the mask.

***

Abstract: The Franks were the shock part of the Roman military. After 300 CE, they staged several coups and wars against the deranged Christian fundamentalists who came to rule Rome.

The Franks soon made relatively more advanced human rights their main business. They offered to impose more human rights, to the majority’s satisfaction, by ruling in their own name. And so it was that a small confederation came to lead millions of Gallo-Romans.

America’s business may be business, as an American president said. However the business of the Franks was even more profitable. The business of the Franks was better human rights, and the re-imposition of some old Roman republican qualities, such as the most ferocious and rigorously organized military. In a way France started as an extremely innovative business model, and its success will not be duplicated by Russia, China or India any time soon. (Because they have not even understood that better human rights means a better economy. Instead they believe they bring more disorder, not realizing that frsh thoughts are always disorderly.)

After leading coalitions which defeated the Huns and the Visigoths, the Franks finally took over around 486 CE as Clovis (Ludovicus, Louis), elected king and Roman imperator and consul, defeated the other remaining Roman army.

Ever since, France, located centrally in Europe, has been at war. Defending more advanced versions of human rights, most of the time, it is the world’s most aggressive country (occasionally a tyrant such as Saint Louis, or Napoleon, has gotten off message). Contrarily to the American canard that the French are weak cowards. (The most lethal war the USA has seen was its Civil War, that is, a war against itself, so Americans don’t know as much about war as they think they do; in particular, the concept of Peace Of The Braves, which the French proposed to the Germans in 1945, and ought to be proposed to Al Qaeda, seems to elude them.)

Important military victories of the Franks included the conquest of Western and Central Europe, which imperial Rome had miserably failed to accomplish, with lethal consequences. The Franks also succeeded to fatally wound the Arab Caliphate, which had just overwhelmed two-third of the Roman empire, in just one generation.

In the Twentieth century the French republic led a coalition, twice renewed, which crushed racist German fascism of the exterminating sort.

In recent weeks, France took decisive action in Cote d’Ivoire, by arresting the Ivory Coast dictator, who refused to leave after losing elections, which he had delayed ten years. The real winner, now ruling president, was Prime Minister of Cote d’Ivoire decades ago. He is also an economist who used to be second in command at the International Monetary Fund. Vive La France!

In a related activity, France is leading a coalition against Libya’s bloody dictator. (Germany and Turkey are NATO heavy weights, and have historically been friendly to bloody dictators and perpetrators of holocausts. So they have tried to use NATO to sabotage the Franco-British effort against Kadhafi. But France and Britain will win, as usual, because progress and the advancement of civilization are their ally. And it is mightier than fools who cling to barbarity.)

American plutocracy is not happy with these developments. It has long viewed France as a threat, ever since France, in 1789, proclaimed that slaves ought to be free, even in the colonies. That meant: even in the USA. And see what happened! The worst war the USA has known, and France won!

What is American plutocracy to do? Well, first, impress on the American people that France is a bad, despicable place.

So French bashing is strong in the USA, it is organized from the top, and it has got stronger in the last few weeks. Here is an editorial from the New York Times: “Government-Enforced Bigotry in France” (April 11, 2011).

“The formal imposition on Monday of the French ban on the full-face veil, which led to the prompt arrest of two women protesting the law, has been accompanied by the usual government invocations of French values, as well as issues of security and gender equality.

But there’s no question about the real purpose of this giant step backward — or of an earlier law banning Muslim veils in schools, or the “debates” organized by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, Union for a Popular Movement, on “French identity” and secularism. They are all cynical attacks on Islam, the religion of about a tenth of France’s population, to curry favor with France’s increasingly anti-immigrant right wing.”

 

My protesting comments on similar editorials were blocked by the New York Times. Intellectual fascism works best when not contradicted.

The French law forbids to cover the space between eyebrows and chin, in public space, for no good reason.

One cannot wear such a mask when driving a car, but one can wear it as a passenger of the same car (the inside of a car is viewed as private space). Exceptions are provided for bikers, festivities, or for weather related causes. Imposing the face mask on someone else carries a one year jail sentence. France has only 65,000 prisoners, so this is viewed as very tough.

At most 2,000 persons living in France have been known to wear full face veils. It is far from clear that they are all legal residents. There is some chuckling about the law, because many women wearing face masks are extremely wealthy tourists from the oil plutocracies. The law will apply to them too. Nevertheless, one does not expect French police to chase those well endowed miscreants around 5 star hotels…

The New York Times’ background is ignorant. Some observations:

1) 68.5% of immigrants to France in 2010 were Muslims. So not only are the French racist, according to the New York Times, but Muslims are also masochists. Muslims flock to France to be “cynically attacked”.

2) In contrast with what the New York Times asserts, the French population of recent Muslim descent is 6% rather than 10% of the total population. Religion is, by law, a private matter in France. That explains why very few French Jews were found and killed by the Nazis in France, whereas nearly all Dutch Jews were exterminated. There was no general register of Jews in France, there was one in the Netherlands. That is why France has, by far, the largest Jewish population in Europe.

So it is hard to say for sure how many “Muslims” are in France (it’s against the law to find out!). However, it would seem there are 4.5 millions of people of recent Muslim ancestry (maybe 30% of the French are of distant part Muslim ancestry, from genetic and blood analyses).

Of these only 2 millions at most observe aspects of Islam. Most “Muslims” in France speak of the country they come from, not of Islam. It is not cool to brandish one’s superstition in France. The dominant religion of France is secularism. Let’s notice in passing that couscous is my preferred dish, I don’t drink alcohol, at all, and I put clothing on when cynically attacked by the sun. Albeit few would consider me an observant Muslim.

3) Muslims presently in France, or their ancestors, were not brought to the republic as slaves. They, or their ancestors, chose to come to France. France is a country of freedom, not chains and whips. That may be hard for Americans to conceive. Slavery has been unlawful in metropolitan France since 660 CE. France is not the USA.

True, there was slavery in the colonies. But colonies were primitive, ruled by the local plutocracies, which flouted European law. It’s not a coincidence that the father of the president of the USA visited the USA as a free man, and his ancestors were not slaves. Having too big a chip on one’s shoulder prevent one to have one’s head on one’s shoulder.

4) Why did Muslims chose to come to France? Well, maybe not coincidentally, the outlawing of slavery in France is as old as Islam itself. Freedom is arguably even more a religion than Islam or Christianism. Islam and Christianity were friendly to slavery, as the masters who preached them liked to have many slaves, be they Imams or Bishops. (Around 400 CE, Europe was pretty much governed by extremely wealthy bishops.) Contrarily to American born contextuality, Christianism is not too hot in France anymore. Secular freedom is.

Try to enslave a Frenchman, you will get a revolution (this is pretty much what happened with the Revolution of 1789, as one, just one, of the seven, yes seven, prisoners held without a trial in that preliminary version of Guantanamo known as La Bastille, was instrumental in making Parisians believe that terrible things were going on in the Bastille… His name was Sade, soon to become perhaps the most empathic hero of the Revolution.)

So most present day “Muslims” in France descend from people who immigrated to France to flee theocracy. They know that theocracy brings misery. So they came to France to flee the veil. Many prominent observant French Muslims support the veil ban, including Imams, they are not just Muslim ministers of Sarkozy.

5) Forcing women to wear the veil is not in the Qur’an. The New York Times does not know this, and oppresses us with its crushing ignorance. All the Book says is that wives of the Prophet ought to dress modestly (and considering that the Qur’an was written under the direction of Aisha’s enemy, that was probably put there as a pique against her, and Muhammad never said such a thing).

Muhammad was very liberal with his young beloved wife Aisha. The sort of liberalism only the most enlightened present day husbands would tolerate… And Muhammad was clearly pro-woman, as he made killing girls unlawful.

The full face veil is just a local tradition due to the strong sun. Even men wear the veil and face masks in the desert… I know the desert quite well, my first memories in life, and I was always as dressed there as when skiing at very high altitude, for the same reasons… in the desert there is sand, which is quite similar to the ice crystals of a full blown blizzard.

Later, I lived in warmer and more humid Muslim countries where most women went about their business all day long, without any veil. Actually they wore no clothing on any part of their torso. For some obscure reason, this traditional half nakedness of Muslim Black Africa is not viewed as Muslim by those ignorants who give us lessons about Islam, although they never lived in an Islamist country. It is true that Wahhabists and Salafists, propelled by oil money, have imposed their views recently. But that’s not traditional, that’s corrupt.

6) In the period 721 CE to 975 CE, France was invaded by Muslims of Arab and Berber origin. Although the armies were defeated, there was no discrimination against those Muslims who stayed as civilians, and they were discreetly absorbed in the general population.

The Franks had adopted many of the ways of the Roman republic, and religious tolerance was one of them. Jews and Muslims had equal citizenship during the empire of the Franks, which lasted at least 5 centuries. Entire villages turned Jewish, Charlemagne’s nickname was “David” (he viewed himself as a modern day king of Israel), and he actually entered an alliance with Muslims emirs in Spain (since he was mostly preoccupied by submitting savage Germans, and Muslims were viewed as a type of more pliable extremist Christians; besides Charles’ grandfather Charles Martel had hammered the Muslims, the Germans had hammered the Romans, and Augustus had insisted that all his successors avoid Germania Septentriona, moreover the Franks had tried to conquer all of the Germany for three centuries; Charlemagne had to finish the job, it took thirty years).

7) The Franks talked about “saints” all the time, but a little reading show that those “saints” were just ethical leaders, and the name of Jesus was rarely used. Evoking Saint Martin for this, that, and the other thing, allowed Clovis to impose a new ethics. That ethics was thoroughly secular, and reminiscent of the heydays of the Roman republic. Same causes, same effects.

However, France lived through terrible religious conflicts, wars and persecutions between 1120 CE and 1789 CE. In the late 13 C, Jews were expelled from France and England, their properties seized by the government. (Secular power was using the anti-Jewish mentality planted by the Catholic Church.)

After being eclipsed by the secular Franks for six centuries, how did theocracy succeed to come-back? The most important factor was the First Crusade (the on-going reconquista in the Iberian peninsula also played a role, by also feeding Christian extremism, as the Muslims brought increasing more savage and fundamentalist help from Africa) .

The First Crusade was the answer to a call for help from Constantinople, which was quickly being overrun by savage Turks coming from far away. Thereafter the spirit of the Crusade was leveraged into theocratic fascism by some elements of the Church. Saint Bernard, in particular, a half crazed fanatic who stood in cold water all winter long, pushed for the second Crusade. There were no excuses for the Second Crusade. Saint Bernard entered in lethal conflict with the philosopher Abelard, getting him excommunicated, his books burned. However, Abelard was no push-over: 30 of his students became bishops or cardinals, and some of the greatest minds of the Church called him “our Aristotle“. Nevertheless, Saint Bernard won. Until 1789.

Saint Bernard’s fascism launched crusade after crusade, and massacre after massacre (many of them in France herself!). Kings like “Saint” Louis, expressed in writing his hatred of Jews, and the pleasure of “plunging knives in heretics’ bellies”. Saint Louis lost an army in Egypt, and was ransomed by his queen mother of a mom (!), the Spanish born Blanche de Castille, in exchange for a good part of French GDP. He had the good idea to catch a deadly disease in Tunis later, during still another of his crusades. Weirdly, “Saint” Louis is still revered, although he is one of the great criminals of history. The system of thought he wrote about, rabid racist murderous intolerant Christianity, blossomed further in the anti-Semitic Luther (another racist still revered!), and then, of course, reached its final conclusion at Auschwitz.

Joan of Arc was condemned to be burned alive because, she wore clothes of the wrong gender. She said she did that to avoid rape. Never mind that there was a powerful female pharaoh, 28 centuries before Jeanne. That Pharaoh, Hatshepsut, often dressed as a man. A millennium after that very successful female ruler, some sexist brutes wrote that often despicable book, the Bible. Somewhere inside that superstitious book, it is said that if a woman wears man’s clothing, she shall be burned. Another “abomination”, just like eating shrimps. Thousands of women were tortured and burned because of that superstition, and millions terrorized, for centuries.

The most atrocious persecutions against Protestants in France lasted 6 centuries. Still protestants kept on generating spontaneously, propped by the oppressive rule of the Catholic Church. The kings of France were trying to protect the Protestants, most of the time (with some notable exception, like the 4th Crusade, in South West France).

In the Sixteenth Century, things came to a head as Philippe II’s fascist Spain tried to invade England, and subjugate France. Millions of influential French protestants resisted, and France saw more than seven religious wars in a generation. In England, Henry VIII had fixed the matter his way.

Having learned from millions of atrocities and abuses from religion, French society came to realize that the Ancien Regime was a theocracy. And that the theocracy was plutocratic: the immense riches of the Church, and its evil designs, were in full evidence when a cardinal offered a priceless necklace to an impersonator, thinking she was the Queen Marie-Antoinette (“Affaire du Collier”). Of course, then, the USA, an instant in history, did not even exist, and American schools don’t bother considering such happenstance as being part of history, as history seems pretty much reduced to Shakespeare in the American mind. That is confusing a fable maker, with a historian.

Nowadays, a disgusting fanatical murderous fascist of the worst type such as Saint Bernard would be put in a cage, and then a psychiatric hospital. The Church came to be viewed as the house of horror.

In 1789, the rights of Protestants and Jews were re-established. French society had become aggressively anticlerical. Priests were made to take an oath to the republic. The struggle against the Church culminated in 1905, when the Churches got taxed, and integrated in the republic.

The Greek republic is coming to that point now, 106 years later, as it dawned on the Greek government that the Greek Church is very rich; some elements of the Greek church are so rich, as to be in obvious violation of basic EU law. Monasteries use their wealth to discriminate against females, excluding them from a large part of European territory, imposing their homosexuality.

The amusing thing is that the veil carry historical negative connotations associated with the Catholic Church in France. Weirdly, the French republic did not deal with Islam as with Christianism and Judaism. Islam was left alone. At least in North Africa (not so in Sénégal). Part of the French problem with Islam is precisely that Islam was left out of the 1905 integration law. Sarkozy made feeble efforts to correct that, and they are interpreted by the New York Times as racist.

Americans believe in God. A large majority of Americans (78%) say they believe in God and 15% say they don’t believe in God, but do believe in a higher power. Only 27% of the French believe in a higher power.

Americans did not learn history showing a millennium of religious terror. So 77 per cent of Americans feel children should be allowed to wear a religious symbol at school, including crucifixes and headscarves. Only 10 per cent of French adults said the same. (And the French go according to French law, which allows religious symbols, as long as they stay small, a notion precisely defined by law.)

Sure, there were times, long ago, when most French people believed in God. But now the French have become, indeed, more cynical. A crushing majority of French adults do not believe in the Tooth Fairy, Trolls, Father Christmas, and so called “God”. History has everything to do with it, as it taught the French that God was mostly invented to oppress the People. That makes the French hard to imagine by God obsessed right wing Americans. Americans have been trained to submit to higher power, and its name is plutocracy, and they call it God. Americans want to think of themselves as free, a mostly interior phenomenon, between themselves and their God. Out there, in real America, if they have no money, they are increasingly nothing. Internal freedom is a beautiful thing.

Every French appreciate the churches and cathedrals, awesome monuments in the landscape celebrating the awesome soaring of the human spirit, and beauty triumphant. Some of the most beautiful art and monuments in the world are mosques. The mosques are also monuments to the glory of man and the great beyond. Iran has incredibly beautiful mosques, some blue, some resplendiscent with gold. There are more than 2,200 mosques in France. A few years back, the Strasbourg mayor rejected a mosque building permit, because he thought the minaret was not tall enough. Minarets are beautiful, and they should be tall.

But back to the savages. The French anti-face mask law was proposed by the government, passed by the National Assembly, and the Senate, reviewed, criticized, and modified by the French Constitutional Court. The USA has no Constitutional Court. Then the law went all around again, before being accepted in its second version by the Court, and signed into law by the president. Thus the New York Times is accusing the French People itself to be racist (that’s what “bigot” means). This is not surprising: the New York Times is a plutocratically owned institution, and, as such, is tempted to view the People as enemy. Even when not directed to do so, dogs love to please masters.

As I showed above, the insult is without merit. Thus I claim that it is the anti-French propaganda at the New York Times which is racist, and hate mongering.

***

Patrice Ayme

Some Stupidities Which Rule

January 16, 2011

EXPOSING WHY ABSURDITIES ABOUT GUNS AND FRANCE THRIVE IN THE USA:

(A Week In The History Of Ideas And Stupidities.)

***

Abstract: The American People is manipulated into despising France and loving guns. Another two cognitive strategies contrived by plutocracy to capture not just hearts and minds, but shrivel them into the hellish context, impotence and mental retardation, that evil and wealth are made to dominate. Comparing with the reality of history and what is happening in Tunisia, helps to put this sort of mental conspiracy into perspective… and suggests that awareness itself would be most of the needed remedy.

***

TWO TRUTHS FROM THE PRESIDENT Of THE USA MOST AMERICANS DON’T CONNECT WITH:

Nice philosophy from Barack Obama in Arizona during the memorial for the latest senseless shooting there. "We should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations." He said even better than that

Obama has to be extremely careful. He could not talk about handguns directly, and why selling them freely ought to be outlawed. If he had, he would have been called a progressive, a socialist, or, may be the right wing nuts would have hurled against him the worst insult they know, and call him French. So Obama has to go around, and from behind, by resetting the basic emotionality of the USA, which is not working right. And he did an excellent job as father of the nation, a role that no American president has done well since Kennedy.

Obama caused already great turmoil this week for saying an obvious truth that American plutocracy hates. Said Obama: “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.” (I removed the bold on Sarkozy, because Sarkozy, in this context, is only a detail of history.)

More pro-American than Sarkozy, indeed, is hard to do. Except for myself and I, your humble servant, of course. But there are several versions of America; just ask Abe Lincoln.

This is an essay about guns in the USA, however it relates to the super rich, the plutocracy, and the frantic anti-French propaganda of the media of the USA. These are all aspects of the same system of thought, or, shall we say, exploitation.

***

WE LOVE SHOOTING EACH OTHER AND HATING THE FRENCH:

The anti-French mood in the USA uses continual misinformation that stops nowhere, and apparently all Americans are asked to memorize. Here is, during the last week, in what passes as serious commentary, Argus Hamilton, the host comedian at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. He dissembled ( a form of lying) thus:"Barack Obama angered people in both Britain and the U.S. Wednesday when he told Nicolas Sarkozy that the U.S. has no better friend than France. Britain fights with us in Afghanistan but France needs our help with their food prices. The reason Obama`s a Democrat is because he only likes people who need, not people who fight."

Thunders "The Telegraph", apparently consumed by the anxiety that London will not be chosen to make Wall Street’s dirty work anymore: “To suggest that Paris and not London is Washington’s strongest partner is simply ludicrous.” Right, London helped to refurbish the White House by burning it to an empty shell in 1814. And London boosted further the American GDP by rampaging around the USA during the war of 1812-1815. Is that why it’s called the "Special Relationship"? And more special than France’s? As I said, the specialitude, not to say speciousness of the relationship, has more to do with Wall Street, and its conspiracies. Example: AIG (American International Group) went to London to lose 182 billions of US taxpayer money, because it was an ocean away from the SEC of the USA.

“The Telegraph” is distorting what Obama was saying, and ought to know better, because France and Britain are unifying militarily, creating what is clearly a military superpower. And by the way, French GDP and population are bigger than Britain.

Now to answer vaguely the other fool, who represents some of the latest anti-French buzz. Food prices? France? France is the second agricultural exporter in the world. (With roughly two-thirds of the total revenue in agricultural exports of the USA.) In spite of a significantly overvalued currency.

France? Not fighting? Is it not that cute… Is not that cutely insolent: the French are crazed rugby players. Rugby is the original, hard root of that soft degeneracy known as American football. Rugby is played without all these artificial gimmicks and aids such as helmets, comfort pads, steroids, and constant suspensions to play commercials, so that the plutocrats can entice the People to give them more money. Equipment for American football does not serve ice cream and French fries yet, to be even more fat and comfortable, but it’s coming. that would allow to take even longer commercial breaks to serve Mammon

Average Americans, who have studied all too little history at school, and do not know that France is engaged in heavy fighting against Salafists in more countries than the USA, as we speak, and has done so for decades (France and the USA cooperate in several of these, not even discreetly) like to say this sort of things. Why? Because they are paid to, if they are part of the media, it’s as simple as that, and the people who pay them are the same that make propaganda for guns… or financial derivatives, or banks.

***

A FEW TRUTHS ABOUT FRANCE: MAY 1940 AND HITLER’S DEVIOUS MIND:

Hating France is of the utmost importance to the plutocracy of the USA. Even loving guns pale in insignificance. The war against the fellow republic, has to lay heavily on all American minds, lest they notice that some things, are done better there, precisely because the search for financial profit, at all cost, is kept away, sometimes.

To call the French non combative, is beyond grotesque. The French are so combative, they made the Nazis look like cows trembling with bovine encephalitis. France declared war to the Nazis, after all. However, one can sometimes get too aggressive for one’s comfort.

French aggressivity was very well known to Hitler (all his comrades had died at French hands in WWI). Astutely, Hitler attacked the neutral Netherlands to exploit that French characteristic. Hitler correctly guessed that the Dutch would whine to high heavens, and beg the French to come to rescue them from the big bad Nazis. There Hitler would set his trap for the overconfident, romantic French, dashing in shining, formidable armor, in the best tradition of Agincourt. (Amusingly, the stupid overconfidence of French knights charging English archers in the mud during the Middle Ages is well known. But what happened in May 1940, when the French charged into the Netherlands with their armored reserve, was a much greater battle, the stupidity was infinitely greater, and the consequences were much more astronomically catastrophic: 50 million dead. At least. The holocaust of WWII would not have happened if the French had kept their mobile armored reserve, in reserve. But French armor was superior in quality and quantity to Nazi armor, that was happened was never considered possible. And it was precisely knowing all this, and that his situation was desperate to start with, that Hitler, used as he was to bar fighting and street fighting, let alone years in the trenches of WWI, devised his far-fetched strategy.

Moved to the core by Dutch wailing, in one the most absurd feats of military history, the French high Command threw their rapid deployment force of seven armored divisions, the French reserve, the Seventh French army, to link with the Dutch, who had already retreated when it got there, and without air support. Tanks, at the time, could not go back and forth 800 kilometers in 3 days, and the French reserve got destroyed.

Several things: 1) Hitler could be a good psychologist, and he ascertained well the French character. 2) The move was so stupid that a trial of high treason of the French high Command was undertaken (under the occupation!). 3) The Nazis had only ten armored divisions. If the seventh army had been kept in reserve, it would have cut the Nazis from behind. De Gaulle with just one heavy armored division, the Quatrieme Division Cuirassee, half cut the Nazis’sickle thrust , and nearly killed their generals. 4) The French love to go in the streets to fight their government, just for fun, and to insure that free speech is alive and well. Reciprocally, how supine are those who never protest?

***

MORE TRUTH ABOUT FRANCE; AGGRESSIVE SECOND TO NONE:

Of course France has been in Afghanistan since day one. Out of 26 allies fighting with the USA there which suffered fatalities, France is in third position in the number of soldiers killed. For Americans who think not enough French soldiers are getting killed in Afghanistan, they should realize that France has been fighting terrorists in the many countries of the Sahel and Sahara, non-stop, for decades, something Canada and Britain do not do.

Anybody who has studied a bit of world history knows that no country has a more aggressive military past than France. None. Even Rome pales in comparison. The Franks sent spies as soon as Muhammad became prominent, and tricked the invading Muslim army at Toulouse in 721 CE, inflicting Islam its first disaster in a land battle. And it was a terrible disaster. It would take 11 years for the Arab Caliphate to try again. It was just as disastrous (Poitier, 732).

Just last week in Niger an al Qaeda commando captured two young Frenchmen in the middle of the capital of Niger. French planes tracked the Al Qaeda’s SUV convoy, and French special forces attacked in Mali, killing many terrorists, capturing others (the hostages were assassinated at some point to be determined). Among those the French caught were some army personnel of a pretended ally…

French aggressivity is not restricted to the military domain. The intellect and romance are preferred fields of combat, and even the abominable Napoleon thought he had to demonstrate his superiority in these domains. In many ways the French and the Americans are very similar, and it is not by accident.
***

SUCCESORS REGIMES OF THE FRANKS UNITE:

The relationship between France and the USA is unique, because without France, there would have been very probably no successful American "revolution", and, perhaps, without the creation of the USA, no French revolution. They are co-dependent in rebellion.

Naturally, the relationship is much deeper than that, because France and the USA (and also Britain) are all successor regimes of the empire of the Franks. This is not just an historical fact, but a set philosophical initial conditions. There were several important philosophical differences between Franks and Romans. Basically the Franks re-established sanity, and humanity, while grabbing from rome what they viewed as superior (they started with the law, written in Latin, and the next acquisition was… fascism).

The Franks loved riches and capital, but spread it around. They esteemed Jesus, but had a definitively secular approach to god. Told how Jesus suffered death on the cross, Clovis grasped his double headed battle-ax fiercely and exclaimed: "If I had been there with my Franks I would have avenged him!" They forced the Catholics to accept schooling as their mission, and Jews and Muslim (civilians) as their brothers.

A giant philosophical difference between the Franks and the Greco-Romans was slavery. Outlawing slavery forced the Franks to establish a socio-economy that entangled progress, technology, and fostering human rights in a non self contradictory way.

All of this rested on an amazing aggressivity which extended to Frankish clothing, multicolored and flamboyant.

Differently from the Romans, who could not handle the Germans alone, the Franks around the Tenth Century beat back simultaneous invasions by Viking, Danes, Mongols and Muslims. The Scandinavians were submitted and integrated, the Muslims thrown out of Rome. And Hungary was conquered again (next time the Mongols invaded it, in the 13C, their loses were such that they then wisely decided to ally with the Franks).

In any case, the Franks decided to reconquer the Roman empire, invaded as it had been by the followers of Sarah ("Sarasins"). After a little, but more profitable diversion, founding new Europes all over the planet, the mopping up of the degenerated, long suffering half of the Roman empire is now back on the front burner. Any questions about lack of aggressivity?

***

WAS LOUIS XVI A REVOLUTIONARY?

Even before France officially declared war to Britain, more than 90% of American cartridges were made in France, and even before that French agents had pushed Americans to sedition. At the time France was a super power, 11 times the population of 2.5 million English American colony.

The hyper costly American war of liberation broke French finances, to the point the American war budget was hidden in secret books, as it caused a super giant deficit.

Why was the France of Louis XVI so pro-American? Well, there was a whole mystique about the New World in France, in more ways than one. Losing Canada, and the freedom it breathed of, had been bitter. The enlightenment needed an outlet, and a world had been stolen.

Louis XVI was a study in contrasts. Louis was very much pro-enlightenment, pro-science, pro-progress, and also personally courageous. An idealist. Not only did he chose state of the art philosophers as top ministers, but he pushed the American liberation project beyond the reasonable. It could be said, in a way, that the greatest revolutionary of the time was Louis XVI himself. His reforms inside France, although attempted, came to nought, because he faltered and completely melted down each time the plutocracy gave him its marching orders (instead, a la Philippe Le Bel, or even Louis XIV, he should have sent some top plutocrats into the fire, or in prison).

Thereafter the American and French republic were completely entangled. The USA proclaimed itself a republic first. Then, in 1789, the USA wrote down a Constitution, and France decided to have a revolution, so she could do the same. The two constitutions came out within weeks of each other. France was still guided by the revolutionary (as I just said, contrarily to received wisdom), Louis XVI, and would have to wait another two years before becoming a republic (after Louis, misguided by his spy of a wife, tried to jump ship)..

The French constitution was more advanced as it had the world "universal" and "human rights" in it, differently from the American constitution’s "We The People" which could be, and was given, for a while, a tribal interpretation. Thus many an American racist has hated France ever since, as she is correctly seen as the enemy of slavery and racism (many famous historical French are of mixed blood, but nobody knows anything of it, as befits a non racist country; an amusing case is Alexandre Dumas, the quintessential French writer).

But let’s go back to the gun craze in the USA, and how it connects with banksters.

***

I SHOOT THEREFORE I AMERICAN:

All politicians have to be very careful about guns in the USA. Even talking of them is dangerous. The National Rifle association has been going around imprinting all Americans will the fabulously stupid slogan:"Guns don’t kill people, people kill people." In other words, guns are innocent, but Americans are guilty. When an American sees another American, it should start shooting, then, according to the gun lobby, and Main Stream Media in the USA, since people kill people. This is exactly what happens. Advantage? As people are busy shooting people, no shooting at the plutocracy, behind its high walls, in its distant enclaves.

What about even more stupid slogans? Idiots don’t kill guns, idiots kill with guns?

This is why Barack was celebrating the central human tenet of rising up to the expectations of children and their magic belief for goodness

Instead of condemning that an obviously deranged maniac could legally buy a European gun with 31 shots bullets’ magazine, hiding it below his clothing (just as legally). A Eurozone gun which private citizens cannot buy in the European Union. (By the way, France makes nuclear warheads, maybe they want to buy some too?)

A little grandmother grabbed the maniac’s next 31 shots magazine, when, apparently following Sarah Palin’s advice for lunatics, "not to retreat, but to reload".

In "Helpless in the Face of Madness", the NYT’s Bob Herbert made an observation that had also struck me:

"… a photo and a headline on the front page of The New York Times this week gave us some insight into just how sick our society has become. The photo showed 11-year-old Dallas Green weeping and using his left arm to wipe his eyes during the funeral for his sister, Christina-Taylor Green, who was 9 years old and was killed in the attack in Tucson that took the lives of five other people and left Representative Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded.

Beneath the photo was the headline: “Sadness Aside, No Shift Seen On Gun Laws.”

What is the matter with us? Are we really helpless in the face of the astounding toll that guns take on this society? More than 30,000 people die from gunfire every year. Another 66,000 or so are wounded, which means that nearly 100,000 men, women and children are shot in the United States annually. Have we really become so impotent as a society, so pathetically fearful in the face of the extremists, that we can’t even take the most modest of steps to begin curbing this horror?

Where is the leadership? We know who’s on the side of the gun crazies. Where is the leadership on the side of sanity?

For starters, assault weapons should be banned. Their raison d’être is to kill the maximum number of people — people, not animals — in the shortest amount of time."

Similarly the Euro-American magazine, "The Economist" made its cover, and leading editorial on the gun problem in the USA. It noticed gun control was going in the wrong direction, that 31 shots magazine were unlawful until very recently, etc. The Supreme Court decided in 2010 that cities did not have the right to make anti-gun-to-kill-people laws, etc… We may have to wait for another maniac to shoot the entire Supreme Court, before it changes its mind.

What is the matter? Why so much regression? Why, whereas the rest of the world progress enthusiastically, do the USA regress rabidly? Is it because Fox News, the hyper powerful TV channel, has turned "progressive" into the worst word in American English? (The talking heads at Fox have campaigned against "progressive" for years, mentioning the word in derogatory contexts at least 100 times a day, as if it was part of their lucrative contract with Murderoch the Great).

Herbert and "The Economist" do not explain what the mechanism of American regression could be. So I sent a version of the following to the NYT, which had the kindness to publish it:

***

GRAND UNIFIED TERROR USA:

Societies drifting into insanity are not infrequent in history, especially when they think obsessively of themselves as "exceptional". (Not believing in American exceptionalism is akin to an un-American activity in the USA.)

A century ago, we had the plutocracy known as the "Second German empire" drifting that way. Germany had the fastest growing economy, the biggest army, the biggest population, the highest literacy, etc.

What Germany did not have, though, was a minimum of introspection. After Britain massacred Boers in South Africa, it reconsidered. Why? Democratic introspection (OK, the Boers were also white…). That was helped by a free press.

However, next door, in Namibia, the German empire proceeded to effect a holocaust, as blatantly as possible, copying the methods of the Massachusetts’ colonists, 250 years earlier (paying for scalps). The broad idea, co-opted by the Nazis later, was that, if the Americans could have make holocausts work, so could the much smarter and educated Germans. (Along these lines, the "special commandos" exterminating Jews were mostly made of lawyers and PhDs.)

This, by the way, show that bad examples, and bad ideas once they have been made honorable, can be tried again under the metaprinciple that if it worked once, and was made honorable it could happen again: NOTHING IS AS MORAL AS SUCCESS. Right, But the American success with ethnic cleansing was mostly due to; 1) facing early Neolithics. 2) using immorality of such a high level that it proved unsustainable in Europe.

As the attitude relative to guns demonstrate, the incapacity to hold the most basic reasoning and to hold the standards of basic human decency is now blatant in the USA.

As it was blatant in Germany when Nietzsche flourished. Nietzsche found a few points in German popular behavior which showed him Germany had gone unhinged. Anti-Judaism, "mob mentality", "victorious" mentality, lack of refinement in thought and taste, and "incapacity to digest" contradictions, to celebrate differences, and whatever was superior were prominent German defects, of the most alarming nature according to Nietzsche. He was right: Germany was suffering moral and mental collapse, even before Hitler’s birth.

The point is this: when a country, a political class, a leader, or, for that matter an individual, go mad, it does not take too many facts, if they are crazy enough, to determine that insanity is setting in.

Fortunately, insanity in the USA has not yet reached the heights it reached in Germany before a mental Rubicon was crossed there on August 1, 1914 (although one could argue that mental Rubicon was crossed earlier in the German colony of Namibia).

The diversity of the USA has kept, so far, the madness in check (but the diversity could backfire: discrimination against Jews in Germany went up and down, before their holocaust; after WWI, the Kaiser’s "Jewish" advisers were made into scapegoats! For example if "black" Obama could be described as having failed big time, the white supremacists would come back with a vengeance, arguing that a "black" man did the worst job with America). However, the gun madness is all over the land. After the shooting in Arizona, gun sales augmented. apparently, killing a nine year old girls, the chief Federal judge and putting a bullet in the brain of representative Sarah Palin had put a rifle sight on, was excellent advertizing for the merit of guns.

Consider the stupidity of it all; the judge and the US representative boasted that they were pretty good shots. However, as Sun Tzu already said, most of the success of an attack consists into surprise. And this at a time when weapons were much less deadly than now. Nowadays, who can fire the first shot has killed. Except if all civilians, including nine year girls, are going to walk around carrying the armor of French soldiers in Afghanistan, at all times, in all places.

And you know what? This gun madness is all a red herring. The media, in the USA, is controlled by the plutocracy. So is the political leadership. The USA is not Tunisia. In Tunisia, the plutocracy did not control the media, so the dictatorial plutocracy had to close and harass the media all the time, for all to see. The media tried to say a lot that the plutocracy did not want the People to learn. But the plutocracy could not close the Internet.

In the USA the situation is different, because the plutocracy owns the media. There is no opposition, no contradiction. So all Americans know guns are good for them, a Constitutional right. never mind that the Constitution states that:"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." the debate leading to the final amendment made clear that this was in the context of a military service (conscientious objectors were exempted). The National Guard is that militia.

In Pittsburgh, January 2010, a survey in urban neighborhoods found that 80% of young people knew someone who got shot. A study showed that, for three felons who avoided to commit a crime once because of a weapon, two were drawn to the challenge of confronting an armed victim. In other words, guns are criminogenic. As Wikipedia puts it: "Research and statistics have shown that guns intensify crime situations, and increase the likelihood of a more violent or lethal outcome."

***

PLUTOCRACY LOVE IDIOTS WHO SHOT EACH OTHER:

So why the increase in guns, pro-gun laws, and gun propaganda? Because the media has decided so (including the notorious radio savages). In other another word; because the owners of the media , the plutocracy, want Americans to shoot each other.

There are three main reasons:

1) Justify The Private Use Of Force; That gives the plutocracy a pretext to be armed, and better. (That also means living in rich enclaves, a modern version of the castles of the Middle Ages, with private police: police, like schools, depend upon local taxes in the USA, differently from Europe.)

2) Promote Stupidity By Denying Causality; As I said in passing, the pro-handguns theoretical arsenal is incredibly stupid, self contradictory. Gabrielle Giffords boasted that she was a good shot with the Glocks gun that drove hot metal through her frontal lobe, in the direction of her speech area. Good shot? Come again? Palin, condemned by Giffords, for putting Giffords in cross hairs, now compares herself to a persecuted Jew during the depth of the European Middle Ages. Anti-Palinism as anti-Judaism.

These asinine debates may sound innocent, but, in truth, they make stupidity honorable, by having to worry decades after decades about how many ways idiots can split hair with their shaking brains. Such respect for stupidity "ought utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind" (to borrow a sentence of Nietzsche). But, in a country ruled by wealth and privilege, the higher ups want precisely to make the entire society below them as stupid as can be safely accomplished. Having unending debates about stupid things generate mental retardation, an intrinsic good in the many, for the few who dominate them. Thus, debating whether shooting guns through people save lives will be encouraged, to accompany the increasing presence of shooting metaphors, and an obsession with sport scores.

3) Shoot And Divide; As common Americans get shot by common Americans, they come to view their fellow citizens as the enemy. And thus cannot conceive of their real enemy, plutocracy, let alone organize against it. after all, the plutocracy is not shooting at them. They have no time for subtle exploitation; they have to return fire.

Release The Crazies; A related strategy was the cutting of mental health spending by Ronald Reagan. From the plutocratic point of view, that was excellent. Not only did it make society meaner, an intrinsic good, as a meaner society is friendlier to Hades. But, mostly, it augmented the shooting of innocent for not good reasons, thus increasing the general paranoia, fears, and divisions. Many of these crazies have been going around, and local authorities, who are unqualified, have been trying to detect them (which should truly be the work of police and government psychiatry).

If crazy is frequent, crazy will be viewed as normal, and that opens new possibilities to the crazed plutocracy; derivatives with your salad, anyone? And of course, whatever alienates reason is welcome.

***

SALAFISM DIVIDES EVEN BETTER THAN GUNS:

Tunisians in revolt used solidarity networks, including on the Internet, to organize themselves against what the ambassador of the USA called "a quasi mafia" (WikiLeaks dixit). Solidarity is the key to revolution. The People is strong if, and only if, it can make one out of the many. (That was the long standing motto of the USA, before plutocracy found it dangerous to its rule, and tried to sweep it below the carpet.)

If the many are busy shooting each other, they will not stand as one. But the plutocracy, the CEO class, the hedge fund wolf packs, the banksters, stand as one. Divided the People get subjugated, idiotic the People submit. So let more bullets fly, and France get vilipended for whatever: thus the rule of Pluto hopes to proceed in the USA.

In many countries around the Middle East the plutocracy has long placed its faith in Salafist interpretations of Islam. That too allows to foster stupidity and divisiveness. Shooting those who don’t agree and calling them Al Qaeda also helps. Notice that bin Laden was on the very top of the Saudi Arabian plutocracy. Not to say that he planned it all as a deliberate agent of said plutocracy. But the rest of the Saudi Arabian plutocracy has found most convenient to justify its violent existence by calling anybody else evil. In Tunisia, Ben Ali justified its 23 year old kleptocratic dictatorship, as a rampart against Salafism, and being called Mr President by the leaders of democracies such as France and the USA. It is not just that the Ben Ali family used Tunisia as a private property. It prevented the average Tunisian to think as well as they could, wanted, and should. Not just for Tunisia’s sake, but for the sake of the entire planet.

And now to reiterate one of our little refrains. We need brains, ever more brains, as the world tumbles towards various catastrophes never heard of before. Otherwise said, we need full democracy. Plutocracy fosters stupidity, ignorance and erroneous logic, getting rid of it, worldwide, so we can think better, will be the essence of survival.

***

Patrice Ayme

FRANKLY FREE.

July 25, 2008

WHEN FREEDOM FRIED FASCISM.

“Freedom” fries or “French” fries are synonymous. Indeed “Frank”, a word that gave “Imperium Francorum” abbreviated as “Francia” (modern “France”), meant FREE. Ferocious and free. The initial Salic law of the Franks gave more rights to them than to plain Roman citizens, reinforcing the meaning of “Frank” as free.

It was hilarious to see ignorant members of the US Congress submitting to their leader, the self described “Decider”, by trying to escape the concept of France while using the very conceptual root, freedom, which gave rise to the word French.

Talking without knowing is like breathing without air: an ominous fate.

The Franks were so free that they insisted their ancestors had escaped from the burning Troy. That made them as prestigious as Rome (supposedly founded by a Trojan). More importantly, it made the Franks born critiques and adversaries of the Greco-Roman civilization.

The Greco-Roman civilization was not conquered. It collapsed under its own errors, in the same way, at least three times. Three times it saw fascism rise, and was unable to stop it. Why? Because it was too fascist to start with. And it was too fascist because it had subhuman populations: the slaves and the women (today the US has the poor, those without health insurance, etc…).

The Franks would shatter the Greco-Roman founding principles of slavery and sexism. Troy was attacked by Greece because a woman had used her freedom of choice. To choose Troy rather than Greece as model and inspiration was to chose women as equal.

Indeed seven Merovingian queens soon ruled. One of them was one of the handful of the most important head of states civilization ever knew. Perhaps the most important, period. Her statue is in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Bathilde outlawed slavery (~ 660 CE). A US president, Lincoln, discovered that was a good idea around 1863 CE. Excuse us, we are the slows: not enough freedom on our fries…

Thus the Franks proclaimed themselves to be free of the Greco-Roman erroneous preconceptions that were too friendly to fascism, right from the start. Those preconceptions had perverted the Greco-Roman valuation system. That made the purely Greek version of that moral system weak and unable to overwhelm the rough fascist values of the Macedonians. And then unable to persuade the Roman elite either.

Rejecting sexism and slavery allowed the Franks to launch civilization with the very best foundations. They had not been seen since Crete (Crete was very anti sexist, with its female toreadors, and Crete was very equalitarian, as shown by its lack of walls and fortifications; instead archeology finds plenty of the crushed blend of materials characteristic of tsunami debris, followed by civil strife).

The concept of freedom for all had eluded both Greeks and Romans, and its absence ultimately caused their social, economic, and technological demise through mental stagnation. The remedy the autocrat Constantine, his son Constantius II and their successors found, the ultimate fascism they called Catholic Orthodoxy, brought the apocalypse of total mental fascism. The Dark Ages.

Aristotle claimed slavery was needed, because they, the ancient Greeks, did not have robots. But they sure had luxury.

Look at the Acropolis. Pretty, but it may have destroyed Athens (she diverted the Dorian League defense funds to build it, causing serious resentment that old fascists in Sparta used to their advantage).

Charlemagne lived very modestly for someone at the head of a giant empire of more than 300 counties (many dozens of times larger than the Athenian empire at its ephemeral apex). So it had long been, and would long be for all the Franks: they lived well, but without excess. That was the “cost” of freedom for all (Buddha would have said that was not a cost). We are far from the armies of slaves of the early Christian bishops, and the extravagance of the Roman urban centers of old.

But then there were millions of free Franks who were motivated to try to improve their conditions through technology. The Carolingian epoch was characterized by great advances in biotechnology (new breeds of horses, invention of nutritious beans), and engineering (deep furrows, and plenty of horse related tech, water and wind mills; by 1,000 CE, the Frankish economy was the most energy intensive in the world, etc…).

The Franks’ meta principle of more freedom for all thus (re)founded Western civilization as a hotbed of technical and philosophical innovation. That allowed civilization to advance again, by freeing it from social and ecological constraints that had bogged down the Greco-Romans.

So now we know the founding principle of Western civilization, FREEDOM, and that it gave its very name to the people who imposed it on Europe.

What was the founding principle of English speaking America? Some will say it did not need any, because, after all, it’s a descendant regime of the Franks (as is all of Europe, even Russia, when the main cultural flows are carefully traced back). So freedom would also be America’s founding principle, and indeed, US citizens often speak of their country as the “land of free” (in other words, the land of the Franks).

But is that truly true? We will see. Doubts are fed when one is reminded of the two groups that truly founded English America, and thus the fundamental principles of its mentality. Real freedom implies to be mentally fierce. It means not aspiring to be submitted to God or man. The Franks were neither. The Franks knew the Bible very well (Carlus Magnus’ nickname -and excuse for his Pagan and creative behavior- was ”King David”). But, as would be descendants of the Trojans, they claimed to be of older mental stock, and they did not submit to that amusing, but much newer story book. Instead, they submitted the Bible to them. They embraced all of life to dominate it, and wore extremely colorful clothing.

 

***

Patrice Ayme.

***

P/S: 1) The immense mass of the Roman urban population was fed (by giant agricultural businesses owned by the hyper rich senatorial class and manned by slaves), but it did not direct its own fate. So it was not motivated to improve it in any way. Apathy dominated all mental realms. By the sixth century, in Constantinople, the masses, the demos, were only excited by watching spectator sports. Truer democracy existed only in the West among the Franks (and that is why emperor Justinian left them alone as he reconquered the Western empire). 

2) The Greco-Roman civilization had subhuman populations: the slaves and the women (race, although exceptionally a factor (Sparta, that died off) was not dominant as a criterion of sub humanity: it was about how they talked, not the color of the skin). Today the US has the extremely poor under class, those without health insurance, etc; this has followed a tradition of exploiting various sub populations… Rome used torture only against slaves. Recently the US leadership proposed to use it even against citizens. What counts is using the principle of “sub humanity”. Not only does it make society unfair and fascist, it makes it mentally lazy, because those on top stay there, not because they are there because they strove to be better, but because they were born there.

RULING THE USA WITH FALSE HISTORY.

June 11, 2008

SOME US PLUTOCRATS MISREPRESENT GROTESQUELY THE HISTORY OF FRANCE TO MANIPULATE THE US POPULATION INTO DEATH, IMPRISONMENT, AND THE PURSUIT OF SERVITUDE.

US anti-knowledge about World War Two is a gift that keeps on giving, to the Rich. In a farcical repeat of how the Roman plutocracy destroyed the Roman republic, war is used as a scarecrow to prevent people to land on the ground of common sense, while the military-industrial complex and the Rich hidden behind it present themselves as saviors of the republic. Whereas all they do is exploiting it to death.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is one of the most famous phrases in the United States Declaration of Independence, all too dangerously close to the French “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. Since Americans know that France is second to none in the “pursuit of happiness”, US plutocrats have to insist that “socialist” France is somehow a deep failure that lives only the happy life by the good grace of the USA. The plutocratically controlled US media has to continually come back, and spread falsehoods about WWII, often presenting France as Hitler’s intrinsic ally, and accomplice in the holocaust.

Slandering France is a well financed industry in the USA. And it’s not just France. Recently a well financed, extremely well known US writer and TV commentator, ex presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, outright accuses Great Britain to have caused the holocaust of the Jews, by having irritated the Nazis with an “unnecessary war” (namely WWII). He also accuses France to have dragged Great Britain into war with Hitler. It’s an old US crime: to want to make war to Hitler, a big no-no with many US racists and plutocrats (no wonder: they partnered with Hitler).

So here are a few important reminders of the basics of WWII:

a) Nazi laws and regulations treating many categories of people as NON human started in 1933, and blossomed in 1935. In France, Pat Buchanan would be prosecuted for holocaust denial. In the US he is feted, invited on all media, and (with the partial exception of his friend O’Reilly on Fox News) talked to as if he had established new standards of historical truth (“Congratulations for the book!” can one hear everywhere: they would invite Hitler, and congratulate him for “Mein Kampf”!).

b) Hitler attacked Poland with more than 100 divisions on the wee hours of the morning, September 1, 1939, alleging Germany had been attacked (the Nazis had set up a fake attack). France gave an ultimatum to Hitler the same day, September 1, 1939: 48 hours to get out of Poland. Great Britain, that had basically no army, was dragged into it because of her intrinsic alliance (“Entente Cordiale”) with France (after all, they were the only two large democracies … with their brat of a child, the USA).

c) France attacked Hitler within days with 50 divisions, across the Maginot Line, but, although she occupied a piece of Germany, could not break through the “Westwall” (“Ziegfried” line) at its strongest point (no wonder: it took the Franco-British-Canadian-US-Commonwealth armies 6 months to break through it at their weakest points in 1944/45). Belgium, goaded by the perfidious pro Nazi American plutocrats, was neutral, and that prevented the French army to attack in an easier place (besides, goaded by the sneaky Americans, Belgium had renegaded on the construction of her piece of the Maginot Line, precisely where the Panzers would break through, turning around the French defenses.)

d) As the battle in Poland raged, the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s murderously effective Air Force, ran out of its US made lubricants, so hundreds of tons of it where shipped to the Nazis by American corporations (good racists help each other).

e) The first British soldier took a month to reach France, after the UK also declared war on September 3, 1939. By then the French offensive had stopped, Poland having been crushed.

f) France had been under US embargo for years for being an enemy combatant (since France was anti-Hitler, and the USA was pro Hitler, except for Roosevelt who just talked, the US Congress embargoed France in 1937).

g) During the early years of the American revolutionary war, 90% of the cartridges used by the American revolutionaries were made in France. In 1939/1940, perhaps exhausted by all the military help it gave the Nazis, the USA did not send ONE cartridge to France.

e) The French and the British conducted an ambitious air-sea-land invasion of northern Norway, in spring 1940, with the aim of destroying Hitler’s Iron Road. The elite Nazi divisions were routed by the French Foreign Legion, and fled towards pseudo neutral Sweden. The next step of the Franco-British was to invade pseudo neutral Sweden (faithful iron servant to Hitler), but the disastrous events in France interrupted this plan.

g) Apparently betrayed by the Prince of Wales (he had been fired as king because he was a confirmed pro-Nazi, but, incredibly, had been made Inspector General of the British Armed Forces, spending weeks examining French fortifications). His Highness, briefed by French generals, finally sent a note to Hitler about where the weakest point was, just at the end of the Maginot Line, where French defenses were broken. Even though, the Nazis had to use suicide attacks by human bomb engineers against a French reserve division.

h) The battle of France cost the Nazis 50,000 troops dead, mostly elite soldiers with a a high proportion of elite officers, the best the Nazis had (driving them mad). The commanding Nazi Marshal commented the “French fought like lions”. The French had 95,000 soldiers killed. In five weeks. Proportionally to the present US population that would have been as if 700,000 US soldiers had been killed in combat in 5 weeks: France had 40 million inhabitants at the time! So much for the French being cowards.

i) Thousands of French civilians were deliberately strafed on the refugee roads (the hatred got so high that in one case a Nazi crew of a bomber that had been shot down, and guarded by French soldiers, was set upon by refugees who killed them). The Nazi losses could not be replaced (once again, proportionally to the population, they would be equivalent to more than 200,000 soldiers and officers killed in today’s USA). As a result Hitler’s army was weaker when it was ordered to attack the USSR.

j) In June 1940, as the French army fought alone against the Nazis, without assistance from anyone, not even the British (who had just been crushed, losing all their equipment), a few things became clear:

 1) The USA would not help, not even with an ultimatum to Hitler. Far from it; as far as many powerful Americans were concerned, their guy was winning.

 2) The Nazis, were enraged, rabid, holocaustic. After French units stopped General Rommel’s elite Seventh Panzer Division on the Somme for three days, the French had to surrender, having run out of ammunition.  Rommel had them executed, soldiers and officers. After a number of such occurrences, the question could be legitimately asked whether the entire French population would not be killed to the last by the Nazis (as they would try to do with the Slavs and Jews and Gypsies later, and had already started to do with the Poles).

 3) In these conditions, keeping on fighting looked unwise to some French leaders. After all, as long as the Nazis were getting massive American and Soviet help, what was a half invaded France to do? Churchill proposed to unify Great Britain and France as one country, instantaneously, and that would have been an excellent solution (making all French citizens British would have caused the Nazis to think twice about holocausting the French; as it was, the Nazis subsequently assassinated more than half a million French civilians). But an idiotic French PM  decided otherwise, and moreover the US government, always helpful (to Hitler), rushed to recognize the illegal Vichy regime.

k) France, under the form of the “Free French” kept on fighting. From May 26 to June 11, 1942, the First Free French Division defended Bir Hakeim against the Italian and the entire Nazi Afrika Korps of Rommel. Resisting for 16 days, it gave the retreating British Eight Army time to reorganize, allowing it to subsequently defeat the Afrika Korps at the El Alamein, at the door of the Suez canal. In just that one battle the Nazis suffered 3,300 dead or wounded, 277 captured, 51 tanks, 49 planes and roughly 100 other vehicles destroyed. Hitler was not amused, and concluded that “next to us Germans”, the French were the best fighters in the world, and so France had to be eradicated.

l) As North Africa got freed in Operation Torch, the Free French were able to raise a huge army (with US equipment: they were often taken for Americans, even as they contributed to the liberation of Italy, France and Germany). By 1944, the reborn French republic had risen like a phoenix, with an army of more than one million men fighting the Nazis, crossing the Rhine under fire, and making it first to Austria.

m) The USA never declared war to Hitler. Hitler declared war to the USA on December 11, 1941. The USA, its pro Nazi plutocracy conniving, had not planned to fight in 1942, and was taken by total surprise. So much for being so attached to democracy and the like.
***

So what does it all mean? France is the sister republic and democracy of the USA. And French civilization clearly “founded” Great Britain in 1066 (in the fiery debate about the Iraq invasion, in 2003, the UK foreign minister, Straw, said so himself). Thus the origin of American civilization is French. By spiting France, some in the USA spite the deepest part of their own civilization. France is a problem for the descendants of the US plutocrats who supported and partnered with Hitler. They got furious against France in 1934, precisely because of France’s aggressive attitude relative to Hitler.

It’s time to understand this, and realize that US plutocrats and racists betrayed democracy, republicanism, France, Great Britain and the entire British Commonwealth in 1939, and all those who opposed fascism to death (profiting of US benevolence towards them, the Japanese fascists invaded French Indochina, killing more than a million). This has never been said forcefully, so the same clique (OK, their grandchildren) brought us the Iraq war and other idiocies of the criminal type.

Anti-knowledge can lead not just to mental retardation, but to servitude. Those who attack France in the USA do not do so just because it pleases them to hate the idea of France, but because they want US citizens to be meek and servile.

Time to wake up to the sad realization the American republic has been severely manipulated, from 1933 to 2003, by the same sort of people, with the same sort of agenda: themselves, above anything else.
***

Patrice Ayme,

Tyranosopher

 


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