Austerity: As Wild As It Gets!

AUSTERITY BENEFITS THE FEW BY STRANGLING THE MANY:

 To fully understand the austerity drive, one has to go fully prehistoric, at the dawn of Homo Erectus. For at least a million years, Homo has known how to profit from fire, and, thus, a scorched earth strategy. That, itself, belongs to an even deeper instinct of apparently wanton destruction. Apparently, but not really.

 The austerity drive has gone further than simply dismantling the welfare state. Austerity has attacked the very heart of the solution to get out of the deep economic, energetic and ecological crises we are getting into. Scientific research and education themselves are getting slashed, in Europe, or the USA.

 For civilization, austerity has become the equivalent of banging one’s head on a wall, in the hope of improving one’s mental faculties. For conventional wisdom, it should make no sense at all, considering the grave catastrophe it’s bringing along. Yet, it makes sense, when one realizes that man has always fought man, even more than the ocean has always fought the ocean.

Even Oceans Fight

 In places where oceans meet and struggle, giant rogue waves often form. They can destroy even super tankers. (One such place is along the south-east African coast, off Mozambique).

 Some pontificate that class struggle is quaint. They are generally paid by the plutocratic system, that made the upper class a subsidiary of evil itself. Yet structures appear through struggles. Austerity itself is a rogue wave from such a struggle.

 The notion of structure is not fully explained: thorough explanations have to go through Quantum Physics. Yet the transition from Quantum Physics to Classical Physics is not part of Twentieth Century science (this is the essence of the debate on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics, and why the last Nobel Prize in Physics was given to students of this mysterious transition).

 The Honorable Paul Krugman lists a number of reasons for the austerity drive, while, correctly, decrying it (See Note). Paul credits humanity, or more exactly its leadership, with too much goodness. The most obvious reason for austerity is the one less talked about: benefiting the few by strangling the many. A master idea of the oligarchy is that class structures are no more. Yet, structures are all over: morphogenesis makes up the universe.

 I wrote against austerity many times before (see Note), explaining in particular that it was the proximal cause of the fall of Rome.

 This Fall is very striking, because it shows that plutocracy will sell its own country to make a buck. Indeed, there was no more money to pay the legions, from lack of taxation of the hyper wealthy. Thus evacuation, from sheer Will-To-Austerity, by the legions of Britain and of the “limes“, throughout the entire north-west corner of the empire.

 Defense was entrusted to the Franks; the idea was that the Franks came for… free. The Franks had no choice, but to ferociously fight, as they were mostly peasant-owners, and needed to defend their land, thus, indirectly, the Roman cities and villas. However, the enemy, knowing the legions were out of the way, got lucky (frozen Rhine) and broke through at Chrismas 406.

 It’s amusing that the “Fall of Rome” is always presented as a deep mystery, when it can be explained by exactly two battles, one lost by Valens at Adrianopolis, and the other as just related. In any case, austerity caused a tremendous military disaster within six years of its fiercest implementation!

 Austerity always favors the rise of plutocracy, and the neo-feudalism we can observe blossoming today; when there is not enough money to employ the many, what needs to be done is still done. But it’s done only by what becomes an indispensable oligarchy.

 Even those criticizing it are feeding the austerity machine: watch the Honorable professor Stiglitz in his palatial office at Columbia University, teaching economics by the People, for the People, while employed by a school that charges, 58,000 dollars a year, namely 20% higher than the median household income of New York City surrounding it. OK, let me explain. The austerity machine is the other face of the luxury machine. By thriving in the luxury machine, and making it thrive in turn, Stiglitz himself is a clog in that giant machine that made We The People irrelevant to the Luxury Tower of Power.

 The deepest reason for austerity is also the simplest, and most shocking. Austerity is not just incidentally causing the strangling of the many by the few. It’s all about benefiting the few by strangling the many.

 Most of the public has been well indoctrinated in Christian like ethics (see Nietzsche below about slave morality). Thus the naïve public will accordingly reject that such an inclination for a final solution of the public problem makes sense. And yet, it does. Thus, the very outraged denial of an inclination to the final solution has allowed it to happen many times before.

 The Final Solution does make sense, once one realizes that ecological imbalance has been the greatest enemy of humanity for two million years. Ecological imbalances caused by an (over-) abundance of people. Thus, as the Romans put it, Homo Homini Lupus. Man is a wolf for man.

 Thus, all the proximal, technical reasons given for austerity act as a cover-up for the deepest drive: making war to others, especially when it feels that there are too many, or at least too many of a kind one does not like. Thus the insistence that only a few should be served.

 Reagan and others of his kind, speaking of government, said that “the beast should be starved“.

 According to what I am saying here, they really meant, what they really wanted to say, as their wild, basic instincts told them, was that the beasts should be starved. Thus ultra hard line conservatism is as mean as the eons have had it. And as mad, as mean as the older evils had it: racism, colonialism… in all cases, it was all about the war of the few against the many, that war that never ends, the war of man against himself, killing, not just because that’s a force that gives us meaning, but because that’s the culling, that gives us a world.

 We could, of course, do differently now. But, instead of insuring the luxury of a few individuals, as the greatest good, we should then strive to make understanding of everything our greatest luxury. And that’s start

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Patrice Ayme

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Notes:

 1) On preceding remarks on austerity: I wrote nearly a year ago, “Why Austerity?”. That listed detailed causes for the austerity drive. “Why Europe Lays Supine” addresses the peculiar European case; Europe credited humanity with too much goodness, too, and believed, that, by being virtuous, the world would follow. Instead the world used European naivety to its advantage. Now Europe finds herself on the verge of an obvious depression, and is finally throwing overboard its ecological drive to lighten the ship: it refused to support its carbon price system, the world’s most advanced mechanism to control CO2 emissions.

 2) Sade agreed with the Romans that man was up to no good. In particular, Sade observed  that politicians had to be among the worst individuals, and relished inflicting their “sadistic” powers on others. And that much of their “politics” was motivated that way. he wrote about it as outrageously as possible, including Prime Ministers torturing the innocent, just to relax. Accordingly, Sade was jailed for decades by the Ancient dictatorship of Louis XVI.

Sade was freed during the Revolution of 1789. He had been one of its main instigators, directly and indirectly. He found himself in some of the highest responsibilities, and advised strongly against imposing the revolution by force throughout Europe, precisely because he was aware of the calculus of violence of man against man, the inclination to commit violence, while covering it up  in noble fashion.

 3) Nietzsche pointed out that there were two moral systems in force in Europe. Christianity, officially enforced, was the morality for the slaves, imposed to the slaves, and they did not know any better. Slaves had been made to believe that Christianity was the only morality in existence. Whereas European aristocracy ruled according to its exact opposite, the rule of the strong. Nietzsche’s analysis is still true today.

Yet, from my more cynical viewpoint the “aristocracy”, is not just admirable, literally a “rule of the best“. Instead, it’s a vile plutocracy at heart. So, instead of embracing the masters’ race, as Nietzsche seems to inclined to do, I reject it, when it’s just a vulgar plutocracy, just as I reject slavery, as another form of the Dark Side. I basically believe that the double morality system goes on today, with the same sort of results: that’s why financiers get to pay taxes at a much lower rate, from complicities in government… While preaching the free market and meritocracy (the moral system for the Plebs, precisely the one plutocrats are violating).

 4) In light of the preceding, Paul Krugman’s remarks, although well meaning, are rather meek. Said he:…”calls for a reversal of the destructive turn toward austerity are still having a hard time getting through. Partly that reflects vested interests, for austerity policies serve the interests of wealthy creditors; partly it reflects the unwillingness of influential people to admit being wrong… a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future.”

But Paul, of course, has to be published, and thus appreciated enough, by Very Serious People  Very Sadistic Plutocrats.

PLUTOCRACY: NEW WORLD ORDER

Western Intelligence, Oriental Despotism; Redux? Democratic Occident, Fascist Orient, & Vice Versed?

Obama just  nominated Commerce Secretary the billionaire heiress who discovered him, and introduced him to the Rubin-Summers-Goldman-Sachs-Citigroup conspiracy. Penny Priztker was condemned to pay a 460 million dollar fine by the Federal government in 2001, for financial malfeasance. 460 million, that’s more than Mitt Romney’s fortune, that made small rank and file democrats huff and puff, in indignation, a few months ago, just like their mighty masters told them to do.

Now, if the 460 million dollars fine felon becomes chief, that’s fine, as long as the masters of the people don’t ask the People to huff and puff about the fine. The finer the fine, the finer the master, say the little People, and they bleat, satisfied. As Obama put it:”Priztker is one of the most eminent personalities of our country“. When Pluto reigns, down is up.

When Common Decency Is A Hindrance

Plutocracy is the New World Order. The New World Thinking. The New World Emoting.

To get some perspective on this, it’s good to have a retrospective look at the greatest plutocratic realms of the past, and ponder why extremely wealthy fascism rose, increasingly, in the Orient, while clever democracy rose, occasionally, in the West. And sometimes fell, disastrously, for reasons related.

It turns out that, when Rome became fascist and plutocratic, it turned to Oriental despotism, and criminals, indeed, came to command and control.

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PERSIA REIGNED WITH ALL CRAFTS; YET NOT SMART ENOUGH:

Establishing  giant, metastatic empires in the Orient is nothing new: the Hittites tried it, they proceeded to invade Lebanon and the rich valleys behind, Egyptian territory. However young Pharaoh Ramses II, defeated them at Qadesh, next to present day Damascus. Through courageous combat in that battle which defined his long rule, Ramses rescued victory from the jaws of defeat, somewhat miraculously.

Ramses lost ground, though, and later made a loving peace with his enemies. Then, the Hittites having been destroyed by the mysterious coalition of the Peoples of the Sea, the Assyrians tried to impose their own giant metastatic empire, using the harshest methods. That brought them so many enemies that they got invaded from all quarters, annihilated as a nation first, and an army, later.

Then the union of Medes and Persians, thanks to three remarkable leaders, established a giant fascist empire, from Ethiopia to Central Asia, Libya to India. The third emperor, Darius, besides being excellent at sword-play in the dark, and a great general, proved capable of using a free market economy, switching to so called Keynesianism, and then a command and control economy, as needed. Darius established a giant “Royal” road network (ancestral to the one the Romans would build, four centuries later).

A Persian Pony Express, with posts every five miles, would bring news from distant corners of the empire in a week. Darius went on to invade the Scythians, land of the Amazons, present day Ukraine.

Darius’ Persia was the greatest empire, so far, larger than the present day continental USA. It became so, thanks to a great variety of methods of socio-economic governance. Some of these methods would later be used by the West, massively. Not just the communication network, the free market, the command and control, but also a crafty diplomacy of seduction, cooptation and local autonomy (that’s how the Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians became collaborators of Persia; whereas Alexander would annihilate Tyr).

However, unbelievably, tiny Athens broke the Persian empire, inaugurating the next great event, still on-going, the rise of the West. Again and again, minuscule Greek armies routed the juggernauts of professional giant armies. Again and again, small democracies proved superior to large fascist foes. I claimed that mental superiority entailed military superiority.

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FREE IN THE WEST, SLAVES IN THE EAST

Herodotus explained the Greeks’ military superiority: free men are more motivated in battle, as they fight for themselves, he said. But it’s not clear that elite Persian soldiers did not feel free.

So I hold something slightly different: free men are, living in an “open society” are not just more motivated, but, simply, more intelligent. Yes, intelligent.

Yet how come that the free men tended to be in the West, and the subjugated ones, in the East? And this for 4,000 years, defining the “West” as anything west of Mount Lebanon. Why did so much of the Mediterranean turn out propitious to freedom and individual initiative? What of the enormous Celto-German forests, from Spain to the Baltics?

Two factors played a role:

1) Trade, with the big man, the leader being the ship owner-captain (Tyr, Phoenicia, Crete, Athens, Carthage, etc.). This required to excel at technology and adaptative intelligence, confronting nature.

2) Small owner-peasants. The West’s agricultural system did better thanks to small, free owner-peasants.  The owner peasant was captain of his own plot of land, and found himself in a situation roughly similar to the ship captain. Such people worked hard, and thought hard about outwitting nature. All of Germany was this way, until the military encroachment of Rome in the beginning of its plutocratic phase, brought, by reaction, a militarization of German society (this is what archeology shows).

A demographic core of owner-peasants was the core of the success of the Roman republic, and its successors, the Imperium Francorum, and France, or anything working along French lines (most of Europe). When enjoying this basic culture, of free, independent peasants, the West did very well. Why so? Because thinking by oneself, for oneself, makes one more intelligent.

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WHY THE ORIENT IS DUMBER:

The Orient did better when the peasants could cultivate. That meant, when they had water. That was not obvious in the increasingly parched lands, from the Maghreb to India. First, there, one needed to bring water to agricultural lands. Whereas in the West, both water and arable land were in the same place, not so in the East. In the East water was on rocky mountains, arable lands in parts of plains at the bottom of said mountains. To bring the former to the latter, one needed great hydraulic works. Underground canalizations, sometimes fifty feet deep, could extend dozens of miles.

Such extensive works meant armies of workers and maintenance people. And also standing armies to establish and protect the necessary order. Plus a field army to roam around the empire, and keep the static defenses obedient.

In other words, food on the carpet in the parched, basin and range Orient meant a large fascist system to make it possible, and everybody enslaved to it, in a military organization (Christianity and Islam, both oriental religions, kept much of this essential psychological character: fascist god on top, giving absolute, even capricious  orders to its slaves below).

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ALL TOGETHER NOW, DOWN THE ROMAN ROAD TO HELL?

What consequences today? Western countries do not depend upon small owner-peasants anymore, but upon giant farms, or agribusinesses, for food procurement. Even trade has become unbalanced: production on one end of the Earth, increasing unemployment, at the other end.

Giant agribusinesses, and unbalanced trade became facts of empire in Rome, and lasted centuries. It was a deliberate plot of Roman plutocracy. At some point, six senatorial families owned most of North Africa. Seneca, Nero’s tutor, the plutocratic philosopher of note, used to boast that he had no idea how many giant properties he owned on the various continents.

That delocalization and globalization made Rome, and Italy into an empty shell of its former self. As those who had the power, the senatorial families, wished. What they feared first, was a proud, potent, empowered People.

(Part of) Italy would resurrect as independent republics, more than a millennium later. 

What’s the morality of the story? Men have a strong instinct for doing things right. In a plutocratic system, though, men who do things wrong get rewarded, and this goes on, until the situation exponentiates and breaks down. Thus plutocratic systems are intrinsically pathological: they reward criminals. Not just criminal according to the laws of men, but criminals according to the laws of nature.

In the Orient, life is harder, less natural, militarization exploits part of the Dark Side, because human beings, by living there, live in a less optimal situation. In the West, the rise of plutocracy did not have these excuses.

The Romans knew this well. The Roman republic was the product of a revolution against Tarquinus Superbus, the king of Rome, of Etruscan origin. So the founding act of five centuries of Roman republic was an anti-plutocratic revolt. Same for Athens (several times, during the same centuries). 

The Romans passed a strong anti-plutocratic law. That law limited, by force the size of a family’s fortune; it fixed an upper bound on how much one could own. The Second Punic war saw the death, on the battlefield, of too many of the best leading Romans. Meanwhile the conspirators of wealth, back behind the walls of the fortified cities, as Hannibal was roaming the countryside, established a New World order of rents.

When Carthage got defeated, those men of greed kept on pushing, and tried to grab control of the state. After several wars of distraction against Macedonia, Carthage, Numantia, Corinth, etc. it became clear that was what was going on to thousands of the best Romans, led by top nobles (in mind and ancestry), the Gracchi.

The Gracchis mostly tried to impose the wealth limitation law. They also succeeded to impose a land redistribution (an unthinkable socialist measure in the post Thatcher-Reagan world!). Yet, the Gracchi and their supporters lost a civil war. All got killed, by the private armies of the plutocrats. By 100 BCE, when Caesar was born, the dice had long been thrown. Only extreme measures could address the situation (extreme measures that Caesar and Cicero, on the good side, would try).

Now what? Losing democracy, means, ultimately, that we will lose not just freedom, but intelligence itself. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans will pull out of their present death spiral into furthering the wealth of the .1%. When bandits are called “philanthropists”, all values have been inverted in a country: gangsters are in control, the mafia has got metastatic. It will go on, all inverted, until it explodes, or get trampled over. The commerce chief will be a certified felon.

The situation in Europe is not as desperate: conditions for a revolt exist. Although Goldman Sachs has its servants in place all over, the Italians threw out one of them, a Goldman Sachs partner, Mario Monti, at the first chance they got.

Some may sneer, as they notice that, once again I used “Orient” and “Occident” according to old Greco-Roman semantics. What of the true Orient, the far-out East, China and company? Well, I will hide behind my usual observation: it’s Western culture that conquered the world. Present day China’s ideology has very little that is specifically Chinese, besides what the West and China had in common, such as the more or less free market. The idea of “People” (Populus) and “Republic” (Respublica) are Roman. So the very title of China, the “People Republic of China” is, well, (Greco-)Roman.

The dangers threatening China, accordingly, like those threatening us, are those that devastated the Roman republic. For the reasons exposed above, the development in the West, of a more advanced civilization was first, thus why everybody adopted it later.  Rome was first to rise as high as it did. But, the greater the rise, the greater the fall. By 700 CE, the fall of Rome had been so great, that China had risen higher, on many indicators. The West, invaded by hordes of savages for more than six hundred years (beyond even 400 CE to 1000 CE) was fighting for survival.

Plutocracy as a New World Order is not just the end of many things. In the fullness of time, plutocracy is the end of everything.

Even the Will to Power. Slave masters are not so masterful. After all, they are enslaved to their slaves.

When Rome went down, Roman plutocrats whined that the “world was getting old“. By this they meant that resources were being exhausted, and that, in its stupidity plutocratic civilization could not find a technology out.

Right now, the world is not getting old, it’s getting killed. And that’s worst.

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Patrice Ayme

Sarko In Sarcophagi!

ONE PLUTOPHILE DOWN? MORE TO GO!

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

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HOLLANDE: FROM HOLLAND, THE ECONOMIST, FROM PINOCHET:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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HOLLANDE CHANGE, SARKOZY, PLUTOCRACY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way I look at it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Aphorism January 2012

***

Species Shifting North, Intelligence Left Behind:

Nothing like raw numbers. In the last twenty years, Europe warmed up by one degree Celsius (about 2 degrees in the primitive, less meaningful Fahrenheit system). That’s equivalent to a thermal shift of 249 kilometers north.

Insects responded by an average shift north of 114 kilometers, and birds by only 33 kilometers. This is creating imbalances (fully obvious in Alaska, and high altitude North America, where the insects move faster than their predators, killing entire forests, which then burn).

This differential adaptation also illustrates an important point the stupid partisans of the “market” always neglect: being more intelligent can make you slower. Birds are more intelligent than insects, so they find harder to leave their families, friends, habits, and landscapes they are familiar with behind. (No, I will not say that insects are more like Americans, driven by the market, and birds more like Europeans, driven also by broader values. I shall resist, lest I move too fast, like an insect, and outrage part of my brainy readership…)

Thus, as the market dominates, so does the stupid.

Adaptation is not always a manifestation of intelligence, and inadaptation often a sign of intelligence. A well known experience is to put a fly, or a bee, inside an open bottle, with a light source opposed to the opening. The bee will search intelligently the bottom of the bottle, where the exit ought to be. The less intelligent fly will buzz around stupidly, and exit first.

It’s no wonder that the partisan of the markets, who are richer and thus more influential, are for something stupid, as they are faster, precisely because they are more stupid, with fewer values, besides the colossal greed which dominates their psyche. So there is a non linear vicious loop, the more the market dominates.

Thus, next year the candidate historically financed by Wall Street will confront the extremely wealthy businessman cum politician, son of his father, also a governor cum businessman. Market against market: the market should not lose. The birds will be left behind by the fast moving insects, once again. Change you can’t believe in.

***

Where is everybody?

“Lord” (!) Martin Rees, “Astronomer Royal”, Nobel laureate, etc., complete with pretty pictures and beautifully spooky music, speculates it’s teeming with aliens out there.

But as Enrico Fermi quipped:”Where is everybody?“

The situation is not helped by us understanding very little about what the universe is made of. In the latest numbers I saw the universe was made 4% conventional matter, and the rest was… Dark. Mostly Dark Energy, with some Dark Matter. Who said the Dark Side was not important?

There are no dominant theories of what the Darkness is made of.

CERN should be able to find stuff below its energy reach. So far, nothing.

We have detected more than 150 planets. It seems one star out of ten, at least, has planets. Some have been detected in the habitable zone, where liquid water is found. But the water has to be continuously present for billions of years. Continuously (which did not happen on Mars and Venus).

400 billion stars in our galaxy. The big question is how many planets can harbor advanced (=oxygen breathing) life. No inkling of that. There are plenty of planets out there, indeed, but most hostile to life. So far. How Much Intelligent Life Out There? On Earth, it took 1.5 billion years to go from advanced life to intelligent, civilized life. A lot of things can go wrong in 1.5 billion years.

That advanced life did not develop on Mars or Venus is not an accident: although on the outskirts of the habitable zone, either planet did not have what it took. Mars was too small, and, just like Venus was not protected by a powerful plate tectonic, with accompanying magnetic field, among other problems (so the solar wind blowing the top of the atmosphere stole the hydrogen, hence water, etc.)

My hunch is that most planets in the hospitable zone, when found, will be bereft of advanced life, although primitive life may be quite frequent. Reason? Too many miracles at work for billions of years in the solar system. Especially in light of what we find out there (We see plenty of Jupiter size planets in close orbits around their suns, presumably after sweeping their entire system clean; OK, that’s partly a result of the method used to find planets presently, but the fact is, we find such situations aplenty! The presence of Jupiter out there, as our guardian protecting Earth from comets looks quite miraculous…)

***

If You Want To Save the Biosphere, Push Tech:

Some people in the Netherlands have suggested building an artificial mountain. It’s feasible, and would be smart to do, not just there, but say in a place such as Saudi Arabia (technical variations on the theme could collect water, as in cloud, or fog forests found in California or Peru).

Another point is that artificial mountains could help protect biological diversity from the greenhouse heating. Cynics would point out that it would take an enormous amount of energy to build them. True, with present tech, and the energy would be dirty too, presently. But that would be another motivation to go green. Green and big.

***

Wind Fall-Out:

Most wind-driven energy system in Europe? Denmark. Most CO2 polluting country in Europe? Denmark. Coal power plants pick up the slack when the wind falters. Another case where nuclear offers its smiling face. Future nuclear that is. Not your great grandfather’s nuclear. Past nuclear tech should be terminated, just like coal. However, there are 100 unexploited, un-researched nuclear energies out there, and only those with insignificant waste will be acceptable. (Nobody would accept a fossil fuel system where only 2% of the fuel would be burned, and the rest allowed to pollute all over!)

Reminder: as the greenhouse heating proceeds, winds will falter because the heat differential between poles and equator will sink, thus shutting down that thermal engine known as the atmosphere (yes, hurricanes will be rarer, but fiercer).  

***

Institutionalized insanity Versus Thinking Right:

In Switzerland a nuclear plant was built one kilometer downstream from a dam, along the same river. None of those two could resist the sort of very strong quake happening occasionally in the Alps. A flood cum nuclear explosion is entirely imaginable. This sort of insanity has nothing to do with nuclear power, it has everything to do with lack of intelligence.

This is all the more strange since some Swiss cantons such as Valais get 20% of their GDP from research. By the way the medical drug sector part of GDP is twice the banking sector in Switzerland. For those who wonder why Switzerland is so rich (the same holds for Sweden and other Nordic company). It’s not (just) about the banks.

***

(More) Direct Democratic Keeps Bankers At Bay:

The weight of direct democracy has forced Swiss banks into reserve requirements twice those of the future Basel III regulations. (In other words, banks are many times tamer in Switzerland than in the USA, if one uses reserve requirements enforced as a measuring device; Basel III does not cover most of the enormous derivative trading, though.)

The scandal of the central banker heading the Swiss Central Bank buying dollars days before taking the decision of making the dollar explode up against the Swiss franc keeps unfolding. Yes, he knew about the trades, and yes, he had days to stop them afterwards.

It is dawning over Swiss society that those with privileged information should not be legally allowed to exploit them. The whole planet has to follow down that line. But, although it has been obvious for years that American and European politicians and central bankers are rich from insider trading, nothing has been done. Yet.

***

The Plutocrats Cash Out And Shame Does Not Count:

What looked to me as the immensely stupid and arrogant wife of the Swiss Bank President, explained herself from Singapore, where she owns an art gallery. If she really wanted to make real money out of her husband’s job, she knew how to do it, she asserted confidently. And there she was going through a list (a), b), c), d), etc… of things she would have done if she wanted to make more than the measly $75,000 she made. And how to make them secretly, she insisted.

Her name is “Kashya”, appropriately pronounced “Cashia”. In this case, Cashia said, in her native American English, they were in a rush, because they just had some cash from selling a chalet to store, so that is why she hid nothing.  That brings a few questions, such as whether she is used to exploit the mechanisms of further cheating she explicated so adroitly on TV. The central banker, the plutocrat Hildebrand, having resigned, will get a million dollar salary in the next year, from the People, while his fellow plutocrats will rush to propose him a much more protitable conspiracy to join. I propose to put him in jail, instead.

***

Another Claim Of Mental Decline. And The Agenda Behind It: There Is No Good Wisdom, Except Dead Wisdom, Say Plutocrats:

Supposedly some new test showed a decline in “cognitive capabilities” starting at age 45. Apparently people were asked to remember lists of words starting with some particular letters. It does not seem to have come to the mind of the experimenters that maybe older brains do not like to remember such stupid stuff.

Thinking means motivating. Without the right motivation, there is not the right thinking.

In the case of “IQ”, a decline is observed at 24, some say… Military officers would concur that it is better to send 18 year olds to die, because they are bright enough to execute orders well, but not so bright that they would know that they might die for no good reason.

A related point: no doubt a two-year old training to go potty remembers very well each time she goes. Whereas an adult tends to lose this facility of neurological retention for this sort of event. One generally observes. But it is not because adults have suffered mental decline that they do not remember every poop. Simply, they have seen lots of poop passing by.

Actually the argument can be made that consciousness and conscious memorization are needed to deploy automatisms, but once those are in place, they are not needed anymore, and so consciousness, and conscious recall should not be present.

When I was a young driver, I remembered everything I did when driving a car, but now I do it automatically, remembering very few of my gestures. When driving, my consciousness is mostly watching for the unforeseen.

Is there a political interpretation explaining such mental declines claims? Indeed, there is. As people get older, they elaborate higher wisdom. Thus, although the soldiers of revolution are typically very young people, because they have their aggression hormones less tempered by wisdom, the leaders of revolution are typically much older.

Let me explain this carefully: fascist and plutocratic leaders typically claim that they are “conservatives“. It means that they justify their mean rule by a refusal to adapt to changed circumstances.

As the French revolution stirred, the most esteemed leaders were senior citizens such as Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and everybody looked up to them, from Louis XVI to Turgot; on the Dark Side, many of the leaders, such as the Comte d’ Artois, were barely teenagers.

Closer to us, in WWII, the SS seduced many a 16 year old. In the last few weeks of the war, many of the most enraged Nazis fighting to the bitter end with the allies in the mountainous heart of Germany were school children with heavy weapons. In more than one case, disgusted American GIs, reluctant to blow up some more enraged children to bits, sent their school mistresses to negotiate with them!

If the (plutocratic) establishment can claim that revolutionary wisdom is actually the fruit of mental decline, presto, no revolution. It will be “conservatism” all the way.

***

Why Do We Want To Always Support Winners?

Supporting the home team is easy to understand: this is the tribal instinct. Human beings are social, they have to love the group, thus dislike what hinders the group, namely, other groups.

One has to love the leader(s) of the group, the alpha(s). In general, to abate social tensions, an instinct has got to exist, which makes the oppressed love the oppressor, or let’s say, the inferior love the superior. or even love the winning group, to be motivated to join it. Something more plausible to females. Hence Beatlemania.

***

If One Wants Happiness, One Should Prepare For The Worst:

Pe Romaneste: So happiness must be an accident.

Alexi Helligar: There seems to be greater power in the accidental than we imagine.

Patrice Ayme: Indeed, to a great extent, everything is accidental. Realizing this means that those who complain that something happened accidentally, and, thus, was not expected, have not understood the first thing about causality. Accidents is how the world happens. Wisdom consists in anticipating their occurrence, and having a plan B, should they occur.

***

Brutality Is Friendly To Plutocracy, Long Life Friendly To Wisdom:

Only wisdom can allow long life. Really very long life, lasting centuries, for individuals or civilization. Short lives are brutish, and this has the consequence in many a perpetrator, to spurn whatever life is offered. Indeed a good way to spurn something is by devaluing it. The brutality of the human condition is self reinforcing…

This why human life extension is a necessity, a preliminary, for the extension of wisdom. Because as long as lives are short and brutish, the short and brutish way of life is all too optimal, for all too many people (although those with children, or grandchildren they love will disagree, but they are not necessarily a majority). 

This is something that life spurning plutocrats such as Mr. Jobs have been busy not understanding, as brutality is their friend.

***

Plutocrats Love Death Indeed:

Steve Jobs, despite leaving Reed College after six months, was asked to give the 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. Why? Did Jobs invent anything important? (Disclosure: My Mom offered me an ultra light Mac Air, and I love it.) No, he was just an artistic technology integrator, but not necessarily as mechanically oriented as a car mechanic (his partner Wozniak was the programmer, but even this one finished his college studies in computer science, 20 years later, at Berkeley, and found them hard!)

In his Stanford address, delivered after Mr. Jobs was told he had cancer, but before it was clear that it would ultimately claim his life, Mr. Jobs told his mesmerized audience of naive sheep that “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”

In this light, the invasion of Iraq by Bush and his fanatical followers made sense: by visiting more than one million deaths upon Iraq, the USA brought the single best invention of life. Everybody, or more exactly 83%, including a majority of Stanford students, agreed, at the time.

Is this love of death why Jobs refused conventional medical treatment initially, until it was too late? Jobs insisted that the benefit of death, is you know not to waste life living someone else’s choices. I guess that extended to the medical.

Verily, death came first, and was denied by life. Life is the denial of death. Life did not have to invent death.

***

Hormuz Crisis Versus Suez Crisis: Spot The Difference!

Why did the USA not get upset when Nasser seized the Suez canal, in 1956? And actually why did the USA instead use the occasion to threaten Israel, Britain and France? Not just that, but president Eisenhower aligned himself with the Egyptian, and Soviet dictators. The Soviets, while invading Hungary, killing at least 40,000 Hungarians, threatened to atom bomb London and Paris. With the loud acquiescence of the USA… Which got France and Britain, not the mass murderous USSR, condemned at the United Nations’ general Assembly. What a crazy week it was.

And now, 55 years later, lo and behold, the USA is getting all upset as Iran wants to stop what’s going on below its nose in the strait of Hormuz? Just asking. Inquiring minds want to know.

Is it that in 1956, France and Britain were viewed as preys of the USA? And now that the USA has grabbed everything from France and Britain, they want to be friends again? Because the rich need servants, maybe? In any case, the Suez Crisis was an incongruous reminder that, in 1939, the USA was allied with the USSR and Nazi Germany, against France and Britain (oopss, something one should never say!)

And my advice would be to be very careful with Hormuz. If one wants long life, one does not want long wars. And one does not want fossil fuels. The sooner we get rid of fossil fuels, the better, and if Hormuz helps that way, so be it. The messy Iranian theocracy will not win a waiting game.

***

No Change, No Life!

What the USA needs to do is to do what all serious countries do, and have always done: change its constitution, since the changed circumstances require it.

***

Cool Is Not Cool:

“Cool”. Why is “cool” such a popular word? Is it supposed to correspond to an attitude? Is it a mark of, and a tool for, our subjugation?

So Obama is confronted to the greatest financial thievery in the history of civilization, and that leaves him “cool“? Having rebooted the perpetrators with public money he goes to them to ask for a billion to campaign for re-election? Cool? I mean: we are not supposed to blow our tops when we contemplate such injustice in the name of change we can’t believe?

In Europe, pretty amazingly intricate financial and semantic engineering is presently deployed to save the banks and the sovereign states entangled with them. There again the bottom line is that the resources of the countries are deployed for the exclusive enjoyment of the few, who happen to be the greatest swindlers ever. Although they are presented as too big to flay.

Actually the same technique as in the USA, Quantitative Easing, is being deployed, and on a similar scale. But, as the head of the European Central Bank, an ex Goldman Sachs partner, pointed out sardonically, a scornful smile on the corner of his mouth, Europeans use a different semantic: they don’t call it Quantitative Easing. Therein the difference. Is not that cool too?

Is the greenhouse effect already that bad that cool is the ultimate state one ought to strive for with all of one’s being? Or are we supposed to reject our mammalian inheritance? Mammals, by being warmer, could do more. So, when climate change happened 65 million years ago, they survived (so did the very warm birds, who evolved from bird-like dinosaurs). Are we supposed to do less now, and not survive? Or then survive like crocs, deep in the mud, super cool, eating carrion?

Is “cool” imposed on us so that people know no higher emotional state than iguanas? Become cool like barnacles, as we cling to the existence the plutocrats condescend to leave us to enjoy? Being so cool we would not be like the American and French hot heads who came forth with new constitutions in 1789? 

So is the celebration of “cool” what forces us to not be outraged, as plutocrats steal and burn the entire planet to forget about their megalomaniac angst? To forget they are just crazy critters in need of some restraint? Is “cool” the state slaves are supposed to be in to optimize the enjoyment of their masters? Is it only cool to be cool like corpses?

***

France anti-genocide law denounced by Turkey:

Now this is hilarious. France passed a law punishing convicted holocaust deniers by up to one year in jail and 45,000 euros fine.

Fine, indeed. Who would turn into a partisan, a defender of holocausts? Is not holocaust denial a form of hate speech? Holocausts remain a problem, because when one has killed most of a human group, there is nearly nobody to complain on their behalf: other people move on, as herbivores do, once one of them has been seized and devoured.

France’s national Assembly passed the anti-genocidal law, with bipartisan support. And what do you think happened?

Erdogan, the three time elected Prime Minister of Turkey, had a fit: how does France dare make holocaust denial a crime? He forbade French fighter jets to land in Turkey (so I guess the no fly zone over Syria will be delayed), recalled the Turkish ambassador to France, and stopped all talks with France.

And the questions are: why does the present government in Turkey love holocausts so much? Are holocaust such an endangered species that Turkey has to protect them with all its might?

Why does Turkey consider that a general attack against holocausts is an attack against Turkey? Is it because holocausts are intrinsic to the Turkish character? Or is it because holocausts are mentioned positively in the Bible and the Qur’an, and the present Turkish government is obsessed with the religion of the child molester Abraham? Is this why Erdogan is angry?

***

We Are Truth Machines.

That monkeys now build cities has not changed that truth. No hallucination added in the last 6,000 years has changed that truth either. Science is what we do, and what stands in the way of that fundamental truth, faces extermination.

***

 Patrice Ayme

No Law Up High, No Republic

ULTIMATE AUTHORITY OF THE REPUBLIC RESTS ON THE LAW.

Is Government Too Separated From The Authority That matters Most?

***

The planet we have is increasingly ravaged by several conflating crises. Burned by the carbonic acid created by excess carbon dioxyde absorbed by the oceans, young fishes die, go blind or become crazy, as bees do on land. The plancton, which fabricates the oxygen we need, is dissolving in the acid bath we used to call a sea.

But the fossil fuel polluters’ crimes are not even fiscally discouraged. Instead they are allowed to also spew lies, and persuade everybody that there will be plenty of air for ever (see the financing of the Tea party in the USA by the Koch brothers).

Meanwhile, the grip financial pirates have on the world has become obvious since 2008. After they seized the world economy, they asked for a ransom. And then again, And it was paid again. Now the serfs are asked to pay for distant banks by allowing themselves to become destitute (and this is happening even inside prosperous Germany, where old retirees discover they have to go back to work!)

Ever since the amazing financial crisis which grips the planet came to everybody’s attention in 2008, it has become obvious that a handful of men in suits take all the decisions with the money, and even the fate, of the public, allowing their class to thrive ever more, while, and because, the public deperishes.

The spirit of the law, if not its letter, has been denied.

I claim that this comes directly from the fact that the executive branch has eluded its responsibilities in implementing the spirit of the law. This is not just a question of the present leaders being plutophile  (lovers of Pluto, thus, wealth). Institutionally, the way executive powers are presently set-up, has less to do with wielding justice than it had under the Roman republic.

Western democracy, led by the English, American and French revolutions of the preceding centuries, consists of representative democracies with three branches of government: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive. Legislation is established by a bicameral parliament of elected representatives (an inheritance from 6,500 years old Sumer).

In a purely parliamentary system, parliament also elects the executive. In the USA, France and Russia, a powerful president is elected directly (by a college of a few hundred special electors in the USA, by the people in France or Russia).

In any case, the judiciary is supposed to be separated from the executive. It is not clear what this exactly means: after all, most judges are nominated by the executive in the USA, and confirmed by the legislative. In other countries (e.g. France) the judiciary self nominates.

So the judiciary is a bit more independent in France: see the Dreyfus affair, where the independent judiciary forced the executive, the army and the anti-Judaists to eat crow. What I will contest here is not the independence of the judiciary, but its power: an ant may be independent, but it is easily crushed by a plutocrat.

In the USA no judge is powerful enough to judge the obvious, namely that the Federal reserve has no right to transfer arbitrary amounts of “monetary base” to the same old crooks, year after year (although a judge recently blocked an all too comfortable accord between the government and a major bank).

The difference in judicial independence between France and the USA shows: the popular Chirac, 12 year president, and Prime Minister before that, was condemned to two years in prison (suspended). For allowing City Hall finances as Paris mayor to provide supporters with somewhat fictitious jobs with real salaries. The offense is so puny, it would not really register on American radar.

The Roman republic was not organized this way. In Rome, the top executives, the two Consuls, were also viewed as the top judicial officers. Why so? It is very simple: the republic rested on the law.

No law, no republic. That had to make the law more important than anything else, including the army. Military power could be used if, and only if, it was legal. The law was the highest value, and thus the highest authorities took care of it. The founders of the Roman republic saw this clearly. Justice was not a department, it was the foundation.

The superpower of the Consuls was compensated by the shortness of their terms: just a year. But they could be re-elected. Gaius Marius was elected seven times Consul. Ex-Consuls were called proconsular officers. They were frequently nominated governors of provinces, and had many prerogatives, including being protected by lictors, special trained bodyguards carrying the axes of the fasces representing the union of the Populus around the power of the law.  

When there was war, it was made in the name of the law, under the eye of the law, as the Consuls often personally directed the operations of the main armies (many Roman Consuls died in combat, over a millennium).

Let’s remember that a mostly functional Roman republic lasted about 5 centuries. And arguably for much longer: after all, there were Consuls, and a Roman Senate, for more than 11 centuries! The founder of Francia, elected king and imperator Clovis, was also Roman Consul. Stretched to the max, a Roman state existed for 23 centuries (753 BCE to 1453 CE).

So where does the system we have presently come from? How come justice got separated from the executive? The break happened around the 13th century. In England, the French barons limited the power of the king through the Charter of Liberties (1100 CE) and the Magna Carta (1215 CE): their ancestors had joined William The Conqueror, a Duke, (that is a high commander in the Roman army of the Late Empire), to invade England, bringing with them most of the (French) army that invaded England. William had been recognized as first among equals, and the descendants of his acolytes intended not to forget that fact.

In France the break came later. Elizabeth de France, the ferocious intelligent and domineering daughter of Philippe IV Le Bel had become reigning queen of England (having visited an unspeakable end to the father of her four children, a Plantagenet, Edward II). When her brothers all died, she ought to have become (absolute) queen of France too. She, and her son, the war like Edward III, were blocked by lawyers (her father had already rested heavily on lawyers, in his hunt for popes and Templars: his closest executors were lawyers). This is how the 475 year long “100 years war” started.

So parliaments rose, ever higher, taking judicial power away from the executive. By the time of the French revolution, England, France and the Netherlands had long seen the judicial system become nearly completely autonomous of the executive. The Bastille was stormed in France to take away from the king the last shred of Roman like power the executive had on the implementation of the law.

After the English, American and French revolutions, too much of the new system has still more to do with the monarchies that preceded it, than with the Roman republican system. The chief executive was elected for longish terms, as if it were a monarch, and directly from the legislature. In other words, the parliament now elected the kings (and queens).

Here a comical aside. The USA elects its president as if he were the Roman emperor. The Imperium Romanum officially re-established by Charlemagne in 800 CE, made Holy under Barabarossa (German: Heiliges Römisches Reich, Latin: Imperium Romanum Sacrum) indeed elected its head from a college of “grand electors“. Thus in 2001, the People elected Gore president, but the plutophile Supreme Court selected Bush, instead. (Perhaps the point when, in the future, the USA will be seen has having given in to the Dark Side!)

The representative democracy, separation of powers system is viewed unanimously as fine and good. (Although Switzerland, the oldest democracy around, uses less representation, and more direct rule of the people.)

But the question remains: when a massive injustice arises, quickly and powerfully, who can handle it? Who is going to deliver maximum power in the name of the law defending the People? In other words, when executive power is needed to re-establish the law, how can the meek executives we now have, thoroughly checked and balanced, exert the required power? America’s Founding Fathers were obsessed by checks and balances, but, although Founding Father Washington became filthy rich (317 slaves in his Mount Vernon house!), the Founding Fathers had no idea what real plutocracy was like. The only plutocrats they knew were in England, and that was judged to be an ocean away.

President Andrew Jackson, one the fiercest generals ever, had a better idea. He hated the Rothschilds (great practitioners of fractional reserve banking, who considered themselves the real power behind the thrones in Europe). Jackson prevented their implantation in the USA. Next he disintegrated the Bank of the United states, and considered that, on his deathbed, to be his greatest achievement. If he was around, as chief executive, he would probably occupy Wall Street and Congress with twenty divisions, the next day.

There are still remnants of the old Roman power the Consuls had: Obama, executing Ben Laden, for example. That was well accepted, because that was overseas (and even below the sea).

Besides Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt Teddy, and FDR, another one who took himself for a Roman consul, was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. But all those powers they grabbed, as needed, were not really the appanage of the presidency of the USA. The water was boiling, so the frog jumped out. Right now, the temperature is slowly rising, and normal powers, in normal circumstances are not enough to address the various problems. That is made plenty clear with the European banking crisis, the on-going financial crisis all over the world (even… in China!), and the ecological crisis (which the USA resolutely refuses to consider, thus undermining everybody).

In the present financial crisis, and in the ecological crisis at some point, overwhelming power will be needed. The only question is to know if the power will be military, and extraordinary, Lincoln style, or civilian and legal.

The spirit of the law has to be defended. For example against the financial derivative universe (which has no collateral, which means the unsuspecting public is the collateral; see lower down).

Too many checks and balances for the power of the People, and all you end with, is the power of the plutocracy.

The arch-example: Geithner and Bernanke directed untold trillions of dollars towards the banks which had caused the crisis, but asked for nothing in return. At that point a strong executive ought to have stepped in and declare that this fabulous gift violated the principle of the law, which is that the republic does not make gifts to private parties, without compensation. Especially when the beneficiaries are the perpetrators.

(The gifts had started under Paulson and Bush II, when the daemon Dimon was offered 30 billion dollars by the fed, collateralized by what he was buying (!!!) to help him swallow Bear-Sterns, the “Jamie deal“. Thus, Dimon is viewed as a genius. When the state gives in to the daemon, crepuscule of goodness!)

The financial crisis has been allowed to roll on because a general laxity about the law. The laxity is fed even by videogames.

The Red Cross pointed out that in the world’s most popular, most sold videogames, the Geneva Conventions rules were not just violated, but gamers get rewarded for violating them. A whole generation is being raised, feeling that one gains 50 points by shooting on ambulances. The Red Cross wants to change this. The Red Cross is right. The plutocrats and their corporations facing them, making billions from a bloody obsession with an alternate reality, will beg to differ. Not only they make a fortune from violating the most basic morality. But those daemons know quite well that the games they sell preach violations of the law, and also violations of civilization itself.

The acceptance of barbarity, as a way to get ahead, the plutocrats meekly hope, will bring more of the abject world in which, and by which, they thrive.

The mood of the times is important: pathetic plutocrats have gone around, requesting the respect they have come to expect. Meanwhile the law is symbolically stepped on. In the last three years, both the French and American presidents, both trained lawyers, violated in public, the very first thing about the law, namely the presumption of innocence (this is not a good example for the inchoating republics of Ukraine and Russia, where the law is obviously used to hunt the loyal opposition!)

The presumption of innocence says that even suspects are innocent until proven otherwise by a proper legal procedure. The presumption of innocence protects freedom, every body’s freedom, not just the freedom of suspects or criminals.

President Sarkozy claimed that former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was “guilty”… although Villepin was later found completely innocent. President Obama, having maybe talked to Sarkozy too much, declared that soldier Bradley Manning, who is accused to have shown the truth to the public, had “broken the law”, as his trial started.

However, as commander in chief, Obama is the ultimate authority for the military tribunal which judges Manning. Constitutionally, he cannot pose as judge and accuser.

(Let’s note in passing that the Nazi government had given orders to not prosecute soldiers who had refused to obey orders, on the ground of violations of human rights. The Nazis were afraid that any official prosecution would shine a light on their violations of human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and German law! It is rather curious that the government of the USA is too arrogant to even be as wise as that…)

Methinks that it is not that Sarkozy and Obama have early Alzheimer, and forgot the very first thing about the law.

Instead I believe that they feel they live in times where anyone up high can get away with everything (witness the enormous transfers of wealth to the hyper rich under their reigns, transfers which threaten the very thrones on which they sit, but the establishments upon which they rule feel they could get away with it, and that there is no other way… Although Sarkozy may soon understand his error, especially when, after losing the next election, French judges start to investigate him in earnest…) 

Is a new age of connivance upon us?

Justice without the determination, or capability to impose it, is no justice.

We just had a beautiful example in Italy: Berlusconi, highest judicial officer of the Italian republic, if one looks at his job in the fullness of the authority inherited from Rome, as one should, refused to prosecute the Mafia energetically. He failed to arrest top mafiosi. Berlusconi was barely gone for a few days, replaced by Mario Monti, a former university president, that the head of the Camorra was arrested (after 15 years living in a bunker in Naples).

It cannot be otherwise according to the spirit of the French and American constitutions: the highest authorities of the state are, have to be, first of all, the highest judicial authorities. It is no accident that leech known as finance is so strong in London, where the Prime Minister has fewer powers (not being head of state, to start with; and according to Rothschild, circa 1820, not the real power in Britain.)

Such disregard for the basics, for the strict letter of the law, I suggest, comes precisely from a general mood which tramples the basics of republican civilization. Or then from having a plutocratic agenda. But to believe that, in the age of the Internet, plutocracy can win over democracy, is itself fiction of the highest order. As people get more and more informed, the transition to a military regime will have to take just a generation, and not five, as it did in Rome. 

To re-establish democracy fully, it will be primordial to realize that the highest authority of the republic is the law, or, more generally the spirit behind it: WE THE PEOPLE.

And the highest officials of the republic have to incarnate it. Maybe we want to have a second look at the institution of consul. Shorter terms of the higher officials (as in Switzerland), with more of a judicial mission may help in blocking the plutocrats. France is also going to imitate Switzerland and California, and make referenda possible, upon popular request. Switzerland has imposed on its banks twice the Basel III reserve requirements. And it is said that the Fed with impose Basel III to its financial daemons; that sounds technical, but, when the banks have not enough reserves, they find them among the unsuspecting public, and then the economy tanks. (It is amazing that not imposing Basel III on American banks was contemplated!)

The derivative markets use enormous leverage (say 25 trillion of net positions out of a notional 700 trillions total, at least that is what the industry claims, giving a leverage of about 30!) But the institutions using them have no collateral. Thus, in case of failure of one, the entire world financial system will come down (as exactly happened when AIG was 200 billion short in 2008). But nobody has had the authority mental, judiciary or political to stop the non sense.

How did Rome fall? The republic faded, Rome became increasingly a fascist empire where justice could not be visited on the mightiest. An intractable financial crisis developed. Its fundamental cause was the refusal of the plutocracy to pay taxes to the Roman state, while its agents were busy disempowering Rome and Italy (to avoid a revolt back to the republic). Since the plutocracy ruled, there was no way out.

Emperor Septimus Severus, a general of at least half Libyan ancestry born in Libya, knew the problem well, and hated the Senate (headquarters of the plutocracy). But he could not fight it.

A man, even an emperor, cannot fight a mood. Only philosophers can do so. But, by the time of Septimus Severus, it was too late for philosophy. All this, because it had become a self serving habit of the mighiest to not apply the law to those who had become too big to fail, too big to flail.

Ultimately, it was a new people’s philosophy, from Germania, which was to transmogrify the ruling mood, and the empire, three centuries later. In the new ruling mood, plutocracy and slavery were out. So the entire economy rested again on small farmers, just as it did in the early Roman republic (those new, northern farmers cultivated the rich heavy soil of the colder, wetter oceanic climes with the new technology of heavy steel ploughs pulled by oxen… or horse).

It would take a few centuries for Western civilization to reach higher than Rome ever did.

But we don’t have that kind of time, we don’t have centuries to change moods, and rebuild on a more sustainable basis: remember the methane bubbling in the arctic. And plutocracy is not that ingrained yet: it is nothing that a 90% tax on the very rich, Eisenhower style, cannot fix.

(In Rome, using the Trojan Horse of foreign wars of choice (around 146 BCE), the plutocracy was able to acquire private armies which were above the law. Right now, it is just short of that. Only its business practices are above the law, and the states have been captured to allow them. But a nasty war or two (say, starting with Iran) could fix the problem.)

Applying the law can change the world. As I said for years, mercury pollution from coal burning, kills tens of thousands of lives every year and causes birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases among millions of survivors. And this in the USA alone (compare with the civilian nuclear industry, which did not kill one member of the public yet, in the USA: is the hysterical anti-nuclear crowd paid by fossil fuel polluters?)

Finally Obama, apparently remembering some of what he is supposed to do, has unleashed the EPA onto the coal burners. It remains, though, to do the same worldwide (worldwide carbon tax, worldwide mercury tax). And if the polluters in China can’t adapt fast enough, let’s tax them into extinction! Why should they be allowed to put mercury vapor in the air, and ruin our brains? Is not that a casus belli?

The mercury pollution is just a small example of the following. At this point justice, the republic, and the spirit of the law, is not just a matter of taste, but a matter of survival.

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Patrice Ayme

Coddling The Super-Rich Is Deleterious

PLUTOCRACY IS A DISEASE, THE GOVERNMENT A CONDUCTOR, THE ECONOMY AN ORCHESTRA. BUT ONE CAN’T CONDUCT A DISEASE.

Abstract: The essence of the socio-economic crisis of the West is the rise of plutocracy. It is enabled by a number of mechanisms that the People have not elucidated, hence the passivity with which they accept further abuse. Many exploitative pathways have to do with the nature of money, how it is created, and that money represents power.

By throwing money to the plutocrats, under the pretext that, if enriched further, they will revive the economy, central reserve banks are feeding the fire consuming civilization.

Thus governor Perry of Texas is not crazy when he calls the central bank chair a traitor: throwing money at the richest, and most culprit, is what Bernanke has been doing. The ever greater amount of riches of the richest means that the rest of the People are increasingly not living in democracy, as they are increasingly deprived of money, thus power.

I explore various aspects of the crisis rarely dwelled upon, in a question and answer session.

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Question: Don Peck in the Atlantic has written a rather tame, not to say lame, review of the symptoms of the crisis in Can The Middle Class Be Saved? As he puts it: “The Great Recession has accelerated the hollowing-out of the American middle class. And it has illuminated the widening divide between most of America and the super-rich. Both developments herald grave consequences. Here is how we can bridge the gap between us.”

A defeated Peck concludes rather meekly that: “Perhaps plutonomy, in the 21st century, will prove stable over the long run. But few Americans, no matter their class, will be eager for that outcome.”

Does your insistence upon evil as a force which gives many people meaning, unveil a deeper layer of understanding of the economic crisis?

Answer: How we can bridge the gap between “us“? Us? How charming, holistic, new age, and wise in the chick sense of the term. There is no “us” there. The world is sick with plutocracy, such is the essence of the crisis. Plutocracy causes the increasing financial, economic, educational pauperization of most of the most developed part of the world.

“Plutonomy” is an arrogant concept: it means managing Satan. This new concept is a further outrageous twist on Faust. It was coined by bankers at Citigroup who made the self serving, erroneous, and grotesque analysis in 2005, that “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats.” Apparently, those new Atlases did not get to the word “plutocracy” in the dictionary.

However, Obama has been operating according to their book of lies. Although, most of the time, he covers himself up, with the opposite discourse. Since the crisis has started, most of the effort has consisted in supporting the “entrepreneur-plutocrats” with public money, under that exact theory, that they “hold the earth up with their muscular arms”. 

Question: How do the plutocrats do whatever they are doing to make leaders obey their wishes?

Answer: Very simple: plutocrats monopolize most of the money and capital. That give them all the power they need to make most people think, feel, and act according to their desiderata.

Not only have the plutocrats captured higher education ever more, the more sensitive it has been to private financing, but they even have tweaked the emotional mien of People. That is why Americans are not revolting.

In recent years, being “cool” has become the most valued behavior in the USA. Obama was pretty much elected on that criterion. If one comes to think of it, “cool” means that one is indifferent to whatever is going on, only guided by one’s inner compass of self “navigation” towards self advantage in one’s self obsessing world. Naturally “no drama Obama” has been the top model of coolness and self obsessed navigation (Obama extols “navigation” as the supreme value a man can have in his imaginary autobiographies).

One can now see that his coolness makes him a strong competitor in the run to worst president ever. His emotions feel fake, and if they are, as they appear to be, the fact that he found impossible to move (“motion”) out (“e”) as needed is fully explained: a man cannot move out on emotions he got from the teleprompter.

Just before Lincoln, an American president tried to encourage slavery, making him the worst president; Obama’s attempt to force Americans to purchase life saving services from private, profit making owners is akin to the same, namely the denial of the basic human right to life, used for profit. I view that monstrosity (which is in the process of being found unconstitutional, as judge after judge knocks it down as such), a direct consequence of Obama’s coolness. Iguanas can’t be in charge of human rights, they are too cool. The Nazis used to consider coolness a top quality, of course.

Besides extolling nihilistic values, such as coolness, as the highest values, the plutocrats have technically made the democratic economy impossible. In their rush to ever more power, the plutocrats have stolen most of the money, leaving not enough to everybody else to operate the economy.

Q: Does not that sound pretty much like the old criticism of Marx and his many French predecessors?

A:  In many ways, the situation is worse now. The capitalists, in Marx’s time needed the workers, now, they don’t.

Q: How come?

A: There are machines and slaves in China, both of which were not factors in Marx’s time. Plus, in Marx’s time, the planet was not going to explode, now it is. The plutocrats are not just exploiting workers nowadays, they are destroying everything.

Q: Are you not abusing the word “Pluto”? Aside from poetry, does it have a technical content?

Satan is a seducer, and he is crafty. He seduces people to act against their best interests. This has been in full view for centuries; see the ancient myth of Faust. So there is a technical psychological content, as I sketched with the reverence for inhuman coolness.

Financially Pluto is a major factor; Pluto lives underground, and can make itself invisible. This is exactly how the banking system works. As the cover article in today’s Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal admits: “Banks around the world are being whipsawed by the fact that much of the bank-funding market is opaque… That forces nervous traders—and even regulators—to piece together a view of a complex, global banking system using threads of data, anecdotal information and even rumors.”

Opacity is one of Satan’s characteristics, allowing it to deploy its abusive schemes, and a quality adverse to democracy. It is central to the exploitation system by plutocracy because People cannot fight what they can’t see, or cannot even conceive. 

Q: Do you have a problem with capital?

A: No. I do not. Capital is as old as the first tools, the first weapons. Property is as old as the first cave. I have a problem with the distribution of capital. I do not share the condemnation of private property made by many philosophers. It is as if they had never heard of cavemen. In the concept of “caveman”, there was a property, the cave. Although I salute these philosophers’ contribution to the slogan of the French republic, Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Which I approve of.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously wrote in his attractive style: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not somebody have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

This was also the point of view, claimed by nomadic American hunters, especially when mounted on horses, and talking to the whites. But the Iroquois came out of their mountain redoubts, and exterminated entire Indian nations that the French Jesuits had civilized, and settled on their lands as  peaceful peasants. The Iroquois had never invaded these lands before. That horror and misfortune is outside the explanatory schemes that Rousseau dwelled in. Instead it belongs to the instinct of intellectual domination. The Iroquois wanted to demonstrate they were better thinkers, they had the best system of thought, and there is nothing better to achieve this, than breaking one pacific opponent’s skull in two.

Indian tribes fought each other to death for horses, if not hunting grounds.

Some animals have to be territorial, because, if they were not, the resources they need to exist would be spread too thin, and their species would die. Humankind, which was 2 billion a generation ago, will reach 7 billion within weeks, and may be reminded the hard way that man is, and has to be, highly territorial. Whenever the Earth belongs to everybody, that is nobody in particular, it suffers the tragedy of the commons.

Humanity had always to be territorial, and even racist, in some sense, which has varied, according to specifics. Humanity was de facto  specifist, to use a neologism: all the competitive species, dozens of them, in particular the Australopithecines, were eliminated. To make the Earth in a human garden, deadly enemies next door eating one’s lunch presented no viable option. (Kipling makes specifism the main message of his novel, “the Lion”.)

All of this to say that demonic tendencies are never far below the surface, by necessity of the human condition. One ignores them at all imaginable costs, as Obama is in the process of demonstrating, from the Hindu Kush, to the Potomac.

The Marquis de Sade’s in his 1797 text L’Histoire de Juliette, agreeing for once with his intimate enemy Rousseau, uttered : “theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft.“ Sade was not up to his usual level of natural objectivity. Nature does not steal, it produces, monsieur Le Marquis. A lion produces territory, to feed itself, just as a fire produces grassland, because it fed itself.

Lodging a protest, a provocation, as he admitted later, French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon summed up the naïve point of view: Property is theft! (“La propriété, c’est le vol!”) in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.

To attack the principle of private property is silly. When it got cold, and Homo Neanderthalis wanted to improve his lodgings, he went into the caves, and chased out the gigantic Cave Bears. Enough of sleeping outside for 250,000 years! This happened around 50,000 years ago. Did Neanderthal steal the bears? He did more than that, as intended. The Cave Bears, with no place to call home anymore, went the way of the Indians later, and were exterminated. Civilization could rise only after most of the ferocious beasts had been eliminated (it is thought that, at some point lion like predators were the most abundant species: a lion can survive by eating just rabbits, as wolves do with mice).

It took a lot of work, for Homo erectus to make the first clothes, the first stone weapons (both necessary to conquer the Caucasus, as Erectus did, two million years ago!) And, a fortiori, to make vast swathes of the earth into a garden. Those individuals could be motivated only if they worked pro privo (for the individual). in other words: privately.

Q: So maybe the plutocrats are the new Neanderthals, and common people need to go the way of the Cave Bears!

A: Keep your sarcasm down. The Cave Bears did not go down without a fight. As you could see in London riots (5 dead), the People is having enough of the exploitation by sleek plutocrats such as Cameron, who find everything “disgusting“, but for their own classy predation. All around the world, nations are chafing under plutocracy, from India to England.

Democracy cannot operate if capital is not spread around enough. Capital represents potential power, and democracy basically means people power. If the People has basically no capital, the People has no power, and there cannot be any democracy. Plutocracy and democracy are completely incompatible.

In recent decades, there has been a massive switch of power to fewer and fewer individuals and families in the West. This had some clear consequences: young people are less relatively knowledgeable and passionate than their forebears in the sixties, so they have tolerated more readily the increasing abuse they are subjected to. In the sixties what president Johnson did in Vietnam was intolerable, but, at the same time, he was creating a “Great Society”, spending a lot on the people, and the program was basically extended by Nixon. For example, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and today’s young republicans want to shut it down. Young people nowadays watch all this with the concern of cows contemplating trains whizzing in the distance.

Q: What causes the present imbalance of capital?

A: Three principal effects concentrate capital ever more: unfair and unsustainable taxation, using the rich to create money, and globalization, aka inverse colonization. All of this under the watchful mind’s eye of plutocracy unchained, whose malevolence has no more bounds than its dissemblance.

In the USA, the foremost process is very simple: the top 400 incomes in the USA pay 17% average tax. It is legal tax evasion, organized by a Congress “coddling the super rich“, as Warren Buffet put it. American politicians coddle the super rich, because they hope they will be rewarded by joining the super rich; see the immensely rich Clintons.

The influential chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, republican Darrell Issa, comes complete with as the New York Times puts it: a “nonprofit family foundation, which seeks to encourage values like “hard work and selfless philanthropy,” [which] earned millions from stock in DEI, which bears his initials. Mr. Issa’s fortune, in fact, was built on his car alarm company, and to this day it is his deep voice on Viper alarms that warns potential burglars to “please step away from the car.”

In recent months, The New York Times has examined how some lawmakers have championed particular industries, pushing measures to protect and enrich supporters. In Mr. Issa’s case, it is sometimes difficult to separate the business of Congress from the business of Darrell Issa.”

Mr. Issa is worth nearly a billion dollars, and generated a billion dollars in financial trades, just from one Merrill Lynch account. He is from southern California. According to the NYT, he would buy a clinic, and then direct public funds to build a great road going to that clinic, this sort of things. He is in charge of financial ethics, appropriately enough in a plutocracy.

Q: OK, there is great legal corruption in the USA, but that does not explain the crisis in Europe.

A: Indeed, legal corruption is the best way to describe the political and fiscal scene in the USA. Most of these deplorable practices are illegal in Europe.

However a second sort of mechanism exists to make the rich ever richer, and that mechanism exists both in the USA, and in Europe.  It has to do with the public mandate some private individuals are given to create money for everybody, an intrinsically perverse mandate, because nobody has elected those banksters, and they have become much more perverse in recent years. Those crafty ones discovered that the cows were not watching, and they kept most of the money to themselves. 

Q: You are alluding to the fractional reserve system, a notion even economists don’t ever speak about.

A: Well, that’s how money is created. Economists paid by the system are not supposed to demolish the system. But there is something nearly as unhealthy in the non separation of bank and state as in the non separation of church and state.

Q: You quote many causes for the crisis, and I know you have more up your sleeve, can you simplify?

A: As I keep on saying, THE ROOT OF THE CRISIS, WORLDWIDE, IS THE SAME: THE RISE OF PLUTOCRACY. That malevolent dragon has to be pushed back in the subterranean sojourns, where it belongs.

Thatcher and Murdoch, in the early 1980s, turned Britain in a plutocratic heaven. It was a summit of dishonesty: resting prosperity on making a country into a haven for world class thieves (the USA, by the way, does the same; at least in the EU, plutocrats are forced to pay the Added Value Tax, heavier on luxury).

Then Blair and Murdoch delayed the day of reckoning by buying the people on credit (and making Wall Street dirtiest derivative work, besides ingratiating themselves to American plutocracy by going to invade Iraq). Meanwhile Clinton gave full power to Rubin (Goldman Sachs) and his assistant, the well connected Summers, to dismantle president Roosevelt’s financial and economic revolution, so that their class could stuff itself with all the money they wanted. They just forgot that even enormous leverage limits how much money there is.

At the bottom, money represents power, that is energy, and there is only so much to go around. If you take all the energy away from the People, they may not be able to make a revolution, indeed, as happened under Rome, but neither will they have the energy to operate civilization, as happened under Rome, too.

Basically the same pattern happened in all the leading democracies. Even upper middle class Londoners and Parisians cannot afford to live in their own cities, which were sold to tax free world plutocrats, in connivance with domestic plutocrats. (Long ago an African “emperor”, Bokassa, had offered diamonds to his girlfriend (?) French president VGE.)

The effect is worse in London, as said foreigners were taxed there even less. Entire buildings in those democratic capitals turned out to be the property of Middle Eastern or African potentates, or, as I prefer to say, plutocrats. For example president Bongo of Gabon was found to own for hundreds of millions euros of property, in France alone (he had properties in Britain, and more than one hundred million dollar in the USA).

Q: Why this irresistible rise of plutocracy?

A: I have explained this in much older essays, and will give a little refresher in a few paragraphs. The rise of plutocracy is a tendency always, ever since capital and property became extensive enough in the Neolithic (hence the rage of Rousseau, Sade and company above). It’s basically a mathematical effect. In general plutocracy won, and demonic wealth ruled thereafter. This why democracy is rare in civilized times, although it is the natural state of the genus Homo.

Even Athenian democracy died this way, as the Athenian plutocracy, however modest, surrendered to the ferocious and mighty Macedonian plutocracy, which had made them an offer they could not refuse. OK, the Athenians had been defeated in a first naval battle, and they surrendered after the second one became indecisive. The philosopher Demosthenes, an enemy of fascism, took poison as Macedonian shock troops seized him.

Q: Does the decline and fall of Rome fit your model?

A: Yes, plutocracy caused the fall of the republic. However, the army came to represent the People, something already obvious in the writings of the Gracchi, or, later, in 100 BCE, when seven times Consul Marius, victorious on invading Germans, a “New Man” fought the hyper rich.  After Augustus, the army fought the Senate, representing the plutocracy. They weakened each other, and the rise of foreign soldiers, or their descendants, and of the Eastern Empire, and theocracy, made it into a 5 way fight. Which became a six way fight, as the Persian Sassanids and then the “Saracens” (“Sons of Sara”) got into the brawl. After a century of darkness, and theocracy, the Franks came out on top.

Q: Were not the Franks very rich? Did they not own Europe?

A: For people who ruled what they called Europe, the Franks were austere, relatively speaking. Most of them were peasants with a frankly unsubmissive attitude. They had a high birthrate, and their inheritance law forced equal distribution of inheritance. Charlemagne’s capital, in Aix, was modest for someone who was the only legal Roman emperor, and controlled most of Western Europe. Over seven centuries of Frankish queens, kings and emperors, I do not know one example of extravagant luxury from one the many monarchs. Many were major war chiefs present on the battlefield, sometimes for decades. Charlemagne spent 50% more time at war on horseback than Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who spent the most time fighting.

Many Frankish head of states (for example Bathilde, Charlemagne, Charles the Bald) supported intellectual activity on the largest and highest scale. Their philosophers were condemned, many centuries later, by the abominable fascists of the Inquisition, representing a most vicious type of plutocracy, the theocratic type.

In general, plutocratic tendencies cannot be avoided. Democracy has to prevent plutocracy actively. Societies, for 12,000 years, have had active forms of sacrifices and taxes to keep plutocracy from killing society.  Obama, a way cool guy, cannot prevent plutocracy anymore than the average iguana, and for the same reason; even if he wanted to, his metabolism is too cool, his passions so little developed, that he cannot get to move. Without e-motion, there is no motion. As everybody can attest.

Q: Forget Obama. Now everybody is starting to agree with you that the guy (to speak like him) is clueless, hopeless without any belief, because we can’t, and it was all about: “Yes, we can!” because he can’t, so we had to step in, but we were not made president by electing him, a point he forgot. You did not answer fully the question on the rise of plutocracy.

A: There are two phenomena at work. One has been in evidence for 12 millennia. It is purely mathematical. It has to do with the nature of the exponential function applied on the notions of capital and interest. You have three ingredients there which are as fundamental as possible: the exponential, the most important function in mathematics, capital, that is potential energy, and interest, without which the human brain would be just impotent jelly, plunged in the abyss of terminal cool.

Q: So you claim that the basic problem with plutocracy involves deep mathematics, but has been well known?

A: Yes, sustainable societies have known forever what capital is, and interest too. Long lived societies also grasped the intuitive properties of the exponential function, such as being its own derivative, so growing the faster, the bigger it gets. Mathematics often makes explicit and systematic notions which were guessed long before, if they were of vital interest.

The ancients in Carthage reacted to the exponential by throwing the eldest of the hyper rich in the fire. Or, more exactly, in a machine which would throw them in the fire. Wives of Viking and rich Indians would also not enjoy the riches of cool inheritance, but the bite of flames. Same idea: prevent wealth to get so ingrained in a few hands that society would come to a standstill.

Q: Is the mathematical tendency for plutocracy to feed on itself why all societies bring up margin rates for taxes for higher incomes?

A: Of course. The exponential function, acting on the interest capital brings, imposes an EXPONENTIAL TAXATION, just for the distribution of riches to stay the same. So strong redistributive taxes are mathematically necessary to prevent democracy to turn into plutocracy.

The hyper rich in the Late Roman empire refused to pay taxes. That dearth of state income was the main proximal factor in the fall of the Roman state, as the political leaders of Rome had to subcontract defense to various German tribes, and even the Huns. When the Franks took over, they took over as the legal army of Rome. They decided to collect tax themselves, as Rome would not do it. Thus the Frankish army became the state. If the USA’s government revenue keeps on collapsing, it is likely that the U.S. military will also take over. An efficient military always operates as a socialist meritocracy.

Q: let’s compare apples to apples. Is the USA more of a plutocracy than in the past?

A: The USA did not have much wealth inequality in its first century, at least among voters (white men with property). Carnegie, the first billionaire, at the end of the nineteenth century, would now be called a left wing liberal, somewhere to the left of Soros. He was an important author, guru to his wealthy contemporaries, explaining the populist bend of early American billionaires.

The top income-tax rate was 91 percent under the republican Eisenhower, in 1960. It was 70 percent in 1980, after Nixon and Carter, 50 percent in 1986, after Reagan and Bush Senior, and 39.6 percent in 2000, after Clinton had sold democracy short to plutocracy, and is now 35 percent. Income from investments is taxed at a rate of 15 percent, and most of the hyper rich have connived with the IRS to claim that rate for their income. The gutting of the estate tax by Oblabla, the democrat from make believe, insures that the USA is transforming itself into an hereditary plutocracy  under our unbelieving eyes. Indeed remember: wealth breeds wealth faster, the bigger the wealth. This is actually how the social inequalities of the feudal society evolved. Just to stand still, a heavy tax need to be applied so that the rich does not grab more and more of the riches, generation after generation.

Q: What is wrong with that?

A: Let’s leave aside the intrinsic violation of the Aristotelian Constitution of the USA that this would be, as it would deny “life and the pursuit of happiness” to the many. Human beings are not psychobiologically made to be submitted. They suffer stress, debilitated health, they become much less intelligent, much less human in the most noble sense of the term… So the USA would become a nation of debilitated morons, ultimately to be defeated on the battlefield.

Q: I thought you admired Nietzsche? You should admire the return of an aristocracy…

A: I am far from agreeing with all of Nietzsche’s ideas. Moreover, Nietzsche precisely alluded to what I just said. We are actually in agreement. On that point as many others, I am more Nietschean than Nietzsche. The slave mentality, slave religion, and spirit of the herd which Nietzsche condemned, he condemned for precisely the reasons I said, although he used different semantics. On top of that, we are not talking about aristocracy here, which is the rule of the best. The mediocre tricks applied in Libya by the Gaddafi clan, and those applied by Western plutocrats, have nothing to do with being the best. We are not talking about Charles Martel’s knights here. What we have been confronting in the last decade has been naked kleptocracy, the rule of the thieves. They did not just a little bit of money, but too much to keep on operating civilization itself.

Q: You think that the hyper rich are thieves, because they become ever richer using not merit, but riches to become richer, and they have got so rich that there is not enough money for the world to go ’round. What about the guy which founded Facebook? Was not that a beautiful American success story? What about Google?

A: What about worshipping Standards & Poor, as you are at it? That’s a whole can of worms. It would take several pages to explain that some sort of organized crime is at play in some exaggerated valuations on the private market. Facebook, like Google, was founded by discrete, but very rich individuals, venture capitalists we don’t want to mention, but we that have personally encountered. They are the real power behind those thrones. the valuation of Facebook, up to 50 billion dollars, according to the usual suspect at Goldman Sachs (both judge and party in Facebook), is an organized criminal plot.

If you want to talk about great American companies, think Intel, or GE (in spite of GE’s propensity to go overseas).

Q: You said that the very way money is created contributes to converting today’s world into plutocracy. How does that work?

A: Money is traditionally created, by private financiers leveraging from public money, laws and regulations prevented financiers to keep (most of the) money to themselves. However laws and regulations to prevent plutocracy were removed by the plutocrats and their (servant).

To make things worse, there is only so much money to go around. Banks create money by leveraging, presently with a multiplier of about 30, it seems, in the USA. So, if the central bank and treasury give a trillion to the banks, they loan 30 trillions. By contrast, in cautious, democratic Switzerland, the multiplier is only 5 (five!)

And of course, the derivative market is in excess of 600 trillion (the banks mumble disingenuously that, once one has added and subtracted everything, it’s more like 30 trillion; the fact remains, it’s at least twice the GDP of the USA!) Banks seem to be loaning mostly to that.

By stealing more and more of the money, the super rich have left the rest of the population with less and less money, hence power. The solution? Hyper tax the hyper rich, or face mayhem. And not just in the markets. Also tax heavily the transfer mechanisms which allow the hyper rich to steal the poor.

Q: Many economists and pundits observe that a DELEVERAGING EVENT is ongoing. Paul Krugman uses the label “Minsky event”, for a deleveraging crisis. Why do you not insist on that point?

A: Krugman wants to advertize Minsky’s views, which are not really his own, but ought certainly to be better known. Deleveraging is part of the crisis. However, deleveraging, although important in the USA, is not the essence of the crisis.

How do we know this? Well, there is a crisis, but THERE HAS BEEN VERY LITTLE DELEVERAGING, SO FAR. Actually, quite the opposite. Indeed, individuals are trying to deleverage, in the USA. But they have not (yet) been very successful (private debt relative to GDP has gone down very little). Moreover, individuals are not deleveraging in Europe (traditionally, the Franco-Germans families have assets, but little debt, so there is nothing to deleverage). Moreover, the states piled up debt since 2007, especially the USA and the nations making up the EU. For example Spain went from a debt around 30% of GDP to 65% of GDP, between 2008 and 2011.

Thus one needs to look somewhere else for the main causative set of the crisis. Much economic analysis, not only does not go to the bottom of economics (which is energy + ethics), but do not even go deep enough to understand even the main factors causing the present Greater Depression.

Q: If deleveraging has not caused the crisis, why do people talk about it so much?

A: Pernicious actors hid much bigger causes behind smaller, rather irrelevant ones. For example, American economists obsess about Europe and the euro in a thoroughly negative way, due to their nationalistic bias (USA first!) Even supposedly left wing economists in the USA do this. Of course, they are paid to howl that way, by their plutocratic sponsors (don’t forget Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, etc. may be great universities, but they are also plutocratic devices). The European Union has a constitutional social welfare, which is anathema to American plutocrats, and they are afraid that the American People could catch the fancy that they would prefer such a society.

Q: So deleveraging will never be a problem?

A: I never said that. Quite the opposite. Deleveraging will contribute to the crisis considerably, if and whenever it gets underway, and stupid political decisions just taken insure that it will, should they be implemented. Decisions coming out of false analogies, such as Obama claiming that the government ought to balance its budget, just as a family does.

Q: Why does not the government need to balance its finances?

A: Because the only correct way to reduce debt is through growth. The less growth, the more debt. Obama, and the Tea Party do not understand the role of government. The government makes banks possible. Government makes the entire financial system possible. The problem is not debt, it is what you make with the debt. If you make nothing with it, you are in serious trouble. This is the case of the USA presently. Even Bush Junior can claim that he put the USA further in debt to pay drugs for seniors. Obama, on the other hands can only show you dead seals in Afghanistan, a surrealistic spectacle that would have thrilled Salvador Dali by its absurdity.

The government is to the economy in general, and the ‘free’ market in particular, what a conductor is to an orchestra. It is also composer and paymaster.

Q: Is there a similarity between the American and European crises?

A: In truth, there is a European banking crisis, just as there is  an American banking crisis. Trillions have already been directed towards American bankers, not yet as much towards European bankers. There is also a deficit crisis, as many states (including the USA) run high “primary deficits“.

The European banking crisis has not been as bad, because the banks there are more regulated. moreover, Great Britain, Belgium and Germany nationalized derelict mega banks.

Q: What’s so great about nationalizations?

A: Once a bank inside a nation has been paid for by the People of a nation, it ought to become property of the People of that nation. Once a mega bank has been nationalized, it can be ordered to lend to the real economy. by contrast, in the USA, Bush and Obama paid personally the crooked bankers much more than their banks were worth, and now those same bankers refuse to lend to the real economy.

Bush senior and Reagan had nationalized 2,000 banks during the Savings and Loans crisis, very successfully (this inspired Scandinavia to do the same during its own financial crisis, a few years later, and an ill informed, pathetic Obama to make fun of the whole thing, 20 years later).

Q: Do you hate the rich? Are you jealous?

A: No. I am extremely weathy myself, at least where it really counts for high self esteem. A form of wealth no money can buy.

In an editorial,  “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich”, Warren Buffet, the third richest individual in the world, goes into the injustice of American taxation. This has been true, for more than a decade, and was mentioned hundreds of time on my sites. Buffet does not mention further injustices, such as tax support for fossil fuels, or for companies making money overseas.

Buffet does not mention why it is so bad to have a few making an immense amount of money while most do not. It is not just unjust: concentration of capital and power is gripping the entire socio-economy of the USA. The remark applies to the whole planet, by the same mechanism. The reason is this: a very rich person can only rise by so much aggregate demand. After all that person and family are only a few. 

When Bill Gross, founder of PIMCO, another money manipulator, bemoans the lack of “aggregate demand” in the economy of the USA, he is an hypocrite, because it is actually his fault. Indeed, Mr. Gross, worth personally more than 2 billion dollars, can only demand so much; how many people will he employ to lick his toes?

In 2009, 25 hedge fund managers in the USA earned, personally, more than 25 billion dollars, and they were taxed 15%. Some will celebrate American ingenuity. What they do not realize, though, is that this money was stolen from everybody else, or, at least retirees with pension funds, and all those that could have been paid when working for these retirees.

In Great Britain a youth who stole bottled water was condemned to 6 months in jail. Others got four years for “inciting riots”… on the Internet. Not that any riots directly connected to what they wrote happened, as the police and “justice” readily admits. This, on Facebook pages (a funny concept, as Facebook is the site, on which the alleged incitation occurred, thus ought to have been condemned too; but Facebook is good for revolution in Syria, not London). In a step soon to come, people who click on this site will be jailed automatically…

Q: Are there objective, factual differences between the attitude to the crisis in Europe and the USA?

A: As I said, some banks were nationalized already. Some major French banks, are among the most crucial in the world (not just because Italy owes them 400 billion dollars, but because they are central to the derivative market). One thing is sure, though: if they need major help from French taxpayers, they will be nationalized.

France, under the presidency of de Gaulle in 1945, did massive nationalizations, which were very successful. Nobody has forgotten that, in Europe.

Q: why is the crisis so deleterious in the Anglo-Saxon world?

A: Australia and Canada are doing great. Tightly regulated banks in the later. It is not just a question of commodities doing well. these are also more honest countries. They both declared war to Hitler a few days after France and Britain in September 1939. Canada landed soldiers in France in 1940, and again in 1942 and 1944!

The irresistible drama of plutocracy in the USA is a direct long term consequence of the collaboration between American plutocracy and European fascists before, during and after World War Two. The fact the USA stabbed democracy in the back in 1939, by helping Hitler, and hurting Poland, France and Britain, was never dispassionately pondered. This American duplicity was never explored, let alone explained seriously, so it has persisted, like a malignant cancer, always there, always growing.

Ever since the spirit American plutocracy, you know the stuff they learn at the “Skull and Bones” society or at Harvard, kept on a roll. That many Nazi songs were modified Harvard songs are the sort of telling details which were swept under the rug. That weapon smuggling from the USA, using American owned companies, armed the Nazis during their hyper violent rise to power is another subject which is ignored. That the Bush family fortune is splashed all over in Auschwitz blood, is something best never evoked in good company. Prescott Bush, and many other American plutocrats were Hitler’s closest and most important collaborators.

In spite of American plutocratic help, Hitler’s Reich last 12 years. American plutocracy on its own, had a better run, but much of it has been, in a sense, Nazi fuelled. Tough. Once again, nobody wants to say this. But many European leaders have these notions, unexpressed, deep in the back of their heads, and American leaders such as Bush have got to have some notions about the friendship between Prescott and Adolf. This has led to a deep, mostly unconscious, so far, conflict between Europe and the USA.

At the root of the Conflict between the USA and Europe is the question of whether plutocracy or democracy will lead the West. Something similar happened between Rome and Greece. In the first phase, Roman plutocratic fascism won. In the second phase, Greece recovered her empire, and Rome was displaced by the Franks. In the third phase, European civilization gobbled everything up. But now, Europe is confronted to a rogue colony.

because, under the façade smiles, it’s coming to the fore. The Americans, paid by their plutocrats, are trying their best to demolish the euro (Goldman Sachs’ organized lying to European authorities about Greek finances being a case in point; using derivatives, with their enormous leverage, to demolish European finances is another example). If they fail in a timely manner, everybody will be able to observe that the primary deficit of the USA is the worst of the planet. We are talking epic failure on a Zimbabwean scale here. The American deficit augments at the rate of 1% a MONTH. Yes, a month. Next years, state finances will collapse.   

Q: Which other deleterious consequences do you see to plutocracy?

A: Plutocracy is fundamentally anti-intellectual, as its power rests on People not understanding what it dies to be so powerful. So plutocracy is against intellectual, philosophical, and scientific progress. It is friendly to stupidity, superstition, superficiality, selfishness.

 

There is evidence that scientific, medical, and technological progress has slowed down, and this, in my opinion, can be traced to the rise of plutocracy, as it was in Ancient Greece, which became distinctly less clever when it got ruled by the plutocrats (“Hellenistic Kingdoms“, Rome).

This is not just lost opportunity. We are in a race between our knowledge and our demolition of the biosphere. As cognitive expansion has abated, the chances for irreversible demolition have augmented. This plutocratic show is just a waste of opportunity, and precious time.

***

Patrice Ayme

Sometimes Revolution Is The Only Solution.

IMPERIALISM, PLUTOCRACY, FRANCE, USA.

Abstract: One of my American readers is under the impression that I insult my American readers. I try my best to show below that his objections are not as deeply grounded as my observations. I am basically replying to his short note with visions of enormous contexts which change the debate completely. Put an ant in orbit, and its vision of things should change. Thus wishful thinking makes happy.

The concept of “emperors”, and plutocracy, are given meaning through some of the detailed history of Europe, America and the world.

Here are a few of the notions explored: 1) imperialism is, fundamentally, fascism at national, or civilizational level. It just extends military order over a vast territory. Sometimes it is necessary for the continuation of civilization, and there is nothing wrong with that. Europe was mostly at peace during the Middle Ages because of the Imperium Francorum, a gigantic empire with strategi depth that Rome dreamed of, and which kept the savages at bay. When that empire waned, and nation-states rose, so did war.

Fascism evolved as an instinct because it was the only way for groups of savannah dwelling, meat eating primates to survive, as super organisms, when struggling for life was the only way out. So fascism, intrinsically  is not any worse than teeth, because one can eat people with them (don’t smirk: at the battle of Cannae, at least one Roman legionary with disabled limbs, left only with a functioning jaw, but still inhabitated with the offensive spirit, ate through his Punic enemy).

2) Most Americans know nothing about plutocracy, because they have been brainwashed into ignoring it, except to pay their respect (every plutocrat has to be called a “philanthropist” by Very Serious Americans). Hence the lamentable show, a sort of Godfather movie, on a continental scale, with everybody paying their respect to the hyper rich. Most American critiques mimic sheep who have never seen wolves, and don’t know what those big teeth are for.

The number one safeguard of plutocracy is to persuade the sheep, that there are no conspiracies, no plots. They live in the best, of all possible worlds. Whereas the evidence to the contrary is astounding. The CIA recruited bin Laden in 1979, the year Carter attacked Afghanistan. Murdoch, the plutocrat from Australia, and England, for years, has been rampaging through minds with his lies, lies which advantaged the plutocracy. And so on.

We even just learned that the FBI was harassing Hemingway. Few noticed. Only Hemingway knew, and his friends thought he was crazy, because he knew, and they refused to know, as good, Very Serious Americans, learn to do, early on. In other words, Hemingway’s friends became a way to drive Hemingway crazy, thanks to the FBI (they tried similar tricks with King). In all these naiveties, the lack of real history in America shines brightly.

But now America has stepped into the flow of history, and ignoring history is tantamount to be carried away by its furious flow. For example, CIA agents encouraged bin Laden to become an abject creature in the 1980s, far away. But that had some consequences in 2001, and thereafter, closer to home. One can pique history, but it may come back to swallow those who riled it up.

Differently from Americans, Europeans lived through history, and bask in its relevance. Or irrelevance. Sometimes too much so (as when the Flemish celebrate frantically a battle Philippe IV of France lost in 1302, which make them cling to a provincial mind set of the sort which could only welcome Nazism with open arms, in 1940; it all started with too much taxes requested by Philippe’s government on the textile industry, to annoy the Anglois; French nobles led a revolt, in 1302, and nowadays the Flemish seem to have gone crazy with the idea of their selfish mini state).

In France, since 1789, the People and the plutocracy have been at war always. This is one of the fundamental truths of France. It is more true than wine, cheese, and, of course, this is not the sort of concept which is brought to the attention of the American populace, with the urgency it merits.

Hostility to hyper wealth does not make France a welfare state, just the opposite: it makes France less of a welfare state for… the hyper wealthy (so they flee to Belgium, see above!) It also makes the country pretty nice, causing, paradoxically, a flocking of world plutocrats to buy real estate in France (making French property the most overvalued real estate in the world, among significant countries).  

***

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HOW GEOGRAPHY INFLUENCES PSYCHOLOGIES, AND THE HISTORIES THEREOF:

Countries have psychologies, arising from their geography, their histories, and the solutions they found to address them. Some countries are even more than that: they achieved the status of full civilizations.

Egypt was the first such a case: it was clearly both a country, and a civilization. That it was all along an incredible serpent of fertility unifying Nubia (i.e., Black Africa), the Mediterranean,  Arabia, Mesopotamia and the Levant is no coincidence. It is a small example of why Europe became so superior later: as a nexus of ideas. One cannot just be a nexus by sitting there, though. One has to have the appropriate software. Egyptian fascism became too much at some point, and Egypt was taken over, as fascists often are, when they cross the line.

I am not embracing the Jared Diamond’s drift in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” that it was all a lucky accident that the beasts, the plants and god know what else, came to serve the Europeans (who, therefore, got plenty of lucky breaks they had nothing to do with). Actually Jared Diamond changed his music when he wrote “Collapse“. That later book was more philosophically correct (so it became less famous, did not get any Pulitzer prize, etc.).

In “Collapse”, Diamond observed that, faced with ecological collapse, during the Middle Ages, Europe and Japan reacted appropriately with strong governmental intervention (as usual with Americans, Diamond talks a lot about Germany, although the measures taken by the much stronger government in France where much fiercer, and have been unparalleled before or after, except may be in some Polynesian islands;  people were interdicted from some regions, to let nature replenish itself, an old Polynesian trick).

My thesis, indeed, is that mental activity of the superior type is necessary, and often sufficient to insure civilizational survival. In the case of Egypt, too much intellectual fascism (perhaps necessary to resist the “People of the Sea” invasion) led to a mental collpase, and then sneaky subjugation by Libyans, and a slow descent into irrelevance. Plutocracy, a form of fascism, can lead to irreversible intellectual fascism.

Imperialism is still another form of fascism. Actually it is the generic fascism of countries and civilizations. But, as we will see below, it is a different notion from plutocracy. Amusingly, in the case of Rome, Roman plutocracy, having lost all control, killed Roman imperialism. Both were replaced by the Franks’ Imperium Francorum (which conquered, or reconquered, most of Western Europe, Jerusalem, and even Constantinople in 1204!) where imperialism long kept plutocracy in check.

What caused Roman decline? Very simple. In the USA the plutocrats and their lackeys in Congress do not want to pay for infrastructure and Medicare, Medicaid, schools, etc. So it was with the Roman plutocrats (it’s called the “Curial” crisis). But Romans plutocrats went further: they refused to pay for the army (and hid behind their private armies instead). Hence the invasions, and the need for the central government to… hire the enemy (and even to hire the Huns!)

China, or India, were other examples of countries which were civilizations. But that is also true for smaller ensembles, such as Japan, Vietnam, or Siam (Thailand), or Indonesia, were other examples of small, but full civilizations.

Some civilizations have known foreign occupation (China, under the Mongol yoke with the Yuan), or denaturation (Egypt, first under the Libyans, then the Greco-Macedonians, then the Romans, and finally, the coup de grace, under the Muslim Arabic overlords).

Other civilizations, of course were annihilated (the Mongols annihilated one Muslim empire, and the strongest Buddhist civilization ever).

The case of Europe is more complicated than anywhere else. Europe is a land of invasions and immigrations (differently from China, or even India, Yuan and Moguls excepted). The many peninsulas, mountains, seas and rivers, smack in the fertile, temperate center of the world (OK, a bit to the side), favored a wealth of mini civilizations interacting (quite a bit similarly, but on a much larger scale, to what had led to the supremacy of the Sumerians, or the Cretan-Egypt-Hittite complex, or the Greeks themselves; Greece had many of the characteristics of Europe, on one tenth the scale).  

The Greco-Roman empire did not suppress the myriad of local mini civilizations. It accommodated them; that was central to the genius of the Roman empire. Cities were pretty much independent, as the Roman administration was incredibly efficient.

In the Late Roman Empire, the situation became even more diverse, by a strange twist of fate. The plutocrats basically refused to pay taxes, and it is not the People, addled by Christian fanaticism, pacifism, and a passion for the apocalypse, which was going to contradict them. Christianism acted as a form of anesthesia imposed by the plutocrats to common sense. So the central government made treaties with many small German nations. Some, like the Franks, a vast and multiple confederation, did not stay small very long: for them things were looking up, and they reproduced like rabbits.

Europe had to live with the interaction between local mini civilizations, and invasions, and evolved meta principles, long held ideas and emotions, which allowed the necessary  compromises to flourish. This created a mood of openness intrinsic to Europe.

Reading this, Pericles would say:”I told you so! We already had that in Athens, what I called the Open Society!” OK, right, but it did not start with Athens. and also Athens completely contradicted that mood during her long war with Sparta, as she massacred small cities, just because, she could, as she argued at the time, in a rarely attained mix of idiocy, inconscience, and mass criminality.

The Franks were careful to never do such a thing (although, under Charlemagne, three centuries after Clovis, they mass deported some particularly obstinate Germans, from Northern Germany, to South Western France).

Europe’s habit of mixing things up may have started way back, when the Neanderthals fraternized with Africans (their descendants spread all the way to China and New Guinea!)

During the Neolithic, farmers from the Fertile Crescent (Levant plus Mesopotamia) migrated to Italy with their bioengineered plants (we know that from genetic studies). Greece itself was nearly annihilated by steel armed Dorians. Around the same time Etruscans moved from Asia to Italy. And according to legend, Romans and Franks escaped from a burning Troy, also located in Asia. Some will say:”Now you use legend to buttress your arguments?” Well, my point entirely: the Romans and Franks advertized heavily their alleged Trojan origin precisely as a celebration of diversity.

Later Germano-Celts invaded most of Europe. A lot of philosophy came with the Celto-Germans, that the Romans were deprived of (for example the attitude to women). After Caesar invaded the 80% of Gaul that the Romans were not controlling yet, a compromise was found. What came out was a genetically and philosophically mixed civilization.

A point here: Julian (the anti-Christian Roman philosopher-emperor), in an often quoted remark, pointed out that Western Europe was not inclined to philosophy or geometry. However Parisians troops elected him “Augustus”  (supreme emperor, instead of just “Caesar”). And that made tremendous sense.

What Julian, a Greek, did not see, was that the philosophy of the West was founded in common sense. One could read all the philosophical treatises one wanted, but if they extolled superstition, or sexism, they were of no use to the Franks. Anyway, they did not read, that came only later. Common sense was the greatest force, as it spared the West from the worst of the Christian insanities, endless debates about this, that and the other thing about Dog God (said insanities directly inspired the Muslim insanities, a few centuries later, although the Qur’an kept them simple; the Qur’an is no more crazy than its direct inspirer Saint Augustine, who believed, and wrote, that most people would go to hell… Augustine did not reveal his sources, but he was believed… even by the Muslims.)

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AMERICAN RAGE AND SUFFERING:

One of the commenter who graces this blog, John, took some umbrage from my latest essay. First he quoted the conclusion of the essay:

” France, of course, made a real revolution against its own outrageous plutocracy in 1789, and, ever since, French plutocracy has known that there are boundaries not to be trespassed before the People goes into the street, and all hell breaks loose.”

Then John blasted away:

“…ever since…” Oh, you mean as in the Empires of EMPERORS Napoleon I and III?

How stupid do you think we are? Both these naked imperial plutocracies (Emperors, duh) were only terminated by military defeats for the French. And initially both Napoleons’ military adventures had been ecstatically supported by the French public.

The French even tried to install an Emperor in Mexico in 1862. A Hapsburg, no less. Why? For exactly the same reasons the US is reviled now- economic and political hegemony in a faraway region with plenty of resources and a supposedly docile population.

Then there was the suppression of the Paris Commune- all hell broke loose that time all right…how did that work out for your “People?”

Don’t treat your American readers like fools. It’s insulting.”

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IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK:

I replied to John in the comments, presenting excuses for giving the appearance of treating my American readers like fools. I don’t see what the interest of that would be. I am honestly searching for the truth. Why France ended with an uncle and his nephew calling themselves “emperors” is a long (his)story.

I have always been highly critical of Napoleon. Like Sade, and a whole current of thought with him, I thought that it was a mistake to try to ram down the French revolution all over Europe (although it worked in many places, such as Italy and Poland, see below). But the revolutionaries had been driven a bit crazy from the attempted extinction of the French Constitutional Monarchy in 1792, by a general alliance of all of Europe’s plutocrats.

John seems unaware of the full context in which the French “empires” arose. For a number of reasons to be evoked below, Napoleon was viewed as anti-plutocratic. Indeed, during the revolutions of 1830, people were crying out, in Paris, Belgium and Poland, for his son, the handsome Napoleon II, a colonel in the Austrian army, to become king of their respective countries. Plutocracy, like democracy, is relative.

There are no excuses for Napoleon III’s coup. However, Napoleon III, an utopian socialist, played an important revolutionary role in Italy, pushing back and out, both Austria, and the Pope’s secular power.

In France Napoleon III’s economic role was quite positive. That he was eaten by a bigger fascist fish (Bismarck) was unfortunate, in light of further developments… Nevertheless, of course, the nephew could have done all this by staying French president. On the funny side, he was the only Swiss national to have reigned over France.

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THE WORST IN THE HISTORY OF FRANCE DOES NOT HAVE TO COME FROM FRANCE:

Well, that’s even true for the Germans and Nazis! Murderous anti-Semitism, generally viewed as a typical Nazi characteristic, is really, at the root, a Christian story. Hitler was preceded by 15 centuries of rabid anti-Judaism from the Christian churches. It’s important to know where ideas, especially the nastiest ones, come from.

France being in the middle of Europe, in more ways than one, has a lot to do with whatever goes on in Europe, and gts in a lot of problems, just because of her geographical position. Standing in the middle of the most hyperactive continent is not just exciting, it can be deadly.

Not every nation can enjoy the peace and tranquility of having an entire continent to itself, as the USA does (the real natives having been helped out of this suffering world, to enjoy the pleasures of the great beyond, as explained in the Bible).

in those times when France had the dubious pleasure of suffering two emperors, two kings, and two republics, during the Nineteenth Century, the USA was mostly standing out of history. Now the USA, just like France for 15 centuries and Gaul for three millennia (or the Franks for even longer if you believe them with Troy), is standing in the middle of history.

I am going to give an even more extensive answer to gentleman John here. It is hard to know where to start. Why? History is not just about facts, but how to link them in a logical network, of causes and effects. History has always a psychological aspect. Emotions become an integral part of history.

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EMPIRE AND PLUTOCRACY ARE DIFFERENT NOTIONS:

Let me remark first that one should not confuse the notion of empire and the notion of plutocracy. In the original Roman meaning, imperial command was just ultimate military command, which was really very ultimate in Rome. Once, in the dying days of the republic, south of rome, two imperators (one of them the young and famous Pompey) greeted each other, a smile on their lips, with the title of imperators, thousands of legionaries standing behind each.

Caesar, viewed later as the first Roman emperor (he was made “dictator for life“), was the head of the “Populares“, and, although immensely wealthy, embarked on genuine works and reforms benefiting the People. He was assassinated just as he was embarking on an immensely ambitious military plan to secure all Eastern frontiers of Rome, in one stroke of genius.

Since Caesar had by far Rome’s, and the world’s, best army, ever, just then, Caesar’s planned jaunt through the Caucasus could well have worked. The insecure Eastern frontiers, in Germany and Mesopotamia, were probably the most prominent ingredient in the ultimate demise of Rome (so Caesar was right on that one, and his grand nephew of a successor, Augustus was wrong).

The Franks struggled for three centuries of continuous wars to secure the shortest Eastern frontier of Rome the Imperium Francorum in Europe. Exactly where Caesar wanted to have it. That work was completed by 30 years of continuous campaigns by Charlemagne (who got all the credit from those who don’t know the history).  

Napoleon I, Napoleon III, and Hitler, all presented themselves as popular, anti-plutocratic leaders. That was the major part of their appeal, as far as the People were concerned. They made very clear declarations to this effect. Whether this was true or not, is a complicated question. It should be answered by noticing that plenty of non plutocratic emperors have existed. Many Roman emperors fall in that category. So do many Frankish kings and queens, or Charlemagne, Genghis Khan (not Kubilai Khan!), or Peter the great of Russia.  All those characters tried genuinely to improve the condition of the People (certainly Marcus-Aurelius or Charlemagne, who were constantly at war, on the battlefield, did not wallop in luxury!)

Right now, clearly the West has an empire, a world empire. Various leading countries (USA, Britain, France, Germany, Japan) play the roles of the major cities of the Roman empire. Others play secondary, but still crucial roles (Canada, Australia, all of Latin America, South Africa, Singapore). Others are crucial allies (India). Some are ambiguously associated (Russia, China).

There is nothing wrong in having such an empire. There is actually everything right. Humanity cannot afford just one major rogue country, at this point in technology and ecology. That is one of the reasons why it is important to get rid of mad dogs, one by one (Kaddafi’s days are numbered, and then the pressure can be brought onto Assad’s dictatorship: Assad had plenty of time to make compromises! Attacking the French and USA embassy is not the right route; the French had to fire their weapons.)

What is wrong, though, is that, far from being a world empire of the People (the explicit aim of Rome, by the way), this de facto world empire is turning, as in Rome, into a de facto world plutocracy (see Murderoch, Rupert).

The turning of a society into plutocracy, as I try to explain, is a phenomenon which can, and will happen, in any isolated post Neolithic society, if it is not deliberately and explicitly contradicted (and ALL durable Neolithic societies had anti-plutocratic safeguards, even to the point of involving human sacrifices).

Unfortunately, under Obama’s pseudo democrats, all the levers are on full plutocracy, even more than they were under his predecessor the war mongering torture oriented plutocrat Bush. Obama can explain that whichever way he wants, the plutocratic facts speak for themselves. It is hard to fight plutocracy in Saudi Arabia, when it is venerated, like the new Golden Calf, in Washington and Manhattan.

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PSYCHOLOGY, OR WHY THE MONGOLS ALLIED THEMSELVES WITH THE FRANKS:

When the Mongol reached the shores of the Adriatic in the Thirteenth Century, they had defeated, so far all Iranian, Georgian, Russian, Muslim and European forces they had met (and all the Central Asian and Eastern Asian forces too).

Only the army of the king of France and his vassals stood between the undefeated Mongols, and the Atlantic. However, the Mongols decided to push no further. Why? Because the Mongols remembered what had happened to their direct ancestors, the Huns: they had been crushed in “Francia”.

Avoiding Paris (“Lutetia“), Attila’s Huns had pushed as far as Orleans (“Aurelianum“), which they seized, and in which they suffered a severe defeat, the same day. Thereafter the retreating Huns, laden with booty, were shadowed by the army of the Franks, which hindered them until the Visigoths, and the main Roman army, could join the effort. The Frankish-Roman-Visigoth coalition inflicted a terrible defeat to the Huns.

Only the double game of the Roman commander Aëtius, saved whatever was left of the army and nation of the Huns, the next day. Aëtius maneuvered to persuade the Visigoths to leave the battlefield, and refused to let the Franks and the Romans mop up the Asiatic invaders. (Over the next few years, what was left of the Huns was defeated in Italy, and then thoroughly exterminated by the Germans as a military force.)

(Interestingly the Wikipedia articles in English in July 2011, on the subject of the Huns, mostly ignore the Franks, at the cost of a few blanks in the history; I don’t think that is an accident, it’s too blatant; the American anti-French racism has got to the point where the history of France is written, by American historians, about one of the two most important battles in France, without mentioning the Franks! Wow. I am not going to bother trying to enlighten Wikipedia further at this point: been there, done that. Working from inside has its limits: many Jews enrolled in the Wehrmacht, or even the SS, 163,000 of them, in the wehrmacht alone, to try to stop the Nazis from inside: it did not work too well…)

There were eight centuries between Attila’s smashing in France, at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, and the Mongol invasion under the overall command of Genghis Khan! Thus the Mongols, through eight centuries of oral history (they had just acquired writing and an alphabet) drew lessons, and remembered them well. All the more since their victory in Hungary against all sorts of European knights came close to disaster.

In the end, the Mongols made friends with those Franks they respected so much, manu militari. The Mongols conquered Damascus and Baghdad with Frankish armies (this is often discreetly ignored). The Franco-Mongol alliance melted away, because the Pope and the French king were furious, and refused to accept the entreaties of the Mongols (on completely racist reasons caused by racial physical repulsion, as far as I can see; the fact 2 Mongol tribes were Nestorian Christian did not help; there was nothing the Catholics detested more than another version of Christianity).

The Mongols tried to defeat Egypt’s Mameluks alone. Instead, it’s them who got defeated. Then they did the next best thing to becoming Christian, and became Muslim instead (as the Pope had refused to send enough missionaries, in spite of official Mongol requests).

***

PLUTOCRACY IN FRANCE, & THE REVOLUTIONS IT LED TO:

Colossal plutocracy, closely tied up to the banking systems, was the essence of Francois I of France and Charles V (the latter was a Bourguignon, that is a “French”, sort of; in any case Charles V’s native language was French). Charles V had been elected emperor of Spain, and he soon ruled over all of Europe except France and England.

The private banking system’s entanglement with politics originated just then, as it allowed François I^er and Charles V to spend more than they had (in exchange for making the bankers ever more powerful; in the following century, no less than two Medicis, that is, daughters of bankers, became reigning queens of France, that is leaders of what was, with Spain, the most powerful state in the world; France was actually more powerful, as she was in the slow process of defeating Spain, an 80 years war which (re)-created the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy).

Colossal plutocracy in France, ever more outrageous, proceeded unabated until 1789 CE. The finances of the French government were broken, thanks to the war of creation of America, but fabulous fortunes were all over France, starting with the Catholic Church. (For a contemporary analogy, look at the Greek Church, immensely rich, and untaxed.)

Extravagant plutocracy in France was made blatant by the “Affaire du Collier“, when a besotted cardinal offered a tremendously expensive necklace to an impersonator, a well endowed countess, in the darkest gardens of Versailles, at night, believing she was the Queen he was enamored with (thanks in part to a fabricated correspondence). The thieves were arrested. King Louis XVI allowed the grave mistake of a very public trial.

Louis was less smart than Obama, who hid carefully the miscreants’ shenanigans, their immense thievery, and, for others, violation of human rights, and the laws of war. Just by prosecuting them not. A solution Louis XVI had refused. By honesty. Clearly, he had lost his head, would today’s plutocrats smirk. 

In one case, the theft of a necklace. Prosecuted. Consequence: a revolution. On the other hand, 230 years later, astronomical theft, incredible violations: no prosecution, no revolution. So far. But, sometimes, there is worse than revolution, namely stagnation, devolution, decomposition, dissolution, annihilation. That’s where no revolution, ever, leads to. Hubris is not protective, far from it. 

The French People did not believe the conclusion of the Affaire du Collier trial, which exonerated the Queen, and, in any case, the People could see the extravagant wealth and corruption in the upper reaches of the Court, and Church.

(By the way, although I gave a link to Wikipedia on the “Necklace Affair”, Wikipedia’s account claims that the Countess de la Motte, the main perpetrator, was not branded. That is not true. La Motte was branded. Just, she struggled so much she got branded on her voluminous breast, instead of her shoulder, so maybe Wikipedia averted its eyes, being American, and that a felony, no doubt; then La Motte bit the executioner, before fainting; these details are well known, and are even in a Dumas historical novel.)

***

REVOLUTIONS ALL OVER, ALL THE TIME:

The Revolution of 1789 corrected French plutocracy in part. As French and European revolutionary armies later headed by Napoleon expanded all over Europe, the old plutocracy got irreversibly trashed. The old plutocracy tried to reconstitute itself when Napoleon was brought down for good in 1815. But it did not quite succeed. The revolutionary spirit kept on simmering all over.

The July Revolution of 1830, immortalized, even for Americans, by the famous painting of David, Liberty Leading the People, spread its spirit throughout Europe. Belgium revolted against the Netherlands, and became independent in bloody street fighting. Then occupied Poland revolted against Russia. The following year, the Netherlands invaded Belgium, defeated the Belgians, but had to retreat when confronted to a French army sent by the (constitutional) July monarchy.

By the way, Poland had been destroyed by Prussia and Russia in 1795 CE. However, Napoleon recreated it as a state, the Duchy of Warsaw, and that state was, in turn, destroyed again in 1815 by the anti-Napoleon coalition. Poland would be recreated by the Versailles treaty in 1919 (to the horror of German fascists and their American friends), re-destroyed by Hitler in 1939 (with crucial American plutocratic help). Hitler actually tried to exterminate the Poles (first by starving them to death, secondly by creating Auschwitz… The Jewish extermination there was just an afterthought, a sort of multitasking).  

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WHY PLUTOCRACY WENT OVERBOARD IN FRANCE, BUT NOT ENGLAND:

France was a co-inventor of the modern era, while, like the rest of Europe, been saddled with extravagant plutocracy. France was bigger, and richer, so her plutocracy was bigger there than the one in England. England had gone through rebellions, revolutions, and even a republic, before being saddled with an oral constitutional monarchy of foreign origin in the 17C!

When the English King called Louis XIV of France to the rescue, the latter refused to send his army, the most powerful in Europe, to England. An uneasy alliance was established between the Dutch invaders and the English plutocrats, and soon Dutch and Jewish financial engineering funded on debt and the fractional reserve system, was reigning supreme in the British isles (the leverage provided by financial engineering is much of how France was defeated, as Great Britain was able to muster greater financing than its much smaller economy gave it naturally. In a way, a craftier plutocratic plot defeated France! The Rothschild were on both sides of the deed…)

Great Britain did not return the favor consented by Louis XIV, in 1792. Contrarily to what Louis XIV had done, or, rather, not done, Great Britain invaded France, although the French constitutional King, Louis XVI, had not asked for a British intervention. Of course, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and countless other plutocratic forces were invading France at the same time too. Nobody had asked the British to invade France in 1792, except for the old fashion international plutocracy, the so called aristocracy, which was exasperated by the French revolution’s redistribution of wealth, and the lamentable example it presented to the rest of the Peoples of Europe.

The Prussian army was defeated at Valmy, not far from Paris, by French artillery, using new, secret technology (September 1792). The republic was proclaimed. In the south, a Corsican captain would take care of the British.

***

PLUTOCRACY: ONE WAY IN FRANCE, THE OPPOSITE IN THE USA:

The recent history of plutocracy in France and the USA is completely different.

The case of the North American English colony was the exact opposite of that of France. It took nearly three centuries for America’s first billionaires. And the earliest of them, Carnegie, had a strong social conscience. Carnegie held that fortune ought to be taxed a minimum of 50%, with a strong inheritance tax, not the 17%, with no inheritance tax, which Obama’s pseudo democrats have made the law of the land.

Rockefeller agreed with Carnegie. But soon, not to be outdone, the wealthy Teddy Roosevelt, youngest American president ever, head of the republican party, embarked the USA on a seriously “progressive” agenda, busting trusts, and advocating enough income for the average American. 

Teddy, a cousin of FDR, represented the late father of his spouse as their marriage. So they were close. FDR realized that the banks had violated the fiduciary monopoly they have to create money by leveraging government money, by creating money not for the economy, but for themselves, the banks, directly. That excellent system installed by FDR, was dismantled thanks to the hard work of Summers, Reagan, and Clinton.  Obama, understanding nothing, hopefully, about the whole thing, advised by his close friends the kleptocrats, put Summers in power again. The most gigantic transfer of money from the poor to the rich in the history of manking ensued, very discreetly.

All the money which has not been going towards the average American, is now going to the hyper wealthy. The English colony in America, was, for centuries, the richest territory in the world, per capita. For the first time in its history the average real income has been going down, for more than a decade.

How did we get there? The American street, and unions, used to be strong. “May First”, known worldwide, as “Labor Day” celebrates a revolt in Chicago by the workers, and its bloody repression, where the judicial system was used to accuse, and execute, innocent progressives that the rich wanted to get rid of.

Now Labor Day has been moved to the other side of the year (but only in the USA), and Chicago is feted with economic Nobel Prizes to dignify a para-fascist economic doctrine which says that all good things of civilization will follow from  tremendous financial profits of the few, and the fewer, and the more tremendous, the better. Obama was intellectually polished there. In that very university. Surprise: he thinks like them.

***

WHATEVER FRANCE DOES, IT’S IN A MULTI-MILLENNIAL CONTEXT:

French children study history throughout their education. France has much more varied, deeper, older, and fiercer traditions, than the American English colony. That’s a problem with being just a colony, and leaving it at that. The Americans ought to consider that European history is also their history, because it is much more instructive. Besides, it’s the truth.

France has been a great power for at least 15 centuries (and much more if one considers the Gallo-Romans, and the Celts before that). That is plenty of time to be duped by elites, and to constitute an entire library of the ways and means according to which one can get duped by the elites.

What do I mean by this? Here is an example, an inverted example. Just when Caesar conquered Gaul, a wealth of experiences on how to be misled was gathered. For example, a peace was  brokered. A young aristocrat, Vercingetorix, disagreed with older leaders, including in his closest family, and restarted a war with Caesar. On paper, he had much larger forces, as Gaul, united, dwarfed Rome, or, at least the forces the Romans could put in Gaul. But Rome, and the bloody Caesar, were on the correct side of civilization. Sure enough, in spite of much higher numbers in his armies, Vercingetorix had to surrender to Caesar. The majority of Gaul had refused to support him. Instead the majority embraced Rome, and rejected the Druids. The majority had embraced the superior civilization.

It would have been a mistake to go all out with Vercingetorix, against the progress of civilization. The wisest Gauls knew this. (The myth of the cartoon “Asterix” is the exact opposite of what truly happened; although Gaul would stay the most unruly part, within the empire, a nexus of revolutions and rebellions; emperor Claudius was born in Lugdunum (Lyons), and soon Gallic senators were elected; thereupon, Gallia was simmering; no doubt that made the symbiosis with the rebellious Franks very easy.)   

Another example; in the 16 C, France knew no less than seven religious wars. How did one get there? It is an immensely complicated story. The regency by the Catholic Catherine de Medici has something to do with it: when the daughter of a banker is in over her head, that’s what you get.

Initially the empire of the Franks, although it was led by very rich men, was not a plutocracy, as inheritance was divided equally. Differently from the Roman elites, who deliberately limited their births and intermarried, to foster their own power, the Franks did not care; when they were rich enough, they lived life, and provided for their many children equally, a per the law (this sort of law, of equal inheritance, and loving attitude to life, persists to this day in France, differently from the USA, where the dog can inherit everything, and Prussian style puritanism is still big).

***

FRANCE’S PERMANENT REVOLUTIONS:

The situation after the colossal French intervention in the American war of independence was extreme: France had won everything, but there had been strictly no profit in it. It’s a bit like the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: the USA has, at best, won a colossal defeat. Or two.

By 1789, thanks to investing in America, France was broke. Something had to be done. The Estates-General, having mutated themselves into a Constituent Assembly, found that a remedy was to break the hold of the plutocracy.

In 1789, plutocracy became the official problem of France. As I said, ever since, if lines are crossed by the French plutocracy, the People go in the street, and rebel. Most of the population did not see the revolution of 1789 as finished. After all the monarchy of 1815 was imposed by foreign powers. Cossacks, strutting down the Champs Elysees.

The Paris Commune is the most famous example of these revolutions. There have been four other examples of massive rebellions/revolutions/national cleansings, since the revolution of 1789. And I am not counting minor problems such as the Dreyfus Affair, and the Franco-Algerian civil war, although they were perceived at the time as near, or in the later case, literal, civil wars… When French troops left for Vietnam, in the early fifties, demonstrations were so violent, people got killed.

The Franco-Algerian war caused the death of hundreds of thousands, and the exile of millions. Many French people in full evidence today, quintessentially French, are actually some of these Africans in exile, or now their descendants. My own father was born and raised in Africa. The first time he visited continental France, he was in his twenties, in uniform, with a helmet, and a gun, having known already combat in Italy. Americans have no ideas about those things, nor the fact that Soviet and American intervention in Algeria, much behind the scene, some at the UN, evolved things the way they got. They were helped by de Gaulle’s confused racism (for want of a better word).

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THE PARIS COMMUNE DID NOT FAIL:

John above seems to gloat about the failure of the Paris Commune. Failure? That is not clear. Supposing, for a moment, that Jesus existed, it’s not because Jesus died, that Jesus failed. Actually the whole point of that Christian myth is the opposite: sometimes the only, or best, way to succeed, is to die for the cause.

This notion of martyrdom was fully absorbed by the Christo-Islamist tradition, and is perhaps the main reason why this religion dominates the planet.

Even obdurate atheists such as yours truly, subscribe to many of the theses of Christo-Islamism; now, of course, martyrdom, for example, was fully understood, and endured by the Spartans at Thermopylae: thus a lot of Christo-Islamism just brandishes what was there before. Christianism embraced many notions which preceded it, and made them into religious notions. (An even more spectacular example is that Christianism embraced the central notion of Greek philosophy, the logos, namely, logic, as God, to ingratiate itself with the Antiquity’s main philosophical current. This strategy avoided a frontal shock between Christianity and Greek philosophy; if that had happened early, Christianism would have probably been wiped out.)

The Paris Commune was repressed in tremendous blood, true. Nothing to be proud of, for the conservatives. As many as 50,000 may have been executed during the savage repression, in one “semaine sanglante“ (which was made in the name of the occupying German army, by the way… It was not that the French suddenly had an inspiration, and tried to kill as many French as they could. The Second German Reich had just been created in Versailles, subjugating both France, and Germany! See what happened in Bavaria…)

The number of people killed to crush the Commune was worse than in the Revolution of 1789. However, the futuristic measures voted by the Paris Commune were implemented later, worldwide. Those measures inspired not just revolutionaries such as Marx, and Engels, or Lenin, but all the democracies, starting with France.

So, ultimately, the Commune was a success. We all profit from it, to this day. The French Third republic admitted that much, by discreetly freeing, a few years later, all the Communards it had so severely punished. Louise Michel, deported to New Caledonia, with another 7,000, went back to France, and were reinstated. Crucial measures of the Commune, such as the separation of church and state, free secular education for all, were made into law.

Something called… Communism, even had some success, for a while. Many of the ideas of communism came from the Commune, were recycled all over Europe, before reaching the USA.  The Commune worked very well, for all the People of the world. Premier Chou En Lai, or Chairman Mao, and Deng XiaoPing, or Lenin, explained that themselves. In truth, most of the ideas of the Commune are pretty standard nowadays.

***

NAPOLEON WAS AN IMMUNE REACTION TO BRITISH AGGRESSION:

John also evokes Napoleon, and brandishes him as an example of plutocracy. Well, not so fast. I personally despise Napoleon. However, if Great Britain had not attacked France in 1792, Napoleon would have not become a dictator. PM Lloyd George admitted that explicitly, more than a century after this tragedy happened.

The British invasion of Provence led directly to Napoleon’s fulgurant ascent. The British held Toulon, and the plan was to march north towards Paris. The French army around Toulon, a city surrounded by extremely sharp limestone peaks and cliffs, had been proven unable to dislodge the enemy. Napoleon, just an artillery captain, came up with an amazing plan. It was implemented, Bonaparte was wounded severely in combat, and the British navy had to flee.

To claim that Napoleon was “ecstatically supported by the French People” is not correct. Napoleon did execute and imprison many. Some were great men. Napoleon was put in power by the bourgeoisie, not the People. He was your basic military dictator, sustained by an oligarchy. He was extremely hated by a large part of the French revolution. During several of the revolutions I alluded to above, the Vendome Column, with Napoleon on top, was brought down.

However Napoleon was long perceived as a friend of the revolution and the revolutionary spirit, because he spent several years, in his early career, in what were basically counter-attacks against the rest of European plutocracy. The fact that Napoleon himself had turned into a plutocracy was such an improbable turn of events, it dawned only slowly on the French people. It would be a bit as if Obama turned into a Tea Party plutocrat, and saved the country by taking out Medicare and Medicaid. 

I am unfair: Napoleon introduced many structures of socialist type, which have survived, to this day. Before Napoleon consolidated power, many had advised to not try to export the French revolution throughout Europe. One of the loudest was Sade, already one of the main actors of 1789.

The invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812 was forced by the on-going British blockade, which required the continent would act as one. The invasion turned badly, in part, it has been recently said, because of typhus. His army was mostly a pan-European army. Although his army had been annihilated, Napoleon revealed to Metternich, the French losses has been slight. No doubt that, if the West European forces had controlled Russia, Tolstoy, and other Russian nobles, would have been forced to free their serfs: Tolstoy could pose as a patriot all he wanted, but morality was not clearly on his side.

***

NAPOLEON III WAS A MIXED BAG:

It is easy to look at Napoleon III’s big disasters and spite him (as Victor Hugo did: he moved in England rather than staying under the dictator’s boot). However, it’s not that simple.

Napoleon III, who used to sit on the knees of his uncle Napoleon I, was elected president, but, later, grabbed illegal powers. Napoleon III, although bad, was not as bad as people imagine him to be, even at his worst. He plotted with Italian revolutionaries for decades, taking great risks. Finally Napoleon III defeated Austro-Hungary in a tremendously bloody war in Northern Italy, allowing the creation of an independent Italy, for the first time since Rome. Otherwise, it is possible that Northern Italy would still be under the Austrian yoke.

There was much blood at the battle of Solferino between 156,000 French and Piedmont-Savoy troops on one side, and 160,000 Austrians, on the other. 40,000 casualties, in a few hours. That was after the battle of Magenta when a French army defeated an Austrian army, with only a few thousands killed. The Swiss, alarmed, by this bloodbath on their doorstep, created the Red Cross. Napoleon III was himself deeply shaken. This may explain why he let Bismarck gobble Austria next.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE USA & EUROPE:

I am not treating my American readers as fools. I am not even more anti-American than I am anti-German, or anti-French. Although I vaguely despise people who admire Napoleon, that does not make me anti-French. Ever since Napoleon became Consul, there has been a sizable part of the French population hating Napoleon.

The USA left the mainstream of history in the 17C, when England, shaken by civil war, left the American colony to its own instruments (England returned, at the point of a gun, after 1700). That made the USA stranger, and less European, in some important ways, than, say, South America (because South America stayed under European control until the 19 C… except for Haiti… where Napoleon distinguished himself by his brute stupidity and the thorough defeat visited upon him Haiti has not recovered from, to this day).

The Paris Commune fought for the future. The roughly contemporary American Secession war fought for against something completely different. A horrible zombie from the past, devouring humanity and civilization. The American Secession war was the attempt to correct a huge historical mistake, a genuinely American mistake, the American institution of slavery. 

Slavery was created in 1619, in Massachusetts. The same state were, soon after, the city government paid for Indian scalps. (Thus the French cannot say that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is treated unusually bad! He is just an alien, Wall Street wants its scalp!)

Slavery was peacefully outlawed under the governance of the Merovingian queen, Bathilde (who was herself an ex-escaped slave, later purchased by the King, who then married her, a tale which says a lot about the strangely republican characteristics of the Imperium Francorum). That was in the middle of the seventh Century, a full millennium before the Europeans who had immigrated to America reinstated slavery there.  

Why so much psychological and civilizational devolution? Europeans, by invading the deep woods of America, and running with the savages, became themselves savage. It’s not all bad: sometimes savagery resets the priorities right. It’s an important part of American psychological inheritance.

***

REVOLUTIONS WORK:

The American revolution was more a rebellion than anything else. De facto, the English American colony was already run as its own republic. It was just a question of expulsing the occupying army. A real revolution changes society deeply.

When asked about the impact of the French revolution, Premier Zhou Enlai (the guy who was running China while Mao frolicked with nurses, and his wife plotted revenge) famously told an American delegation:“Too early to say.” It was assumed he talked about the French revolution of 1789. 1789 too early to say? That would have been a bit surprising, since the Revolution of 1789 is all over China, all over the United nations Charter, and all over the world. Zhou Enlai, who had been educated in revolution in Paris itself, with so many of his colleagues, knew better.

Indeed one of the American officers with Kissinger at the time has just revealed, 30 years later, that Zhou Enlai was referring to May 68. May 68 spread to Prague, and led to the Soviet invasion of August 1968. That event, like the crushing of the Paris Commune, may have looked like a failure of revolution. In truth it was reculer pour mieux sauter (backing up, to further jump). After the Soviet 1968 invasion, a meek form of the bloodbath of the Suez-Hungary invasion (40,000 killed in Hungary), Soviet fascism had lost all and any moral authority.

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MAY 68 WORKED:

May 68 did have an impact on Europe. It ushered a new, more thorough critique of society. The old left (of the Communist Party and “Internationale Socialiste”) came under as much condemnation as “capitalism”. Ecology was taken seriously, old framework of thought, shattered. The impact of European construction was immediate, and very deep.

The American supported dictatorships in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece) were definitively rendered contemptible and intolerable. They were forced to integrate the European Union as democracies, not American CIA playthings.

And that was just the beginning. Many of the ideas of May 68 led to farseeing efforts in Europe to curb ecological abuse. The USA refused to follow suit (and so did, initially some of its lackeys, such as China; although now clearly China knows that was a mistake, and is going the other way). Actually the USA has been going in the opposite way to May 68 in nearly all ways. But of course, the USA did not go through May 68. There was enough of a spirit of revolt in the USA for Johnson to say he would not run for the presidency. And there were riots. But, differently from France, the entire country did not go on strike, as France did, for four weeks.

World history is complex, it’s not just about nationalistic schemes, and whether America is tops, or bottoms. For example Chancellor Bismarck, who brought down Napoleon III, was himself a fascist. However, Bismarck was not as much a fascist as those who succeeded (and overthrew!) him. Bismarck introduced free, universal health care, in a way which worked, in a way which works to this day, and which was much less plutocratic than Romneybama care. American readers should learn about it, to would feel less foolish. And to try to understand why they great progressive leader treat them less good in the Twenty-first Century than Bismarck treated Germans in the Nineteenth Century.

Right now, in the best French tradition, people have protested in the streets in Greece and Spain. France is eerily calm, as the economy is doing pretty well, and the People understands that things are not simple. The French see even the reviled Sarkozy trying to implement reforms, worldwide, which are blocked by worldwide plutocrats. Ditto with Cameron, who has kept some of the anti-plutocratic measures of his predecessor. Hence London financial pirates are fleeing to Geneva… Now the Swiss can be squeezed into submission, all right, but it won’t help, as long as plutocrats can flee to Singapore, or buy New York justice.

We need anti-plutocratic revolutions more than ever. Rothschild explained, nearly two centuries that, individuals such as himself, who created money, were the real power behind the throne. That creation of money is a monopoly which was kindly given by the People to those peculiar individuals.

I do not like USA president Jackson ( he was as bloody and empire minded as Napoleon, but, of course, his imperial invasion was a success). Jackson was ferocious, and he is one of many American early presidents who saw through bankers’ tricks, and did not let them invade the USA. Instead Europeans financed canals.  

Meanwhile plutocratic finance has captured the USA, as FDR’s silent revolution, the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass-Steagall”) was overturned by the silent coup instituted by Wall Street, using individuals such as Summers.

A new revolution is in order. But to work, it will need a lot of technical knowledge on derivatives and high frequency trading. Most opposition figures are blissfully unaware of these concepts (not Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a top university full professor in economics, which may explain the furor of New York media against him: when the master indicates irritation, his dogs bark  against the offending individual).

As long as most people are, blissfully unaware, nothing will happen. Except, of course, if enough people get infuriated, and start to break things, which is what happened during the Revolution of 1789.Peopleo ideas have to win. Mastering all too high high frequency trading is easy: just impose a financial transaction tax. If one can get enough votes to bomb out mass murdering dictators, one should be able to get that passed at the United Nations.  Mastering derivatives would be more refined in the details, but there, too, just as with Tax Heavens, the UN should be most helpful.

Right now, pirates have taken control of finance. Democracy needs to put them out of commission, and recover mastery of its economic destiny. In an important, it is indeed too early to know if the fight against outrageous plutocracy started in 1789 has been a success. Right now, with its capture  of the American mind, and of the American political system, it looks like a failure, as other plutocrats are all too ready to point out that, should they be left behind, their own countries would be left in the dust with them.

And what is wrong with the idea of a Flemish mini state? Simple: one of the main reason of the defeat of 1940 was the neutral Netherlands, and neutral Belgium. In truth, they should not have been neutral, because they were democracies, and clearly, in danger of being gobbled up by the racist dictatorship next door (which had gobbled up several Germanoid territories). But they were neutral, because they thought France could take care of Nazi Germany, so why should they make any effort?

Hitler, though had a plan taking into account French empathy. So he attacked Belgium and the Netherlands with even more brutality than he had attacked Norway (where war crimes had been committed). The French command, in a debauch of astounding stupidity, sent its mobile reserve army, seven armored divisions better equipped than the ten Nazi Panzer divisions, through Belgium, into the Netherlands. That was a trap. The real Nazi thrust was way south.

When Churchill flew to Paris he asked the French commander, genral Gamelin (an idiot):” Où est la masse de manœuvre?(“Where is the strategic reserve?) To which the idiot replied, and it was the truth:”Aucune”.(“None”) The reserve had been sent to the ingrate, anti-French Flemish, or thereabout, celebrating 1302 CE.

The situation would have been very different if Belgium and the Netherlands had been allied, a few months, or even a few weeks, prior. Similarly, if Sweden had not been busy selling high grade iron ore to Hitler, and 88 mm guns, Hitler would have had no tanks, no guns, and would have been much deprived.

(Britain having an army would have helped too. Let alone some American growling, which would have scared German generals into submission, before they were irreversibly stained by war crimes the Nazis induced them to commit.)

Nowadays France and Britain are squeezing the juice out of Kaddafi, and the bloody Assad is next. However small European countries don’t help much. Their reasoning is the same as in 1940: let France and Britain take care of the local fascists, in the meantime we shall be rich, because we shall pay less tax. Oh, and this time the Americans are in it too, so why us worry?

This is exactly the sort of reasoning which was the proximal cause of the fall of the Roman empire (hyper fascism and Christianized fascism came later, after enough defeats): the fewer taxes, the less army, the less civic sense, the better. Fortunately, this time, the USA stands with France and Britain, yes. However, their resources are not infinite, and they may have to pay themselves, some way. (The French and American ambassadors just displeased Assad by going to visit one of the cities the Assad family already killed more than 20,000 people in recent decades.)

Although it does not look so, there is a global organization of the planet. Here is an example of a global conspiratorial plot. Pakistani nuclear scientist gave North Korea (and Kaddafi, among others…) the means of building nuclear bombs. In turn, USA plutocrats (such as G. W. Bush) directly used U.S. taxpayer money to develop Pakistani nuclear BOMBS. So, basically, through a little intermediary, the military-industrial complex of the USA financed North Korea to threaten the USA, allowing then to have a pretext to build a very expensive anti-ballistic missile system to protect the West Coast of the USA. Just like with bin Laden, but bigger and subtler.

Stand reassured: anti-ballistic defense probably will not work, and that will be an even bigger surprise than 9/11.

Sometimes revolution is the only solution. And not just in Egypt.

***

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

Sex & Drug Legalization Unavoidable

BUT VULTURES FIGHT BACK.

Abstract: Police and judicial work can be used to enforce not just the established order, but organized crime. Contrasts between vultures, sex, and drugs.

***

WORLD VULTURES UNITED:

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund have been following theories elaborated in Washington. Krugman, the “New Trade” theorist and his accomplice Larry Summers, were advisers of Reagan when Reagan became president. That’s how they started their careers. They were not even 30 years old.

Ever since, just as for American homeowners, a policy of making the poorest countries dependent upon debt servicing has been enforced. Same idea of how serfs came to be in the Middle Ages.

Serfs in the European Middle Ages, worked for the Lord at most one day a week. In exchange the Lord was in charge of the highest governance, justice, law enforcement, and defense. The serfs lived of sustainable agriculture the rest of the time.

The “New Trade” theorists established a system of exploitation of Africa (among other places), way worse than “colonialism” (that is why they bad mouth “colonialism” so much, they want to hide that the situation actually deteriorated under their evil guidance).

The Kensington Fund, based in the Cayman Islands, bought at some point, for 2 million dollars some company in Africa, and then asked for 120 million dollars in debt service, fully backed up by the might of American law, and New York law. Funds doing this sort of things are called Vulture Funds. Some African officials went to Washington at an official IMF conference, to complain about Vulture Funds. They got arrested (for complaining about Vulture Funds).

So what did Dominique Strauss-Kahn messed up in all this? Well he redirected the IMF towards “helping” Europe (by far the largest contributor to the IMF). This was a grave deviation from servicing New York inspired vultures as the IMF is supposed to do. It was unavoidably going to attract European attention towards what the IMF, and Washington, and, behind them, Wall Street and the Cayman islands, and other tax havens, stuffed with plutocrats, consider to be normal practice, in their over exploitation of the whole planet.

When one looks at the full work of the World Bank and the IMF, especially in Africa, one looks at countless murders too. But things are changing for the better. South America has progressively been coming out of the financial terror, and China, with nearly three trillion dollars officially in play, has become a new source of loans, combined with barter as the PRC offers public works reminiscent of the old fashion “colonialism”.  

But the fact remains that vulture funds have worked the political system in New York. Whereas initial judicial decisions in New York, went against Vulture Funds, now New York justice, corrected by appropriate legislative work, finds that supporting vultures around the world is the best thing since motherhood and hard cash.  

***

 SEX YOU OUT:

In Malaysia, the main opposition politician is continually prosecuted for “sodomy“. The same charge had been used, in conjunction with pedophilia, to allow Philippe (IV) Le Bel to burn (alive) dozens of the leaders of the Templar Monks (1310 CE). Examples like that crawl all over history. Sex is not just handy, it’s shameful.

“Sex Crime Unit“, New York. The Pride Of A Big Apple, or Just One More Snake in the Garden of the Beasts?

The “Sex Crime Unit” is famous for punishing the old, weak, overweight, sick, oxygen deprived, brainy head of the International Monetary Fund, the economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for “subjecting another person to sexual contact without the later person’s consent“. Apparently the Jew Strauss-Kahn “attempted” to cavort with a mysterious towering young muscular maid of the fanatical Muslim kind, whose legal migrant status is far from clear.

The old, weak, overweight, sick, oxygen deprived Dominique Strauss-Kahn is supposed to have overwhelmed the physically powerful, without causing any physical injury, probably using his dirty, powerful French mind. Powerful French minds, and the “French Theory“, not far behind it, should be illegal, as they cause grave injury to the New York Centered World Trade plutocracy.

It is turning out that Ms tall, young and muscular victim, posed for racy and provocative pictures which ornament the frontcover of a magazine in Switzerland. You will not see those pictures in the USA, for obvious reasons of basic propaganda of the plutocratically financed politicians in New York. Don’t be surprised if Ms Provocative shows up at the tribunal in a veil, clutching some beads, shaking all over with fear! Greed does that, sometimes, or more exactly the fear of not satisfying it enough.

The New York Sex Crime Unit is the object of a cult in America. It has 40 detectives: sex is big in New York, and its crimes numerous. Everybody says that the “Sex Crime Unit” is “very respected“. It prosecutes, namely puts in cages and treats as dogs, 1,000 individuals a year. OK, I am exaggerating: one does not chain dogs, that would be cruel to the animals, especially if innocent. Only 20 of those prosecutions of the “very respected Sex Crime Unit“, result in condemnations, though. Let’s think a second about what that means.

I am not saying that there should not 1,000 inquiries on “Sex Crimes”. I think that any “Sex Crime” lead ought to be followed diligently, and even ferociously, in the case of possible “pedophilia”. But I think that, as for other suspicion of possible criminal activity, prosecution ought to be done very discreetly, to protect the innocent.

So let’s consider the innocent. It turns out that the innocent are 98% of those whom the “very respected Sex Crime Unit” puritanizes, chains, locks up and terrorizes every year.

I am just observing that 980 people a year get treated worse than dogs, like criminals, American style, and are found to be innocent, every year, in New York, about alleged sex crimes they did NOT commit. Although they were publicly humiliated, condemned in the court of public opinion, and punished for all to see, for crimes they did NOT commit. Punishing the innocent, especially publicly, is outlawed in fully civilized society. Protecting the innocent is actually why the law exists in the first place.

Now, if you beat a dog, he will turn nasty. Especially if you do it for no good reason. Just try it. Moreover, far from being a deterrent, a rush to condemnation and so publicly, encourages many to cross the Rubicon. Thus the question is this: is the “Sex Crime Unit” itself crime generating?

If police brutality itself is criminogenic, a much needed explanation for the high rate of crime in the USA, would offer itself. Criminogenic police activity would go a long way towards explaining that about 10 million Americans are actively punished, under official judicial condemnations, every year, with 2.5 million imprisonned. That is the highest rate in the world. By far.
***

SPEAKING OF CRIMINOGENIC POLICE HYPER ACTIVITY,
A prestigious United Nation commission found that the “War Against Drugs” has not worked any better than the famous prohibition against alcohol in the USA, in the 1920s. The later had increased considerably organized crime activity, by making many in the USA accomplice with the mobsters. Prohibition was terminated by president Roosevelt.

Interestingly “drug abuse”, which is punished, implies that “drug use”, a milder form, should go unpunished. The point is that very dangerous drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and various “medical” neurological drugs, some given to children (Ritalin), are authorized. So why is not mild use of some other drugs also authorized?

The president of Bolivia has insisted that some mild coca should be allowed for sale outside of Bolivia (where it is legal).

Funny aside: although I use tea and coffee, I have never ever used alcohol and tobacco. I just did not like the idea to have to drink something to be merry, or poison the atmosphere, to look cool. Happiness and calm ought to be spiritually generated, for those who live by the superiority of human thinking.

However I have resided at high altitude in Bolivia, and loved coca tea (sold there in grocery stores). It’s quite different from normal tea, but extremely nice. Energetic, soothing, friendly to the mind.

I can’t imagine how one could abuse it, and what is wrong with it. Thus I deduce that the screaming against some drugs is highly hypocritical, and it’s not our confessing ex-”blow” (cocaine) using  president who is going to contradict me.

Let’s remember that coffee, at strong dosage, is forbidden at the Olympic Games. At very high doses (100 standard US cups), coffee is lethal (so is water). However, correct usage of coffee is good for the mind, and for health in general (it is full of antioxidants, and has been proven to reduce Alzheimer).

***

Patrice Ayme

Roman Decay, Frank Renaissance

WHEN AN ETHICAL REVOLUTION TRANSMOGRIFIED ROME INTO EUROPE, ASHES INTO BRAINS.

Abstract: For all its sins, some compounded by Christianism, Rome had to get out of the way of civilization. And it did, thanks to the Europeans.

All important countries can extract important lessons from Rome’s fate. Many of the quandaries found now within the USA, or on a planetary scale, already occurred within the Imperium Romanum. Rome did not solve these entanglements without a marked civilizational devolution into ill fated successor regimes.

Oriental Rome, and Islam, became parodies and nemeses, of the Roman republic, conceptually speaking. The third successor regime founded and named Europe. And rebooted civilization ethically, allowing technology to progress so much that Rome was soon left behind.

Detailed analyses of what afflicted Rome carry within solutions. Clearly those solutions would have had to be enacted, as early as 150 BCE. Rome’s great victory in the Second Punic war, after much slaughter  and devastation, led it to privilege empire over democracy, and plutocracy, over reason.

Whereas the remedies to Rome’s ailments look now obvious, we are very far from applying the similar remedies which are needed now. And the cause of this is the same: a conniving plutocracy takes the decisions, and it is not interested by what is best for the many. The essence of plutocracy is to hurt the many, and call that life. This is particularly clear in the USA.

As the subject is gigantic, I will concentrate on the period when the Late Empire turned into the Dark Ages, and the Franks pulled out of them savagely. Although the facts I mention are true (and readers are invited to correct them if not to the best of their information), some of my interpretations are unique. For example, I consider that the decline and fall of Rome lasted more than six centuries, including therein the whole civil wars period, and the entire empire. In that perspective, Christianism was just the nail which prevented the corpse to open the coffin, when the grossest superstition became the deepest reason.

I put the end of the Dark Ages in 486 CE in Gaul, when the Imperium Francorum launched its reboot of all of civilization. This new chronology is well supported by philosophical reason, and increasingly by recent archeology and historical research. Recent science show that, contrarily to legend, progress in most ways had fully restarted in the High Middle Ages, and had left Rome behind. And it did so on a much better, much more sustainable basis, therein its success.

***

***

Inquiring Mind: How can you be so sure of what happened?

PA: Certainty is indeed hard to achieve. The Christian fanatics destroyed most of the evidence. Books got nearly completely destroyed in Occident.  In the Orient many books survived only because the enemy of Rome, the Persian Sassanids, provided books and intellectuals with shelter against the ravages of Christian monks.  This led to a terrible war between Constantinople and Persia, and the Arabs won it.

After the Arabs took control, they viewed books and intellectuals as precious riches, since the memory of Muhammad was fresher.  However the Caliphs had their own agenda, and they selected against works too revealing of the democratic, republican, and secular nature of Greco-Roman society. 

Historian have had a bias against analyzing the fall and decline of Rome. Colossal works of bishops of Gaul, concerned that they had been wrong all along about turning the other cheek regarding the Visigoths, have started to be studied and translated from Latin only very recently. 

There are new sources of knowledge besides books. New, impressive archeological work has brought unexpected revelations.

 

Simplicius: Such as?

 PA: Parts of the empire, in today’s Syria were extremely rich, and getting richer, as the catastrophe was imminent, in the Sixth century. This means that the empire, in the Orient, functioned well, at least economically, down to the time in which it plunged into religious strife and foreign war.

By then the Franks had established their own civilization and total military control over the core of the Eurozone. The Occident had switched to wood construction, which left fewer traces, misleading naïve historians to believe that the populations were lower and more miserable than they really were.

Part of the switch from stone to wood was a switch to a sustainable local ecology. Rome ran a global civilization, as good as the long range trade it depended upon. By the Fifth Century long range trade of grain had been greatly diminished, by various invasions and destructions. Then it came to a halt as the Islamist terror crushed the fertile southern two-thirds of the Roman empire. A paper blockade forced the return to parchment.  This perspective, that Islam caused misery in the West, is called Pirenne’s thesis. It has obvious merit as an aggravating factor, but as cause only secondary to Christian terror and oppression, which, ironically, is the main cause of Islam itself.

 

Simplicius: Your friends will be few, and you better keep on hiding in the mountains, the way you trample the most sacred religions, and those who are ready to kill for them. And who we both respect.

PA: Good people make good things from Christianism and Islam. Truly good believers will not mind harsh criticism, because very bad people have made very bad things from Christianity and Islam. 

 

Simplicius: Why to study the Greco-Roman civilization? Did it not collapse miserably? Why should it have any bearing on the Land of the Free?

PA: It collapsed instructively, and those who took command kept those instructions in mind.

The real history of what happened to Rome in the West is never told the right way. In truth, there was no frank collapse of Roman governmental authority in Occident. Quite the opposite.

The real Dark Ages obscured the Late Roman empire. In Occident, the Dark Ages were characterized by the bishops having often the highest secular authority: government by bishops, for bishops. It was a time when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, forced the Augustus, the highest Roman emperor, the fearsome Theodosius, to penance, under the threat of excommunication. This supremacy of the cloth did not happen in the Orient, where emperors stayed the highest authority, and ruled a fascist theocracy which inspired Islam ever since.

By the time the empire of the Franks was established, a new philosophical basis had been found for civilization, much of which never seen before, and it was being imposed militarily. People came to call it Christianity, but it was something else. What is usually described as the Dark Ages was a frank renaissance.

The Franks took political control of the church, as in the Orient. But they did not operate a fascist autocratic system. Clovis, as his father, was elected. The Frankish society was basically a society of armed free peasants, very similar to the Roman society, in the heydays of the Roman republic.

 

Inquiring mind: How can you say that Rome did not really fall, when everybody knows that the last emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 476 CE?

PA: The notion of “emperor” is a modern one. And it was not a notion which was ever well justified. Not having an emperor was less of a problem than having too many (see 69 CE, the year of the four emperors!)

The Romans used a number of terms for different high officials,  such as Tribune, Consul, Imperator, Princeps, Caesar, Augustus. In theory, the republic was still going on, under the Principate (starting with Octavian-Augustus). Who ruled at the very top, and in which guise, was pretty much haphazard. One knew the imperator when he had been acknowledged by the biggest and best army. Who was the boss was fundamentally determined by soldiers. Soldiers were found throughout the empire, helping civilians and the private sector, they were not just in big military camps out there.

When Augustus died, Tiberius kept a low profile, not too sure what he was, besides Augustus’ legal heir, and his top general. The plutocratic republic went on on its own, without an emperor. But if there was to be an emperor, it could only be Tiberius. So the senate kept on begging Tiberius to take charge. In the end, so did he, but not in all ways.

There was never a clear path to succession in the empire, until Constantine switched the system to a dynasty (which had no coup, for three centuries, in the Orient).

When 450 years after Tiberius, Romulus Augustus was deposed, no arrangement was made to nominate a successor. But that meant nothing, except that Roman authorities in Constantinople did not want an Ostrogoth to be recognized. Emperor Zeno should have recognized the Ostrogoth Theodoric, but he did not, although the later had helped the former control Italy.

Emperor Justinian, based in Constantinople, regained control of all of Italy 75 years after the traditional end of the Roman empire in Occident. At that point Roman imperial rule had been re-established over much of the old empire. Except for the part that  the Franks, also representing Romanitas, ruled from Paris.

Thus, under the Franks, Romanitas kept on going.  In the Seventh Century, the Roman Senate still existed in Rome, and the Roman emperor, coming from Constantinople, visited the city of Rome herself, to gather metals from the fabulous buildings’ metallic roofs, to make Grecian Fire super weapons. The empire was fully mobilized against invading Jihadists conducting a Blitzkrieg.

The so called “Land of the Free” is a direct continuation of Rome.

By 486 CE, the “Frees” constituted the official Roman army over a large part of Western Europe, including Gaul. Their commander in chief, whose name was Chlodovechus (the name morphed into Clovis, Ludovicus, Louis, and Ludwig), although elected, was himself the son of a Roman imperator, Childeric. When Clovis was given Consular rank by the Roman government in Constantinople, he had become the official Roman leader in the “Occidental part”.

 

Simplicius: The “Frees”? Never heard of them.

PA: You are like Molière’s Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose his entire life, without knowing it. French fries also known as freedom fries, remember? Unwittingly, the dim witted American “neo”-conservatives were making a correct point, a very deep point. Frank, French and free are synonymous.

The Franks called themselves the Frees, because, after 486 CE, and for a little while, the Salian law they went by, gave them more rights than Roman law gave to standard Roman citizens. They phased out these privileges very quickly, as they established a symbiotic relationship with Roman society. So within two centuries, every citizen became “free”, a Frank. Slavery had become unlawful.

 

Simplicius: If Clovis was a Roman grandee, how come we never heard of that either?

PA: The notions of imperator (coming from the republic, the top general with right of life and death on his troops), Consul (top magistrate and executive), Caesar and Augustus were different.

Clovis was both imperator and Consul. The Empire of the Franks was never officially at war with Oriental Rome, precisely because of the Consular powers the leadership of the Franks had; the Franks represented official Roman power, especially after they eliminated other German “federates”, and the Visigoths were extinguished by the islamists.

The domination of the Franks was boosted in 800 CE, when Constantinople recognized Carlus Magnus, Charle-Magne, as Imperator Romanorum. Since a woman reigned in Constantinople at the time, it was a bitter pill to swallow in the Orient: the “Augustus” of the entire Roman empire was a Frank! And he led an army so mighty, he had succeeded to conquer all of Germania, something Rome had always failed.

When the eastern two-thirds of the Imperium Francorum made their own (sub)-empire, they grabbed that title for themselves (although the French king kept it too, becoming “empereur en son royaume“).

The Franks often campaigned with the Oriental Roman empire, against the Muslims. However, in 1204, the Franks seized Constantinople.

 

Simplicius: You went on a tangent, with your Land of the Free still on-going-as-we-speak. Can we go back to the decline and fall of Rome?

PA: It is not a tangent. The Franks recovered many elements of the Roman republic. At the same time, they reintroduced elements of human rights natural to Homo Sapiens, which had been artificially negated in the millennium of Greco-Roman civilization.

Thus the Franks founded a stronger civilization, rising on several pillars which had eluded the Greco-Romans. The Franks made a global civilizational reboot. That’s why they claimed to have originated in non Greco-Roman Troy (as the Romans already had).

 

Simplicius: Why is Rome so relevant to what is happening today?

PA: There are many close analogies between what happened during the fall of the Roman republic, and what is happening now.

There were two main types of problems with Rome. Problems coming from the unbalanced Greco-Roman craziness, and problems related to plutocracy. There was a synergy between both, which made the society increasingly idiotic, just at the time when the Romans observed that the “world was getting old“. Ecological exhaustion was requiring new technology which the fascist governance of the empire was unwilling to favor. Instead it favored its opposite, superstition.

Interestingly, there are similar elements of imbalance in the American variant of European civilization. The biggest flaw of the Greco-Roman civilization was slavery. It led to an over-exploitation of man by man, and a brutal society, even after the economic importance of slavery waned. There is the same problem in the USA, as exemplified by the reigning Reaganism, and its metaprinciple that greed makes for a better society.

 

Inquiring Mind: What do you think was the primary cause of the decline of the Roman empire?

PA: It’s a complicated subject, because the decline came from a number of factors, acting synergistically, and causing in turn other factors, which are more in evidence, although they are not fundamental.

Gibbon claimed that Christianity caused the “decline and fall of Rome”. However, the decline was clearly engaged much earlier than the apparition of Christianity, as Gibbon implicitly recognizes when he claims that the apogee of the empire was under the Antonine emperors. Marcus Aurelius had to spend his twenty year reign, on the battlefront, on the Danube, fighting invading Germans, all too close to Italy, the heart of the elongated empire. That was 150 years before the imposition of Christianism.

Moreover Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus became co-emperor, and then emperor, making such an insane maniac of himself that he was assassinated in a vast plot. At this point the throne was put for auction, and a rich plutocrat bought it. From there on, but for the stern reign of the African imperator Septimus Severus, things got worse. Inflation, plague, dozens of emperors, an emperor defeated and transformed into a foot stool by the Persian archenemy… All of this derangement was festering well before Christianism was imposed from the top.

 

Simplicius: So Christianity has nothing to do with the “Decline and Fall” of Rome?

PA: Before Christianism, the empire was the theater of a conflict between two fascist entities, the military-industrial complex, representing the People, sort of, and the Senate, representing the financial plutocracy.

By the time of Diocletian, around 300 CE, the empire had been re-established in its military splendor, and extended from Scotland to Mesopotamia, Morocco to Armenia. However, Diocletian augmented the idiocy level, by making Rome an empire under God (Sol Invictus), whom he personally represented.

Constantine got the idea that the Christians’ existing administrative structure, with its dioceses, and its naturally fascist God, would be a better fit for the fascist empire. Then he decided what Christianism would be, selecting his interpretation of “Orthodox Catholicism“, as self proclaimed “bishop” and “13th Apostle”.   

The empire was hobbling along, getting progressively worse, before Christianity was imposed, and a succession of fascist emperors found they could use it to humiliate minds. By the late Fourth Century, the very respected head of another religion said that civilization had fallen into a “Dark Age”.

Christianism has nothing to do with the political “Decline” of Rome, but everything to do with its “Fall” into complete insanity and anti-intellectual barbarity.

Orthodox Catholicism helped fascism, making it more intellectual, more thorough, a cause with a moral justification. Constantine, the emperor, using fiscality, made, de facto, Christianism into the state religion, within a decade (although it took another 60 years to do it formally).  Then he killed his very competent son, the Caesar Crispus.

 

Simplicius: Non sense. Constantine is a saint in Orthodox Christianity. How could he have killed his son? Can’t you just respect religion, for a change?

PA: The fact is, Constantine had his son executed. If superstitious people want to be respected, they should stop acting like barbarians, and that starts with ignoring evidence of the barbarity of what, or whom inspire them. Constantine was up high in the viciousness scale. a religion which sanctifies such viciousness should not be surprised to practice lesser sins, such as pedophilia.

Crispus had proven a very competent general and admiral, a winner of major battles.

However, Constantine had been educated at Diocletian’s court, as an implicit hostage. Even as a teenager he was feared by the top emperors in the empire, because of his ferocity and legendary physical prowess. Emperor would have connived to have him fight a lion in single combat, lead impossible cavalry charges in swampy land…

Constantine believed that one assassinated first, if one wanted to survive best. He fled the emperor Galerius for his life, hamstringing all the horses he left behind at each relay. Soon he was back at his father’s headquarters in Britannia. His father was the other Augustus.

Constantine killed his nephew, and steamed his second wife like a lobster. It is therefore appropriate for Orthodox Christians to view him as a saint. Christ wanted unbelievers to be burned, Constantine introduced another innovative cooking method for miscreants.

Crispus was not enamored with Christianism. It is highly likely that he would have reversed Christianization, as the Franks, the shock part of the Roman army, were skeptical of Christianism as a method of government.

This attitude of the Franks was no idle threat. Julian The Philosopher came to reign that way. Julian was one of two nephews of Constantine who survived the next wave of massacres inside the imperial family, ordered by the very Christians sons of Constantine. Julian went to Paris, and after a string of military victories against Germans, his Franks named him Augustus, starting the Parisian revolutionary tradition. 

Between 310 CE and 486 CE, the Franks were integrated in the top of the Roman army, and rolled one plot after another to get rid of Christian theocracy. But Romans were not ready to be led by Franks. Finally Clovis grabbed Christianism by the horns.

 

Simplicius: You are confusing me. The Franks converted to Christianity with Clovis. Traditional historians present the conversion of the Franks as a great victory of Christianity.

PA: Yes, it’s a myth the Franks themselves created, starting with Clovis. They claimed to be submissive sheep. 9,000 of Clovis shock troops dressed just in a simple shirt, and walked on bare feet, to be baptized with their king on Christmas day in Rheims. 9,ooo nearly naked Frank super killers walking the streets, and taking a bath in the middle of winter carries an ominous message to those endowed with less robust constitutions.

In a similar fashion, the wolves would disguise themselves into sheep if they could. As they came to have dinner with the flock. The Salian Franks were the Roman army, they made the bishops of Gaul an offer the men of cloth could not refuse. Then they seized total control of Christianism in the regions they ruled, which was everything in Europe, but for Visigothic Iberia and parts of Italy controlled by “Longobeards” or Constantinople.

The Imperium Francorum was not a theocracy, though. It was a deeply secular regime masquerading as a theocracy. Its local saints (Saint Martin, etc.) allowed it to enforce its neo-Christian morality.

 

Simplicius: We are always told that the Roman empire succumbed to invasions. Did Christianity cause the loss of battles?

PA: It did so indirectly, by further removing the empire from the republic which had originated it. A fascist empire is weaker intellectually and morally than a democratic republic. Superstition is intrinsically made by, and for stupid people, and foster more stupidity. Fanatical Christians were pretty stupid, uncultured people. The three young surviving sons of Constantine got a Christian education eschewing pretty much all of Greco-Roman civilization, so they were uneducated brutes. That is why those sons massacred all of Constantine’s family, but for the very young Julian, and his half brother Gallus. Stupid brutes endowed with maximal power.

You cannot foster an empire of the stupid, and hope to win battles. The USA should meditate that one, while there is still time, under God, Allah, or whatever.

Emperor Valens lost two-thirds of Oriental Roman army and his life at Adrianople, August 9, 378 CE. Valens had rushed in before the Occidental Roman army, led by the mighty Occidental emperor Gratian could arrive on the battlefield. Valens wanted to keep all the glory to himself. So he got into battle with an exhausted, thirsty army, on a hot summer day, and forced a battle without preparations, although the Visigoths wanted to surrender, and nobody knew where the Visigothic cavalry was. As it turned out, the German cavalry surprised, by happenstance, the left wing of the exhausted Roman army, from behind.

 

Simplicius: What’s your point?

PA: Valen’s attitude, believing in miracles, and making little of life, was characteristically Christian.  The Christians read in the Bible that their super hero, Jesus, son of whatever, would come back only after the world was destroyed (“Apocalypse”). It is natural to suspect that the many absurd, self defeating, criminal and idiotic decisions they took in the Dark Ages were motivated by that revelation.

The Christians burned public libraries, put in power men in black, hordes of vampiric monks. They killed entire regions on the ground of slight differences in doctrine. That made  them less worthy than the barbarians at the gate.

 

Inquiring mind: Can we go back to the fall of the Roman empire? If you do not believe that Christianism was the fundamental cause of the decline of Rome, but just amplified the primary cause, fascism, how do you reconcile this view with Gibbon’s belief that Rome reached its apogee under the Antonine emperors?

PA: Indeed, I completely disagree with Gibbon about what the apogee was.

Recently an Airbus 330 crashed into the Atlantic, falling all the way into the ocean in an apparently irresistible fall.  The disaster started when, after losing its speed indicators, and then its computers, the plane pitched up, and gained altitude quickly. Then it stalled, and lost lift. Gibbon is confusing that fatal rise, the early Principate, and then the Antonines, with a great success. Although it was indeed an apogee of fascism, it was also a decline, fall and catastrophe for civilization.

 

Simplicius: Can we remove aeronautics from the metaphors we will use in history?

PA: No. Metaphors allow to translate entire specialized and correct bodies of logic to another realm. Even the Bible uses them. Making metaphors is exactly how mathematics work. Mathematics is a set of systematically prepared metaphors, that’s all. Using new and wild metaphors allows to use mathematics where no official mathematics exist yet.

You see the three pilots of the Air France flight applied the doctrine imposed worldwide in such a case, which was to keep the nose up, and apply a lot of power. As it turned out, in two successive accidents, that doctrine is completely wrong.

Gibbon was writing in the eighteenth century, and believed that a fascist empire was the highest form of civilization. That sure made him popular within the British empire. Remember: a British admiral was hanged, because he had lost a battle, “pour encourager les autres“, as Voltaire put it. Hanging lots of children also encouraged others to behave. Gibbon was modern in his denigration of organized superstition, but not in his apology of fascism.

 

Inquiring mind: Have the flight directives been changed?

PA: A year before the Air France disaster, there had been a mysterious A320 crash over the Mediterranean. These planes are never supposed to crash, but for gross human error, or acts of god. The brand new plane had on board extremely experienced pilots, aviation authorities, including a civil aviation inspector, from Germany and New Zealand. Nevertheless it stalled during a test flight, in day light, good weather, with a perfectly functioning plane.

After analyzing that crash, and after its AF 447′s preliminary findings, the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile (BEA) guessed what happened in both cases. The world aviation authorities changed their recommendations. The new doctrine privileges  the recovery of a correct angle of attack, rather than the old, and erroneous approach of training pilots to power their way out of a near-stall with minimum loss of altitude.

It turns out that the forward position of the two engines beneath the wing in such planes as the A320 and the A330, tends to make them pitch up, the more power is applied, thus contributing to the stall. The new recommendation applies to Airbuses and Boeings.

 

Simplicius: So let me get that, you think that the Roman empire somehow stalled? And the crew could not recover it, because it used the wrong understanding of the situation, so the more it applied power, the more it stalled like these ill fated jets?

PA: Exactly. Even well meaning emperors made a bad situation worse, by applying too much power, and not enough intelligence. They should have recovered the correct angle of attack, the correct attitude, first (as the Franks did).

Those well meaning and all too power hungry leaders would include the Antonine emperors (1C), or Diocletian (~ 300 CE), Constantine (4C), or even Julian (who attacked too readily in Mesopotamia, getting killed there, possibly by treachery, instead of comforting first at home his abatement of rabid Christianity). It’s hard to make a stupid society intelligent by becoming more brutish.

 

Simplicius: What happened to your habitual obsession with plutocracy, in this explanatory scheme?

PA: Plutocracy is the fundamental reason why civilization degenerated into fascism. I was just explaining what happened further down the line of truths and consequences, why power itself made a bad situation worse.

Rome had lots of power, and power kept on being reapplied for centuries, for trying to make work what did not work. In the Sixth Century emperor Justinian started with a pretty good situation, but, by applying more and more power, he destroyed the empire ever more, in the guise of reconquering it.

Plutocracy is not a particular tribe, nor a particular religion. Plutocracy is a mathematical effect. It happens in all and any society. It concentrates ever more power in ever fewer brains.

Ultimately plutocracy fails, because, having only a few brains in power, it lacks brainpower. So one ends down with a stupid society. Plutocracy subsumes mass, and massive, stupidity. That is what happened to Rome, Orient and Occident. A stupid society is less able to handle an exterior challenge, be it ecological or military.

Plutocracy is always abated in societies which perdured. The Vikings used to reduce the plutocratic effect by using up (so to speak), and then burning, the concubines of the chief. Indians did pretty much the same (until the Brits outlawed the time honored, religious tradition). Comanches killed the horses of the chief, sometimes thousands of them.

The Franks redistributed wealth, and power, by equal inheritance, a huge difference with Rome. Middle Age Europe switched to a civil wars, revolutions, and a confiscation model, to redistribute wealth until the modern taxes on inheritance.

When the Mongols (and their Franco-Georgian allies) destroyed Baghdad, the Khan accused the Caliph to have just accumulated wealth, instead of taking care of his people, before putting him and his family to death.

 

Inquiring Mind: Did the Romans lose their technological edge? Did that make the situation worse?

PA: Indeed, the Romans lost their military technological superiority. Parthian arrows from composite bows could pierce Roman armor, and so Rome could not submit the Parthians. After 300 CE, the Franks had pretty much the best steel, and the better weapons. It was a good thing that they were more faithful to older Roman republican ideals than the leadership of Rome itself. But it is also why they dominated the Roman army, from inside, starting with Constantine. Thank God.

 

Simplicius: Why did the Romans lose the technological edge?

PA: A preliminary question is why did they acquire it to start with. Under the Roman republic, officials were motivated by doing their official jobs well. So they tried to equip the army with the best weapons. When they saw a better weapon somewhere, they adopted it, adapted it, and rendered it superior. They did this with the Spanish sword, Carthagenese ships, etc.

Under the empire, starting at the top, with the emperor, officials were more pre-occupied by their position in the crab basket, than by doing their official job well. In a fascist empire, the moral system in force is self advancement by persuading the few, or by somber conspiracies, while piling up more riches, be it only to buy everybody, whereas  in a functioning democratic republic, the moral system is all about doing the good job one is elected for, verified by the people.

Simplicius: Are you saying the military-industrial complex was corrupt in the Roman empire? 

PA: It certainly was, starting well before Germanicus’ assassination under Tiberius.  Germanicus was to be successor to Tiberius. He was a wildly successful general, recovering Germany, hence his name. He decided to launch a campaign by himself, instead of quelling in blood a rebellion of the legions. Top generals were pretty much to know that fate in the empire, and weapon procurement became an afterthought.  

One can see a similar phenomenon in the present USA, where many weapon systems are extravagantly financed, although they are known to be ineffective against maximal threats. F22, F35, and big aircraft carrier fleets are example. The F22 has never seen combat, although it’s the most expensive fighter plane.

The F22 could not even be engaged in Libya, lest it be shot down, whereas the French used Mirage and Rafales against a fully functional anti-aircraft system. The French use active stealth, anti-noise. The Chinese have made no mystery that they would sink U.S. carriers, using ballistic missiles. The Americans have no defense against ballistics. Too busy spending money on pork barrels. This may have the perverse effect to entice the Chinese to attack Taiwan, as they believe that the island will get no support from the USA’s obsolete F18s.

 

Simplicius: Where does the USA stand between these the two extremes of total plutocracy, and full democracy?

PA: Pretty much on the way to Roman style plutocracy, a republic in name only.

Just look at Obama’s Director of the Budget. After helping to direct dozens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, to a particular bank, Citigroup, Peter Orszag accepted a job there, although he has no experienced in banking.

Never mind: he will be rewarded with millions. And Mr. Clean, Obama, who was going to have nothing to do with lobbyists, sees nothing to talk about there. In Great Britain, Obama’s ex director of the budget would have been thrown in jail (there is a specific law against this sort of bartering).

In the Roman empire, this sort of things was systematic. Public service was replaced by private service. Roman emperors would even be jealous of their generals, and restrained them, so that they would keep the glory to themselves. There was a bit of that showing up, when Obama personally directed, and made it known that he supposedly micromanaged, the raid against bin Laden.One can see the cult of personality rising. In truth bin laden’s capture was a deal with the Pakistani ISI, but it was presented as the personal, heroic, herculean work of the emperor. Just like in Rome.

 

Simplicius: how do you know the ISI sold bin Laden?

PA: Logic per se is enough. Let’s make a Star War analogy. If you found the leader of the resistance residing comfortably in the center of the empire’s Death Star, you would naturally suspect that the emperor knew about it.

As it happened, some French journalist TV crews where in the same city the night bin Laden was eliminated. They drove in early the next morning and asked witnesses. everybody agreed that the entire city is under secret service lock down, and the TV crews, with hidden cameras got some pretty enlightening sequences on the spot. Don’t expect any of this to show in the media of the USA anytime soon.

 

Inquiring mind: So what is exactly the connection between plutocracy, fascism, economy and technology?

PA: Well we have a four dimensional space here. A society such as imperial Rome was an object in that 4 dimensional space. Rome showed, for centuries, that plutocracy and fascism, although related, are different dimensions: the former was centered around the senate, the second around the army. Economy and technology were also independent, but related dimensions. Rome was a technological society. When its technological organization collapsed, it collapsed.

 

Inquiring mind: Did the emperors discourage technology?

PA: Just as they discouraged their generals (when they did not outright execute them, as Nero did with his top general), the emperors discouraged technology itself.

Some Roman emperors explicitly advocated technological stasis. They said it was to preserve employment. Machines would steal employment. Engineers got rewarded for NOT revealing their inventions. A very large factory complex powered hydraulically  was found in Provence. By the Third Century, the Romans used water power extensively, for example for fulling or sawing wood, and stone. 

 

Simplicius: And did your “Frees”, your Franks, changed that? Did those illiterate savages advance technology?

PA: They sure did. And it was not just the Franks themselves, but the regions in which Romanitas had penetrated, under the wing of Christianism. So technology progressed in Ireland, or Anglo-Saxon areas. The introduction of ship mills (originally launched by Justinian’s general  Belisarius, as the Muslims controlled the land, hence the streams) spread to those regions. So did tide mills, by the Sixth Century in Northern Europe.

The Franks did not stay illiterate very long. (The case of Charlemagne was special, something about his dad wanting to make a real man of him, and not a weak intellectual.) Differently from other Germans, the Franks wanted to penetrate the higher reaches of Roman society, so they pushed their children towards education, and mingling with Romans in all ways (something below the dignity of the Goths).

Soon technology was advancing again strongly. The Frankish army annihilated the Moor and Arab armies in a series of famous battles and campaigns, something Rome had proven unable to do even once, on land. In the process, French steel proved itself even better than Damascus steel, and the Franks invented heavy cavalry, perched on monster horses.

Biotechnology was a particularly Frankish achievement. The Tenth Century was “full of beans”. Newly engineered beans, that is. Because slavery was unlawful, and it was not recommended to try to domesticate a Frank, the Franks domesticated instead all sorts of animals, including oxen and very convenient draw horses. Developing new, deep ploughs to go with them. Europe covered itself with windmills and watermills.  

When Europeans made it to China, they were amazed to see that the Chinese did everything by hand, including moving huge tree trunks, hundreds of people lifting them, something which was done with few people, animals, and mechanical advantage in Europe.

By 1,000 CE, the energy at the disposal of individual European was the highest in the world. Rome had been superseded, the world was left behind. And this was accompanied by a theoretical and empirical understanding never achieved before, while the rest of the world was going around in circles.

Abelard used to be called “our Aristotle”, an acknowledgement that French theory had superseded Athens by 1120 CE. The oscillatory mechanical clocks of the 13th century contained a lot of hidden understanding of physics. And so on.

Thus the colonization of about half the planet by Europeans in the next nine centuries, and the global triumph of Western civilization was no accident, and its seed was ethical, and planted by 486 CE. Some will say it was not just the Franks, but that the Irish, and the like, saved civilization. However Saint Patricius, the so called Saint Patrick, was formed in Cannes, Provincia, where a famous festival is still held nowadays.

As fascist Rome decayed, Romanitas expanded in the guise of Christianism, and soon was found all the way to Norway, Ethiopia, and Mongolia. The Franks were particularly good at using it ahead of their armies. And told the natives that Charlemagne would be mollified, if, and only if they had converted first.

The  fundamental superiority of Western civilization invented by Europeans after the fall of the massively fascist empire, was a new covenant giving more clout to individual minds. That covenant was a reversal of massive fascism, the strategy used by the Egyptian or (all too many) Mesopotamian super states from the start.

Thus, at a more advanced stage of civilization and technology, the Europeans were able to renew with the sort of freedom founds at the roots of Egypt, its most creative time, or the innovative freedom of the Sumerian cities, or of the Cretan thalassocracy. 

The covenant for the mind rested on empowering individuals through more freedom , while keeping in sight that the freedom of all means the equality of much.

 

Simplicius: Did not Tocqueville warn against too much equality  at the cost of freedom?

PA: Tocqueville was a young aristocrat who spent a few months in the USA. He is viewed as a deeper thinker than he really was. After the first massive revolution of 1789 dialed back the extravagant privileges and riches of the French plutocracy, he could only be bitter.

The white Europeans who had emigrated to North America, had just established a government, the grandly named United States of America. Tocqueville saw columns of Cherokees, the original inhabitants, forcefully deported in a scene which would be repeated only in the death throes of Nazi Third Reich.  The white invaders of America were using their freedom to treat the inhabitants to extermination through deportation. However Mr. young aristocratic philosopher could not find within himself the deep mental resources necessary to say anything about it.

 

Inquiring Mind: Were the Franks more equalitarian than the Greco-Romans?

PA: Incomparbly much more so. The leaders of the Franks were typically great warriors and, or consummate  politicians, they were also very rich, with sometimes nearly as many residences as Senator Mc Cain. However, because of the equalitarian inheritance laws, the wealth and property would be quickly distributed , and also made women rich, powerful, and influential. Hence, the most important Frank after Clovis, was queen Bathilde, who outlawed slavery.

Thus an important part of the new ethics was that women also ruled. I think I counted seven female sovereigns in 150 years. And they were not figureheads. The Imperium Francorum was a multipolar oligarchy where many ruled, from men of the cloth to kings, dukes and counts, quite a few of those self made persons (such as the runway English slave Bathilde).

The continual redistribution of riches fed the incessant Frankish inheritance quarrels. This has been confused with a weak state in later times. But such was not the case. It was a new style of state, which has a lot in common with today’s European Union (albeit with constantly changing borders which meant nothing).

Frankish civilization was enabled by constant arguing about ethical points. Kings would come out, and point out that “Saint Martin would never have done that, because of this, and the other thing, so we should not do it either. Instead, being very wise, he would have done what we are going to do.”… Differently from Roman imperators, Frankish leaders justified themselves ethically. All what Roman soldiers expected from their imperators were  greed satisfied and conquest achieved. It was a completely different world.

In the first ten centuries, after the domestication of church and Rome alike, the Franks, east and west, and their successor regimes, built many of the democratic institutions of Occident.  They also established a sustainable economy. Or, at least, sustainable for 8 centuries of demographic expansion, before the conflation of dramatic problems of the Fourteenth Century. This, once again, demonstrated the superiority of their civilization over greed and exploitation based Rome.  

More powerful, more appropriate, more sustainable, hence more  advanced technology: such is the way of the wise, running away from the problems of previous technology, towards a more understanding future always. Wisdom without science, and conscience, is only the ruin of freedom, and of the cities themselves.

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Patrice Ayme

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Simplicius: Do you make a difference between Christianity and Christianism?

PA: I prefer “Christianism”.  The French use “Christianism”, and it helps us with the notion that it is a system of thought among others. Such as “Islamism”, or “fascism”, “Marxism”, “Communism”, romanticism, scientism, relativism, existentialism, nihilism…