Anti-French Racism In The USA II

JUSTICE IS WHATEVER MAKES THE EMPIRE STRONGER.

***

Abstract: Adolf Hitler observed in “Mein Kampf” that people are used to little lies, which they encounter in their little lives. However, they rarely come across big lies, so they do not expect them. Thus it is easier for a propagandist to use big lies than little ones. Hitler put these observations to practice so successfully that, in the next twenty-two years, most Germans believed the enormous lies that the Nazi propaganda machine uttered, and the bigger the lies, the more they believed.

A new, systematic campaign of lies has been vigorously conducted against the French state and the French people in 2011. It was under way well before Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, to the point that I published an article protesting it, April 13, 2011, Anti-French Racism In The USA.

Now Anti-French racism has become the official line of American justice (the sick DSK had to remain in jail, because… he was French, said the DA, Vance, son of Vance, his name, and he gave two explicit reasons why, being French, he should be discriminated against; these would apply to any French citizen, so it’s indeed racism).

The latest method of anti-French propaganda consists in comparing the alleged ways of the French, and how the French justice system operate, with the ways of the Americans, and the American justice system allegedly operate. 

I do such comparisons systematically, among all ethnic, religious, and historical groups, so I think such comparisons are very important, and enlightening. It is an old tradition among thinkers going back not just to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters,  but all the way back to Herodotus. In a way, the Greeks at Marathon were motivated by such comparisons.

However, to do such comparisons correctly, one has to use correct facts, and it is difficult, and, often, the real facts are not as expected. The present comparisons made in the USA, or even in France (!) about France versus the USA rest, all too frequently, upon big lies presented as obvious facts. Entire articles are written, where all the facts are inverted. The French get accused by propaganda to do exactly what the Americans excel at doing more of. For example:

a) It is absolutely not true that there is more violence against women in France than in the USA. Actually it is the opposite which is blatantly true (see statistics below). The differences reported by international study groups are so huge, it is actually funny, in a sick way. Also familial statistics show French families to be more united than American ones, and reducing human relationships to “dates” does not even exist in French semantics, because the practice would look base to the French (if they understood it). Superficially, the level of anger between the genders is much lower in France. Two of the three main political parties in France are led by women. True, there is much progress to be done, and the DSK scandal is accelerating it.

b) Contrarily to what has been said, the French justice system goes systematically after French politicians, and much more vigorously than the American system ever did. Some French politicians were even executed (traitors such as Louis XVI, or Prime Minister Laval are examples).

The penultimate French Prime minister has just been condemned (Villepin, he is appealing) and a former French president is indicted (Chirac, for corruption before he became president).

In glaring contrast, the American justice system has left his politicians alone, even when they trade with the enemy, or when they help Hitler build Auschwitz (so of course Americans never heard of that, and will think you are a lunatic to say such a thing).

c) The American justice system is depicted as completely fair: another absurd lie. Fairer than justice in France? Indeed, in France, there are no bails, so, very unfairly, the rich stay locked up. Whereas in the USA Dominique Strauss Kahn (“DSK”) could post a six million dollar bail, for having touched the maid without her consent (she claims, after surprising him naked), and now he is locked up in a house. So advice to the French visiting the USA: be ready to pay millions, if you just touch, the USA economy is that bad. Maybe the USA could do as Libya under the Ottomans did, 200 years ago, and live off legalized hostage taking… Just trying to help, by making helpful suggestions.

Jokes aside, what is going on, why such American officialdom rage? Well, the guy prosecuting DSK is an American politician, whose campaign was, most probably paid by Wall Street (not just Obama gets his most important contributions from Goldman Sachs!) All of New York lives off Wall Street, which lives off the world. Wall Street brings in the big kills, worldwide, and all the scavengers, down to bacteria, profit from it.

DSK wanted to regulate Wall Street much more. As IMF director, and soon French president, he had the means to bring Wall Street to heel. Achilles had his tendon, while DSK had it tender for skirts all too much. If you want to play hero, don’t have a weakness.

***

***

In the 1950s, the CIA had on payroll many French journalists, including the famous Raymond Cartier at Paris Match. They were supposed to tilt French opinion the right way, towards Washington. They did a great job. That secret program, part of a worldwide pro-America propaganda machinery, was revealed later under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some will excuse the whole thing, by pointing out that the CIA was then directed by Dulles, brother of Dulles, the Secretary of State who told Eisenhower what to say. Those Dulles lawyers represented not just American plutocrats such as Bush, but also more than 100 Nazi companies before the war. Dulles became the Berlin CIA chief, in charge of hunting down his former German speaking colleagues (to propose them new jobs, it turned out).

Nowadays, reading the French press is amusing, because it is still obviously the case, that some are getting paid from the USA, as they repeat the same lies found in the American press, as if their income depended upon it. It probably does.. With the exception of a courageous Ben Stein, in “Presumed Innocent, Anyone?” and a discrete implication by Paul Krugman, the American press is a monolithic block of racist rage against “presumed-innocent” DSK. The honest French have been trying to adapt to the hostility coming from New York (a city they generally liked for reasons they are soon going to find increasingly obscure).

Another day, another trash article about the French in the New York Times, darkly promoting the American empire while racially denigrating the French. Latest technique: make the French themselves tell the Americans how primitive, base, sex obsessed, criminally inclined and judicially inferior  the French are:

New York Times’ propaganda: “Ms. Cottavoz, a Frenchwoman… exposed a “slippery slope” in France between what she called “chauvinist behavior” and something more aggressive, like the sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper … In New York, she has felt respected as a woman in a way she might not have been in France, where, she said, “Frenchmen get away with too many sexual advances…

We know in France that the general culture makes it comfortable for men to take liberties with women, and in America it’s not like that… In America, if they take liberties, there will be consequences.”

Philosopher answer: “Liberté, Liberté chérie” is the sixth verse of La Marseillaise… Liberties are the essence of France, as the name France indicates. “Francia”, “Frank”, etc. means  free. When “taking liberties” bring “consequences” in a country, it is fascism by another name.

To reproach “liberties” to the French is a declaration of war, against what has been the organizing principle of a country, for more than 15 centuries, a country that spawned Germany, Spain and Britain, and ejected the Muslim armies out of Italy. Even the Huns broke their teeth there, and it’s doubtfull that wild west justice will stop French liberties either. Liberty has proven a much more potent weapon than fascism. Even when fascism dresses in black, and takes grand airs. 

OK, let’s get into facts. The American media has proclaimed that women have it harder in France. That is rubbish.

There is much more sexual violence in the USA. The statistics are inescapable.

Rape per 100,000 in the USA: 30.2. Rape per 100,000 in France: 17.3. (Of course American chauvinists will claim that rapes get reported much less in France, a proof ot the terror French women live in! Soon we will be told that there are millions of invisible prisoners in France, all females, raped every  day! The idiotic CNN reported a few months ago that there were nearly ten million invisible Muslims in France, so France would soon disappear in a Muslim sea… Meanwhile the USA is at war with DSK and BHL, who are Jews, and very Gallically so.)

Murder rate USA: 6 per 100,000. Murder rate France: 1.6 per 100,000. I leave your imagination about how many of these were sex-murders.

Percentage of prisoners who are female, USA:  8.5%. Percentage of prisoners who are female, France: 3.8%.

Serious assault per 100,000 per year, USA: 281.6 (# third rank in the world, behind South Africa and Swaziland, but ahead of Zambia; “serious assault” means more than “assault”, but short of murder). Serious assault per 100,000 per year, France: .3 (# 79th rank in the world). No wonder the Americans are expecting DSK to have assaulted seriously, leaving invisible injuries, and the French are surprised.

***

Then, in the same article purporting to report facts, the New York Times rolls out a well trained academic who knows how to feed anti-French racism: French-Americans, said Thomas Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, do not integrate into the American mainstream as easily as other ethnic groups… Rather than dismiss Mr. Strauss-Kahn with tabloid descriptions of him as a “frisky Frenchman,” they may view his fall from power as that of a man with “a tragic flaw”…

Still, Mr. Bishop of N.Y.U. said, French-Americans are aware that in France, similar charges embroiling a powerful politician might have been “swept under the rug” by a justice system he said was more susceptible to political intrigue. The more scrupulous American justice system is something the French here grow to appreciate, he said.

“The system doesn’t always work perfectly,” Mr. Bishop said, “but people cannot just walk away from something.”

Philosopher says: By using the word “might” as much as the New York Times does, it may be feasible to re-establish slavery to serve the American plutocracy. Just give us an example of French politician who walked away, Mr. Bishop… Don’t just talk, brandish facts, or then pass for the simple beggar you are, trying to ingratiate yourself to the powers that be.

I am now going to give you a few examples of big American politicians who walked away, and everybody knows it.

Powerful American politicians can swim, even under the influence, drown people, and then get away with it, thanks to the more scrupulous American justice system. After driving into the sea because he was drunk, Ted Kennedy waited until he was sober to present himself at the police station, and advise law enforcement that his latest sex toy was drowned down there inside that car. He was free to go, as he came. Hey, he was one of the grandees of America! No problemo: at Harvard, another guy took his Spanish test.

Speaking of Kennedys, the dad had made most of his fortune during the prohibition, financing the mafia. He walked away with it, becoming ambassador to Britain, where he furthered Hitler’s cause.

How many examples do we need? Nixon, as president, ordered a burglary of the headquarters of the opposition. Was he charged, arrested? No the scrupulous American justice system forgave him, in 1976. Some will say the director of the IMF does not compare to the president of the USA. Indeed, the director of the IMF is elected to represent 7 billion people, whereas Nixon represented only 250 million.

Edgar Hoover reigned over the FBI forever, in a multi decade (37 years! He died in office) crime spree strange emphasis on harassing civil rights figures, while forgetting that the mafia reigned all over, including Cuba. The FBI headquarters is named after Hoover. Equivalent figures in France do not quite exist, as they were prosecuted before becoming inamovible.

Ronald Reagan sold weapons to Iran (trading with the enemy!), financing secretly this way an illegal war in Central America. When he was asked questions, Reagan said he could not remember. He is still loved to death by the American population (literally… as it dies from reaganomics). Governor Clinton helped Reagan ferry the goods, using an airfield in Arkansas, and was condemned to serve, by the scrupulous American justice system, as American president too. Rough justice.

USA president Carter started officially the war in Afghanistan on July 3, 1979. Millions killed. Americans venerate Carter, Nobel Prize given: scrupulous justice done, once again.

Prescott Bush was one of Hitler’s closest collaborators, managing his most important defense company, working Auschwitz’s slaves. Many other American plutocrats, such as Watson (head of IBM), Ford, etc. were pillars of the Nazi regime. Top American corporations, such as Standard Oil, kept on, not just supporting Hitler’s regime, but kept on being paid throughout. None got prosecuted. Still venerated in the USA. By contrast, France nationalized Renault, judged too enthusiastic in making trucks for Hitler.  

By contrast, France prosecuted its war criminals: (pre-WWII) Prime Minister Laval was executed, Marshall Petain was condemned to death (commuted to life, considering his advanced age at the time of his crimes), and so on. France executed up to 40,000 Nazi collaborators and traitors in the period 1944-1948. Papon, a very high level official, prefect of Paris in the 1960s, was condemned, when his WWII crimes finally surfaced.

In further contrast, there are many examples of contemporary French politicians who got, or are prosecuted, including ex-president Chirac. Mighty minister of the interior Pasqua got condemned to a year in jail (he is appealing). Prime ministers such as Fabius, or Villepin were, or are, prosecuted very seriously. The head of the Supreme Court, Dumas, was prosecuted, and had to resign.

Not to say that the French justice system is always superior to the American one. It is deprived of the possibility of class action lawsuits, and that’s a great disservice to the little ones, in France. Some French plutocrats, such as the well connected drug magnate Servier (successfully prosecuted in the USA and Canada) have still to see their comeuppance (the noose is squeezing, though).  

***

Still in the same article, here is the New York Times, in its on-going anti-French rampage: “Marie-Monique Steckel, president of the French Institute Alliance Française, which promotes French culture and language: “although some French-Americans may think Americans react too prudishly to the sex scandals of their leaders, Ms. Steckel said, “There is a difference between a womanizer and rape.”

“A womanizer is more acceptable in France,” she said. “It’s kind of considered good health and vigor, which is different from Americans, who are more puritanical. But violence against women is very different.”

Seeing conspiracy is another matter that divides Americans and French …Ms. Steckel said many French-Americans found it difficult to talk to friends in France who suspect the arrest was a plot by Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political opponents.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to be the Socialist candidate for president. French people who have lived in New York for a long time, she said, have moved beyond seeing the world in such a conspiratorial fashion. “The French adore the idea of plots,” she said. “They see plots everywhere. French-Americans become more factual.” ”

Philosopher: Americans, those God lovers, with America-under-God, are now factual? A god in every pot? Verily, people in New York have never seen a conspiracy in action: on 9/11, they were looking somewhere else, busy being factual. Plane goes into tower; boom. A fact, not a conspiracy. Another plane goes into another tower: boom. Another fact, not a conspiracy.

How many boom booms does one need to resonate in the American mind? But of course, I forgot, Americans do not know that they own government conspired to attack Afghanistan in 1979, using bin Laden. Since there are no conspiracy, nor plots, just facts.

In truth, history is pretty much made exclusively of conspiracies. So all this obsessive belief that there are no conspiracies, only God, says, is this: Americans have never heard of history. Let alone read it. A country can only go that far this way, because it means it learned nothing. All knowledge is historical, even in science.

The Afghan war was started by the USA, secretly. And bin Laden was recruited, secretly. That was the result of a secret plot of the CIA and Prince Turki (head of Saudi intelligence). And bin Laden made a plot, secretly. And the French and the Israeli pretty much warned the USA about it, secretly.

And then the Pakistani ISI harbored bin Laden in its most fortified town, secretly, for 6 years, until it secretly sold it to Obama who, all too loudly, said it was not so. Oh, yeah, what about the secret paper with Stalin about secretly dividing Europe? That was not a plot?

Americans are conditioned to believe there no conspiracies, no classes, and no plots.  Thus the cattle goes to the slaughterhouse, with equanimity, head high, as behooves the stupid. Then Americans can’t explain Auschwitz, the Civil War, disappearance of the Indians, or slavery. And they don’t care. It does not matter, because they have reached the most important conclusion that way: there is no plutocracy, but plutocracy and mental apathy is its prophet. Plutocracy provides, it’s most merciful: look at all the tall towers in New York. Strauss-Kahn wanted to take all that easy money away, and actually make New York work for a living. No wonder New Yorkers hate Strauss-Kahn.

OK, now for a humoristic break to show how clueless the New York elite can be. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, interviewed the future (French!) female successor of Strauss-Kahn at the IMF, Christine Lagarde (note): “The French are reconsidering the line between seduction and aggression. I asked Lagarde how she would delineate it. “You know when you receive a big slap in the face,” Lagarde says, “or when someone says ‘No.’ ”

Has she ever felt sexually harassed? “No, I’m too tall. I’ve been in sports for too long,” she says, smiling and flexing the muscle under her black Ann Taylor jacket.

“They know that I could just punch them.” “

As Dowd, who had insulted Strauss-Kahn in previous essays, revealed earlier in her article, Lagarde is 5-10. Dowd does not understand at all what Lagarde is telling her. That the funniest part; Dowd faithfully related Lagarde making fun of her, and Dowd is so dumb, so blinded by her preconceptions, she had no notion of it. So she related faithfully Lagarde’s contempt for her, with no notion of it.

Lagarde is telling Dowd, that Dowd is a complete idiot. Lagarde, a conservative, says: of course Strauss-Kahn could not sexually assault me, because I would punch him out. And guess what? Lagarde knows that Strauss-Kahn supposed victim towers above her, Lagarde!

Everybody knows in France that the presumed victim in the alleged rape attempt is more than 6 feet tall, and that her strength is legendary (from her job). She probably could strangle Strauss-Kahn with just one hand. The only thing that prevents her to do that, in the exalted American legal opinion, is the even more legendary virile prowess of the Frenchman, that domineering beast, who can probably rape, just by looking at a woman. And it’s well known the French do plenty of that, even to exaggeratedly tall illegal Guinean immigrants.

Strauss Kahn is short, fat, old, sick (he was hooked up by American prison authorities to an oxygen machine, just so that he would keep on breathing through the night in jail). One has to be idiotic, or very well paid, like a New York tabloid artists, or a New York talking head, to not understand any of this.

All New York tabloids are owned by legendary plutocrats, singing the glory of plutocracy, protected by bodyguards and killer maids. Even Jon Steward knows who his masters are, and he flexed his pathetic racist muscle against philosopher Henri Bernard Levy (if I were an American Jew, I would not attack French Jews, because American Jews did nothing effective to prevent the Holocaust, when they could, and should have; so millions of Jews were stuck in Europe, when the war started, and died at Hitler’s hands, in partial consequence of American Jewry unwitting, and dim witted, collaboration). 

When Murderoch, a plutocrat who inherited his fortune in Australia, and expanded it propagandizing for neoconservative Thatcher, became American, to become even bigger. He bought many tabloids. Some are in New York, now screaming against Strauss-Kahn, working on the jurors’ minds (that’s called the justice screaming system).

Murderoch bought the Fox channel, crazy like a fox, indeed. Then Murderoch told the little Americans to go attack Iraq for him, and they did, like enraged lemmings, crossing the sea, foaming at the mouth, and hating France which was in the way. Plutocrats have hated France since 1789, and counting. French plutocrats have adopted a low profile.

Strauss-Kahn’s pretended victim, in the prime of her life, nearly as tall and massive as the Terminator himself, is 30 years younger. Oh, and how did that creature get to the USA? Did she swim, like Ted Kennedy? She has no American relative. Her Muslim fundamentalist family is in the business of making money from Islam, and is relatively wealthy (they own the biggest house, painted all over, up there in the wet Fouta Djallon mountain range). The victim to kill all victims has at least 11 close family members in that Guinean village. No, of course, this whole thing has nothing to do with the fact that she discovered that Strauss-Kahn is a Jew. Nothing to get hysterical about, a bit of cavorting for the Muslim fundamentalist, with the naked Jew she surprised in his rooms.

Some are going to scream that I lack sympathy for the potential victim. No, I do have sympathy for victims. I have been one myself, several times, for reasons related to my opinions. But I also know that the law can be used to aggress. I have seen several cases, in several countries, close and personal. Moreover, I have been myself the object of more serious aggressions, than this ridiculous he said-she said-that-he-touched-me-there.

When I was aggressed, blood flowed, and lots of it. Vertebrae broke. Limbs were torn, fingers were on the ground, like little sausages (although the target, when I was bombed, somebody else got the brunt of it). That’s serious crime. And the perpetrators got away… precisely because of political considerations! Instead, some of the victims got prosecuted… So I get very suspicious when I see big politics involved, and official rage being turned on from up high. And especially when racism is involved (the racists who threw a bomb on me were not seriously prosecuted, and yes, it did not happen in the USA.)

I also get suspicious when a full grown gigantic woman scream attempted rape. If an elephant is scared of a mouse, that’s not the fault of the mouse. And she can give a good slap instead, as Christine Lagarde said. That’s the feminist way. Feminism is not about protecting fake helpless women from imaginary abuse. That is persevering with the old system, where women are so impotent, that they are terrified of even old, sick, short, overweight men.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a corporate lawyer, agrege’, and tenured university professor of economics, before he became France’s finance minister. His rich culture is of mixed Alsatian Jew and Tunisian Sephardic Jew. He is this rare bird, a very competent economist. His actions at the IMF re-introduced Drawing Rights, on a huge scale (roll over, American dollar!) He pulled the world out of a serious crisis when heading the IMF. But not in a way which could please American plutocracy.

In this demented world, nearly half of the profits of large companies in the USA originate in the financial sector. Strauss-Kahn had proclaimed, loud and clear, that what was needed was more government, worldwide, and more regulations. In other words, he wanted to violate New York, den of financial piracy, rob it of its major source of wealth.

I will inspect the justice system of the USA soon, with an arsenal of scathing facts. The USA has a more cruel justice system in 2011 than France had in 1815, coming out of Napoleon’s dictatorship. Time to demonstrate it, as American justice claims to be exerted through summary executions, all the way to Pakistan.

I will ponder why the New York DA, a politician most probably paid by Goldman Sachs and the like, proclaimed two reasons for American law to discriminate against French citizens. And why American judges agreed. And whether this is related in some sense to this little American Indian boy, who, 160 years ago, shot a toy arrow through a Texan judge’s heart.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: Christine Lagarde’s only difficulty with getting the IMF job is that French justice has her eye on her, about going too easy on a rich guy, Bernard Tapie (who claimed to be owed money by the state). Just a question of 285 million euros (she sent the case to arbitration, instead of leaving it in court her opponents say). Whereas American plutocrats count their gifts from Washington in billions, if not dozens of billions, and never been even suspected. Talk about the French justice being easy on French politicians…

RELATIVITY + QUANTUM = CRAZY

Gravity Versus Quantum Seen Through SIMPLICIAL DECONSTRUCTION. Relations With Oligarchy.

[Lots Of Physics For Inquiring Minds.]

***

Abstract: Once, long ago, some unknown author gave a joint physics-mathematics conference in Stanford on Black Holes. Some math-physics celebrities were in attendance. The author concluded that General Relativity cannot be used to demonstrate  singularities in spacetime, because of Quantum effects. At the time, the author was accused of “meditation”.

Several years later, Hawking (in a “Brief History of Time”), adopted that conclusion, that Quantum overwhelmed Relativity. It seems to have become standard. The source of ideas are not always where they seem. But, to those for whom thinking is the prime motivation, it does not matter, they proceed, through fire, objections, dejections, the ashes of illusions washed away…

Present physics abound in deep paradoxes in plain sight. I ponder here another: Why are Black Holes not Total Holes? Indeed if photons cannot come out of a Black Hole, how come gravitons do? The Theory of Gravitation and the Quantum contradict each other.

Here I search for truth through simplicial deconstruction. If the logical skeleton makes no sense, how could the logical body around it survive?

This complex essay ponders the nature not just of nature, but also of the scientific oligarchy, and how it connects with the plutocracy. This explains the insufficient funding for deep science, when deep questions lay all around, untouched. The usual suspects are brought out for the traditional perp walk.

***

***

I MEEK, THEREFORE I GOOD:

There ought to be such a thing as a theory of theories. The philosopher (and scientist!) Karl Popper said that falsification was important in science, but he did not present a new technique of falsification. When Derida proclaimed deconstruction, he did not really forge a new insight, either, as thinkers have been busy falsifying and deconstructing, as this is what thinking is all about.

Falsification does not reduce to computation: only parts of science are amenable to computation. Most of the most important falsifications, historically speaking, did not rest on computation.

For example the heliocentric theory was proven right computationally by Kepler. Kepler followed pointed advice from Tycho, who thought, rightly so, that Ptolemy and his friends had cheated. However, both followed the work of Buridan, 250 years earlier (rehabilitated by Copernicus), or even Aristarchus and his predecessors, 19 centuries before.

Those theoreticians had already falsified the geocentric theory by presenting something more plausible. Buridan hinted, and Copernic said, that heliocentrism was true, before excruciating computations could verify it (that certainty was the motivation for the expensive multi decades effort to establish the orbit of Mars). And Ptolemy had cheated, to prove the opposite, through the sophistry of mathematical lies.

By the same token, even though Kepler had demonstrated, in his “War On Mars“, that Mars followed an ellipse with the sun on a focus, he was not believed. Until about 1700 CE, in spite of Galileo, Newton, and all their numerous fellow travelers, most scientists did not believe in the heliocentric theory.

Why? Because the scientific establishment is an oligarchy which is mostly anxious to find out who is in, and who is out (as Feynman put it, before he resigned from the academy in protest). The Bible said that the sun turned around the Earth, and the Bible was the foundation of established order. That was good enough a reason for the scientific oligarchy.

The scientific oligarchy augments its power to the max by ingratiating itself with the plutocracy in command. And plutocracy prefers its rabble meek and reeking of the same old thoughts, and the more inconsequential, uncontroversial, and incoherent, the better. If the meek and weak venerates incoherence, they will never make sense and the mastery of force will elude them. They will stay meek and weak. Coherence is what gives a laser its punch. If yesterday’s venerated idea can reveal itself a lie, could not all the evidences which make Plutocracy’s throne also reveal themselves to be lies? 

The Catholic Church, forced by a Parisian students strike, in 1200 CE, to embrace Aristotle, embraced him with a vengeance, as a new rigidity, a new definition of evidence. That was all the more judicious, since Aristotle, brought up in the highest circle of Philippe’s Macedonian court, was most attentionate to fascism and plutocracy.

Some will scoff that it is not like that nowadays. That now reign super scientists, super qualified, super selected, the ones and only, the finest flowers of thought among 7 billion.

However, as I already showed in other essays, and will do some more, there are major problems, even blatant contradictions, in today’s physics (contrarily to the idyllic picture often haughtily presented).  This is true in theoretical physics, and thus, a fortiori, in applied physics. (Out of dozens of thousands of possible materials for  batteries, only a few hundreds have been tested in decades!)

The correct consequence to be drawn is that there are way too few physicists, and way too few experiments conducted in physics (an experiment alluded to below on the dragging of frames from a rotating mass, was mostly organized by some physicists at Stanford University, and took more than 40 years to reach orbit, from dearth of funding; the 2010 Nobel was given to physicists who made a major discovery, a new state of matter, by peeling graphite… with scotch tape!)

***

 DECONSTRUCTION AS SIMPLICIAL STRIPPING:

I demonstrate a total hole in the union of the two most prestigious pillars of physics. Usually this is done in a way which is not only incomprehensible to non specialists (gravity is found to be “non renormalizable”), but also not logically compelling.

The union of the two most celebrated theories in contemporary physics, “General Relativity” (GR) and “Quantum Field Theory” (QFT) does not appear incompatible with energy conservation. My first order reasoning is ridiculously simple.

An approach to falsification uses the meta-idea of stripping down theories to lower dimensional simplicity, and see if what’s left still makes sense.

I view any theory as a simplicial topology made of simplicial complexes (I will detail that theory of theories some other time). The reason for doing this is that complex reasonings can hide simpler, more fundamental truths, just as a WWI destroyer could hide behind a smoke screen. If the lower dimensional part of a theory cannot be reorganized so as to make sense,  danger signals should go up. Not only this gives some punch to Popper’s and Derida’s vague slogans, but it is worthy to remake all of science and mathematics that way. The essences come out…

This approach deserves a name: SIMPLICIAL STRIPPING (roll over Derrida!). Simplicial Stripping does not have to be restricted to science. It works even better throughout politics, ethics, philosophy. Look at Israel: a contradiction onto itself (and putting it back into its 1967 cage won’t change that!). Or look at the economic rescue plan since 2008: save the plutocrats! (From themselves.)   

***

EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF GRAVITATION, IN FIRST ORDER :

Here is the skeleton of Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation, so called “General Relativity”. The idea is actually not Einstein’s, but Riemann’s, in 1860 CE: gravitation is  inertia in an elaborated geometry defined by mass-energy.

In its most primitive form, the idea that inertia can replace force originated with Buridan, around 1320 CE. Buridan brandished the disappearance of force to explain that planets, submitted to no force, were going around the sun. It was a big progress over the completely silly Aristotle, who thought force was needed to keep on going (so things would stop in vacuum, according to him and his clueless followers).

If you never heard of Buridan, Johannes Buridanus, please thank the fascist plutocrats of the Inquisition for simplifying your mind. Buridan, an adviser to kings, head of the university, mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and teacher to major mental heavy weights such as Oresme, was much more famous, and inflected civilization much more than a modest contributor to thinking such as Einstein. That is precisely why the Inquisition forbid his works, more than a century after his death, just when Copernicus was a young man. 

Whether gravitation is no force (Buridan-Riemann-Einstein) or whether it is a battle between the centrifugal force and Ismaël Bullialdus’ inverse square law, as Newton had it, was solved in the favor of the first… By Einstein. The zero order reason for the switch is that the concept of “centrifugal force” is not clear (it has no Lagrangian).

***

 I TAUTOLOGIZE, THEREFORE I LOGICAL:

“The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity”, by Albert Einstein, Annalen der Physik, 49, 1916 contains the following revealing statement by Einstein:

“It will be seen from these reflections that in pursuing the general theory of relativity we shall be led to a theory of gravitation, since we are able to “produce” a gravitational field merely by changing the system of co-ordinates.”

OK, fine, so everything is relative, and out pops gravity. I can reflect too. From my point of view, Einstein described everything, and explained nothing. He was proud to have identified acceleration with gravitation, but the problem is that any force, including gravitation, shows up as acceleration.  If the sheep formally identifies grass as food, did anything happen?

(Some are bound to scoff that General Relativity is well checked, GPS, bla, bla, bla; indeed, such is the property of any tautology! Tautologies are the definition of absolute truth. The non trivial effects of GR can be obtained directly; for example the prediction of gravitational waves is immediate from the belief that gravity is a field. The slowing down of the clocks next to a mass is caused by energy conservation, etc.)

***

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY GETS FORCE FROM A LAGRANGIAN:

Riemann’s insight, as implemented by Einstein, Hilbert and company looked fine. Until an interloper showed up on the scene. Studying elementary particle collisions, physicists discovered an unending zoo of particles accelerating here and there, thus exhibiting new forces in action.

These were new notions of force, same as the old one, the one before Einstein. Indeed the same old notion of force as in the seventeenth century, by Bullialdus, or electricity, in the eighteenth century, by Coulomb. Namely anything which causes an acceleration.

This can of worms was a deviously obscure scheme, Quantum Field Theory, QFT. Einstein got lessons from one of the top early practitioner of that dark art, and gave up.  Einstein believed in the big idea, whereas QFT was a bunch of cooking recipes with stuff found in bubble and spark chambers.

The basic scheme of QFT is to guess a Lagrangian (an expression depicting force), taking consideration of what has been found experimentally (such as the strong force, or the weak force, or what has been imagined, such as the inflaton force, etc… It’s like a modern salad). 

Thus there is no big idea: force is whatever acts funny. To accommodate all the new forces, according to the basic Riemannian scheme, one would have to augment considerably the number of dimensions of the universe.

It was found possible to add just one dimension to accommodate electromagnetism (Kaluza-Klein), but electromagnetism, as Bullialdus had already (knowingly) pointed out, is similar to gravitation, whereas the strong force is very strong, and very short range, and the geometry for that, obscure.

As it turns out the strong force is described best by curvature in an SU(3) fiber bundle over spacetime, Quantum Chromo Dynamics, QCD. Beautiful math, but spacetime found itself relegated to playing the role of base space of a fiber bundle (“base” here has both a technical, and poetic meaning…)

***

WHY GRAVITONS? BECAUSE ONE CAN VIEW QFT AS EXCHANGING VIRTUAL PARTICLES:

When people think of science, especially physics, they think of irresistible logic. And so it is for very well established physics. But when it’s really not well established at all, on the theoretical edge, anything goes (see the deeply grotesque “multiple infinite universe” theory). And, as Bohr said, nothing presented yet is crazy enough. (Although I am trying my best!)

The most intuitive and handy way to depict the development in series of Lagrangians has been through a pictorial scheme found by Feynman, Feynman Diagrams. De facto, it depicts interactions as exchanges of particles, which are called “virtual particles”. Whether those virtual particles really happen is a matter of debate (rigorists refuse the abstraction of “virtual particles” as they cling to equations, like infant monkeys to their mummies). Feynman himself was coy on the subject, as behooves a higher type. However, in practice, experimental physicists view forces as particle exchanges, this is the essence of QFT.

More exactly, the essence of QFT is the Lagrangian. As one tries to develop it in series, virtual particles show up, exploiting, and allowed, thus “caused” by the time-energy uncertainty of Quantum Mechanics (higher dimensional idea).  The higher the mass, hence energy, of said virtual particle, the less time it can stay directly undetected, thus big mass, short range (and big force too, to create said mass). 

So QFT says, in practice, that forces are depicted by particle exchanges. It certainly looks so for all forces known, thus so should it  be for gravitation (it’s an emotional reasoning: physicists are human beings too).

***

FORCE AS GEODESICS’ DISTANCIATION:

OK, let’s go back to how Einstein’s theory of gravitation is an implementation of Riemann’s proposition that all forces can be viewed as suitably curved spacetime geometries.

What is this splendid idea? (“Riemannian”) geodesics are defined by the distance function (aka “metric”). In a curved space, geodesics, if close enough, will either converge, or diverge (contrarily to Euclid’s straight lines).

In Einstein’s 4 dimensional spacetime, crawling along the geodesics correspond to the flow of time, and particles follow said geodesics. Thus, according to whether geodesics diverge or converge, particles will either approach each other, or flee each other. But that is exactly how an acceleration, and thus a force is detected: how the distance varies in the fullness of time. In other words, how the distance between geodesics varies describe a force.

Some mathematics then show that how the distance between geodesics varies is equivalent to curvature. [Here is a philosophico-mathematical proof of that: both curvature and how the distance between geodesics varies are the only two infinitesimal variables of the geometry, but it’s relatively easy to prove that there is only one connection, id est only one geometry compatible with the Riemannian distance, so they have to be the same, because, if they were not, there would be two different geometries!]

Hence, to describe the gravitational force, one needs a space with the appropriate curvature. Newton, following Ismaël Bullialdus’ inverse square law, plus Huyghens’ balance of centrifugal and attractive, and contributions from Hooke and Borelli exploited the notion that gravitation was proportional to the mass.

Thus Einstein (in collaboration with Hilbert, among others) needed an equation such as:

curvature = mass. This is, basically, Einstein’s gravitational equation.

That’s all (the rest is complicated details; including that ‘mass’ is mass-energy, and that’s a 16 dimensional tensor, whereas, at first sight, the left hand side of the equation is a 256 dimensional tensor; so one needs tricks to reduce the dimensions on the left to write an equation…by making the riemannian tensor into a lower dimensional Ricci tensor).

***

LAPLACE’S BLACK HOLE DISCOVERY:

The nature of matter is not clear, because the nature of particles is not clear, and that’s not clear because particles are always Quantum Mechanically entangled, and entanglements are non local. But today, we will, exceptionally, ignore that fascinating subject, which is more fundamental than space and time, and is what the true order of the universe is really made of (the realm of my pet, TOW).

The Greeks thought matter was made of atoms. That was confirmed 20 centuries later. However, what atoms were made of revealed Quantum Mechanics. Atoms were made of protons, electrons, and, first of all, vacuum. It turned out that the electrons were found where their waves added up nicely (Bohr-De Broglie).

And what was light made of? Huyghens in the seventeenth century suggested waves, Newton suggested particles. A century later, Laplace arrived on the scene. Assuming that light was made of particles, he observed that they would be submitted to gravitational attraction. Thus, if a star was massive enough, it would pull on light, and light would lose energy (that’s known as the “Gravitational redshift” in Einstein’s gravitation). If the star was dense enough, the pull would be so hard that no light could escape. Laplace (and a less well known English polymath named Mitchell) concluded that the brightest objects in the universe may well not be seen. They had discovered Black Holes. At least Black Holes in the light-as-massive-particle theory. Development in the subject stopped when Young (another english polymath1) and Poisson (another French matematician!) demonstrated, beyond any suspicion, that light was “made” of waves. Waves were thought impervious to gravity (curious, because it is not so in the ocean). 

The prediction of Black Hole in Einstein’s gravitation is not much different. The photons have no mass, so they follow spacetime geodesics perfectly. But mass pulls on the geodesics, and if it pulls hard enough, those will spiral in. Thus light can’t escape.
***

IF THERE IS NO GRAVITATIONAL FORCE, WHY SHOULD PARTICLES CARRY IT?

In conventional physics, a force is anything that accelerates. According to the essence of QFT, a force is enacted by an exchange of particles. Thus gravitation is caused by an imagined, hypothetical particle, the graviton.

Notice that this logic makes no sense in Einstein’s theory of gravitation, since, according to said theory, its essence is that gravitation is just inertia. (Said inertia is determined by geodesics, determined in turn by the mass-energy field, and if the mass-energy moves, as when it rotates, the sense of inertia should be dragged around, an effect verified in 2011 by gyroscopes in low Earth orbit.)

So if there is no force, so why should there be a particles exchange depicting said force?

Some sophisticated, mathematically competent physicists, will have a sophisticated piece of sophistry to answer that one. They will argue that interactions are wavy fields, and particles are their lowest excited states. So, be it gluon or photon, or W or Z boson, by “particles” we mean those primary excitations, these “virtual particles”.

By the same token, those sophisticated types would define the graviton as the lowest excited state of the wavy field known as spacetime geometry.  

Thus, the Theory of Gravitation, looked at face value, cannot be a force, and thus exchange virtual gravitons, but, looked at as a Quantum metatheory, it has both! The smallest conceptual incorporation of the simplest piece of QFT in the Theory of Gravitation generalizes the concept of “force”. Usually a force displaces an object, within a geometry, here the force deforms geometry itself. A meta-objection to that meta-interpretation is that this destroys the intuition of Riemann. But of course, nowadays, geometry of geometries are a standard tool: that’s what the Ricci Flow is all about, a flow from one geometry to the next, until a sphere is reached.  

***

Conclusion: THE MORE WE KNOW, THE MORE QUESTIONS: The edge of physics is stuffed with questions of the deepest philosophical nature. In his lectures on physics, Feynman whined that philosophers are always around, talking a lot and having nothing important to say. An immediate consequence was that Feynman’s son graduated in philosophy. Feynman should also have realized that the closest mirror would bring to light a philosopher he knew all too well. Actually, he obviously did.

But, of course, in one sense Feynman is right, because all too many of today’s philosophers are ignorant of science. Can one be ignorant and wise? Socrates thought so, exhibiting his ignorance. And driving civilization into the ground.

In first order of understanding, if gravity respected the basic principles of Quantum Field Theory, a gravitational field which is strong enough will prevent gravitational quanta to come out. Just as it prevents  electromagnetic quanta (photons) to come out, and for the same reason.

A major problem has been whether “virtual particles” are real or not.  The abstraction of virtual particles brings into question the very notion of existence,  what “real” means, and even what abstraction is, and how the mind works.

Let’s make a joke mathematicians will get. Are complex numbers “real” or not? The human brain makes abstraction “real”, because real means the way the brain is.

Kant had decided that there was such a notion of “thing in itself” “das Ding an sich“, causing a great disservice to philosophy, by declaring it unknowable. As it is, the greatest task of the edge of physics is to figure out what exists, and what does not. The line between essence and appearance is where the edge of science is. By claiming it is obvious, an entire school of philosophy made itself ridiculous (philosopher-physicists such as Mach, also disagreed with Kant).

Does gravitation exist? Obviously it does, a monkey could tell you that. Is it just inertia, as Einstein had it? If it is, and gravitons follow spacetime geodesics, how come gravitons come out of Black Holes? Or do Black Holes, when sufficiently black, all together drop off the universe? That would violate (local) energy conservation.

As I pointed in “Dark Demon Energy” energy conservation is probably violated (it is a well known problem that Cosmological Expansion violates energy conservation, in a global fashion, let it be said in passing, and I know of no convincing hand waving that explains that away).

I will explore some of these questions later. Science teaches modesty to those who learn it well, but also the pride and elation of reason well deployed.

There are not enough scientists, and not enough science made. Just as there is not enough common sense deployed in government (example: the refusal of the Japanese government to consider virtual tsunamis real, which is seconded by the same attitude on the West Coast of the USA, by the way).

The dearth of science, scientists, and common sense are related phenomena: after all, science is just common sense, thoroughly deployed. Plutocracy can be achieved only when enough common sense has been reduced to the bleating of sheep. That is exactly why the West is deploying just enough science to survive, but not enough to thrive. 

The tragi-comical spectacle of a few lawyers, “elected” to decide in secrecy the fate of the world at a French resort, flows along the same geodesics, the inertia of plutocracy and its servants, attracted by the darkest side, imprisoning even light. What do those know, and what are they talking about? And it’s all too real.

If the major Western countries had dozens of millions of scientists, it’s unlikely that the  plutocrats and their lawyer-servants could keep on hypnotizing the masses with tales for children. That works well only with a scientific oligarchy, where the few scientists can be bought off with enough toys and ribbons.

One can buy a few people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all the people, all the time. A scientific massocracy cannot be bought (if I dare to borrow the term “massocracy” from my nemesis Libyan dictator Qaddafi).

Where to find the resources, the money? Agricultural subsidies ought to be reduced. Those who want to live dangerously will propose, as the foolishly bold Dominique Strauss Kahn did, to augment government and tax and regulate the pirates of finance into oblivion. But who wants the New York Attorney paid by Goldman Sachs and its partners in crime, accusing them of attempted rape on the closest tall mammal that they can find?

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” said Kissinger in 1973. Plutocracy is all about the obsession with power. But power is what physicists study.  Let’s not forget that the most powerful Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn, a mathematician, or Sakharov, a master of the H bomb, and a top theoretical physicist, were scientists. That was no coincidence. Honing the capability to distinguish what is real, and what is not, and how energy flows, is intrinsically revolutionary.

***

Patrice Ayme

Plutocracy Hollows The Core

 DEVALUING EVERYTHING, THAT’S WHAT PLUTOCRACY IS ALL ABOUT:

Abstract: the Obama’s administration attempts at resurrecting the economy of the USA are in the “too little, too late” category, due to a lack of understanding of the real problem. Neither understanding, nor resolution, are helped by the likes of the honorable Paul Krugman singing the praises of dollar devaluation.  

The problem is actually much more general than the one found in the USA. Devaluation of a currency hides the real problem, which is general civilizational devaluation. (The former tends to imply the later too.)

General civilizational devaluation is not incidental to plutocracy, but it is its very principle. So it is when plutocracy takes over: civilizational devaluation is not just a symptom, but the socio-economic method looking forward. Yes, in other words, as any mathematician worth its salt would point out, an exponential phenomenon feeding on itself.

The plutocracy empties the core, because it is its safest course.

***

***

Krugman looked at the trade balance of the USA in manufacturing. He found it much improved. His conclusion? “The weaker dollar really has made a big difference.”

Indeed, recently the euro had risen 50% above its very long term average on the French Franc (the reference for the long term value of the euro versus the dollar). The weak dollar has been manufactured by keeping very low interest rates for cash. So international investors have no interest to keep earning American interest. 

This has two consequences:

a) American savers, the little grandmothers, lose money by keeping money inside saving accounts (as inflation is higher than the interest earned).

b) Big banks make like bandits, risk free; they borrow from the government at zero interest, and then turn around and reinvest with long term bonds of the government at 4-5%. (This is risk free, as long as the whole pyramid scheme does not come crashing down, but the government has no interest for this to happen, once again, so it will keep interest at zero as long as possible.)

The preceding holds in one sentence: the government of the USA has found a new method to transfer trillions from the poor to the rich, without the poor noticing. You can’t fool all the People all the time, in the same way, so the masters had to find new tricks.

The manufacturing deficit is not as bad as it used to be. Says Krugman: “Crucially, the manufacturing trade deficit seems to be coming down. At this point, it’s only about half as large as a share of G.D.P. as it was at the peak of the housing bubble… major U.S. firms like Caterpillar that once shifted production abroad but are now moving it back. At the same time, companies from other countries, especially European firms, are moving production to America.

And one potential disaster has been avoided: the U.S. auto industry… has weathered the storm. In particular, General Motors has now had five consecutive profitable quarters…”

Well, Obama’s task is not easy, especially since he did not do much when he could have done something because he controlled the Congress and the Senate. The GM rescue, one of the rare things done, cost 49.5 billion dollars.

Imagine: saving GM cost nearly as much as the Goldman Sachs (total) rescue. GM makes car, Goldman Sachs makes trouble… And makes American politicians. Especially with its perverse influence on American politics. History will not view it as a coincidence that the Wall Street District Attorney indicted the short, fat, sick, on oxygen, grandfather at the head of the IMF, a respected university professor, for assaulting a six foot tall, 200 pounds Diallo, thirty year his junior, and in great shape from her physically demanding job.  The DA Cyrus Vance Jr, not to name him, son of his influential dad, has just prosecuted a construction company for abusing… Goldman Sachs. Naturlich. 

Krugman concludes:”while we still have a deeply troubled economy, one piece of good news is that Americans are, once again, starting to actually make things. And we’re doing that thanks, in large part, to the fact that the Fed and the Obama administration ignored very bad advice from right-wingers — ideologues who still, in the face of all the evidence, claim to know something about creating prosperity.” In the end, the government of the USA did not spend much on the reindustrialization of the USA. Its main policy remains the cheap dollar.

Krugman, and most American economists are great believers in devaluation: they would fix all the problems of Greece, Spain, etc. by devaluation relative to France and Germany. Extending the reasoning, one would expect the American Rust Belt,  Detroit, or Nevada to devalue relative to Manhattan. But that would break the great American nation… Not fun. Whereas breaking Europe, that’s a moral duty. Same as the time before that. 

***

DEVALUATION IS EXTERNAL, PROBLEMS ARE INSIDE:

Krugman admits that: “The manufacturing revival isn’t going to make health reform unnecessary or obviate the need for a strong social safety net.” The USA has of course other problems. Education is one of them: there is not enough public funds to insure the quality of yesteryear.

Inequities have also made the USA into the world’s most repressive country, at least if one looks at the numbers of people incarcerated, or under active judicial punishment (for an astounding total of 10 million).

Inequities also are demotivating, and make people fearful of expressing the sort of ideas which could help fight the descent into submission, and its attending despondency. The author of this set of essays has lost most of his American friends and family as those worthies expressed that president Obama can only be displeased (although most of them do not know Obama personally). I know it sounds unreal, and pure insanity (especially in a supposed democracy). Sometime in the future, I will give details (right now I am too shocked to do so).

One can easily imagine that, if this sort of fear permeates society, not much significant progress will happen. That also explains a lot of Obama’s caution. Obama, by telling Israel to reintegrate its 1967 borders took an enormous risk, political, and even personal (remember what happened to Isaac Rabin!) Now that he has done in bin Laden, the Islamist-in-Chief, the Commander-in-Chief plays the agent provocateur…

***

REAL ROOT PROBLEM OF THE USA:

Devaluation relieves symptoms of de-industrialization, but it does not treat the decease. It’s like a shot of adrenaline. It will not fix the underlying decay at the heart of the USA.

Moreover, the problem with devaluation is that, as Germany, or Argentina, and many other countries found long ago, devaluation can get out of control. Or it can become an addiction. 

The dollar has devalued at least 40% versus the euro. Still the Eurozone has stayed, by far, the world’s greatest exporter. How? By making manufactured products of the highest quality. The higher the euro goes, the greater quality the Europeans are forced to endow their products with. European know-how is forced to become ever more awesome. It’s a virtuous spiral, up.

Reciprocally, the lower the dollar, the more shoddy American products can be, and still be competitive. It’s a vicious spiral, down.

The real question is how come the manufacturing of the USA, which used to be second to none, became so bad? An ant sees the details, but the baboon can scan the horizon. The very nature of American economists prevents them to see the big story.

The sort of decomposition which seems to affect the USA is found in any large plutocracy in history. The plutocracy always hollows the core (and this has been the problem of Muslim countries, as Islam can be instrumentalized to favor tyranny).

One out of six worker in the USA is foreign born, with much higher proportions in the most plutocratically weighted states (California has 35% of foreign-born workers, New York and New Jersey are at 27%; nobody cares about the boondocks, where little U.S. GDP is generated, and direct descendants of those who used to make much of the industrial strength of the USA, the Rust Belt, the new native Americans, live).

Plutocracies do this, even militarily. Eschatologically, Rome depended upon entire German nations for its military (the Franks being the most famous). At some low point, Rome even recruited the Huns (until the Roman-Hun army got defeated in south-west Gaul). Muslim regimes  were particularly good at this: Egypt, the Ottoman, and even the Iranians depended, at their core, upon foreign-born militaries.

Why so? Why do plutocracies fear the natives? To ask the question is to answer it; it makes the truth self obvious. Plutocracies fear the natives because the plutocrats fear revolution. So they do what they can to make the People at the core weak, dumb, impotent, in other words, not too competent, employed, or irreplaceable. That way revolutions are easy to contain. Hence the “Panem et circenses” Juvenal noticed, 19 centuries ago. Give them bread and circuses. But don’t give them employment.

As plutocracy has interest to weaken the core, it can only reinforce itself by using the periphery (thus making it stronger). That is why great plutocracies always engage in heavy immigration and foreign mercenaries (look at the Ottomans, the Achaemenids, Rome, China, etc.),

If this is all correct, the USA, by employing the Chinese, while bringing in hordes of unsophisticated immigrants, reacts as a typical plutocracy, and the old middle class and its descendants are in the crosshairs of the masters of America. The last thing masters of finance and oil, and health care, and the dark arts, want is a People of engineers who know where all the levers are.  

Thus the worsening of unemployment and the general melting down of all the civilization supporting factors, such as investing in progress, industrial or educative, are no accident. It’s the system the plutocracy needs to survive and thrive. It’s not a disaster, it’s a conspiracy. (Reminder: I use the word conspiracy not as “plot”, but in its etymological, original sense: the fact of breathing together, and they do more than that: they drink, eat, sleep, think, feel and work together.)

The USA is victim of a plutocratic metastasis, devouring all in its way. Lowering the dollar for ever has no future as a valid strategy. If anything, it makes the problem worse, as pain relief disguises the real disease. The only way out, is for average citizens to realize that they are manipulated into impotence and submission before they become too decerebrated  to notice anything significant beyond sports. The basic problem is nothing new. It was already in full view  at Marathon. When a small army of free men defeated the world’s largest plutocracy.

In the case of the “Oriental Part” of the Roman empire, the realization never came. By the Sixth Century, sports were reigning supreme, and the serious rebellion against emperor Justinian (“Nikka Riot”) started in the sport arena. People were afraid to think, let alone to see what was wrong. Justinian stayed in power, barely so. And proceeded to massacre much of Anatolia, millions dead, to make triumph, he said, his interpretation of what Christ said (he was just warming up, he devastated Italy later). In truth he was just the typical follower of Pluto.

In the “Occidental Part”, by then the renaissance had started because it was again the land of the Free, or, as they said, the land of the Franks. (And those were the only ones Justinian did not dare to attack.)

***

Patrice Ayme

Aphorisms May 2011.

***

Main themes:

1) What the economy truly is, and why the USA not understanding this is causing the present malaise.

2) God as a big, bad, dad… Is believing in God a form of infantilism?

3) The strange, obdurate story of Israel, or why, relatively speaking, there are always fewer Jews. Intolerance and exclusionism do not bring understanding, oneself, or others.

4) Speaking of religious apartheid, Pakistan is, conceptually speaking, a child of Israel. OK, some are going to resent that remark. They also have a common Achilles’ heel, namely beng on the (bankrupt) USA payroll.

5) A set of nuclear reactors at Hamaoka in Japan, 190 kilometers from Tokyo, is being shut down, to build tsunami defenses. They are on a very narrow peninsula, with a government prediction of 87% probability of an 8 Richter  within three decades. How insane could deciders be?

6) Radioactivity, we can leave with, to some extent. Mercury, not so, to the present extent. Why can’t ecologists understand this? Is it because too many of them are anti-technological, thus anti-scientific, thus anti-rational?

7) Messing up with Iraq, has not started to backfire yet, for the USA. But it will. The USA started, unwittingly, the reunification of Iraq and Iran.

8) The notion of “conspiracy” is weaker, and thus more general, than that of “plot”. As the USA keeps broadcasting to the world its notions of justice, one week bin Laden is dispatched, another Strauss-Kahn humiliated as a “perpetrator”, there will be consequences. When they come, the food stamp country will not know what hit it (47 million food stamp recipients in the USA, speaking of humiliation).

***

***

Managing A House Is More Than Letting Greed Run Amok:

The ruling economic orthodoxy in the USA is that all the economy needs is greed. 1960s:”All You Need Is Love!“. Fifty years later:”All You Need Is Greed!” That fits plutocracy just fine, thank you. (However, the élucubrations of the director of the IMF about the need for more state regulations, were just insufferable. Hopefully that has been fixed in the usual manner…)

The sociopaths who lead America into oblivion do not know, nor want to know, nor want to consider, that greed is only one human motivation among others. By considering, at the outset, that those other motivations are not generators of economic activity, the plutocratic orthodoxy impoverish the notion of  economy (= housemanagement). No wonder the socioeconomies they manage have always tended to go down (Sparta, Macedonia, all Muslim countries are example, in the fullness of history). Its theory and practice of the dismal science is exerted on a body politics that they mutilate themselves.

Thus democracy does not just provide with superior intelligence, but also with a superior economy.

(Islam and its Golden Age, Constantinople and its Roman empire, China, all dictatorial and very wealthy seem to be counter-examples… But a detailed examination show that they achieved much less than their potential. Actually they all failed spectacularly, as they were unable to sustain enough of a socioeconomic effort to hold off enemies which wiped them out, or turned them into shadows of their former selves… as happen twice to China in 400 years). 

Taxes allow to finance economic activities not sensitive to greed. Thus, by shrinking taxes too much, one shrinks the huge part of the economy for which greed cannot be a motivation. Care, for example, is in another dimension than greed. So are science, philosophy, poetry, and most of the noblest arts of the human spirit. So is education, so are so many of the life giving arts.

One will not provide the best care, because one is the most greedy. Worse: selecting individuals and organizations on the basis of greed to provide care insures failure. Indeed, care and greed live in different parts of the brain.

The failure to understand that basic neurobiological fact, the failure to understand that loving someone else, is different from sucking all the life blood from a creature, explains why the USA is turning into an economic black hole.

The USA, and the UK, are both obsessed by destroying off the non greed based economy. They are doing a good job of destruction.  The latest numbers show that their economies are keeling over. Whereas France and Germany, havens of central planning and high taxes, are expanding at a hefty clip… In spite of a currency (the euro) which has been overvalued by as much as 50% in the last quarter (thus damaging what is by far the world greatest exporting economy, that of the Eurozone). Let me rephrase this: the dollar has been at the bottom, uncomfortably close to the breaking point.

Let us be fair. The USA has automatic stabilizers. California will close 70 (yes, seventy) state parks (hey, it will allow to “fire” 220 state employees, realizing enormous savings). Thus hungry Californians will be able to go scavenge in the forests, come next winter.  If only one legalized cannibalism, think of all the savings!

***

My Dad Is Bigger Than Yours, Let’s Call Him God:

The mysterious concept of “God” is very handy. First it allows to confuse debates. Indeed, in an important a way,  “God” is the pseudonym of many a creature. “God” the pseudonym hides various actors, often with wildly antagonistic minds. So its use makes debates more ill defined than they would be otherwise. Let me explain: when Obama speaks of God, and say some religious fundamentalists do not speak of “God” correctly, it is more than just ludicrous. It’s typical. Obama and the religious fundamentalists he disagrees with do not mean the same thing by “God”.

Second, those with a bigger, better, badder god are obviously endowed with a bigger, better, badder dad. So they feel more powerful, and this display of confidence may induce others to feel that they are more powerful too. So these metaphysics of power have consequences on power in real life.

***

Will Israel Survive?

OK, with nuclear weapons, anything can happen. Granted. Nuclear weapons could insure the survival of Israel. Entire populations could be exterminated, at the rate of a few Auschwitz a minute. So maybe Israelis some day will come out of their fortified burrows over radioactive ruins, lonely survivors of a Mid-East turned to a fine crisp. Think about all the West Banks to settle with men in black (radiation) suits… Think of King David’s kingdom, throughout the Fertile crescent… Hope springs eternal…

However, adverse developments, adverse from the Zionist point of view, that is, such as universal nuclear weapons’ disarmament and generalized peace are to be feared. In theory, generalized nuclear disarmament  has been launched. But not for Pakistan, which makes at least a new thermonuclear bomb, every week, and maybe much more. By making Armageddon more likely, Pakistan is the best future  many nuts in Israel can hope for.

Einstein refused the (first) presidency of Israel. Although he hated the Germans by then, and reproached heavily Born (fellow Quantum Nobel physicist) to go back to Germany for retirement, he could only espouse the natural position of those who have looked at hatred and exclusion in the eye.

The (Jewish German) philosopher Isaac Berlin summed the creation of Israel  this way:”They did not listen to us. They listened to Hitler.”

Similarly Obama, in the guise of killing him, listened to Osama’s notion of justice:”Whatever we say it is”. When a conflict there is, one conventionally looks at who won. The more sophisticated approach to conflicts is to look at which system of thought won.

The case of Israel is curious, and enlightening in the greatest scheme of history. At the time when Judea rebelled, most Jews did not. Maybe 15% of the Roman empire population was Jewish (more than 10 million, and much more than there were Celts, as those suffered heavy losses at the hands of legions, besides more than a million sent as slaves to Rome, after Caesar’s bellum gallicum).

The Judea war killed may be a million Jews (in multiple way fighting, as the war against Rome was augmented by a war of various fanatical sects against each other). However, the Jewish religion was not outlawed by the Romans (instead it had a covenant with Rome, and Saint Paul was prosecuted for having violated Jewish religious law, as he went into the temple with a bodyguard who was not Jewish).

Meanwhile, the Celtic religion was outlawed (basically for crimes against mankind, to put it in contemporary terms).  But the Celts stayed where they were. And last observed, restrict their inheritance to music, and being themselves. Curiously, for about 5 centuries, the Celts were the greatest enemies of Rome, and, later, in collaboration with the Franks, and other Germans, pretty much subdued Rome.

Lesson? Clinging to one’s superstition is apparently not the best way to impose oneself. The best way may be sometimes to accommodate the oppressor, collaborate, pick up the best it has to offer, and use it for intellectual assist. Out of the Roman occupation, the Celto-Germans made a superior civilization (thus, when Julian came to direct the legions in Gallia and Germania, the Parisians showed him the way, in the end proclaiming him Augustus).

A few rebellions later, and thanks to the tender mercies of Christianism, founded by a number of Jews who did not like Jews, the Jews got chased from Judea.

The question of Israel, if one listens to Orthodox Jews, boils down to this: should we make a refuge for each and every single religion? A refuge where those who are not of the religion are not full citizen, or not viewed as human, in other words? 25% of the population of Israel right now is not Jewish… Shall they be expelled?

It may be wiser to remember that “Outremer” and the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdoms and principalities founded by the Franks in the Orient lasted mostly a century. Two centuries at most. Why? They cost too much, and were not profitable, especially in light of negotiations with Muslims such as Saladin, which resulted in a significant and durable decrease of tension.

Israel is presently kept afloat by enormous financial help, direct and indirect (through Egypt), from the USA, plus the fact that the USA trains, equip and hypnotize the Egyptian army, and the Saudi plutocracy. If this contraption goes, can Israel do better than “Outremer”?

***

How Did Pakistan Come To Be?

Heard on a French speaking TV (I don’t remember from where): “Pakistan is the fruit of the colonial past“. Sure. That, hail storms, malaria, and slavery, have got to have originated with colonialism. When something is wrong, blame the colonialists. Especially in India, where there were no colons. (India, was sometimes “ruled” with as little as 1,500 British civil servants; not to say that Britain did not behave in a thugish fashion in multiple ways; but, overall, the influence of Britannia was good).

Claiming that Pakistan was engineered by the colonialists: nothing could be further from the truth. The British had united India, or, more exactly, the Raj.

Previously, the Mughal Raj, starting in 1526 CE, had united most of what would become the British Raj, plus Afghanistan, and minus the extreme south of the subcontinent. The (Islamized) Moguls were not from South Asia, but of Turco-Mongol origin. The Mughal empire is also known as the Timurid dynasty, as its founder Babur descended from Timur (a ferocious, conquering Mongol, but not the partly civilizing force that Genghis Khan had been). The Mughal empire disintegrated mostly on its own, two centuries later. The British had little to do with it, and their rule was nice, in comparison.

The British civilized India, after millennia of racial apartheid stagnation. They made reason more prevalent.

The creation of states on the ground of religious appurtenance in India, post independence from Britain has been just the opposite. Building a religious state was a fundamental takeover of humanitarian principle by gross superstition. By definition superstitious religions such as Islam or Hinduism (and  various variants) stand above the real world. That means they stand above reason; that is they founding mental act: “We believe a number of things which make no sense, therefore we are more important than sense itself“. In other words, common people and their common sense make no sense, only the theocrats makes sense. In the case of Pakistan, a small group of adventurers used religion as a pretext to justify their rule.

Who decides upon religious appurtenance? Well the proverbial commander of the faithful. The one who send the death commandos, the Caliph, the maximum terror chief, the one who tells you when “Justice Has Been Done“. 

Gandhi was the main force behind apartheid in India: he initialized it, by extolling Hinduism. Gandhi was the anti-Mandela. True, he did not commit the irreparable, as the Muslim leaders did, but he instigated it. At the end of his life, Gandhi no doubt preferred to die, rather than to contemplate what he had done.

In a sense, Gandhi was one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest  racists (no wonder Hitler was his “friend”). People of his sort claims that Hindu apartheid, being religious, is not racial. Logics demonstrates otherwise, and recent genetic studies have confirmed that.

Pakistan was founded on the same principle as Israel: “our God rules, he rules us, and even you, so get out!” Universal Human Rights will have to rule over all these little ‘hoods divinities, though, if most of us want to survive, and it would be better for all these little ‘hoods to understand this in a timely manner.

***

What We Don’t See Can’t Hurt Us:

On the narrow tip of the Tokai peninsula, two plates meet. On one side a bay, on the other, the Pacific ocean. Best place to build nuclear reactors of course. Right on top of the fault. The fault between the two plates.

Don’t worry: a 6 meter tall sand dune was installed, to protect against the six meter tsunami. There is probably a local tradition that tsunamis are polite, bow and make themselves less than 6 meters high. Not all tsunamis are as gross as the one of March 2011, whose wave crested at 42 meters.

That tsunamis be polite and bow low is all the more important that a fabulous megathrust Richter quake is expected, anytime, on the triple plate junction just south, or on the other one, 200 kilometers east. An embarrassment of very moving riches. As I said there are nuclear reactors there, by the beaches. The beaches, which are on both sides. Fun never stops. (Latest news: as of mid May, the nuclear fission is being stopped so that the plant can be made more resistant to quakes and tsunamis.)

Point to be meditated upon: when the Japanese nuclear plants were built, seismic activity was low in Japan. Looking at history shows that seismic activity is concentrated in space and time. Haiti had a lot of very bad quakes in the 18C. Then nothing until recently. Right now the entire Pacific plate seems to be in play, from one side to the other. But the Americans cannot notice such as thing: it would be anti-American, say those who don’t want Americans to work (as the key to the plutocrats’ peace is an unemployed population).

The Chernobyl reactors had no confinement, and were of an extremely dangerous type, which explode when coolant leaks (whereas a PWR loses nuclear fission, as its neutrons are going too fast to be captured, when it loses coolant/water). Both characteristics should be totally unlawful, by international law. Before the famous explosion (of reactor 4), at Chernobyl, reactor 1 had a partial meltdown, and then was refurbished. Three of the crazy reactors at Chernobyl kept operating at the site for up to 14 years… After the famous disaster.

***

Some Hate What They Don’t Understand:

Burning coal is the leading cause of human-caused global warming. But did you know that coal-fired power plants are also the single largest source of mercury pollution in much of the world? Coal burning in China creates mercury vapor, which condensates over the Arctic, making wildlife there increasingly poisonous. China accounts for about half of the world’s emissions of mercury. As I hold that China is the USA in drags, it ought to be the responsibility of American politicians to push for a resolution of this. American corporations make pile of money by using mercury laced cheap Chinese energy (the rest of the world has taken anti-mercury measures).

Mercury poisoning attacks the nervous system, affecting everything from brain development to muscle coordination.

The not-yet-born, and infants are especially susceptible to mercury exposure. Mercury vapor released into the atmosphere settles into rivers, lakes and oceans, where it is absorbed and ingested by fish. When expectant mothers eat the tainted fish, they pass the mercury on to their children. One in six U.S. women of childbearing age have enough mercury in their bodies to harm a pregnancy. annual mercury emissions have increased two to five fold within the last century, with anthropogenic emissions now surpassing natural emissions in the industrialized world. Annual mercury emissions have increased two to five fold within the last century. They come mostly from a mineral (HgS) found naturally in fossil fuel, especially coal. Methyl mercury piles up in fatty tissues, and is not eliminated, so it concentrates up the food chain, from small fish to man.

Compare this enormous, worldwide mercury disaster, with the obsession with the dangers of nuclear power. True, nearly all existing nuclear power plants should be seriously refurbished, or replaced. They are not safe. Technology to make nuclear plants much safer not only exists, but is for sale.

In particular most of the plants in Japan should be scrapped or seriously worked on. But the fact is that, even nuclear power plants which have been constructed in the most dangerous fashion, and should never have been allowed to operate, even after they have exploded, do not , have not, and could not, create a disaster comparable to worldwide mercury poisoning. The most awful nuclear pollution pales relative to coal induced pollution. At worst, some areas may be returned to nature, and wolves, moose, lynxes and wild horses can come back, as is the case in Chernobyl. Six workers at Chernobyl were injured by one wolf (later shot).

So what is wrong with most ecologists’ heads? The simple fact that they don’t understand nuclear fire, but coal has been burned for a millennium?

Another thing self defeating ecologists do not understand is thermodynamics. Or even how the wind works, and why there is wind. If they understood all this, they would be less sanguine, especially about wind energy (10% decrease in wind speed bringing 30% down in energy, something to be expected not only as wind farms proliferate, but as the greenhouse proceeds…)

Some not only hate, or fear, what they don’t understand, but they hate it so much, or fear it so much, that they cannot be motivated to understand it, and, thus, fall prey to it with greater ease. It’s the deer-in-the-headlights syndrome. This mechanism was in full view, when the Nazis threatened the Jews, and various other potential victims. Failure to understand Nazism was the prime failure of their prey.

***

More Middle East Gates Of Hell:

Secretary of Defense Gates on “60 minutes”: “We are gaining the upper hand in Afghanistan… We are turning the corner“. The USA already acquired the upper hand in Afghanistan in 2001. So we have to guess it slipped down the sand pile in the meantime.

Pursuing his flight of fancy, Gates has found an improbable culprit, everybody else: “Maybe spent a trillion dollars in Iraq, 4,000 dead (etc.), and now the state department is going to carry us across the goal line… and the Congress is going to be penny wise, and pound foolish [and it will not happen]“. Verdict: Gates has watched too much sports. The world is not American football, but Gates, the ex intelligence chief of the CIA, does not understand that. So what does he understand? Whatever it is, it will be minute, and inconsequential.

In Iraq, or in Afghanistan, the American oligarchs played with history, something they did not master at school enough, to get a sense of it. History bites back, and North America is no island anymore, but a 40 minutes ballistic reach away, from anywhere in the world. And the world you build, is the one you have to live in, thereafter.

What is that the “goal line” Gates evokes? The USA has nearly reunited Iraq with Iran, through their common Shiite inheritance. Otherwise said, the USA has nearly reconstituted the (Baghdad) caliphate (which succeeded the Arab caliphate in 750 CE). The U.S. state department cannot go through the goal line, even if bloated with thousands of mercenaries to chase the terrorists around Iraq. American foreign policy, at least in Iraq, is a chicken without a head: its goal has nothing to do with what it can do, and is advantageous, only if what it wants, is a war with Iran. In Afghanistan, of course, for 32 years, there has been more coherence: the goal has been unending war, not just for war’s sake, but, as I explained, to get to some more oil and gas.

In the realm of the mad, lunatics are kings. But there is hope: the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said that Colonel Qaddafi, his bright son Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, the de facto prime minister, and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanousi (chief of intelligence) formed an inner circle that ‘crushed peaceful demonstrations and ordered the use of live ammunition and heavy weapons against protestors’. Three judges will decide whether to issue arrest warrants.

***

New York Justice: Stupidity Makes Vicious.

A few words on the repugnant, uncivilized way, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, was dragged in the mud.  It’s all too typical of the state with the world’s greatest incarcerated population. Fully one American adult citizen out of 20 is in serious trouble with the law, a proportion inconceivable in Europe.

A proportion which brings a question Americans may want to meditate: what could be an objective definition of a police state? Let’s put it slightly differently: if, just looking at numbers, one tried to define the planet’s top police state, what would it be? A hint from Wikipedia: “The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.”

Americans who do not have eyes to see, claim that, in the USA, people are “innocent until proven guilty“. While the police make sure the cameras are there before exposing said “innocent”. It’s called the “perp walk“. Yes, “perp walk”. So much for “innocence”. It is obvious that the “perp walk” creates a bias against the defendant, as, by definition, said defendant is presented as a “perpetrator“ (which is what “perp” means).

Such treatment against a person presumed innocent is unlawful in France. (Even suspected murderers can walk without handcuffs if not deemed very dangerous.) Judge Eva Joly, a well-known French and Norwegian magistrate, adviser of the Icelandic government on white collar crime, who once brought charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn for corruption (of which he was later acquitted), observed that “these are very violent images”. The images from New York. Very violent.

Americans seem unable to comprehend that the “perp walk” is a violation of basic rights. It is a curious thing.

At least, in the Middle Ages, when the humiliation of the pillory was applied, there was a conviction, prior. Madoff was free on bail, and so was Michael Jackson (suspected of serial pedophilia). That is what people know, when they look at it from the rest of the world.

Why does New York hate Strauss-Kahn that much? He was the Grinch who wanted to steal Christmas, as the French are won to (in the imagination of the owners of U.S. media).

Let me notice the following:

a) Strauss-Kahn changed completely the orientation of the IMF from an extremely abusive device at the service of American plutocracy, into something different. He also contributed to hold up European countries together with IMF funds (the EU contributes nearly 38% of the IMF; and the USA only 17%). Anybody reading even as “liberal” a “left wing” economist such as the esteemed Paul Krugman, will know that the Americans want to destroy the euro. To start with.

b) Strauss-Kahn held pro-government, pro-regulation opinions which are just the opposite from the anti-government, anti-regulation propaganda which presently reigns in the USA. As far as Wall Street was concerned, he was the enemy. Like Eliot Spitzer, or the Gracchi, long ago, Strauss-Kahn was the worst sort, traitor to his kind, and thus fully abreast of its tricks.

c) Manhattan is the very center of the pro-plutocratic worldwide octopus. The island lives off it. Such is often the paradox that people who profit most from an empire, find themselves at the center of it, and, even if they deplore it, they may sink themselves, if they think too much.

d) A conspiracy is not a plot. It’s much more sinister than that. The Romans had discovered that the simple fact that people together breathe (con-spirare) is enough to have dreadful consequences. A judge does not need to be bought off. Nor does the police. They are creatures of the same ecology, and if that ecology is threatened, they will strike back. In Manhattan, the ecology is the plutocracy.

Simple breathing-together of judges, police, and political, or plutocratic power, is enough to create bias, in the absence of very explicit legal guidelines. Breathing together is enough to build the right neurology of the conspirators, the neurology of mutually insured self survival.

Imperial Rome was full of police, and full of judges, all arrogantly above any suspicion, or self examination. They were full of it, and belong to the garbage of history, complete with their smug cruelty, and self interested stupidity. The Roman republic went down the drain on the heels of its degraded and degrading conception of justice. It resurfaced 2,000 years later.

***

Patrice Ayme

ASSASSINATING TRUTH

DOES NOT DO A CIVILIZATION GOOD

Main Ideas: The USA attacked Afghanistan. In July 1979. The USA recruited, financed, trained and armed the greatest Muslim Fundamentalist army of Jihadist warriors, that the world had ever seen. In particular intelligence services of the USA and their proxies recruited Osama Bin Laden. That was the high point of the terror strategy of the USA, which consisted in supporting terror leaders, throughout the world, if they were friendly. If they had oil, they did not even need to be friendly.

Most Americans, being told of those facts, would think you are crazy to talk that way. The president may want your “head examined”. The plutocracy of the USA has succeeded to hide from its ignorant populace the oily game it has been playing by using Muslim Fundamentalist warriors to get to Middle East, and Central Asian oil. Central Asian oil? That is why the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was attacked by Carter in 1979 (under advice from his pro-plutocratic advisers).

As if this were not bad enough, some of the fundamental tenets of Western civilization have been thrown to the wolves by the leaders of the USA, for all to see. Reintroducing “extraordinary question” (also known as “enhanced interrogation” or torture) was bad: torture was already unlawful against Roman citizens, 25 centuries ago.

But now Obama has suggested to wipe out 25 centuries of justice by proclaiming that it is done as it was done with Apaches. First use the Apaches, to hunt Apaches, then kill them, and cover it all up behind lies as thick as Middle Eastern oil.

In truth the Greco-Romans imposed justice as the supremacy of the law, above anything else, including expediency. The law is not just about killing Apaches… or Jews. There is such a thing as the law of the West, and it is above Americanism… just as it was above Nazism.

Adding to this, civilization has found more recently that justice’s highest goal is to establish the truth on criminal systems of thought. All of this should not be thrown to the fishes, just because one has a bigger boat.

Supporting terror leaders, and terrorist systems of thought, such as Islamist fascism (as American “intelligence” has done perfidiously),  goes against the necessity of making terrorism unlawful. Terrorism has to be thrown out, because, if it is not, there will be nuclear war. That means a world where people eat people (there would be nothing else left to eat, as neoconservative torture supporters will be pleased to inform you).

So it is high time for the USA to rethink its approach to progress. Truth is sustainable, lies are not. Blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions for the whole planet to see, is not tolerable, especially in a major, would-be democratic regime. There are no ifs and buts. 

***

***

Abstract: President Obama basically, and unwisely, admitted that he ordered Bin Laden killed, and then added: “…the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”

Polls: 80% of U.S. citizens think that killing Bin Laden was the right decision. Those who think it was the wrong decision are 1%. (OK, the approval rate of the Iraq war was 83%, at the time, in 2003: same uncomprehending hatred, same wolves howling to the wind of madness.)

Obama is not expressing any opinion on mass murder on Afghan soil by American paid, armed and trained Jihadists. Mass murder on Afghan soil is an entirely different matter, let’s make a note of that.

Examining heads is what philosophers do, starting with their own. Correct thinking requires precision. Certainly Bin Laden got what he deserved. Anyone knows that. However, anyone who would not question whether the way Bin Laden got what he deserved is compatible with the continuation of civilization looking forward, should have his sense of civilization examined.

Confusing bullets and justice does not do a body politics good. It’s not just bad Karma, a terrible incitation, but also the justification of Osama, by Obama: I kill, therefore I just. Hyenas beat Descartes anytime, because they have bigger jaws.

Of course Obama is just a politician, the leader of the pack. If it’s a pack of culturally challenged wolves, he has to howl louder. A good politician has to be Machiavellian. Were I Obama, I may have assassinated Bin Laden too, putting to rest forever the assertion that I were a wet rag. Except, of course, that would have made me a war criminal, and that is a line I would not have crossed, not matter what. (Be it only because when Athens, a democracy, committed war crimes, it condemned itself to be hated by everybody, removed its greatest weapon, moral superiority, and that made Athens lose the war that destroyed half of its population, and would have extinguished it, but for Sparta.)

Obama has to do more than accompany the philosophy of the People, he has to lead it in the right direction, if he wants to be remembered as somebody who made a difference.

Philosophers make the philosophy of future people (and the best politicians consulted with philosophers, starting with Pericles). So contemporary people often act as the enemies of philosophers, because humans aspire to mental supremacy, and do not love to be told they are full of it.

In the week after Bin Laden’s elimination, the USA was traversed by another of these nationalistic frenzies we have observed in 2001, or 2003. I am well aware that Americans will hate what is written below. I am aware that nationalistic hatred knows no bounds. Here is a typical comment in the New York Times, made by “Justin”: “I consider myself a strong liberal but being upset about bin laden’s burial or not being taken alive is too bleeding hurt even for me.”

“Justin” has understood nothing, except that when the wolves howl, he better howl with them, to become their friend. I am also aware that the Dalai Lama has howled with the wolves. I expected nothing else from him.

Wisdom was not built on hatred as much as on a correct analysis of reality. 

That American so called “strong liberals” are like little children from a courtyard, or jackals howling with the jackals, is the fundamental reason why they are increasingly manipulated into oblivion by the victorious plutocracy. Plutocracy, or the oblivion of civilization. Civilization is not so much about “bleeding hurt”, than about the toughest, most elaborate mind reason can build. It’s the opposite of bleeding and hurt.

***

***

THE POWER, AND THE ETHICS, OF OUR CIVILIZATION RESTS ON TRUTH.

Any other description is a lie of the highest order, and most dangerous sort. Science establishes truth, so does justice. Bullets only make holes.

To survive and thrive, civilization will have to rest on ever more rigorous notions of truth. The ethics of Muslim Fundamentalists rest not on truth, but on superstitions found in old books: the Qur’an, and the Bible. Justice then meant whatever the guy at the top decided.

By throwing out, as if it never existed, 25 centuries of the advancement of the idea of justice, and choosing instead Biblical revenge, the government of the USA has allied itself with the enemies of the present civilization. Once again.

It is a curious thing that, while ostensibly fighting against bin Laden, after having fought in his company, in the end, the government of the USA agreed with Bin Laden on the most important subject. Ethics. Obama won Osama’s fight by killing him, the way he did. I kill, therefore I just.

It is an even stranger thing that, after being burned by Bush with the assault on Iraq, civilization and human rights by the Bush administration, the American people seems to have learned nothing, and becomes overwhelmed by joy as justice is subdued by bullets. “Does our children learn?” -As Bush would say, with his characteristic kindergarten grammar. (The fact that it is individuals with mangled culture who elaborate the devolution is rich in signification.)

 ***

NO JUSTICE, NO CIVILIZATION. WAS IT JUST TO ATTACK AFGHANISTAN IN 1979?

Our formidable, worldwide civilization progressed in no small reason because of ever more sophisticated notions of justice. Precisely because justice is a form of truth. The American president has decided to throw them into the trash. It is an ominous victory of primitivism over wisdom, in a country with global pretentions.

Contrarily to the mythology their masters have stuffed gullible Americans with, the USA launched a war against Afghanistan, on July 3, 1979 (see document below). Of course, 9/11 killed 3,000 Americans and this is a much more important fact for Americans to be horrified by than the 3 million Afghans (at least) killed since 1979.  If you tell Americans about the three million Afghans killed by a military action initiated by their government, they will look at you like goldfish. They will think you are beyond the pale, a type of crazy, who widely steps beyond appropriate mien.

This shows that, in the generally accepted estimate, an American life is worth more than a thousand times an Afghan’s life. 

Bin Laden, then a son in one of the world’s richest families, was recruited by the “intelligence” oligarchy which helps to rule the USA. Bin Laden, from the second richest Saudi family, had the contacts among plutocrats to provide the secret war with needed funds. As an engineer and businessman, Bin Laden’s organizational skills came in handy. He became the head of a 20,000 men terror army, the point of the CIA war in Central Asia. Bin Laden, and other Jihadists, were  taught to inflict terror on hard-to-defend objectives, such as primary schools for girls.  Yes, it is abject. I am just describing hell and its demons. Only then did the government in Kabul called the Soviets for help.

American leaders, the powers that be, have no interest to see some of their unsavory top ex-operatives being brought to justice, and this sort of facts to come to the surface. This is the true meaning of the CIA archipelago around the world. Nor does the American public want to hear the truth in a courtroom, or anywhere else. Not anymore than Germans wanted to hear about Auschwitz, when Hitler was conquering the world.

Some truths are more than inconvenient, they could be lethal to the powerful, the reigning oligarchies, and the hopeful little servants crawling by their feet, full of all the psychopathic emotions which animate the creepy.

By ordering jihad against a secular republic, Carter signed, basically, the order of assaulting Afghan primary schools: this is what we are talking about here, the abject reality of the policy conducted by the American oligarchies just boiled down to that. Carter, the ethical crater, was of course given the Nobel peace prize: he had served the established order well. This puts in evidence why American presidents always sing the praises of Islam: they order the armies of Islam around. Ostensibly for Islamist purposes (they say to the Muslims), and freedom (they tell the rest of the world).

Before that, the war against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had been conducted even more secretly, through Pakistani intelligence (ISI). Thus the relation between the masters of Pakistan and the masters of the USA is that of partners in crime, a fact best hidden to everybody in sight, lest said masters find their rule more complicated. Nothing such as terrible secrets in common to unite (Reciprocally many Muslim fundamentalists are aware of some of the elements above, and, as they spread that revelation, that true message, mixed with the grandeur of simplistic ethics, they gain in credibility, because it all makes sense; in other words, the lying of Western leadership allows the religious fundamentalists to use against the West its most terrible weapon, the truth.)

Why did the USA attack Afghanistan in 1979? Really vicious governance piles up layers of lies as if they were sediments. Officially, the Carter administration defended its attack of Afghanistan as an attempt to catch the USSR in an “AFGHAN TRAP” (this defense of U.S. policy was made in France; it is pretty much censored in the USA; see document below).

This is another excellent lie, because it has an appearance of truth. As usual, confronted to a mysterious crime, it is wiser to search to whom it profits. Much of the superiority of the USA in the last 150 years comes from oil.  So where is the oil? Afghanistan itself has no oil. The oligarchs alluded to the truth when they admitted that they wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

The real truth is that the American oiligarchy was trying to get to Central Asian oil and gas, and extend further American plutocracy’s dominion. It needed jihadists, bin Laden, to clear the area from the Russians. And it worked. So far, mostly: plutocracy: 100, everybody else, zero.

Bin Laden was assassinated, to prevent the public to contemplate deep perspectives, over the abysses upon which their masters rule. And the unraveling of elaborate tales.  Americans find themselves in the position of the Germans of old, not too keen to ask too many questions to their guides, lest their mental and material comfort suffers…

***

***

AMERICANS ARE UNAWARE OF 32 YEARS OF AMERICAN ASSAULT ON AFGHANISTAN:

Obama gave the context of the death of Osama: “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”

Really? Came to our shores? Started with slaughtering U.S. citizens? The American people did not choose this fight? Well, that is speciously true; it’s the plutocrats of the USA who attacked Afghanistan. And they kept it secret first. So, indeed, the “American People did not chose this fight”! Well done Mr. President! what’s next? The Nobel prize in logics?

Then the plutocrats next described their assault on Afghanistan as a fight for freedom. but mostly, Americans chose to ignore that, and revere Reagan’s regain instead. The first inkling that most know-nothings American had that something wrong was going on was the (counter-)attacks on the USA, on September 11, 2001. THAT was painful.

ON JULY 3, 1979, USA’S PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER SIGNED A DIRECTIVE FOR SECRET AID TO THE TERRORIST OPPONENTS OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN.

The (official) aim of USA was to drag the Soviet Union into the “AFGHAN TRAP” as US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski termed it. And that too, was also a lie. Lies, within lies, within lies… The USA attacked the democratic republic of Afghanistan, using Osama bin laden and his friends, for the usual reason, as I will explain. But let’s get the first version of the story from the snake’s mouth:

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*

Question, Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. BUT THE REALITY, SECRETLY GUARDED UNTIL NOW, IS COMPLETELY OTHERWISE: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

 Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

 Brzezinski: Regret what? THAT SECRET OPERATION WAS AN EXCELLENT IDEA. IT HAD THE EFFECT OF DRAWING THE RUSSIANS INTO THE AFGHAN TRAP AND YOU WANT ME TO REGRET IT? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

 Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic Fundamentalism [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

 Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? SOME STIRRED-UP MOSLEMS or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

 Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

 Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

[*] The version of the Nouvel Observateur sent to the United States did not include the Brzezinski interview. Perhaps the minders of America did not want to stir -up the natives. Clearly, Obama does not want American youth to know more than the fantasy that the American assault on Afghanistan started in 2001.

***

CIVILIZED JUSTICE VERSUS JUSTICE OF THE APE:

In primitive, Biblical times, justice was about retribution in kind, an eye for an eye. It was all about revenge, and it led to an unending cycle of violence. The cycle of vengeance and violence became the bane of the Mid Terra area. That vicious circle is still found in a few of the most primitives parts of the planet, such parts of Albania, or parts of the Amazon. Now the USA has proclaimed, loud and clear, that it has joined the reservation.

The Romans had introduced a more advanced notion of justice. Roman justice was represented as blind, weighting the evidence from the facts alone, and not carried away by the fury of appearances. Roman justice incorporated the notion of forgiveness: suspects could not be judged, too long after the facts, as those could not be determined precisely. Facts ruled: no facts, no justice.

Rational, fact and law driven justice broke the cycle of vengeance which came to wreck much of the Mid-Terra world. Superior justice was no small contributor to the supremacy of Roman civilization, and to the ultimate triumph of many of its mental elements through the superstitious, irrational, anti-intellectual, Biblically induced Dark Ages.

Roman style justice survived the Dark Ages, in no small part because Roman lawyers and/or generals had written down, in Latin, a Salian law for the Franks, which complemented nicely secular Roman law. Even the fanatical Justinian, emperor of most of the Roman empire (but for Francia), refurbished all of Roman law, ordering to separate carefully secular law from Christian law (this refreshed law was instated in the “Occidental Part”).

However, as the centuries passed by, it was found out that justice could be endowed with an even higher purpose that had escaped the Romans. The failure of understanding, in a timely manner, that there was more to justice than punishing the guilty, allowed the collapse of the Roman republic, and its transmogrification into the fascist empire.

The highest purpose of justice is not anymore what it was under the Romans. Replacing vengeance with the arbitration of a third party, the law, same for all, was the highest purpose of the Greco-Roman style justice. The leading edge of civilization has done much better since.

After the cataclysm of Nazism, the most careful thinkers in Europe imposed a higher purpose for justice. Contrarily to what the Nazis asserted, it was not “victors’ justice“. Quite the opposite. THE HIGHEST PURPOSE OF EUROPEAN STYLE JUSTICE  BECAME ESTABLISHING CAUSALITY. ESPECIALLY IN THE CASE OF CRIMES INVOLVING THE STATE. SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT WERE PUT ON TRIAL.

***

INFAMY IS INDEFENSIBLE, PUTTING IT ON TRIAL INSTRUCTIVE ALWAYS:

Confronted to monsters who had killed sometimes millions of people, during WWII, the European leaders did not go ape. They kept their cool. they did not devolve civilization further. They did not behave like Nazis, but as their antagonists, that means they clang to the principles of western civilization.

European leaders, and democratic institutions, did not just put on trial suspect individuals. They also tried the systems of thought that animated them, by going deep in their motivations. Some of the criminals defended themselves with the best they had, and that was exactly what was the worst with them, their own criminal systems of thought. A careful selection of the worst thinking was made, and publicly tried, condemned, and executed.

The top Nazis themselves exhibited the paucity of Nazism when they tried to use it to defend themselves. Bin Laden using Salafism to defend himself would have put Salafism on trial. For all to see. Fundamentalist Islam would have suffered. That means: an ally American plutocracy has been able to surf on beautifully would have suffered, weakening the ride it provided plutocracy with. Also, of course, the symbiosis between CIA, ISI, and Jihadism, may have come to light. When crime is well organized, witnesses are the first to go, even if, especially if, partners in crime.

By defending themselves, Nazi criminals exposed their logic. In the end none of the miscreants of Western civilization had anything important to say in the defense of Nazism, fascism, and racism. Even the worst Nazis were emotionally shattered when the monstrosities they had allowed, incited, or ordered, were shown on the screen. In the end, most of them put themselves at the mercy of the court, admitting their best defense was to admit their own mental, cultural and moral retardation, and fundamental viciousness.

Goering himself, and many other Nazi leaders found themselves recognizing that the holocaust had been a horrible thing. Many claimed, implausibly, that they did not know. In other words, the top Nazis themselves could not defend Nazism in its hour of need.

Justice did not just execute criminals, it executed Nazism, and its executioners were its top practitioners. Justice made it so.

This way the world was rid of Nazism and racism, for good, and quite a while. (Things could have gone much further by exposing the forces behind Hitler and company, but those ruled in the USA, more than ever, after their collaborator’s ignomious fall; see the Dulles brothers, P. Bush, H. Ford, GM, IBM, etc…. It was a from of gravity assist: evil falling in the abyss, to gain even more energy. Hence the problem we are facing today!)

By assassinating bin Laden, the USA has proclaimed that, far from respecting the Roman conception of justice, it devolved back down to the Biblical notion of justice, not far removed from that of the apes. Forget all this European notion of advancing understanding through justice, and judging systems of thought. It’s a war, and an eye for eye. What war exactly? A war that, contrarily to what Obama insinuated, the USA itself started. The war for the control of Central Asia, and its enormous reserves of oil and gas. Who is next?

Far from being a secular, thus a modern country, most of the USA is caught in a time warp. It had it so good for so long that it cannot understand that the music has stopped, and it has run out of Apache territory to invade. With all the Muslim rebels, as with the Indians: progress means that, this time, the fishes will have Geronimo. Justice, the American way. Throw the means to get to the truth in the abyss.

***

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM:

Europe and Israel were careful to not throw their mass murderers to the fishes on the first day. First they made them sing. All those who were intercepted were tried (Himmler, once detected by the Brits took poison).

Great mass murderers and criminals against humanity are too good a counter-examples to civilization to go to waste. It is an insult to victims to dispose of criminals against mankind as if they were nothing important, just fish food. Move on, we have an electoral campaign!

Israel conducted a commando operation to arrest Eichmann in Argentina, in total and appropriate disregard of Argentine law (France conducted similar arrests in Bolivia and Sudan, removing respectively Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal). Eichmann killed millions of Jews. Eichmann had a long and elaborate trial (so did Barbie and The Jackal in France). He was condemned to death, and executed.

Eichmann’s defense during his trial was extremely edifying. He claimed not to hate Jews, far from it. His best friend was a Jew (he begged Himmler to save him). Eichmann suggested that Kant misled him. Kant was a Prussian philosopher of obedience, and respect of conformity, much admired by those who don’t want to think too much.

Thanks to Eichmann, those who have not been persuaded by Nietzsche’s fierce attacks against Kant, can now associate Kant to German fascism and mass murder. This is a very important point: Kant is still very admired. This is thought to be very scholarly an attitude. But Eichmann gave a vivid and livid illustration  that Kant is loved by those who crave the power of the conformism fascism cannot do without.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote up a whole book, exposing her theory of the “Banality of Evil” (which was certainly an appropriate description for most Germans). In any case, a high level debate has been conducted ever since, to hunt down the elements in human psychology and philosophy which led to the criminal madness of Nazism, and how they seduced most Germans (and few others).

The Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion was monstrously courageous to send Israeli special forces kidnap Eichmann, and to conduct an open trial. During the war, he had negotiated with Eichmann. Eichmann proposed one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks. Ben Gurion refused.  So, in a sense, Ben Gurion was a partner in crime with Eichmann. However, he was unafraid to stick by his position that (re)constructing Israel was the best way to save Jews. According to him, it was no good to send Jews to Britain.

***

JUSTICE WAS NOT A GIFT TO NAZIS, BUT AS AN INDICTMENT OF NAZISM:

The U.S. president wants to ‘examine the heads of those who question’. Cheering assassinations is much better, and should not be questioned: the USA is turning into Godfather central.

Whereas the Europeans conducted all the trials of Nazis and their collaborators, and the trials of some of the world’s most famous terrorists in the open, the USA has refused to do so with Muslim terrorists. Why no open trials? Are Americans afraid that if a Muslim fundamentalist open his mouth, they will turn to stone? Or is it simply that the American People should not be reminded that Muslim terrorists were collaborators of the USA for many decades (at least 6)! The true meaning of the Guantanamo archipelago is that terrorists have not to make any declaration to the American People, only secretly to their secret masters in Washington.

People with unexamined heads feel that justice is a gift to the criminals. But justice, as it allows to discover what led to the criminal behavior, helps civilization understand sociopathy, and thus allows people to live better lives. It was important to determine what made Bin Laden tick. And it is even more important to know, if those who winded Bin Laden up sat in the White House (or would that then be the Black House?)

Once again, it is not my conspiracy, it’s not just inhabitating my mind: I did not raise a 300,000 jihadist army to bomb primary schools for girls. The powers that be in the USA did. Then they played gravely offended on 9/11.

Some of the oligarchs who decided to use “stirred up Muslims” to get to Central Asian oil, probably had not studied enough history: betrayal by a mercenary army is one of a great theme of history. It happened to Carthage. And to Rome many times, and, in the end, fatally (the battle of Adrianople, where the Oriental Roman army was destroyed, and the emperor killed).

But then, again, maybe some of them did: more on this later.

During the Nazi occupation, Europe was rife with massive state sponsored hate crime. Afterwards, some countries reinstituted the death penalty, after more than a century without.

Countries tried to understand what happened, what led so many people to crimes against humankind. In Norway, Quisling established a treacherous regime. Quisling knew Hitler even before the hostilities, and started his collaboration even though the Norwegian army and state was still fighting a few miles out of Oslo in April 1940 (the Norwegians caused considerable losses to the Nazis, even sending below the cold waters of Oslo fjord, the entire administration the Nazis planned to impose on Norway).

Quisling organized the deportation of Norwegians to Germany for assassination. Responsible of thousands of death, hated by the entire country, he was nevertheless given medical treatment, a good health, and the opportunity to mount a defense. He claimed he never suspected the holocaust (the usual line). He was executed five months after his arrest.

France confronted worse mass murderers than Osama bin Laden (they killed more, and more horribly). However France, as a state, showed real cool, jailing and judging all of the biggest fish appropriately. Famous collaborators, including writers, ex war heroes, highest police officials, and a Prime Minister, were executed in the end, along with many thousands of lesser Nazi loving criminals. No country (but for Stalin’s nightmarish fascist kingdom), executed as many collaborators.

Justice was done above the board, publicly. It is now possible to consult the argumentation the fascists made when they tried to save their precious skins. That exposed logic now allows jurists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers to understand much better what makes fascism tick. This body of knowledge is now an archeology of evil. Digging through it allow to understand how to prevent the repetition of such dreadful abuse.

Why do Americans not want to understand why 19 believers killed 3,000 Americans, in an act of faith? Are they afraid that faith would not look good? Or that the 19 had strong reasons to believe that the USA was what ailed them? And if so, why? What about 19 Pakistani engineers believing the same, with their fingers on 200 thermonuclear bombs, inside 200 rockets pointed to the United Stupid of Apathy? Is there nothing important to learn there? Or is it all fish food?

An example: SS Klaus Barbie, killed more people than bin Laden ever (Barbie tortured to death 5,000 people, one by one, over the years, and some were children). France captured Barbie in Bolivia, where he was a top CIA operative, in charge of drug and arm trafficking.

How strange: Barbie was in a role of self financing of American intelligence, somewhat similar to bin Laden’s task. Barbie used drugs and weapons trafficking, Bin Laden his plutocratic friends.

Barbie was condemned to life in jail by a French court. After a public trial, defended by the best defenders. Plenty of facts were exposed, such as the systematic use of the worst torture by Barbie and his crew. Nothing to hide. France, as a nation, has tried to discover what happened before and during World War Two, be it only to find out what went wrong. That requires open justice.

***

JUSTICE DONE BY KILLING APACHES VERSUS JUSTICE RENDERED BY CIVILIZATION.

The USA named Bin Laden “Geronimo“. This is more than a Freudian slip. It is more than a mockery of a past genocide. It is a more than a civilizational slip. Geronimo, the last free Apache had been… betrayed by the USA. It is also a warning: Arabs who resist are Apaches, and shall be treated as such: employed as the Apaches were to further the goals of the USA, and then eliminated, when not of use anymore (many of the Apache trackers who helped the U.S. Army were treated as badly as those they had contributed to catch…)

One has to keep in mind that the hunt and extermination of Native Americans was deeply uncivilized, starting in the technical sense: it was conducted on the frontier, where there were no cities. So frontier justice is fundamentally uncivilized. Now Obama wants it to be the world’s justice, in regions where there have been cities, for 10,000 years.

A few weeks ago, in a joint, UN requested operation, French aircrafts demolished the fortified mansion of the ex-president of Cote d’Ivoire. Ggabo wanted to pursue his decade long tyranny. Losing an election forced upon him by the United Nations, did not make him relinquish power to his highly qualified opponent. After serious, lethal combat, over many days, with thousands dead, republican soldiers captured the ex-president, his (hated) spouse, and their 30 something son (bloodied). They are alive, awaiting the wheels of justice. This is a face of topmost African justice, 2011 style. It has much improved. What is the face of topmost American justice, 2011 style? It has much decayed. What used to happen in secret in remote locales is now flaunted in public. The USA now hunts Apaches in the middle of Pakistan.

In the first few days, the White House floated various interpretations of bin Laden’s death. In some the villain took a wife as human shield, in others he engaged in a firefight. As it turned out the wife was shot by the Americans, and bin Laden was unarmed, and received one chest wound, and a shot to the head.

Real justice from real civilization means that, when you have 79 super trained, super armed, and armored commandos, you do not assassinate unarmed suspects, one of them a 19 year old, even if their name is bin Laden.

You do not assassinate, in a democracy, especially if the name is Bin Laden. Why? Because you want, if you are a democratic leader, to go to the bottom of things. And, if you do, as a democratic government, you don’t crow about it. Things are completely different if you are the hired and paid hand of a plutocracy. The difference between the army, or police force of a democracy, and mafia goons then come to the fore. The democracy acts out of justice, the mafia out of imposed silence, retribution, and reinstatement of the status quo ante.

The president glorified the dubious notion of plutocratic justice of frontier towns, where the local sheriff was on the payroll of the local wealthy rancher… or oil man. That old notion of “justice” where the local inhabitants, present there for millennia were hunted like vermin, where entire ecological systems were destroyed, not just to get to gold, but to starve the natives, where treaties after treatises were signed to gain advantage and provide opportunities for the most vicious betrayals.

To flaunt all this, to serve it as a reminder to the entire planet that, as far the American government is concerned, we are all Apaches, and it was correct, politically correct, judicially correct to massacre the Apaches, and so it would be to all the savages who stand between the USA and its oil, Bin Laden was named Geronimo. What else? They are not that clever? But that is worst: because they have learned nothing. Sometimes deliberate evil, in the know, is better than self righteousness so acute that evil is confused with goodness.

In the CBS “60 Minutes” interview, Obama admitted that, not only he got bin Laden killed, but other people too. After apparently assassinating Bin Laden for all to see, the president of the USA, just to make sure that the sheep out there got it, looked straight at camera, and assassinated the idea of justice.

Obviously, the government of the USA has things to hide from the People in the name of which it governs. Not just that, but it ominously let it be known that it does, and that everybody should shut up about it. The oligarchs did not want their ex-agent bin Laden to explain how their mass murdering collaboration evolved into squabbling. The oligarchs did not want bin Laden to stand up, and plead not guilty. They would have hated to see bin Laden request that directors of the CIA be brought to the stand as (presumably hostile) witnesses.

The same method was used with Saddam Hussein: silence, the Western governments have nothing to do with your badness, you little pawn! Bush kept repeating like a deranged parrot that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people, forgetting that this was during a war against Iran more or less incited by the West, and where the West gave the means to Saddam, including the chemical capability.  The will to dissimulation and dissemblance emanates from governments serving their friend the plutocrats (the oil men, the military industrial complex, the financiers) rather than their voters, the public.

***

THROWING JUSTICE TO THE WOLVES IS ANTI-AMERICAN:

If Africans can do justice, why can’t Americans? Obama insisted that “justice was done”, “bin Laden was brought to justice”. He should know: he taught constitutional justice at the University of Chicago.  If anyone knows what American justice is about, it is Obama.

Perhaps Americans are stupid, and they believe the statement that “justice was done”. And, if they don’t, trust Obama to repeat it to them another 1,000 times. However, the rest of the planet is smart enough to know that if it is what the USA mean by justice, they don’t want it. By flaunting a Biblical notion of justice, Obama is feeding raw anti-Americanism, and also the very religious extremism, “stirred-up Muslims”, he claims to want to fight. That may seem contradictory, but it’s not. At least since 1953, a big part of the policy of the USA in the Middle East has been to stir-up Muslims, and get them to do the dirty work… Against democracy and progress.

***

THE USA’S OILY & SLIPPERY GAME IN THE MIDDLE EAST:

An obvious observation is ominous for American democracy: the government of the USA does not want to reveal what transpired between itself and bin Laden. That is the one and only explanation for the elimination of Osama without examination. Alternatives such as Obama was so Oh Drama about Osama don’t stand scrutiny. As he said it himself, he did not lose sleep about him. 

An example of disinformation is the Wikipedia article “CIA-Bin Laden controversy” where the best reputable sources are presented as “allegations“, while propaganda is presented as “scholarly“. With so many Harvard professors on Qaddafi’s payroll, “scholarly” has a double meaning. Openness is rejected, because it would turn the USA to stone. The USA conducts its secrecy in the open, like its collaborator, China. Call that whatever you want, but democracy is not its name.

At some points, if enough allegations about American plutocracy double dealing with Hitler, even Stalin, all sorts of Muslim Fundamentalists, and organizing giant transfer of monies from the poor to the rich in guise of saving the world’s economy, end up on the surface, all exposed, the American People may understand that it is in its best interest to figure out what is going on. Elements of the Obama administration have even ludicrously claimed that money was made, by taxpayers, out of the financial disaster. It is a lie, as anyone reading the Wall street Journal (as I do every day, me and Karl Marx!) knows (see the WSJ, May 9, cover story about AIG). 

***

 

WHAT COULD HAVE BIN LADEN REVEALED?

Well, Americans have been told to not know the following, and they, and their hypnotizing, plutocratic owned media, are doing an excellent job at it:

1) The plutocracy of the USA has instrumentalized Islam. Islam has become a tool to achieve some of its aims, so it is appreciated. That is why the USA admits that it organized, financed and armed a 250,000 jihadists army in Afghanistan, now known as the Taliban (“Wilson’s war”).

The instrumentalization of Islam is why the American president talks as if he were the Caliph. Just listen to him carefully, he will tell you what the religion is. Daddy knows best. Let me explain explicitly: Obama has come on the TV, many times, and told us what was bad Islam. He told us, speaking of some particular Muslim Fundamentalists: this is not religion. Obama, just like Osama, knew better. Ayatollah in Chief bin Obama thus played the oldest game in Christo-Islamism: deciding who is a believer, and who is not. (The proper role of the leader of a secular democracy is to NOT make religious interpretations; THAT is the difference between a Caliph and the president of a republic; the leaders of fuller democracies are careful NOT to present themselves as if they were caliphs.)

Those who are out, the unbelievers, said Jesus Christ, the well known prophet of Islam, should be burned (read the evangel of John carefully, if in doubt). Who knows what is good Islam, and what is bad Islam, and sends armies to impose his fatwas? Well the Caliph, of course. No wonder so many Americans think Obama is a Muslim: he proffers Muslim opinions (“fatwas”), all the time: this one is a good Muslim, this one, I kill. Bin Laden used to do that too. Takes one to silence the other. How do you spell bad karma? But of course Americans are a primitive crowd: 61% believe bin Laden is in hell.

Yes, really in hell, not as a figure of speech; then some chant that this is not a crusade! It goes without saying that the fact Americans believe that bin Laden is in hell feeds the opposite point of view, in those that the USA or its agents oppress. Let’s be explicit here: by making bin Laden an absolute revulsion, the definition of evil, 61% Americans say that it good to absolutely hate. And who do they hate? The one that their own government dispatched to commit terror jihad against the innocent, in the hope it would weaken socialism and secularism.

By saying that Osama is ultimate evil, and Obama ultimate good, they are a letter away from contradicting themselves. And they will, because one letter is not much, when all you have is chanting. How embarrassing. In any case they teach the Muslim world with the example of the metaphysics of hatred, unbridled emotion.

OK, let the primitives to their own instruments, and let’s be serious. The policy of fitting Islam to the purpose of American oil men and American financiers started in 1945. (16.5 years before Obama’s birth: I am not claiming that Obama is an original thinker!)

2) That policy of instrumentalizing Islam worked splendidly: plenty of oil and gas was produced, and made American oilmen rich, while plenty of petrodollars were recycled through Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex. Prince Bandar reigned over Washington. Americans were instructed to respect Islam and those who mastered it. Oil procurement distracted the populace through oil addiction and waste (the Romans wanted bread, the Americans wanted oil, so they could out and play with mind consuming toys). Bin Laden and Al Qaeda became themselves distractions, and blames defectors.

Don’t ask what you could do against bin Laden, ask what your bin Laden has done for you. Well, bin laden has made Obama into Osama. Kill, and call that justice. That is where my Obama head examination irresistibly leads me to.

However, a number of the believers who were instrumentalized, such as the Shiites in Iran, realized later that they had been pawns of Uncle Sam, and they turned against the American chess masters with a vengeance. Turning against the USA with a vengeance started with Nasser, it went on with Iran, Iraq, then bin Laden. It’s starting to happen with Pakistan. Anti-Americanism has a rich future, because one cannot exploit and manipulate all the people, all the time. Not everybody has interest to be as gullible as the American people. As the manipulation mechanisms are revealed, the People will revolt. It has already started. But this is just a start, although some hope to stop it, Tiananmen Chinese style (Assad’s line in Syria).

When bin Laden and his fellow jihadists understood that they were played like violins in American hands, they rebelled. That rebellion was facilitated by the fact they were out of work, after the ignominious defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. (Many then tried to make an Islamist revolution in Algeria, but the Algerian military, in full cooperation with the redoubtable, pernicious and obdurate French republic, blocked them in a bloody civil war reminiscent of the Algerian war of independence. Exploding very high speed trains and trying to crash jumbo jets over Paris in 1996, did not help any.)

After 9/11 American propaganda was able to fall back on its feet, by increasing lying and dissemblance Brandishing Islam, and claiming that “the USA is not at war with Islam” is part of the dissemblance, for the good and simple reason that it is not the proximal outrage at hand; the real question was:”How come the CIA employed operatives who now attack the American People?” Another dissemblance is to say that Bin Laden was not a CIA employee. Neither was Klaus Barbie, of course.

American policy in the main oil region of the planet has piled lies upon lies, upon lies. In the apparent hope, so far realized, that the American People is too misinformed, or too dumb, to figure it out.

There are no bounds to the Machiavellism. For example, American “intelligence” has created Pakistan, and its nukes (the latter partly, and officially paid by Bush and his taxpayers!). At first sight, that does not look very smart. But, on a second, and much deeper look, a nuclear, crazed Pakistan is exactly what the oiligarchy and the military-industrial complex need. If the interest of warring in Afghanistan now escapes the American public,  warring all over Pakistan offers rich opportunities. OK, not everybody will get rich, only those who pay millions to befriend the president, or only 50,000 dollars to be in the same room, admitted to the presence.

In the end the system laundered money from the American public, through oil producing countries, back to the richest manipulators of the USA, on Wall Street. A small example: the financial system of the USA found itself with 60 billion dollars controlled by Qaddafi (the Saudi sums are astronomically larger).

***

WE THROW YOU TO THE FISHES, SUCH IS THE MAFIA:

The mafia style assassination of bin Laden, and the propaganda accompanying it, with its imagery from the Mafia (“fishes”), and ethnocide (“Geronimo”), will live in history as one of the most famous cover-ups.

Movies such as “The Godfather” are nothing relative to what we just witnessed, the guy on the red carpet, looking the whole planet in the eye, coolly announcing that the notion of justice of Athens and Rome was not valid anymore. Too soft that law according to Greece and Rome. The USA has returned to the old fashion way, Babylonian justice. According to Obama, justice is now back to pure force, and those who thing otherwise “should have their head examined”… probably before being thrown to the fishes too.

Socrates, who could have escaped, as Aristotle did, preferred to die to confirm the supremacy of the law over the City and its citizens. Now an American comes to tell us inconsiderately that the last 25 centuries of civilization were for nought. “Justice is done” now with bullets. Those who “question” that, “should have their head examined”. The Guide’s hysterical populace is besides itself with joy, in a show reminiscent of the public face of Nazi Germany, complete with the joyful face of hate and bloodlust, music bands marching on TV sets.

 

Not only is the silencing of partners in crime by the powerful unworthy of a confident democracy, or republic, but it is a further step in its decomposition. The relationship between bin Laden and American intelligence and its proxies lasted a quarter of a century, and was perfectly illustrated by the sheltering of bin Laden right in the lair of the Pakistani military, for all to see, once again. Maybe that is why Bush was so unconcerned about catching bin Laden: who would want to catch oneself in public?

I am calling here onto the spirits of big time history. When democracy in the USA behaves worse, 21 centuries later, than an already deeply troubled Roman republic, Earth, we have a serious problem. Confronted with much more serious, dangerous, and mass murdering foes of the treacherous type (Jugurtha, Vercingetorix), the Roman republic arrested them. They were executed much later. There is little doubt that bin Laden could have been executed later. In theory, the ruler of the USA is the People.

The People should have had questions for bin Laden. Starting with: why did you meet many times with CIA operatives at the American hospital in Dubai in July 2001? What was exactly your relationship with the CIA? And the ISI? And Prince Turki (Saudi intelligence head)? Were you ordered to attack primary schools in Afghanistan? If not so, who did it? Etc.

I do believe in the superiority of civilization over the wastes of the wilds. That superiority rests on logics. Thus it can come and go, as logic does. Who profited from the immediate elimination of bin Laden? Well, those who did not want him to answer questions in a judicial process.

***

FIGHT OF THE DINOSAURS: ADVANTAGE AL QAEDA:

American plutocracy versus Jihadism, its ex-employee. Al Qaeda was able to steer further the USA towards civilizational irrelevance, by making it embrace Biblical justice. So Al Qaeda won in spirit. And spiritual elements are what lasts longer.

Al Qaeda had only 200 men in 2001. The USA launched a three trillion dollar war, ostensibly to fight it, killed hundreds of thousands of people, changed the nature of American society, and made the USA more like old Sparta, with an oligarchy ruling an increasingly destitute American population, as the society became more and more molded by war, for war.

The disproportion is astounding. 200 guys on one side, and the USA has still not won! The USA ruined its economy, its sociology, its law and its civilization, and the 200 guys are still out there, fighting back. Bin Laden was not the most important character of Al Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from the Muslim brotherhood, is much more important (and may have given bin Laden’s location to Obama, for all I know… There were good reasons for this crafty move…)

Not just this, but, the USA did so, while making Al Qaeda and its imitators stronger. Only fools will think that this was just out of clumsiness. A more subtle interpretation is that this was a computation of the American oligarchy to reign more, onto its own People.

Pro-plutocratic Romans used to chant:”One must destroy Carthage!” (“Cartago delenda est”.) Carthage had become democratic, and thus, being the enemy of Rome, Carthage became a way to paint democracy as the enemy of Rome. Something similar is going on now. The presence of Carthage had been used to justify the weakening of democracy, while increasing the militarization. Similarly, the presence of a jihadist army allows American plutocrats to do exactly the same.

Before howling that I see conspiracies everywhere, and my head should be examined again, think about it. Which country, in the world supported financially, trained and equipped an army of  300,000 jihadists? Only one: the country of the towers which fell by total surprise, among the bleating sheep.

“A fight that we did not start, but came to our shores”, as the thinker in sheep, I mean in chief among the sheep, blurted out repetitively, the way sheep are won to do.

“To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.” (U.S. President Reagan, March 21, 1983.)… we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones” (Charlie Wilson, head of U.S. Congress for Afghan jihad.)

In the end, American commandos fought just one guy to kill an unarmed bin Laden, and no American was wounded. Was it much ado about nothing? No. Bin Laden became a pretext to invade much of the oil producing part of the planet, that the USA did not control yet.

 

However, in the end it cost too much in lives and treasure. More than 6,000 American soldiers, and more than 1,000 other NATO troops have been killed in action, and dozens of thousands of soldiers have been gravely wounded. NATO populations, profoundly incognizant,  are still supporting the wars, but their economies have already cracked… And we were told it was all because of greedy homeowners. (Now to be helped, by giving free money to the world’s richest people, the one who fill the campaign coffers of the politicians who serve them.)

The conflict did not come out as intended by American oligarchy. By making the fight with 200 guys into an enormous war, with the enormous ambition of controlling Iraqi oil, and Central Asian oil and gas, the USA bit more than it could chew. Al Qaeda, and a new anti-American galaxy, won militarily. The USA is defeated militarily, and is trying to extract itself from Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq is on the verge of a grand alliance with Iran and Syria. Pakistan is playing a complicated game, using both the jihadists and China against the U.S. taxpayers. The plutocracy of the USA keeps its cool; nothing like a big mess, to advance its cause.

Al Qaeda won philosophically: the USA embraced its primitive disregard for Western civilization. Not only Americans, like the Salafists, believe in hell, but they indicate that civilization is in the way, and ought to be jettisoned.

Some will say that is sad, and unfortunate. They miss the point: it was deliberate, and a joyful occasion for the plutocracy. And so was the pseudo-crash of 2008 (which was more akin to gravity assist, when a space probe falls into a passing planet’s gravitational field, in a near crash, and then comes out with much more energy.) A whole menagerie now reigns on American TV, celebrating “enhanced interrogation”. In the Middle Ages, that was called “extraordinary question”, colloquially: torture. It was discontinued in the Middle Ages, because more efficient ways were found to find things out, while making civilization progress.

***

DEMOCRACY IS BEST FOR WAR, & SOMETIMES CANNOT AFFORD ANYTHING ELSE:

Salafism is a form of fascism. So is all too much (not all) of Christo-Islamism. Christianism was fascism, and so was Islamism. Christianism was domesticated long ago, when the Franks took control in 486 CE. (It escaped out of its cage, by using the Crusades, and it took centuries to completely re-domesticate it). But nobody came out, and domesticated Islam. Even the French, expert at the domestication of Christianism and Islamism in “Francia” herself, did not try to domesticate Islam in Algeria. That was to the advantage of the hyper wealthy (who feel that they profit from an ignorant population), but not to the advantage of advancing civilization (which all too many French did not want to advance in Algeria, as primitives are more easily exploited than the sophisticated).

Islamism is more alive than Christianism. People have been lapidated in Afghanistan in 2011, because of so called “infidelity”. Videos were taken (they have been shown in the West). The game of NATO and the USA in Afghanistan has been to leave islam in command, for the same reason as stupid French left islam alone in the Maghreb; it is easier to exploit the primitives. More exactly it allows to make deals with a few fascist leaders, such as Karzai.

Mubarak and the Saudis, or Qaddafi, did not charge fully for oil. If those regimes were democracies, oil would be more expensive, and Israel would find harder to pursue its exploitation of the Palestinians, and the oppression of the quarter of its citizenry which is not Jewish.

Islam, just as Christianism, has been mostly used as an excuse fascists have found to stay in power. Fascism is the  Raison d’être of Christianism and Islamism.  See the (rich) Egyptian military leadership making deals with the Islamists, as Mubarak used to, under the cover of officially not liking them. And see the deal between the Saud family (fascists) and the Wahhabists (theocrats).

The planet has shrunk, democracy cannot be weak with fascism. Weakness, or more exactly, in the case of the (plutocrats of the) USA and the UK, double dealing, was tried with German fascism. It worked well, but mostly for the (plutocrats of the) USA. Bin Laden was part of a similar system: as a good Saudi, he brought the goods to the USA, in this case, a jihadist army. So, basically the same double deal was done with Muslim Fundamentalists as was done with Hitler: get the best deal from the fascists, by collaborating with them.

Resting one’s fortune on a holocaust is not easy to duplicate, though. The (plutocrats of the) USA ought to be careful next time. Apparently next time is now. In no small part because the plutocratic system is increasingly hard to hide, from Wall Street to Qaddafi.

I have advocated that fascists who lose legitimacy and present a threat ought to be aggressively removed in a timely manner, as needed by democracy. Hitler ought to have been assassinated by the Germans, and the West ought to have assisted in that matter by treating Hitler with proper disrespect. This is done with Qaddafi right now, by stopping him militarily, attacking his reputation, property, and dragging him to justice in absentia, for crimes against humankind.

An obvious problem, though, is that the world plutocratic system is all tied together, as an organic whole. The ambassador of the USA related secretly the North Korean weapons transfers through China (WikiLeaks). The Chinese and the North Koreans know that Washington knows, and Washington lets it happen, becoming an accomplice. Why? As I said, it’s an integrated whole. As long as the public does not know, it flies. WikiLeaks worries Beijing and Washington, because it exposes how they rule, for the benefit of their oligarchs, and that rests on excluding the public from ruling.

One more example: Switzerland just found in its coffers 400 million dollars tied in to Ggabo, the arrested dictator of Ivory Coast. OK, that’s far from the 150 billions of the Qaddafi clan and the 80 billions of the Mubarak clan, or the 8 billions of the Ben Ali clan (Tunisian dictatorship). But that is only in Switzerland. The world’s greatest tax heavens is actually the… USA. And the Qaddafis had 60 billion there (according to Hillary Clinton).

***

A BIN LADEN TRIAL WOULD HAVE BEEN ADVERSE TO THE RULING CLASS:

Pluto can make itself invisible, such is one of its qualities the Greeks discovered.

Obviously, the government of the USA has things to hide from the People in the name of which it governs. Not just that, but it ominously let it be known that it does, and that everybody should shut up about it. Heads examined otherwise. And don’t forget “enhanced interrogation”.

The oligarchs did not want their ex-agent bin Laden to explain how their mass murdering collaboration evolved into squabbling. The oligarchs did not want bin Laden to stand up, and plead not guilty. They would have hated to see bin Laden request that directors of the CIA be brought to the stand as (presumably hostile) witnesses.

The same method was used with Saddam Hussein: silence, the Western governments have nothing to do with your badness, you little pawn! This will to dissimulation and dissemblance all comes from said governments serving their friend the plutocrats rather than their voters, the public.

***

THE LEGEND OF BIN LADEN WILL LIVE ON:

The stories about bin Laden’s death keep on changing considerably. In the latest version:

…” the raid, though chaotic and bloody, was extremely one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy Seal members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden. Administration officials said that the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the beginning of the operation… After the Seal members shot and killed Mr. Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, the Americans were never fired upon again.”

An unarmed 53 year old man, armed only with his bare hands, cannot be subdued by dozens of super trained American commandos.  The indomitable bin Laden, we are told, faced with immense numbers of armed, armored professional killers, not only does not surrender, but resist splendidly the elite American supermen. A crowd of the best American warriors are like nothing, faced by an invalid in pajamas. Just here, we now have more than enough for a formidable legend: see what a true jihadist is! Bin Laden may have been gravely sick for more than ten years, Americans are still like insects, relative to him. They cannot subdue him. In that crucial moment, the impotency of the USA reaches the visage of god, and god spit them back.  So the Seals shot bin laden lethally. But so great is his spirit, so great is their fear of incompetent little men, they have to shot him lethally multiple times. 

We are also told that bin Laden was shot at least twice: in the head, and in the chest. Wait a minute: if he had been shot in the head, why to shoot him in the chest? Thus it has got to be the other way around. And if he had been shot in the chest, why to shoot him in the head? Because one wanted to make sure he was really dead? So that he could not hold any interesting conversation? Then Obama tells us that bin Laden has been too disfigured  to be shown. Really? Or is it because it looks like a mob execution? Bad karma that would be, and karma sees through all.

Then bin Laden was thrown to the fishes. When I advocate civilization, I do not mean that the fishes have it.

Then there were the grotesque rejoicing in the USA, reminiscent of the grotesque rejoicing on September 11, 2001. The Main Stream Media used marching bands, etc… But no element of media went  beyond any analysis about anything preceding September 11, 2001. The conspiracy of starting history on September 11, 2011 has worked splendidly: all Americans seem really to believe it all started with the big boom booms that September day. That reminds me of the German (fascist) conspiracy of starting history in 1919, with the Versailles Treaty (as if nothing had happened before, and in particular, grave injustices had not been committed by the Germans against many peoples of Eastern Europe, such as disappearing entire nations) .

***

FURTHER DISSEMBLING, FURTHER PLOTTING:

Obama insisted for half an hour on CBS that they were no more than “50%”, or 55% sure that Bin Laden was there. It looks highly implausible that the USA would have risked a shoot-out, in the middle of a sovereign country, with the armed forces of that country, while killing the bodyguards of some rich plutocrat.

The very fact that Obama insisted, again and again on the notion that the CIA figured it out, all by itself, without any help from anybody else, is conducive to suspect that the opposite is true. So Bin Laden was sold, and probably by some accomplice(s) in the Pakistani governmental structure, and that Trojan Horse has to be protected.

It is clear that elements of the ISI sold Bin Laden. Actually major arrests of Al Qaeda leaders had been made in the same city 3 months earlier (of some Bali bombers). And they said enough to deduce bin Laden was in that house. So Obama was clumsily trying to protect his accomplices. He should work on his lying.

As I mentioned other members of Al Qaeda may even have had interest to dispatch Bin Laden. The democratic revolutions in the Arabo-Muslim world made Bin Laden irrelevant, He could not bring any funds anymore. Long gone the times when he would jet into London, in his private jet, as he did as recently as 1998. Best to make him a martyr, and re-orient Al Qaeda a bit.

Why do I mention this? Am I not an enemy of the fascist Pakistani system. Sure. But fascism is fought by exposing it, not by plotting within. The forces of light triumph by exposing the darkness, not by pulling the curtains.

***

Conclusion: AMERICANISM IS AN INFANTILISM:

When the dust settles, one fact stands firm: the USA thinks the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, are for the fishes. They don’t hold for Apaches, and, presumably, not for the rest of us either.

According to a senator who saw the pictures of Bin Laden after he was shot, an explosive bullet entered in his ear, and came out, by Osama’s left eye, spilling brains over his face. In other words, after having been shot a first time, bin Laden would have been shot from the back, in the head. Yes, when an army does that, it commits a war crime. And when the commander-in-chief calls it justice done, he also commits a war crime. (There are very precise laws on this. Obama said he would visit Europe after his presidency. It’s not so clear now: Bush had to cancell a visit to Geneva recently, lest he be arrested… For his apparent crimes against mankind.) 

Erich Maria Remarque observed that: “Tolerance is the daughter of doubt.” By the same token, “Intolerance is the daughter of certainty.” True justice is not certain to start with. It explores, and observes. It questions. And nowadays it needs to go beyond culprit individuals, to culprit thoughts. Bin Laden did not start the war in Afghanistan. The USA did. And that much is certain.

What do children want? Everything. After all, they are trying to find where the bounds are. But infantilizing an entire population while giving it thermonuclear weapons cannot have a good outcome. That way the USA and Pakistan are similar.

Trying to justify not showing the gory pictures of a dead Bin Laden, which would have made clear to forensic experts that he had been assassinated, Obama said several times:”We do not spike the football, that is not who we are”. So how come you have that infantile picture in your mind? And did you not compare Bin Laden to a football, just now? How much more childish can one be?

Given a populace of lemons, plutocracy makes lemonade. The oligarchs were ready for a new approach to the Central Asian oil procurement plan. Since Pakistan was a problem, they suggested hopefully that their “allies” to the north of Afghanistan would come in handy to help. In other words, the Central Asian (oil & gas) issue, which, as I said, is the fundamental one, is already acquiring a new cover-up! The American army has to occupy Central Asia to save Afghanistan. Pakistan made us do it!

Can a civilization thrive on lies, fables, and children stories? Sometimes yes: the Nazis and their supporters got quite a bit of mileage, from claiming they were protecting the Jews, as they were removing them (and stealing all their property).

All humongously oppressive regimes rest on enormous lies, and those can last centuries. The most enormous example is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ is viewed as the definition of love. That was a lie: Jesus ordered to burn those who did not believe in him. That was, clearly, not very loving. But that lie was extremely convenient to various “Christian” fascist regimes, for 15 centuries, as the rebellious ones were not condemned just to have their heads examined, but were actually thrown in the fire.  

To describe infantilism, one has to define what a lie is.

A lie is a misrepresentation of reality which could have been avoided, had the agent which proffered it taken full care in deploying full, imaginable logic, and checking thoroughly the subassemblies it is made of.

This apparently convoluted definition covers deliberate ignorance and other mental contraptions erected to manipulate one’s subconscious into a state of dissemblance. The archetype of the modern lie is that the Germans did not “know” about the Holocaust (or the Communists did not “know” about Stalin’s terror, horror, enslavement and mass murdering). Sure they did not “know” about it, in the sense that it was not front page news. But, had they been a bit observant and logical, they would have deduced that they were lied to.

The lamentable shows of exuberance throughout the media of the USA to celebrate bin Laden’s execution, were a form of lie. They assumed that ultimate happiness has been reached, because the military of the USA terminated, with the help of the CIA, the essential problem which affected the USA. In truth, it was nothing of the sort. Bin Laden was just one of the CIA’s most important past operatives. Bin Laden did not start the war, he was just a recruited agent.

This is immature. In the full sense of the term: are Americans little children?  The CIA organized a little show for them, and they cheer. The Bin Laden rocket climbs up the sky, its great fireworks extinguish the USSR in the name of Reagan, before falling down to the ground, and being extinguished, by the CIA. Among thunderous applause. Apparently the president can get away with enormous hallucinations such as “we did not start this fight”, and nobody serious and respected rises, and call the hallucination for what it is.

No wonder that the Pakistani intelligence tried to preserve in bin Laden a living witness of what had really been going on, and who gave which orders, who got which ideas, and who had been manipulating whom. No wonder too, that this indispensable witness was fed to the fishes by the masters. As in old Mafia movies.

Oops: I guess i have fallen back already in my anti-American mode. All good, rational Americans learn as early as 2 years old, that there are good and bad people, and “no conspiracy theories”. A “conspiracy theory” is any explanation in which plutocracy does not come on top, ethically speaking.

Rachelle Maddow said that Bin Laden’s assassination  was a “cathartic moment for all“.  Maddow is as left as American left go. As far as I am concerned her lack of critical sense suggests that she should be called “meadow”, like something to be trampled on and munched by cows. The Greek word. kathartikos  means “fit for cleansing, purgative”. Far from being cleansing, Bin Laden’s elimination has removed an easy path to the truth.

Thus, bin Laden was absolute evil, now it has been made into fish food, justice is done, and all conspiracy theories about the forces of good are also dead. The only conspiracies are those of the forces of evil. American Main Stream Media actually run shows “advising” parents about what to say about Bin Laden. The new sense of justice is introduced to toddlers: kill your enemy, that’s justice done.

There have been many systems of thought which have become oppressive, or even murderously insane. Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Nazism are examples. They all have this in common to be forms of political fascism.

Not that all fascism is bad all the time, even from a fascist political system. The best example of that was the invasion of fascist, mass murdering Cambodia by the Vietnamese army. Vietnam, a communist regime inspired by hard core French communism, battle hardened against the French and American military, intervened for humanitarian reasons. And it was true, and it was well done. Vietnam stopped the holocaust in Cambodia.

It is often said that democracies do not fight democracies. But Rome, a plutocratizing republic, attacked several democracies around 146 BCE. The massive wars around 146 BCE allowed Roman plutocracy to seize the world, starting with the Roman republic itself. No wonder that Roman plutocracy had interest to get them started. So maybe some of the American plutocrats believe that a world war would be the best thing which could happen to their class. In that sense, helping Pakistan with nuclear weapons makes a lot of sense.

Moreover, democracies can become extremely exploitative. Peoples can attack, and exploit peoples. An example is the slave system which fed the American colonies. Or the way Belgium, a democracy, let its head, the plutocratic king, ravage the Congo.

People, and their democratic government , can even exterminate other peoples. The best example is, of course, the USA itself, which exterminated (most of) the American natives. Don’t mention this too loud, if you want friends in the USA: evoking this is in the category which leads your friends to think your head should be examined.

So what is Americanism? A system where reality, sometimes uncomfortable, is denied through infantilism. The key there is high school, and college. The philosophy, and even the culture imposed on American youth is that of sports, and scoring over the rival team. As the banners screamed it: Obama 1, Osama, 0.

In infantilism, higher ethics is not the furthermost guidance, sports and Jesus’ call to burn miscreants, are good enough.

Some of my interlocutors have suggested that I was naive and that the democracy movements have been also instrumentalized in Libya by the Western oppressors. Just as I have long argued that Islam was instrumentalized. But I completely disagree: literal Islam is mentally primitive, democracy is not just advanced, but inimical to literal Islam (as it is inimical to literal Christianism).

The French instrumentalized Islam a bit, to help with African volunteers to fight German fascists in WWI and WWII. It was a complicated relationship: some Islamists were arrested and exiled, before being reinstated, celebrated, and honored by the republic.

However, overall, the French and British were careful with Islam. They kept at a distance. When the French nationalized religious establishments in 1905, Islam was ignored (big mistake).

On the other hand, the USA had no such qualms. Remember: from the American point of view, Middle easterners had oil, and were all Apaches. Instrumentalizing Islamism  was the way to manipulate those who had oil, while pushing out the French and British, by financing, helping and organizing jihadists… Against the French, and the British, or their proxies. The method of American intelligence to use Muslim Fundamentalism against the progress of native socializing republics  or democracies was used in Egypt, against the French, and most famously against PM Mossadegh in 1953, in Iran. And, actually, all over the place.

The rising of a giant American Mujahedeen army in Afghanistan was a particularly striking symbol of that. Financing Pakistani nukes, now built at an amazing pace, another. Don’t forget that American planners think they are only dealing with Apaches: they have no fear.

In Egypt, the old (secret) alliance between the plutocratic military and the Muslim Brotherhood, pushed (secretly) by Western plutocrats, is alive and well. It’s partly a question of American (Egypt, Saudis) spheres of influence: the Egyptian army has been trained, educated, domesticated by the Americans. . In Libya, the Europeans are trying to regain a foothold in their own backyard, and they push democracy, not Islam.

By throwing the idea of justice to the trash, the American government is trying to throw to the trash a piece of Greco-Roman civilization which survived even the Dark Ages. Last time a big, modern country full of arrogance and exceptionalism threw justice and civilization to the trash, it was called Nazi Germany.

What to do then? Well, tell the truth. And tell it to everybody. That is how justice starts.

***

Patrice Ayme

Foundation Delusion

Kneel to hyper wealth, the republic is history.

TOO MANY FOUNDATIONS ARE JUST PLUTOCRATIC EXPLOITATION DEVICES.

Main ideas: All too many foundations further plutocracy. Their nefarious influence spreads far and wide. From the University of Chicago (fief of reducing all to greed, founded by a foundation), to the four decades of American sponsored war in Afghanistan (a devious plot of the 1970s to institute oil procurement in Central Asia). The many foundations of plutocratic type drag society down the road to hell in all sorts of ways, some overt, some covert, and the worst are emotional.

Paying careful attention to emotional distorsion brings a new twist to the school building foundation tied to “Three Cups of Tea”. It should have been “Three Cups of Oil” (surprise, surprise!). I view that foundation’s main mission to be part of a giant cover-up about what has been truly instituted in Central Asia, in the name of American consumer. Indeed, real U.S. policy was the exact opposite.

***

***

Abstract: In my book, plutocracy is the rule of Pluto, not just wealth. Wealth is only one of the characteristics of that God. Invisibility is another. Being underground, under cover still another.

And then, of course there is Hades sie, the Dark Side of the Mind. Plutocrats have many awful tricks. Foundations are one of these tricks. Foundations allow their corporate officers to rule the world ever more, while living like kings and queens ever more, including to enjoy the warm glow of the adorating masses cued by the Main Stream Media (see the Melinda & Barack school show).

But the underground has other tricks. The magazine of the plutocrat Forbes will not talk about his colleague Qaddafi’s 150 billion dollar fortune: that’s friendly, and that is wise (otherwise people would understand what plutocracy really is!).

Qaddafi, of the most powerful sort of plutocrats, the mass murdering plutocrat, hides behind the innocent, preferably masses of children. That helped him to reign 42 years. He learned his lesson well. Once Qaddafi, during one of his invasions of Chad, decades ago, was among his military, like the average dictator, without any women and children to hide behind. He was at a desert air strip. French aircraft came low and fast. Their bombs, slowed down by drag chutes, nearly killed him. Ever since the dictator has been careful  to surround himself with curtains of innocents. 

Qaddafi had been conducting state sponsored terrorism with impunity. In one of his rare appropriate decisions, Reagan bombed his command compound. Qaddafi whined disingenuously that an adoptive “daughter” had been killed. Another trick. Nobody had heard of that daughter before. Qaddafi had been informed by some traitors, within NATO, that 100 American bombers were heading his way. Qaddafi and his entourage fled, with more than half an hour of warning. Qaddafi did not explain why he strangely forgot his beloved daughter-one-had-never-hear-of-before. Maybe he left her behind, as one leaves a goat for a tiger. Most probably she was not his daughter, either. maybe she died somewhere else, in some other way. Tricky, tricky. Recently, dead demonstrators were brought out of storage to be recycled as NATO victims.

As it is, dozens of American plutocrats have taken a well publicized oath to shelter all their money in foundations, calling that philanthropic. See: they should not be taxed, they are already so good, besides supporting the world on their mighty shoulders (and if they smirk,  for your own good too, because you have not worked enough, you have not served hard enough to be able to do that, so they are doing it for you: watch their servants serve in Washington, and be rewarded with fortunes, thereafter).

The blossoming of American foundations is a devious plot to foster, advertize, and protect American plutocracy. Foundations let the hyper wealthy avoid taxes, while allowing them to gather ever more power, with the complicity and collaboration of  the political leadership.

(For another touching aspect of the foundation story, see Obama saving American schools thanks to a few millions from Melinda Gates, apparently a sort of unelected unofficial official who married well. Instead, why does not Obama propose to tax the Gates 50 billion dollars, to get some real money, for American schools? Is somebody looking for a future source of income, thus preserving it carefully for future generations of his own brood? Just asking…)

The scandal of the foundation delusion extends well beyond “Three Cups of Tea” and its sordid entanglement of military policy and propaganda in Afghanistan. The reign of foundations aims at replacing the justice of the republic by the philanthropy of feudalism, part of a cynical, concerted attempt to make the public thing irrelevant, and foster the cult of Pluto and its agents.

And Qaddafi, top plutocrat, and top foundation artist in all this? Is he out for good? Would not that be tragic for plutocracy? For the new foundation of the world on plutocracy? Sure. And that is why, as I write this, American envoys are secretly negotiating with Qaddafi in Mauretania. Not something European philosophers approve of, to put it mildly. But still a new twist in trickery of those who believe that the world ought to be in their pocket.

***

***

USA: A WEALTH OF POVERTY, FRANCE: A POVERTY OF WEALTH?

One constant element of plutocratic propaganda in the USA is the sentence:”Americans are the most generous people in the world“. If one watches Fox News for a few hours, one will encounter that leitmotiv a few times. By that they probably mean that their rich sponsors have given them a lot.

Indeed, this is rather curious: so much generosity, so much poverty! The overall poverty rate climbed in 2009 to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said its annual report on the economic well-being of U.S. households in September 2010 (the poverty line is $21,500 for four people). The share of Americans without any health coverage rose to 16.7 percent — or 50.7 million people.

Let’s compare with the usual suspect, the French public thing, the French res publica. The poverty line in France is set higher than in the USA at half of median income (thus would be 25K for 4). The poor seem to be around 6% of the French population… with free health care, free education, subsidized transportation, etc., the French are not poor in the American sense of increasing destitution and decreasing lifespan. The occurrence of poverty decreased in France over 30 years down from 15% (namely the present American levels).

France improved, the USA blatantly regressed, and this durable collapse is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s (on long time series). 

Why such a contrast between US and French poverty? The USA ought to be much wealthier than France. Like Saudi Arabia, the USA has massive reserves of oil and gas, and France has none. Like Germany, the USA has lots of coal, and France has none. A hint to solve that riddle: in France the hyper wealthy get taxed the most, and that is more than 50%. In the USA, the hyper wealthy get taxed the less, and that is an average of 17%. (France has Arnault, a self made man, nearly as rich as Buffet, and without insider trading! So French billionaires are not suffering too much…)

And that 17% tax for the hyper wealthy does not even take into account the tax dodge of the FOUNDATION ILLUSION.

***

FOUNDATIONS AS ONE MORE WEAPON OF THE PLUTOCRATS:

As a private company which set up “Private Family Foundations” puts it:

“In recent years, several private foundations have gained prominence in the media, and raised public awareness of their causes. Foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates, are often created with one philanthropic goal in mind. However, as the grantors often realize, establishing your own foundation can often make smart money sense, as well.

Plus, your last name does not have to be Rockefeller or Getty to start your own.

The Role of the Foundation:

A Private Family Foundation (PFF) is a separate entity, privately funded by you. It is created with the specific purpose of contributing to various charitable causes.

As a distinct, legal entity, The Private Family Foundation:

1. Contributes to a charitable cause and takes a tax deduction, while relinquishing personal control over your gift.

2. Minimizes your estate tax liability.

3. Avoids capital gains tax on the sale of appreciated property contributed to the charity of your choice.

4. Provides continuing employment and activity for your family members.

5. Identifies and preserves your family name for years to come.

Create and Control Your PFF:

Any Private Family Foundation must be created with a charitable “intent.” The Foundation is managed by a trustee or executive director that oversees the Foundation’s investments and distributes the Foundation’s assets.

You can even appoint yourself as the trustee of your own Foundation. This way, you maintain control over the assets contained in the Foundation.”

The Foundation Law in the USA was passed the same day as the Income Tax Law. Need I say more? The point (3) above means that if an individual becomes immensely wealthy through, say, the growth of shares in a company, he can transfer the gigantic profits without having to pay tax. Nor will his heirs have to pay tax. No wonder so many American foundations are rabidly “conservative” (a euphemism for plutocratic propaganda).

Did you ever wonder why so many hyper wealthy Americans set-up “charities” overseas in the most scenic places, and are thus forced to tough it out in the world’s most expensive hotels? (Hint: see which heavenly places the “Melinda and Bill Gates” enjoy when they go rescue Kenyans from mosquitoes!)

Thus we can see that the basic Foundation Law is a sham, a tax shelter for the hyper wealthy one is supposed to adore as if it were the Golden Calf. That is another advantage of the growth of foundations. It incites the commons to admire the hyper wealthy, and view in them heroes whose immense generosity saves the world.   

As foundations are protected from taxation, those devices of the hyper wealth, or the instruments they created, themselves typically tax-free, never stop growing. They are to the American jungle what ever-growing crocodiles are to the Australian swamps. Thus their strident pro-plutocratic propaganda is always louder. (See the Heritage Foundation, which is always careful to put the usual suspect, the French republic, at the bottom of all the classification it makes, and then Heritage is widely quoted in turn by the Main Stream Media of the USA, itself plutocratically owned.)

Then “The Economist” wonders in its April 28, 2011 issue: “Angst in the United States. What’s wrong with America’s economy? Its politicians are failing to tackle the country’s real problems. Believe it or not, they could learn from Europe.”

Really? “The Economist” used to sing the praises of the bloody dictator Pinochet (hey, another plutocrat!) and used to hate European welfare. For that neoconservative magazine to say this, that europe has got it more right, that Europe of the welfare state, the situation has got to be dismal. And so it is. “The Economist” praises welfare models against unemployment, that is massive government programs of retraining found in several countries.

However, “The Economist” does not realize the depth of the sociological problems of the USA. The cult of the foundations, that is, the cult of the Golden calf, is one of them. And that cult keeps on eluding “The Economist”. (Although the magazine has bemoaned the importance of wealth in the access to higher education in the USA.)

The dominance of the society of the USA by unlected, uncontrolled wealth has reduced democracy to shambles and fumes. That is why the white, educated USA is not reproducing anymore (as digging in the Census’s statistics show), making the problem even worse. Which schools would the educated white middle class send their children to? To do what thereafter? To serve the hyper wealthy by becoming valet park attendants?
***

NOT SO FUNNY PHONIES:

Recently the revered Buffet, the USA’s richest financier, has been exposed in a way even American naifs  can comprehend: his closest collaborator, with whom he worked for decades, engaged in a form of massive insider trading (buying for his own account stock he would then get Buffet’s fortune to purchase).

I view Buffet as the world’s greatest insider trader, the ultimate splurger at the financial buffet. But, since its collaborator in this matter was the Bushama administration, and the untouchable puppet master Goldman Sachs, I shall thread lightly for now. The spider web of foundations extends throughout the USA, with poisonous spiders all over. As I said, Buffet connects to Gates. Both connect directly to Obama.

Another who became famous, and even central in the propaganda machine of the plutocracy of the USA, was the author of “Three Cups of Tea”, a required reading at the Pentagon, the entire world was loudly told. That Greg Mortenson, a medic, a sort of mountaineer, discovered and proclaimed that schools were better than bombs. Wow: all America was fascinated, by such Christian secular wisdom, that it broke into applause, and a Greg Mortenson cult grew: one American medic cures the world, teaches the little Muslim girls. How strong is America! And how good! See American money save the world, thanks to American generosity!

It turns out that the whole thing, top to bottom, may be phony (surprise, surprise!) Indeed why not to set-up good schools in the USA first? If education is that important? And why not to impose good schools in Central and South Asia through local government programs? Well, it sounds fishy, does not it? As we will see, the answer is convoluted, but central to the quagmire.

Jon Krakauer was impressed initially, and gave Greg Mortenson $75,000, but then, as he relates in “Three Cups of Deceit“:

Mortenson [used] his phony memoir to solicit tens of millions of dollars in donations from unsuspecting readers, myself among them. Moreover, Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute, has issued fraudulent financial statements, and he has misused millions of dollars donated by schoolchildren and other trusting devotees. “Greg,” says a former treasurer of the organization’s board of directors, “regards CAI as his personal ATM.”

***

IS CAI SPELLED CIA?

The ramifications are much more sinister than even the astute Jon Krakauer has it. The strategy of the government of the USA is a conspiracy, or it’s not. Pseudo charities such as Mortenson’s are part of an obvious trick to mislead Americans, and others, about the real policies of the government of the USA in Central Asia. (Russia, and now China are also very good at disguising agents as aid workers… something the French don’t need to do, as they have their military in many African countries, when they do not collaborate tightly, as they do with Algeria, Morocco, or say, the Ivory Coast, now that French rockets have cleared said coast…)

The real use of Mortenson’s organization, as far as the thinkers in Washington are concerned, is as a propaganda operation, and a lot of the targets, is the public. The gullible public is in the USA, and South Asia. CAI hides the reality, which is, in its historical whole, the exact opposite of what CAI claims to want to do. Thus Nixon insisted:”I am not a crook!”. American policy is Nixon, writ large (and this is literally true: it’s Nixon and the still influential Kissinger who launched the plutocratic collaboration with the Chinese dictatorship… Nixon also launched HMOs… officially, Carter launched the war in Afghanistan in 1979, but some digging would no doubt excavate Nixon again).

***

HOW CENTRAL ASIAN OIL WAS WON FOR THE WEST:

By having the Pentagon read “Three Cups of Tea” ostensibly, American progressives and American conservatives were led to beleive that the American defense apparatus went according to Mortenson’s credo: “schools, not bombs“.

The progressives felt good, the conservatives, even more so: American charity at its best. Not only are these people trying to kill us, but we keep on building schools for them. American do-gooders got persuaded of the opposite of reality. A first aspect of reality is that there are more American private contractors in Afghanistan than soldiers, and they are not building schools, but making war. Indeed,  the historical reality of American governmental policy is the exact opposite of the Americans-bring-schools-not-bombs myth the CIA, and the CAI, are trying to push.

Historically the Afghan war started when Pakistani intelligence, certainly incited by its boss, American intelligence, organized some primitives and thugs to prevent girls to go to school in Afghanistan. It all started with a  policy exactly opposite to that which is ostnsibly Greg Mortenson’s misson, and that is why Greg Mortenson is such an important cover-up, with sponsors in the highest places. Nothing better for a cover than the exact opposite of what is below.

Why so mean? Why did American intelligence promote an anti-girl policy? Because killing those who taught girls and attacking schools destabilized Afghanistan into civil war, into religious war, and towards a primitive, proto-Islamist state. If you want to rule, start by inciting potential opponents to fight each other. Nothing like religious war.

Some will say: “Wait, there is no oil in Afghanistan, just rare earths, the stuff green cars are made of!” Yes, true. As in the countries occupied by China next door. However, there is a lot of oil and gas, just immediately north of Afghanistan. That area was under Russian lock and key, before American intelligence started its Afghan adventure.

American intelligence knew all too well that Islam was the way to destabilize Central Asia. Destabilizing Aghanistan would gibe the USA a plausible reason to organize a Jihad. A somewhat similar strategy had been used against… France, in Algeria and the Sahara.

It worked then, sort of, against the French, and it worked again, and this time, much better. Mostly secular Afghanistan became a battlefield dominated by the USA, its army, its intelligence agents, its proxies, and a 250,000 strong army of Jihadists. The richest Saudis got a green light to spread money and jihad around, all the way to the Caucasus, and beyond.

This has been going on for four decades, although deliberately ignorant Americans became aware of Afghanistan only in 2001. Not only was Afghanistan destabilized, but so was all of Central Asia, and even the Caucasus. The Jihad spread all the way to London, even New York (distracting, but giving no the excuse to send official armies all over the region!)

Now American oil companies are all over Central Asia, north of Afghanistan, and the Russians are mostly out. Who said the Afghan war was not a great success? (The pathetic Russians were reduced to trying to cut the oil pipelines in Georgia, with their tanks!)

So it is the highest heights of insolence to now have the American Army crowe that it does good because it allows American civilians such as Mortenson to build schools for girls! If Mortenson’s Central Asian Institute did not exist the American oil strategy, the American Central Asian strategy, would have had to institute it. If something exists, look carefully at whom it really profits (and the same goes for foundations!)

***

GENEROSITY FOR REAL:

Governments can be much more generous than individuals. It is a physical fact: a government is much larger, first of all. Secondly a government trying to be generous has a non-profit mission: office holders are not stakeholders. The officers of a government trying to be generous do not go in the best hotels in private jets, as the Gates do. And do not pay themselves hefty salaries to reward their own generosity, as most foundation types do.

A government can make sure that its generosity is not corrupted (there are laws against that, worldwide). And a government can be much more organized too. Besides, a government can enforce generosity, through taxation.

For all the big talk about their generosity, the American hyper wealthy are sucking the USA dry. They are like hyenas with a clamp on the throat of their victims, and they cannot talk.

The government can make sure that those who have it by far the easiest can contribute he most. After all, it’s the overall organization of society which allows them to have it by far the easiest. It is not that the sweat of their brow is a torrent, whereas sweat only pearls on the brow of others. Heroes exist, true, as Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and zillions of others have pointed out, even before Ramses II’s tremendous non victory at Kadesh in Syria against the Hittites. Everybody agree that the Pharaoh in his electrum chariot, defended by his Greek bodyguard, saved the day.

But most of the greedy who crave power through money are not cut of that heroic cloth. They are more like rats who will do anything to get to the cheese, under the cover of darkness. (And therein a serious cancer, in the mind of our civilization, as  I point out in conclusion.)

Heroism should be encouraged, thus rewarded (although not exactly as in the USSR). But heroes do not lift the world: heroes they are, yes, but Atlases carrying the economy and sociology of the world, no.

***

MISSION CIVILISATRICE, YES, FAKE GOODNESS, NO:

Americans discover that it feels good to instruct the ignorant. Good. But nothing new. The “Mission Civilisatrice” of Nineteenth Century French colonialism was not invented yesterday, and it worked (mostly). All of Senegal was conquered, or, more exactly pacified, by 5,000 Senegalese soldiers led by ten French born officers. Thus out of many local potentates, and seven nations with different languages, one national entity, Senegal, was born. With mandatory public schooling and free health care. Not bad for a country where, in the boondocks, slavery was one of the main industries, a generation before.

Although I smirk at superstition, I recognize that some religious organizations have contributed very positively to the civilizing mission (some Christian, some Muslim). Some of the clergy means the goodness they advocate (and it has nothing to do with the superstition in the name of which it is done).

But peace was also, and mostly, conquered at the point of a (well aimed) gun. In India, the British did, at the point of that well aimed gun, what 35 centuries of Hinduism and 24 centuries of Buddhism had not done. The British took out the murderous infamy of the caste system (a system the abominable Gandhi defended with all his meekness, down to his humiliating assassination).

The British also disrespected violently Indian superstition, by outlawing the  time honored religious tradition to burn the young widows alive with the corpses of their old rich husbands. Actually the Brits pushed their meddling so far as forbidding any burning of widows whatsoever, alive or not. Talk about colonial arrogance!

Overall, except for the occasional holocaust against Neolithic people (in the USA and Australia), the civilizing mission of the West has been pretty effective to foster more advanced civilization (the intellectual trade went both ways: African music spread worldwide, for example). However, this is not what is going in Afghanistan. (It is going on in Libya, though.)

Americans have been victim of plutocratic propaganda, and really believe that their “charities”, these foundations made initially to turn around the estate tax, and other taxes, work. No. If you want charity, institute a 50% tax rate on the well-off, as in Europe, and cut down on the personality cult. Then insist on the generosity of the government.

Government generosity is a splendid success in Scandinavia. After taking great care of their own citizens (generally wealthier than Americans, with much less poverty) those countries give a considerable part of their GDP in true generosity.

In the USA, the much vaunted generosity of Buffet, Gates and company is just a mask for one the most unfair societies in the world, getting even more so every day. Obama and his demoncrats have been kinder to the rich than even his (future) billionaire of a predecessor (by lowering tax rates even more). Just look at how many Americans are in prison, or in serious trouble (parole, etc.) with the justice system: about ten millions. These rates of incarceration are, by far, the highest rates in the world.

Foundations have their place, but not how they are presently set-up in the USA (other countries have other arrangements). The Foundation law ought to be changed, so that foundations cease to be tax shelters, and influence-peddling oppression devices of the hyper wealthy. Obama should learn to avoid the wealthiest tax dodgers, instead of advertizing them as somehow worthy of presidential praise.

***

FOUNDATIONAL DEMONIZATION:

Last, but not least. I have exposed above reasons to disapprove of the grip foundations are having on American (hence World) society. Foundations are tax shelters, they exert undue influence, their replace public policy by private whim, they help buttress the spectacular claim that plutocracy that it is a philanthropy. Foundations incite people to go on their knees and beg the plutocracy as if it were the Golden Calf. The Bible warned us about Golden Calves. And rightly so. 

But there is worse. Foundations select for guidance by the worst. Even if it is guidance for the best, all too often it is guidance by the worst. And no, I am not just alluding to the Qaddafi Foundation.

Selection by the worst? Why? How? Why did parts of mankind ended being led by murderers such as Qaddafi or Hitler? Was that bad luck? not at all. They led the way they did, precisely because they were the worst. Only the worst can commit mass murder to satisfy their ambition, or, even worse, can view mass murder as a worthy ambition. 

There is an ominous connection between extreme ambition, the will to move mountains, and achievements akin to having mountains crumble on the many.

Evil exist in this world, as Obama himself recognized. Evil has a mission: submit the many into oblivion. That mission was evolutionary selected because of its ecological advantage. It leads to the yearning for power; submitting the many feels irresistible.

Hence the obsession some have to gather as much power as possible. (The bell curve of the frequency of unhinged domination was tilted just so by evolution that there are enough of these to insure just enough of whatever is necessary in the human character to provide with, which is also very bad. However, that shift into badness, just so, is adapted to war with sticks and stones, not thermonuclear weapons, and that is why democracies have to be pitiless, but not for the reasons and with the low standards Athens used.)

Those people obsessed by dominating others are going to compose most of the cohort which amasses great fortunes (as the 2011 book on Bill Gates by his closest collaborator, Paul Allen reveals). Should those types lead humankind? Some will mumble that Pericles, although overambitious, was a great political leader, that he inflected civilization the right way. True enough. But Pericles was just the mouthpiece of a number of top philosophers, and he mistreated Anaxagoras enough that the latter embarked on a suicidal hunger strike. Similarly, Caesar, Charlemagne, and many others were moderated by top philosophers.

Now all the plisophy which rules is from Wall Street, finance, oil tycoons, medicine greedsters, in other words, aspects of Pluto.

***

PUBLIC RULE VERSUS PRIVATE WEALTH:

In any case, although most foundations have a political role, be it only by displacing proper public institutions, the fact remains that many, if not most of the influential ones, are intrinsically associated to artists of greed rather than the duty of good.

In a democracy, a republic, the power of elected officials is kept in check, first, by the public. Not so in a society dominated by foundations by the rich, for the rich.

The public, in a true democracy or true republic, also decides which emotions should dominate society, by financing them properly. Not so in a society dominated by foundations by the rich, for the rich.

And this is one difference with europe that “The Economist” should mull over. European powers finance the emotion of care, by financing public health care, or taking care of the unemployed (with income support and retraining: see the Netherlands).

Whereas, in the last thirty years, the political system in the USA, propped by foundations and their creatures (such as the university of Chicago) has financed the financiers, thus fostering the emotion of greed, and what goes with it, the greatest fraud ever conducted (the fake collapse of the financial system in 2008, and its “rescue” by politicians, in the name of the ignorant public, mobilizing much of the power of the American economy, ever since, something the Tea Party tried to understand, before failing to do so, no doubt thanks to its plutocratic sponsors such as the Koch brothers, and something that most of the public does not understand at all, in part because it would be too painful to switch to the revolutionary mode).

Foundations put ever more power in the hands of those who have proven, by their very successful careers, that they are the most obsessed by power, greed, domination and submission. Or in the hands of those who are the most devious (see Krakauer’s book above). Thus public control slips, and so does the enticement and reign of the mind’s noblest emotions. Hence foundations bring humankind ever lower, down the road to hell, the worship of the worst.

In a republic, if one genuinely wants good to be financed, one starts by learning not to kneel to Pluto and its the Golden Calf. One needs better emotional foundation than that.

***

Patrice Ayme