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.

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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.

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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.)

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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).

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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:

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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.

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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.

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Patrice Ayme

WWII Details Worth Examining

MUCH OF UNEXAMINED WWII IS RELEVANT TODAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CLEAR & PRESENT ABUSE FROM INCOMPLETE, OR FALSE HISTORY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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WHY THE NAZIS HATED FRANCE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

WHY DID HITLER ATTACK RUSSIA?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

WHY DID THE NAZI INVASION OF RUSSIA FAIL?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

VICIOUS MOODS ARE ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Boosted By Soros On Europe:

BAD GERMANY, BAD EUROPE:

Abstract: I agree with much of what Soros said on the bank and currency crisis in Europe. Under his calm language, his indictment of Germany is frightening. I add fuel to the fire, naturlich.

[This is the European centered part of Soros' discourse.]

***

  Soros:The fallibility of market participants, regulators, and economists must also be recognized.  A truly dynamic situation cannot be understood by studying multiple equilibria.  We need to study the process of change.

PA: In the case of European Monetary Union (EMU), even the equilibrium analysis was flawed from the start. It is not a question of Europe not being an optimal currency area (as American Europhobic destroyers often have it). It was much more basic than that: the nature of money was misunderstood.

  Soros: The euro crisis is particularly instructive in this regard. It demonstrates the role of misconceptions and a lack of understanding in shaping the course of history. The authorities didn’t understand the nature of the euro crisis; they thought it is a fiscal problem while it is more of a banking problem and a problem of competitiveness.

PA: As Soros himself would say further on, it’s even deeper than that: the possibility of making “fiat money” was denied. Thus European states were cut at the heel. “Fiat Money” goes at the heart of the concepts of money… and state.

There is also a massive corruption problem, and it is not confined to banks. It implicates the very nature of today’s constitutions.

The very nature of representative democracy is to put a lot of power in a few hands. This is also what plutocracy does. Make interact together the very few elected ones with the very few who have a lot of money, boost all of this with the fractional reserve privately money creating banking system, and churns out the rule of wealth, an aspect, with titanic corruption, of plutocracy.

  Soros: And [European Officials] applied the wrong remedy:you cannot reduce the debt burden by shrinking the economy, only by growing your way out of it. The crisis is still growing because of a failure to understand the dynamics of social change; policy measures that could have worked at one point in time were no longer sufficient by the time they were applied.

PA: They applied the wrong remedy deliberately. Merkel, Sarkozy and the Brussels’ fauna are in cahoots with the private financial pirates; they are their legal arm. All they wanted to do is that their friends, the pirates, recover their principal, after squeezing hard enough the colonized. So they set-up an aid system nominally for the latter, but, truly for their bankster friends. 

The delay in the correct measures was also deliberate. The allies of plutocratic banks (Merkel, Sarkozy, Barroso, etc.), have used it as a tactic to do nothing.

Always doing too little, too late, is an efficient way to do nothing, while claiming one meant well. Let’s not be fooled by Merkler and her kind.

The basic, deliberate flaw at the base of the EMU, is to make money creation a plutocratic affair. It would have emerged anyway. It emerged now, because we have a plutocratic bubble.

That bubble, in turn, was caused by the arrogance consecutive to the Bush-Obama(-Blair-Sarkozy-”Citizens-United”) years, when the plutocrats’ influence has started to look unimpeachable, and this once-in-a-civilization chance to grab power once and for all has made them frantic! 

The same happened after 150 BCE in Rome. Then, the plutocrats won, and Rome started its long decline. This time the decline is guaranteed to be short and brutish.   

  Soros; Since the euro crisis is currently exerting an overwhelming influence on the global economy I shall devote the rest of my talk to it. I must start with a warning: the discussion will take us beyond the confines of economic theory into politics and the dynamics of social change. But my conceptual framework based on the twin pillars of fallibility and reflexivity still applies. Reflexivity doesn’t always manifest itself in the form of bubbles. The reflexive interplay between imperfect markets and imperfect authorities goes on all the time while bubbles occur only infrequently. This is a rare occasion when the interaction exerts such a large influence that it casts its shadow on the global economy. How could this happen? My answer is that there is a bubble involved, after all, but it is not a financial but a political one. It relates to the political evolution of the European Union and it has led me to the conclusion that the euro crisis threatens to destroy the European Union. Let me explain.

PA: Agreed that there is a political bubble. But to say there was not a financial bubble is, simply false. The financial bubbles in Greece, Ireland and Spain were blatant. So was a general real estate bubble. For years, decent, hard working upper middle class people could not afford to live decently in the world’s most expensive cities, although those concentrated much of the GDP of the world (this is an allusion to New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, among others). So the main producers of added value work could not afford to live where they added the value, making the West’s economy inefficient (and society unjust).

Actually there is even, worldwide, a plutocratic bubble, the one Soros does not want to see. But I agree with him that the European Union is threatened at this point. Mountainous decisions have to be taken in days, in a system made to produce a few mice in a decade.

  Soros: I contend that the European Union itself is like a bubble. In the boom phase the EU was what the psychoanalyst David Tuckett calls a “fantastic object” – unreal but immensely attractive. The EU was the embodiment of an open society –an association of nations founded on the principles of democracy, human rights, and rule of law in which no nation or nationality would have a dominant position. 

PA: Although I see what he is trying to say, Soros is starting to thread very dangerous ground here. The European Union has to be, or there will be another war. It is not a bubble, it is the main weapon against insanity.

Europe is not a “fantastic object’, it is a necessity.

  Soros: The process of integration was spearheaded by a small group of far sighted statesmen who practiced what Karl Popper called piecemeal social engineering. They recognized that perfection is unattainable; so they set limited objectives and firm timelines and then mobilized the political will for a small step forward, knowing full well that when they achieved it, its inadequacy would become apparent and require a further step. The process fed on its own success, very much like a financial bubble. That is how the Coal and Steel Community was gradually transformed into the European Union, step by step.

Germany used to be in the forefront of the effort.

PA: Sort of. Although German politicians used to be in the forefront of the effort in the 1920s, after Germany fell into Nazism, it was of course unable to lead mentally. If nothing else, Nazism had decapitated Germany. Instead, after the Nazi disaster, Germany followed the lead of French statesmen, who had brandished the olive branch (say by not insisting to recover the entire West bank of the Rhine; the same generosity was mysteriously applied to Italy, although clearly major ex-French speaking parts of Italy such as Val D’Aoste, and next to Turin, used to be part of French speaking Savoy, and, after Mussolini’s forced Italianization could/should have very well be annexed!).

One can observe Soros’ drift into anti-European, pro-plutocratic and (implicit) anti-French bias. All students of the early European Union know that Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, two Frenchmen, played the leading roles, and the German role consisted mainly to salute the French led effort, and goose-step behind it. The tables of collaboration had been turned around.

Many surviving Nazi generals knew all too well that they got incredibly lucky in 1940, and had been in excellent position to observe the self defeating nature of the war against France. So, although still influential in German society (!), in the 1950s, they pushed for the symbiosis with France, that Hitler himself, at Speer’s urging, had to admit had to happen. That drove Hitler to many a feat of rage.

But if even Hitler had to collaborate with France, the country that he hated so much, how could any German refuse to collaborate with France?

If Hitler had to collaborate with France, then why did he start the war? Hitler obviously felt. The answer, as the Nazis insisted at Nuremberg is that it was France, not Germany, which had started the war. Well, France had to start the war, it was a question of civilization, and the proof was Auschwitz.

Hitler and Rommel had admitted earlier that the French strategically destroyed the Afrikakorps at Bir Hakeim (don’t believe what all Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia says about it; they quote from some vengeful Nazi). The resistance at Bir Hakeim to the fury of the entire Afrika Korps deprived it from its only chance to surrender and destroy the British army protecting the Middle East. The scythe move in the desert before Tobruk, was blocked by the tiny army of (ironically named) general Koenig.

By the time of this strategic French victory (May-June 1942) the Americans had not fired one shot against the Nazis yet. If Israel exists today, it’s thank to Bir Hakeim. OK, back to our Jewish survivor here.

  Soros: When the Soviet empire started to disintegrate, Germany’s leaders realized that reunification was possible only in the context of a more united Europe and they were willing to make considerable sacrifices to achieve it. 

PA: Soros here is starting to get really crafty. He knows very well that what he says he is not true: it’s the French (and, especially Mitterrand, who I do not like, but was right on that) who insisted upon the Euro, in exchange for supporting Germany’s reunification. As Mitterrand had (unlawfully?) financed his good friend Kanzler Kohl’s re-election, it was hard to say no. The French idea was precisely to make European Unification impossible to reverse.

(Mitterrand used similar methods on Thatcher, by supporting her crucially for the Malouines/Falkland war, he extracted from her the Chunnel and the Single European Act…)

So why is Soros lying? Because he is trying to put in sharp contrast the alleged wisdom of Germans in the 1990s versus the sort of neo-Nazism we are now condemn to contemplate the apparent rise of. Here we have the spectacle of a Jew, Soros, being too crafty by half, and much too polite with proto-fascism, the sort of process philosopher Hannah Arendt, also a Jew, loudly, and justly,  decried in the 1930s and 1940s.

  Soros: When it came to bargaining they were willing to contribute a little more and take a little less than the others, thereby facilitating agreement.  At that time, German statesmen used to assert that Germany has no independent foreign policy, only a European one.

PA: That’s the least Germans could do, after fostering, for a century, a policy of systematic assault against other nations, starting with a war against Denmark in 1864. This policy was ended by force, in an action started by France (leading) and Britain (following belatedly), on September 1, 1939 (Ultimatum to Germany) and ended May 8, 1945 (capitulation without condition of said Germany. Now some Germans are saying they are tired of the “Nazi blackmail”. Well, then, they should not practice it, again.  

  Soros: The process culminated with the Maastricht Treaty and the introduction of the euro. It was followed by a period of stagnation which, after the crash of 2008, turned into a process of disintegration. The first step was taken by Germany when, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Angela Merkel declared that the virtual guarantee extended to other financial institutions should come from each country acting separately, not by Europe acting jointly. It took financial markets more than a year to realize the implication of that declaration, showing that they are not perfect.

The Maastricht Treaty was fundamentally flawed, demonstrating the fallibility of the authorities. Its main weakness was well known to its architects: it established a monetary union without a political union.

PA: This is true, but that was a deliberate plan, to force unification from the top down.

There was an more proximal flaw. As created the European Central Bank was deprived of many fundamental powers that all other central banks have had, since there are central banks. (The first central bank was the Bank of England, with a tight relation to the financing of the Royal Navy, followed later by the Banque de France.)

In general, sovereigns have always struck coinage. However, under Dutch (highly leveraged) influence (“Glorious Revolution”, 1688, truly an invasion), Britain set-up a highly leveraged plutocratic system, the fractional reserve. (That it is plutocratic was observed by the Rothschild themselves, who were at the core of it.)  

  Soros: The architects believed however, that when the need arose the political will could be generated to take the necessary steps towards a political union.

PA: The main architect was the French, Jacques Delors, a socialist and loud Christian. He amplified thus the system put in place by French banker, Rothschild servant, and also French president, George Pompidou. A law of 1973 outlawed the financing of the French state by its central bank (something all other central banks do). Instead the French state had to go to plutocrats to beg for money.

As leveraged banks are truly state institutions, this established a further control of the French state, hence Europe (after the European Monetary Union), by private individuals, the bankers.  

  Soros: But the euro also had some other defects of which the architects were unaware and which are not fully understood even today.

PA: Those architects claimed to be socialist, while ruling that banks would rule thereafter. In other words, if they were not arrogant idiots, they were deeply corrupt (yes, I am talking about Delors… somebody I long viewed as a European hero, and now looks more like a European horror!)

  Soros: In retrospect it is now clear that the main source of trouble is that the member states of the euro have surrendered to the european central bank their rights TO CREATE FIAT MONEY. They did not realize what that entails – and neither did the European authorities.

PA: Not just that: the power of the ECB to create fiat money is ALSO very restricted (it cannot be lent to states directly, governors can’t be overruled, etc.) As it is, it left only the plutocrats with the power to create, through private banks, money in Europe.

As I already said, can one be that idiotic without being deeply corrupt?

Money is nothing without a state. A state is nothing if it cannot project power, and this it is does through military power, first of all, and financial power, when it is in a good mood. The stick, and the carrot. The way the EMU was set-up, there was not carrot in control of the state, the carrot was in control of wealthy people and their managers. Nor was there a stick. And the state does not really exist, either.

  Soros: When the euro was introduced the regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital; and the central bank accepted all government bonds at its discount window on equal terms. Commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate the bonds of the weaker euro members in order to earn a few extra basis points. That is what caused interest rates to converge which in turn caused competitiveness to diverge. Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, undertook structural reforms and became more competitive. Other countries enjoyed housing and consumption booms on the back of cheap credit, making them less competitive. Then came the crash of 2008 which created conditions that were far removed from those prescribed by the Maastricht Treaty. Many governments had to shift bank liabilities on to their own balance sheets and engage in massive deficit spending. These countries found themselves in the position of a third world country that had become heavily indebted in a currency that it did not control. Due to the divergence in economic performance Europe became divided between creditor and debtor countries. This is having far reaching political implications to which I will revert.

PA: Perfect analysis, nothing to add.

  Soros: It took some time for the financial markets to discover that government bonds which had been considered riskless are subject to speculative attack and may actually default; but when they did, risk premiums rose dramatically.

PA: Soros is admitting here implicitly the culpability of money changers (such as hedge funds… there are 20,000 of those; one, failed for being on the wrong side of trades in Italian government bonds; it was headed by J. Corzine ex-gov of New jersey, ex-head of Goldman Sachs… Billions disappeared mysteriously…)

  Soros: This [speculative attacks] rendered commercial banks whose balance sheets were loaded with those bonds potentially insolvent. And that constituted the two main components of the problem confronting us today: a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis which are closely interlinked.

The eurozone is now repeating what had often happened in the global financial system. There is a close parallel between the euro crisis and the international banking crisis that erupted in 1982. Then the international financial authorities did whatever was necessary to protect the banking system: they inflicted hardship on the periphery in order to protect the center. Now Germany and the other creditor countries are unknowingly playing the same role.

PA: Once again, for pedagogical and diplomatic reasons, Soros is extravagantly polite with the German authorities. There is no way they do not understand that they are destroying Europe. (…And helping Putin’s Russia. BTW, Merkler speaks Russian.)

  Soros: The details differ but the idea is the same: the creditors are in effect shifting the burden of adjustment on to the debtor countries and avoiding their own responsibility for the imbalances. Interestingly, the terms “center” and “periphery” have crept into usage almost unnoticed. Just as in the 1980’s all the blame and burden is falling on the “periphery” and the responsibility of the “center” has never been properly acknowledged.  Yet in the euro crisis the responsibility of the center is even greater than it was in 1982. The “center” is responsible for designing a flawed system, enacting flawed treaties, pursuing flawed policies and always doing too little too late. In the 1980’s Latin America suffered a lost decade; a similar fate now awaits Europe. That is the responsibility that Germany and the other creditor countries need to acknowledge. But there is no sign of this happening.

The European authorities had little understanding of what was happening. They were prepared to deal with fiscal problems but only Greece qualified as a fiscal crisis; the rest of Europe suffered from a banking crisis and a divergence in competitiveness which gave rise to a balance of payments crisis. The authorities did not even understand the nature of the problem, let alone see a solution. So they tried to buy time.

Usually that works. Financial panics subside and the authorities realize a profit on their intervention. But not this time because the financial problems were reinforced by a process of political disintegration. While the European Union was being created, the leadership was in the forefront of further integration; but after the outbreak of the financial crisis the authorities became wedded to preserving the status quo.

PA: Merkozy caused a lot of damage, in other words.

  Soros: This has forced all those who consider the status quo unsustainable or intolerable into an anti-European posture. That is the political dynamic that makes the disintegration of the European Union just as self-reinforcing as its creation has been.  That is the political bubble I was talking about.

At the onset of the crisis a breakup of the euro was inconceivable: the assets and liabilities denominated in a common currency were so intermingled that a breakup would have led to an uncontrollable meltdown. But as the crisis progressed the financial system has been progressively reordered along national lines. This trend has gathered momentum in recent months. The Long Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO) undertaken by the European Central Bank enabled Spanish and Italian banks to engage in a very profitable and low risk arbitrage by buying the bonds of their own countries. And other investors have been actively divesting themselves of the sovereign debt of the periphery countries.

If this continued for a few more years a break-up of the euro would become possible without a meltdown – the omelet could be unscrambled – but it would leave the central banks of the creditor countries with large claims against the central banks of the debtor countries which would be difficult to collect. This is due to an arcane problem in the euro clearing system called Target2. In contrast to the clearing system of the Federal Reserve, which is settled annually, Target2 accumulates the imbalances. This did not create a problem as long as the interbank system was functioning because the banks settled the imbalances themselves through the interbank market. But the interbank market has not functioned properly since 2007 and the banks relied increasingly on the Target system. And since the summer of 2011 there has been increasing capital flight from the weaker countries. So the imbalances grew exponentially. By the end of March this year the Bundesbank had claims of some 660 billion euros against the central banks of the periphery countries.

The Bundesbank has become aware of the potential danger. It is now engaged in a campaign against the indefinite expansion of the money supply and it has started taking measures to limit the losses it would sustain in case of a breakup. This is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the Bundesbank starts guarding against a breakup everybody will have to do the same.

PA: Yes, Germany is rotting at the head, and it’s not just the heads of Chancellor Merkel and her government.  Launching a self fulfilling prophecy of evil is no small matter, morally speaking.

  Soros: This [a self-fulfilling prophecy of breaking up] is already happening. Financial institutions are increasingly reordering their European exposure along national lines just in case the region splits apart. Banks give preference to shedding assets outside their national borders and risk managers try to match assets and liabilities within national borders rather than within the eurozone as a whole. The indirect effect of this asset-liability matching is to reinforce the deleveraging process and to reduce the availability of credit, particularly to the small and medium enterprises which are the main source of employment.

So the crisis is getting ever deeper. Tensions in financial markets have risen to new highs as shown by the historic low yield on Bunds. Even more telling is the fact that the yield on British 10 year bonds has never been lower in its 300 year history while the risk premium on Spanish bonds is at a new high.

The real economy of the eurozone is declining while Germany is still booming. This means that the divergence is getting wider. The political and social dynamics are also working toward disintegration. Public opinion as expressed in recent election results is increasingly opposed to austerity and this trend is likely to grow until the policy is reversed. So something has to give.

In my judgment the authorities have a three months’ window during which they could still correct their mistakes and reverse the current trends. BY THE AUTHORITIES I MEAN MAINLY THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT AND THE BUNDESBANK because in a crisis the creditors are in the driver’s seat and nothing can be done without German support.

PA: Europe is so organized that one country can block everything if so determined. However, even Thatcher’s Britain never did this. That Germany is thus cornering Europe, on the first real threat that European integration faces in 65 years, is astounding, considering history.

  Soros: I expect that the Greek public will be sufficiently frightened by the prospect of expulsion from the European Union that it will give a narrow majority of seats to a coalition that is ready to abide by the current agreement. But no government can meet the conditions so that the Greek crisis is liable to come to a climax in the fall. By that time the German economy will also be weakening so that Chancellor Merkel will find it even more difficult than today to persuade the German public to accept any additional European responsibilities. That is what creates a three months’ window.

Correcting the mistakes and reversing the trend would require some extraordinary policy measures to bring conditions back closer to normal, and bring relief to the financial markets and the banking system. These measures must, however, conform to the existing treaties. The treaties could then be revised in a calmer atmosphere so that the current imbalances will not recur. It is difficult but not impossible to design some extraordinary measures that would meet these tough requirements. They would have to tackle simultaneously the banking problem and the problem of excessive government debt, because these problems are interlinked. Addressing one without the other, as in the past, will not work.

Banks need a European deposit insurance scheme in order to stem the capital flight. They also need direct financing by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) which has to go hand-in-hand with eurozone-wide supervision and regulation. The heavily indebted countries need relief on their financing costs. There are various ways to provide it but they all need the active support of the Bundesbank and the German government.

PA: Even the famous anti-European magazine “The Economist” said as much about all the preceding.

By the way, there is more than 1.1 trillion dollars ready to help (before leverage), allowed by existing treaties. However, let’s notice that, in spite of funds being at the ready, and dedicated for Greece’s research and high education, they have not been disbursed for two years. So, it’s not because the money is here, that Germany will allow to use it. Is Germany deliberately trying to sabotage Europe?

  Soros: That is where the blockage is [Germany]. The authorities are working feverishly to come up with a set of proposals in time for the European summit at the end of this month. Based on the current newspaper reports the measures they will propose will cover all the bases I mentioned but they will offer only the minimum on which the various parties can agree while what is needed is a convincing commitment to reverse the trend. That means the measures will again offer some temporary relief but the trends will continue. But we are at an inflection point.  After the expiration of the three months’ window the markets will continue to demand more but the authorities will not be able to meet their demands.

It is impossible to predict the eventual outcome. As mentioned before, the gradual reordering of the financial system along national lines could make an orderly breakup of the euro possible in a few years’ time and, if it were not for the social and political dynamics, one could imagine a common market without a common currency. But the trends are clearly non-linear and an earlier breakup is bound to be disorderly. It would almost certainly lead to a collapse of the Schengen Treaty, the common market, and the European Union itself. (It should be remembered that there is an exit mechanism for the European Union but not for the euro.) Unenforceable claims and unsettled grievances would leave Europe worse off than it was at the outset when the project of a united Europe was conceived.

PA: After so much insanity deployed and allowed to rampage, the British and French military budgets will also have to be cranked up… To insure that further insanity is contained, looking forward, all the more since, as in the 1920s and 1930s, Germany is flirting with the dictators of Russia.

  Soros: But the likelihood is that the euro will survive because A BREAKUP WOULD BE DEVASTATING NOT ONLY FOR THE PERIPHERY BUT ALSO FOR GERMANY.

PA: However, Hitler started a war, just so that he could lose, as Salvador Dali pointed out. A country with a culture so idiotic and criminal that it could develop Nazism, over several generations, as the great philosopher Nietzsche pointed out at the outset, is perfectly capable to keep on acting dramatically against its own interests, just in the hope of punishing everybody.

Punishing everybody, that’s what Germany did in 1914, and 1939, launching wars it had no moral right, nor reason, to wage, and a quasi zero probability of winning without enormous devastation to itself.

Maybe Germans like so much to be the bad guys and to lose, they want an encore?

  Soros: It would leave Germany with large unenforceable claims against the periphery countries. The Bundesbank alone will have over a trillion euros of claims arising out of Target2 by the end of this year, in addition to all the intergovernmental obligations. And a return to the Deutschemark would likely price Germany out of its export markets – not to mention the political consequences. So Germany is likely to do what is necessary to preserve the euro – but nothing more. That would result in a eurozone dominated by Germany in which the divergence between the creditor and debtor countries would continue to widen and the periphery would turn into permanently depressed areas in need of constant transfer of payments. That would turn the European Union into something very different from what it was when it was a “fantastic object” that fired peoples imagination. It would be a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland.

PA: Soros is 100% wrong here. There will be no German empire. Germany is completely delusional and delirious at this point. German domination of Europe will not happen, because German culture is on its way out, whereas French culture is on its way up.

France rests on universalism, Germany on tribalism. Just to get the workers it needs, Germany is forced to draft non Germans into tribal Germany.

Let me explain more: in 1940, France had less than 40 million inhabitants, and Germany more than 80 millions. Nowadays, France has 66 millions, and her population augments by 350,000/year, internally (no immigration, thanks to the ferocious and ungrateful Sarkozy, now eliminated). These 350,000 new French a year are real French of fangs and claws, not the imported kind.

Whereas, even with significant immigration, the German population is decreasing. A fiortiori, the part of Germany of genuine German culture, so to speak.

Already now there are 30% more young French people than young German people (and, as I hinted, many of the latter are not really of issued from German culture). Merkel herself had no children. Her nasty cultural disposition will not be passed to her children.

German median age is 5 years older than the French (although the French live two years longer).

Verily, part of the senile reaction of Germany to the Euro crisis is directly imputable to Germany’s aging and scared behavior.

  Soros: I believe most of us would find that objectionable but I have a great deal of sympathy with Germany in its present predicament. The German public cannot understand why a policy of structural reforms and fiscal austerity that worked for Germany a decade ago will not work Europe today.

PA: Soros is right, “most of us would find” that sympathy for Germany should be limited. In some ways Germany is a plutocracy led by rich Mittelstand owners. I know some. Those mini plutocrats are the kings and queens of Germany. They work the little people hard, while scaring them with destitution. Those who know history will be reminded of the old landed aristocracy, especially of the Prussian type, which was a major, probably the major factor, in the rise of German fascism and racism (craftily, their tool, Hitler, electorally campaigned against them)

There is no minimum hourly wage in Germany. The states force some of the poorest people to work for one Euro an hour.

  Soros: Germany then could enjoy an export led recovery but the eurozone today is caught in a deflationary debt trap. The German public does not see any deflation at home; on the contrary, wages are rising and there are vacancies for skilled jobs which are eagerly snapped up by immigrants from other European countries. Reluctance to invest abroad and the influx of flight capital are fueling a real estate boom. Exports may be slowing but employment is still rising. In these circumstances it would require an extraordinary effort by the German government to convince the German public to embrace the extraordinary measures that would be necessary to reverse the current trend. And they have only a three months’ window in which to do it.

We need to do whatever we can to convince Germany to show leadership and preserve the European Union as the fantastic object that it used to be. The future of Europe depends on it.

PA: The future of peace, too. To believe that a fractious Europe, after such a stab in the back, the deliberate destruction of the European Union by Germany, would stay long at peace, is delusional. In any case, socialist France has already constituted a vast coalition, and, differently from 1939, Spain (conservative), Italy (conservative), and the USA (more to the right than any European country) are in it. Even Britain is scared out of its wits that German driven selfishness will drag it further down the abyss.

So what are German officials thinking of? (Besides the desire to self destroy?) Well, the siren song of the ex-KGB officer, Putin, is obvious in the distance. Putin is trying to seduce Germany, which gets already all its gas from there (more than 22% of total German energy usage). The mutual seduction between Germany and Russia in the 1920s and 1930s had a deplorable effect on both, a mutual feedback loop of brutish behavior.

Brutish behavior is what we see today when Bundesbank officials talk as if they ruled Greece. They don’t. What is happening in Greece, as Soros said, is more the fault of the creditor countries than Greece’s. The aid programs to Greece have been, truly, mostly aid programs to non Greek banks which financed their friends in Greece (often plutocrats they had dirty deals with).

The arrogant, offensive and injurious attitude of so many German officials shows that those who did not learn humility from history cannot be trusted.

So are we back in the 1920s and 1930s? Is the collaboration between Germany and Wall $treet based plutocracy back on the front burner? (It sure sounds that way; major Wall $treet banks, such as JP Morgan, have come out with astounding pieces of propaganda, as a reader kindly informed me)

Are we back in the 1920s and 1930s? … When Germany was secretly plotting, and training with Stalinist Russia? That blossomed in the formal alliance in 1939, of the USSR and Nazi Germany, in a vain attempt to block France’s thirst for justice.

So is Merkel working for the Putin, that is for the KGB, or Goldman Sachs and its ilk? Both maybe? Like Hitler, in the end, rather ironically, did? (The Fuehrer basically said so himself in his political testament…)

There are very good reasons to suspect all these schemes, and they will be further divulgated soon. It would be all very funny, if it were not so disconcerting.

***

Patrice Ayme

Big Lesson Not Learned

USA EXCEPTIONALLY BLIND?

“American exceptionalism” is an expression all Americans are familiar with. It seems to even pervades all the way down to the bones. Tellingly, the concept originated with Alexis de Tocqueville, who was the first to describe the United States as “exceptional”. First irony: the fig leaf was made in France. (So was the Statue of Liberty, and the concept of the Land of the Free, after which Francia was named…)

Americans are familiar with their “exceptionalism”. It claims that the USA is qualitatively different from other nations. (Yes, of course, the USA is a European colony, a Europe overseas, and most nations did not start as colonies, only a few dozens did.)

America’s alleged exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution (as if there had been none in France or Britain, Rome, or Athens, or, for that matter, Venezuela, or Port au Prince!), becoming “the first new nation”, the “New World”, while developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire.

The same holds for all Spanish speaking countries in the Americas. And Canada is not far behind. Come to think of it, most countries agree with these goals, and practice them to some extent.

It is highly ironical that the last concept, laisser-faire, supposed to depict the reigning socio-economic paradigm in the USA, is French, and was born there well before the USA itself. If anybody knows about laissez-faire, it should be the French, since they invented it, and practiced it well before the city of Boston was paying for Indian scalps (a picturesque twist on government welfare state, a typical way to turn public initiative towards matters military, made in America; just a bit north the French were running Canada, and they did not do such a thing, quite the opposite).

Tocqueville, the germ of American “exceptionalism” was an impoverished aristocrat, a small scale philosopher. Tocqueville is popular with American plutocracy for insisting upon the self serving fancy that freedom is more important than equal rights. Any obdurate member of the plutocracy would reason that way. Tocqueville aristocratic roots go all the way back to the battle of Hastings, in 1066 CE, when the Franks invaded Anglo-Saxon England. (Mine are much older, but never mind, an angel full of discretion shall slither away…)

Unsurprisingly, Tocqueville’s doctrine of the superiority of freedom over equality is pounded into young American minds in American universities. Tocqueville missed a lot of the big picture of the USA, that makes him all the more useful. It is not surprising that he was caricatural, as he spent a grand total of nine months in the USA. He was also much less than honest. He had nothing to say when he witnessed the Cherokees being deported, dying on the way to concentration camps. This silence demonstrated that Tocqueville was a fast learner on the subject of ingratiating himself with his hosts.

Mitt Romney, a Mormon businessman, son of a governor, governor himself of Massachusetts, where he invented what came to be known as “Obamacare” has a big problem, besides having invented “Obamacare”. He speaks French. So he tries to compensate that with blatant Francophobia. Francophobia is popular in the USA, because plutocracy needs it, to show that the road not travelled by the USA is despicable, alien, hostile, to be rejected absolutely, albeit superficially tempting, in other words, French.

(This Francophobic negativism has the funny consequence that, since the Cartesian French spend a lot of brain power trying to do the best for themselves as a society, the USA ends down embracing increasingly the opposite of French ways, namely the worst solutions, for themselves as a socio-economy… But of course, this is precisely what unbriddled plutocracy wants) 

Mitt Romney claims that Obama takes his ideas not from the small towns of America but from “the capitals of Europe.” Romney insists that Obama is offering “European answers to American problems.” And, horror of horrors, Obama has put the USA in tow behind France and its anti-dictatorial philosophers. Says Romney: “We’re following the French into Libya.” Obama undermines the USA by his “questioning as to whether America is an exceptional nation.”

Heady stuff. The New York Times ran an editorial on part of this, and I decided to conduct my own little experiment. So I sent an outrageously true comment, in connection to France, Britain, Hitler and the USA, to see how many readers of the New York Times had a true appreciation of history. Here is my comment (published by the NYT, June 17, 2011):

***

Patrice Ayme:

“We’re following the French into Libya.” So? It is a change for the best. After all, did not France follow the USA into Afghanistan? (And suffered the fourth largest number of deaths there?)

The greatest mistake of the USA, ever since it exists, was not to follow France and Great Britain in September 1939, and declare war to Hitler too. If the USA had followed France in 1939, or 1940, the Nazis would have been quickly dispatched, and seventy million people, would have been saved from death. (Including up to 6 million Jews.)

The relationship between France, Great Britain and the USA is not usual. It is the relationship of parents to child, and they constitute pretty much the same polity. After all, France and Britain were long part of the same country, and their filial relationship to the USA is direct.

***

Oops. How do you spell unpopular? Last I checked, only two readers approved of this correct and important piece of history, whereas 120 readers approved of a statement riling against “American exceptionalism”. Namely: “The average American is unable to accept the idea that the rest of the world’s civilized nations have caught up to us. Their universities are competitive, their industries are competitive, and in many cases their early educational system are well ahead of ours.” (David Underwood, Citrus Heights, CA.)

What Mr. Underwood wrote is correct, and rightly popular. However, what I wrote goes to the bottom line, and is much more painful, hence unpopular. Thus one observes that, where it really hurts, readers of the NYT are in total denial.

THE USA STABBED DEMOCRACY IN THE BACK IN 1939. Not only did the USA view France and Britain as “belligerent countries” (France since 1937, for opposing Hitler), and applied sanctions against them. Not only the USA did not join Canada, Australia, India and South Africa in declaring war to Hitler. But American companies even rushed supplies so that Hitler could keep on fighting Poland and France simultaneously in September 1939. Hey, the business of America is business, and that, among nations, the submission of morality to being busy, is truly exceptional.

Of course, in the end, it all makes sense. It is an eternal return of the same. The Nazis were immensely impressed of the way the USA exterminated the Indians, with a mix of hypocrisy (“protecting the natives” from colons, by sending them “west”; similarly the Nazis would protect the Jews from resentful Germans, by sending them “east”), deportation (if you die as you march in the snow without food, it’s too bad, correct thinkers and sinkers like Tocqueville had nothing to say about it, and the Nazis also duplicated that method to great effect), and concentration camps (for your protection against yourself). The Nazis decided to do just the same, forgetting they were confronting modern societies, not low density societies with partly Neolithic systems of thought.

I am not for repentance of the crimes of ancient generations, but I am for cognition, and exploration, of said crimes. “Truth and Reconciliation” as implemented by Mandela works, if one starts with “truth”. A great power such as France committed many grave errors and crimes (often towards herself), in the more than 15 centuries of her history. However, French philosophers and historians have led politicians, and then the entire population, and the culture which nourishes it, into drastic reassessments of the notion of political and philosophical correctness.

No doubt the USA does the same. However, for analyzing the attitude of the USA in, and leading to, the Second World War, there is much, if not everything to do.

Whereas the French have reassessed the crimes of those who hijacked the French state in summer 1940, most of the American population does not understand that a road which made Auschwitz possible started in the USA in 1933. Then Jewish organizations conducted a mock trial of Hitler in New York, driving the Nazis furious. President Roosevelt in turn used all his might to prevent further such mock trials (which were very efficient at making Americans furious against Nazism).

However ambassador Dodd of the USA in Berlin had met with high level German officials who told him secretly that such protests in the USA were the only way to stop the worst Nazis to commit their increasing crimes, and urged him to encourage more protests in the USA. So Roosevelt was pushing for the opposite of what his ambassador recommended.  

Moreover, the USA and its Congress relentlessly pursued a policy hostile to France. And, not to be outdone, in 1935, Great Britain made a pact with Hitler which violated the Versailles Treaty. By 1938, Great Britain was back pedaling. But the USA never did, even after the Nazis attacked American destroyers (and sank one).  Now it has come to the surface that payments from the Nazis to Standard Oil were ongoing during the entire war. Thus the hanging of Mussolini from a Standard Oil gas station in Milan.

History is hard. Stabbing democracy in the back, even harder, for a democracy. But Americans would be well appraised to realize that the very system of government they depend upon stabbed democracy in the back, once before, and got away with it. Not just that, but the crime paid, as American plutocracy became ever richer and more powerful since then.  Thus the question: who is next?

A hint: at some point the Paris plutocracy embarked on a crusade, nominally against the Albigenses, but truly to submit and steal the very rich south of “Francia”, the de facto republican regime nominally headed by the very powerful count of Toulouse. It was a massacre: one million dead (starting in 1209 CE).

This crusade is both ancient history, and living present. It led, in the fullness of time, to the USA. Indeed Simon de Lancastre (“Lancaster”), the newly nominated (by the plutocrat in chief, the king of Paris, and France) Count of Toulouse, was himself infected by the parliamentary mood of the French south, and tried to be elected king of England by boosting the powers of the English parliament, something which would lead, in the fullness of time, to the Congress of the USA.

Philosophy in all this? The entire conflict, the renaissance of a brutal theocracy instrumentalized by Paris plutocrats was the consequence of the philosopher Abelard’s defeat by Saint Bernard, a Christian fanatic. Abelard was supported by many, and mighty they were. However Saint Bernard’s fascism was irresistible to plutocracy (which put it to good use, as we just saw). The system of thought Saint Bernard amplified the militant and armed Christianism of the Crusades, leading to the holocaust in Toulouse and 1,000 cities in southern France, within two generations.  

History is immensely complex. Thus it is hard to learn. The danger is not just to repeat history, it is also to persist in the errors of the past, simply because they have not been denounced as such.

The USA had no billionaire in the first century of its existence. Europe, and much of the rest of the world, had plenty. The USA was a more equalitarian society, then. Now things are the other way. No wonder: Nazism was used by American plutocracy as a interplanetary probes use planets for what is called a gravitational boost. Refusing to learn of this boosting mechanism, is neither ethical, nor prudent.

A simplistic picture of the world is not just erroneous, it is also less interesting. Passion is not just exciting, it is also more powerful, as it incites to spend the energy to create more subtle brain structures, which can model the universe more precisely. Even those who want to be good, especially those who want to be good, have to abide by it.

***

Patrice Ayme

UNREAL

THOSE WHO DENY WHAT THEY DID CANNOT FACE WHAT THEY ARE.

(By "those" I mean, in particular, institutions.)

***

Abstract: The role played by the plutocracy of the USA and the state that serves it, in the creation, rise, and momentary triumph of the Nazis has been considerable. But it is ignored to this day. Worse: victims, such as the French state railways, which had nearly as many executed by the Nazis, as died in New York, on 9/11, get accused, to create a diversion from the sad reality of the role the power of the USA played in Nazism. The USA will not progress, as long as it does not face its truth, be it only because of its direct effect on the architecture of power in the USA, and the world, to this day.

Example: In 1921, it’s not Germans who put Hitler on a personal $50,000 stipend. It is the grotesquely racist Henry Ford, an American plutocrat. Nor is it Germans who created IG Farben, but Wall Street. IG Farben the chemical Uber-monopoly, was the mastermind of Auschwitz. IBM had the monopoly of computing in the Third Reich, managed from New York, throughout the entire war. Many top American plutocrats gave Hitler the means to wage war, and he rewarded them with money and fame. Prescott Bush was Hitler’s right hand man. And the airport in Washington is named after another top Nazi.

Yes, some weasels will claim that Bush and Dulles, and hundreds of other American plutocrats and servants were not official members of the Nazi party. As Hitler was the first to point out, it was better that way.

Without cognition, there cannot be contrition. No cognition, and no contrition invites retribution. The USA ought to keep that in mind, as the rest of the world will increasingly ask questions on how exactly the USA leveraged World War Two to create a world empire, in three years.

***

Found in American media:

PARIS (AFP) – France’s state-owned rail company SNCF has expressed remorse for hauling thousands of Jews to their deaths in Nazi camps, after US lawmakers threatened its chances of winning lucrative contracts.

Until recently, the company insisted it had been forced by France’s World War II German occupiers to help deport 75,000 French Jews to the gas chambers, and noted that 2,000 of its own rail workers were executed.

But, with SNCF and its main train-builder Alstom seeking work in the United States, the company’s chairman Guillaume Pepy earlier this month met in Florida with elected representatives and Jewish community groups to express his regret.

Pepy told them he wished to express "his profound pain and regret for the consequences of acts … carried out under order".

Lie. This a serious distortion of the truth: the AFP did not say this. Not all deportees were French. Of the 75,000 deported Jews, 55,000 were non French refugees. Also hundreds of thousands of non Jewish French were deported, and DIED. Why are non Jews never mentioned? Are they, somehow, less human?

Imprecision: SNCF is not a state company (it was in 1940 property of the French state, but the French state arguably stopped existing on June 17, 1940, because of a coup against the Third French republic; the reality is that, after that German Nazis were giving the orders in France).

***

Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, an historian, from the most famous Nazi hunting family, and a Jew, is indignant: SNCF got a requisition order from government authorities, and had no choice. In occupied France, the Nazis ruled. And not only were they not respecting the law, but they made a point, after the first Nazi soldiers got killed during the occupation by the resistance, to instill an ambiance of terror. Directly resisting Nazi orders was not an option.

Let’s be direct: the SS generally used Zonderkommando (special commandos), often made of Jews, to execute their victims (themselves often made of Jews). The Jews executing Jews executed the SS orders not because they were Nazis, but because they were victims, and they had no choice. Either they obeyed, or they were tortured. The same applied to SNCF workers, with further twists in the horror: if they obeyed orders, they had a quasi normal life. If not, they were arrested, brutalized, and they were threatened with execution, and their own families with "deportation", and more of the same. Fools who don’t know history but have opinions about it often think that only Jews ended in extermination or concentration camps. But this is not true: more than two-thirds of the civilians exterminated by the Nazis in camps were not Jews in any sense.

The "Holocaust" of the Second World War killed more than 50 million people in Europe alone. Between 4.5 million and 6 million were Jews. Poland lost 6 million (a lot of them were Jews, but the Nazis started the Pole extermination program in October 1939, following with a Jew extermination program only in July 1941). In any case, those who think that the "Holocaust" of WWII had to do only with killing Jews are themselves racist and accomplices of the real, full holocaust, because they are asserting that only Jewish deaths count, and they ignore another 45 million or more victims. It is philosophically and ethically unacceptable.

The position of the USA in WWII was also long philosophically and ethically unacceptable. Arguably no country played as much a role in the rise and power of Hitler as the USA. This is the dirtiest secret of the Second World War. It keeps informing today’s American politics, economy and society, and thus, the world. If Americans act weird, worldwide, it is because they did not come to grip with the role of Janus that American power played with Nazism.

***

ALL AMERICAN HERO:

Hitler was declared "Person of the Year" by TIME Magazine in 1938

. Why was the USA not at Munich in 1938? Too busy celebrating Hitler.

***

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our AMERICAN RULING FAMILIES are to the Nazi regime. . . .

"Certain American industrialists had a GREAT DEAL TO DO WITH BRINGING FASCIST REGIMES INTO BEING IN BOTH GERMANY AND ITALY. THEY EXTENDED AID TO HELP FASCISM OCCUPY THE SEAT OF POWER, AND THEY ARE HELPING TO KEEP IT THERE." – William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937.

The American industrialists gave not only various weapons and means (trucks, magnesium bombs, automatic pilots, armor, etc.) but also secret industrial processes (synthetic oil, rubber, and lead tetraethyl, crucial for military engines). The accords with the Nazis often stipulated that the secret processes would not be revealed to British or American military.

With all due respect to Ambassador Dodd, another type of American plutocrat, the bankers and Wall Street, played as important a role as the industrialists.

***

WHEN THE USA STABBED DEMOCRACY IN THE BACK:

The USA, its president and Congress declared in Fall 1939 that the French republic was a "belligerent country" because it had declared war to Nazi Germany. Sanctions were taken by the USA against France because France fought Hitler: it was unlawful for an American citizen to set foot on a French ship. It goes without saying that this was stabbing in the back of democracy by American plutocracy.

Canada, Australia, India, among others declared war to Nazi Germany, following France and Great Britain in September 1939. The Canadians landed troops in France in June 1940. But the USA was not in the war: too busy doing business with Hitler (example: Prescott Bush, Hitler’s right hand man, father and grandfather to American presidents, was busy managing Hitler’s greatest defense concern, while using Auschwitz’s slave labor).

Meanwhile, various American corporations rendered operations of the Nazis possible by shipping diverse goods, including oil and anti-knock compound for military aircraft and various other necessities and weapons. American tankers were fueling Nazi ships and submarines in the Atlantic while France and Britain were struggling for survival. More stabbing in the back of democracy by American plutocracy. And very significant: as the Poles fought desperately and 45 French divisions attacked on the narrow, difficult, very fortified front they had in the west, between Luxembourg and the Rhine, the fact that Hitler’s Luftwaffe stayed in the air only thanks to American power, was, what Obama would call a "game changer".

***

JEWS LIKE FRANCE:

In 1940, France counted 330,000 official and declared Jews including 140,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism who had been refused entry to the anti-Semitic USA.

Right now the number of persons in France who, according to the law of Israel have the right to return to Israel is at least 1.5 million. The French presidential couple, Sarkozy-Bruni had at least one Jewish grandparent on each side. Arguably around half the French population (including de Gaulle) has some Jewish ancestry (a lot of them have also Arab and Berber ancestry, due to commerce and invasion in the first millennium).

So why the witch hunt of Americans against French entities on the ground of anti-Judaism? Because of basic American racism and plutocratic cover. Because Americans do not want to question their own history. They cover up their own history by accusing others loudly, and playing holier than thou. And putting the debate in other people’s courts.

What happened around 17 June 1940 is that after an enormous battle since May 10, more than 5,000 aircraft had been destroyed, and more than 185,000 soldiers killed. The French republic formally requested the USA to warn Hitler, and the USA refused to say anything against Hitler, let alone come to the rescue of democracy, or France and Britain. Around mid June, the French Air Force could plausibly have recovered air supremacy over France, but the Wehrmacht was in Bordeaux. Churchill, his government, the British Parliament and the plenipotentiary representative of the French government (De Gaulle) decided to unify France and Great Britain. This would have protected French citizens from Nazi vengeance as French forces would have kept on fighting the Nazis.

However a few adventurers and old generals met, on June 17, and highjacked the French state, creating the Vichy regime, ordering a CEASE-FIRE with the Nazis. The USA, Hitler’s best friend, after Stalin, immediately recognized the Vichy junta. De Gaulle declared the Free French would keep on fighting on 18 June, and Churchill made a discourse, in French, on 22 June, declaring Britain was not ceasing fire, and "Hitler sera pendu" (Hitler will be hanged).

American corporations and American plutocrats and their employees kept on helping the Nazis. Dulles, after whom the airport in Washington is named, American Peace Be Upon Him, represented about 100 Nazi companies. Ford and General Motors trucks had conquered France. IBM had the monopoly of computation in Nazi occupied Europe.

So why don’t American corporations do not present excuses and disgorge their fortunes as they profited from Hitler? The Bush family got 13 million dollars in 1953 for having managed enormous defense concerns using Auschwitz detainees. Why don’t they present excuses and get to reimburse their victims… Including SNCF?

The USA will not progress as long as it does not face the particularly sordid history of its plutocracy before, during and after World War Two.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: Coincidentally, 15 hours after the preceding was written and published on this blog, the New York Times revealed that:

“WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

Dave Dieter/The Huntsville Times, via Associated Press

Arthur Rudolph, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA. He was one of one hundred top Nazi engineers and war criminals (Nazi rockets were built in tunnels by slave labor worked to death).

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades….”

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Note 2: It is tiring to have to talk only about Jews killed in France by the Nazis. It is not just tiring, it is taking part, being de facto accomplices, in a racist enterprise. Are only the Jews human? Those who obsess only about Jewish deaths surely talk like it. The French empire lost two million dead in World War Two. 25,000 of these were deported Jews. Do not the other two million count as human? What about 28 million dead Soviets?

Most Jews arrested in France for being Jews, were surprised in France by the French defeat. Of those who died, 55,000 were foreign refugees in France, unable to flee to the USA, because the USA refused to accept them (not enough space, I guess…). In the 25,000 French Jews sent to Germany, 8,000 were French because they were born in France from foreign parents (right of the soil), 8,000 had acquired French citizenship.

More details in French below.

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The (at the time hardware) company IBM was the company which provided Hitler with the technical means to do a lot of things, including where Jews were hiding to enable the “Final Solution”, the killing of millions of people [http://news.cnet.com/2009-1082-269157.html]. Read more on that in the book "IBM and the Holocaust" by writer Edwin Black (2001).

The GM and Ford companies had subsidiaries and conducted business with the Third Reich well before the Second World War started. US motor companies had factories in German soil and utilized forced labor to produce vehicles that they were sold to Nazi army. GM’s participation in Germany’s preparation for war began in 1935.

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25.000 Juifs étaient de nationalité française et 55.000 de nationalités étrangères. Parmi les ressortissants français, 8.000 enfants étaient nés de parents étrangers mais étaient français par déclaration à la naissance en application du droit du sol, 8.000 étrangers avaient obtenu leur naturalisation. Le nombre de Juifs français de souche déportés s’élève par conséquent à une dizaine de milliers.
75.000 juifs ont été déportés, soit 25% de l’ensemble des juifs en France, nationaux ou apatrides ;
50.000 juifs on été arrêtés dans le Zone Nord occupée ;
38.000 juifs ont été arrêtés à Paris ;
25.000 sont des Juifs nationaux
50.000 sont des Juifs non nationaux: Polonais, Allemands, Russes, Roumains, Grecs, Turcs, Hongrois…
42.800 sont des hommes ;
32.200 sont des femmes.
Lieux de déportation :
69.000 à Auschwitz
2.000 à Maïdaneck
2.000 à Sobibor
1.000 à Kaunas
1.000 à Buchenwald et Bergen Belsen
3.000 ont survécu.