Oligarchy, Or Plutocracy?

USING THE CORRECT WORDS MATTER.

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Abstract: Very Serious People trying to describe the socio-economic situation in the USA, and the world, like to use the word “oligarchy”. The rule of the few. However, according to their own discourses, they ought to use the word “plutocracy”. Plutocracy, in conventional semantics, is the rule of wealth.

Plutocracy is what we have in Libya, under the crazed dictator. It is not just the rule of wealth. It is the rule of Pluto. As I was saying in the last essay, at some point only force works against Pluto.

See below an otherwise excellent editorial of the unfortunate Paul Krugman, dragged below as exhibit number one: a purring kitten when a giant roaring saber tooth tiger is needed.

All Very Serious economists such as Simon Johnson, or Stiglitz do this. Describing plutocracy, and then calling it “oligarchy”. However something has to be said about understatements.

Understatements and euphemisms can be a form of lying. For example when Jews started to disappear from Germany, the authorities claimed they had been removed for their safety. They explained that the Jews caused the world war, and had been sent east, to protect them, since people wanted to exact vengeance. Most Germans decided that was good enough an explanation.

A related form of lying is to always present as equally valid points of view, as long as they are opposed to each other. In the end, that absolute equanimity is a denial of judgment, and thus of justice. After an insane maniac has killed a few people because he did not like the way they dressed, are we going to present his point of view as equally valid? As CNN’s Anderson Cooper concurred with Jon Steward, there is something as the truth (I am paraphrasing). One cannot give a lie equal time, just because it’s opposed to the truth. And then claim to be “fair and balanced”.

Obama is one euphemism further removed from reality. He does not even dare to use the word “oligarchy” (presumably because then the question would naturally arise of why he himself is not ruling, since he was elected to do that).

So Obama uses the expression “special interests“. That’s what the French would call talking with a “wooden tongue”. Because “special interests” says nothing. We all have “special interests’, except those of us who really have no interests, and are nothing special. Or does that mean that Obama is nothing special, and has no interests? So he finds quite remarkable that some people have “special interests“?

The debate is not only semantic. Without a precise vocabulary, there is no precise thinking. False semantics breeds false thinking. If plutocracy there is, those who are in charge ought not to call it specially interesting, as if they were visiting a museum somewhere.

After giving some outrageous examples of the frasques of plutocrats, I let Krugman talk, as he describes plutocracy quite well, while calling it something more acceptable to the powers that be. And why so? Because plutocrats commandeer much more of the resources of the planet than people expect. It’s not just Maria Carrey and Beyoncé who sing for those who ought to be in jail. Intellectuals, let alone politicians, know how to find the right notes to seduce those who have it all, because they stole it. And that corrupts us all, deep inside.

I also claim that the semantics of the word “plutocracy” have to be taken in full, and seriously, since therein the ultimate warning.

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PLUTOCRATS DO AS HADES DOES:

In Libya, Khadafy pursues his criminal insanity, as he has for 41 years, claiming it’s a revolution. To get on NATO’s good side, he briskly asserts that the country is at risk of becoming a new Afghanistan. However, he is proud in his boots, while he assassinates thousands of who he claims are drugged out youth under the order of bin Laden (he has got to believe that NATO is even dumber in Afghanistan than it already is). He also called protesters “greasy cats and rats“.

To help in his rule, Khadafy uses African mercenaries (paid a fortune in oil money). Khadafy used to fight a war in Africa against France, him using African mercenaries, and the French using everything, even supersonic jets, decades ago. So this is nothing new. Each time Khadafy’s sons offered millions to sexy Western pop stars, ostensibly to sing a few songs in their Caribbean palaces, that was good for business, said the West.

The New York Times gave egregious examples of the plutocracy in Libya, complete with one of the many sons of the “Guide” requesting 1.2 billion from an oil company to establish his own private army. The New York Times calls such acts “exploits”. I don’t think that irony is either cute, or appropriate. Use irony with Obama, if you wish. But, with blatant criminal insanity in plain sight, where thugs kill thousands while corrupting the world, irony is self defeating. Shall we be ironical about Auschwitz? How does that feel?

I call Khadafy’s sons antics, international criminality similar to what happened under the worst of fascism, in the first part of the Twentieth Century, and if we don’t react in a timely manner, it will end up the same.

Not only is international plutocracy in business with these people, but learning to tolerate their monstrous behavior, teaches us to respect monstrosity, and, thus, to find our local plutocrats loving. In the USA the word “philanthropists” is used as a replacement for  the word “plutocrats”. It does not just sound Greek, thus democratic and learned; it is the first word American plutocrats hide behind. The irony that man eating tigers are also “philanthropic”, in a rather similar sense, is lost on the mesmerized population. So far.

What is Khadafy’s clan fortune? 30 billion in liquid assets were quickly found by “The Telegraph”. More thorough accounting show at least 120 billion. One of the world’s richest families. Not coincidentally, made of some of the most nefarious sadistic killers in the world.

In Kosovo, the new president is an extremely wealthy man who once restored the Kremlin (he got the contract for the restauration of the vast seat and residence of the Russian government)… and was examined unsuccessfully for corruption by the Swiss authorities. He wanted to become the self described “Berlusconi of the Balkans“.

Berlusconi is another extravagantly rich multibillionaire directly in power, rumored to have long befriended the Mafia, by making its laundry (money laundering, that is). Is the Kosovo president the one suspected by the UN and the EU since 2003 of killing people to sell their organs? No that’s Hashim Thaci, Kosovo’s brand new prime minister and the former head of the Kosovo Liberation Army. I am not making these things up, no need: the truth is more alarming than the imagination. Plutocrats everywhere, doing whatever it takes to further their dark arts.

In Wisconsin the just elected republican governor cut the taxes on the rich, in his bankrupt state (he gave 140 million in tax cuts to friends and corporations). Cutting taxes on the rich: another way to help the economy, say the rich. According to Reaganomics, the more one gives to the rich, the better the economy.

Then the governor decided to make collective bargaining of government employees unlawful (to save money he said, as if talking was expensive). Being employed by the government of Wisconsin would be like joining the army: Mussolini, here we come!

How do such people haters get elected? How did Mussolini and Hitler get elected? Simple; you gather some of the hyper rich together, present your plan, and, if they accept it, voila! The money is sent where it counts, or where it hurts, or where it impresses, or where nobody knows it irrigates the reasonings. And soon the people is persuaded that its tormenters are its saviors. (Governor Walker is indeed financed by the rich billionaires, the Koch brothers, and, indirectly, by many other billionaires.)

Mesmerizing people with money is particularly easy to do in the USA, where not much of an attempt to separate politics and money has been made. So the hyper rich buy the TV, and the masses do as they are told. (A sneaky way to do that is to run advertisements for the erroneous ideas themselves, so that people are then persuaded that lies are truths, and truths are lies. That works well because people do not understand that which ideas get elected is more important than which puppet gets to implement them.)

Studies have shown that, in the USA, the candidate who spends the most money is elected in 94% of the cases.

The governor wants to prevent collective bargaining with the unions, which often has to do with working conditions, or augmenting efficiency. Saving some money will allow to give more to the rich, since the rich are the economy. But mostly it demolishes some more an example of what I call ‘democratic institutions’ (see Krugman below).

There were protest demonstrations. Representative Paul Ryan, the sort of creature who passes for a star in the republican party, made a singularly apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.” Indeed. Complete with one of Mubarak’s little helpers, stealing from the poor to give to the rich, and forbidding people to organize themselves to resist.

In New York, the Libyan delegation rebelled, and condemned the tyrant Khadafy as a “war criminal“. Khadafy is indeed a war criminal: his regime has no democratic legitimacy whatsoever, beyond killing people.

Khadafy’s children are known for being filthy. One beat up his wife in London. She was advised to claim to the Brits it was not what it looked like.

Another son beat up a maid in Geneva, so he was arrested by the local police. Libya, to compensate for that outrage, took Swiss citizens hostages. Switzerland soon capitulated.

Just as the USA and France had capitulated earlier, after the bombing of their jumbo jets, and various other attacks; Reagan had shown some apparent resolve, and bombed Khadafy, but the result was the death of some innocent child… So Gaddafi said. He did not explain why, alerted by some traitor in NATO, had fled his compound, with all his entourage, in a timely manner, and never explained why he left a child behind, as if she were a goat left for a tiger. (A French bombing once in the desert in Chad nearly killed Gaddafi, long ago, but that’s another story.

Khadafy’s son, his heir apparent, the intellectual Seif Al Islam, warned of a holocaust, should the protesters keep on protesting. By the way, Seif Al Islam purchased a PhD at the London School of Economics. OK, many Anglo-Saxon universities are for profit organization, and the plutocrat Soros had been instrumental in the granting of the PHD, written by some eminent Harvard professors for Mr. Seif Al Islam Kadaffi. However, since PhD means Philosophiae Doctor, should not they strip him from it? What’s philosophical about preaching mass murder?

Notice that the young, Senegalese born Secretary to Human Rights in France, Yama Rade, courageously protested the coming of Khadafy to France. She got in very hot waters from her boss, the plutocratic friendly Sarkozy (he then cancelled the position she held). Sarkozy is not a plutocrat, but many individuals in his closest family, let alone countless friends, are. Fate is a most miraculous thing.

Notice also in passing that (Hilary) Clinton and company (Obama?) acted very well in the Arab revolution, because, in total contrast with their attitude with WikiLeaks, the USA taught young protesters how to use the Internet to implement a revolution (yes, some of those the Department of State helped also worked for WikiLeaks, and a lot of the horrors revealed on many of the nasty regimes came, trough WikiLeaks, from the US Department of State! Maybe the anti-WikiLeaks rage was all an act…)

Libyan Air Force pilots fled, with their French made supersonic jets, to Europe. The war criminal has been using jets to bomb protesters. Why does not the EU and the USA issue a warrant of arrest against Khadafy for on-going war criminality? And a no-fly zone? (Since I wrote this, the UN made some hesitant steps in that general direction; but a freeze on anything pertaining to the Khadafy clan ought to have long been in force.)

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CALLING LIONS LIONS HELP IN NOT BEING EATEN:

Concepts such as “Satan”, “Evil”, and “Pluto” were invented for occasion such as these: when personal madness disguised as self-love kills thousands, for no other reason than self expression. Khadafy ought to be arrested on sight. When he bombed American and French jumbo jets, killing nearly 500, he was forgiven. Who gave Western leaders the authority to forgive him? It was a crime against mankind, and there is no forgiveness for that. Khadafy was recently received in Paris and Rome as if he were the messiah.

It would probably take only a small fraction of the armed forces of any one of the three leading armed democracies (USA, UK, France), and just a few days, to do away with the murderous Libyan thug. View it as realistic training. That would be good, especially for the Italian army.

Or shall we do as with Auschwitz, wait until the heat subsides, and the ovens cool, and decision makers can whine that they would have done something, had they know? The truth is, our politicians love his oil, his money, and the established order, worldwide plutocracy, that the Libyan dictator belongs to.

It is not just that Libya, with 3% of the world oil production, a lot of it “Light Sweet Crude” necessary to Europe, is an important piece of the set-up. Khadaffi helps keep the principle of dictatorship honorable, the People down, and it does not hurt that his enormous portofolio of 150 billion dollars keep many a Western bankster happy.

The comparison with Auschwitz is not outrageous. First, before it got real big, Auschwitz, and the like, started small. After a few years, it got real big. Of course, Libya is small in population (7 millions). But to leave huge outrage in Libya alone will encourage others, much bigger, to become outrageous too, and much more outrageous, since they are so much bigger.

Second, the comparison is not outrageous, from my point of view. I have important family reasons to have that point of view, since my direct ancestors engaged Nazism in combat, on both maternal and paternal sides, and those born in Europe moreover engaged in the resistance, sheltered the hunted in secret rooms, and barely escaped with their lives.

They were saved from the Gestapo by a traitor inside the Gestapo (!) and by US GI, while chased across the countryside, so any claim of primary anti-Americanism against this site have to be taken with a grain of salt, since, without GIs, there would have been no author; thus American GIs are objective accomplices to whatever is going on here. Also claims of primitive anti-Germanism don’t hold water either.

I had an uncle with the inner German and Nazi story, as he had married in the very highest reaches of the German military-industrial complex (he knew some of the plots from inside, thus was never allowed to visit the USA, although a most famous astronomer). This background made me a Nazi expert. By the age of 6, I had already a few iconoclastic theories I still subscribe to today, and were plenty enough to irritate a beloved, older cousin with (who defended conventional wisdom, as she meekly claimed the Germans had been abused just by Hitler; I knew better from the other side of the family!).

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WHEN NAZIS WERE REVERED IN PLAIN VIEW:

From my point of view, Nazism was pushed by hyper wealthy financiers and industrialists, not all of them German. Many were based in England and the USA. It is ironical, and I guess part of a general cover-up, that the movie “The King’s Speech” talk so much about the difficulty someone had in reading a discourse of Churchill (OK, I did not see the movie yet).

On second thinking, maybe it’s not surprising. The preceding King, his brother, had been thrown out, ostensibly, for wanting to marry a woman, who was to divorce several months later, thus putting her in the position of marrying him. Her picture is part of the handsome threesome below.

The truth: ex-king with co-conspirator in 1937.

Wallis received roses daily from the Nazi foreign minister Von Ribbentrop, apparently slept with him, and kept on leaking secrets to him (the FBI was told). It helped that the very rich Von Ribbentrop, a wine merchant, had an extremely expensive residence in London. The influential network Ribbentrop had set-up in England led to a de facto alliance of the UK with Hitler in 1935 (this alliance then proceeded to violate the Versailles Treaty; this explains why France did not attack Hitler in 1936: no matter what, France was not going to contradict Great Britain).

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HIGHEST TREASON IMAGINABLE STILL UNCONDEMNED:

In truth Edward VIII was thrown out for being part of a vast pro-Nazi conspiracy throughout British upper society. Similar cleansing was needed in the USA, but never happened. Instead the American pro-Nazi conspiracy headed what one ought to call the Nazi reconversion movement, after the war.

When are we going to see a movie on that much more interesting subject, namely when all too many leaders of the West, stabbed democracy in the back, by becoming Hitler helpers, or even enablers?

The pro-Nazi British conspiracy was not finished after the abdication. The best was yet to come. The ex-Edward VIII stayed powerful and influential, especially in Portugal, and Spain. But he liked France best. So he was naturally named Inspector General of the British Forces, with the rank of major general, and, as such, had a full month to inspect the French lines in 1940, when France and Britain had been at war against the Nazis for more than six months.

And this, well after the German ambassador to the Netherlands had warned, in February 1940, that the ex-king had leaked to the Nazis the Allied war plans (the German ambassador thought the Nazis were crazy).

Hey, why should the armed forces fear a man who declared about their enemy: “In the past 10 years Germany has totally reorganized the order of its society … Countries which were unwilling to accept such a reorganization of society and its concomitant sacrifices should direct their policies accordingly.” (Edward VIII, 1940).

True love: ex-king Edward VIII reviewing a squad of towering SS, with Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front. Ley hanged himself in 1945 to escape further Allied punishment.

Ley was the head of the Nazi trade union busting effort (for further trade busting, see Wisconsin above). It helped that Ley was of a poor, socialist and trade union background. Ley was indicted at Nuremberg on three counts. Count One: “The Common Plan or Conspiracy to wage an aggressive war in violation of international law or treaties”. Count Three:”War Crimes, including among other things, mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilian populations“. Count Four: “Crimes Against Humanity – murder, extermination, enslavement of civilian populations; persecution on the basis of racial, religious or political grounds”.

The ex-Edward VIII informed Hitler where the weak point of the French defenses was. Hitler then took enormous risks (and big losses), to mass all his armor through one tortuous road in the Ardennes mountains. Nazi armor was seen by a Spitfire pilot, but he was not believed.

Hitler then broke through the weak point, thanks to a pounding by the entire Luftwaffe, and suicidal charges by explosive laden engineers. In a mystery unexplained to this day, giant French guns in the area did not fire. The second rate French reserve division which was in the way of the entire Nazi army panicked, and the rest is history. Dozens of first rate French (and some British) divisions, and nearly all the Franco-British armor were north, in Belgium and the Netherlands, punching in a vacuum.

Although vastly superior to Nazi armor, the French and British divisions were cut from behind. The American plutocrats were on the other side of the Atlantic, not counting their chicken, since they were not hatched yet.

Desperate efforts by courageous Canadians and the remaining French army were not enough to insure the safety of French aviation (which may have regained air superiority), and a coup and associated cease fire followed, before the proposed Franco-British common nationality could be implemented (because a government needed to represent and protect the French, and the only remaining government was in London, headed by Churchill).

Charming scenes followed, such as Hitler giving, with his entourage, the Nazi salute to a bigger than life portrait of the ex-Edward VIII, in his castle in Sologne. Or when the ex-Edward VIII ordered the Nazis to put guards at his residences in France (even on those on the Riviera). And the Nazis did! Hey, one would not have wanted one of these crazy French to make the ex, and future, Edward VIII uncomfortable.

Finally an exasperated Churchill ordered the treacherous ex-king to return to British soil, lest he be court-martialed (and probably condemned to death, for high treason). He was exiled to the Bahamas.

There Edward VIII had to live among Jews and “negroes”, and he did not like it. As he said about the most prominent editor in the Bahamas: “It must be remembered that Dupuch is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium.”

Edward VIII knew about equilibrium: he was half Nazi, half British. No wonder his brother stuttered.

Edward VIII would stay rich, influential, and unpunished thereafter. The plutocracy knows how to take care of its own, and rein in the unruly. Never mind that Edward was an important contributing factor in the death of 50 million (the defeat of France and Britain in 1940 happened because of an extraordinary confluence of amazing events; in theory, the Nazis did not have a chance against the combined strength of the French and British empires, plus the British Commonwealth; the defeat happened because of many factors the reigning oligarchy has shown no enthusiasm to explore, as many keep on going in the present world, as strong as ever).

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IF IT’S THE RULE OF MONEY, MONEY-RULE, PLUTOCRACY, DON’T CALL IT JUST “OLIGARCHY”:

The Nazis would have recognized immediately that what the governor of Wisconsin is trying to do is a beautiful, and necessary thing. The Nazis themselves, in spite of tremendous efforts, were unable to subdue totally the unions and guilds.

The Nazis were the original believers in trickle-down economics, although they hid it below a “nationalist” and “socialist” discourse (although many Nazis were genuinely nationalist and socialist, the smaller group around Hitler was neither: it was just predatory, and self obsessed, and directed from not so far, by their plutocratic sponsors, because that’s where the money was).

As Nobel Prize Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times [February 20, 2011]: “What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy.”

Said oligarchies are ALWAYS characterized by immense wealth, and the wealth is used to rule. So they are more than oligarchies, they are plutocracies.

As I have long insisted, democracy cannot work without institutions; democratic institutions answer the objections of the Platonic Socrates against democracy.

(By the way, this implies that if the West, namely the USA and the EU, want to help democracy in democratizing lands, they should help the building of democratic institutions, and not even hesitate to do this before the one-man one-vote thing, which the Greeks viewed, correctly, only as part and parcel of a democratic society.)

Socrates whined that anybody voted about anything and for anybody, and that one ended with unqualified people leading the City. But Socrates’ reasoning is weak, because he shows no specific examples. He was judge and party in the matter, having educated, enlightened, bedded, dined, feted, loved, admired, celebrated and begged many of the controversial principals (his lover Alcibiades, the “30 Tyrants”, etc…). Those later led the anti-democracy movement in Athens. They were all members of a would-be plutocracy of Athens, and they all, at some point, were active dictators, or first class traitors. (Hence the accusation against Socrates of “corrupting the youth“, and hence Socrates philosophically smelling like a rotten fish. At least on that subject.)

However, corrupt Socrates’ mind was in the matter, his core objection is valid, and the European Middle Ages worked to answer it over a period of 15 centuries.

15 centuries? When the Middle Ages finished is a matter of serious controversy. Philosophically, 1945 CE could be advanced, and not just as a half joke. What Hitler did was similar to what Justinian did, and exactly what the European Union was designed to prevent, namely the return of holocaust driven fascism. So the FINAL break with philosophical traditions started under the fascist theocratic Roman empire happened after 1945, not before; last point: some of those traditions that came to be typical of the Roman empire, were antinomic to the principles of the early Roman republic.

In my chronology of meaning, the Dark Ages got rolling when Roman plutocracy started to dictate policy, around 146 BCE; it was then just a matter of time before everything decline and fell. Amusingly, that came in blatant evidence as Marcus Aurelius, who was dabbling in philosophy behind closed doors, put his biological son in charge (making him an early version of Khadafy; although Marcus Aurelius was much less plutocratic, differently from his rotten son).

By the same token, regimes giving prominence to a particular superstition are part theocracies, thus partly stuck in the Middle Ages (that’s an allusion to Muslim regimes).

The Middle Ages invented many institutions to allow expertise in a democratic context. An important type were the self governing cities (some under the theoretical supervision of some distant king).

Another important type of institutions, invented in the Middle Ages were the guilds. They still exist today. Many are called unions. the Nazis tried to break them, and they failed. Let me quote Krugman in extenso, since he brings some fuel to keep my fire burning.

…”contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.”

One is often condemned to repeat some ideas, until most people in the target audience get it, and revolution can click. In this case the audience is the world, with its seven billion people, augmenting quickly, and using the planet’s resources as if it were 50% larger than it really is, time is of the essence.

Michel Bréal introduced the word sémantique in 1883, from the Greek semantikos “significant”, from semainein “to show, signify, indicate by a sign“. Semantic is an integral part of any logical system. Exactly how that works has not been figured out yet, in my opinion (I am aware of the “Semantic Theory of Truth” of the famous Polish(-American) logician Tarski, or later pertinent objections by the US philosopher Davidson).

Basically the logic gives cooking recipes, semantics tells you what the ingredients are, allowing you not to prepare your Coulis de Framboise with red mercury, or trying to use frozen nitrogen for fuel. Precise logic needs precise semantics. Euphemisms pollute semantics.

A good example is the habit of using “oligarchy” where one truly means “plutocracy”. This clearly what Krugman means above, as he gives a near textbook definition of plutocracy, without giving its name (God used tio be the one with “no name” in the old Hebrew religion).

Just as Ley could not utter the word “war criminal” about himself (instead he stuttered so much, the word never came out), the honorable Krugman, Johnson, Stiglitz, do not dare utter the word “plutocracy” about the USA. So how come the private bankers got 5 trillions in the USA alone (trillions in Europe too)?

(OK, Krugman has claimed that giving money at 0% to the private banks so that they could place it with the same government at 4% was not a subsidy, because one was short, and one was long, a distinction without a difference if there ever was one! So what one sees here is that a reluctance to call plutocracy plutocracy, that is calling a cat a cat, leads to view a cat’s meal as a short term phenomenon, even, when, long term, one shares the same cage, and there is no place to go, except between those teeth …)

The (contemporary) Greeks have to suffer because rich private European banks, and the likes of Goldman Sachs, conspired to lend money to the government, which could not be paid back. How did that happen? Because the rich private banks greased the paws of the cats and rats (to recycle Khadafy’s poetry). So why not prosecuting those who got greased and those who greased? Well, because this society of deciders is a plutocracy, not an oligarchy: money rules, and that means many got greased, so many that they form a class, a solidarity, an union of the malfeasant, and they demonstrate their determination every day more, as they not build further fortune, but work to escape justice, and thus jail and restitution. As Madoff said, there is no way the banks did not know.

Of course they knew, but they were doing the same, exploiting a pyramid scheme, so they were not going to denounce pyramids, especially tiny ones. (Madoff’s pyramid was about 60 billion, the banks’ pyramid is in excess of 10,000 times bigger: such is the size of the derivatives’ markets, more than 600 trillions, and don’t believe anything the banks say about it; the only thing you need to know is that last time they went down because of derivatives, and they are the main investors’ therein.)

Thus, in an important sense, the plutocracy works precisely because it’s not the rule of the few. But, instead, it is the rule of the many who have money, so precisely plutocracy works because it’s not an oligarchy.

An oligarchy is the rule of the few. A plutocracy is usually defined as the rule of the wealthy. Hence, usually, the rule of the few. Thus any plutocracy is an oligarchy. Except when the corruption has spread so far, and  wide, and deep, that it is a matter of the many. That is what we have now. That is why there was no prosecution of the persecution.

This has happened many times in the past. The Persian empire that Athens fought was such an international plutocracy.

Here is another famous example. As Edward Gibbon observed in his “Decline And Fall Of the Roman Empire”:

“The lands of Italy, which had been originally divided among the families of free and indigent proprietors, were purchased or usurped by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which proceeded the fall of the republic, it was computed only two thousand citizens were possessed of any independent substance.”

Well these people, mostly of the senatorial class, were often immensely rich. they used their wealth to manipulate Roman society. They could field private armies, like Adolf Hitler in 1923, or the sons of Khadafy, in 2011.

Cutting taxes on the very wealthy augments quickly the possessions of the hyper wealthy because of the nature of the exponential function. So the present policies, in the spirit of Reagan’s “trickle down” may start with an entire class profiting, but will end up (or down!) with plutocracy where only very few are maximally profiting.

Knowing this, since the beginning of the neolithic, sustainable societies have taxed the wealthiest enough to insure that the exponential function would not take over. Societies which did not do this were not sustainable, and left little behind.

I understand that many economists of note prefer to use the word “oligarchy”, to sound less controversial, and not irritate the masters, as the word “plutocracy” no doubt would.

However, why is all happening? Out of not just the will to Power, but also the Will to Mayhem. When speculators make money out of food stuff, and people die from the resulting famines and troubles associated to them, we are talking about the worst behavior mankind is capable of.

Killing others out of hatred is terrible. Killing others out of greed is worse.

And this is happening now, and those perpetrators wear the most expensive suits. Shall we call them “special interests”, and wear an expensive suits too? And then read whatever they put on the teleprompter?

Those who impose the rule of money are not just doing that in a vacuum. In Greek mythology, the universe had been divided between Zeus, Poseidon, and Pluto underground (another name for Hades). The great philosopher Heraclitus made the keen observation that: “If they did not order the procession in honor of the god and address the phallus song to him, this would be the most shameless behavior. But Hades is the same as Dionysos, for whom they rave and act like bacchantes.” This reminds us of the source of the Ganges, of the Shivling, and Shiva, the supreme Hindu god, which has a wild, crazy, and destructive side. And indeed Shiva and Hades are related: the Greeks and Hindus communicated big ideas to each other, and that is one of those which went through. The worst part of that Hades-Pluto-Shiva is that it is, not all bad, and, thus, much more seductive.

Mythology, like semantics, did not grow out of the blue, but out of time honored wisdom. The world of plutocracy is also that of craziness, bacchantes and destruction. So plutocrats are motivated by evil, and they serve evil. That is why those “oligarchs” need to be called by their true name, plutocrats. Pluto is their master. And the word “plutocracy” should be generalized to mean the “rule of Pluto”, not just the rule of wealth.

The plutocrats do not just want us to venerate the Golden Calf. They want to crush us with it. It is the oldest instinct. But we, the seven billions, have better alternatives than the time honored holocausts they propose, once again. Shiva destroys, Shiva creates. But this time, Shiva, after destroying will have run out of a world. Einstein used to say that the fourth world war would be fought with sticks and stones. But that was wildly optimistic, since it supposed a breathable atmosphere would still be around.

Evil is sourced in the most noble necessity of sustainability. But we can find a better god. We are that clever. And have no choice in the matter. It’s this, or extinction of all we hold dear.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note1: The importance of semantics. In a way, mathematics is more about semantics than about logics. As the great mathematician, physicist and philosopher Henri Poincare’ put it: “Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.”

*

Note2: So when can one use correctly the concept of “oligarchy”? Well, when the few who are ruling, are not using money to rule. A military junta, when it is still materially poor may qualify (not the Khadafy clan, though, since it became immensely rich as seen above).

Indeed an army can function as a democratic institution (as it claims to want to do in Egypt, now that it has seen the blinding light). But since it holds the big guns, it is always tempting for generals to stray. The situation is a peril in any democracy. Even in France and the USA generals have come close to high treason a few times, and hanging an admiral occasionally as Great Britain did in the 18C, maybe a good way to remind the military of whom it is supposed to get its orders from.

Plutocracy is all too often hiding. Just as the mythological Pluto is often invisible, so it is with money. The USA is crisscrossed by “foundations”, “institutions”, “think tanks”, and “research centers” which are well financed and pose as Very Serious sources of ideas, when in truth they are just propaganda outfits. One could talk of a socio-economic oligarchy servicing the plutocracy.

***

NO REVOLUTION, NO CIVILIZATION

 

DON’T ASK WHOM REVOLUTION IS TOLLING FOR, IT TOLLS FOR THEE.

Civilization Without Revolution Is Only Perversion And Stagnation. We Revolve, Thus We Progress.

***

Abstract; Civilization amplifies man. Plutocracy destroys man. There are many reasons for this, such as greed (l’appat du gain, in French).

However, the full truth is much more sinister than that. Ultimately, plutocracy destroys man by design, evil design, rather than by happenstance.

As usual, by plutocracy I do not mean just the rule of wealth, but also what eggs on this obsessive behavior, the RULE OF EVIL. Plutocracy: Pluto’s rule, Pluto in full, not just the Pluto who wants to grab all the treasures of the underground, but also the Pluto of everything else, the one who can make himself invisible, the one who is the other name of Hades.

So, by Pluto I mean Pluto as evolution created it: the ultimate way to keep Earth in balance with the genus Homo. Through the culling of the genus Homo. (But culling, just so, is so delicate to do, with weapons of Mass Destruction.)

 

Plutocracy in the usual sense, the rule of wealth, appeared as soon as huge quantities of capital could be created, and thus concentrated by the few. Indeed, capital tends to concentrate (a purely mathematical phenomenon).

As capital concentrates on the few, others are left with too little. Thus plutocracy renders most people impotent. But people are made to be potent. “Live potent or die”, this is how evolution had it. Thus plutocracy makes civilization morbid, ready to collapse at the first adversity, be it only because not only does it estrange Homo from himself, but, by making most members of society impotent, and thus incompetent, it makes for a society of worthless individuals, grains of sands in the machinery of meaning.

This is why revolutions are necessary. Verily the real sense of the concept of “revolution” is not destruction, and a jump into the unknown, for the unknown’s sake. In truth, it’s the exact opposite. Revolution is actually the act of going back, to re-turn [Latin: re-volvere]. Nietzsche would have been pleased. He was obsessed by the “Eternal Return of the Same”. I am saying that said return has to be engineered.

Return to what? What is so revolutionary about returning?

A real revolution returns to the fundamental nature of man. A real revolution re-empowers average individuals, by allowing them to return to their fundamental nature. A real revolution free people from those chains Rousseau was talking about. (That is how a real revolution can be distinguished from the fake ones: a real revolution brings back to the real nature of man; a fake one drags man further away from man; what I mean here is that Lenin, for example, organized a fake revolution; he brought more plutocracy, not less… And that was even his program!)

Thus, although revolution is necessary for progress, it is the most conservative thing. The enemies of revolution claim to be the most conservatives, but they are the exact opposite. Or then hyenas are the most conservative. After all, they want to keep the entire carcass to themselves.

Civilization has to protect itself from excessive plutocracy. It does this by undergoing periodic revolutions, cleansing excessive plutocracy, adapting the essence of man to the new reality that advancing technology, plutocracy, and changing circumstances have brought about.

Otherwise, if civilization does not undergo a significant revolution in a timely manner, it fails epically: see the Mayas drying up, at each others’ throats (650-900 CE). Or see Muslim Spain falling apart all by itself (in a flurry of petty lords fighting each other) , or look at the Baghdad Caliphate in 1258, annihilated after typical plutocratic madness had rendered it unable to perceive the roughest outline of reality (see below).

The West has been erroneously described as “Christian”. Nietzsche insisted that this was never true, and that aristocratic morality dominated along, whose values were deeply anti-Christian. Although Nietzsche sourced his reasoning in literature, the historical record is pretty clear, and the actors even more so. They have names, and I don’t hesitate to brandish them. Real history beats philology anytime.

In truth, the fundamental ideology of the West at its best, is the permanent revolution. The West has done well because of its propensity to revolution.

 

In its most significant outline, the history of the West is pretty much the history of revolutions. Revolutions have cleansed plutocratic pollution. They have prevented the Occident to turn into the hydraulic dictatorships of the Orient. Revolutions have allowed to adapt to technology, and push it further.

Contrarily to received wisdom, revolutions do not have to do with mobs. Revolutions are always led by intellectual elites. Then a People implements it. When a mob rises to seize the Bastille, it is the fracture at the end of an accident.

The history of China is replete with fascist paroxysms such as the short lived Qin dynasty. A revolution in more ways than one, many have said, and evidence shows, but in my set-up anything that augments fascism considerably, to the point of burning books and burying scholars, actually end up increasing plutocracy, and does not qualify as a genuine revolution (which has to do more with ideas; fake revolutions by plutocrats and fascists aspiring to become plutocrats are abundant; see Libya, and various other Arab speaking regimes).

The Ming can be viewed as a revolution against the Yuan (= Mongols), but there again, its anti-intellectual character makes it more a mental collapse and a coup than anything else.

In other words, between Confucius and the Twentieth Century, a lapse of 26 centuries, China has known 2 successful foreign invasions (not counting the ephemeral French, British, and Japanese occupations), but no revolution. The absence of genuine revolution was China’s major problem. China has been playing catch-up, by indulging in at least 4 major revolutions in a century, which brought in a cornucopia of Western ideas. And many have worked spectacularly well.

Same in India, for that matter. In spite of Buddha’s pretty meditations below those big trees, the caste system stayed in place until the British squeezed the life out of it. That was a non neglectable 33 centuries or so. And it was genetically based (modern gene studies have shown). So much for the great achievements of Indian philosophy, and the life impacting wisdom exuding therefrom. But now India, too, has become revolutionary (I will make Gandhi a honorary revolutionary, but not the main one, just for the occasion of this particular paragraph).

Similarly in the lands that Islam crushed, no genuine revolution was ever seen. Except in Turkey, where the intellectual leadership that characterizes a real revolution was provided by the “Young Turks”.

Right now, the intellectual leadership for revolution against fascist plutocracy is provided by the Internet.

The quasi simultaneous revolutions in Athens and Rome, 26 centuries ago, are exemplary. An earlier example was the revolution from the top in Egypt, when a Pharaoh decided to reduce vampiric theocracy by imposing just one god, a secularist, naturalistic god, to replace the many gods with their attending theocracies (circa 1350 BCE). This Egyptian revolution, like many other Egyptian revolutions, had consequences to this day (in particular, it clearly influenced, JCI, Judeo-Christo-Islamism, the religion of Abraham, the would-be child killer; the child killing itself is in the “MLK” tradition: Moloch, and had nothing to do with Egypt… Until the followers of Abraham, that is, partly, Moloch, conquered Egypt, 16 centuries ago).

An anti-plutocratic revolution is a matter of restoring the highest principles above the machinations of the few who are animated by that part of the ethology of man which is man-destroying.

There are other types of revolution, in science, philosophy or art. They are related to purely anti-plutocratic revolutions, because any established system of thought gets captured by an oligarchy (priesthoods, such as the priesthood Muhammad was trying to avoid when he set the basics of Islam, are examples). So for correct new thinking to be accepted, an oligarchy has to be seduced, or vanquished.

Thus Europe has been thinking well, because Europe has cultivated the spirit of revolution. This observation generalizes Nietzsche’s thesis that the spirit of the god Dionysus (the feasts of the senses, mental anarchy), animated the Greeks as importantly as that of Apollo (classical beauty, rigor).

Reciprocally, if the spirit of revolution falters, so will creative thinking. Be it only because creative thinking, when it is creative enough, is always a revolution.

***

***

REVOLUTIONARY ANTIQUE EGYPT:

Egypt brought enormous contributions to civilization. It was at the very top, until rendered stupid by the religion of Abraham. Egyptian civilization was the last remnant of the Saharan civilization, which had to flee to the margins, as the Sahara became the world’s toughest and largest desert (short of Antarctica). The Egyptians adapted to the Nile. Their contributions go far beyond the monuments left today. The Egyptians were part of the work group (so to speak) which invented the alphabet, as they exchanged ideas on that with the Sumerian cities.

A lot of what came to be known as Greek mathematics originated in Egypt. Egypt had also a close, symbiotic relationship with Crete before the later got destroyed by the crazy volcano. Much later, at some point Athens attacked (for a while successfully) to free Egypt from its Persian occupiers.

Deciphering ancient texts has shown that life in ancient Egypt was amazingly modern in feeling, closer to the present day West than to the Salafist hell which have come to pass for normal in the region for the last millennium or so. People would have a picnic in the park with the children (watching the crocs and hippopotami). A lot of the famous legends of the bible can be found verbatim in Egyptian fables. The Egyptian fables are thousands of years older.

Women were fully liberated, as they used to be in prehistory. Egypt had many female pharaohs, as the eons passed by. And many queens of superlative influence, such as Nefertiti. That makes Islam, with its vision that woman ought to be, at best, worth half a man, particularly offensive, and grotesque, in a place which knew little sexism for millennia.

As the following demonstrates, real Pharaohs could be extremely enlightened. At the time of the following, the Pharaonic empire was gigantic: it extended all the way to Mesopotamia and Anatolia.

***

 

A REVOLUTIONARY PAROXYSM OF CONSEQUENCE IN EGYPT, 33 CENTURIES AGO:

Pharaoh Amenhotep IV had succeeded his father Amenhotep III’s. Amenhotep III reigned 38 years (better than Mubarak!). Mono-Atenism, a revolution, was launched by the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV who changed his name to Akhenaten or “Living Spirit of Aten“. Akhenaten was exasperated by Egyptian theocracy, which was sucking the empire dry (he was the top theocrat, so in good position to know).

Amenhotep/Akhenaten’s chief wife was Nefertiti. His son was Tutankhamun (DNA confirmed). So we are among the elite. Akhenaten’s revolution was from the top.

The revolution imposed by Akhenaten was astounding: he basically imposed the belief that the nocturnal struggle of the sun, characteristic of the old Egyptian religion, did not happen. Instead the rise of the sun was viewed as mechanical, led by a mechanical god (who had three aspects). Akhenaten believed in a god one could not really pray to. (So what happen in the after-life? After a beloved daughter died in childbirth, the pharaoh recognized he did not have an answer… and he was sad; that was the Achilles’ heel of his religion… Achilles would come within a century).

Akhenaten preceded Judaism by 2 centuries. some have suggested he was the true Moses. Sigmund Freud, a sexually obsessed secular Jew, argued that Moses was an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt when Atenism fell in disfavor (as bad luck would have it, there was a plague). There is much to be said on Akhenaten. Akhenaten believed in nature, and the art of the period is characteristically, very realistic:

Plaster portrait study of pharaoh Akhenaten (or some pharaoh closely related to him). The heads of Nefertiti (= “Real Beauty has Come”) and Tutankhamen, are from the same period.

***

MEN DIE, IDEAS LIVE ON:

From the preceding a conclusion arises with inevitable splendor. Revolutions are natural to Egypt. Recent Muslim autocratic stagnation is not.

If Ancient Egypt had been as dumb, in a sexist way, as the Qur’an wants it to be, it would not have been: dumbing women down, dumbs down all of society, because women teach infants and small children, when intelligence is taught the basics. That was always the downfall of sexist societies. They breed idiots.

That makes Islam, its associated, vicious, meek potentates, offensive and grotesque. It is amusing to see a religion coming out, and making fascism into a moral principle (see Qur’an, Sura 4, verse 59, a quote all would be revolutionaries and defenders of Islam ought to consider; it makes Hitlerism virtually identical to Islam, on that point, the point of what Islamist politics is all about; no wonder: Hitler knew Islam well, and sang its praises).

As I always say, but it is as good a place to remind it as any, plutocracy encourages theocracy. After all, plutocrats thrive better when they are viewed as divine, or as having a special relationship to god (the formula Roman emperors settled on).

The European Middle Ages is the archetypical example of plutocracy leading back to theocracy. In recent decades, plutocracy has been facilitating theocracy both in the USA and in Muslim countries, the former bringing the later, and it is backfiring in both places, as it always does. That this plutocracy is USA based is irrelevant to the mechanism itself; the initial rise of Salafist Islam during the Middle Ages was also plutocratically driven, but indigenous, and took much longer.

Rebellions, revolutions and wars in Europe cut down, again and again, the unhealthy rule of plutocracy and theocracy.

Past Egyptian revolutions’ ideas are still driving our civilization today. However, the first rate civilizational role of Egypt collapsed after the grabbing of power by the follower of Abraham. In light of this, anybody extolling instead the grandeur of Islam ought to go see the history doctor. Probably the psychiatry doctor too.

Akhenaten was the world’s richest man, when he launched his revolution, and had always known extraordinary privilege. He used his astounding position to rule for the better, and leave behind ideas that would help to rule for the better. That proves that the relationship between money and rule has to refined, as I advocate. Plutocracy is not just the rule of money. Akhenaten’s rule was no plutocracy, because he was not inspired by the worst in man, but by secularism, pragmatism, the observation of nature. It was the rule of revolution, actually aiming at decreasing theocracy and plutocracy.

(Marx himself was made possible because his friend Engels was rich, born of the rich; top thinking has always required a tap on the top means.)

However the evolution of ideas know strong relapses, and the stronger the ideas, the stronger the relapses. Under later Pharaohs, a lot of the ancient Egyptian religion was re-instated (although Akhenaten’s ideas were never completely forgotten).

By the time of Pharaoh Ramses II, Akhenaten came to be known simply as “the enemy“, and the method he had himself used, what the Romans came to know as “Damnae Memoria”, where all references and statues and representations of a previous ruler are erased, was used against him.

***

EUROPE, OR CONTINUOUS REVOLUTIONS EVERYWHERE:

Sparta, Athens and Rome had drastic revolutions within a century of each other. The Athenian revolution was more drastic than the Roman one; Athens was a democracy, the People ruled, whereas Roma was a republic with a “mixed” constitution (Polybius dixit), part democracy, part aristocracy (with the two chambers systems of Sumer, 15 centuries earlier).

Revolutions is how Athens and Rome came to be. Those who admire Greco-Roman antiquity admire revolution. Athens had more than one revolution, as it relapsed in plutocracy. Those revolutions threw out kings or tyrants, in other words, plutocrats. The Athenian or Roman civilizations would not have happened without these revolutions. What would have happened instead is a mystery: a Marseilles-Etruscan alliance against Carthage?

It is significant that, in the usual Marxist view of history, these fundamental revolutions are ignored; however they redistributed wealth, expropriated, and reorganized the class structures. They are more reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s revolution than to anything mild. I guess evoking their amplitude and radicalism would have sabotaged Marx’s simplistic view of the ineluctable flow of history, from feudalism to communism.

Many other thinkers have ignored those revolutions too, including Nietzsche, who contented himself with pointing out that the Greeks were hysterically “Dionysian”, non rational in the conventional sense, and therein their superiority (until Socrates came around, all tangled up with his little three cents arguments). In truth the Greeks were fundamental revolutionaries.

Conservatives, Neoconservatives, and various fascists wax lyrical when they evoke Rome, but they tend to forget that it started as what would now be called a “Marxist”, or “Socialist” revolution. Although, in all fairness, the Italian fascists, and even the Nazis remembered. Those critters were explicitly anti-oligarchic, and anti-plutocratic, as they understood quite well that the Peoples they led by the nose confusedly understood some elements of the connection between plutocracy and civilizational regression.

So fancy night clubs were supposed to be closed, In Nazi Germany (wow). In truth, of course the Nazis were faking it, it was a camouflage: so it is when the death adder resemble dead leaves. The Nazis were the greediest, and so where their supporters, and they all conspire to steal the Jews and other Europeans, so greedy they were.

Even after it was occupied by the armed forces of plutocrats, Athens kept on revolting. First against fascist imperialist Macedonia. Finally, with Roman help, it was successful in getting rid of Macedonia. It had taken 180 years.

But the Roman allies stayed, like the Americans would have liked to do in France in 1945. And they stayed in an aura of terror, because they had wasted Corinth, on the ground that t was too socialist a city.

Still, Athens stayed alive, like ambers of a fire ready to devour its Roman masters. Emperor Justinian, nearly 6 centuries later, would finally close the Athenian academies, and outlaw any critical, secular, or philosophical teaching not under the state’s Christian close supervision. The punishment for miscreants was according to Saint Pau’s orders: by burning the culprit alive.

The Revolution of 1789 in France was severely criticized (including in the USA at the time), for being something iconoclast, something never seen before, bloodied, respecting nothing.

However, those holding such opinions show their ignorance of history. The revolution of 1789 was in the best tradition. It was the revolution Athens and Rome should have made: giving universal rights, including voting, to all.

Athens had given the vote. Rome had taken back the vote, but extended the rights.  The revolution of the universal rights of man and the citizen of 1789 was in the best tradition started by Athens and Rome. BLOODY REVOLUTIONS: THAT IS HOW THE WEST WAS WON.

The two heroes represented below assassinated one of the two tyrant brothers of Athens (514 BCE). Members of their families could dine for free forever after.

Statue of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Naples. [Roman copy of the Athenian version by Kritios and Nesiotes.] The heroes are au naturel, because the raw spirit of real men needs no cloak. Only the Dark side needs to hide.

The conspiracy to do away with the tyrants was revealed a few minutes too early, so the other tyrant escaped and was able to torture the surviving hero to death. Later a Spartan army swooped in, and did away with him too. Violence does not just feed on violence, it can eat up entirely.

This by the way illustrates what I would call the NON VIOLENCE FALLACY. The illusion that violence can be vanquished, or is best vanquished by non violence. if that Spartan army had not shown up, the great Athenian civilization would not have been. [See below.]

There were even mini-revolutions under the fascist Roman empire. The Roman republic was forced by its Italian allies to grant them citizenship: Rome won that war, but lost the argument. It was a war for equality, something even more drastic than a simple revolution. Finally, under the Severian emperor Caracalla, Roman citizenship, and all its privileges, was given to all free men (3C).

Then, of course, Christianity itself, imposed from the top by Constantine as he was busy conquering the empire (helped by his Franks), was a revolution. Christianity, as interpreted by most Christians, was opposite of a lot of the Roman ethical system under the empire: instead of cruelty, it promoted love. Christianity was even opposed to the ethic of the republic; instead of the (republican) law, it promoted forgiveness (highways became deadly as the Christians refused to punish robbers). And so on. Rome was punished by its own instruments, as the application of Christianity soon proved itself more cruel than anything Rome had known, ever. Killing with kindness is still killing. And Christians were often more demented than kind in any sense.

That Christian ethical ethical revolution was not the end all, be all. It built up on the Greco-Roman republican ethics (with its notion of equality). It was more sexist than Romanitas (after all Rome had empresses, the Augustas: whereas the church never had a female leader). Christianity was also indifferent to the greatest flaw of the Greco-Romans, slavery.

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THE FRANKISH REVOLUTION:

The ethical driver of Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism and cruelty. However Christ was himself power mad and cruel, as demonstrated when he suggested to bring unbelievers to him so he could strike them with a sword, and kill them. One could argue that Christ was less power mad and cruel than say, emperors Constantine, or Constantius II, who killed most of their own families. But that is not saying much. As a good Roman imperial leader, Christ celebrated his ability to break families with his personality cult, as children would follow him rather than their parents, a boast Hitler would also make, word for word. Great minds of the Jewish hating kind think alike.

OK, Christ probably never existed, so I will forgive him. Nietzsche correctly argued that it was erroneous to describe European civilization as “Christian”. Nietzsche observed that the European aristocracy rarely behaved as if it were Christian, but, instead celebrated anti-Christian values.

Indeed those who view Europe as Christian are far from the truth. They are confusing the truth, and the crafty cover-up which was set up to hide it. Most read history naively. As Clovis pointed out, if he had been there with 10,000 of his Franks, Christ would have never been crucified. Naively, one could say that Clovis understood nothing to Christianity. But it would be as if saying that the wolf understands nothing to the sheep and its immaculate robe, because it eats it alive, and splashes blood everywhere. Who is naïve here?

What Clovis was saying is exactly what he said: if he had been there with “10,000 of his Franks”, there would have been no crucifixion circus, and thus no Christianity. 10,000 Franks: no Christianity.

The Franks did not respect Augustus’ advice to leave northern Germany alone. The Franks conquered Europe, brandishing the cross, because that instrument of terror was excellent with distant savages. But they did not conquer Europe with love. Quite the opposite. They conquered Europe with military hyperactivity: several of the most famous Frankish leaders, over a span of 3 centuries, were continually at war. The Franks made the Romans look like placid cows. The Franks invented methods of victory and domestication later copied by the Mongols, and the Americans.

The Franks made an anti-Christian revolution (they were above any suspicion, since they had just converted to Catholicism, they loudly proclaimed, caressing their francisca). Christianism had been against law, order, the military, thinking, books and education, to the point of suiciding society. The Franks swept all this, and established at the helm a sly mixture of German democracy and Roman fascism, under the banner of “Europe”.

In the following three centuries, one can argue that the Franks piled up at least three other revolutions: the outlawing of slavery (7C), the nationalization of the Church (8C), and forcing the church to teach secular knowledge to all the children (8C). And all of this was before Charlemagne. Charlemagne instituted a flurry of mini-revolutions. Such as linguistic revolutions: replacing Roman capital letters with Carolingian minuscules, which could be written in 3 strokes, and thus allowed to copy books much faster. They also created written German.

The invasion of England by the Franco-Normands also rode in as a revolution (and many revolutions rolled over England in the next 6 centuries). The Conqueror instituted a direct relationship with his subject, and preserved the local assemblies. His relationship with the lords of his French army would soon lead to the Magna Carta (as the French Barons saw themselves as partners in the conquest of England, rather than simple subjects).

Another aspect all too neglected, is that the Franks claimed (like the Romans) that they came from Troy. The Roman story may have percolated from the mysterious Etruscans (who indeed came from the area of Troy, sort of). The Etruscan plutocrats were the victims of the Roman revolution, but they had taught Romans to count their cows.

However the Franks were much more seriously anti-Greek, in the sense that their vision of society was definitively radical: they wanted no slaves, and women were to be equal enough to reign (Rome had several “Augustas”, reigning empresses, de facto, but one had to wait the Frankish queens to have female leaders with exactly the same “authority” as if they had been men… the reigning queens and empresses Europe would enjoy a millennium later come from that tradition… curiously it died in France where it had been born, as a reaction to the fearsome Isabelle de France, daughter of Philippe IV le Bel, queen of England).

This is the flow and ebb of revolutions; the Greeks and the Romans had been outrageous enslavers and sexist demons. Crete, the partner of Egypt, centuries before the Dorian conquest of Greece had not been sexist: it had female toreadors, exerting with very little clothing. However the Dorians came in as males armed with steel swords, killing the men, and enslaving the women.

Both Christianity and the Franks owe their success, ethical, and then material, to the fact that they reconciled civilization with the authentic inheritance of the genus Homo.

France, of course, stayed revolution central ever since (even organizing one in America, just for the heck of it, repaying England with some of its own medicine).

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TO UNDERSTAND MAN, GO OLD:

When one wants to understand man, one has to look back to prehistory always. This is the most worthy religion; re-ligare, re-tying to our true nature, and, thus the true nature of nature. Why?

Simply because man, and that means man’s ethology, evolved over at least the ten million years anticipating that sliver we call history. It’s not ten thousand years of Neolithic, not even one half of a thousandth of the duration, when the gens Homo has proudly carried its name,that changed the eons that preceded them.

OK, some population, from Norwegians to Kenyans, learned to digest milk as adults, in the last few millennia. But they did not change how they loved, feared, hated, and yearned for glory, mayhem, and the hunt. Why? Because man is out of nature, for and against nature. Manipulating nature into something more suitable is what Homo does, ever since she learned to cut rocks just so, make clothing, and use fire.

However, nature, in its full glory, has not changed much. OK, Homo has mangled the biosphere, and caused the worse extinction tsunami in 65 million years. But the rest of nature has stayed pretty impervious: lightning is still there, volcanoes erupt, and the tides don’t dance the samba, however strong we wish them to. And we are quickly running out of metals (a problem overlooked by past historians, as far as I can tell, but which was a major factor in the decline of Rome).

What is the implication? The deep nature of man, of Homo, was apt to solve the deepest problem: evolve a nature to master nature itself for the better (and the better had to be defined according to wishful thinking). So the deep nature of man, prehistoric man, is not just about who we truly are, but about what the true nature of the mental machinery for resolving nature is.

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NEOLITHIC & CIVILIZATION AMPLIFIED THE DARK SIDE:

If anything, Neolithic and civilization (the first cities appeared in Anatolia, 10,000 years ago) made a bad situation worse, or let’s say that civilization and neolithic made some already all too human characteristics, much more so. And not always for the good.

 

I am not saying that this is a possibility, but, rather, part high probability, part fact. Why? Because the neolithic and then even more so, civilization, increased human densities, hence human interactions enormously. Increasing density put humanity, and humanism, on steroid, so to speak. Man’s intelligence is culturally programmed, and if the intelligence of culture blossom, so does individual intelligence (it goes the other way too: submitted to a really stupid culture, such as Nazism, or superstition, individual intelligence can go in reverse).

Studies of earthly remains show that neolithic life was extremely murderous. And it was probably much more murderous than before. Indeed paleolithic human groups used to be small, widely separated, with low birth rates, during the millions of years of the paleolithic. Paleolithic man had more problems with the local lions. Although, of course, expeditions to steal someone’s else fire were probably the greatest achievement for hundreds of thousands of years as Homo Erectus appreciated fire, an engine of survival, but did not master enough thermodynamics yet (namely that heat is motion). Wars, and holocausts (of more than a dozen humanoid species) imparted the human mind with its very Dark Side.

Thus the Eden Rousseau longed for, not only never existed, but was deeper in prehistory, where our character comes from, and roasted Rousseau for dinner was a much rarer occasion indeed (in all senses of the term).

But still, agreed, things got worse, in more than one sense as the combinations evil thrive on multiplied with each other, when human densities went up.

Civilization meant the high density of cities, but it also meant the high intensity of thinking, and therein the possibility of imaginative solutions, those which allowed to survive, the sustainable ones, the mores, morality, and its enforcement, the law.

It is funny how many talk about “oligarchy”, the rule of the few, whereas few talk about “plutocracy”, which I define as the rule of hell. But, pray tell, how could only a few rule, without giving hell to the many?

 

Another countersense is to call regimes such as the Tunisian, the Egyptian “autocracies”, the rule of self, whatever that means. Since when has “self” ruled alone? The Tunisian and Egyptian regimes rested not just on the army (which switched sides), but the police (now claiming to have been a victim too), and, just as American rule in Iraq and Afghanistan, on secret armies of private goons expert at the darkest arts, such as killing people from afar (snipers’ position were revealed on Twitter, though…)

Maybe Stalin was the closest approximation of the rule of self, or then Roman emperor Domitian. But Stalin, after his buddy Hitler attacked the USSR, stayed secluded for days. When he met with the politburo, Stalin expected to be fired (aka executed). Even Stalin did not rule alone. Domitian, or Nero, ended up doing so, and they were disposed off in vast plots. And plots not from the People, but from fellow oligarchs, or more exactly, plutocrats (a similar scenario held with Caesar, except Caesar was far from alone, but he decided to go around as if he did not even need one companion or bodygard).

Look at vile regimes such as Mohammed VI’s in Morocco, or the Saudi: you have got many, thousands, grossly profiting from the regime. Same in Jordan, or Algeria. Ultimately people of the West profit also from cheap phosphates (Morocco) or cheap oil (the Arabs). in truth, the money is recycled, such as when the owners of Arabia buy zillions of dollars of weapons to their fellow senior partners in plutocracy based in the USA.

In Algeria, health care is free, thanks to the 60 billion dollars of oil revenue, a lot of which is redistributed.

 

Call, if you want, Mubarak’s Egypt an oligarchy, or a dictatorship, but both descriptions will come short, as neither brings to the mind the rule of the worst that the human character can display. But a regime which can kill more than 300 of its pacifically protesting citizens in 2 weeks (while hurting thousands more), for all to see, that’s a hellish regime. Of course, Libya will do worse, because it’s less civilized.

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RECOGNIZE EVIL, IF YOU WANT TO FIGHT IT:

Where does hell come from? Here is the Roman answer:

It’s all mixed up! Yes, the yin-yang symbol appeared at least seven hundred years earlier in the West than in China. Even two thousand years earlier, if one counts, as one should, its ubiquitous apparition in Celtic art (where the Romans probably got it from, since Gallia Transalpina is now known as Northern Italy).

Roman republican civilization was hard, tough, uncompromising. It’s the Romans who brandished:”Homo homini lupus.” (Man wolf for man). Under the Principate (“empire”), this revelation turned to plain cruelty.

The same idea, that toughness is central to effective civilization, is in the fascist symbol, representing justice, an idea adopted by Rome from Etruria. A bundle of rods together: E Pluribus Unum, Out Of Many, One, holding an axe. So justice without the threat of ultimate violence is not.

 

Roman fasces

 

Not only is hell all mixed up, it is a matter of location in the dynamics of the swirl. No violence, no justice. Justice associated to violence: the way of the West, the way of revolution.

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THE NON VIOLENCE FALLACY TRICK:

Since Gandhi became fashionable, it has been said that the best revolutions are non violent. How convenient for those with the guns.

It is true that non violent methods can be very useful. Mr. Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolent revolution, such as “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents with practical advice.

However, as I always tend to argue, Gandhi did more bad than good. So arguing pacifism, and non violence was good is a bit like arguing that vegetarianism was good because Hitler, a vegetarian, wanted to free Bohemia. OK, Gandhi esteemed Hitler, I know, and Hitler did free bohemia, his way.

Gandhi was fighting an enemy, the British, whose ridiculous tax on salt, and the like, was going to be discontinued, just as their rule. The Brits were the first to know that. Gandhi was fighting scurrying rabbits. Gandhi’s later life shows that he was aware of how wrong he had been. Not only did he want to repay the Muslims, in spite of death threats of enraged Hindus, but it seems that he wanted to die.

Non violence is pushed by those who want to fight only scurrying rabbits, and bleating sheep. It is a maneuver of the vicious ones, essential to their rule. even more so than building a fear barrier.

Greenpeace forced Japan to give up killing whales, in the present Japanese execution of whales season. But if Greenpeace had been only peaceful, it would have got nowhere. Instead it took huge risks with its science fiction motorized catamaran, and great violence was used.

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PLUTO PREFERS TO HAVE A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE:

While the oligarchies advise peace and moderation to protesters, they do not feel so constrained. In Egypt the 18 days rebellion of February 2011 killed at least 365 people. Within a few days of the start of protest, the obviously mentally impaired Khadafy had killed more than 200.

To counteract that governmental violence, violence of the People, that is force of the People, was, and had to be used. The demonstrators protected the Egyptian Museum on Tahir place, which (violent) thieves (probably regime goons) had raided. Thousands of Molotov cocktails were exchanged. If all “non violent” Egyptians had been thoroughly non violent, Mubarak’s son, Gamal, would have sat in the throne in September, after another fake election, as planned by the plutocracy.

In Tunisia, demonstrators tried to take over jails, in which political prisoners were held. They got killed, until the Tunisian army, charging with tanks, interposed itself, ordered the prison guards, police and goons to open the jails, and surrender.

When a real revolution is needed, real violence has already been used. Only more violence can push it away. In Tunisia, definitively, and in Egypt, half way, the revolutions have worked because the armies sided with the demonstrators. So it is FORCE which decided which way things would go. The pictures of Kasserine, with the red berets officers standing barking orders from the top of tanks, holding heavy caliber weapons tell more than volumes of wishy-washy pata philosophy by the meek and weak.

And indeed, where the army supports the regime, the regimes did not break. Algeria is the quintessential example (but there the army can justify its existence, as it fights vicious Muslim fundamentalist closely related to Al Qaeda). In Libya the murderous clown, Khadafy, at the head of what he calls his “massocracy” (rule of the masses), killed more than fifty, just in the first two days (Libya is supported by various European powers).

In Bahrain, the USA supported dictatorship felt that it could fight, considering that the world empire of the USA has a major military basis on the premises. So the army, paid by the plutocrats, came out in the night as demonstrators were sleeping. The army charged and shot, killing at least 5.

One could object that my little theory that non violence does not amount to much was disproved in South Africa. But South Africa was a special case, and not just because of Mandela’s extraordinary intellect. His enemies themselves were also pretty extraordinary, and they had lived through something similar themselves, as victims, a few generations earlier, during the Boer War. The Boer had been submitted to a holocaust, and none of the other locals had it so bad.

Both Mandela and Gandhi were British trained lawyers. Both are depicted as giants of non violence. However, that’s an illusion. Mandela’s approach was completely opposed to that of Gandhi. And so were his solutions. Mandela embraced bombs when it was important to show the whites they would not win a violent struggle. Seriously jailed, he embraced the minds of his enemies, learning Afrikaner, and subduing them mentally. Then he found a “Truth and Reconciliation” approach which was most appropriate to South Africa.

Some who read me carefully may feel that embracing Mandela’s “Truth and Reconciliation” while approving the French method of shooting legions of collaborators in 1944-45, seems a bit spastic.

However, different places, different reconciliations. In South Africa, the Peoples needed to be reconciled. In France, starting in 1944, the population had to be reconciled with the idea that the republic was strong. Also the USA, carried a bit by president Roosevelt’s dislike for France, had planned to occupy France, as if she were Nazi Germany, or Poland, and the USA were the USSR. The USA had to be warned to: a diminished France would play the game of collaborating with the new world order, but only so far. and, as in 1939, was ready for the greatest sacrifices.

Shooting up to 40,000 collaborators in 1944-46 was not just a sacrifice on the altar of the republic, it was a warning by the republic to all enemies: if we can do that to the French, we can do it to you too.

This American occupation did not happen because the French army, even with 6 million prisoners in Germany, was more than a million strong (not counting reserves). And it was a ferocious army. Some officers had fought 6 years. An IBM director (believe it or not), and the fact that North Africa was basically France at the time played an important role there (which explains why the USA then tried to separate France from North Africa, exciting the Muslims against the French republic).

In other words, just as the USA exploded atomic bombs over Japan, in part as a warning to Moscow, France executed a lot of Nazi collaborators, as a warning to those too tempted by the idea of crossing again the French republic. The fasces of the republic had to come down hard, as a strong teaching for Europe, the world, and the future. After the war, the USA collaborated with thousands of the most vicious Nazis. In France the collaborators of Nazism had to be very careful.

Some may feel that I talk, talk and talk, gushing with execrable facts and theories, and, as a French speaking commenter decried, that I never propose any solution. But not so.

If the armies dominate, as I say, then the West, should it want to change the regimes, can influence the armies. Those armies generally depend upon the West for their armaments, and, thus, training. (A dictatorship such as Myanmar receives military support from its main trading partner, and fellow soul in more ways than one, China. it is the exception that proves the rule. In the world plutocratic system, no dictatorship is an island.)

Exerting force on the military is what the USA has done in Egypt. The force to be exerted could be just the force of persuasion (say in Jordan, Libya, Morocco).

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ROME FAILED BECAUSE IT HAD JUST ONE REVOLUTION. THE FRANKS SUCCEEDED, BECAUSE THEY HAD MANY:

The history of the West is pretty much the history of revolution. Continual re-evolutions have allowed the West to keep on progressing. It is pretty telling that Rome had only one revolution (when it threw the Etruscan kings out). Then there were many centuries of an increasingly democratic republic, until the disastrous Second Punic War (starring Hannibal). Rome’s elite was decapitated, nouveaux rich took over. Plutocracy thrived, and fed the military industrial complex. The machine overheated, the world was conquered, with one war of choice after the other. Aggression against Greek republics committed.

Then those aristocrats, the Gracchi tried a revolution, but they and thousands of their supporters were killed by armies of private goons in the employ of the hyper wealthy. At that point the Roman republic was lost, and transmogrified into a senility gnawed at by gangrene (and indeed, by 200 CE, although the empire is still militarily overwhelming, science and literature have died).

The Gracchi had viewed the problem with total clarity: plutocracy. They described it with flame and fury. They legislated land redistribution. Thus, once again, Marx and company invented nothing there. The Roman republic died, because the revolution the Gracchi tried to implement, failed. It failed, because overwhelming force was used against it. And only because of that.

As the Greco-Roman civilization caught fire, disintegrated, and ravaged all, in its theocratic death throes, the Franks tried several coups, revolutions, and all out wars. The Franks named two of their candidates Augustus, and one of them was the famous Julian, Augustus of the unified empire, hated by the Christians, who call(ed) him the “Apostate” (he was mysteriously killed).

Clovis succeeded where Julian failed (unfortunately, by then, after 125 years of anti-civilizational terror most books and teachers had been destroyed). Whereas Julian and his brother, soles survivors of their family, had access to a tremendous library and teachers in the imperial castle at Macellum in Cappadocia, the libraries got burned under the order of Augustus Jovian, who succeeded Julian, and the teachers soon followed.

It is pretty telling that nobody ever disserts about Christian theocracy and its tremendous holocaust. Is that a form of racism? (Namely Christians can do no wrong, so the proclamation of the Dark Ages by 375 CE is something better ignored. What would have happened if the Nazis had won? Auschwitz and its 40 square kilometers, would never have happened? )

Revolutions can fail: the first half dozen anti-Christian revolutions attempted by the Franks failed. Julian counter-revolution also failed. It can be argued that he used too much “Truth and Reconciliation”. “Truth and Reconciliation” would not have worked against the Nazis. When American services used the Nazis after the war, the approach was “Lies and Concealment”. Clovis and company succeeded in part because they claimed that they were not what they were, so they were well accepted. Another trick was to progress progressively; when slavery was outlawed (around 660 CE), it was outlawed initially only in the sense that citizens of the empire were not allowed to own Christians.

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Conclusion: WE RE-EVOLVE, THUS WE DOMINATE: Rome did not re-evolve, so it declined and fell into a heap. Having learned from this mistake, European civilization is about permanent revolution. When plutocracy has become too domineering, it is time for some more re-evolution. The reason for this continual struggle is that technology evolves, thus opening new avenue of domination to plutocracy. For example Corinth invented the trireme. Soon, a public-private program devised under Themistocles, allowed Athens to build 200 triremes (cutting all its primary forest in the process), and to construct a sort of aquatic empire stretching all the way to the Black Sea. That was all for the good. However, the plutocrats of Macedonia, those predatory horse lovers, also learned to build triremes, and, differently from the Greeks, they were extreme imperialists. In the end, they defeated Athens in two sea battles, as the rich Athenian captains decided to go to the Dark Side.

This shows that, the faster technology evolves, the more opportunities open to the Dark Side. The present financial markets, with their metastatic evolution are a perfect example: new technology has literally allowed them to get away with murder. For example as the world organization they set up for commodities, or rather, necessities of life, have allowed them to starve to death thousands, if not millions.

Let’s not overlook the fact that both the Athenian and Roman republics were sparked by forceful ANTI-PLUTOCRATIC revolutions. The Franks themselves conducted quite a few of them. So what’s the ultimate religion of the civilization we have now? REVOLUTION. Forget Christ, his jealousy, and his sword, in the name of his self aggrandizement. When the Americans made their revolution, it was against the king, the plutocrat in chief. It would take more than a century for the USA to see a billionaire again.

We welcome our Egyptian comrades to the side of permanent revolution. Their road is long and narrow, and passes through their hearts. Many have died, and more will, as satanic regimes fight back. All over North Africa, the Middle East, and even the world, Western plutocrats have installed rotten plutocrats they deal with, in a collective exploitation of all the peoples, all over, all the time. Insane maniacs such as Khadafy are perfect examples. Cracks are appearing in these cozy arrangements. Make no mistakes: what you see in Egypt, you have it at home. It’s just a bit more crafty. You had plutocracy in Egypt, because you have it at home.

 

But the fact also remains that North Africa and the Middle East have been the object of the very Greco-Roman and Hydraulic Dictatorship influences which made them too friendly to sexism, enslavement, and submission to theocracy and its obscurantism. “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Qur’an is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.

They Muslim brothers, those submissive ones, learned that from Theodosius and Justinian, but they don’t know that. in a way, they are slaves to Constantine, Jovian, Valens, the two Theodosius, and Justinian. They need to be liberated from their Roman catholic lords.

Once I pointed out to a very educated Moroccan woman living in the USA that the Romans came to Morocco before the Arabs. She was so outraged that she told me that it was the end of this 15 year acquaintanceship, just there. Education is relative. But the big question, in the flow of history is: when is it enough? In 1258 CE, the largest army ever fielded by the Mongols, led by Hulagu Khan, attacked Baghdad. More than half the force was not Mongol. Aside from the usual Chinese siege technicians contingent, the army counted the Georgian army, Armenian cavalry, and the unavoidable Frankish contingent, from Antioch. All Muslim inhabitants of Baghdad were destroyed as if they were rats. Maybe a million died. The “House of Wisdom”, and countless libraries and treasures of the literature of antiquity were annihilated.

It was an immense catastrophe, and the end of the most enlightened Islamist civilization that ever was. I guess the Muslims of Baghdad ought to have been careful not to antagonize Armenia and Georgia (which were Christian centuries before Muhammad was born). Hulagu was particularly incensed by the Caliph’s haughty plutocratic behavior, and made a short discourse telling him why he should died for having preferred luxury to the welfare of the People.

Democracy permits men, and women, to live free as evolution made them. Greco-Roman theocratic plutocracy, as incarnated by countless Roman emperors, the true prophets of the Qur’an, was a perversion of civilization by the Dark Side. It is high time to revolt against 25 centuries of history of a pervasively perverse type.

And the West better not stay in the way. Being in the way, would not be against the nature of the West, it would be against its best self interest. $300 dollar a barrel oil will help the planet, and thus the West. But not just that. Roman leaders used to start their declaration with “Urbi et Orbi” (” to the City of Rome and to the World”). Republican Rome, when it became imperial, had it in its head that it would conquer the world (that was already an idea of Alexander, which had to be abandoned when his army went on strike in India). That dream terminated when a German coalition led by a traitor a la Bin Laden, Arminius, smashed the elite Roman army in Northern Germany.

We now have not only the occasion to spread republic and democracy, worldwide, but it is also a necessity, the alternative being rising seas and thermonuclear war. It will also be a good occasion to reflect on, and correct, the fact that, as the Athenians would point out, our present system, of “representative” democracy, is more oligarchic than democratic.

Ultimately history will judge today’s political leaders. It will judge whether they sided with civilization and revolution, or plutocracy and mayhem. It’s their choice, their judgment. But fear the consequences:  history can move at lightening speed. So did it, already 25 centuries ago. Let alone today. Today’s scums don’t have palaces big enough to hide inside. And the planet is now a village: nowhere to run.

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Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Mubarak, his wife and sons, and all the plutocrats associated to them, and similarly in Tunisia, are plutocrats of a high criminal type. They should all regurgitate their ill gained possessions, and be punished. Switzerland waits from a word form an Egyptian prosecutor to freeze all their assets.

A Long & Windy Road For Tunisia, Egypt…

 

Democracy Needs Institutions. Democracy Is Adverse To Army, Plutocracy & Superstition. A Tall Order For The Lands Where Theocracy Reigned.

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Abstract: God destroyed most books, and killed most of its numerous enemies. But that was not enough. The Franks subdued God in 486 CE. Thereafter, the Franks made God eat in their secular hands.

However that charming scene was true only in the Imperium Francorum (Empire of the Franks), centered around Francia (modern France). The rest of the theocratic, fascist Roman empire kept on sinking in the Christian superstition, like a hopeless mammoth in the tar of ever increasing stupidity.

The theocratic dictatorship based in Constantinople was able to keep on imposing its holocaust, cloaked in superstitious terror. Under the fanatical terrorizing Christian-in-chief, emperor Justinian (483-565 CE), who reigned 40 years, much of the Roman empire was reconquered (Justinian attack all, but the Franks, who represented Roman authority just as well, but a Frankish army attacked Justinian’s forces in Italy).

Justinian caused great religious oppression, in the name of his triple headed god (does that make the Christian god a hydra?). He committed massive exterminations in the name of superstition, killing millions. Intellectuals fled to Persia, which, long the enemy of Rome, became, paradoxically, the protector of Greco-Roman intellectual treasures (that’s how the "Golden age of Islam" started, with the much older Zoroastrian civilization proving more mentally sustainable that the Greco-Roman folly; the former was founded by a philosopher, the latter corrupted by slave masters).

Ultimately the South East corner of the Greco-Roman empire, starting in Gaza (!) rebelled. That rebellion was exploited by Muhammad, and his cousin, a Christian monk. It is now called Islam. But it was all too similar to what it replaced, Christian terror. In particular Islam followed Constantinople’s degenerate idea of civilization, imposing a theocracy.

When God rules, the People does not. Theocracy prevents the growth of DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS, which are crucial to overcome Plato and Socrates’ objections to democracy. Whereas in Occident, democratic institutions steadily grew in power, respectability, and inevitability. Democratic institutions make expertise compatible with one person-one vote, one person-one voice…

Egypt, and all lands conquered by Islam, have a long way to go. They are going to vote, but their democratic institutions are weak, or inexistent. Those lands have to do to Islam what the Franks did to Christianity 15 centuries ago: put it in a tool box. Then build democratic institutions. Maybe their growth can be accelerated, thanks to the worldwide web.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian army is a plutocratic device with its head in Washington. It is also a democratic device, as younger officers and soldiers are not as corrupt. This sort of contradictory situations has often happened in history. The most spectacular case was Athens herself, as her Navy was both highly democratic, but also insidiously betrayed by its leaders, rich men fatally attracted to plutocracy (who succumbed to the ancient charms of Antipater, one of the old generals of Alexander and his father).

In Imperial Rome, the army had also replaced, and displaced, the People ("Populus"), as it quarreled with the Senate, for 5 centuries or so, to see who was going to eat more of the cheese.

Thus it is not clear how things will turn out throughout the lands submitted to overwhelming, crushing, anti-intellectual superstition for 17 centuries. There will be a battle royal. The plutocracy which is trying to subdue the West, and has done an excellent job at it, cannot be too happy as it sees its greedy tentacles bruised overseas. Especially considering that is where the oil it buys its own serfs with, comes from.

Then again, as was done last week, the Obama administration could help the force(s) closest to democracy. That closest force, last week in Egypt, was, indeed, the army (as it was in Tunisia a few weeks before). If the USA, and the EU, help democracy as much as they used to help the oil men and Israel, much unexpected good could come out.

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Republican and democratic practices in Western Europe are not yesterday’s papers. Republican and democratic practices in Western Europe are about 27 centuries old. That is, older than the Bible. They preceded similar practices in Rome, and even Athens.

Of course, the Germans lived under a sort of democracy in their forests. But they hardly had a modern state. Actually they had no states at all.

However, the Greek colonies in southern France, such as Massalia (from the Greek: Μασσαλία), or Nice (Νικαία, Nikaia, "Victory" in Greek) were combative republics, surrounded by enemies (Carthage one of them). They built an empire which collided with Carthage in Spain.

Republic and democracy are not invented overnight. The memories of what happened before was not fully erased later. Just the opposite: it stuck around, a fog of truth from the past. Southern France would stay persistently more democratic in its institutions, and people from there would make the English parliament into an institution which could rule (that would take another 4 centuries).

Some Neoconservatives who used to love invading the Middle East with giant armies have somewhat repented (an example is Roger Cohen of the New York Times). Their new sing song is to say that the USA brought the Egyptian revolution, after trying everything else under Bush, from billions of dollars thrown at the problem to outright invasions.

This is a misreading of history. Bush’s predecessors, other American presidents, starting with Roosevelt, FDR, had succeeded to subjugate the Arabs, using a hefty dose of support for old fashion Islam (Salafism) to do so (FDR himself inaugurated the method in 1945). The American presidents also used highly hypocritical anti-Europeanism masquerading as holier than thou anti-colonialism (somewhat reminiscent of when Hitler posed as a liberator of oppressed populations, to better invade and subjugate; Europe ought to remember how the USSR and the USA cooperated during the Suez-Hungary crisis, and the dictators in Moscow threatened to atom bomb Paris and London, with apparent American encouragement).

This American system of oil procurement and control worked well, and for a very long time. However, it carried within the germs of its own destruction. Enormous American hubris showed up in somewhat crazy support for Salafism. It backfired already when the Iranian Shiites proved to be ingrate. And so it was with Saddam Hussein, who used to obey, and shake the hand of Rumsfeld with enthusiasm (Rumsfeld being Bush II’s defense minister later).

American exploitation of Salafism backfired further when Osama Ben Laden and his colleagues, employed by the USA to defeat the Soviets, realized that they were instrumentalized by American plutocrats: they were tools of American plutocracy, and could sit at a table, but not the highest one.

Salafists and Arab nationalists came to understand that the American plutocratic plan was forever an exploitative order, where the oil would flow as long as it could, as cheaply as needed. That hurt the pride of Arab war lords, especially after their huge army had done the heavy lift in Afghanistan. When they tried to do a similar job, on their own, in, say, Algeria, they saw the Americans lining up behind the French to support the military dictatorship there. A civil war that killed much more than 150,000, led nowhere the French did not want to go.

So the Salafists friends of the USA soured on the USA. The same happened in Iran. Next Saddam Hussein, long a Euro-American strong man, and an enemy of the Salafists, also soured on the USA. His attempt to switch to the European currency for the oil payments was a final insult that the USA was not going to tolerate (as it threatened the world dollar system; something that the USA cannot afford is to pay its oil in Euros).

Thus Bush’s feeble, disorderly military efforts, were an attempt to recover control. He did not. Far from it, he made a bad situation worse. The only thing that progressed was military technology, but, since no peasant army was planning to invade the USA, except for the unstoppable Mexicans, it was no use. Obama is now using cheaper and craftier methods. However, in great part thanks to the worldwide web, the collusion between the USA (and to some extent, France) and the dictatorships is better known.

The Egyptian army chief of staff was in the USA when the revolution started, the Egyptian army is formed by the USA, and the generals get retirement pay from Washington. Besides, the army is in direct business, in cooperation with American business interests.
The Tunisian revolution lighted up in Kasserine, and the poorest part of that poor city. The dictator, Ben Ali gave his goons order to shoot. 40 elite marksmen in Kasserine alone. French TV, in hidden camera took some in picture, standard military machine gun in the back, and long barreled sharp shooter gun in the front (to kill people from afar). The pictures and stories of the unarmed demonstrators were shown on the Internet. Associations allied to WikiLeaks, taught internet users how to turn around the internet embargo set by the Tunisian dictatorship.

The revolutions started in Tunisia and Egypt are secular. They came from young, unemployed, smart and educated youth. The revolutions have to do with poverty. They may not know it (although ElBaradei does), but they strive to undo 13 centuries of Islam supported dictatorships.

Make that 17 centuries of dictatorship in the name of Christ and then Allah. Islamist dictatorships were an outgrowth of the Roman Catholic empire, and its abominable theocracy (which had gone on for three centuries, when the Prophet Muhammad thrived).

Initially Alexandria surrendered to the Muslims because it was suffering under the atrocious "Catholic Orthodox" Roman theocratic dictatorship. The Christian fanatics had earlier burned the library, the largest in the world. They had butchered alive top intellectuals, such as the world famous Hypatia (Hypatia’s chief butcher is still a Christian so called "saint", so is that even bigger butcher, Justinian). Alexandria realized its mistake within 3 years, and revolted, but it was too late, and the Second Caliph, Omar, clamped down.

How does one create democracy? As Socrates sourly, and obsessively, repeated ad nauseam, one man, one vote is no panacea. The European Middle Ages retorted more subtly, by building many DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS. The guilds were an example. So were orders (lawyers, doctors).

The feudal system was itself somewhat democratic, because it rested mostly on oaths (namely contracts; the system originated with the Roman state contracting German micro nations for defense).

In theory the law of man applied to all equally. after the immensely wealthy Count of Coucy let a poacher hang, Louis IX informed him that next time it would be Coucy who would hang.

Athens had (mostly) two democratic institutions: the National Assembly of the People, and the Navy.

But, in Athens as in other Greek cities, would-be oligarchs and plutocrats were not far from the surface. At the battle of Plataea, a Greek army led by a 40,000 Spartan contingent (5,000 Spartans + attending Helots), and a considerable Athenian army, plus other cities, confronted Xerxes’ juggernaut (300,000 strong says Herodotus; that number has been contested, but I contest the contesters).

I find pretty telling that the horribly invading Persians had Greek allies, such as Thebes. And there was (Herodotus numbers again), 50,000 of them, Greek traitors (Herodotus admits that’s a guess). Why were so many Greeks supporting the horribly invading, fascist, plutocratic Persians? Because Thebes’ regime was oligarchic (that is the word, and concept, the Greeks used at the time to describe Thebes). Athens was a democracy, Thebes an oligarchy. In Athens the People led, and sometimes led like a mob. In Thebes, at the time, only a few ruled, so they became naturally friendly to the few who ruled Persia.

A plutocracy is an oligarchy, not all oligarchies are plutocracies. However, they tend to be friendly to each other, as the principle of the few who rule the many unite them. Modern representative democracies are, de facto, ruled by a few, so they are oligarchies. Thus no wonder that, like Thebes at Plataea, they love plutocracies. And that is a warning: people talk big, and they say we live in democracy. but the Athenians would have sneered, and enumerated a long list of reasons why democratic republics such as the USA and the EU are not democracies. (Many Europeans would readily agree about the EU.)

The Franks made a big deal that their presidents, which they called "kings" (or, more exactly, "Rex"), were theoretically elected. The French dropped the pretense after Philippe August (1223 CE), but, it was never far removed. The Franco-English civil war (the 485 years long so called "100 years war") started precisely because the rightful Franco-English queen, Isabelle de France, was refused her rightful inheritance, by a Paris based cabal. Henri III, before being called back to head France, had been elected king of Poland, and his chosen successor, Henri de Navarre, was pretty much (reluctantly) elected by the Parisians.

Two thirds of the Frankish empire, its middle and eastern part, kept on electing its emperors all the way until the Corsican dictator Napoleon from Ajaccio, much admired by the weak minded, discontinued the practice in 1806 (being a Corsican bandit, he gave all the top jobs to his family, and, to this day, Sweden is led by his descendants).

But let’s stop digressing. The Franks had forced, by law, all and any Christian organization to teach secularly. Even before that, the bishops of Gaul had understood belatedly that the Christian folly was destroying civilization. Frankish power protected them from the murderous madness of the Pope Gregory (so called ‘The Great"). That was facilitated as the Frankish state named as many bishops as it pleased.

Out of the cathedral schools grew Europe’s university system, which became a democratic institution. It took a few centuries to allow professors to marry officially, since the despicable Saint Paul put marrying just above burning. Christians, following Christ, love burning; emperor Justinian, the saint mentioned above, attended the burning of many individuals he did not like the religion of, such as Pagans, Hellenist (= secular humanists), Samaritans, and various Christian heretics. Calvin would do the same, 1,000 years later (proving, if need be, that it had everything to do with Christ)

Other democratic institutions which grew in the European Middle Ages were the state administration and hospices (some of which being direct survivors of the Roman state; although French police, by 1300 CE, had become more powerful than Roman police ever was, as proven the arrest of most Templar monks on Friday the 13th).

Democratic institutions could not grow in regions dominated by Islam. Because Islam claimed to be a political system. It’s intrinsically a superstition claiming to be a theocracy. The only sort of institutions compatible with the Qur’an are tribes (it’s mentioned there). They are hardly democratic.

The Occidental bishops had tried theocracy around 400 CE contributing to the disintegration of the Roman empire (bishop Ambrose of Milan excommunicated the mighty, notoriously Christian, emperor Theodosius, as the later had done a small holocaust somewhere; Theodosius had to beg to be forgiven and reinstated…).

The difference with the Oriental part of the empire is that in the West, the Franks, who obviously despised the Christian moral system and its superstition all along (while officially embracing it), took command, and established their secular state (with the Christian cross brandished high as a symbol of the new ethics, which had more to do with Franco-German ethics than Christ’s obscurantism).

In the Orient, the Roman Catholic Orthodox (that’s how they called themselves) machine had not been dismantled (although Muslims came close to defeating it, it suffered terminal defeat only in 1204, at the hands of the Franks, although the Franks had already saved its skin with the First Crusade).

The (present government of the) USA and its People (Peace be Upon It!) do not want a real Arab revolution.

Why? Because if the Arab speaking people took control, they would ask for as much money for the oil as the free market can take. That would mean oil at $300 a barrel (then the secondary sources such as the tar oils of Canada would become irresistible). It would also mean that Israel could not afford anymore its present leaders and their mean policies.
What we have right now, is a coup, not a revolution: we were threatened with Suleiman Aleikum, the Moo-Barack from behind, as I pointed out in a somewhat timely manner, 3 days before Suleiman’s grab for power came crashing down.
A last minute change put directly in control the only candidate for a democratic institution in Egypt, the army. Vice President Suleiman was livid, as he announced in a 40 second address, God’s mercy, Mubarak’s resignation, and his own personal eclipse.
Speaking of mercy, it would be merciful if my incendiary essay on the subject had been read in high places…
An obstacle is that the Egyptian army is not just obedient to American plutocrats, but itself plutocratic on its own. Generals are paid by Washington, especially when they retire. moreover, it is said that the Egyptian army controls as much as 15% of Egypt’s GDP, and thus is fully part of the worldwide plutocracy. So this plutocratic control is not over in Egypt.
It is far from clear that the Egyptian people will come out on top. A fortiori other Arabs. The obscene Mohammed VI is thriving in Morocco, having gathered 10% of GDP all by his little self. He is the Pope of Morocco. Like Justinian, a similar sort of Pope, he commands the army. History ought to write a warrant for his arrest.

***
Patrice Ayme

Suleiman Aleikum: From Mubarak To Moo-Barack

SULEIMAN ALEIKUM: TORTURE WILL MAKE YOU FREE!

***

Abstract: Something funny happened. After decolonization, in many countries, things got drastically worse. In many countries, such as Nigeria (population 152 million), the GDP per head has gone down since the 1960s. Plenty of other things went down too. Although stoning went up.

Of course, some aspects of real colonialism were aspects of plutocracy, and I am not going to defend them. But the entanglement of (mostly) European powers with Third World countries did not reduce to having colons on the ground. Many countries had none (where were the British colonists in India?).

However, in many countries European imperialism was more a form of administration with more or less European standards. Removing the imperial power removed those administrations, and thus many European standards, including those pertaining to justice and fairness.

Who did that removal profit? Well, Americano-European plutocracy profited enormously from decolonization, as it covered the world with potentates it made deals with. Plutocracy was suddenly free to do whatever it wanted, such as buying off local potentates, or even creating them, and ruling through them.

Thus: decolonization often meant plutocratization.

In particular, as early as 1945 the USA made a deal with the Salafist owners of Arabia: Give them Islam, the old fashion way, give us the oil, and we will give you Wall Street, and all the riches you can possibly imagine.

Thus all of North Africa and the Middle East became a giant machine profiting the worldwide plutocratic order, with the tacit approval of the masses of the West, who learned not to ask too many questions, like the Germans of old. Little did they understand that plutocracy would thus gain so much power that it would be able to turn around and master and enslave the West, as it is in the process of doing, modulo the "finance crisis" deal.

Plutocracy is global, the law is local, and thus the former can turn around the later, and enslave the planet.

Some strategists in the USA have become aware that a fresh coat of paint is needed. So they push for the sumptuous idea that Egypt’s torture chief since 1993, as tight an American collaborator as they ever get, be named to replace their old employee Mubarak. The shadow will wander in the light. All by itself. Change you can’t believe in. As usual. Hey, was not American preceding president a would be torturer in chief too? G. W. Bush has been going around, celebrating with gusto his hundreds of torture orders, in the grand tradition of his grand father, who expanded enormously the family fortune through Auschwitz’s slave labor. Pluto reigns over the minds of plutocrats! 

It would be funny if real people were not oppressed, spoiled, tortured, and killed. Just in the recent insurrection, more than 300 people got killed in Egypt.

It would be funny if the financial artists, in the sense that Nero was a self described “artist”, had not put the entire planet at their beck and call.

For once, don’t look at slave work in China. For once don’t look at the way the fossil fuel guys made the planet dependent upon the CO2 addiction. Look instead at how the financial artists have made speculation in food possible by buying off the local potentates. Never mind if some people starve; the glory of Pluto is where it is at.

Man does not rule just with light and reason, but walks the valley of the shadows of death, and become Death, the destroyer of worlds. (Bhagavad Gita, with Bible parroting).

***

WHEN YOU OWN A THIEF, IS THAT ORGANIZED CRIME?

The Mubarak family grabbed at least 70 billion dollars in assets (say the Swiss). The wife, is, by herself, a billionaire. The sons may be so too: they pile up high fancy buildings in some of the fanciest neighborhoods, in places such as London, or Paris. The typical Third World plutocratic family: in the employ of the West, sucking it all up.

Notice that the Mubarak family fortune is roughly commensurate with the size of official American help to Egypt. Does that mean that all taxpayer money is going to a particular plutocratic family? Well, not really: plutocrats can leverage their control of the military, so it is enough to support financially the army, as the USA does, and then the local controllers of the military, encouraged by the world plutocratic order, are free to serve themselves. It could be Jordan or Morocco, so it works. And the Irish government’s decision to have its own taxpayers reimburse private lenders they had no previous connection to, is roughly just as big an example of systemic corruption for all to see (of course the USA, and then the EU, preached by example) .

So indeed, let’s talk about the third world plutocrats, but, well, what about our Western plutocrats? Were they not the ones pulling the strings of nearly all the dictators in Arab speaking countries? Why not a warrant of arrest, or at least a freeze on all (extravagant) properties of the so called leaders of Third World countries?

However, we were told that the Arab speaking countries had it good, because they were dominated by "Islam". It was great that the Arab speaking countries were dominated by "submission", with the benediction of the West. Hence the insistence, by American politician of the greatness of Islam. Good, old fashion Islam, and thus the exploiters of the people celebrate Islam through the Middle Ages (just when it turned into a disaster). It’s the proverbial package deal. Muslims ought to be happy to have these Western sponsored dictatorships, as Islam was a great religion?

True grit, in the West, will be shown when the fight against plutocracy will be joined, by asking for the departure of our own plutocrats, the plutocrats of the West, who are truly leading the world dance of plutocracy. Western plutocrats pull the strings of Western politicians, and, from there, the strings of Third world plutocrats (euphemistically known as "autocrats", another lie, connived to hide the fact that they generally depend upon strings originating in the West). Time to put the head of the snake back in its bag, lest it invenominate us all.

***

WHEN YOU PROPOSE A TORTURER, IS THAT ORGANIZED CRIME?

Frank Rich wrote an editorial critical of average Americans, and their lack of interest for the knowledge necessary to be good citizens of the world. See some of what Rich said below, in the Note. I then sent the following to the New York Times, which decided to save my reputation, by not publishing it.

The isolated brain, the American brain, is a form of extreme hubris; gimme your oil, and leave us alone, we are the super power, to all superior, and we don’t know you from the dogs. All what we care about is black oil. Ah, yes, of course, Islam is a great religion: that is what we thought you wanted to hear, so give us the oil, and we will tell you who your latest moo-Barack will be. Barack will tell you how to moo. Mubarak, that was before, it’s all over, moo-Barack, that’s now.

Barack thinks Islam is great. So he says. Suleiman aleikum: Suleiman be with you. A good man. Suleiman, Mubarak’s long time "intelligence chief". He knows how to organize elections.

Just like American potentates are on Goldman Sachs or Citigroup payroll, Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief is on American payroll. So Suleiman is Goldman once removed. The eternal braid of plutocracy, nicely entangled, as usual. And thus American potentates hope that the oil will keep on coming, hushing We The American People, and the money will be recycled through Wall Street, flying above the great unwashed.

Suleiman is the torture chief of Egypt, one of the torturers the American dark forces have used industrially in the program of "extraordinary rendition". In other words, a dictator, the one who speaks, will be replaced by a torturer, the one with the pincers.

As the New York Times (02/08/11) puts it: "Vice President Omar Suleiman of Egypt says he does not think it is time to lift the 30-year-old emergency law that has been used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders. He does not think President Hosni Mubarak needs to resign before his term ends in September. And he does not think his country is yet ready for democracy… The Obama administration is still trying to balance support for some of the basic aspirations for change in Egypt with its concern that the pro-democracy movement could be “hijacked,” as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it, if change were to come too quickly.

The result has been to feed a perception, on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, that the United States, for now at least, is putting stability ahead of democratic ideals, and leaving hopes of nurturing peaceful, gradual change in large part in the hands of Egyptian officials — starting with Mr. Suleiman — who have every reason to slow the process."

Hey, no doubt Himmler was the best guy for "nurturing peaceful, gradual change… ahead of democratic ideals".

***

NEW PHILOSOPHY, OLD FRAUD:

Some will smirk that, once again, I committed the heavy crime of blatant anti-Americanism, aggravated by saying nice things about European imperialism.

So let me relax the atmosphere by attacking a pseudo-colleague of mine, BHL. Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher. Because he self defined as a “New Philosopher”, French president Mitterrand (who had trained under Vichy) found alluring to befriend BHL. BHL found interesting to replace his own father at the head of the failing family business. Mitterrand, helped by his devious son, forked over the juicy contracts with the local African potentates, and then, presto, BHL was richer than ever. And many a place in Africa had no more primary forest (wood is what Levy harvests).

Thus, do not expect BHL to rile against plutocracy. Since he and his friends own palaces in Morocco, do not expect him to say anything untoward about the plutocratic dictator of Morocco, either.

Aristotle and Plato were famously sympathetic to dictatorship and slavery. Both had tight links to plutocracy, so that is not surprising. To present as new, the same old crocodile drifting to look like an innocent tree trunk is not reserved to politics. 

***

I DON’T KNOW, THEREFORE I LIVE:

How did Nazi Germany come to be? Well, old fashion Germans minded only their business, they had been imprinted that way. That came, at the cost of emotional and cognitive dwarfism. They knew little else, except what their profession required. A society of artificial robots. Clogs in a machine, unthinking, unfeeling.

That was pretty much the logico-emotional path followed by Rome before. Hence the constant reminders, in Nazi Germany of eagles, domination and predation (following also Napoleon, himself mimicking imperial Rome).

Fascism is compatible only with a reductive, and reduced emotional system, where the only emotions worth having are about domination, predation… and submission (Hitler admired Islam, a society of warriors according to him).

In a fascist regime, most people obey: "O ye who believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER." (Quran, S.4; v. 59)."

Thus most people learn to find their emotional reward in submission, and being happy not knowing too much. That makes fascist regimes fundamentally hostile to cognition.

In Nazi Germany those who knew too much were anti-German. (That is one of the reasons the regime could only hate the Jews, who, coming from at least two cultures, were fundamentally more cognizant).

In Rome those who appreciated more than the games were living dangerously. In the USA, knowing more than team sport is to thread where culture is confused with rancor.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: Says Frank Rich: "A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. American foreign policy, even in Afghanistan, was all but invisible throughout the 2010 election season… And so now …does anyone seriously believe that most Americans are up to speed? Our government may be scrambling, but that’s nothing compared to its constituents. After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely distinguish Sunni from Shia."

Verily, the USA has been fighting for more than two decades of in Iraq, and fighting more than 30 years in Afghanistan (since 1979: the direct American armed intervention was started by Jimmy Carter, Mr. Nobel (in War and) Peace Prize). And the USA destroyed Iranian democracy in 1953, and has been supporting evil Salafism in Arabia for 65 years. What is there not to like? Pass the pop corn, and watch the steroids on TV. Just don’t stand below the walls when they come down.

***

The Obama administration sent Frank Wisner to Egypt, as a Special Envoy. Wisner is currently working for the firm Patton Boggs, which has represented and currently represents the dictatorship of Egypt and its cronies.

The French Prime Minister, and the French foreign Minister, spent the 2010-2011 Solstice vacation as honored guests of the Egyptian and Tunisian dictatorships respectively, and as guests of their friends, the local plutocrats.

***

CLEVERLY STUPID

A VACUOUS MIND IS AN EASIER THING TO RULE:

In a few words: The dusk of plutocrats cannot come fast enough. Plutocrats paralyze minds with stupidity. Such is their venom, a neurotoxin. Witness the old, grossly obvious collusion between the USA and Salafism (= the religion of the old ones, fanatical Islamism; don’t forget bin Laden was a CIA employee for decades, and that the Shiite coup in Iran, in 1953, was organized by the CIA; and the USA messed up similarly with Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, etc.)

Nevertheless, if you evoke this blatant connection many average Americans, and many, not so average, will call you mad, a conspiracy theorist, anti-American, or, even worse, as I am often told, what is for them the ultimate insult, “French”.

Now to deny the collusion between the USA and Arab autocrats is really stupid. But this stupidity  has its uses, and of them we will talk. The coup against the democracy headed by Mossadegh, for example, is a well known case where the CIA instrumentalized the Shiites against secular democracy in Iran. Reagan did the same, instrumentalizing the Iranian Shiites, because he needed some conspiratorial cash to wage war in the name of plutocracy in the Americas. Arguably, Bush re-instrumentalized the Shiites again. And that’s just for the Shiites.

But many Americans, especially in the upper middle class, have made into a religion to be stupid. They think, or rather, have been imprinted to repeat like parrots, that it is very clever, to be very stupid. This essay will explain how come they sank so low.

A second apotheosis for plutocracy in the USA reached beyond the ridiculously corrupt in recent years (think Goldman Sachs). However, plutocracy seems to encounter its first serious trouble in the Middle East and Maghreb ever since Constantinople was oppressing everybody with its mad plutocracy disguised in religious fanaticism.

There is hope, at last, that the old core of civilization will regain its rightful place.

By the way, insurrection in the West’s pet Arab dictatorships demonstrates the stupidity of the “Clash Of Civilization” ignoramuses. Everybody wants democracy, it’s not just a right, it’s the nature, the ethology, of the genus Homo. To call some human beings “Muslim”, and then say they can do with reduced human rights, reduced human nature, that is good enough for them, is sheer racism.

Man is a theoretical animal. His main product is theories about everything. When the Dark Side, plutocracy, dominates man, it rules man’s theories, its logic, its sense of reason, its passions, even its appreciation for special entertainment. 

Capture of hearts, souls and beasts by the Dark Side, by plutocracy, is a madness of civilization. It is aggravated by its sympathy for a very deep instinct of ecological control, waste and devastation. However, this civilization is our last chance, it will not be refreshed by Armageddon.

So, as revolt rumbles in the distance, what about our Western plutocrats? Were they not the ones pulling the strings of nearly all the dictators in Arab speaking countries? Is not the Egyptian army, with its American tanks, long headed by Mubarak, an Air Force general, like Pinochet, paid by the USA?

True grit, in the West, will be shown when the fight against plutocracy will be joined, by asking for the departure of our own plutocrats (those pulling the strings of Western politicians) and the head of the snake is put back in its cage.

***

Abstract: AGAINST STUPIDITY, THE GODS THEMSELVES CONTEND IN VAIN, THEREFORE SO WILL DEMOCRATS. Imposing stupidity has proven to be the winning strategy of tyrants.

Thus tyrants, and their goons, support all and any mental habits and traditions which make people stupid.

Make the mind, and the heart, of the many, a collective that is a desert, make having no mind, and having no heart, but a cruel bend, indispensable, and even fashionable (as happened to the Greco-Romans), and tyranny can thrive, because the many have identified to those who lead them: vacuous, cruel, heartless, acultural.

Thus tyrannical regimes are not only stupid and heartless, but they rule by making their populations just the same, or even more so.

This desertification of the greatest mental characteristics of humanity was accomplished in the so called Muslim world, and it’s now being attempted in the West, (once again, and it’s not the first time!). It has been most successful in the USA.

Such is the fundamental deficit of America, a growing mental deficit, which has a lot to do with how Salafism made the parts where it reigned deficient in all sorts of ways. (This was long my opinion, now I observe with satisfaction that is shared by the courageous ElBaradei, see below.)

The stupidity they impose and reinforce, is why tyrants favor superstitions so much. “In God We Trust”, they smirk, and they reach for the Gold hiding behind God.

Superstition robs the mind of the ability to detect what is real, and what is not, an incapacity most useful to abusers. So tyrants force people to revere superstitions, calling them religions.

Thus tyrants replace other, more human, solidarities, which tie people again (re-ligare), with fiction standing above the world. The Internet has allowed to blossom old fashion human solidarities anew, hence the attempts to interdict it, say, by assassination threats against WikiLeaks, or by censorship, as in China, Egypt.

Hence tyrants love Christianity, Islam, the Aztec religion, Moloch, etc., all superstitions endowed with the worst punishments imaginable (once again a cruel stupidity most convenient to tyrants).

Imposing stupidity from the top, by autocrats, is how plutocracy is rendered stable. It’s the ultimate “extraordinary rendition”. One has to be pretty evil to impose one’s own (“auto”) rule (“kratos”). So autocratic, or tyrannical rule is all about the notion of “plutocracy” taken at face value: that is, more than the simple possession of wealth, the notion of the rule of hell, which is exactly what “plutocracy” means: the ancient Greeks had it that Hades, Satan, the dark, invisible side were indeed ruling, in a state of plutocracy. 

Imposing stupidity from the top is conflated with the rule of the One (autocracy again). One single individual rules, and thinks for all.

Ruling in the name of Jesus happened to the Occidental Part of the Greco-Roman civilization. That made the Occident incredibly stupid (because burning all other truth was part of the Jesus deal). The empire degenerated into immensely domains, separated and above society (the “curial” crisis), while bishops were left to rule the rest of society, that is, the poor.

That was Rome’s Reagan moment, a senile lapse, directed by, precisely, the Roman Senate (= the old ones, like Salafism). It lasted centuries, until nothing was left, but senility and Alzheimer’s disease, on a civilizational scale (don’t tell that to Obama he would cry, as Reagan was a feel good moment for him, an important notion for this abandoned child, to share among children of alcoholic fathers).

Imposing stupidity from the top happened in the “Oriental Part” of the Greco-Roman empire too, but the stupidity was different: it was even more fanatical, so much more fanatical that the dictatorial system stayed in place (and gave birth to Islam)… And preserved more books. Persia next door (and Islam!) had mitigating effects (this is an understatement: Persia came all out for preserving Western culture! and so did early Islam!)

Imposing stupidity from above has no better example than the Christian rampage of the Late Empire, and deserves its Fourth Century name well: the DARK AGES.

Enforcing stupidity works in symbiosis with imposing terror. Imposing stupidity from the top is the most obvious way to hijack civilization throughout history. Imposed stupidity explains many periods of mental stagnation. It is a wonderful thing, because it has immense inertia: centuries after the Christian fanatics burned the books, a rich would a library be, if it had 63 of them.

Destroying civilization with top down stupidity was made blatant with Salafism, which rendered, in the end, most regions infused with Islam stagnant in all ways (even Spain by the 12C). The Prophet would have been horrified. It also explains why the plutocracy of the USA has been so friendly to Salafism, and the tyrants incarnating it (Mohammed VI, Ben Ali, Mubarak, Saud, bin Laden for decades, various strong men of Pakistan, to just quote a few).

Western propaganda long pretended that what Arab speaking populations got, dictators justified by Islam, the old fashion way, was perfect for them, and ought to be respected.

That was the theme, the underlying hypothesis, of “The Clash Of Civilization”. It was a very stupid idea, and highly unethical. But that idea was highly profitable for the Western plutocrats who promoted that these Western sponsored dictatorships were good enough for Muslims (look at the USA paying, and guiding the Egyptian army, lately to replace Mubarak by his old intelligence chief). Stupid for all, profitable for some, such is the way of the weasel.

***

***

HELL ON EARTH MEANS PLUTOCRATS IN COMMAND:

Some have wondered why the American right is so stupid. They should not wonder; playing stupid is part of a very old strategy, the main strategy of exploitation of the many by the few.

As Mohamed Al Baradei put it, (Newsweek, February 7, 2011): “Historically speaking Islam has been hijacked 20 to 30 years after the Prophet, and interpreted in such a way that the ruler has absolute power and is accountable only to God.”

This is my main thesis on Islam, and how it caused civilization to degenerate in all places it came to control, as it made plutocracy the work of God (an idea which the Roman emperors toyed with for centuries, before emperor Constantine implemented it; the idea was implemented in turn, and anew, by a successor of The Prophet, 350 years after Constantine).

This thesis was not invented by al Baradei, or by myself. It was first suggested by those, 13 centuries ago, many of them from Muhammad’s family, who revolted against the autocrat who ordered his version of the Qur’an written…and all other versions destroyed.

It’s also why, when Obama sang the praises of Islam in Cairo, coalescing religion, people, “legitimate aspirations“, and his American man in Cairo, Mubarak, all the plutocrats, worldwide, were singing his praises. Standard Islam served the interest of the established order of the hyper wealthy… among Muslims for centuries…and in the West in more recent decades. (Of course dirt cheap oil also pleased the peoples of the West, so they were accomplices that way.)

Defining people by the superstitious religion imposed on them is the number one trick of the plutocrats. It is pretty stupid, but it works. It works because it is pretty stupid, because it forces people to become pretty stupid, because they have to conform (lest they want to be burned alive, a preferred method of Christo-Islamism, sufficiently disagreeable to cause people pause). Once people are stupid like sheep, they can be fleece like sheep, or even devoured like sheep, as the Aztecs had it (OK, they had no sheep), or made into hamburger, like sheep, on various battlefield.

Plutocrats like to flatter themselves, and to justify their rule, by evocating the exceptional worth that, according to them, characterize them. So they call themselves “the best” (aristos), or the few (oligoi). In the USA, they have succeeded, after decades of propaganda, to persuade the population that they, the hyper wealthy, and they alone, create employment and the economy (really a stupid idea, hence worthy, because it makes people more stupid when they start to believe it). American plutocrats evoke their rich autocratic partners, worldwide, and how they bring trade, oil, and other goodies, namely control, and call them factors of stability.

The very outrage of plutocratic exploitation denied  can be transformed into a tool to reach lower levels of stupidity. This is why American plutocrats, who give only 17% of their income in taxes (instead than the more than 50% European plutocrats have to pay… except, of course, in Greece) insist to be called “philanthropists”. And the Main Stream Media sing their praises every day.

Thus the leopard has spots, to appear as a play of lights and shadows. Many a philanthropist is just a plutocrat in disguise. Much of the public has learned not to see it: that makes them not just naïve, but stupid.

They learn to tolerate, even to welcome. and befriend, stupidity that way, and learn to be rewarded by it, when they meet their sponsors in special events (for the higher reaches), or just through the TV (for common folks). Some in the most educated public see through it: they see the plutocrat hiding behind the philanthropist. But they have learned to tolerate that outrage, they have learned not to be indignant: that, too, makes them stupid.

Those who stay cool when they contemplate infamy, teach stupidity to their hearts.

In truth most plutocrats just rule according to the Dark Side, that side which tends to view man itself, individually or in his multitudes, as the ultimate problem. That is why they are called plutocrats. Armed with this revelation (“apocalypsis” in Greek), plutocrats proceed to solve the problem by all means as their disposal.

This Will To Subjugate, Hurt And Destroy, is a deep human instinct. It is important, evolutionary speaking, because, for millions of years, it has kept Earth in balance. One way to lead people to subjugation or death is to make them so stupid that their world blows up.

The best example of imposition of apocalyptic stupidity by plutocrats, is the period known as the Dark Ages, that degeneracy that spread throughout the Greco-Roman empire, from Scotland to Iran, and Morocco to Armenia.

Thus the Dark Ages did not happen during what is usually called the “Middle Ages” proper, but well before that. Then the paroxysm of Roman fascism set in motion an apocalyptic Christian wave it tried to surf, with abominable results.

The Roman Catholic emperors destroyed books, libraries, philosophers, Jews, schools, academies, mental diversity, all variants of Christianism, and everybody who did not believe in them or whatever they had decided theology would be. The holocaust was fully on by 363 CE, after an attempted interruption by emperor Julian and his Parisian troops.

Yes, Parisian! Parisians made Julianus, Augustus. And Julianus was a philosopher, who had gone to Athens to study philosophy. Julianus was fully aware of the damage fanatical Christianism, or more exactly, the rule of fascism hiding behind Christianism, preparing for the second coming of the mythical boy Jesus, and his anti-intellectual violence was causing to civilization. But Julianus was promptly pierced by a lance (like “Jesus”). He was probably assassinated in a conspiracy (in Mesopotamia). The (Christian) conspirators covered their tracks well. 

The Dark Ages did not start out of the blue. The entire Greco-Roman empire was anti-intellectual. But it got worse, and worse. That’s how it came to be. So imposed stupidity is good at generating fascist empires with a theocratic bend (making emperors into gods happened right away, so Christianism and it’s all devouring mien was the fruit of a four century long evolution).

Marc-Anthony (Marcus Antonius) nailed Cicero’s hands on the door of the Senate (Cicero wrote too well, apparently). Emperor Domitian in the period 80-96 CE, would later kill entire families of philosophers (while sponsoring others; good thinking would make you rich, bad thinking would kill you; Christian theocracy was more of the same, crazy to death: the Christians did not invent anything, they just did it until they got themselves completely insane, as some bishops of Gaul admitted, shortly before surrendering, body and soul, to the Franks).

There was a repeat of the performance of imposed stupidity in the late Middle Ages, by the same suspect, the Catholic church, then, as now, the world’s oldest big institution. Again, European Jews were killed, books were burned, terror and stupidity reigned, civil wars rolled over the lands of Europe.

***

I CALL IT PLUTOCRACY, THE RULE OF HELL, BECAUSE SO IT IS:

The Nazis echoed these time honored bouts of Christian terror and stupor, during the lamentable abomination of their atrocious rule: burn books, burn Jews, burn anybody not thinking right, steal what’s left. The Nazis were also plutocrats. Both in the conventional sense (their sponsors were immensely rich, and they became even richer by stealing all they could), and in the sense of making hell’s reign come alive.

Thus I use “plutocracy” from the most general, conflated, meaning of the concept of “Pluto”. So for me, and it ought to be the same for everybody, Pluto is not just the “wealth giver”, the god of the underground, and its riches, equal, deep inside, to Zeus in heavens, but Pluto is also the god that could make itself invisible, and another name for Hades, the god most hateful to mortals (the references on this are Plato, and the oldest Western book, the Iliad; Iliad 9.158–159). The rule of Pluto means just that (amusingly it occurs at some point in the Book Of The Apocalypse of the Bible).

Thus in my definition, theocracy, because it is most hateful to mankind’s ethology, is a form of plutocracy. And so are corruptocracy, kleptocracy, military rule, and political fascisms (all and any “oligarchies” are forms of fascisms, by definition, and so is imperialism).

The present world financial system is thoroughly plutocratic, in all senses of the term: it is hidden, it is underground, it is hellish, and it provides its supporters with wealth.

Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia are part of the world plutocratic system, a hydra whose main head is Wall Street. The plutocratic hydra is all around the planet. Even countries such as Tanzania were made part of the world commodity speculative system of hedge funds. Local leaders, enticed by enough riches for themselves, were persuaded to deprive Tanzania of its subsistence economy. Global organizations at the order of plutocracy, such as IMF and World Bank helped along to do so, as does straight buying off. If enough countries do not have a subsistence agriculture, they depend upon international traders, and commodity speculators, and contribute to make these markets wilder, thus more profitable to the creeps who organize them.

SUBTLE IS PLUTO, AND VERY NASTY HE IS. (To apply some anti-thinking to Einstein’s famous saying finding everything right about “The Lord”.)

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ENFORCING STUPIDITY IS HOW PLUTOCRACY REIGNS PRIMARILY.

Guns and terror are secondary to plutocratic rule. Ruling over sheep is more comfortable. sheep are cuddly, and they don’t think too hard.

The advantage for absolute rulers of making the populations stupid is demonstrated, in particular, in so called Muslim countries. There the local superstition has enforced, for centuries, a milder form of the Christian Dark Ages (they did not destroy nearly ALL books). Excluding women from a full participation in society has guaranteed that even children are not as smart as they could be. That is why the oilmen of the USA, and their agents in government (CIA ,etc.) have supported Muslim Fundamentalists, for generations.

Enforcing stupidity also occurs in the West. The West was visited by the most severe bout of enforced stupidity: the Roman Catholic Dark Ages.

And the West suffered several drastic bouts of related darkness (Crusades, Franco-English civil war, Inquisition, religious wars, the wars related to 1789, and 20 Century German fascism). Just as the plague can return in a milder epidemic, so did the Christian Dark Ages (it is no coincidence that the Nazis burned books, the SS were dressed in black and killed Jews, after making them wear distinctive clothing, but all this, and much else were deliberate mimicry of Christo-Islamism).

It can be easily be argued that the cognitive failure pertaining to the so called financial crisis of 2007-2008, is symptomatic of a new Dark Age. Unbelievably, the People of the West, who view themselves as the smartest, best educated, have been made to believe that the hyper rich, like Atlas, supports the world. Thus the emperors and kings of old were believed to interface with God. This is the essence of Reaganism (so it makes all the multimillionaires in the Bush and Obama administrations good people, most giving to the economy of the USA).

Meanwhile in Davos, elements of the world plutocratic government are plotting for all to see. Their world governance consists in promoting unfathomable stupidity to drown general cognition into abyssal lies. It works well for them: whereas, before, it was mostly those they had lent money to who were subjugated, now all taxpayers are toiling for the bankers and their private jets, fiscal heavens, and influences on governments. The bankers even told government they had enough to be criticized harshly, and would they please order the media to tone it down!

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AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM MEANS TORTURERS ARE ABOVE THE LAW:

By manipulating cognition with skill, a tool such as the mind of the masses, can come to be, and can be perverted to accommodate a few on top. Many Americans know everything about obese football players stuffed with steroids, but nothing about where they get their oil from, and the terror network to support it (those who don’t think it’s terror can go visit Iraq, or the House of Saud). This is also a moral failure, somewhat reminiscent of that of Germans who did not want to know anything about where the wealth the Nazis distributed around came from. Nor did the Germans want to look carefully about the ethics involved (as they search for oil in Poland, Romania, the Caucasus).

A particular case of this moral failure is torture in connection of getting oil. Now of course, no Nazi ever claimed to billions of people that torture was a good thing, as G. W. Bush did for years, in his memoirs, or in multiple interviews, accompanied by uncountable smirks of the truly evil. even Hitler knew better. The fact that some most influential Americans have forgotten some basic ethical knowledge that even Hitler remembered, is a cause of worry. The failure of international instances to launch a warrant for Bush’s arrest is not a judicial blip, but a cognitive and logical lapse, which affects the entire nation of the USA, and the entire West.

Blips of Western officials cannot be overlooked. For example, the French media has been scrutinizing the friendliness of the French foreign minister with elements of the Tunisian plutocracy.

After all the West is at war in Afghanistan, and related places (such as Mauritania and the ex Twin Towers of the WTC). And that war, against Afghanistan, started even before 1979 (under Carter), and, since NATO is fighting there, allies have a right to interrogate the ethics of fellow officers in the military alliance. To be led by an official torturer ought to be a no-no, because it denies the very foundation of the ethical justification for war. NATO cannot be at war just to promote the oil and military oligarchies, and the usage of drugs and corruption, by implementing torture for all to see. at the end of WWII, an American general had the German population of a city visit the local extermination camp, which was in plain sight. The American generals wanted to force the Germans to see what they had refused to see. By the way, in WWII, fighting enormous evil, allies troops committed no war crimes for all to see (whereas the Nazis did against French and British troops during the Battle of France, in 1940, and later against American troops, there was at least one large scale massacre, in late 1944; the latter was prosecuted, but not the former, because the perpetrators were dead.).

Democracies where the powerful is above the law, for all to see, are assuredly exceptional. They don’t last very long. Maybe the USA claims to be exceptional that way?

The West has been promoting unsavory collaborators, such as Mubarak, and Ben Ali (and the Moroccan clown, etc.). That is part of the reason why Bush is protected. If one respects Bush, the promoter of torture, and Goldman Sachs, promoter of stealing taxpayers on an astronomical scale, then one can promote Mohammed VI and the Pakistani strong men and their nukes.

Not prosecuting Bush is saying that he law is not the same for all, a contradiction with equality against the law. The same is not happening in France, where the esteemed ex-president, Jacques Chirac, to everybody’s regret, will have to face judges in a trial on alleged favors he extended while he was Paris mayor (before he became president, and just after such alleged helps to collaborators became unlawful).

The contrast could not be any more striking: the French state prosecutes an ex-president for nothing much, on the ground of logical coherence, the absolute supremacy of law. The American state, in an extremely grave case which is an insult against Western civilization going back 25 centuries at least (not using torture against citizens), decides that his Guide Bush, grand son of an Auschwitz exploiter, is above the law. Why? Because the USA is “exceptional”, and so are its Guides.

The stupidification of the masses is obvious in the “exceptionalist” theory of the USA, and theories of the so called “republicans”. This is a particular case of nationalism, something which is justified only, well, exceptionally, when fighting barbarians (say).

American exceptionalism, and nationalism overall, generally prevents to understand the real history, and thus the real problems, as it concentrates the collective mind in irrational chants. This is particularly true as one tries to address the global plutocratic crisis (semantically morphed into other concepts such as “economic crisis”, or “financial crisis”, or “euro, or dollar crisis”.

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AGAINST STUPIDITY, THE GODS THEMSELVES CONTEND IN VAIN, THEREFORE SO WILL DEMOCRATS.

Such is the strategy of the American billionaires who support the extreme pro-wealth party of the USA, whose extreme figureheads are the “mama grizzlies”, who play on their cuteness on TV, the best known of whom being governor Palin and representative Bachman. Stupidity is also the main force of the pro-wealth Main Stream Media (MSM). for example Fox news run a campaign against PROGRESS itself. Imagine; the most popular TV channel makes propaganda against anybody who is for “progress”. In the Fox registry of insults, “progressive’ is the highest of them all. whereas “French” attracts an amused smirk, “progressive” calls for a condemning frown. In the hands of tyrants, and tyrants-to-be, stupidity is a strategy. And one which is hard to defeat: how to fight and contradict idiocy?

Idiocy builds up brains, just as intelligence does. Al Jazeera an Arab channel based in Qatar, makes Arab minds different, more clever. An idiotic brain is wired differently from an intelligent one. Such is the plasticity of the human mind. In other words: how to teach philosophy to chimpanzees? Thus the prime goal of plutocrats is to foster stupidity, then to use it as a weapon that democrats will contend in vain against. Hence the war against knowledge, and the war against logic.

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WHEN DECEREBRATION GETS DISHEARTENING:

Hitler held that lies, if they are big enough, are always believed because normal people lie only on a small scale, and thus do not know what a big lie is, and cannot conceive of it. Just as animals who have never seen man, or a predator do not fear him (a well known curiosity of isolated islands).

Lying misinform people, misshape their brains, on a case by case basis. Making them stupid, misshaping their brains globally, makes them unable to handle information on global basis. If all what makes them salivate is steroid football players, or men in uniform, marching in unison, they will have no brain for the higher mental functions. This mental devolution is well documented in the Greco-Roman empire; the usage of sports and food stamps to dull people’s minds was denounced by Juvenal, but was at its apogee four centuries later. (The USA will not have the luxury Rome had to dominate geopolitically as a super hyper power; the German invasions were consecutive to Roman internal policy choices; even the Huns were invited in! The first invasion which was not much of a choice was the Muslim one, post 632 CE; even then, Constantinople had not paid Arab nations in its employ, which then rebelled, and had cruelly imposed its version of slightly demented, triphasic Christianity.)

Making people stupid is a more advanced theory of lying than the one Hitler wrote about. (That does not mean Hitler did not practice stupidification: he did. Extensively. And that is why Hitler talked about lying so much, to divert attention from what he was really doing on the grandest scale, namely, stupidification! Hitler, like Bush, should never be underestimated.)

I have some family in Colorado, a part of “fly over country” (and it sure is, intellectually speaking). Although they belong to the higher society there, they mostly know nothing about everything, and all their passion is concentrated on the local shopping mall, and ridiculous football team derangement (doing sports for them consist mostly in watching steroid guys bang each other in public, in very tight second skins). They don’t know Egypt from Mongolia, or mental autonomy from pantomime, and they don’t mind. They don’t know culture from the local dog news.

In a further twist, they get afraid of depth, and when culture shows up, even culture of emotional depth that normal human beings operate under, they leave the room, as if they had seen the devil. So they don’t mind having no mind, but they are worried when others exhibit some. In one sense it’s philosophically instructive; it’s like seeing Nazi Germany live.

I have a little one now, a new soul to take care of, in all ways, rational, cognitive and emotional, and I discovered to my surprised dismay, that this decerebration in Colorado extended all the way down to the heart, making decerebration; literally, disheartening. The mind has really become a desert when the heart itself is arid.

To remove the heart of people, not just their brains, to make them afraid of other, slightly different minds, is part of the basics of dictatorship, as so many Tunisians and Egyptians are saying nowadays, and they point to the new “solidarities” they have built, and which allow them to conduct their revolution.

When one has no more heart, one does not care about one’s fellows. Thus, one cannot organize street fighting, and not even street protesting against the plutocrats in command. But not just that: not caring about one’s fellow is good training for not caring about one’s family, or even about oneself. Thus one can see those who do not care about the world lays on couches watching steroid players on the giant flat screen TV, their minds draining away into stupor.

A decerebration to the point observed in Colorado is no haphazard decerebration: enough stupidity prevents to envision even the mere possibility of other outcomes than those presented by the oligarchs.

This is particularly true in the ongoing economic crisis, where the political and cognitive authorities have been lying through their teeth, even about the very nature of the crisis. (Which is nothing new: for example the fascist leadership in Germany lied through its teeth, to the German people, about why it needed to attack and invade other countries, both in WWI and WWII. It was important to lie, otherwise the Germans may have showed less enthusiasm, or even refuse to go out and kill foreigners.)

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JINGO DINGO:

Nationalism was Hitler’s main propellant. And the propellant of most mass and war criminals.

All really stupid regimes have presented themselves as exceptional. A particular case of this imposition of stupid, and stupidifying, nationalism is the theory of “American exceptionalism”.  American “exceptionalism” is therefore becoming ever more interesting, exceptional, indeed, historically speaking, but not in a good way.

An important component of American exceptionalism is deliberate ignorance of, and spite for, the rest of the world. an example: the USA is the only country not to use the metric system Americans have been conditioned to view that such weirdness is not an interesting subject of reflection. So it is not just the rest of the world which is dismissed, but reason, and even the attraction reason exerts on normally constituted human beings, which is dismissed as unworthy of interest. the way one reflects on the last cannibals.

Obama’s own State Of the Union was full of jingoistic silliness, nationalism gone mad (“only the USA cares about its children, nobody wants to live anywhere else, etc.”). Some were outright lies; the USA has the most productive workers, said Obama. (The last 4 or 5 the USA has?) That productivity claim is very far from true. Many European countries have higher productivity.

However many world statistic organizations, to satisfy the needs of American propaganda, massively belittle the GDP of European countries (one trick, the PPP trick, consists in putting the euro at parity with the dollar; that immediately lowers euro GDPs by at least 25%, demonstrating the superiority of the American way of life; then US economists affect concern, and, immediately after lowering, the euro, observe that the euro is weak; mental retardation, here we come!)

Obama’s nationalistic utterances of the wild, or erroneous type, made him instantaneously more popular. However encroaching stupidity is the greatest threat against the economy of the USA, or even the USA itself. And nationalistic stupidity is typically the dangerous crutch of decaying countries; they lean on it, until it breaks. And then they fall flat on their face.

On the good side, the president has stopped to order God to bless America. He has now introduce the subtlety: “May God bless the USA“. The president has learned it is not cool to present oneself as the one ordering god around. The critters in Egypt may then come to believe that the president of the USA orders Mubarak and its “intelligence” services around (does having “intelligence” services mean the rest of the population is stupid?)

Ryan, the republican answering Obama’s SOTU came out with a succession of descriptions of Europe which (even) Paul Krugman, our residential anti-EU skeptic, found ignorant. So Ryan is another mentally challenged arrogant ignoramus, probably with a Reagan voodoo shrine at home. On his knees he worships the emotion of feeling good, rather than the pleasure of thinking good. Obama himself pointed out that it was what was good about the Reagan cult, the feeling good aspect of it. Like a bit of “blow”, presumably, it feels good, indeed. That Reagan eyebrow gymnastics. The sincerity of a (B movie) clown (minus the chimp).

Today’s leaders of the USA know nothing about Europe, obviously. Even “The Economist” found that Obama confused NATO and Europe. But only one American out of five has a passport. whereas most Europeans have travelled to other countries (and, typically, with another language, as only one European out of eight is a native English speaker).

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PLUTOCRATIC DAVOS:

In the posh ski resort of Davos the self described “highest worth” individuals, mix it up with their governmental servants and their top propagandists (Bono, etc.). The admission tickets to the grandly entitled “World Economic Forum” are at least $70,000 and sometimes more than $600,000. There are different levels of access, in Davos, the highest ones are called “strategic”. “Strategos”, in Greek meant general. To whom, are those generals making war? Certainly not on China. The next Chinese president’s daughter is, of course, enrolled at Harvard (for a more poetical perspective on Harvard see Polanski’s movie, “Ghost writer”; Harvard is writing a ghostly script onto the world, indeed). Plutocrats prefer to know who the next president is going to be, it’s more “strategic”.

The plutocrats pretend that they do not know what a forum is. A forum is a public place open to all, as public places are by definition, so that the public could meet and discuss, openly.

As rumbles of revolt are growling in the distance, throughout europe and the arab speaking world, the organizers of the forum suddenly claimed they would have 450 CEOs sending tweets and the like, to inform the masses of their grand schemes in 140 characters. What about sending the plots over/ And are not plots among the powerful against the law to start with?

Or, if the plutocrats are going to persist into calling that gathering of them a “forum”, does that mean that if you cannot spend $70,000 you don’t exist as a citizen, and have no say in world economy, to be determined solely by the filthy rich? Hey, you can’t even enter the forum about the world, so you have got to some sort of Untermensch, some sort of subhuman form. republic and democracy on the forum, but just for them plutocrats. Others are too stupid for input, or even contempt.

Could it be anything more blatant than the Davos plutocratic circus to tell us that we are dealing with a plutocratic gathering making war on the People, wherever they are ? Look at the 5 trillion dollars, or much more, given by the government of the USA, to privately managed banks in the USA alone, in the last 2 years.

Look at taxpayers throughout Europe having to pay much more so that the rich “generals” in Davos can stay rich and in command, making financial war to the planet, and the very notion of progress.

Throughout Africa, the Middle East regimes, and even Asia, immensely rich plutocrats have seized entire countries. The country the Saud family has modestly named after itself being the most well known example. But when the USA sells for 60 billion dollars of weapons to that plutocratic family, and the name is Saud, it shows its hand. its plutocratic hand. Plutocracy knows no bounds, and has organized the world accordingly. A boundless world, with unlimited opportunities for the few, the hyper rich, the strategic ones.

Many chuckle that the the Davos “World economic Forum”, held every year, did not see the 2007-2008 financial crisis come. Some think they are very clever to have noticed this. How naïve. Thus horses jumping off the cliff to escape prehistoric hunters felt very smart, but not for long.

The Davosians are the hunters. They were ready: they had all government officials eating in their hands, when they were not, like Mubarak, or the Moroccan, Libyan, Tunisian, Algerian, Pakistani, Afghani, those governments themselves. See the French foreign minister ride in private Tunisian plutocratic jet, while revolution was growling in Tunisia. Her defense? The Tunisian billionaire is her “friend” (truly her employer). Her husband, who was also in the same private jet, is also presently a French minister (Sarkozy has several major plutocrats among his closest “friends”, no wonder that all the French income tax is going to pay the national interest on the debt, in other words, to pay the plutocrats). These are French examples, different in scale from the American examples, but not in nature.

Who profited from the financial crisis of 2007-2008? Those who got to keep all the riches they amassed before 2007-2008, and when then were made whole by the governments, in the name of the People. When the People adulates the rich to the point that making the rich richer by making the rest of the population poorer, plutocracy has not just been achieved, it has become self sustaining.

And how did it do that? By depriving people of their intelligence to the point they have lost not just their dignity, but their sense of self. They identify with their captors, and they call for more punishment, to show their mettle. even beyond that, people have lost their critical sense; watch Obama saying that Sweden had “4 or 5 banks”. OK, I am in the pocket of plutocracy, so, when my little head comes out of the pocket, I shall scream:” Down with Sweden!”

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SURRENDER CIVILIZATION TO SAVE THE EARTH? OR FIGHT BACK?

This pathetic surrender of the people, and their minds, to the plutocrats has often happened in history. It is probably an old instinct, akin to that of the prey which does not defend itself, lest it damages the predator, and instead surrenders, and lets itself being eaten alive, as it drowns in endorphins, and forgets reality, to only talk about team sports, food and health (as Krugman correctly points out in “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Goes Eating“… No doubt another old instinct, as one ought to build fat reserves when tough times loom).

That sort of abject surrender of the individual to fate, incarnated by the plutocratic demons of the Dark Side, protects the Earth, but it is fatal to civilization. If there are people no more, indeed, the biosphere has a chance. But it will not be our chance, nor that of our children. Peter singer may say it’s all for the good, but hitler led us down that road before, and we know war is better than to accept that.

However, we have one of those abject surrenders at hand here. Look at the dismal way the Irish are treated: the yoke, because investors played in Ireland, and lost (as I said, the Irish case is generic, it applies to German or French, or British, or American taxpayers, and also all the citizens of these countries, as public services get cut right and left).

Stupidity was imposed from the top by the (mostly) Western based plutocrats, and their lackeys, such as the plutocratic, dictatorial leaders of the Arabs (remember, even Hamas was a tool of Israel, initially).

Fortunately, there are indications of active, productive revolt. It is particularly encouraging that revolt is blowing throughout the Arab speaking world, after 13 centuries of plutocratic friendly Salafism, a religion imposed by a plutocratic dictator (who was assassinated for the horror he instigated, but the horror kept on going, as I pointed out for many years, and Al Baradei said above).

We have, we the human species, at this point of technological evolution, only one chance to keep civilization going, as we do not know enough yet to survive, but have exploited too much of the Earth to keep on going the same as we went before (Rome had a similar ecological problem, and some of the ecological recovery is not yet complete). We have exhausted the readily available resources, civilization will not be born again, lest we get rid of the plutocrats. Right now, the battlefront is in Cairo. The government of the USA, and those of the EU, have to walk their talk. Oh, by the way, that ought to lead to $300 per barrel oil (as the Arab speaking people get their due).

The plutocrats ought to regurgitate the thousands of billions they stole from the People, all over the place, and the money creation system they profit from, investing most of the money the West has in the derivative universe (that include the commodity system, thus food for the planet).

Godspeed to the democratic revolution, it’s going to need it, in the Arab world, after 66 years of American serving dictatorship, and 13 centuries of Salafism. And don’t forget to spread it to the West, that’s where the main vipers’ nest is to be found, a most enlightening revelation to come.

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Patrice Ayme