Truth Is Hell: Iraq, etc.

TRUTH DIGGING CONSISTS IN UNMASKING EVILS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Saint Outside, Devil Inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

PLUTOCRACIES USE THOSE POOR DEVILS, MERCENARIES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

PLUTO PROFITS FROM WAR, ANY WAR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

ATROCIOUS WAR CRIMINALITY IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN:

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

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

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

From Young’s letter, published on TruthDig:

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

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

(Read Young’s entire letter here.)

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

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

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

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

***

ONGOING FRANCO-ALGERIA DRAMA:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

WITH SAINTS LIKE THAT, WHO NEEDS DEVILS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Aphorisms, July 2011

The More Fascist, The More Indignant:

China is upset. How dare Obama receive the Dalai Lama, that Tibetan monk in red? Blood is much better than red. Much better to shoot to death Tibetan refugee children in the back, as they try to escape the dictatorship in Tibet. Too bad there were dozens of mountaineers to witness that, and record it. Or may be it was good, as everybody could see China meant business; if you don’t like it here, you leave, in a coffin.

And remember: the fascism you see is only a symptom. The real disease is deep down inside.

***

Coherence Wanted:

Murderoch and his lackeys are heading to jail. Hopefully. OK, only a few thousands plutocrats and their lackeys to follow them. Some of the charges could be the same as for the Nuremberg trial: promoting war of aggression. Others would be new: promoting publicly torture and inhuman treatment, something the Nazis did not dare to do.

Let us be clear: Nazism was repressed with ferocity, but not soon enough to prevent the death of 70 million (yes, seventy millions, it was not just about Jews).

Nazism was a mental, civilizational disease that struck Germany progressively, over a few generations. It developed, in a place, Germany, which was initially pretty pacific (but for Prussia). Racist fascist plutocracy developed to mass murdering proportions, because it was not struck, in a timely manner. Nevertheless, advocating torture and wars of aggression is something that even Nazi Germany knew was a bridge too far.  So, in a way, thanks to Murderoch and his friends, imitators and collaborators (that would include Tony Blair), the situation is philosophically worse now.

By not striking its plutocrats now, the West has been weak. Obama has been irresponsible. Which makes him now responsible of any further decay, looking forward.

Now that Murderoch and his salaried criminals are been exposed for what it was clear they were, over decades, a new dawn can be seized. It is an occasion to get out of it clean. At some point, civilization has to be defended, or one will go down the ethical drain, as Rome did.

And that means writing down bad banking investments, and punishing the bankers when it turns out they invested the way they did, from corrupted practice; corruption is the defining word of the Murderoch empire, and its propaganda. The so called financial crisis, a paroxysm of exploitation by the plutocracy, is entangled with Murderoch, and his ilk.

So is the war in Afghanistan, started by the USA in 1979, against a secular republic. Now the self described democrat in chief is allied to a narcotrafficking, Islamist regime, thoroughly corrupt and rotten, and NATO is supposed to spend 15 billion dollars a month there (officially), let alone all the maiming and murdering… That is progress, and civilization, only in the Murderoch sense.

***

The Education Of Effort:

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, harassed by cancer, is going back for chemotherapy in Cuba. “I find myself before my highest mountain and my longest walk,” quoted Chavez from Nietzsche’s treatise “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.” Nietzsche’s philosopher-prophet (con)descended down from a mountainous retreat to mix it up with humankind.

That Chavez quotes regularly from an All European philosopher is a good sign. Never call Nietzsche “German“, he would have resented the insult. Nietzsche was the first to say that he was anything but German (although he wrote in German). If you insist, you can call him “Polish”, he said.

A beautiful steep and vertiginous path up from the sea next to Nice is officially named after Nietzsche, who hiked it regularly. Nietzsche, a solo mountaineer, even on ice, even when (lethally) sick, was friendly to reality. And reality is encountered in the mountains, or at sea, or in the wilds, not in saloons and high society. That is why Nietzsche resigned from the university: he wanted freedom of thought… and emotion.

Nietzsche’s strident warnings about the lethally violent mood which was going metastatic in Germany, were not heeded enough by enough people of the German persuasion.

French and German socialists made a last hour, coordinated effort to stop World War One, with a general strike. Tragically, the effort came to an end when the most famous French tribune, Jean Jaurès, himself a top professional philosopher who became a leader of the socialist party, was assassinated by a French nationalistic fanatic. Otherwise we would have had a show down between democratic progressives and  fascist plutocrats, rather than between Prussian and French armies.

The great showdown between democratic progressives and  fascist plutocrats, has no happened yet. Throughout the 20C, that fundamental civilizational reset was diverted into side issues, such as Communist fascists against racist fascists, or democrats, against fascists. But the full causal confrontation has never happened: at Nuremberg, many more should have been sitting, many of them not German. Many of them Western industrialists and bankers, who had financed Hitler, or even done his job before he was in power.(For example by creating the monster IG Farben.)

At first sight it seems strange that Nietzsche, an advocate of the “Will to Power” would be followed by the socialist leaders. But it’s not: you need lots of will to climb. Nietzsche was angry against the transformation of the German people into an unthinking herd, manipulated by newspapers. The socialists had the same problem.

We, the world, have had the same problem, as the plutocrats were authorized to Foxify the world. Fox, owned by Murdoch, is the dominant TV channel in the USA, with an unending parade of beautiful people pounding Nazi logic, for the whole world to learn by rote. Crafty as a fox, it lives off red meat, as it, and its friends, scavenge, worldwide.

***

The Hypocrisy Of Social And Financial Success:

Now what to think of beatifically happy authors such  Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, another French philosopher who became a success author of gnan gnan theater? (Schmitt has been translated in 50 languages, and basks in it.) I appreciate his theater (literally and figuratively). But not his philosophy, which is most dangerous, because it lies.

Schmitt claims that “anger is utter stupidity“. Well, he is neurologically wrong, and an hypocrite full of himself, besides. I guess that the declaration of war of September 3, 1940, of Britain and France against Hitler, an act of astronomical anger, was also “bêtise compléte“, to quote Schmitt in his original French.

Schmitt ought to make us angry, no wonder he does not like anger. Schmitt was born in Lyon. Why did Schmitt become a Belgian citizen? Obviously, to avoid high French taxes. That’s a well known trick which many who come into money in France practice (other authors flee to Ireland, where authors are not taxed at all (!), and corporations pay only 8% tax; no wonder France, Germany and Britain feel that Ireland is exploiting them… and their banks).

Why are French taxes much higher than in Belgium? France has a serious army and an expensive military-industrial complex, whereas the profession of Belgium is to not defend democracy.

That hypocritical defenselessness was the main cause of the Franco-British defeat against Hitler in May-June 1940, as the sudden switch of the Netherlands and Belgium from Hitler-friendly to lamentable victims, and their strident calls for help, completely disorganized the French and British armies, which rushed in to help, as Hitler had hoped.

So Schmitt smiles beatifically, but this deformation of his face, truly a mask, has no value. He went to Belgium, not out of goodness and giving, but out of selfishness and anger. Yes, anger. The anger of a man who had to pay his share, and refused to. Acts can talk louder than smiles. Better the smile from an angry man, it’s worth something. The smile from a mask is worth nothing. The most recent neurology shows that the only way to shake the brain into shape is with strong emotions.  And anger is the prime strong emotion.

***

Better Late than Never:

After more than 3,000 French bombing strikes on Kaddafi’s mercenary forces, the Libyan National Transitional Council, NTC or CNT, has finally been recognized by the USA, July 15, as the legitimate Libyan government. France recognized the NTC March 10.

Force for the better? Force for the better. If democracies live on their knees, soon they will eat dirt. France has fought hot wars against Qaddafi, on and off for four decades, it’s time to finish him off.

The French national Assembly voted to pursue the war in Libya, 482 votes for it, 27, against. All the Communist deputies voted against. (Thus those Americans opposed to the war in Libya are French communists, aligned with Moscow! I am trying to be funny, because the hour is grave enough.) Some of the communists argued that Syria was treated better. This is not correct. Just Qaddafi killed twenty or thirty times more, relative to the population, than Assad has so far, before French bombers bombed.

France is trying to do the transition right, in Libya, to anchor the righ side of the Magreb. Algeria was told to stop sending petrol to Qaddafi. And that will be stopped, one way, or another.

Have no silly hope: should Assad persists in his evil, Pluto inspired way, and engage in much further, Qaddafi like behavior, he is next. Once again, we are not in world where democracy can sit peacefully, next to fascist regimes getting bloodier everyday, without compromising its own survival. (And that sibylline declaration holds for Israel too!) Besides bombings, weapons can be sent, some of them from planes landing in the desert, as the French do in Libya, putting anti-tank missiles in the hands of the Berbers… (in a touching re-enactment of the Algerian war).

The French PM argued that “la solution politique commence a prendre forme“. Kaddafi’s chief of staff was received by the French president. Negotiations work better at the point of a gun. (As pointed out by Bruce Willis in Besson’s movie, “The 5th element”.)

***

More Faces Than Janus:

“The Economist”, the magazine which used to celebrate Pinochet and his friends from the CIA, is definitively less sanguine about the USA. It revealed that the French government was, rightly, shocked, after massive war efforts in Ivory Coast, Afghanistan and Libya, to hear from the departing Secretary of Defense of the USA, that the Europeans were not doing enough in defense.

Quite the opposite, the French, and other Europeans, noticed that the Americans made a puny effort in Libya. Now, of course, Libya is strategic for Europe, whereas Afghanistan is nothing to Europe. Europeans are in Afghanistan by solidarity with the USA, to help them catch their ex-mercenary, the rebel Bin Laden. I wonder how that is going.

American defense is huge. But it’s not just a giant police operation, the USA policing the world for what they view as the better, it’s also a military-industrial complex which takes care of its business by never ending a war too soon. The situation in Afghanistan is a disaster mostly because the main agent of the war since 1979, the USA, made it so. Including with its importation of bin Laden, to Afghanistan. It was a made into a deliberate disaster (as it was advocated to be, at the start, by Gates and Brzezinski), again and again. The interest of that was to keep a reason to be (there) militarily.

After 9/11/2001, the USA could have easily killed bin Laden, be it only by grabbing the situation at Tora Bora, a mountain range were bin Laden was besieged. The USA could have also imposed on Afghanistan a secular constitution, the best way to return to the pre-1980s situation, and separate the secular forces from the Islamists.

That which was not done in Afghanistan, imposing a secular constitution, can now be done in Pakistan, and OUGHT to be done. It was just done in Bangladesh.

***

When The USA Ought To Swallow Its Own Free Trade Medicine:

“The Economist” also ran an article drifting my way on an important point of American defense. Namely it observed that the F35, the new American fighter, ten years after it was decided to build it, is turning into a radical failure. The least of its problem is that it will see service not before 2016 (a full decade after the more performing Rafale).

Among other problems, like being slow, and having little cargo capacity, the F35 carries only two missiles inside (the only way it can pretend to be stealth). The F35 is so under-armed, that American generals, “The Economist” informs us, wake up at night in panic, covered with sweat. American analysts have concluded that the F35 was no better than the F105, a plane shot down in great numbers in the early stages of the Vietnam war, before it was replaced by the more performing F4 Phantom.

The French rival to the F35, the Rafale, has been engaged very successfully in combat in Afghanistan and Libya (the Rafale is a multipurpose aircraft: it does air superiority, interception, bombing, ground attacks, and reconnaissance).

The Rafale can carry more than its own weight in ammunitions, and 250% of its weight with supplementary fuel and electronics, because  they can hang from 14 hard points below its vast, but compact dart style wing, helped by a  big forward canard, full of stealthy, reactive electronics. It also has twice the combat radius of the F35 (combat radius is crucial for carriers, and the combat radius of the F35 is abysmally too small, only 1,000 kms).

The Rafale is protected by active stealth (it makes anti-radar), so it can be metallic and fast. Anti-radar works so well, that it is unlawful in cars.

Rafales attacked Qaddafi’s tank columns while facing fully operational and active modern missile systems some mobile, some fixed, at point blank range, in the desperate, last minute defense of Benghazi. So effective were the Rafales that they covered non stealth Mirage fighter-bombers operating with them.

This action in Libya definitively proved that active stealth works (passive stealth, American style, is known NOT to work, as was demonstrated during the war against Serbia: A Czech system imitating modern radio astronomy was able to detect F117 stealth planes, and direct cannon fire appropriately… All modern warplanes, since 1940, that is, since radar exists, have had stealth coverings, by the way. So American style stealth is as old as radar. Active stealth is a completely new technology, only the Rafale has it.)

“The Economist” says that the USA ought to scale back the F35. But it does not notice that the USA ought to swallow its own medicine. If the European Typhoon and Rafale, especially in light of the “Meteor” ram jet missile development, which they are made to carry, are better, why should not the USA buy those? Is this not the key advantage of free trade?

The British, especially, and the French, quite a bit, have bought in the past American weapons. Although the Americans refused to buy European made, superior air tankers (which the Australian and British have bought), the French, to this day, use American air tankers (KC35). And have used in the past American fighters (the Crusaders).

The Brits use American strategic missiles and submarines, which they bought (France makes its own, completely independently of the USA). Could it be that the Americans refuse to reciprocate? And use their military-industrial complex not just as an indirect instrument of imperialism, but, directly, as a way to prevent others to have one? (Small production lines being very expensive.)

Justice, economy, and the belief in the free market, should lead to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be for the USA to give up on the F35, and replace it with Rafales.

Some would whine that this would be the end of American defense. But not at all, quite the opposite. It would improve American defense. The USA could concentrate on its strengths, if it cooperated more with the Europeans. Trade American flying robots against Rafales. The French would be interested (as they are debating buying American drones, with their more advanced tech).

The Americans are way ahead in drones, and other aspects of electronic warfare. Reinforce that advantage. Moreover, an adequate defense for aircraft carriers against ballistic missiles is crucially absent, and tempts rogue elements in the Chinese military to hope that they could keep American carriers in the middle of the Pacific, far from the puny 1,000 kilometer range of the F35.  That mesmerizing possibility will make them more aggressive than if they had no hope.

As the American defense budget shrinks dramatically soon, European cooperation in developing hyper expensive weapon systems ought to be welcome.

***

 When An Army Is Right, Militarism Is Moral:

Eva Joly, candidate to the presidency from of the ecologist party in France, thinks there should not be a French military parade on 14 Juillet. This has created some controversy, as Joly has double nationality, and became French 50 years ago. The French PM let it be known that this showed her French culture was not that deep.

I do like and esteem Eva Joly a lot, and admired her work as a tough investigative judge against the French plutocracy, made, in the face of death threats. However she is completely wrong on that one.

Now, of course, I am myself a fanatical anti-militarist. Still, civilization needs to be defended.

In 1940, France and Britain came to the rescue of Norway, after Hitler attacked it. Joly was born in occupied Oslo in 1943. The Nazis committed atrocities in Norway (war crimes).

if France and Britain had done nothing against Hitler, Hitler would have gone east (he had an accord from 1935 with Great Britain to this effect). France and Britain could have waited as everybody else in Europe was having a fight to death with Nazism. That was the American “isolationist” model. The model of Eric-Emanuel Schmitt, in other words: no anger, it’s an utter stupidity, gnan-gnan reigns.

Michel Foucault, the philosopher, made fun of the sentence “civilization needs to be defended”. It is fashionable to view such an idea as deeply reactionary. However, one has to be careful to not be an opulent exploiter of a system, while decrying it. Condemning the cake, and those who want more, while eating the cake and splurging, makes one into a liar.

So it all depends. If it is to fight Hitler, no bomb is big enough. If it is to fight strikers (as happened in the past in France, or the USA!), the military ought to stay in its barracks. Thus the present author is against the war in Afghanistan (mostly because of its history, and the fact that, in turn, created an irreversible gangrene), but for the war in Libya (not only are the rebels on our side, but their ideology is correct, being ecumenical, and non Islamist).

Anchored deep in the French psyche is the tremendous sacrifice of anti-fascist wars, with the huge losses they entailed.  The verdict is not that the wars ought to have been avoided, and France should have disappeared, or turned Nazi, but that the wars should have been won at a lesser cost.

Nietzsche screamed loud, about German hyper nationalistic racist fascism, but people paid attention too late. To this day, idiots teach haughty lessons about WWI having been caused by other factors, spread all around Europe. What France learned is that, when Prussia attacked Austria, it ought to have intervened. And Britain learned the same, when Bismarck connived to make it appear that France attacked Prussia. France and Britain learned that one had to make a stand against fascism, and the earlier, the better.

***

Historical Chaos:

Of course the onset of WWI could have turned differently if Jaurès and the German socialists could have pulled a last minute strike to avoid war, as they tried to do (but Jaures was assassinated by a French fanatical nationalist). This means that millions of the workers knew that the war was a plutocratic plot, and a fascist one, too But not enough knew it, and they did not disobey enough.

By being anti-militaristic, Jaurès was anti-fascist; and he was right to be so; in the end it’s half a dozen plotting fascist generals at the head of the Prussian Army staff which created WWI.

***

Too Soft A Philosophy, Too Drastic, The Consequences:

In a way, there was a first war, which France, thanks to Voltaire, refused to fight. That was the Seven Year War, against Great Britain and Prussia. As a result most of the world French empire was lost, and, ironically enough, the Lingua Franca of the world became English (the old “Anglo-Normand”).  

That’s when France shrank, and the Anglo-Saxon empire became giant. There are three ironies in this:

1) that French self imposed defeat led to French vengeance, and the creation of the USA, and weakened Great Britain so much that she could not be of much use to France at the start of WWI and WWII (although Great Britain was of some use, in WWI, as the ten or so divisions of the British Army of general French (sic) played a role on the Marne).

2) although the Anglo-Saxons attribute their superiority on the French to the subtlety of the English laissez faire, the truth is the exact opposite: they won because of their militarism, an attribute generally bestowed, ironically, on the French…

3) France and Britain, long the same country, are again quite the same. But their creation, the USA, the fruit of their discord, has some wild tendencies which need to be addressed, and harnessed, lest the Atlantic turns into an insufferable split, and lest the advantages one could find in this gifted child be denied.

***

On Bastille Day, 14 Juillet, a French soldier was killed in Afghanistan in combat. The day before, 5 French soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. From a suicide bomber Afghan soldier, during a sura.

A lot of morals in this. First, how come the French have been inside Afghanistan since 2001? Was not that a war started by Carter on July 3,1979? Somebody explains that. Why does not carter fight his war alone? After all is not his Nobel peace prize just for that?

Second, the hare brain plan to give power to the Afghan military seems prone to unforeseen explosion.

Third: the big mistake, in Afghanistan, was to fail to separate friend and foe. How could have one done that? By imposing a secular constitution. It was easy to do in 2001/2002. But I forgot: Bush was preoccupied with allowing his (ex?)friend bin Laden to escape.

That was just done in Bangladesh, and the Islamists went rabid in the street. Religious fanatics always do that, it’s part of the process of calming them down. But the Islamists are not represented in parliament, and secularism ought to weaken them further.

So, practicality in this? Insist that all and any theocracy is no democracy, and sanctions apply. That would, of course, include Afghanistan. So give an ultimatum, and evacuate.

***

Warning To Egypt:

Standard Islam and its standard Qur’an was created by a military regime, twenty years after Muhammad’s death. A civil war started, among diverse interpretations of Islam, to this day, 13 centuries later.

In a way, what we see presently in Egypt is a continuation of that history. The war will go on, until secularism triumphs, as it did in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.

***

There is lots of value in post thunderstorms sunsets. As we come to appreciate their beauty, we come to appreciate the apocalypse, any apocalypse, &, thus, to transcend it. thereafter no fight is too hard, no mountain too high, no martyrdom too cruel (esp. if visited upon others.)

***

***

What’s so hot about being cool? The snake is cool, the mind is hot. So, is it not cool to have a mind? A burning subject in cold semantics.

***

Yes, of course the real problem is not the banks, which only claim to be suffering. It is the consumer debt. And the debt cannot be fixed, except by winding it down further. Thus, the government has to create jobs to compensate. Instead, the cutter in chief only intends to cut, cut, cut.

Later Obama will switch to the progressive stuff, he said July 15, so progressives should support him. Presumably after the country has died from a 1,000 cuts…

***

Save the banks, say the plutocrats, and they smirk. Instead, banks which require public help ought to be nationalized, as Reagan and Bush Senior did during the failure of 2,000 Saving and Loans.

***

Obama claims to be a democrat. Hope he can believe in. When he was in full power, with the full Senate, and the full Congress behind him, he could easily have done away with tax breaks for billionaires. He just did not think about it, darn. And he could have done rising taxes on billionaires, even after losing the elections in November 2010. But that would have been cutting the branch on which he sits proudly, isn’t?

Thus Obama waited safely for the republicans to be in control of Congress. Then he claimed he wanted to tax billionaires, while going, hand in hat to Wall Street, to beg who he defined as his “friends” for money, lots of money.

No doubt he will get it. Because his friends on Wall Street see no contradiction. They know their boy’s service is always impeccable, and stylish, besides. The boy has got class. Maybe he could be rewarded as well as Clinton.

***

No, they don’t know what the truth is, and they don’t care. They are not looking for it. Truth, for them, means power. They just laugh as they get ahead, trampling us all on the way (spoken form one who has had direct evidence of the caudillo maximo…).

Why this, why now? Because it gets in the air, and a civilization goes down thus; rots by the head. Leaders have their own society, they don’t see the rest.

***

Living on the road to happiness does not beat having a home there. Paid cash, from the savings one made, avoiding bad investments.

***

Israel Outlaws Boycotts Against Israel: more stunts like that and swimming across the Med will become a priority. The old Jerusalem kingdom was supported by West, until it was not anymore. Then it disappeared quickly. Without Western support, Israel is not viable. So be nice. Behave.

***

Paupers Don’t Make A Country Richer:

The Washington crowd thinks pauperization motivates people. It does not. They will find that out, the hard way. People work if there is profit in it. Otherwise, they may as well hang out, go on welfare, and food stamps (which is what is happening).

The minimum wage in France, or Germany, is more than twice that in the USA, and those economies are roaring at this point relative to the economy of the USA, which is stagnant, especially if one counts that only the metastatic financial sector is doing well (instantaneous German expansion is around 6% at this point, France is at 4%, the USA is folding over).

***

Truth, BTW, even in formal logic, is not fully elucidated. (For more on that search for “Tarsky”, a late Polish-American logician, and “truth”). No wonder truth is hard to find in political life…

***

Patrice Ayme

RULING THE USA WITH FALSE HISTORY.

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

 

MORALITY WINS WARS. CONVERSATION IS NOT JUST CIVILIZATION, BUT DEMOLITION.

TO WIN WARS, IT IS MORE EFFICIENT TO BE MORALLY RIGHT THAN BONE HEADED. CONVERSATION IS NOT JUST CIVILIZATION, IT’S ALSO DEMOLITION.

***

Many people oppose “hard power” (supposedly American, good) and “soft power” (European, weak). They have it all wrong. It’s common sense: before smashing someone’s face, a few words are in order to clarify the situation, and give the opponent a chance to evolve positively. Absent this attitude, one cannot really initiate positive change. And this is exactly what one observes: but for the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the USA has always been hanging way behind European intervention, often by many years.

European “soft power” was not that soft in Bosnia, and it came years before the USA. French artillery used radar guided counter fire to silence the guns that were destroying Sarajevo. True the Dutch got overwhelmed, later, during the Srebrenica Massacre, and when they asked the French to help, the later military could not, officially because of a dearth of combat helicopters (only the USA had enough of these, it was claimed).

France also intervened in Rwanda in 1994, ultimately dropping from the sky (with some US logistical help) an entire paratroop division, that stopped the tit for tat genocide (that guaranteed the furor of those who wanted some more vengeance).

Of course, we do not expect these facts to be widely known among US lovers of neoconservatism. Colonial English American neoconservativism is by definition anti French ever since American Founding Fathers such as Jefferson were told they could not keep slaves in Paris (by the police of the Ancient Regime!) and ever since La Fayette tried to persuade his good friend Washington, the famous slave owner, to abrogate slavery. But so much the better: nothing European progressivism loves more than a never ending war with US neoconservatives. It’s like going to the gym to work out against stupid machines, but now to exercise the moral and mental muscles instead.

In conflicts, the most important, and most moral foundation is simply to be right, or more exactly, less wrong, and adaptive (learning quickly from one’s mistakes).

European “soft power” is often misunderstood: it gets everywhere, and so it gets involved easily enough to bring any conflict to a head, by its mere presence, but not enough to use overwhelming force, and kill it. In a way, soft power is the opposite of the Powell doctrine (that is, to use overwhelming force). Soft power can be insidious, all the way down to a soft mental virus, and completely lethal to old thought.

An example is those European journalists who interrupted the Olympic Games’ lighting-of-the-flame a few days ago. They got arrested by Greek police, but they promised more. What did great nation China do for greater glory seeking now that slapped in the face? Well it made a bad situation worse. China censored the news, showing fake footage, and its true face, bloody, uncomprehending, dazed, senile. Uninformed, uneducated Chinese were then interviewed in Chinese streets by a delighted Western media, and they showed in turn a blatantly sheepish Chinese public, bleating contently that the heavenly Chinese government would set everything right up there in heavens. So two European journalists in far away Greece made China stumble, for the entire world to see. Much more of this, and China will have to choose between becoming again a rabidly idiotic dictatorship, or turning some more the pages away from simpler fascist methods. In any case, change.

The European idea of soft power is to seize the high moral ground, which is the most important ground to occupy in war. To do that, the Europeans have learned to trot out important matters of principle, stick to them, and open a dialogue about them. Or a monologue. The idea is not to be cuddly. Quite the opposite. The idea is to harass with ideas. It allows to start small, hence right away. Experience shows that thinking is what fascists hate the most, and are the most vulnerable to. They really can’t take it, because fascism, by definition is a simplification of thinking. Complicated thinking is by definition anti fascist.

This method was inaugurated against Hitler. France (and, more reluctantly, Britain) put pressure on the Nazis, a soft pressure which increasingly reduced the mental freedom of the Nazis, to the point they made a fatal mistake (attacking Poland without noticing that a small print clause in its treaty with France guaranteed that Britain would follow France in counterattacking the Nazis).

The first problem with US “hard power” is that it often cannot be engaged, and thus becomes an excuse for cowardice (as demonstrated by Clinton in Bosnia for years, as Roger Cohen points out: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/26/opinion/edcohen.php).

All too obsessed by total victory, which looked dubious with the Nazis, the USA, just like in 1914-1916, did not want to get involved in enforcing democracy by supporting its parents, France and Britain, lest it be TOO conflictual. So the USA was not at Munich, and had an embargo against France (for being aggressive against those poor Nazis). If the USA had been at Munich, things would have been different. Both in 1939, and in 1914, things would have been also very different (France, which was most the military might of the West at the time, would have attacked Hitler right there, or Hitler would have lost face).

The fear of soft power, power on the matters of principle, led the USA to NOT send ONE cartridge to France in 1940 (by contrast, 90% of American cartridges were French during the American independence war). Instead the USA waited, from 1914 until 1917, and from 1933 until Hitler declared war to the USA for Christmass 1941… As if the USA was waiting to see on which side it was better to use overwhelming force to come to the rescue of victory.

Using overwhelming force is also the US way against smaller opponents. This is an American habit developped when exterminating the Red Skins during the three centuries it took to genocide them (the most successful genocide in the known history of mankind). It was highly successful, since, until recently, the USA was a triumph of the white European race and its ways, so it was self reinforcing. It became a cultural trait.

This pouncing on the weak guarantees the lowest moral ground, insuring long term defeat when the enemy cannot be outright exterminated (and exterminating all of the long civilized and very populous Middle East is distinctly more challenging than exterminating neolithic populations).

That is what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, with grotesque “shock and awe”. All what intensive aerial bombing has guaranteing is that Homo Americanus Simplex occupies the lowest moral rung. To ask NATO to help splash around that ethical sewer would just spread a moral, and mortal infection. What is needed is an EXTRICATION from the present MORAL ABYSS, and once high morality has been regained, and a stakeholder plan for the average Iraqi and Afghan has been devised, get much cheaper UN soldiers to come in to back up the Iraqi and Afghani armies (if there is a need, but if things are well done, there should be little of a need).

French and Western European and African Union forces are involved in the Darfur-Chad-Central African theater in a much more reserved way (the occasional French special force soldier dies in Sudan). Instead the Powell doctrine would call to march onto Khartoum, after bombing the hell out of it, killing hundreds of thousands, and costing a fortune one does not have (either morally or financially). Thus the Powell doctrine can’t do a thing, but France/EU/AU has slowly, and softly, deployed thousands of troops and proxies, putting an increasing squeeze on the miscreants. France also was for a very long time in a quasi war with Libya. That allowed to contain Libya, and gave it time to perceive the extent of some of its errors, and change its ways. Full war could well have only reinforced the miscreants, or create an Iraq like mess.

Hard power is mentally retarded if the enemy has not been discovered first. In Iraq and Afghanistan the enemies are mostly not what the USA has been fighting. One cannot drop a bomb on economic improvement, no more than on corruption, backwardness, or the Qur’an. Bringing in one more school, rather than one more bomb would be more like it. Of course, Quranists kill for thoughts, as bin Laden kindly reminded us last week; so teachers will need bodyguards: soft power does not mean no power. Bin Laden insisted that the “freedom of words” was a worse offense than simple bombing. The man hinself says it; he fears soft power more than hard power. Nothing like a drawing of his prophet doing his thing: it drives him mad, because it shatters his universe.

In Tibet, we have an excellent occasion to show to that astute student of Western ways, China, that much progress still needs to be done on the moral and cognitive level. Putting pressure on China of course cannot be done in an overwhelming way (it would mean a world war). But it can be done using soft power. Start by requiring the full reopening of Tibet to non Chinese capable of reporting what’s going on. Absent this, one does one want to repeat the moral atrocity of 1936 (when Hitler inaugurated the Olympic games). The UN general assembly could be presented with a vote towards boycotting the opening ceremony (to start with). China has lost face in Tibet, but does not know it. Without an opening ceremony to the Games, it will lose face in a way that all Chinese folks will be able to see. Let them light up the flame with just Chinese to look up at it. That would be soft power, true, but it will be also capturing the moral high ground, and showing to all the Chinese population they are becoming international pariahs.

Making the WW II Germans into international pariahs significantly weakened Hitler’s military power: too many Germans knew they were viewed as evil by the rest of the world, they could not set their hearts to fight for evil to death as much as they would have otherwise. International moral pressure is very powerful, it works. It undermines Goliath’s mind. When Goliath is confused enough, about why he is doing what he is doing, he is ready for a high technology demise.

Patrice Ayme
http://www.patriceayme.com
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com