The Fiscal-Military Anglo-Saxon Model

SO CALLED LIBERALISM IS AS LIBERAL AS AN OCCUPATION ARMY

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Abstract: The meat of the so called Anglo-Saxon liberalism was actually a leveraged war machine that entangled finance and military. Forget misleading plutocratic propaganda. The invisible hand was more about war than it was about commerce. When Napoleon assimilated Britain  to a nation of shopkeepers, he did not know what he was talking about, as he found out soon enough.

The Anglo-Saxon “liberal” model, is, first of all, a war machine of the few against the many. It worked, against France, from the eighteenth century, until the twentieth century, as I show, by evoking major historical facts which are generally superbly ignored.

Happenstance does not a logic make. Especially when the happenstance is military (England was lucky to defeat France), and the logic economical (there were other European economic models; that plutocratic leveraging defeated France at that particular moment of military history proves nothing in matters economic: if Louis XIV’s mighty army had invaded England, as Louis was begged to do, by the king of England, himself, none of this would have happened!)

The plutocrats’ greatest enemy is the socializing European Union. The EU is also turning into the plutocrats’ greatest source of profit, as they dismantle it. It is time for the Europeans to understand that they were naïve and self contradictory to build peaceful altruistic Europe as a servant of an economic model which rested on war and exploitation.

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CELEBRATING THE ANGLO-SAXON LEVERAGE DEBT PLUTOCRACY IS CELEBRATING MILITARY VICTORIES:

What has the Anglo-Saxon economic model been successful at? How did it arise?

It’s a long story. It goes all the way back to when Julius Caesar and his generals were astounded by the immense Celtic, ocean going fleets which opposed them as they conquered “Long Haired Gaul” (“Gallia Comida”). These were the three quarters of present day France which were not part (yet!) of the Roman republic. The Romans invented technology to topple the tall Celtic ships, and won that war. Nevertheless, Ireland and Scotland escaped the Roman grasp… in a very long war.

Having the ability to navigate throughout and off the British archipelago stayed a must, though. Who dominated the seas, dominated the isles. The sea was how to invade, and how one got invaded. The Vikings demonstrated this, by eradicating many places, including much of Ireland.

It was nicer to make war on the continent than in the isles, if one were an islander. Thus, the nearly five centuries long “100 year war” was fought on said continent. By 1600, Elizabeth I had been seduced by the West Country Men, immensely nasty plutocrats who, after conquering Ireland, turned to North America.

Full leveraged, all-market, all plutocratic “Anglo-Saxon” finance is four centuries old (for the Plutocratic aspect) and three centuries old (for the leveraging aspect). It was devised not as a “free market“, because no market was ever free from the state. West Country Men used to line up their lawns with skulls, this is what they meant by “market“: abject terror. Neither was it “liberal”, because there is nothing very “liberal” at conquering half of the planet in 100 years.

In truth the Anglo-Saxon economic model’s military aspect was no accident. It was designed as a fiscal-military system. As I will explain, Europe, which has neither fiscal, nor military aspects, copied that system, apparently not knowing what it was for.

Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, closely tied to his co-investors, the West Country Men,  hated the “vile custome of tobacco“, personally, and wrote scathingly about it. Although, all well considered, he lowered the tax rate on it, so as to maximize the tax revenue that tobacco brought. Tobacco made the American colony profitable. We all have to negotiate with evil, it seems, when profits loom.

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NO WEST COUNTRY PLUTOCRATS IN JAPAN, ALTHOUGH THEY TRIED:

Ireland, North America, made the difference of Britain with, say, Japan. Japan tried the West Country Men trick, and shogun Hideyoshi invaded Korea with enormous armies comprising 200,000 Samurais. However, Korea, especially backed up by Ming China, was no push over. The Korean Navy was able to isolate and starve the Japanese into ignominious retreat, although the Korean population suffered enormous losses.

There was 8,000 years of civilizational progress between American Indians and East Asians. So the two tremendously expensive Japanese invasions failed. Japan stayed bottled up in Japan.

The “virtuous” inferno of building a blue sea Navy to serve transoceanic plutocracy never developed in Asia, because Asia was all too developed everywhere and invading neighbors was unprofitable.

It would take three more centuries of breakneck techno-military “progress” for Europe to be able to dominate Asia by sheer force, easily and profitably (and that lasted only a few days with Japan in the 19C, when the American “Black Ships” showed up in Tokyo’s harbor).

Japan tried the West Country trick again in the late 19C, with Korea again, and Formosa. First it worked grandiosely. By the 20C Japan extended the method to Russia, then China, and French Indochina. It all ended in the terrible defeat of 1945, when the very spirit of Japan got so crushed that its population is now collapsing (like that of fellow fascist countries, Germany and Italy, but worse, as Japanese racism and isolationism are greater, thus offering no compensation through immigration; funny how the worms of defeated psychology multiply in time).

To serve the plutocrats, a strong Navy was a must, and the Bank of England was created to serve it: its profits were used to finance the Royal Navy. Thus a tight seal was created between the military and finance. That, in turn, allowed to use tremendous leverage in finance. Because there is nothing like an invasion to demolish markets.

The markets were secure, because of the Navy was there to repeal invasions, and the state of emergencies that the threat of such would bring, say in France (the plutocrats had conspired to double the Dutch invasion of England of 1688, with a coup, so that is the exception that reinforces the rule). Also, because the Bank of England, the lender of last resort, was, actually, the Navy, in a sense, top plutocrats had nothing much to fear. And it was clear who was giving the orders; admirals could be hanged, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire noticed.

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INVADING WITH LEVERAGE, SUCCEEDING WITH GUSTO:

When leverage succeeds, it succeeds like nothing else. After being injected the Dutch mania for leverage, the Anglo-Saxon liberal system became operative in Great Britain in the Eighteenth century. Plutocratic propagandists have hypnotized much into believing that it is economically superior. Militarily, certainly superior. As it turned out.

Military superiority makes an empire economically superior, if the military superiority is translated into ownership. The Anglo-Saxons, circa 1900 CE, and its extension, the American empire, circa 1950, owned, or controlled, more than half the planet, insuring wealth, in a way which has nothing to do with intrinsic economic superiority.

Within 150 years, a giant Anglo-American empire came to cover the planet. North America, Australia, among others, became Neo-Europes of the Anglo persuasion. At some point South Asia and other parts belonged to the British empire. The USA defeated Spain in the Philippines, and replaced it, to a great extent in Latin America, And so on.

Those empires were actually military empires, carefully financed. Careful financing is how Britain had, generally, a better, bigger Navy than bigger, better France. So the Anglo-Saxon financial system was actually a fiscal-military system. (Fiscal comes from Franco-Latin for “treasury”.)

That British system blossomed as a weapon against France, and then the world, both of them, much bigger, to start with. Hence the necessity of using leverage.

Ironically enough, it was rather curious that French socialists would adopt the Dutch-British financial-military system to found Europe in peace, union and prosperity. Even more curious, maybe out of abysmal ignorance, the makers of Europe adopted only part of the Anglo-saxon model. They forgot both one of its head, the fiscal part (the present European Union and Eurozone do not have a treasury, just a central bank). They also forgot its other head, the military one. What was left, it seems increasingly, was a spastic, decerebrated corpse.

So let’s recap a bit.

In the mid Eighteenth Century, Europe’s greatest power was France. France had more people than Russia, and three times the population of Britain. It was the most solid economic block in Europe, and the most developed in the world, with roads and canals all over.

(Unfortunately for French demographics, in a village called Condom, an artisan discovered a better realization of a new device; Condom denies it, although it is located on the river “Baise” (“kiss”, as an euphemism); what is sure is that the French population stopped towering because of contraception, and Napoleon’s devastation; all the growth came from immigration.)

Mighty Spain had been defeated by France, after 150 years of war. That 150 year war gave birth to the Netherlands, during the Eighty Years War of Independence of the Netherlands. Each time Spain had to repress its unruly province, it found itself at war with next door France. The Netherlands, ancestral homeland  of the Franks, was too big to fail, as far as France was concerned.

And, of course, the Dutch came to understand that they were too big to fail, as far as France was concerned, and developed great taste for speculation and leverage. Thus the Low Countries, and independent part of France (the ex “Germania Inferior” of the Romans) learned to take great risks.

This may have created a moral hazard; the Dutch may have believed they could get away with anything, as long as they used massive leverage. Since big daddy France was always coming to their rescue, and they attributed that to their genius.

Finally France crushed the Spanish Squares, the elite Iberian army formations, starting with the battle of Rocroi.

Then the Dutch William Of Orange, unable to become king in his republican homeland, made an arrangement with bankers to put together a 20 miles long fleet and a highly professional army, and, after two Dutch-English sea wars, invaded England (November 1688 CE).

The main reason of state for the invasion was to prevent further alliance between England and France. After grabbing power, the Dutch proceeded to make a coalition, including England, to attack France. The Dutch bankers who had financed the army came with it. By 1700, the top two powers in the world were the Netherlands and France. That’s how the present British monarchy arose: Francophobic Dutch poodles. (Dutch politics had long been divided between a very Francophile faction, as, fundamentally, the Netherlands were a piece of Francia, and, of course, a faction opposed to that; the Anglo-French “100 year war” started there.)

The general coalition led to a succession of wars to prevent French hegemony. However, by 1714, the war of the Spanish succession, although it expelled France from the Netherlands, Bavaria, and Italy, ended curiously. As the late Spanish monarch had wished it, Spain, and her gigantic world empire, was ruled by a Bourbon. France was ruled by Bourbon too: Louis XIV. Philippe de France, grandson of Louis XIV, and second in succession for the French throne, became Felipe V, king of Spain.

In North America, French territory, from Louisiana, through Colorado, Canada to Quebec, a Franco-Indian alliance, completely surrounded the 13 white English colonies, and blocked their invasion of Indian lands.

The Anglo-Saxon, Bible inspired model of negotiations with the Indians was for government to offer money for their scalps.

In the second half of the eighteenth century something strange happened. Britain defeated France and Spain. It was a bit as if nowadays France defeated the USA and China, in a few decades. How were France and Spain thoroughly defeated by smallish England, within a few years? (Trafalgar in 1805, where the combined French and Spanish were sunk and Waterloo in 1815, were the final nails in the coffin of Franco-Spanish supremacy).

Great Britain was able to defeat France through financial engineering, extensive leveraging, a private-public devotion of the state to war.

The Seven Year War, a world war, was fought from India to the Canada. It is known in the USA as the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763). It was started by an officer in the British army, who doubled as a land speculator, George Washington.

Britain spent (the equivalent of) trillions to pay for her superlative Royal Navy, and for paying countries such as Prussia to attack France from behind. This was all financed by leveraged bankers who thought they would inherit the world, if they financed massively the upstart British. And they did.

By the time of the so called Napoleonic wars, the house of Rothschild financed both sides, a familial system that was duplicated by many other plutocratic families, many of them Jewish (gentiles did not care where the money came from, and the position of wealthy Jews, both in and out of the system, made them natural conspirators; from these incontrovertible facts the extravagant racist ranting of Adolf Hitler, his predecessors, and friendly non Jewish plutocrats originated, according to the false and misleading equation: Plutocracy = Judaism)… the same familial system of covering both sides was followed by Nazi supporters (example: the Thyssen family).

As Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, pointed out: “A financial system… constantly improved can change a government’s position. From being originally poor it can make a government so rich that it can throw its grain into the scales of the balance between the great European powers.”

He should have known: he was financed by Britain, and by various exactions against Poles and Jews. Following Frederick upside down, one may deduce that a financial system, constantly worsening, can change a government’s position, from being originally rich to so poor that it become a grain of sand in history. This is where we are at.

In the Seven Year war, France lost Canada, part of West Indies, (rich sugar exporters), India…

The vengeful French counter-strike against Britain was thoroughly counter-productive: France, under the incoherent leadership of Louis XVI, created what would become for France an all too often fair weather friend, the somewhat ingrate USA.

Moreover something strange happened: France was ruined by EXACTLY THE SAME FINANCIAL MECHANISM which is ruining country after country nowadays. France had to roll her long term debt with short term borrowing. The War of Independence of America had cost (the equivalent of) trillions. If France had spent as much during the Seven Year War, she would have kept Canada.

By 1789, half of the French budget was going to paying interest on the national debt. In other words, what threatens to happen now to many powers, including the USA, happened then to the world’s greatest power.

Louis XVI ought to have refused to pay the plutocrats one more cent. Instead he wobbled, as usual, and convoked the General Estates, in the hope that the latter could somehow persuade the hyper wealthy to pay more taxes. The hyper wealthy had blocked for years attempts at fiscal reform by enlightened ministers of Louis XVI such as Necker (Adam Smith’s professor) or Turgot… They did it again, but the Third Estate had long lost patience, and now that it was all together in Paris, it could raise hell.

The Third Estate renamed itself the “Commons” (“Commune”) and proclaimed itself a Constituent Assembly (with the aim of writing an advanced constitution and defaulting on the debt). The incorrigible Sade, a victim of Lettre de Cachet, a resident in an apartment at the Bastille, screamed from his window that people were being murdered at his jail. Sade was believed by the rabble. It was a lie, but the Bastille was taken, and occupied by the outraged People. Louis XVI ordered the army to crack down. La Fayette, of American fame, prestigious head of the army, and a strong enemy of slavery, refused to fire on the People.

Three years later, Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia and their fellow plutocrats invaded France, which reacted by proclaiming herself a republic, one man, one vote. The British invasion was repelled in Toulon, Provence, by a brilliant plan from an artillery captain, Napoleon. The Prussian were repelled by new, state of the art guns and explosives at Valmy, invented for the occasion (these innovative gunnery would help Napoleon’s victories).  

Great Britain became a global hegemony in the 19C, with France playing second fiddle.

Thus an important paradigm was created, even among the victims and opponents of the leveraged financial system that Britain profited from: the rule of leveraged plutocracy and its fractional reserve system had brought economic supremacy. They forgot the important detail that this happened through the rule of empire imposed by maximum force, and the most vicious morality imaginable, that of the “Devil” (Pluto) unrestrained.

Tellingly, early American presidents knew how the sausage was made: after all German troops paid by Britain had fought against the Colonists. And after all, those colonists who opposed independence were the richest ones. American revolutionaries proposed to establish the “Order of the Leech” for them, or to honor them with titles such as “Their Rapaciousness”. The American rebellion is called a Revolution, because it was fundamentally anti-plutocratic.

The first American presidents were highly hostile to central banking and other plutocratic conspiracies of Rothschildian inspiration. To destroy central banking was viewed by Jackson, on his deathbed, as his greatest achievement, (although he had doubled USA controlled territory under his presidency).

This mighty aura of the invisible hand of financial leverage had infused the superficially learned minds of a core component of mostly French socialists. When they pushed for the European integration, they integrated in their model the very same system which had made Great Britain so powerful, thinking they would get powerful, like those savages who get strong by eating the brains of their enemies. Instead, they got kuru.

Indeed, so doing, though, they made the same mistake as the Islamists did in the Ninth and Tenth centuries. Islam had been conceived as a war machine against the Roman empire (Muhammad himself said). It was highly successful that way. But an ideology of conquest is not an ideology of peaceful progress.

Many times in history an ideology of conquest was unable to switch to a sustainable state. The Mongols presented with an obvious example, and not just in China, but all over. As the Yuan, they were able to hold onto China for just a century (1271 to 1368 CE).

Islam was a perfect war ideology tuned to defeat the Greco-Romans, and time was of the essence,  Muhammad explained. In a few decades, Islam conquered most of Greco-Roman territory (before being stopped on the sea by Constantinople advanced technology, and on land, by excellent Frankish steel).

Once installed, Islam turned to increasing fascism and theocracy (the Qur’an and the “Sharia”, were invented twenty years, and a full century, respectively, after Muhammad’s death; it’s probable that Muhammad would not have been amused).

As centuries passed, the countries Islam had subjugated, converted increasingly to the Muslim faith, and senseless Sharia. Left to its own instruments, Islamist civilization stagnated ever more (this happened in several distinct, unrelated places, demonstrating the limitation of overwhelming theocracy).

In total contrast, the Franks who took power in Gaul around 480 CE, were able to marry an ideology of conquest with one of bon vivant (the good life). In the end, they proved the successful nemesis of military Islam.

Similarly the great Anglo Saxon financial machine was conceived, under Dutch influence, as a war machine against France (ironically, as France saved repeatedly the Netherlands from Spanish occupation, as I said, creating a massive moral hazard, which adversely affected France in the 18 C).

The French socialist builders of Europe, which is extended France, used, to build Europe, the so called free market. It is a free market, because it is free for plutocrats. On the free market, the European states were also supposed to shop for money, as if states had become housewives. Now they are desperate housewives.

A system which had been built for war, against, well, not just the world, but, first of all, France, was adopted enthusiastically by somewhat demented, and certainly deluded… French socialists, probably self congratulating about their own openmindedness of borrowing tenets of “capitalism”.

And those forward looking Europeans did on the ruins of Europe, destroyed, well, by fascist regimes financed and organized by Wall Street in the 1920s and 1930s. (I include in the concept of “Wall Street” corporations such as Texaco, and Standard Oil, IBM, Ford, GM, etc.; I conflate finance, the CEO class, and corporations)

In other words, from lack of historical knowledge, or outright corruption, the builders of Europe established their house for the hens to be guarded by the foxes.

Why? Because, naturally, the states leveraged themselves as much as they could. That came to mean that they would borrow more to pay interest on the preceding debt. This could be survivable only if that debt shrank, relatively speaking. That can happen with high growth and high inflation, as the debt would become small relative to (nominal) GDP.

But the European Central Bank got the mandate of little (2%) inflation. And high growth became impossible as the population aged. All the more since the initial debt was used for current spending, by the… states (which acted like crazed  consumers with many credit cards, using the latest to pay the oldest, a Ponzi scheme onto themselves).

Debt is a good strategy if, and only if, the capital it brings allows to indulge in some activity that brings in much more revenue than the interest on the debt one has to service. Spending debt on welfare is not so, except if the money is spent on potentially revenue enhancing research, and, or on revenue enhancing education (of the young).

The small croc is eaten by the big one. This is where we are at. A naïve attempt at beating them by joining them, and only ruin to show for it!

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EUROPE’S ORIGINAL SIN: KNEELING AT THE FOOT OF THE GOLDEN CALF:

It is traditional among Anglo-Saxon historians and economists to celebrate the Anglo-Saxon economic model. They do not realize that they are congratulating themselves about a piece of military history rather than a piece of economics.

What came to be identified (unfairly) as the Anglo-Saxon financial system has been much admired, because it has been so successful. This is said, again and again, and taken for granted.

So successful that model was considered to be that French socialists, such as Delors, and other forward looking Europeans, adopted it for the whole of Europe. The “free market” could do no wrong. And they made the free market the enabler of the European currency union. Namely they decided that European countries would purchase money on the free market… of money.

That was, of course, a total surrender of sovereignty. Indeed, the number one prerogative of the state, since times immemorial, has been to strike coinage. That had the distinct advantage to make the adoption of their European integration project more savory to wealthy supporters and banks.

And indeed, the later can celebrate: not only they have the Greeks on their knees, but now even the French and the German taxpayers.

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LATEST MISLEADING IDEA FROM SOPHISTICATED PLUTOCRATIC PROPAGANDA:

Paul Krugman, who hates the idea of European Union in general, and the euro in particular, now is trying to extract himself out of his own contradictions in Original Sin And The Euro Crisis by claiming that:

“how can I reconcile my scorn for warnings about bond vigilantes with what is happening to Italy?… developing countries were especially vulnerable to financial crises because they borrowed in foreign currency…. The key point is that by joining the euro, Italy took a bite of the apple — it converted its advanced-country status, as a nation issuing debt in its own currency, into original sin, with debts in someone else’s currency (Europe’s in principle, Germany’s in practice). That is the root of its new vulnerability.”

Well, this is silly. The only reason why German GDP is larger than French GDP is that the German population is larger (a bit more than 80 million, against France’s 66 millions). But, at this point, the German population is sort of shrinking, whereas France has the highest birthrate in Europe, enough to grow, even without a legal immigration of 200,000 a year. Relatively soon France ought to be larger than Germany. Now if one adds the population of Italy (60 million), and Spain (40 million), one clearly sees that Germany is no giant of the euro zone.

There is a problem with the price of bonds, true. But who controls this? Well, not Germany. The “bond vigilantes” Krugman claims to scorn, most of them capitalists operating from their Anglo-Saxon dens, in other words the leveraged plutocrats, control the price of bonds.

So Krugman’s latest blast against the euro is another devious viewpoint. Krugman is paid for his nationalistic, plutocratic serving stance. This is how he started his career, as an extreme leftist serving Marxist president Reagan, hand in hand with democrat Summers, as twenty year old geniuses who brought us the economy and finance we have now (Marxist by today’s standards, of course).

The worse part is that Krugman has achieved the status of Very Serious Person. He goes to europe and injects his venom. Last he talked in Mainz, next to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt sits the European Central Bank, the ECB, which refuses to use Quantitative Easing (which means that it leaves that monopoly to the American central bank, the Fed, and leaves total freedom for derivatives armed speculators manipulating bond prices). Who heads the ECB? Or, more exactly, what?

Not too hard a question. Of course. A ex senior partner at Goldman Sachs, Draghi,  now heads the ECB. Draghi: what a drag, what a lousy joke. Draghi will drag Europe under Goldman Sachs.

In truth, those who hate always find a reason to hate. All the more when they have interest to do so. In all this, we are very far from the anti-plutocratic roots of the French and American revolutions of 1789 (when the constitutions were written).

The Dark Side is how humanity has moderated its own worse demographic and ecological excesses, as it evolved, over millions of years.

Except, nowadays, with high technology, everything has changed. We need new wisdom, not to go back to an economic model equipping the few with immense wrath, and whose greatest gift has been the extermination of entire continents’ populations.

Europe was supposed to introduce new wisdom after the disaster of fascism unleashed in the period which one hoped had ended in 1945.

Instead, Europe embraced the very ideology and financial system that caused the terrible wars between 1754 and 1815 CE. And caused the repeat of roughly the same, between the 1860s (when the  wealthy landowner, the plutocrat Bismarck, guide of Prussia, went on a rampage, starting with Denmark) and 1945 CE. Stupid.

A leveraged fund, MF Global, founded by an ex governor of New Jersey, Corzine, who used to head Goldman Sachs (strange that name is all over, from Greece to the white house) just failed. Its leverage was 100. Its real assets were 1/100 of what it theoretically “managed”. With leverage like that, the debts of countries such as Greece or Italy are easily manipulated. Don’t expect Krugman to focus on that anytime soon, he is supposed to divert attention towards other things.

Leveraged finance, pushed to its extreme, leads to leveraged war. Time for a re-think.

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Patrice Ayme

Right Makes Might?

WHEN CONFRONTING EVIL, BIPARTISANSHIP IS NOT THE ANSWER. 

Witness against himself Obama has made bipartisan thinking infamous, and rightly so. When confronted to the worst extremism, such as the Tea Party, he crosses the bridge, and offers himself as a target. This way Tea Partisans need not vote for Perry, they may as well vote for Obama. Hey, everybody will win! The audacity to win! As one of the “senior advisers” of Obama, 40 years old, had the impudence to point out.

Bipartisan thinking was not invented by Obama, even in Anglo-Saxon countries. Some notables of the American revolution switched sides. Bipartisanship was already practiced by Pontius Pilatus. Earlier Plato befriended the tyrant of Syracuse, while claiming to be a partisan of the “Republic“. (Thus Christian despots did not burn Plato’s books, recognizing in him a kindred spirit.)

Confronted to Hitler, many crossed the bridge to him, in the name of openness, bipartisanship, and thus enabled him (among the first to do so was G.W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott, one of Hitler’s closest collaborators, head of American-Silesian; thus it was not surprising that Bush covered his family’s tracks by exhibiting the opposite attitude, loudly proclaiming a vast gap between himself and evil! Very crafty.)

Facile, or bipartisan, or not partisan, thinking incites some people to still make the case for Auschwitz. That they do not understand this does not excuse them. After all, most of the Germans who enabled Auschwitz did not understand that they did so. Actually they did not even know what Auschwitz was, nor wanted to conceive of it. That would have been un-German.

 People who keep on making the case for Auschwitz can persevere in this, because not enough contempt, condemnation, and, first of all, revelation, has been heaped over them, their deliberate obscurantism and confusionism, and their criminal attitude of tolerance for “infamy”. (To use Voltaire’s non bipartisan semantics.)

 Roger Cohen wrote an editorial, “Score One For Interventionism” in the New York Times. As Roger puts it:” Libya will not end the debate on intervention. But it confirms that the West must be prepared at times to fight for its values.”

 Yes. One should not even have to wait for such a confirmation anymore. May 8, 1945 should have been enough confirmation. Remember Auschwitz? The threat thereof incited the most famous intervention of the spirit of the enlightenment of the West: when France and Britain declared war to Hitler and his criminal supporters. It took five years and eight months, but, ultimately, Western democracy, and the enlightenment of the West, crushed the Nazi barbarity.

 So I expressed in a comment to the NYT, my agreement with Mr. Cohen:

“Score TWO for interventionism, as France threw out the dictator in Ivory Coast a few months earlier. So let’s recapitulate; France won two wars in a year, and the USA lost two, in a decade. Something else: France and Britain started the intervention in Bosnia, but, at the time, were too insecure to push it to victory quickly. France also intervened way late in Rwanda. Of this, no more.
Civilization needs to be enforced. “

 I was a bit taken aback: just one reader of the NYT approved what I said, whereas more than 80 clueless individuals approved what I view as a tissue of the usual irrelevance, lies and stupidities from a  guy called Richard Brauer, based in South Africa. That was more than twice the number of approvals any other comment got, which means that such mass murderous friendly thinking is widely shared by many who read the NYT.

 Brauer made his mass murdering criminal friendly thinking transparent. It rests on a confusion of notions, and inventions.

 1) The first point Richard Brauer made was that “Bosnia is still  a mess“. Thus, according to Brauer, keeping order is more important than preventing holocausts. The West should not have saved millions in Bosnia, because it is still a mess.

  Presumably, if Hitler had killed another 200 million people in Europe, it would have been less of a mess, and, thus, according to Brauer, and his admirers, a greater success. Mass murdering fascists, such as the Nazis are always fond to celebrate the “New Order“. (I was myself bombed, once, by a French fascist organization called “Ordre Nouveau“.)

 Only fascists worry about order, rather than worry about human lives. So, actually, Brauer is somebody who has embraced a central tenet of fascism. To great applaud of the pseudo left wing readership of the New York Times. OK, Stalin, a genuine fascist, was also pseudo left wing (and boasted to Churchill that he killed even more Soviets than Hitler did.) Hitler too: not only did he invent the expression: National Sozialist, but he craftily borrowed socialist and left wing themes all over, to improve his appeal, as he cynically explained himself!

 It is as if Brauer wrote this from the perspective of an old South African white racist supremacist fascist. Richard, tell us ain’t so.  

 That Bosnia is, or is not, a mess was not the reason to intervene in Bosnia for those whom superior morality guides (by opposition to those that Hitler, Ghadafi, and the like, guide). Of course if the Serbian fanatics had been left to their own instruments, they would have killed all the Muslims, and all the Croats. Indeed, as Brauer implicitly points out, order in Bosnia would be much better by now.

 Similarly if whites South Africans  had done like the white North Americans, and killed all the Indians, I mean, the black, order would reign much better in South Africa, and Brauer would rest easy. Much better order, mein Fuerer, and purity of essence, besides.

 Historically, under a UN mandate, French and British troops were interposed between the civilians in Sarajevo, and the rogue (“Bosnian”) Serb army. Heavy Serb guns reached encircled Sarajevo, impacting it with thousands of high explosive shells, from 30 kilometers away.

 The French, allied to Serbia in 1914, were leery to counter-attack the descendants of their ex-allies. But they had to save the population Serb fanatics were determined to exterminate.

 The French finally used counterforce strikes: once a flying Serbian shell was detected on radar, the computer found where it originated from, and French shells were directed there. This destroyed the Serb guns, and allowed to stop the destruction of Sarajevo. The depredations of the fanatics kept on going, though, in the rest of Bosnia, and the siege of Sarajevo was not lifted. Years later NATO had to intervene in full. (Now Serbia is 99% collaborating with civilization, and improving by the day, in its anxiety to integrate the European Union, which is the final solution to the Yugoslav problem, for all concerned.)

 2) The second point that the fascism loving Brauer made was that “It’s way too early to judge the USA a success, even on idealistic Western terms. We’re pretty far from a stable and democratic country at this point.” OK, I replaced in Brauer’s original version, the word “Libya” by “USA”. It sounds just as pertinent. If the USA is neither stable nor democratic at this point, why to require it for Libya?

 3) The third point Brauer made was that “the rest of the world sees it [the intervention in Libya] as a naked grab by Western governments on behalf of their energy companies.”

  Brauer does not seem to have observed that most of the world is the West. At least, officially speaking. Indeed, the UN Charter reflects the basic credo of the West. All the Americas are in the West (except for Cuba, which is not too clear about where it wants to be). Most of Africa is in the West (OK, except Zimbawe, Sudan, and a few limbo states). Most of Eurasia is in the West, too, philosophically speaking (even Russia, officially speaking; the notable exception being China, which is a collaborator and accomplice of the West, or, at least, its plutocracy). Did I forget Australia and Antarctica?

 This is exactly why France was able to persuade most powers to support, or the rest to tacitly approve her intervention in Libya. France acted in the name of the principles of the West, id est of the principles of the Rest. This is by now the standard French tactic. It works if and only if genuine. 

 For Brauer, and his ignorant, or malevolent admirers, if the “rest of the world” believes in a complete, counterfactual idiocy, we should consider that a problem. However real problems are not defined by counter-factual idiots.

 As I said many times, Ghadafi was giving the West all the oil it needed. 80% of Libyan oil was going to France and Italy, which had, therefore no motivation to engage in war according to those who think that the war was about oil. Actually the oil flow from Libya has been stopped for more than 6 months now, so the oil men ought to have been on Ghadafi’s side, which they were, indeed.

 The historical development of establishing a set of reason for revolution in the Arabo-Muslim world and in Libya in particular, was due to philosophers, not to oil traffickers, and other plutocrats.

 This is something important to understand. In the 1930s, when France tried to do something against Hitler, American officials argued that France was being imperialistic, and that Germany should be left to be all it wanted to be, preserved from the terrible French imperialistic intervention.  That argument was entertained as early as 1934.

 There was just one fly in that ointment; the Ambassador of the USA in Berlin, the historian Dodd, agreed 100% with his imminent colleague, the French ambassador in Berlin, Francois-Poncet. What did Washington do? In 1939, it replaced Dodd by a pro-Nazi ambassador. The best way to encourage Hitler to be firm with France.

 The fact remains that philosophers were singularly silent in the 1930s (many, most of a new generation, fought courageously, in the 1940s, against Nazism, and died that way; but by then the infuriated Nazi dragon had escaped the grotto).

 In the 1930s, Anglo-Saxon plutocrats collaborated with Hitler and other fascists, because they augmented their profits that way. This collaboration was so enormous that it allowed Hitler to survive the initial shock against France and Britain (although the Nazis losses, by the time France fell, were already considerable, comprising more than 50,000 elite troops and officers; by the time Hitler had to attack the USSR, he had won in Greece, but his victorious paratroops had been wiped out; by the time American soldiers fought their first shots with the Nazis, the French had inflicted the decisive defeat to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, deep in the desert).

 Plutocrats collaborated with Ghadafi intensely. Thus they had no interest to fight him. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal gives an example, August 30 2011. Here we go:

 “ TRIPOLI—On the ground floor of a six-story building here, agents working for Moammar Gadhafi sat in an open room, spying on emails and chat messages with the help of technology Libya acquired from the West….

Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, [which] installed the monitoring center. A warning by the door bears the Amesys logo. The sign reads: “Help keep our classified business secret. Don’t discuss classified information out of the HQ.”…..The room, explored Monday by The Wall Street Journal, provides clear new evidence of foreign companies’ cooperation in the repression of Libyans under Col. Gadhafi’s almost 42-year rule. The surveillance files found here include emails written as recently as February, after the Libyan uprising had begun… VASTech SA Pty Ltd, a small South African firm, provided the regime with tools to tap and log all the international phone calls going in and out of the country, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter. VASTech declined to discuss its business in Libya due to confidentiality agreements.”

 Maybe Mr. Brauer is somehow related to VASTech, or to the oil companies which lost money due to the Libyan rebellion?

 Conclusion? France intervened in Libya not because her plutocrats wanted it, but because (some of her) philosophers made an irresistible case for it. To French president Sarkozy. Contrarily to the 1930s, when the USA was systematically hostile to France’s higher thinking, Obama’s USA cooperated, and France was able to convince enough of the rest (to get the 9 votes at the UNSC she needed; she got 10).  

 By the way, genuine French philosophers are not in love with French plutocrats, although at least two individuals (BHL and the father of Bruni’s first child), belong to both categories. Usually there is strong, solid, professional and intimate enmity between both groups.

 Mr. Brauer neglects the interventions of the Western powers sometimes assisted by African allies in the Sudan (where French troops died in Darfur), Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad (where France fought Ghadafi for decades, recovering a part of Chad occupied by the guy with the bad hairdo), Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Libya (the two French led interventions of 2011). Among other things. Intervention also worked against racist South Africa (but failed to replace racist Rhodesia by the better regime, as Zimbawe is clearly a terrible place).

 So what motivates the likes of the ignorantly aggressive Mr. Brauer? Does Mr. Brauer, and his supporters regret, deep down inside, that France intervened against the genocidal, racist, fascist Hitler, and his Neues Ordnung?

 Or is Mr. Brauer happy to join a herd of the ignorant and facile, thus creating cheaply in him and his flock the illusion of strength and wisdom? In other words, naturally enough, Mr. Brauer whines when one attack fascism, because he indulges in the fascist reflex.

 Thought crime ought to not send people in jail always, but it certainly should not go without condemnation, and evisceration, when it boils down to making a shrine to the concept of holocaust.

 Thus those inclined to idiotic lies of the mass criminality inducing type have to be answered, even if we have to stoop very low to do so, and engage in a shouting match. Ignoring the stupid brutes all too long is what made Hitler, Stalin or Pol-Pot possible.

 Right now the partisans and practitioners of torture in the USA are loudly claiming that torture is the best way to go forward. Never mind that it is a direct violation of the Third Geneva Convention, never mind that the U.S. Army, and the most elementary logic, are against it: Cheney and Yoo (the UC Berkeley professor of law who wrote the legal opinion giving the green light to Bush) preach torture, with more boldness than ever.

 They have been encouraged to do so by the ambiguous attitude of the ever bipartisan president. Confronted to torture, Obama crossed the bridge, and said: we don’t do that, but we will not do anything about those who did that, and want more of it. Instead of dragging Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and a Federal judge I forgot the name of, to court, Obama said: let them be, let’s not rush to judgment. Actually, let’s not go to any sort of judgment.  Obama let torture walk free, as he let the banksters walk free. And now he is surprised that society is captive, and people feel that it is his fault.

 French general Paul Aussaresses admitted in his 2001 book, “Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955–1957“, to the use of torture during the Algerian war (he claimed under civilian orders from subalterns to F. Mitterrand). Subsequent to his gloating, for justifying the use of torture, the elderly Aussaresses was condemned in court, stripped of his army rank, stripped of the right to wear a uniform, and he was stripped of his Legion of Honor. All of this happened decades after Aussaresses apparently advised South American militaries about his methods of torture. In other words, torturers breed torturers. Worldwide.

 Of course, convicted criminal Aussaresses went on major media of the USA to justify the use of torture against Al Qaeda. His defense of torture arguably incited the American proponents of torture. Thus thought crime propagates. Bipartisanship about torture, as bipartisan about anything else dubious, under the pretext of coolness, is encouraging torture, and all other sorts of evil.

 France, whatever France means, lost the Algerian war (some very close family members of mine died). Although, technically, the French army had won. But it was the wrong sort of victory. That war was not a military campaign, but a campaign about right and wrong, and the usage of torture guaranteed wrong.

 In 2011, France intervened, and won, twice: in Ivory Coast, and in Libya. Why? How? By being on the side of right, twice. If one wants to win, one better be right. To start with. That Obama forgot in Afghanistan, in his colossal naivety. But one would expect nothing else from someone whose moral sense is about being bipartisan, not attributing blame, and looking real cool, no matter what. Such a moral sense does not have “right” as a fundamental notion. “Right” is all about how it looks.

 Obama encountered Hitler. What do you think happened? “Enough blame  to go around,” confirmed the president. OK, pathetic, I agree.

 Being bipartisan about holocausts is no option for the morally correct. Non assistance to people in danger is one of the worst crimes there is. Once one has justified the worst, or let it go free, and unmolested, how much worse can one do? Indulge in infamy, instead of just entertaining it?

***

Patrice Ayme

*** 

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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