Strikes Against Civilization

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

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

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

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

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

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

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Don’t deny.

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

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Patrice Ayme

North Korea: CRUSH INFAMY!

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

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

ICBM Trajectories To Hawai’i, West USA On Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those who know history are condemned not to repeat it. 

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

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

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

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

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THE HEAVY RESPONSIBILITY OF THE USA IN THE 1930s:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL OUGHT NOT TO BECOME THE NEW PARADIGM:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

KILL NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL NOW:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

TO ENCOURAGE A COUP, NO CONCESSION WHATSOEVER:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

SHOULD ONE FAIL TO ACT…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Ecr. L’inf., Patrice Ayme

Mali: USA Ought To Fuel France

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

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

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

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

Mirages Above Mali

No fuel, no war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Greatest Nation On Earth”? Really?

YES WE CAN, MURDER WHOEVER WE WANT:

What Else? Not Much. 

The Higher The Assassin Climbs, The More It Shows Its Bottom.

***

[Those who spurn critical thinking can take the blue pill offered by Krugman, trying desperately to mumble vaguely positive about who history may abstract as the assassin in chief! Uncritical thinking: what mussels do.]

***

“We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” 

Thus boasted Obama at the democratic convention. If a politician in France proffered such a lie, voters would think he was not just deranged, but nationalistically crazed. What’s true instead? We are much less employed:

Employment Ratio Prime Age Population

If one had an ethical graph, it would crash through the floor. Obama stood on its head 25 centuries of Ius Belli (see below). Assassination without due process is the only category where Obama unquestionably surpassed G. W. Bush (Bush had implemented free drugs for seniors, effective immediately, so, in a sense, Bush beat up Obama at the health care game: Bush really did something major, and positive, while president).

The naive may object that the collapse of employment was not Obama’s making. But the opposite is pretty much true. Obama approved, with the republican presidential candidate, John McCain, in a showy way, the decisions of the Bush administration. Obama even left the main engineer in charge, tax avoiding New York Fed chief Tim Geithner. Geithner is still in place, having presided over a collapse of employment.

Plutocrats, starting in ancient Rome, have always loved unemployment, because it transforms the People into hungry pigeons who eat in their hands, humbly. Nothing makes Pluto happier that this daily humiliation.

Moreover Obama resurrected Larry Summers, and took him as economic guru, starting in August 2008. This is exactly when unemployment rolled over, big time. The obvious causal relationship is that, at the time Summers gave a presentation to Obama about the importance to save the criminals, the banksters, and re-establish their wealth. that, in turn, gave the Bush administration a green light to do just that. So, instead of playing FDR, that means, stimulator to the economy, Obama played stimulator to banks.

A the time Bush was lost, his dreams smouldering, and checked out (and not just out of Iraq). Geithner, Summers, and the Mc Cain advisers were all in agreement to save the banksters, and damn the real economy. So here we are. Worldwide.  

Instead what had to be done, ALL OVER, was what was done to save the car industry. Obama did it, but just for the car industry (I gave explicit recommendations on how to do it in other industries, so it was possible to do so, obviously… Trillions were spent on the banks, for the banks, by the taxpayers, order of Obabush.)

Mr. Summers was the architect of the sustainable crushing of the economy by an unregulated bubble of financial derivatives and activities, under money hungry resident Clinton. It made the economy red hot under Clinton, and after that, it imploded. For this, people are much grateful to Clinton.

People are mesmerized by Clinton, like birds by a mamba. Something about bird brains, that even mambas understand.

Verily, the much despised Greeks work 2,100 hours a year (that’s because Greece is the country with the most family owned businesses). Koreans work 2,200 hours, and USA citizens work “only” 1778 hours. At least 15 nations work more per hour than the USA… In the OECD alone.

These numbers are known by all serious people. So why is Obama seriously lying to the thunderously applauding multitude? Why is the pseudo left multitude applauding those serious lies? So that they can better forget that their great leader is busy reverting 25 centuries of civilization, replacing justice by assassinations, in the best tyrant style?

It is revealing to compare the French and USA presidential elections. Raw nationalism is very strong, all too strong, in the USA. Nationalism is even viewed as a moral duty, in the USA. In France, among other European countries, nationalism is viewed with intense suspicion, so one does NOT go shrill that way, there. In France, nationalism reeks of insufferable bad manners (except in the despised National Front, despised precisely because of its nationalist rhetoric). 

After all, when the Nazi tanks rolled in, the most important mental force in plain view was nationalism. Nationalism is the “Na” in Nazism.

So no wonder nationalism is not hot in Germany anymore, either. And that’s very gut.

Civilization is not made just of things one does, but also of things one does not do anymore. Lying about other countries is a very bad habit to have. Just as it is a rather bad habit not to reveal that the USA attacked the Republic of Afghanistan, with the help of its henchmen in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, more than 35 years ago. Attacking people, killing millions, for no good reasons, has consequences. In the fullness of time.

True, Rome killed and enslaved millions in Gaul; but there were good reasons, said Caesar, although the Senate stridently disagreed. The judgement of history, and of most of the Celts themselves, at the time, and even more afterwards, was that Caesar was right. So killing millions is not necessarily bad. (Anyway, conflicts cascaded in Celto-Germania, and Caesar did not start the war, the Helvetes did.)

Killing more than ten million Germans was the price to get rid of Nazism; there was an excellent reason. In Afghanistan, all the reasons of the USA, to sow religious war there in the 1970s, were terrible, anti-civilizational, and part of the price is the unravelling of the constitution of the American Anglo Republic into an unprincipled Principate.

The official story about how 9/11 came about, is an enormous lie. In truth, the USA attacked civilians on the other side of the Earth, and that was followed by a counter-attack, more than a quarter of a century later, after the primeval action of the USA led to the death of several millions in Afghanistan.

The truth is mean, but it is the truth. And even so called “god” cannot do anything about it.

“We are endowed by our creator… we are the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world has ever known…” We we we we… Is that a mutation of the self satisfied he he  he he of G. W. Bush?

We, we, we, we have a president who is personally acquainted with his “creator“. Was that creator UBS, or Wall Street? Those were the only creators in plain sight, for the objective observers (except for the millions of suckers like me, all the little tini tiny creators who helped decisively Obama come to power, last time, of course. But then he forgot us all, because we were not banksters!).

Speaking of that great other USA president, G. W. Bush, his CIA tortured those it captured for Qaddafi first. Hey, what are friends for? “We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” Indeed, some world records may have been shattered. Torture records and cover-ups records are piling up. For the whole world to contemplate.

Some victims were left dangling from manacles around their wrists and feet for four months straight (interview on French TV from a famous survivor captured in Asia by the CIA). This assuredly demonstrates that USA torturers can get lazy: leaving a guy to hang around for four months does not smack of hard work. Besides those CIA goons are not that smart, because they forgot to kill all those they tortured, so now they speak (at least to non USA media).

People will say: “Oh, that was Bush, that was before”. Right. Things have become much worse, as a policy of systematic assassination by robots is being conducted worldwide, even on USA citizens, even on some of those who are still children. People should meditate this carefully: do they want a world where a so called “commander in chief” selected by some tribe with 4% of mankind go around the world, assassinating people without judicial process?

The Roman Republic leaders, 25 centuries ago, found such a notion atrocious, repulsive, uncivilized. Some of Rome worse terrorist adversaries received a sort of legal process (for example, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala; the former three were judged and executed, the latter, condemned to life imprisonment). These events were, in order of people killed, relative to the population then, and the danger they represented to Rome, greater, by orders of magnitude, to relatively puny 9/11. Still the Romans kept their constitutional cool, they applied due process to the criminals.

Formidable adversaries such as Josephus, the top Jewish general in the (treacherous Judea war) in the end was adopted by emperor Vespasian, and inherited his mansion, in Rome.

And the Romans kept their constitution intact, whereas Obama considers he has right of life and death on anybody, worldwide, without a semblance of due process. Definitively a violation of Ius Belli and international law. Say the millennia.

The Romans knew that “Ius Belli“, the Law of War, killing the adversary philosophically, was more important than killing the adversary physically. Obama confuses looking cool as a chap, and cold blooded assassination. Worse: goose stepping behind, cheering and applauding Obama’s exhibitionist love for his family, a circus for little children, USA citizens are carefully arranging their forgetfullness about what the Romans knew, 25 centuries ago. Namely that it matters when one goes and kill people, that everybody understand why, and that the cause be just.

The main axis of France’s foreign policy, since May 8, 1945, has been to re-educate the Germans in the way of peace and love. Franco-German reconciliation has been number one top priority. This was not compatible with nationalism, and that is why France did not seize one square kilometer of German territory after the Nazi defeat.

I turned the TV on, to watch the democratic convention, and here were sexy girls speaking like they knew it all, telling the USA what to think. They were movie actresses, and the crowd just loved them. With a teleprompter, any mental retard who knows how to read can work harder and smarter than anyone else.

Talking about plastic surgery, here was Vice President Jo Biden. All excited, and delivering a pretty good speech. He celebrated, (for want of a better word),  the death of more than 6,000 soldiers, and 50,000 wounded some so very severely, he marvelled with exorbited eyes. The RESOURCE WAR, aka “war against terrorism“, brought a tear eyed evocation. Biden finished on :”God bless you, God bless you!“

God bless you for what? Destroying Afghanistan since 1978, just because “yes, we can“

What struck me, beyond Joe’s predictable rhetoric, was how Biden had suffered from plastic surgery. His eyebrows were angling up, then came down hard on the side. His eyelids were wide open, as if he had been immensely struck by the incongruity of it all, after been hit on the head. What did that creature remind me of? It felt familiar. Yes. Those Batman movies, with the Joker. OK, I am not a specialist of Batman, and I have not really seen the movie, just extracts, so I cannot explore further what Biden has been trying to say by being a real life imitation of the joker incarnated by Jack Nicholson. Is it all a joke? Is that what he wants to say?

Another contrast with France was the so called “First Lady” that introduced “the love of my life“. Nobody of importance in the USA is aware that the “First Man” semantics was invented by Augustus, Rome’s first life long tyrant. But, even Augustus, did not introduce the ridiculous notion of “First Lady“. Who are the Last Ladies?

And why is the First Lady’s sex life so important? Sorry, I meant romantic. Hey, go easy on the steroids, by the way, those shoulders… And why does the resident instrumentalize his daughters? “Malia, Sasha, we are so proud of you… and tomorrow you have to go to school.” Why is that national news? Why does the president’s official business includes telling his daughters he is proud of them? It’s not obvious? He did not think of it before? He needs a teleprompter to communicate with his family? 

And why are taxpayers paying 100 million dollars for this pathetic, clownish circus?

Are USA citizens so deprived of these things they need to see them on TV? I was amused when Michelle made a huge smile off sync while telling the story of someone who could not afford health care. It was meant to express compassion, but the timing and intensity were off. With these little things sincerity, or lack thereof, shines through. Can one work the appearance of a heart harder and smarter than anyone else? A question much of the world has for the USA.

“Michelle…I love you so much” Thus Obama does not just love to coolly assassinate citizens, worldwide. His love is all encompassing. And the other clown who smiles, immensely touched by this apparent revelation, just made to her, watched by hundreds of millions. And they embrace, and embrace… Why don’t they go all the way? Would not that augment the audience? Worldwide exhibitionism. What happens when it turns out that the president was sleeping around with the hordes, as happened so many times in the past, with many other presidents? Maybe all these drugs they are given to perform 24/7, like circus animals who would never, ever, rest in a cage.

For that matter, how come ex-resident Clinton, now filthy rich, is immensely popular while everybody should know, by now, that he planted, with his gardener, Larry Summers, the seeds of the financial disaster? Namely plutocratically engineered derivatives to the horizon, devouring the world economy? Is WE THE PEOPLE dominated by masochism?

So why the exhibitionism? Because when there is enough style, it can displace substance. And when the substance is banksterism as far as the eye can see, it’s best hidden in plain sight.

The best joke was Obama’s content empty discourse. He even forgot to mention “Obamacare” also known as the “Affordable Care Act”. His sycophants used to call that monstrosity his “signature achievement“. And here he was, refusing to sign his achievement again! Tell us it’s not true, Barry-Barack, tell us that you do not just say what the polls tell you to say.

Health care is much improved, just wait for the bill. Apparently Obamacare has become better not talked about. (True the ACA is supposed to increase how much most people are supposed to spend in health care: the act may be affordable, but is it care? The Republicans have noticed that Obama proposed to reduce the funding of Medicare by $750 billion… So naturally they pounced on that, while proposing to transform Medicare into Vouchercare. Democrats are screaming it ain’t fair, as if that were not predictable. Either they are lying, or they really have puny brains)

In truth, Obama and his Pelosi plutocrat carefully wasted time when they had total control with a health care plan that will not work (because it does not have a sustainable mechanism for cost control). They agitated the ACA as the red flag it was, thus distracting the attention of the People away from the banksters (neither jailed nor even prosecuted), and from Quantitative Easing (print money for the banks that caused the crisis), and from allowing banks to use loans as rents for over-valued properties (over-valued by the banks themselves), while they, those Pelosi plutocrats, were keeping the taxes on the hyper rich at rock bottom, more than ever, and closing their eyes on giant loopholes in taxation (such as billionaires borrowing instead of spending).

Did I mention the tripling of troops in Afghanistan? (The Iraq withdrawal was pre-set by Bush the torturer, but that did not prevent Obarack to claim success for it, whereas, in truth, he was kicked out by the Iraqis, after trying to stay.)

The Pelosi plutocrat has long posed as a leftist, while owning Sugar Bowl, among other things. Never mind that Sugar Bowl had plotted with Royal Gorge LLC to destroy a huge amount of wilderness to extent both resorts (now an ad hoc conservation group has saved the wilderness from the claws of Pelosi plutocrat and her kind).

“Hope has been tested“. Obama has switched from being the candidate of hope to the candidate of “hopeful“. So cars will go twice further “in the middle of next decade” (news: they already do, in Europe, and they will anyway, even in the USA, when oil hits $200 a barrel). OK, could have been worse: Obama could have passed a law to improve cars in the middle of next century, and improve health care by selling body parts. Small favors are better than no favors. Four more years of empty promises, and love of my life celebrations. In the Roman Republic the two Consuls were elected for a year, and rotated supreme authority every month. OK, Romans did not have plastic surgery honey babies to tell them what to think.

Obama finally left the stage, after bellowing about the “greatest nation on earth“. A god nut, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, took the stage to deliver a general blessing. May this land of the free never lack those willing to grab guns, and kill others, said the holly man in substance, as he circled several times around the notions pertaining to “men in uniform“.

‘One nation under god, so dear god, bless the USA.’

The old fat man of god was a nice contrast with the young sexy actresses who had warmed up the scene before. Sex and the City of God. Even more weird was the gun fanatic who got shot in the head (with many others) and came to be rolled out as a great hero, whereas all she proves is that, even before being pierced by a bullet, she did not think right.

But 73% of USA citizens attach the greatest importance to shooting other USA citizens. A problem when crazies get crazier: craziness is viewed as heroism (for further reference, see our historical guinea pigs, the Nazis: the deeper they got in their madness, the madder they got).

So what is Obama proposing to do, by the way? Change you can’t believe in! Obama is mostly proposing to do what he did not do when he was in total control, namely rising taxes on the rich, and imposing a minimum tax of 30% on the hyper rich. It’s safe to propose it now, his masters have determined: he is not in control anymore (the Republicans are). So his masters told him: OK, go ahead, tell them what they want to hear, the Dream, the American Dream.

We work harder and smarter than anyone else. Who is that “we” who haunts us? The plutocrats?

Raising taxes on the rich is also insufficient, in any case: it won’t solve the deficit, right now augmenting at one trillion a year, for a grand total of 16 trillion dollars, nearly as much as the 17,6 trillion GDP of the European Union.. . And certainly higher than the 15 trillion dollars USA GDP. (European countries have an Added Value Tax of at least 15%, by law, 17.5% in France and Germany, up to 20% in Great Britain, 23% in Greece. That reduces deficits, but Obama does not know what it is, although I wrote extensively about it, and offered him a book, where it is, black on white.)

Partisans such as Krugman speak only of a USA deficit of around 10 trillion dollars, allowing the USA to look slightly better than France or Germany. How do they do it? How do they cheat? Partisans of USA greatness omit what the USA government borrowed from USA government funds whose spending in the future is mandated by law.

By the way, recent graphs show the USA GDP going up by leaps and bounds, whereas the EU’s stagnates (with Germany not enough to compensate Britain rolling over, lower, while Italy and Spain sink, and France is going nowhere). This looks good, for the USA, but it means nothing. Inefficiencies, waste, jams, and the intrusion of pay services in what ought to be free (like school and care) augment GDP artificially, or, let’s say in ways that cannot be compared!

Obama crowed that he had signed free trade agreements that allowed to sell lots of products stamped “Made in America”. Never mind that “America” is not an official country.

Never mind that the free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia, South Korea, were long stalled, because of the fear for USA jobs, and passed… by the Republican Congress in October 2011. The democratic crowd roared its approval, of the great Obama victory, grabbing his pen to sign on Republican policy, I guess. I am also for free trade… But only if and when everything else been equal. Actually the USA administration (and also Europe) are claiming that China dumps solar panels. Among other things.

Obama forgot to put a carbon tax, so his ‘5 millions‘ renewable energy jobs did not materialize. (By comparison Sweden passed a carbon tax in 1990, to great success for employment and CO2, let alone energy independence.)

Nationalist frenzy, and plutocratization, are hard to reverse. Citizens of the USA view as a self evident truth that they got attacked on 9/11 by a country they had nothing to do with, as they were careful, and still are careful, to NOT learn what really happen. Namely they do not want to read that the USA was engaged in a war of aggression in Afghanistan as early as 1978. (Shortly after three government sponsored Franco-Afghan geological missions under Dr. Laparent, found great mineral wealth. Is the Afghan war just a Franco-american conflict?)     

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, stated in 1998, to the French “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began… after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998] After Brzezinski’s confession, other US officials who denied US involvement prior to the Soviet invasion, also changed their story. (For instance, Charles Cogan, head of the CIA covert aid program to Afghanistan at this time.)

For a fuller quote and a more comprehensive story see: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

By the way, it’s really hard to search the web, in the USA, only in the USA, about the Pelosi plutocrat‘s plutocracy, or Carter’s henchmen terrorizing Afghanistan. It’s not just the People Republic of China which manipulates the search engines.

But it works: the professional killer who was leader of the section who killed Bin Laden, although increasingly cynical in all sorts of ways, really believed that the USA was treacherously attacked on 9/11. Attacked, sure. Treacherous? Not so fast. That soldier had no idea that USA henchmen instructed the Islamist Fundamentalists to attack civilian objectives in Afghanistan, and, preferably school for little girls, a full generation earlier. (No, I will not bother to make a search for this from the USA; I would come empty. But, overseas, the documentation is plentiful.) 

Obama also strokes the dream of the unprovoked 9/11 attack.

Whatever happens, plutocracy will soon elect its next USA president. It would be funnier, if it were Biden. With his distorted face, he looks the part. Joker.

Obama has accomplished his role, that of a vaccine against change. You can read through his face his great interrogation: are they, my rich friends, replacing me with one that they would like more? So he mouthed the change-y thing unconvincingly. He took the left for granted, giving it only pittance. All the horrors inaugurated by G W Bush were left in place, more, even more terrible, were added. Worst: the left took Obama for granted Brown skin, lofty rhetoric, what could go wrong?

Fact is, although the assassination program and its death panel is going strong, the economy is going, at best, nowhere (in France, EU, or the USA) once population change is factored out. See the fawning Krugman, September 7, admitting in a burp of honesty, speaking of employment:“A plunge and a stabilization at a depressed level, which has now gone on for almost three years. Everything else is just noise.” (By the way, Krugman is now looking at the employment ratio, which I long advocated as more pertinent than the U numbers.)

Systems of minds are dynamic. As they go on, they become their own initial conditions. Plutocratization is hard to stop. In Rome it got unfettered after Hannibal’s forever wandering cataclysm. The situation got ever worse. 160 years later, the Republic had fallen. Augustus, of course re-established the Republic, formally speaking, so he claimed. With a caveat: he was to be known as the “First Man In Rome.” Princeps. Or as the French, always inclined to abstraction, put it: prince.

Whatever that was, whatever that is, it’s not democracy. Certainly not democracy as the Greeks understood it, and not even democracy as the Romans understood it. An abomination looking for a catastrophe is more like it. In the fullness of time, sometimes the present itself turns into a golden legend, as the floor disappears below a civilization.

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Chanted Obama and his helpers four years ago (me among them). Yes, he could. Asssasinate whoever the death panel Obama instituted at the White House wants. This has been Obama’s presidency greatest breakthrough, its true signature achievement. Not fighting climate change. Not bringing jobs. Not rolling back metastatic kleptocratic finance. No. It’s all the way back to the jungle. Yes We Can! Assassinate. Whoever we want. For whatever they do.

And yet ethics was invented for economics, not just survival. When the god fearing Carter sent his assassins to Afghanistan, he set the groundwork for 9/11… And probably much worse to come (the USA has helped Pakistan’s Islamist regime make thermonuclear weapons, thus enabling a potential thermonuclear 9/11).

Nastiness does not just propagates, it feeds on itself. Not that the plutocrats mind. In hell, all fired up, ready to go, their lord dwell. When plutocracy turns into an avalanche, civilization is swept away.

***

Patrice Ayme

Independence From What?

INDEPENDENCE FROM THE TRIBAL INSTINCT WOULD BE A GOOD THING!

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

CALLING 9/11

ENOUGH CHILDISH GAMES ALREADY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

BUTTERFLIES KNOW BETTER:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiculturalism is intolerable, says transculturalism.

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

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

***

 9/11: PRICE & PRETEXT FOR MORE PLUTOCRACY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Immigration Deception?

 Curious, but revealing incident in a park, somewhere in the USA. I was walking with my daughter, when I came across a group of very black children, accompanied by an older white woman. Usually American “blacks” are not that black, and to see a whole group of charcoal like children was exceptional. All the more since they spoke French, not English. Actually, they did not understand English.

 Having spent most of my childhood in French speaking West (really black) Africa, my interest was raised. My toddler, from her towering 23 months of ancient wisdom, was delighted to meet French speakers, and show them around the playground. Her antics made her instantaneously popular: she was using with proficiency a playground made for children at least 5 year old. Extremely charming: she conducted her business with great seriousness, beaming with pride. 

 I asked the teenagers what they were doing in the USA. I had expected them to be visiting for summer. I was surprised when they demurred. They said I should ask the American lady, who loomed in the distance. I found that weird. I asked the lady. She told me she was an immigration lawyer, and these children were “political refugees”. She had requested the U.S. Immigration to offer them political asylum. 

 PA: “Political asylum? Which dictatorship are they from? They cannot be from Zimbabwe, they speak French!” 

 Lady Lawyer: “They are from Haiti.”

 PA:“Haiti? But Haiti is a democracy! They just had a presidential election! With international observers, and the UN all over! There was no violence, whatsoever.” 

 LL:“You think so, but it’s not like here, it’s very poor there!”

 PA:“So you are saying that the poor ought to get political asylum, just because their country is poor?” 

 LL:“Yes, of course!” 

 PA:“Don’t you think that is abusing the concept? Besides, as a Socialist French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, once said:”La France ne peut pas receuillir toute la misere du monde!” (“France cannot welcome all the world’s misery!”, meaning that just because people live in misery, they should not be welcome in France.) I don’t see why the USA ought to accept all the world’s misery, either.”

 LL:“The USA is not France. This is the New World! The more immigration, the better the American economy gets!” 

 PA: “Well, after World War Two and the Algerian civil war, the French economy was destroyed, but recently, in spite of little immigration, the French economy has clearly been doing better than the USA: free healthcare, free infant and toddler care, free schooling, much better life spans, less poverty, etc.”

 LL:“Americans are very generous people. They want to help Haiti.” 

 PA:“Well, so are the French: not only do they help Haiti too, but they are sending 15 billion euros to Greece, while paying for it with a 12 billion euros austerity plan. That help for Greece was just last week. Moreover, overall, France is a country where the poor get much more help, and the hyper rich pay, like in Great Britain, 50% tax or more. In the USA, the richest 400 incomes pay only 17% tax, and the democratic president, in a flourish of hypocrisy, claims that this will revive the economy.” 

 Lady Lawyer: “Well, a rising tide lifts all boats, the more people come into this country, the better it is for everybody.” 

 PA:“Sure the corporations love to have more janitors and valet park attendants come in, and maybe the economy of the USA can survive all this generosity. But certainly not the ecology, and the quality of life. 30 years ago, there were 17 million people in California, now there are 38 million. This makes California into the fastest growing state in the world. The entire world. It is pretty clear that California has not withstood the shock. Now they are closing schools in some villages in the mountains. There are a lot of mountains in California. Children will have to drive 30 miles, over snowy roads, which may be closed at the first Pacific storm, to go to school, next winter. Other cities are closing their police departments, some cities are bankrupt. Even the ultra conservative U.S. Supreme Court has ordered California to release more than 50,000 prisoners held in inhuman conditions. And the Post Office of the USA may close within 6 months. From lack of money. Why not help Americans too?” 

 At this point the immigration lawyer just walked away. I wondered not why she did. Perhaps to exhibit her generosity, and reconstitute her dominance, like the head chimpanzee exhibits his strength by dragging a branch, she went to help my daughter down a slide. She had not noticed that my sweet angel is a slide master, and could do without someone waiting for her at the bottom. 

 The lady lawyer do-gooder, anxious as she was, to receive the little goddess in her arms, forgot she had a heavy reflex camera hanging around her neck. The representative of justice and love ended smacking generously the heavy black contraption in my toddler’s face. The innocent angel cried profusely, to everybody’s consternation, while her lip swelled. 

 I thought that was a telling moral to the story: to be good, it’s not enough to want to appear good, or even to mean to be good. One has to act well, too. Or one may end mean.

 So what do I think about all this? Should I go all the way to the bitter end of that lady’s reasoning, and proclaim impoverished Americans to be political refugees in their own country?

 First, to import Haitian children as if they were political refugees is a travesty of the status of political refugee.

 Second, that taking children away from Haiti does not help Haiti. An empire of 310 million ought not to steal its substance from a country ten millions.

 Third that the resources given by the government of the USA to help Haitian children should be sent to Haiti to help them in their own country, where they belong, and where it would help Haiti more, by a multiplier effect. 

 Fourth, I immediately perceived an enormous cultural gap: the Haitian children were delighted to play with my baby, in a way I have never seen American children do it. American children tend to be standoffish , and are conditioned to engage in much less physical interaction, to touch much less, preferably not to approach, to even avoid eye contact, let alone unguarded speech outside of automatic banalities. 

 The Haitian children were all over my blonde child, and delighted by her enthusiastic French babbling. I could not resist thinking that the USA was not their country, they were not made for it, they would have to lose a lot, to stay in the USA, and survive what would be, for all practical purpose,  a hostile culture. 

 I actually mentioned this to the lady lawyer, and she retorted that the children will have to stay with the Haitian community. 

 Which brought me back to what was this lawyer was trying to do? OK, maybe she was motivated by greed, sorry, her profession, being paid by some organization(s) to import Haitian children. Or maybe she was truly delusional, and she really thought she was doing good. Indeed, how does it help the USA to put more of a burden on its exhausted social services? How does it help ten million Haitians to have American ladies come, swoop, and steal their children? 

 So now the numbers. In 1940, the USA had 140 million people. In 2011, the white Americans are 196 million, the blacks are about 20 million (I am using rough numbers, from memory). At this point the white population is not growing anymore (maybe because it is not getting enough help from the shrinking social services!) But the total population is 310 million, including 50 million Hispanics (who basically did not exist in 1940, they have been imported since). 

 Why so many Hispanics suddenly? Cheap labor, that’s why. Massive immigration has filled up the coffers of the corporate USA. This strategy of importing quasi slaves has stooped all the way down to infamy: the USA has refused to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The USA is the only country to refuse the children rights, with… Somalia, another country involved in ever less government, and ever more military spending. 

 Of course, Somalia is famous for its sea born pirates, while the USA is famous for its financial pirates. So both countries have, indeed, something else in common, besides child labor. The USA closes its collective eyes as Hispanic immigrant children go work the fields, with, or without their parents, who are paid little more, and just as trapped.

 All this immigration, far from lifting the population which was already there, as it used to, seems to have made its life harder. Why? 

 Well, in the past, the distant past, the government of the USA, thanks to presidents such as Jefferson or Jackson, had seized from Native American Indians, and others, gigantic portions of North America. Then they distributed them for a song to whomever wanted to take possession of them. This instantaneously made citizens of the USA, the richest, and healthiest people, in the world. By far. As more came in, they filled up the extremely needed manpower. 

 Nowadays the situation has completely changed. First, there are robots, and the like. Secondly the government is not in the habit of making free gifts to the middle class, as it did with FDR (when the government employed millions, in a few weeks), or the GI Bill (sending GIs to college for free), or LBJ’s “Great Society”, or even various social programs of Nixon. 

 Ever since Reagan, the government’s ideology has changed. It has become anti-governmental, and more and more resources were devoted to the rich (reaching a paroxysm under Obama, who cancelled the inheritance tax on billionaires, and lowered taxes on the hypoer rich more than Bush did, in his anxiety to show them he is such a good boy!)   

  Thus the main stream population of the USA, the white middle class, was less needed, and actually feared as a potential source of demands, requests, revendications, not to say unions, uncool behavior, or even outright rebellion. So the middle class is being robbed of power, and progressively starved.

 That starvation is an ongoing process, thanks to Obama, and his bipartisan partner, the Tea Party, who have never seen a tax on the rich they did not want to cut, paid for by cutting public services… to the point the economy of the USA is now grossly misfiring. For example cutting public transportation makes it hard for low income American workers to go to work, or to have any money left once they have transported themselves (and thus are incapable to contribute to economic activity, beyond their own work). But the rich lawyers in their fancy cars (as the lady above in her white Mercedes), or the multimillionaire president aspiring to become a hyper millionaire, don’t care to understand any of this.

 To import Haitian children is more of the same importation of humans to serve the for profit machine of the last three decades. It does not differ fundamentally from importing slaves in centuries past. Just replace the whip by dissemblance. Some will say: Oh, but the slaves had it hard! Not necessarily so much that they would rebel. Indeed, rebellions of black slaves in the USA were very rare. 

 Remember Jefferson’s children-slaves, who followed him back to the USA, willingly from France? Although they hesitated? Why? Because he made them false promises about freeing them, once they would be back to America. He was a full grown man, with an abyssal bend, they were just children. They believed him, and he lied. Maybe that should be mentioned in his beautiful memorial in Washington? Why not? 

 After talking to these Haitian unfortunates in the only language they knew, my impression was that they were made false promises too. And they seemed to guess it, but it was too painful, and pointless, for them to contemplate. Nobody relishes exploring the potential betrayal of those who profess love, and in whom one has believed. And, of course, they were only children. Three of them could not have been more than 13. 

 When I think back on it, a few days later, my impression is that I witnessed a pretty serious crime. The crime of a would be do-gooder, but still a crime.

 As the white Mercedes left, Athena pointed towards it a sanctimonious finger, and with a steady gaze, tears drying on her pink cheeks, declared: “Lady nose hurt bad!” Truth comes from the mouth of children.

*** 

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

Aphorisms, April 2011.

 

No Greenhouse, The Tornadoes Blew It Up…

The USA is the country which contributes the most to the emission of CO2, either directly, or indirectly, through its factories in China, fed by the power of radioactive, mercury laced coal.

The most deleterious consequence of CO2 emissions is the acidification of the oceans, which are turned into carbonic acid, according to the exact same reaction which makes all carbonated drinks interesting.

Another consequence of the CO2 poisoning of the biosphere is the rise of atrociously bad weather, as the energy pumped into the atmosphere goes up. That makes the atmosphere, well, much more energetic.

North America and Eurasia are the only continents which spread appreciably from the polar regions to the tropics. The continents do not have the thermal inertia and conductivity of the oceans, so air masses passing over continents are not rendered mild, as they are above the oceans. However, Eurasia has gigantic mountain ranges enforcing a continuous separation between the glacial north and the hot south. Those ranges spread from the Pyrenées in the West to unknown ranges in Eastern Siberia. The polar and tropical air masses are thus segregated in Eurasia.

In the USA, mountain ranges are absent in the Middle West, so polar air can battle hot humid air from the gulf of Mexico. As the greenhouse gets worse, the death toll in the heartland of the USA keeps on climbing. More than 300 dead on the outbreak of April 27-28, 2011.

An aggravating  factor is that so many American citizens live in so called “mobile homes”, shacks which were once on wheels, and have no basement (to take shelter in). Only Gypsies live in such conditions in Europe. And even then, not really, that would be unlawful. so the Gypsies mobile homes are still mounted on wheels, ready to take off before the local authorities get really irked.

Thus, the socio-economic organization of the USA is directly  at fault in the tornado massacres: too much of a consumer, debt driven economy (bringing the CO2 up, and the infrastructure down), too much dire poverty (hey, we want the rich to boast of their “philanthropy”, with their 17% tax rates, and no taxes on inheritance).

What is the plutocracy going to do about it? Don’t hold your breath. Probably pay some Stanford or Harvard professors to go around the Main Stream Media, to claim that the rise of energy in the atmosphere has nothing to do with tornadoes.

***

At War With China & Pakistan?

The Main Stream Media report that Pakistan has been urging Afghanistan to switch alliances from the USA led NATO to the holy alliance of the Taliban, Pakistan and China.

I have said all along that such was the real threat. But now it’s a problem, and it’s in the open.

What do these three have in common? Dictatorship. In other words forms of plutocracy which Lenin was not aware of when he was still healthy, and became suspicious of only when he was on his death bed, and (ex bank robber and terrorist) Stalin had taken control of the Soviets.

***

Syria, Or Why Tyrants Love Tyrants:

Some have protested that the leading democracies attack the bloody Libyan dictatorship just for its oil, instead of the blood it spilled over the last 42 years.  

But not so. First Libya does not have that much oil. It should be enough to give all 8 million Libyans a good life, for a little while longer, but Libya is not Saudi Arabia. Libyan peak oil is soon, Saudi peak oil not before another 15 years or so, and at considerably higher rate of extraction.

Politically; the French succeeded to persuade China, Russia and Brazil to not stand in the way at the United nations. The French have important high technology transfer programs with them all (nuclear submarine with Brazil, nuclear power plants with China, aircraft carrier/command ship and high speed trains with Russia). Economic ties (gas, cars, steel) are also playing an important role (even with India). But now Britain, France, and the USA “shall not rest” until Gaddafi is out.

So the muscular regimes or dictatorships, or plutocracies who have no love for their own minorities, and want to keep on cracking down in all serenity, have now understood the danger of democracy spreading. They object strongly to threats against Assad and his dictatorial system, because they know they are next. So this time, whatever the French want, they will try to veto them at the UN on intervening in Syria.

But of course, by the time France decided to intervene  in Libya, Gaddafi had killed thousands already, and Assad is not yet there. Once he gets there, and he will, the West, and democrats in general, will be better able to distinguish friend from foe, and the cleverly righteous from the stupid cowards…

***

 

Creeping Irrationality.

As the Roman empire matured, degenerating ever more, irrationality gained. Ever more. The same process can be observed nowadays. Why so?

Our leaders, the plutocrats, and their sycophants, are uncommon. By definition. Anything having to do with the commons is antagonist to them. Common sense is not just their enemy, but thoroughly alien.

There they go, per the grace of their god. What should they fear? Revolution? There will be no revolution as long as the debate is not about the true problems. So, instead of talking about the corruption of the political system by high finance, and the feeding of high finance with common tax money, or the collusion of international plutocracy with the dictatorships, the propaganda makes it so that the Main Stream Media talks of other things: overstretched Medicare in the USA, overstretched peripheral economies in Europe.

***

Is America Tribal? Or Just Rendered Stupid?

So Obama went on his knees, and produced the “long form” of his birth certificate. Trump, the plutocrat, proclaimed victory.

It is interesting how, 150 years after the Secession War, Americans are still basking in the glory of having a two track citizenship. There are real Americans, those, born in the USA, who can become president. And then there are second rate citizens, who can be deported, and are not good enough for the US presidency.

Let me be clear here: the worst problem is not with republicans. Most of these, in polls, did not believe that Obama was born in the USA. This showed, as usual, that most republicans have a diminished sense of reality. The worst problem was with the left wing media, which did not realize that, by being indignant about where Obama was born, they made the point of the racists, and the partisans of the “us versus them” mentality. Why? Because it OUGHT not to matter where Obama was born. And, moreover, on the letter of the law, it did not matter. So the left argued as an extreme right, while thinking of itself as, well, on the left!

So much for human rights, and equality! It is alarming to see that, 150 years after the Secession War, people still do not seem to understand that violating the neighbor’s rights violate their own, and that the tribalism of geographical origins is nothing to defend.

Let’s notice in passing that Sarkozy, the French president, himself the son of an immigrant from Hungary, suggested that naturalized citizens ought to have fewer judicial rights. But the outraged reaction of French public opinion, and of French democratic institutions, such as the Constitutional Court, made Sarkozy gave up completely on the idea. Having entertained it brought down Sarkozy in the polls, as low as a French president ever got. 

What is particularly grotesque is that millions of American parents have lived overseas, giving birth to American Untermenschen… Even if the families of each parent had been American for generations. And still most Americans and the Main Stream Media consider them to be a lower caste.

Oh, and what does the Constitution of the USA say?

The Constitution reads as follows: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States

The US Constitution does not say you have to be born INSIDE the USA to be a natural born Citizen.  Actually John Mc Cain was born in Panama. True, the US Supreme Court messed up the “natural born” common law idea by deciding at some point that Native Americans were not Americans. (That was rescinded in 1924.)

Barack Obama’s mother was a citizen, a child of two natural born citizens who always lived in the USA. She lived in the USA for more than seventeen years before his birth. That made Barack Obama a natural born Citizen no matter where he was born. One would think.

Hence, Obama is a natural born citizen from two independent criteria. So why to talk about this non subject with so much enthusiasm for so long? Either the Main Stream Media is stupid, or wants people to be stupid, or both.

***

How democracy Turns Plutocratic:

A democracy is as wealthy as the many who compose it. It is complicated to keep people individually well provided for. That is a seduction of plutocracy: only the wealth of the few matter matters, and they call that an economy. And how does plutocracy happen? By transferring wealth from the many, to the few. The few (oligoi) manage (nomos) the house (eco), and the many are left to live in the outhouse. There we go.

What we have now is more a politically driven phenomenon than an economic one. The fact that the presidents of the USA, for decades, have been immensely wealthy men, and similarly for most of the American Senate and Congress, has a lot to do with it. The extent of that corruption is different from that occurring in normally functioning democracies.

***

Geological Realism Against Unreal Plutocracy:

The entire Pacific plate seems to be on the move. From archeogeological studies, we know that the 9 Richter Cascadia quake entails a San Andrea quake south.

And look at the geography of California: it sure appears as if the land West Of the San Andrea fault, a part of the Pacific Plate compacted by the American plate, periodically falls into the ocean. How nice a tsunami does that make?

Although the San Andrea is classified as a “transform” fault (sideways motion), clearly the entire West Coast is, overall, a massive subduction zone, a giant pile up (a plate is sinking below another, never to be seen again).

Indeed the American plate heads westward ever more, crushing and… subducting the Pacific plate. As proven by the volcanic range which extends from British Columbia to Mexico, including on the way the massive Long Valley Caldera.

So the fact that the Pacific plate one moves north westward does not make the overall subduction go away. Whatever geologists say. But of course, if the geologists assert that no subduction quakes can happen in California, they ingratiate themselves to the powers that be, and their departments will be well funded. Reciprocally, should their insinuations irritate the powers that be, they will be, at best, ignored. At worst, their departments will get de-funded.

Farfetched? Exaggerated? How many tsunamis do you need to be warned? Japan was hit by three massive tsunamis in 30 years prior to 2011. It was known that the Senai plain had been hit in 860 CE by a tsunami, which went four miles inland. How many miles do you need?

Geologist Shishikura and his colleagues told the government. The powerful Trade Ministry dismissed the evidence. Trading first, tsunamis cannot be traded. Nuclear power plants were left by the sea, defended only by sea walls corresponding to recent wave activity. Fukushima had a 5 meter wave, so they put a 5.5 meter wall. When the tsunami came, it was 15 meters.  

Thus, ultimately, expect a Richter 10 quake along the West North American coast someday (after all, there was a 9.6 Richter quake in Chili, in 1960, same plate, similar situation).

But 10 Richter quakes are not something plutocracy has to worry about (its recent, expensive homes being the most capable of resisting quakes). it has only to worry about geologists, engineers and construction types working hard. If they work so hard, who would pay for them? The plutocracy. And that is insufferable. The plutocracy does not need arrogant geologists and engineers with their science, and , contractors with their big muscles.

The plutocracy needs valet parking, servants, servers, valets, private security, goons, sycophants and paid escorts.

Thus West Coast media and politicians ignore the quake danger, they are paid to ignore the danger, however indirectly, another aspects of neglect and complacency which has its root in the class structures of the USA.

***

Riling Against High Speed Rail Because Is Where The Money Is:

University professors play an important role in fabricating an ideology compatible with the plutocracy in power. Under the USSR, professors were generally in the pocket of power. When Sakharov, or Solzhenitsyn turned against their masters, they  were rare exceptions who proved the rule.

A week or so ago, a Stanford professor blasted High Speed trains in the USA, claiming that, worldwide, only two Very High Speed lines are profitable. One in France, the Paris-Lyon line, one in Japan, the Osaka-Tokyo line. I don’t know about Japan, but the statement is blatantly false about France.

This is subtle ideology transfer. The gross message: “High Speed Rail is bad”, is accompanied by disinformation, if not lies. Indeed  the definition of High Speed Rail is 300 km/h in France, but only 200 km/h in the USA. Most of the French main lines go at 200 km/h. Most are profitable (SNCF, a private company, being overall profitable, although most of its mileage is internally subsidized  small lines in the boondocks).

In truth, France’s very high speed lines are profitable. So much so, most use double deck trains. The Paris-Lyon-Marseilles, Paris-London, Paris-Brussels  lines are very profitable. New lines are established with a mixture of private and local state financing, and would not be engaged in, if not guaranteed profitable (the local city will not sink municipal funds into nothingness).

Electric trains fed by nuclear power have at most 3% of the CO2 production of other means of transportation. Something to keep in mind next time very warm air mixes with cold air in the neighborhood.

***

Patrice Ayme

Anti-French Racism In The USA.

SOME LIES ABOUT FRANCE & ISLAM, EXPOSED & EXPLAINED.

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patrice Ayme