Nationalism, Superstition, Greed: Violins Of Evil.

 

HEAPING SCORN ON NATIONALISM, SUPERSTITION AND GREED IS A MORAL ABSOLUTE.

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Abstract: Nationalism reinforces aggression, and thus fascism, which profits greedy elites. Mishandling reason is a must in the utilitarian perspective of the few on top. Superstition helps in that endeavor.

The USA would survive better, as a superpower, if it integrated the notion that unjustified nationalism is a disservice to the nation, although most helpful to the exploitative oligarchy. Europe has understood this the hard way: hunting down nationalistic behavior has become a moral absolute there. Time for the USA to follow.

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ISLES MUCH DESIRED:

A nationalistic issue is resurfacing in the South Atlantic. There are a number of islands and archipelagos there. Their history is a bit complicated, in the sense that it is not clear who saw what first. When the Europeans happened on them, the largest land mammal was a very special wolf, the warrah. There were no indigenes.

The Spanish name of the main archipelago, the Falklands, is Islas Malvinas. It is a translation of the French name, "Îles Malouines", thus named by Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1764, after the first known settlers, mariners and fishermen from the port of Saint-Malo in France. Hence, just here, the islands ought to be French, and, therefore British, since, as the Queen of England, Isabelle de France, pointed out, circa 1320, she was France’s rightful sovereign.

For a while British and Spanish sovereignty was claimed. At the time, Argentina did not exist yet. Both Spain and Britain being now part of the European Union, it is one more reason for the natives of the Falklands to be European citizens.

When the United Nations was formed, in 1945, Argentina mysteriously claimed sovereignty on the Falklands. Great Britain coolly replied that it was a matter of the natives’ self determination. It is a general principle that, if a people wants to join the European Union, and the later agrees, it can.

Unsurprisingly, the Falklands natives opted to become European citizens rather than subjects to, what was, at the time, a banana republic dictatorship, albeit without any bananas. Moreover, it looks as if some in Argentina are made to eat bananas.

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ARGENTINEAN NATIONALISTIC OBSESSION:

Some Argentines claim those enchanted isles are next to South America, their continent, a mere 480 kilometers away. By that token, Alaska belongs to Russia, the USA to Canada, and Korea and Japan, separated by a much smaller 128 kilometers, have serious ownership problems. Also Spain should claim all of Africa, which is in direct sight.

Some Argentines observed that the Falklands were sitting on the same continental plate as they do. This does not explain why Argentina when it invaded the Falklands/Malouines in 1981, also invaded other islands not sitting on that plate (South Georgia, South Sandwiches).

In particular the large island of South Georgia (170 kilometers long) is about 2,000 kilometers away, thus, by that Argentinean reasoning of sort, since Antarctica is much closer to Argentina than South Georgia, the frozen continent also belongs to Argentina, and should be invaded. Come to think of it, the Antarctica peninsula is a geological extension of the Andes, also implying that Colorado belongs to Argentina, as confirmed by its Spanish name, and its discovery by conquistadores.

After the Argentinean dictators invaded the Falklands in 1981, Britain reacted and defeated Argentina in a small but ferocious war. More than 900 soldiers died, 255 of them British.

Why did the Argentinean dictators invade? Mostly to distract their people from the oppression they were submitted to, and to re-direct their anger as a nationalist frenzy towards the big bad British. After its ignominious defeat, the dictatorship fell.

Now an oil rig is off the Falklands, as oil reaches $80 a barrel again. Operating one of these devices is expensive – about 200,000 euros a day.

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ALL YOU NEED IS OIL:

According to some geological surveys the Falkland Islands may have the equivalent of 60 billion barrels of oil in total.

By comparison, the USA has 21 billion barrels of reserve, enough for only…8 years. As another perspective, Venezuela’s reserve are 87 billion barrels. Iraq oil reserves are officially 115 billion barrels (3 rd largest in the world), and maybe as much as 350 billion barrels (first in the world, according to the latest estimates, a number I always held true and going a long way to explain why there are several hundred thousands American warriors in the Middle East, including 250,000 US soldiers…)

[The exclusion zone is where Britain wants no Argentinean forces to show up again.]

Argentina said earlier this month that it strongly opposed energy exploration on "its" continental shelf (that extends all the way to Florida, remember, and please observe that "Florida" is another Spanish name).

"What they’re doing is illegitimate…it’s a violation of our sovereignty. We will do everything necessary to defend and preserve our rights," the Argentinean Foreign Minister opined. Venezuela’s Chavez addressed the queen of England, informing her that "imperialism was over". Since his oil reserves are four times that of the USA, and relatively increasing, Chavez is ever louder.

A resolute British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, an eye to his incoming elections in spring, said: "It is perfectly within our rights to be able to do this. I think the Argentineans actually understand that."

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SUPRANATIONALISM: A WISDOM FOR THE AGE:

A good consequence of the European Union construction is that Europeans have annexed each other, making their empire much more considerable, without much pain or effort. No need to attack, as Argentina did. Europe looks forward annexing Siberia, someday. With smiles, and plenty of checks, and ideas.

This new method, of tolerance, understanding and inclusivity is irresistible. This has become the European way. But it is a re-acquaintance with the basic Roman method of integration: after the extreme violence of total war, the Romans were very inclusive, and tolerant (and introduced the notion, and realization, of universal citizenship, with full equal rights, a notion which escapes the USA to this day, since it officially discriminates against some categories of its citizens).

Maybe Europe should annex Argentina. It is not because of a continental shelf, or distance. It would solve neatly the problem of the Malouines (and not "Malvinas" please!). Saint Malo is in Bretagne (= Britannia = Britain… because the army from Britannia fled to Bretagne in the 6C, hence the name; before this flight, the Romans knew Bretagne as Armorica!)

After all, Argentina is a rebellious European colony, and, come to think of it, if Argentina is not going to recognize the self determination of Falkland islanders, why should Europe recognize the self determination of Argentines?

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OUT WITH RESPECT FOR INFAMY:

Since God is dead, morality needs to be re-established on different principles, and an absolute basis. (Replacing the absolute God.)

Morality has been corrupted with "multiculturalism", a doctrine that says that, if they worship it, it is right. Whatever "it" is, and whoever "they" are. And absolute moral progress does not exist.

Indeed it can be argued that different cultures are different forms of mental achievements, and they all bring something. That way I am a fanatical multiculturalist too. But it is important to de-fang local cultures first, when global cultural progress has exposed their poison, if any. Because primitive cultures can be highly poisonous. After all, that’s how they survived.  

For example,  Maoris ate people, and other Polynesians were known to keep captives alive for days, as they devoured them piece by piece (salted and freeze dried meat technology having not being invented yet in these regions… although they had long been invented in other parts).

But there is no doubt that Maori culture brought something to the rest of the world (although Maori ways such as tattoos were found in the rest of Polynesia, the late and massive, well documented practice of cannibalism in New Zealand ought to provide the most advanced philosophers with an excellent counter example to many naive theories in multiculturalism and human nature!) 

Unexamined multiculturalism may make you not worth living. (In case the reader did not get it, this is a play on Socrates’ "The unexamined life is not worth living"). By the token of multiculturalism, the Nazis ought to have been revered for their deeply resented feelings. And the Aztecs would still exchange human limbs with a grateful president Chavez.

Multiculturalism’s modern prophets of evil were Herder and Rousseau.

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NATIONALISM IS A VARIANT OF ABSOLUTE EVIL:

An example of intrinsic badness is nationalism. Nationalism is very bad, it is nearly always bad. Nationalism is discrimination on the basis of origins, gone official, and made into a religion.

There ought to be no excuse for nationalism, except as a defense (Iraq, Afghanistan). Aside from this, as a pure defense mechanism, it should never, ever, be tolerated. OK, when meeting an Afghan who does not know any better, and who has suffered a lot, by all means respect his nationalism and gently explain how, and why you beg to differ. But when nationalism happens between first world people, who ought to know better, it should be trashed.

Nationalism is not a violin making an harmonious sound. It is the screech of barbarity unchained. The "Na" in Nazi stood for Nationalism… This is no coincidence. Auschwitz is what nationalism and associated tribalism do, when they are fully allowed to express themselves. Nationalism and tribalism, and other discriminations posing as secular religions, always did such things, and always will.

Nationalism is a form of tribalism that poses as an emotional ultrafilter, an emotion that dominates all other emotions.

That ought not to be tolerated.

The Argentine president talks nationalism, because her economy is lousy, and her people need some distraction, so she treats them as crocodiles, throw them some meat, in the hope, that, indeed, they will revert to the saurian condition, characterized by immense stupidity, carnivorous greed, and easy herding in some swampy pen. Too bad, I like her otherwise. But she may have little choice, as many are the dogs of nationalism howling to the sky…

Kanzler Merkel with the President of Argentina, Christina Kirchner, before the EU-Latin America summit.
[Photo: Regierungonline/Bergmann]

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WHY TO CONDEMN NATIONALISM WITH SUCH ELAN?

As I said, the evidence of the extreme mass lethality of nationalism and affiliated feelings was plain by 1700 CE.

Weirdly, though, nationalism became ever more popular during the next 245 years in Europe. Nationalism festered already in the philosophy of Herder in the eighteenth century. Far from being repelled by the horror nationalism and its ilk brought in the late Middle Ages, under provincial and religious forms, Herder extolled the beauty of tribalism, singing its praises as an end in itself, a teleology he deprived the concept of progress from. Herder was the anti-enlightenment philosopher par excellence.

What had happened prior to Herder? Centuries of mayhem all over Europe, animated by petty misunderstandings of the sort people learn with mothers’ milk.

The civil war between France and England started comically with a feast of the Franco-English aristocracy, a big family, where each side insisted to eat its own food (roasted versus boiled, etc.), and drink its own beverages (wine versus beer, etc.). And sit at different tables. In the following generations, this comic posing ended with the durable devastation of France, and acts of war for more than 5 centuries.

Nowadays, the seven French religious wars, the century long war between France, the Netherlands, and Spain, the 30 year war in Germany, the war between France and… Savoy have all been forgotten, and so are the tribalisms that animated them. Those wars, plus the Crusades, durably transformed Europe into a battlefield for half a millennium. All very good, according to Herder, but his student, Goethe, disagreed.

Goethe was a universalist, he loved the (French) revolution: all men are brothers, as Ludwig van put it.

Herder thought it was his sacred duty to hate French universalism, and kneel at the altar of tribal difference. Herder founded multiculturalism (aka cultural relativism).

Multiculturalism, in Herder’s time, led straight to terrible wars: the Pitts Prime Ministers of Great Britain took it onto themselves to rabidly oppose the (French) Revolution, and the revolutionary reaction was terrible, as France fought all of Europe’s Ancient Regime.

In the end, after the terrible dictatorship of that spiritual dwarf, Napoleon (a direct consequence of British meddling, as PM Lloyd George would point out a century later), France was defeated, many millions died all over Europe, Belgium was born…

But the French revolution won the war: the ideals of the revolution now rules the European Union (including increasingly Great Britain, in an ironical twist). And even the United Nations (although the UN self contradicts its charter of human Rights by some mumbling on multiculturalism).

In any case Herder, plus Rousseau’s hatred for civilization, led directly to Hitler (the Prussian educational system, using these worthies and their philosophical clique formed generations after generations of Germans according to these erroneous doctrines of violence, race, savagery celebrated as PURITY OF ESSENCE).

I am not claiming here that Herder and Rousseau were worthless in all ways. But they were worse than bad in some most important ways (and Goethe, Voltaire and Sade were vociferous in their opposition at the time).

Why is nationalism so intrinsically bad? Because nationalism is tribalism on steroids. And TRIBALISM MEANS THE MAINTENANCE OF GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL BALANCE BY THE MASSIVE KILLING OF OTHERS.

That art of balancing the ecology through war is already practiced in chimpanzees (as documented first by the very Christian Jane Goodall, good-all around).

With weapons of mass destruction, and an enormous human population with its own delicate technological ecology, tribalism reborn would mean humankind dead, and no rebirth. Far from bringing the spice of originality, TRIBALISM CAN ONLY BE NOW THE END ALL OF BE ALL.

The Argentinean howling towards the Falklands would be funny, if seeing human beings reduced to the lupine condition by their cult of the primitive was funny. But it is less funny than French and English lords from the same families arguing about the merits of beer versus wine in the twelfth century. And that did not end well.

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NATIONALISM KILLS PEOPLE, SUPERSTITION KILLS REASON:

Another emotional ultrafilter, that ought to be viewed as always bad, is superstition. Whereas nationalism means the gathering of evil feelings and ideas to promote the mass extermination of other human beings, SUPERSTITION EXTERMINATES FIRST REALITY ITSELF.

Superstition is also known, by abuse of language, as "faith". Faith is an excellent behavior, the milk of hope. Superstition is what pigeons do. Superstition hides behind faith, like a murderer behind a grandmother’s smile.

After killing reason, or torturing it, or making seriously fun of it, unsurprisingly, anything goes. Then an elite can kill whoever they do not like. Emperor Justinian used Christianism that way, during four long decades, and Stalin used Marxism-Leninism that way.

That is why superstitious religions can be tolerated only when their superstitions make themselves very discrete (Rome was very tolerant with any superstitious religion, as long as practical bounds were not breached).

Superstition is a natural abuse of the metaprinciple of causation that intelligent animals discover early on in their mental development. As the famous American psychologist Skinner observed, pigeons kept associating in their minds facts which are truly unrelated if they had happened together first in their experience. "Some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis."

Tell children that God wants this, that and the other thing, plus a few murders besides, if need be, and they will believe it all their lives. Advantage, if you are an oligarch; once your subjects believe this, they are ready to kill, and get killed, and you will stay on top, as the masses murder each other.

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GREED, REAGAN’S ENGINE, LEADS WHERE HUMANKIND CANNOT GO:

Greed is called the "profit motive", in the present USA, and now, undeterred by the weak and scared Obama, the private health, military and banking industries of the USA are running away with greed, pushing around the naïve and overwhelmed young president.

Some health insurance jumped by 39% (now delayed by weeks, to Obama’s naïve satisfaction), and the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan tripled in the first year of Obama’s naivety, now having passed 1,000. The military budget of the USA, also augmented enormously, bigger than the rest of the world combined, has jumped up, in a country with 10% deficit. And bankers own the place, now that all taxpayer money, and more (borrowed from China), was sent to them to lose again.

Greed is another bad emotional ultrafilter, and it is related to nationalism and superstition. Greed basically asserts that having power on others is the emotion that matters most. In a sense greed stands above nationalism and superstition, because it is conducive to them both.

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NATIONALISM, SUPERSTITION AND GREED ARE INSTRUMENTS OF RULING OLIGARCHIES:

When one has removed such bad emotional ultrafilters, as nationalism, superstition and greed, what are we left with?

Well, with those emotional ultrafilters resting and encouraging reason, and love, pure and simple.

Reason resting on animal and human nature, as they profit to individuals, and the masses. What is there not to like?

Why are such bad emotions, such as nationalism, superstition, and greed, fostered, instead, with such enthusiasm? Of course, ecological constraints can lead to the necessity of reducing considerably a human population, the hard way.

But sometimes the natural ecology is not to blame. What else is there? Well, the ecology of elites.

Oligarchies. Oligarchies are those mostly exploiting bad emotional ultrafilters. Why? Because they are bad, precisely, meaning bad emotions lead to mega death, thus activating the main defense mechanism in the collective psyche, in other words, fascism.

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OLIGARCHIES LOVE ANYTHING CONDUCIVE TO STRIFE, HENCE FASCISM, AS LONG AS THEY STAY ON TOP:

Fascism is first an intellectual reflex, that of allowing a mass of individuals to operate as one: "E Pluribus Unum". Thus the mass of individuals is made by the fascist instinct into one super-organism, fighting as one: discipline is the strength of armies, because of this, precisely (and chimps on the war path behave very differently, as one silent well coordinated mega individual, and so do fighting baboon troops, fighting, or the threat thereof, being something that happens to baboon troops many times a day).

So oligarchies, be they the power elite in Argentina, or some religious-superstitious order, or the American financial military oligarchy have interest to activate those bad emotional complexes. Because that single mind at the top, it’s precisely them.

This could be viewed in the financial crisis of 2008: it was an economic and financial assault, and fascism, economic fascism, was activated. It was decided that the People would give all and support, as one man, its leader, and that leader was the same as the one that precipitated the crisis, namely the exact same group of corrupt financiers. The crisis augmented the economic fascism, because it reinforced the leader, as all crises do, if one is not careful.

This is why, as the disasters they provoked unfolded, Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin, and countless other demented leaders, got ever more support; disaster activates mental support for the one who leads the fight, whatever the fight is, and even if he started it. All independent thinking on the big stuff is shut down, and left to the leader. The mass just follows.

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WHY THE USA IS MORE NATIONALISTIC, & EUROPE LESS SO NOW:

Bad emotional ultrafilters favor the exploitative leadership of the few, hence the great deference of the American power elite for bad emotional ultrafilters such as superstition (Christianity or Islam), greed or nationalism (remember Obama in the "State of the Union", telling us America invented the automobile, whereas the USA invented none of automobile technologies, at least in the first 150 years of the history of the automobile; but American oligarchs love this sort of national glorifications, to use them as emotional red herrings)…

The final enlightening step is to realize that greed, nationalism and superstition introduce themselves humbly always, in the small, and that is in the small that they shall be crushed most readily.

Here are concrete examples of nationalism light: When some Americans claim that the USA invented things they did not invent (the car, the plane, the transistor), that’s nationalism. When Americans claim that French cars are "crappy", that’s nationalism, or that France is basically a communist country, an American protectorate, where nothing gets done except wine, cheese, and welfare, that’s nationalism too. When Americans claim the USA is the land of the free (implying thus that other lands are not), that’s nationalism. When Europeans claim that all is bad in the USA, or that the USA is all about money, and private enterprise that’s also nationalism (but a mistake Americans themselves make: in some ways the USA is more public than the EU! Say about water…).

There are subtler forms of nationalism. Say, just from ignoring other people’s cultures, thus weakening one’s reflection on the very existence of one’s nationalism. An example of this is the USA’s discrimination against those of its own citizens not born there. No other country does that. It is a screaming example of natio-nalism: only those born there, in the USA, are fully human. Others, less so, with fewer rights. Thus establishing that principle that there are several types of human beings, even inside the nation.

Such screaming tribalism is rendered possible by being blind to American exceptionalism, through the ignorance of other countries. No other country has two kinds of citizens (but it is nothing new: think of the slaves). [After I wrote this, Roger Henry kindly observed out that this was not quite true, and he pointed at Germany. Although Germany had a multi track citizenship under Hitler, not so before, or since. The question of naturalization in Germany, although scandalous, was different, and has been addressed; for more details, see the comments. Muslim states DO have multi track citizenship, just like the USA.]

Being blind to one’s country’s major defects is a form of nationalism, unwittingly, or not.

The last infiltration of greed in USA society is charging ($300) for emergency calls: soon you will be asked for your credit card number if you want to live another day. Greed. Then, again, no other country does this, but for the USA (or, more exactly the great city of Tracy, California!). But a consequence of nationalism is that Americans do not know this.

One will have noticed that examples of nationalism gone mad abound in the USA. Am I exhibiting anti-American bias? Some will excitingly clamor that this is so. And they would be right, if I were wrong, but I am right. To deny the truth in national matters is also nationalism.

Some will say that this is my opinion. Yes, sure, but not just my opinion. My opinion is not coming naked and screaming. It is coming armored, intelligent, knowledgeable, and well escorted by facts.

The fact that the USA has a scandalous two-tracks citizenship, is hard, harsh, cold reality. The fact that the USA has the lousiest health care system in the developed world is also a fact, and the fact Americans mostly ignore this, and never miss an occasion to sing the praises of the USA health care system is a nationalistic fact. The fact the USA spends so with a "defense" system that girdles the world is undeniable too. In Europe, people would know what it means: nationalism out of control, foaming at the mouth. In the USA, American hyper militarism is nationalistically interpreted as American goodness, next to sainthood, as militarism used to experienced in Imperial Germany.

Europe learned that nationalism was conducive to the deadliest things around, the hard way. Whereas in the USA exhibiting strident nationalism is viewed as an indispensable part of the mien of a citizen in good standing, in countries such as France, nationalism is viewed as in poor taste. This, to look down on nationalism, the Europeans, and, in particular the Germans, have learned the hard way. Things have really gone a long way, because the Germans and the French used to be extremely nationalistic a few generations ago, much more than the citizens of the USA used to be.

After 1945, top intellectuals in Europe understood that nationalism ought to be abated. That ought to be a primary mission. A change people ought to believe in. And abated it was. It was even mutilated. a point was made that European superpowers ought to have no more rights than others (starting, of course, with Germany and its insufferable past tendencies). Malta (population: 400,000) and Slovenia (population, 2 millions) have, on paper, the same rights as France (population close to 70 millions). By 1945, Europe had learned something important: nationalism pays back, big time. But only in blood, sweat, and tears.

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ENOUGH EVIL AROUND ALREADY!

Nietzsche famously pointed out that: "Verily, there is a future, even for evil." Well, there is plenty enough of a future for evil. New technologies open new avenues to evil all the time. So we have to be busy closing those we have identified, already. Nationalism is one of those.

The savage wars that wrecked Europe for seven centuries (1250 to 1945… after many centuries of quasi peace…) have been a lesson for Europeans in the dangers of nationalism. Nearly all nations on earth existing today are of recent vintage (even China ought to be viewed as recent, just as the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914 was only 44 years old, China is about 60 years old in its present philosophical nature). Fresh nations have learned nothing much yet.

It is hilarious to see the Americans furiously reproaching the Chinese the under-evaluation of, well, the Sino-American currency: talk about blind nationalism.

The fundamental reason for nationalism is the same fundamental reason for evil: too many people do not a world make. So, shall we rise above fatality and the weight of natural evolution? And impose man above fate?

As Voltaire said:"One must crush infamy"… And one should not miss a single occasion to do so. There is not just morality in crushing infamy, but the prospect of sheer survival for all concerned. Blind and unexamined nationalism is the most dangerous infamy. Let’s crush it, it’s good exercise.

PA

P/S 1: The notion of ultrafilter comes from topology, and has a precise meaning there, as a maximal element for inclusion. It basically corresponds to (being perceived as) ultimate concept.

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P/S 2: I said nationalism was justified if and only if ("iff") a defense mechanism. Critiques will point out that offenders always claim to be defending themselves under some sort of perceived aggression. The wolf had to kill the sheep becomes the latter’s brother polluted the canine’s water last year.

For example, NATO claims to be defending itself during its occupation of Afghanistan, already much longer than WWII, and still killing completely innocent civilians there with wild abandon. Indeed, one has to be careful with the concept of defense. NATO is clearly under attack from hard core Islamism (just as the West used to be under attack under the extremely similar hard core Christianism) , but NATO is not under attack by Afghanistan… And never was. (Bin Laden and friends were put in Afghanistan by the USA, and equipped with fancy weapons.) Thus, differently from the WWII started by Franco-Britannia on September 3, 1939, it is not clear that the Afghan war is a just war. It will be just, only if well done. Which is not presently the case.

As far as the Afghans are concerned, though, their war against NATO is a just war of national defense. Thus, the real enemy of NATO is not just that reality, but also that perception.

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P/S 3: The Chinese have pegged their currency to the US dollar. So, as the USA proceeded to lower its currency to gain unfair economic advantage (although the USA has 25% of the world’s industrial production, 2010). The Chinese peg meant that the Chinese currency went down with the American dollar, ruining the little American plot for gaining…unfair advantage. This is now over, as the European Union had enough, and found a way to ruin that unfair little plot. These could become tragic games, if people stopped seeing the humor hidden in them…

Greed Can’t Lead

 

Many parts of the economy of the USA are falling apart, or getting retarded. It is as if the economy was not an activity worth having anymore.

Even Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, an admirer and perpetuator of plutocracy, recognized that 75 percent of the public schools have structural deficiencies and 25 percent have problems with their ventilation systems. Dozens of thousands of bridges are falling apart, and the number of those decaying is growing faster than the number of those getting repaired. Even Russia is building high speed electric rail, and China claims to build 47 such lines, but the USA is not working on a single one. What is going on?

A small power elite has grabbed the debate, and imposed its conceptology, and its axis is maximizing financial profit, independently of any other considerations. Unfortunately for humankind, that financial world is derivative, not primary. It is a convention, not a realization. Thus make belief has replaced what really is. The real infrastructure is disintegrating, precisely because the derivative rules, and, as all mathematicians know, integration is the inverse operation from differentiation.

This is not a silly play on words and concepts: the mathematical analogy here goes all the way; letting financial derivatives rule is basically a gigantic mathematical mistake civilization has been making, in great part because those who decided, or let decide in their name, a bunch of lawyers without calculus background, such as Bill Clinton, were cognitively incapable of understanding the most basic mathematics in play.

To have made financial profit the guiding principle of civilization is, of course, deeply absurd: the fox was made guardian of the hens.

Finance was given extravagant powers in the last two centuries, powers that it did not have in the 4,000 years of civilization before that, and for very good reasons.

This abdication of power made finance the real power behind the throne, worldwide.

As Baron Nathan Rothschild (yes, from the Rothschild family) put it: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."

Puppet. That is Rothschild’s word, not mine. It is also reality. A reality that explains the main diversion of most available capital towards the system set-up by Goldman Sachs and the like in the last 90 years, and, in particular, reinforced in the last 13 months.

Indeed, unbelievably for those not in the know, this is the exact same system that brought fascism to Italy, Germany, Spain after World War One, and made Britain, France, and the USA into close calls themselves.

The same system of thought, and actually some of the other same institutions were tender nannies for nascent Nazism (Nazism being just the most outrageous example, outrageous not just because it happened that way, and the horrendous toll, but because the instigating institutional system was capable to successfully cover its tracks. Of the people behind the Nazi scene, only Hjalmar Schacht, a "Lord Of Finance" was put on trial, and promptly acquitted in 1946. But Schacht, directly, and his ilk, more generally, made it so that Hitler got his job).

There are extremely extensive regulations in most economic domains, worldwide, but not so much in finance, although finance is the overall money creating and money allocating system.

Finance created Hitler, even the Soviets. Lenin used to joke that the "capitalists would even sell him the rope to hang them with"; at least one American plutocrat, Averell Harriman, was bestowed with the honor of being made a "Hero of the Soviet Union". Harriman got the top medal both from the Soviets, and the Nazis!

The bank Brown Brothers Harriman was a massive money laundering operation for the Nazis. JP Morgan organized and financed German cartels that propelled Hitler, etc. Unsurprisingly the same lords of finance are back to variations of their old tricks, as they allowed, if not incited, some governments to turn around all sorts of laws. Then, having violated the law, they trade on this, as the ultimate insiders! [Some of this occurred even in the last few weeks, so sure of impunity Goldman Sachs is. I say: write international warrants of arrest!]

So what is happening now, with the invention of financial derivatives, is that most of the world’s disposable capital is manipulated by financial sharks, so as to create fake revenues, to justify their bonuses and overall power wielding. There is therefore no more capital for the real economy (or, more exactly, increasingly insufficiently little).

Hence all financial products ought to be declared unlawful, until proven safe and effective. Financiers already are endowed with the regalian power of creating money (which government bestowed on them in the last 2 centuries, but which they did not have prior).

However, financiers know not enough to create a sustainable economy. Financiers are not engineers, just profiteers. And their search for profits has blinded them to their extravagant privilege, and even to how the universe works. Civilization is an exquisite mechanism, and so is an increasingly stressed biosphere. [This is not to be taken lightly: violating ecology and civilization simultaneously is how the immensely old Maya civilization self destructed, without any exterior input aside from a drought.]

None of this is new in principle. As James Madison, fourth president of the USA put it: "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."

This is not new, but we have just reached the breaking point, the point at which civilization and the biosphere are not sustainable anymore, from the activities of that obsolete particular financial system. It brought us Auschwitz, among other disasters. Left in power, it will bring up worse, soon.

There are other emotions than greed. Love, altruism, the passion for understanding, or for a job well done, can guide reason better than the obsession with having what one stole from others as they were looking somewhere else. It is time for reason to guide, and greed to be crushed. Otherwise there will be no world to call home, for anybody, whatsoever.

Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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Annex and background: 1) FINANCIERS HAVE BEEN TELLING US WHAT MAN IS, AND THEY ARE WRONG. They have just been telling us about who they truly are. It’s all about them, not us.

Subjacent to economic theory is neuroeconomics. The hypothesis that the financiers and their political servants made, that profits ought to dominate social organization, was, fundamentally, a neurological hypothesis.

But greed belongs to the basic instinct of the Will To Power, whereas studying neurology belongs to the specifically human endeavor of establishing systems of thought. In other words, the neurologist is a new species, with a new kind of motivation, whereas the financier is an all together different species, animated by the sort of motivation we have seen in the last half a billion years, since there are social animals, and they crowd together, and need a unique leader, to have the single mind that allows them to stick together. This need, E Pluribus Unum, is the fundamental reason for the Will To Power, Nietzsche talked so much about. Will To Power is also the mechanism behind tyranny, oligarchy, and the domination of the Lords Of Finance.

Man is the species that went beyond Will To Power as the fundamental organizational principle of society. Being overlorded by finance is subhuman.

***

2) The "Nobel" Prize in Economics was given for some equation helping to price some financial call options. It surely will not be given for the simple mathematics alluded to above, which are much more drastic, but much more deserving, as they throw the entire existing financial system out of the window, as deserved for flaming material threatening to burn down the house of civilization.

***

3) Shacht (economics PhD, 1899) met with the American JP Morgan as early as 1905. Yes, JP Morgan, founder of the eponymous bank, whose present leader is much admired and befriended by Barack Obama (so he says).

Shacht, in charge of finances in imperial Germany occupied Belgium, was summarily dismissed, when his superior, general von Lumm, discovered that Schacht had diverted funds through his present and future employer, the bank (Dresdner), the sort of incest that passes for routine in present Washington.

After WWI Schacht came to lead the Reichsbank, the German central bank, and got to campaign against Germany paying war reparations, and helped set-up the Young and Dawes plans with Wall Street (which made Germany into Wall Street toy and profit generating center).

By 1926, besides supporting Wall Street, JP Morgan and various American banks’ operations, Shacht, the most important Lord of Finance in Germany, entangled with American financiers, through and through, was supporting the Nazis. Soon Schacht organized petitions by top personalities and plutocrats to persuade president Hindenburg to nominate Hitler Chancellor. Schacht’s financial career blossomed further under Hitler, as he headed the Reichsbank and the economy ministry (busy stealing Jews and other victims). He was to rise again after he got cleared of any wrongdoing in 1946.

Not to say that Shacht was thoroughly evil in appearance. He was not. Like Eichmann, his evil was rather “banal” (to use the concept from Hannah Arendt). Like Eichmann, Schacht pretended to keep on befriending Jews under the Nazis, and have empathy for them.

For a plutocratic servant, Schacht was rather personally pristine. But he efficiently pushed many extremely criminal ideas in his lifetime, and thus he was an ideal instrument for the plutocrats. Such people are legions. Instead of attacking them one by one, day by day, emotion by emotion, and anti-idea by anti-idea, it is more productive to attack the system of thought that gave rise to them.

And, as it is, the criminal system of thought is the regalian fractional reserve banking system, which allows private, unrepresentative, unelected, unsupervised money men, the bankers, to create most of the money, and distribute it to whoever they want, to do whatever they please.

Indeed, contrarily to what most people believe, although the state makes physical bank notes and coins, it’s the big private bankers who create most of the money, and, aggravating factor, do it through debt. That system was created, because it is very profitable to those, the plutocrats, who selected the politician-servants who defend and further their interests. That it went on for about two centuries in some parts (Britain) does not mean it is sustainable. Rome switched to a system biased towards plutocracy in 300 BCE, but lost its republic about 255 years later.

***

The question of how to have a currency, and how to make money to use in the USA, was a central question from 1791 (when up to an amazing 50 currencies were used inside the USA) until the “greenbacks” of the Secession War. Two attempts were made at making a “Bank of the USA”. The second such bank helped create a huge bubble in land and agriculture, to feed Europe, and displace its agriculture, after the old continent had been devastated by the Napoleonic wars (this to say that speculative bubbles can serve imperialism well). Because the “Bank of the USA” got accused of corruption and undue influence of European financiers, it was allowed to expire under president Jackson.

***

Publicly Funded Plutocracy.

 

THE CORRUPTION PRINCIPLE THRIVES.

In the office next door to Obama, at the White House, one can find Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff. During February 2010, Mr. Emanuel claimed glibly that Tom Daschle, who used to be one of the most Senior Senators, a specialist of health care, had to be happy with his non descript basement office in the White House, far from the President. Why? Because, according to Mr. Emanuel, "any square inch of real estate inside the White House — no matter where it is — is more valuable than anything outside it."

At least we have a full confirmation of what makes Rahm Emanuel vibrate. Rahm Emanuel was an operator in the Clinton White House. Emanuel’s father used to be member of the Israeli terror organization, the Irgun. Rahm Emanuel was given 16.2 million by a bank, over two years. Aside from serving in the Israeli Defense Force and having a Master of Speech, Mr. Emanuel had no finance or economic background.

In Europe, judges, finding that a politician got a salary of 16 million in two years, between public offices, would suspect corruption.

The French National Assembly would go ballistic, and pass a law, which is exactly what it did once, when it learned about a trader’s bonus. In the United Kingdom, there is such a law: it prevents politicians to cash on their influence after leaving office. But cashing in, in the USA, is viewed as greater glory, or, as Obama puts it, "success", "wealth" (see below, for the great man’s train of thought on that matter).

The French National Assembly goes ballistic whenever salaries surpass two or three million dollars, or euros, for anybody managing a company, public or private. Only sport figures and some entrepreneurs have been spared, so far, the suspicion that they earned what they stole.

It makes sense: sport figures do not manage the organizations that determine their compensations. Whereas CEOs do. A high income in a sport figure, it’s the free market at play. With someone who determines his own salary, a high salary is suspect. In a government official, it would be called corruption. Many high level government officials in France have been prosecuted in recent years. A famous French politician (Pasqua) was condemned to jail (in connection with "Angolagate"). He used to be the boss on the National Police (among other things).

By his remark on the worth of square inches, Mr. Emanuel basically flaunts the CORRUPTION PRINCIPLE, as what he is in government for.

According to the corruption principle, governing is not about furthering the right civilization, but about riches in general, and personal enrichment in particular. Mr. Emanuel believes that happiness in the White House is all about the worth of real estate there. A rapprochement most Americans, with their faltering home values and joblessness, will appreciate, as the ship of state goes haphazardly about in the fog, spending trillions on those who caused the Great Recession, and massive unemployment.

Something else Mr. Emanuel flaunts with cool insanity is demented hubris. The White House is not "worth more than anything outside it". This will stand up there in the realm of the absurd with Hitler’s "Thousand Year Reich". For declarations such as these, at the helm of a state, any state, no matter how powerful, only an ominous doom lies in wait.

Meanwhile Mr. Emanuel’s boss claimed that Wall Street paychecks were morally equivalent to the paychecks of sport figures. A matter of "free market", he weirdly pontificated. This was an anti-idea, just there: the financial disaster than unfolded in the last few years had nothing to do with a "free market", BUT WITH PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE. To pose as an evidence, at the outset, as Obama does, what is completely false, in retrospect, makes any subsequent reasoning irremediably erroneous.

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to his self described "friend" JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

While $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

This is about as clever an observation as if one did not "begrudge" cannibals, because some crocodiles eat more, and don’t make it to the "World Series", shocking Obama (whatever the World Series is: except for a few American colonies, nobody in the world plays baseball; but Americans think it is cool to pretend that they are the world).

Speaking of the financial suspects, Dimon and Blankfein, Obama is proud to reveal that: “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in an interview in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek.“I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free market system.”

"Begrudge" comes from the Old French "groucher" which means to grumble, or murmur. So, according to Obama, when Americans see wealth, they stay in awe, and respectful silence for wealth is the American way. Americans do not begrudge gangsters, as long as they are wealthy and successful. Americans, according to Obama, were made to be little brown servants in big white houses, serving their wealthy masters without the slightest murmur. No begrudging, please, we are Americans, and wealth is our everything we stand in awe for.

One wonders what the American Revolution was all about. The British Crown had actually tried to set-up a feudal system in North America, for its devoted servants, but the white natives (headed by Washington) preferred to be those Lords (even if they had to give up on the titles!)

Under early American Presidents, such as Jefferson, the system of counters allowed Indians to pile up debts, and, when they were unable to pay back, their properties were confiscated. Thus was the Ohio Valley conquered by the USA, circa 1805. 

Some will say that was excellent then. The same would love the banks now. They are just doing the same, although they have run out of Indians.

Obama is also proud of his "friend" Dimon "portfolio". I could not manage that, he confided. Dimon’s portfolio includes 80 trillion dollars of derivatives, about twice world GDP. It is as much money that does not get in the real world economy. It is also borrowed, leverage money, which, actually is everybody’s property, not just Dimon’s (neither Dimon nor Obama understand this, be it only because they have no interest to understand this). Only a daemon would think otherwise. Dimon is that daemon, Obama is proud:"I know those guys". "I think, therefore I sink": thus the daemon inflates with self satisfaction.

What about suspect Blankfein? Not only did Goldman Sachs set-up a profitable conspiracy with AIG, and then ripped dozens of billions from the US public, but the latest is that Goldman allowed some in the Greek government to falsify the books to a fabulous extent, by using deliberately erroneous derivatives, set up by Goldman, to turn around the European Union’s Maastricht constitution.

According to Der Spiegel, "Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future," one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

Greece’s debt managers agreed to a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date. They used fictional exchange rates.

All indications are that the sentence "savvy businessmen" does not apply to the likes of Goldman guys. International thieves is more like it (the cheating with AIG was through a London office, just to be safe, in case the tight grip of Goldman on the US government would falter for a moment).

Obama is apparently unaware that baseball players didn’t trigger a global economic collapse.

Obama is also apparently unaware that the baseball industry isn’t the beneficiary of a massive and continuing taxpayer bailout.

The ongoing bailout of the banks is not restricted to TARP, it involves the zero rate interest policy, and re-investing the money given by the public with the central bank to earn risk free profits, it involves manipulations of Fannie May, the FHA, to keep mortgages rates artificially low, and thus fictional home values way too high, and on and on. Anybody who knows how to add, gets to trillions of dollars of on-going PUBLIC aid to the banks. Plus, banks would be in deep trouble if it were not for the belief that they have a government backstop, and for the government sustaining the fiction that their assets are much more valuable than they really are.

Basically, under Obama, the US government has been running its own taxpayer financed subprime program, for the benefit of the biggest banks.

The truth about the banking system as it exists is simple: bankers create the money of the realm, because the government of the realm allows them to do so. Thus, bankers are government agents, just as agents of the CIA are government agents. Big bankers are basically the most officially corrupt civil servants who ever were. The very nature of the profit their banks claim is corrupt. BIG BANKING IS A GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY, a regalian privilege bestowed to a few unelected, unsupervised individuals, by public officials who later are rewarded with their own fortunes in acts of touching reciprocity.

The "independence" of the central bank of the USA is mostly a sham, or, more exactly a carefully tended misunderstanding. True, the Fed is independent from democratic control, because it is under the control of private bankers.

According to Bloomberg, Obama trumpets “the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.” But did not much of the entire American corporate system come tumbling down? Was not General Motors long the largest, wealthiest American corporation? Is it not now a ward of the state?

In recent decades, European corporations have gained ever more on their American counterparts. There are two blatant differences between top European and American corporations. They explain the increasing European ascendency.

First American corporate leaders tend to be much taller physically (although European populations, in the countries with the top corporations are taller than the USA population). This tends to indicate that American leaders are selected on looks.

Secondly, the leaders of top American companies are paid several times more than their European counterparts, and their employees are paid much less, and have less security of employment. Whereas American leaders are supposed to be the end all, be all, in Europe, more accent is on the middle management, and blue collar workers. When the Great Recession started, German companies were encouraged by the state to keep their workers, giving them the opportunity to acquire higher skills.

Paul Krugman, describing some of the facts above, joined others (Stiglitz, Johnson) to find Obama "clueless" and concluded: "We are doomed".

It is hard to draw any other conclusion. In Europe the leaders of Britain, France and Germany are perfectly aware of the madness of the present banking system. At least so they speak. Brown (UK) and Sarkozy (France) were long finance ministers, and helped set-up the present system (especially Brown). Sarkozy is deeply entangled with the plutocracy (through marriage and family).

Sarkozy went to (the world plutocratic conference in) Davos and informed hostile bankers that banks’ financial speculation ought to be outlawed. The bankers were infuriated. Sarkozy left the scene then came back, and scolded the bankers some more. Then, as President of the French republic, he formally requested that those in the back of the gigantic room who agreed with him rise up. Then the begrudging bankers all reluctantly did. Bankers do not fear Obama, their star struck boy, but Sarkozy is something else (after all Sarko, besides leading the volatile, head strong French is an aristocrat married to a pink billionaire, and his brother is a major plutocrat).

One can only marvel at how much the American people can take without begrudging. Maybe they are mesmerized by the cluelessness of their leader.

Ah, last but not least. It seems that NASA will feed 6 billion dollars to private companies to develop access to space. Some will go to a company called "Space X". Some considerable amount of public money also goes to another private company, Tesla Motors, which makes a $150,000 electric variant of the European Lotus Elise. Tesla and Space X have the same CEO, Mr. Musk.

There was mother, and apple pie. It was said that America invented both. But then Obama claimed that America invented the automobile. That was not true either. Nationalism, in its despair, was finding nothing specifically American anywhere to boast about. So now it is with pride and pleasure that we can introduce a specifically American invention: the publicly founded plutocracy. Thank you, taxpayers! And please do not forget to be All American: no begrudging of wealth and power. After all, it all comes from you.

Patrice Ayme

History: The Enemy Of The Chinese Dictatorship

 

Abstract: The "People" Republic of China is the most powerful dictatorship that ever was. Global plutocracy has made China stronger, and uses it pretty much as it used (mostly German) fascism up and during World War Two. As a device to exploit the world further. Time to wake up to the danger at hand, relative to which, cavemen reading the Qur’an literally, are nothing but quaint critters.

Cracking down on the Chinese plutocratic complex ought to do wonders to reinstall the most advanced, bountiful economy where it belongs, in the most advanced democracies.

***

THINKING BY ROTE, OR WHY FASCISM FALTERS:

I sat on a chairlift in the Alps a few days ago next to a young, pretty woman, of Chinese ethnicity, richly dressed and made up. Lin had flown from England that day, with a British friend. She had spent six months in England already, studying economics and international relations, sent by the People’s Republic of China. It was her first time out of China, but her English was perfect. This is one of the world’s tallest chairlift, so I had plenty of time to ask her what she thought of Europe in comparison to China.

She did not bat an eyelash, haughtily declaring that she could not talk about Europe, because she knew Britain, and Britain had absolutely nothing to do with Europe, it was a completely different system. Perhaps obfuscated by this weird statement, the lift stopped, and she screamed. I can understand the proud and powerful lift: more than half of the skiers in French ski stations are British (which means they are truly British ski stations, a jolly entertaining paradox: the French’s worry is that the British, impoverished by the crisis, and the sinking pound, will evacuate the continent, and return to their fog shrouded island).

Her friend tried to reassure her, as we balanced away, one hundred fifty feet off the snow below. He explained to me that it was her first time on a chairlift. Yes, it’s my first day in Europe, she confirmed. Her boyfriend was slightly embarrassed, he suggested delicately that the United Kingdom is often viewed as part of Europe by Europeans. She looked at him as if he was an uncomprehending insect. Two systems: Britain and Europe, like China and Hong Kong. No doubt completely different she had learned by rote, back East.

Now, of course, Britain is part of the European Union, and, however hard the pirates in London finance want to believe that they are from another galaxy, the fact is, British citizens are European citizens, and Britain is just a country within the Union, just as Texas is a state within the other Union (in neither case is there an exit procedure, to the chagrin of some tribal types).

Millions of Brits live mostly in France (an old tradition: Richard, the Lion Hearted, king of England, born, married and dead in France, spent only 18 month in England: he was basically a Frenchman with part of his kingdom on the other side of the Channel).

But back to our Chinese butterfly. She was an excellent representative of the Chinese problem: young, very competent in some ways, completely foolish in others, and seemingly incapable of imagining that there were such concepts as doubt, second opinions, and extremely complex situations.

In contrast, Europe has by far the world’s most intricate political system, the exact opposite in complexity of the simplistic "communist" "People" "republic" in China.

Verily, to believe that France and Britain have completely different systems is less true than believing that Northern and Southern California have completely different systems, because the later two do slightly different things, whereas France and Britain do not.

Countries such as France and Britain are basically undistinguishable except for the climate (as I just pointed out, the old Francois is being displaced by the even older Anglo-Normand, aka English). The reason is that Britain and France came from the SAME most progressive polities, long ago, and have chosen to form another once again in the last two centuries (at the very exact time, 1815, when the British monarch renounced his rightful claim to the French throne).

Already well before Caesar decided to pay a visit to "Britannia", Celtic states thrived on both sides of the Channel, parts of the same Celtic nation, sharing the same language, religion, political system and advanced technologies (in particular tall ocean going ships that neither Greeks nor Romans ever had, obvious ancestors of the ocean going ships of the European Middle Ages, 13 centuries later).

The situation is completely different in China, where completely different ethnicities have been united by the most brutal force.

No terror forces the Europeans together: they belong together naturally, as people do in a big family, united in all ways, now that fascism is out, and social democracy reigns, and plutocracy keeps low enough a profile.

The happenstance of China is completely different. After adopting Marxism, a particularly strident Western European philosophy, and hooking up with global plutocracy, an opposite philosophy, China, balanced between these tow extremes, using both these anti-democratic philosophical engines for propulsion, has come to play a central role in the new world order.

***

PLUTOCRACY LOVES FASCISM SO MUCH, IT BRINGS IT ALONG:

China’s GDP has been increasing by leaps and bounds. Last time we saw this blossoming of apparent wealth it was called Nazi Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Nazis stole from the Jews, as some will say that China steals from Tibet (which is full of expensive rare elements crucial in the latest technology).

Although both of Hitler’s and Stalin’s realms were fascist regimes, their origins were completely different. One was more of a cause, the other more of a reaction.

What happened with Stalin was simple: the "Man of Steel" had persuaded his colleagues they had ten years to get ready to resist a war of extermination. As the events proved, he was completely right on that most important point.

So Stalin put the USSR on a socio-economic war footing, and even imposed a military dictatorship, with the most extreme emergency powers. His colleagues grudgingly agreed, except for the chief of the Red Army, Trotsky, who got rewarded with an axe through his skull.

Trotsky was a great general, but Stalin had been the bank robber in chief of the Bolsheviks, for him, killing and stealing people was business (or more exactly "revolutionary contribution", as was the euphemism).

To whip the Soviet Union into shape, Stalin killed even more Soviets than Hitler (at least so he said drunkenly to Churchill, according to Churchill). Since the official Soviet losses in WWII are now up to 28 million dead, this is saying much. No doubt that the Gulag killed more than ten million slaves… But many of these slaves, with their little hands, built great things; canals through the north, roads through Siberian mountains…

The ferocity of the Soviet regime left the Nazis haggard. To hold the front at Moscow, "blocking sections" of the NKVD shot on sight any retreating Soviet soldiers. Prisoners were considered traitors (that meant the death penalty). Officers in the Red Army had the right to shoot their subordinates, no questions asked. Some soldiers were Soviet women, even in the tank forces. Thus motivated, much better than by the profit motive, workers at Stalingrad hopped on tanks they had just built, and rolled into combat, from inside the same factory.

Hence Stalin saved the USSR by half killing it, in his waltz, and lethal embrace, with German fascism. Stalinism was really a special case.

Nazism is therefore of more import, as a cause, in the sense that Stalin was a reaction to the extermination threat that German racism and fascism posed, and was not the origination of the threat.

There was also another factor, subjacent to all the preceding. The Soviet Union had been attacked at birth by plutocrats.

As soon as the USSR was created, the Franco-Anglo-Americans, fresh from their victory over German fascism, helped the "White Russian" army attack the communists. After a few years of this, they failed. This, nevertheless helps to explain the paranoiac nature of the USSR. As far as the Soviets were concerned, they were under plutocratic attack.

Before WWI, the French people had invested enormously in newly democratic Russia, which developed amazingly fast (helping the paranoia of the Prussian generals, who decided upon war in 1912). Understandably, little French savers wanted to recover their investments. That was one of the reasons to throw down the Soviets, who refused to honor this debt (Russia looked into it 70 years later).

In any case, the Soviets felt as if global Western plutocracy was out to get them. And they succeeded to block it, as they took control of the entire Russian empire (and more).

After being blocked by the Soviets, what was global Western plutocracy to do? Was it going to fade away? Hell, no. It is not named pluto-cracy for no good reason: the lord of hell itself is its soul.

Well, Germany was an obvious target and playground for hyper rich plotters. At this point, 1919, a split occurred in plutocratic ranks: France expected a return of German fascism ("in 20 years", Clemenceau had prophesized).

What France wanted was the reconstruction of North-West France, that the retreating imperial German army had devastated, flattening Middle age castles and factories, downing power and telephone lines, flooding the mines (some miles deep), etc. The German fascists refused, preferring to cause hyper inflation, and whine to Anglo-Saxon plutocrats that the big bad French, with their big bad black soldiers were raping them.

As the duplicitous Germans did not send enough telephone poles (!), France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr.

Next the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy intervened, proposing, and enacting, several plans with several American and German individuals who were going to be the greatest promoters of Hitler (the later was on stipend from Henry Ford). The basic idea of the plutocrats was to use Germany to go around the American anti-monopoly laws enacted by Teddy Roosevelt. Nazism was born as a trick to escape American law.

***

DEMOCRACY HAS TO CHOSE WAR IN A TIMELY MANNER:

Global Anglo-Saxon plutocracy built itself a kingdom in Germany, and later pushed for Hitler to lead it. The relationship of France with the USA became terrible by 1934, when it became clear that the USA would support Hitler, come what may. France rearmed massively, and prepared grimly for war, penalizing her economy under the weight of the military effort.

After 1936, French diplomacy succeeded to wrestle Britain progressively out of its Nazi embrace. (It was a long process, because the King, and even Churchill, had been pro-Nazi; the king was abdicated, and Churchill changed his convictions, waking up to his inner French soul, and giving up on Mussolini’s considerable charms).

***

PLUTOCRACY, OR HOW THE AMERICAN CENTURY CAME TO BE:

In 1939, France was at war with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and American plutocracy. Britain was scrambling to build an army, but was too late. Asked formally to help, the USA refused, pointing at France as an enemy combatant of sorts. A particularly low point for the USA, which brought 70 million dead, a rich price to be paid for the so called American Century.

The American Century was that period when American plutocracy, having getting rid of the British, German and French ones, manu military, was sole owner of the world, but for the impoverished USSR and Maoist China. The American People profited from its so called century, of course, so was not too keen to understand how it all worked.

A renascent Western Europe, under Franco-German leadership, soon started the European Union, and the other part of France, Britain, had to join. When Germany reunited when Eastern Europe freed itself from the Soviet dictatorship, France (Mitterand) requested the Euro, and Germany (Kohl) accepted. A big Germany was OK with France, as long as it was a bigger France.

And here we are. The financial crisis of 2007 was long time coming. Differently from, and more severely than the Great Depression, it was announced by a faltering of the augmentation of real income per capita in the USA (real means once headline inflation, the CPI, and a fortiori real inflation, is taken into account).

***

PLUTOCRACY HAS COME BACK FOR MORE:

Now the spirit of the history I recapitulated above is not found in history books: the global plutocracy makes sure of it. It is actually hilarious how they clean up Wikipedia. But, even for the common, uncurious People, the events of 2008-2009 were revealing: the very rich individuals who had caused the crisis were sent trillions of Dollars and Euros. Normal people were told that there was not enough money to pay for their modest unemployment checks.

Obama, having offered trillions to the richest, most culprit of the rich, informed the baffled people that health care costs had to be contained for the future (when president Palin wants to invade Uzbekistan, and needs plenty of money for that, apparently). Thus, the enraged people of Massachusetts elected some guy even more good looking and naked than Obama was.

As it turned out, the financial crisis of 2007 revealed a great breathing together (con-spirare = together-breathing). Worse: a great synarchy, the greatest synarchy that ever was, came into view.

Indeed, it became clear that the same plutocratic networks and organizations, or even families, that supported German fascism after World War One still pulled the same strings.

One of the most blatant case is the Bush family: Prescott Bush was one of Hitler’s most important collaborators, as he managed, for Hitler, the most important "defense" cartel of Nazism, the American-Silesian corporation.

That was, of course fine as long as American plutocrats were busy stabbing democracy in the back. But, 8 months after Hitler had declared war to the USA, it became an embarrassment. Thus Prescott Bush was made a senator. Now Wikipedia points out that Prescott Bush was never a Nazi. And why would he have become a Nazi? He did not need to become a Nazi anymore than Stalin, long Hitler’s ally, did. Hitler’s was Bush’s employee, not conversely (banks and Wall Street played major, precise role, bringing Hitler in the service of Bush).

***

TRADING WITH FASCISM OUGHT TO BE VIEWED AS HIGH TREASON:

Trade with the Nazis later made the Nazis extremely strong. Without this trade the Nazis would have had nearly no weapons, no fuel, no rubber… and no friends.

Although the Nazis were very friendly to their Anglo-Saxons plutocrats and dictatorial friends in the East (Polish colonels and Stalin, among others), France’s strenuous opposition put them off balance, as she persuaded Britain to return to her roots, as Britain finally understood that she was malignantly manipulated from inside by plutocrats of the fascist type.

China does not have a dedicated country as an enemy, as the Nazis had in France. But it is even worse: the enemy of the Chinese dictatorship is history itself.

China is not a democracy. If China encounters internal trouble it will be tempted to do exactly what the fascists did in Germany in 1914: create an exterior war. Notice: Germany had a figurehead parliament at the time, in 1914, but China presently does not even bother with this fig leaf. It is even more naked than Scott brown (the naked white Obama from Massachusetts).

What does that mean, not being a democracy? It means most people, and their opinions, do not matter. People do not have a mind of their own, on important subject, just as Lin above.

People, instead of being an assembly of varied minds, become just one mind. All ideas are lined up in rows, goose stepping behind a few big ones, and the most important of them all is that the leaders are always right. This idea is explicitly in the Qur’an, and was the key idea of Nazism. Hitler called it the Fuererprinzip/ A double concept: principle of the guide, and guiding principle.

***

WHEN ONLY AN OLIGARCHY DOES THE THINKING, IDIOCY REIGNS:

Hitler was crafty like a fox; but, like a fox, he could be hunted. By late 1940, it became clear that he would not be able to defeat Britain.

An important Soviet delegation was in Berlin, November 12, 1940. It had to flee, with the entire population, in underground shelters, as British bombers shook Berlin, convincing the Soviets that the Nazis were seriously weakened (the Nazis had lost 50,000 elite fanatical soldiers and engineers, just in the Battle of France, and more than 2,000 planes).

This is the central weakness of fascism: a few do all the thinking, others obey and think only according to the thoughts the few on top have determined to be correct. By November 1940 those who thought in Germany could have seen Germany had already lost the war. Instead, Hitler ordered to plan the invasion of the USSR, and the obedient, brainless ants got busy doing so.

So our young Chinese is told that Britain and Europe are two different systems, and she repeats that with utmost seriousness, beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt. By that token, Tibet, Taiwan, Eastern Siberia, and why not Vietnam were always part of China, and especially the oil of the so called South China sea.

Plutocracy has of course seen in China its new fascist Germany. It uses it in a similar manner.

This time, though, the West has nothing to lose to enforce its civilization and ethics, in a timely manner. It can learn from history, the same causes having the same effects.

If China wants war, better now. Waiting that fascism feels ready to attack is not the optimal approach for democracy.

***

THE TIME TO FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY IS NOW:

In 1914, the fascists felt ready, and attacked. Only the semi miraculous battle of the Marne saved civilization (whatever naïve, plutocratic and aristocratic Bertrand Russell said). In 1939, Britain and France short-circuited the uncanny alliance of Hitler, Stalin, and some powerful American plutocrats; if they had not done so, then, Nazism would have won (the Nazis intended to arm themselves with sophisticated weapons and attack five years later).

Now, of course, it did not happen that straightforwardly. As Hitler formally allied himself with the Soviets, to get supplies he needed, such as oil, he expected to scare France. As far as Hitler was concerned, to reunify the Great 1,000 Year German Reich with Eastern Prussia was only satisfying the legitimate wishes of oppressed German minorities, part of whose heartland was occupied by the inferior Poles. Hitler did not want a world war: he was not ready yet. Five years later, maybe.

But France had no choice. France knew that Hitler was getting all sorts of supplies, even weapons and oil, from the American plutocrats. Attacking the Nazis had been delayed for years, to allay Anglo-Saxons sensitivities and interest. It was either attacking in1939, or waiting until the Nazis were ready to attack, as happened with the Prussian generals in 1914. The Nazi Reich was becoming ever more powerful every day, greatly thanks to its American plutocratic friends.

We are getting to similar crossroads with China: everyday China becomes physically stronger, but indications have been recently that, not only its intellectual progress is not keeping pace, but it is going backwards.

Paul Krugman, now followed by others, including Larry Summers, has argued that the Chinese currency is deliberately pegged to the US Dollar, and since the US Dollar is too low, so is the Chinese currency. Fair enough, but it is mostly the Europeans who ought to complain.

More troubling was China’s circus in Copenhagen, when Obama was treated as a little boy and Europe superbly ignored about doing something against overheating and acidifying the planet.

This was very strange: China is the number one polluter, and decided to make a huge effort in renewables, so it ought to play along. But maybe some of its plutocratic sponsors whispered in the appropriate ears of the Chinese oligarchy that green progress ought to be stopped (how else to explain China’s 180 degrees turn, reminiscent of those that Hitler boasted he could do, since only him took the decisions).

When democracy plays with fascism, it plays with fire. With the negative effects of "globalization" getting uglier everyday, maybe it is time to concentrate trade on the democratic countries (that includes all the Americas, except for Cuba, and all of Europe, apparently all the way to Kamchatka).

But then again, a firm hand could be just what China needs to see the light in a timely manner.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama mentioned that the USA "invented the automobile". How does that relate with the preceding?

This statement is blatantly not true. The first (steam powered) automobiles dating from 1769, as part of a French army program (several were built, and the first car accident occurred). In 1806 a Swiss invented the internal combustion engine (hydrogen-oxygen). In 1895 Peugeot fit the first rubber tires, and Michelin invented the pneumatic tire.

It would seem that the first American automobiles appeared in 1902, made by Mr. Olds. It is hard to find anything having to do with automobiles which was actually invented first in the USA. But it feels good, so the president says it, stoking the jingoistic fires.

Now what is the difference with monolithic thinking from China? Well, the USA is still a democracy, and one can protest when blatant lies arise. Piling up little lies (such as the USA invented everything, say) is mostly grave because it tends to lead to big lies. But big lies can be stopped in a democracy.

For example, the American People got exasperated by all the lies, or unreal craziness of the Obama administration. Lies or craziness such as sending trillions to the banks’ criminals, right away, not questions asked, no strings attached, meanwhile proposing that cost control panels (aka "death panels") should scrutinize Medicare, to save a few measly "billions", in the future. Perhaps. Real harm, savings for President Palin. 

Confronted to this craziness, what did democracy do? Well, it elected the naked white guy in one of the most left wing states of the union, as a calculated insult of the collective subconscious.

Democracy works, fascism does not, and the day fascism understands that, it attacks.

***

Out With NASA Decadence, In With Better Union

 

OUT WITH THE PAST, IN WITH THE NEW, SAME AS THE OLD PAST

Let me add my spice to the excellent decision of Obama to change the strategy of NASA back to what it used to be, and what it ought to be: shaping the sharp edge of science and technology, where the profit motive does not provide enough lift.

Obama proposes to drop Bush’s going-back-to-the-moon-because-it-is-there-and-we-can-do-it-with-wheelbarrow "Constellation" program. "Constellation" is a nice French word, that was the best to be said about it, before burying it in shame.

"Constellation" was only going to use old technologies for a backbone, with a varnish of new gimmicks. When I say old, I mean really old. Example: the Ares I idea came from China, a millennium ago (the inventor died in the process).

Instead of using obsolete technologies that ought to, and could have been, deployed 30 years ago, Obama proposes to push for new technologies, an unusually bold, courageous and clever plan (for an administration known for its Summers of our discontent).

Inventing really new technologies was what NASA used to do in the 1950s (with the glorious X program). At the time the idea was to push for new technology, and new science. Going to orbit, and then the moon, qualified as such, back then. But we have been to the moon, and we do not have the technologies to stay to the moon sustainably (which would be the only way to progress scientifically, technologically and economically there).

True, sending explorers to Mars would bring a huge scientific progress, but we simply do not have the means to do this reasonably yet… Considering that robots can do plenty there (pushing robot tech in the process, no doubt most profitably in the most down to earth manner.) in particular, a French-American robotic Mars sample return mission that was scrapped (too expensive, said the USA), could be revived.

Obama is thus entirely correct to go back to the way it used to be.

If worse come to worse, and private USA companies cannot go to space safely and effectively, the USA does not have to use Soyuz forever. Indeed the French led European rocket, Ariane V, and its Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle, modulo a bit of tinkering, would be a perfect replacement for the Ares program: whereas Ares I promised to be an even stupider vehicle than the Shuttle, Ariane V, with its hydrogen propulsion, and safety and effectiveness record, is perfectly state of the art. Besides the French have embarked on the future Ariane VI program, and, knowing them, they will not quit.

Indeed, remembering 1940, the French view is that superiority in aerospace is of the strategic essence. The USA can afford to be more relaxed, considering it is better defended by demography, geography, and history.

After Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor, it got quickly defeated because the USA was more mass technological. What do I mean by this? The USA had much more pilots, for example, including thousands of women pilots, who helped crucially the military effort in the Pacific, by flying very dangerous cargo missions. After Midway, when the competent Japanese fliers ended in the drink, or as combustible on the flaming Japanese carriers, Japan did not have enough competent pilots to train others and fly missions. Equivalent losses would not have stopped the American juggernaut.

The USA also had much more technologically competent individuals and private companies than Japan (or Germany) did.

As a result, the USA was a republic of engineers, and had much more advanced technologies than Japan, that it was able to deploy quickly. American carriers with armored decks and steam catapults, the imperial Navy did not have. So quickly the Americans were flying much better, well armored planes into battle, and turning their radars on. Superb Japanese binoculars came short during the night battles the Americans relished. Besides the USA had cracked the Jap codes, and USA submarines were superior, preventing the great rising sun imperial contraption to ship anything much between the dozens of thousands of islands on which it had cleverly spread countless garrisons (sometimes discreetly reduced to cannibalism).

It will be good, this time, for the core of the West, the European Union and the USA, to operate more as a unit, in a timely manner. Things got messy in the Second World War (and also the First world War) precisely because Europe and America did not operate as a unit to start with (instead some rogue American plutocrats went to operate as a unit with… Hitler!).

The USA waited malignantly until France and Britain won the war for them (WWI), or nearly lost it (WWII). It was great for the so called "American Century", but that did not last too long… And the 75 million or so who died in WWII, among others, sure did not find the strategy most profitable (differently from Wall Street, which laughed all the way to its associated banks!)

It is not well known that the "Manhattan Project" truly started with the French "War Ministry" in January 1938 (you will probably not find this information on Wikipedia, and I will not bother putting it there). The French removed all the nuclear patents deposited by French scientists, and insured the cooperation of Norway in a determined nuclear bomb effort, extended later to the UK, and then the USA, which ended by hastening the end of WWII with as little blood and roasted flesh as possible(as everyone does not know yet).

My point? Because of a tradition of technological, scientific, and generally mental supremacy in the West, there is much more to be gained in cooperating, than by having everyone sulking in its corner.

The Eurofighter, and the F35 Lightning, are examples of contemporary major multinational military programs (on these superiority fighters and the Franco-French Rafale does, and will, the air supremacy of the West depends).

Less well known, France used the USA to mass produce the 75mm gun in the First World War, helping to save France (the "75" was perhaps France’s main weapon in WWI).

But not just that: USA private companies learned to mass produce the “75” with higher precision than they could initially muster (the Ford Model T would come out of that new technological tradition of massive precision, a decade later).

So welcome to the future! One of the reasons the European Union was created was to make economies of scale, and synergies of mental efforts. For example, although all Airbus models are assembled in Toulouse, France, all Airbus’ wings are conceived and constructed in Wales (UK).

There is no reason why the same economies of scale could not be extended systematically to the USA, as a collaborator of the EU (the Saturn robot, Huyghens-Cassini, is a splendid example of this; Boeing’s 787 another, with Japan thrown into the mix, as Mitsubishi now traditionally makes Boeing’s wings, which is more crafty than fighting Boeing’s planes; by the way, Airbus is now more of an American company than Boeing itself…)

In other words, nothing prevents its errant colony to come back ever closer to its parent, Europe, in order to achieve a better union… And others should, and ought to join in, which means, democratize (and the eye was on Beijing.)

PA