Borrowing For Nothing. Twice.

PLUTOCRATS LOVE UNEMPLOYMENT.

Abstract: The government of the USA has borrowed enormously, when it was expensive to do so, to enslave its population, instead of raising taxes on the hyper rich, and tax corporations (many of the largest, instead, get more money from the government than they pay in taxes).

Obama was full leader of this apparent madness: as he was in total control of the USA, he spent his time pleading with the republicans that he was the adult in the room, and there was enough blame to go around, so he won’t play that blame game. Such circuitous logic in outer space, very cool, allowed him to do nothing, but ingratiating himself with the plutocracy, personally, while the pundits could claim it was all beyond them.  That apparent madness does make sense, underground.

Now, however, that the government of the USA can borrow for nothing, to create jobs, it refuses to do so. Both maddening ways of mishandling debt are fruits of the same logic, I claim, and it is all entirely natural, considering who truly lead the USA. Expanding massively on Krugman’s pondering, we explore that apparent contradiction psychoanalytically, and find how to make sense of it all.

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When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents. We are going to think about what this means.

Professor Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico argued in July 2010 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that farming made no sense when it arose. Or, more precisely, makes no sense within the conventional “Better Mousetrap Theory“. That says that new technologies evolve, which are more efficient, and thus they are adopted for narrow, purely economic reasons. And that adoption modifies society in turn.

Instead, Bowles found that a much bigger picture is needed. I have advocated such a bigger picture for a very long time. Most drastically, purely philosophical changes can have direct predatory effects. This is found in several guises, in the rest of this essay. why to insist on predation? Well, predation primes evolution, as the one who has been eaten cannot evolve as a free agent anymore. Plutocracy often devours the very society, country, even the civilization, which has given birth to it. Rome and the Mayas are examples.

Textbooks tell us cultivation and herding came about because they allowed humans access to more abundant food. But an analysis from Bowles shows that they were much less efficient than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they replaced in terms of producing food. I believe that Bowles may overstate his case a bit. However, early farmers ate less well, and there were more of them, and both of these are known facts, from direct archeological evidence (see Bowles’ abstract reproduced in the note below.)

Why then did humans make the switch to agriculture? More children and more war capability is the answer arrived at by Bowles. This supports one of the great philosophical themes of this blog. Namely there is more to economy, and to civilization, than what activates conventional economists.

In particular, the switch from the Greco-Romans to the Franks was, first a philosophical switch, from the enslaving, sexist, superstitious, obscurantist to less sexist, secular, free, in other words, frank, system. It also boosted military performance, just like the switch to agriculture. As the USA deviates from the philosophical principles of the Franks, it deviates back into obscurantism and plutocracy.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Borrow 40 cents to do what? To be the imperial power of the world, the super power, with a total military plus “black operations” budget close to a trillion dollars, bases all around the world, and countless useless military programs (new aircraft carriers, F35, all known not to work before they even sail or fly, etc.) Plus several totally useless, counterproductive wars (and I am counting Libya as a useful war, and it’s mostly fought by France, seconded by Britain, anyway).

Useless wars? The wars are against, or between variants of Islam. So they are, in first order, theological debates. The only correct position for western democracies, looking in, is secularism. Instead, Obama has posed a mullah in chief, telling us some variants of Islam were not really Islam, and that is why he fights them, etc. Ridiculous.  

One true reason for the wars has been the support, by the West, to get oil, of feudal regimes resting on obsolete, fanatical Islam. When Obama says there is nothing wrong about (THAT) Islam, he feeds the pump. And the animosity. Nothing wrong with Wahhabism? Says the legitimately furious: “Let me show you!”

Counterproductive wars? By striking unlawfully populations by missiles fired from robots often operated by non military personnel, without a UN authorization, Obama has put the USA out of the law in several ways. That Bush started it is no excuse. Bush knew it was wrong, for the reasons I cited, so did not do it much. Now, of course, idiots have said it was highly productive. The same idiots, or the same sort of idiots used to say that the relationship with Bin Laden was highly productive. Then there was 9/11, and they forgot all the idiocies they had said before, and Obama told us the USA did not start it. Start what? The relationship with bin Laden? If Obama makes war in Yemen, said war should be made legally, officially.

Western democracies are not, or were not, and are not supposed to be, piratical regimes operating in the dark on a massive scale. If we have grudges, they should be legitimate, so they should stand in the light, for all to see, and our cause ought to be just, for all to see, and that is why and how we stand in the light… We cannot do this, because our cause is not just. Obama loves to do everything in the dark, not to say the black (since he prefers red), and that is fundamentally antidemocratic, as his campaign argued, following closely my various sites.

So this is what Obama and its USA do with its trillion dollars on war, spent annually: make enemies who have been treated really badly, and then lose wars. Indeed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are total losses. All what comes out of it, is thousands of enraged, fanatical, aggrieved warriors, ready to visit many 9/11s on the West.  At first sight, it makes no sense. But that is because one is looking above the ground. Underground, where Pluto dwells, it makes sense. Therein another true reason for the military madness.

One can compare with France, which was able to fight and win an Ivory Coast war, after obtaining a UN mandate. (Well, in truth, France attacked first, and, because the cause was just, got the UN in, later; the USA cannot go to the UN about Yemen, because the USA’s cause in Yemen is not just!)

France operates on a military budget which is incredibly lean relative to that of the USA. However France engaged as leading actor in the two wars of 2011, in Ivory Coast, and Libya. France had been the leading actor in the war against Serbia in the 1990s (no, it was not Clinton! France was followed by Britain, under a UN mandate, and the USA intervened decisively, but years later). And was the only actor to finish the civil war in Rwanda (the USA just gave a logistical support to France). Of course France was the leading, sacrificial, actor against Hitler, and that is no coincidence. All these wars were, ultimately, big wins, and they helped France, as a nation. Not just her military-industrial complex. It extirpated fascism incompatible with French democracy. And that is why Britain often follows. It does not have to do with materialism obsessed imperialism, but  with the imperialism democracy needs to survive (examplified by the wars the Roman republic led in its heydays).

The difference between the French and American war spending right now, is that the French military is supposed to win wars, at this point, not just being a big pork barrel (France has been there, and done that, way back in the 1930s, leading to the astounding defeat of May 1940).

The American war in Afghanistan was never fought to be won, as letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora proved. It was just fought to justify the American military expenses. The same holds for the ambivalent conspiracies subterraneously manipulated by American services in Pakistan. One cannot escape the conclusion that, when the USA paid for Pakistani nukes, under G. W. Bush, the aim was just to create a potential justification for more military spending by the USA.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Borrow 40 cents from whom? Most of them, from the Chinese dictatorship. Those who don’t know history, nor economics, nor common sense, argue perpetually that this is an insurance policy, as China will never attack who it is owed money by. Right. 1 + 1 = 0. Too! This is literally right, in base two (not in the conventional numbering system, which is in base ten). Nearly all statements can be viewed as right, if one tweaks their context enough.

Right, just as China will never destroy American aircraft carriers, although, in its naivety, the Chinese army believes it can do so, with new special ballistic missiles. Who is naïve there? the Chinese military, or American pundits and lobbyists? With the future F35 defending American carriers, with its puny range, half of that of the existing French Rafale, and its minuscule payload (whereas the Rafale can take off with nearly three times its empty weight!), we can be sure that the Chinese do not feel too scared.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Why? Because it makes the American population into serfs. As simple as that. This is exactly how serfdom arose. From debt. And this is the effect that the American oligarchy is looking for. Because it is inferior, and tries to prove to itself that it is not so, by piling up material goods, with bigger planes, bigger mansions, more islands and beaches, privately owned, more servants… And by piling up power and influence, like Murderoch, to forget the ugly hearts and feeble minds they are affected with.

In the Eight Century, the empire of the Franks, the Imperium Francorum, was the richest, but less defended, part of the world. So it was invaded, from the North (Vikings), from the East (Avars, a sort of Huns or Mongols), and from the South (Arab and Berber Islamist armies, foaming at the mouth, which had created, undefeated, the world’s largest empire, by the sword, in less than a generation, extending from India and China to the Atlantic).

The Franks not only resisted, but counterpunched. They freed Northern Spain from the Islamists, conquered Hungary, pushed civilization east of Berlin, rolled back the Muslim out of Rome and Italy, “Christianized” the heathens up north, etc.

So the Franks had huge military spending. They did not borrow from China, or other hostiles, to pay for it. Instead they nationalized hyper wealth, namely, their piggy bank, the Christian Church.

Then the Frankish military borrowed heavily from the peasants, and made them pay, in turn, for their services. A weird communist organization with lords on top came out of it all: the feudal system. It was highly effective to create military supremacy, as the Franks not only conquered England, Sicily, Cyprus, and crusading armies not only fought and conquered the Balts or reconquered Jerusalem, but the Spanish crusader army, which was supposed to finish Islam in North Africa and the Middle East, for good, got diverted, to the just discovered Americas, and conquered that. (The conquest of North America was stopped by emperor Charles V, on the ground that a holocaust had been committed.)

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Why can’t the government of the USA find the money elsewhere than China? Because American plutocracy, basically, wants to turn average Americans into serfs. That may sound counterintuitive. But it is not. (Moreover, it has a little plot plus conspiracy going with the Chinese dictators, although Immel, head of GE, right arm of his little boy Obama, has screamed stridently recently that it was not so: the louder they scream, the more obnoxious they are.)

The Very Serious People leading the USA are plutocrats and their obsequious servants (contemplate Geithner for obsequiousness). The plutocrats want to keep on flying private jets, live in mansions, etc. They want hordes of servants, and domestics. They want the ear, not to say the beck and call, of the White House.

Krugman attracts the attention (July 31, 2011) upon the fact that borrowing now comes for free, so, presumably, one could borrow massively, not to fund useless pursuits, such as the military-industrial complex all around the planet, but to give people jobs.

However the plutocratic party has insisted to cut spending, just when it should be maximized to put people to work. The true employment rate of the working age population in the USA is now less than what it is in France, the archetype welfare state vilified by Murderochs and other plutocrats. And this is a general effect relative to Europe, see the graph in Krugman’s “The End Of Eurosclerosis“. The USA looks better in employment, only when one puts the elderly and children to work in the statistics (putting children to work is against UN law, and only Iran, North Korea, and the USA think it’s a great idea).

Americans are heavily in debt: when the Greater Depression started, thehousehold debt was 100% of GDP. Now, in 2011, it’s 90%. In 1982, at the depth of the recession then, household debt was only 45%. So people need jobs to get out of this hold, and this hole. The goverment can force private industry, which sits on 2 trillion dollars of cash, to spend it, by ooffering jobs.

Example of legislation enforced economic activity: not just refurbishing schools, bridges, but, say, burying utilities by law, which would be quite useful in areas of the USA threatened by fires, quakes, tornadoes, storms and hurricanes… which is most of the USA. Let alone making housing efficient. The European Union has such laws, and they will make the Union ever richer.

So why don’t the plutocrats want Americans to work? What plutocrats don’t want is to share equally. That would defeat what they are all about, which is their personal splendor, made more prominent by comparing itself to misery. Putting everybody to work would spoil the fun, they want an unequal society. So they do what enhances their glory to themselves: deciding the fate of the world, their way. By doing their biding, Obama hopes to keep on being their aspiring boy, and share their fun, one of the dreams from his father, invited to their houses, eating their dinners, sleeping in their sheets (all of this against old Roman republican law).

Now that all the plutocrats have lined up in Washington in the last few days, reminding their domestic politicos who was the boss, no doubt things will advance their way some more.

What should American progressives do? Or, let’s say, what should those who don’t want to regress do?

Well first get rid of their Trojan Horse, and its black operators. The dark horse speaks one way, and acts the other. He bemoans the tax cuts, but he set them up. One cannot fight war in the front, when one is stabbed, in the back. Better to lose an election, and regroup. The best wars can start with the best defeats, as nothing can increase the motivation better.

So throw out Obama and his plutocratic groveling, to start afresh, with a better idea about what the correct attitude is. don’t worry, he will be alright: the masters know how to reward their operators, “pour encourager les autres“.

The correct attitude is not to grovel to the masters. The masters have proven that they were full of it, in 2008, for all to see, after a decade of decreasing real family median income (a point I have made, long ago, now captured in turn, by Krugman; I used that point to argue that we are in a GREATER DEPRESSION, and the plutocracy has caused it, with its increasing feudal, colonial regime, served by its little boy-servants).

Offering, as Obama did, apparently, to take the first bite out of Medicare and other social programs, vastly inferior, as they are, to what is found in the European Union, just so that the plutocrats can keep on flying in private jets, is within the realm of clear betrayal. How many stabs in the back do we need?

Obama and his predecessor and apparent mentor, G. W. Bush, borrowed for nothing. OK, I am unfair to Bush: he borrowed for covering drugs to seniors. It is Obama who has really nothing to show for it. Even Hoover started a whole bunch of massive employment projects, including several huge dams which have paid handsomely since. Obama, in a much graver economic situation than the Great Depression, has understood nothing. Why? Maybe he is too stupid and full of himself. But he also has no interest to understand anything deep, as it would compromise his literal sleeping with the hyper rich in the Silicon Valley for example (I was there, I saw it). To argue that Obama had a recession, so he could not put people to work is dysfunctionally stupid: so did Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. Those tow disagreed on the extent of public spending. Obama and his Tea Party believes cuts is what is needed. It is not because Obama claims that he is not in the Tea party that he is not it’s, de facto, leader. He is. Don’t read his lips, read his record.

Then what? Differently from Rome, which stood alone, the USA has plenty of competition. So some shrinkage of this whole circus is in the offing (not all nations have been captured by plutocracy, gagged and bound, hand and foot).

As agriculture and herding rose, another activity did, too: civilization, the art of living in cities (the first cities, found in present day Turkey, depended partly upon foraging). So did the plutocratic effect, because capital renders it possible (roll over, Marx, and don’t bother me).

I have argued that the plutocratic effect is a great danger to civilization. Nevertheless, it is not all that simple: indeed war societies do best when led by a well fed warrior class (well fed means taller, bigger, fiercer, better neurology). In other words, a plutocracy.

Highly successful long lived societies in Europe, India, Japan were led by ferocious plutocracies which towered, tall and fair, above the dark, small peasants, while protecting them, as shepherds protect the sheep they eat and fleece. The implicit argument the reigning American extreme right is making is, implicitly, that one. But it is wrong, in the present circumstances.

It is not just that more intelligent societies will, probably, predate on the more stupid ones. And that too much plutocracy promotes and is only compatible with the stupidity of the masses. It is also that the world environment is collapsing, and that making the American population more stupid, a crucial ingredient in the rise of the plutocracy, has contributed considerably to this collapse.

Many governments around the world are increasing spending on real investments, or have created conditions for such by private industry (a consortium of French private companies and banks announced July 30 the construction of a very high speed, 250 mph, train line towards Brittany, to cost 5 billion dollars). The American government is nearly the only one to act against the most basic logic, and to confuse the cancerous growth of Wall Street and its banks with something good. Hopefully, those dangerous delusions will be restrained to its little courtyard, looking forward.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: The picture of being “stabbed in the back”, was suggested ironically by a British general to general Ludendorff, effective commander of the Prussian army in 1918. Ludendorff, a Nazi before Hitler himself, found that name, jumped on the concept, and the Nazis ran away with it, claiming  that the Versailles Treaty (not signed when the Brit made fun of Ludendorff) had stabbed them in the back.  This being said, as the tale of the Trojan Horse has it, it is entirely possible for a nation to be stabbed in the back. This is what Napoleon did to France, as he turned from defender to exploiter. Actually the declaration of war of a few Prussian generals, to the world, in 1914, stabbed Germany in the back (as it was highly unlikely that Germany could defeat France, Britain, and Russia).

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Note 2: Bowles speaking, 2010: Did foragers become farmers because cultivation of crops was simply a better way to make a living? If so, what is arguably the greatest ever revolution in human livelihoods is readily explained. To answer the question, I estimate the caloric returns per hour of labor devoted to foraging wild species and cultivating the cereals exploited by the first farmers, using data on foragers and land-abundant hand-tool farmers in the ethnographic and historical record, as well as archaeological evidence. A convincing answer must account not only for the work of foraging and cultivation but also for storage, processing, and other indirect labor, and for the costs associated with the delayed nature of agricultural production and the greater exposure to risk of those whose livelihoods depended on a few cultivars rather than a larger number of wild species. Notwithstanding the considerable uncertainty to which these estimates inevitably are subject, the evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the productivity of the first farmers exceeded that of early Holocene foragers. Social and demographic aspects of farming, rather than its productivity, may have been essential to its emergence and spread. Prominent among these aspects may have been the contribution of farming to population growth and to military prowess, both promoting the spread of farming as a livelihood.

GREATER DEPRESSION

THE 1930s WERE JUST A WARM-UP. THIS IS THE REAL THING.

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In a few words: There were no good reasons to have a depression in the 1930s, whereas now, there are plenty. We have global, entangled crises in trade, finance, democracy, demographics, resources, pollution, ecology, energy. Let alone unbalanced climate and oceans. So, although avoiding a repetition of the mistakes of the 1930s is a must, it will not be enough to avoid disaster. Meanwhile the Obama presidency has turned into more of the Clinton-Bush madness, with a few new crazy twists, but none of the courageous decisions needed.

Abstract: I advocated long ago that we were engaged in “Great Depression III“, the mother of all depressions. The word “depression”, is starting to  appear, here and there, even among Serious People, as Obamania goes from cool to cold, and dissembling to disassembling. Obama. duplicating Bush, thought it was smart to lower taxes on the hyper wealthy. That helped to explode the deficit. Now, sadly, the president’s erstwhile allies, the bipartisan republicans, have apparently informed him that he is past his expiration date.

Indeed the situation is depressing: never, ever, have many things looked so grim; Obama’s dawn has transmogrified into a sun sinking into red ink. The Federal government spends 24% and takes in 16% of GDP. And has little to show for it… Besides saving the auto industry. Mr. Obama, where is your Hoover dam?

Mr. Obama, why did you not rise taxes on plutocrats, and hedge fund managers when you controlled Congress and you had a super majority, filibuster free, majority in the Senate? (And as I asked insistently, BTW.)

But the drama is much bigger than Obama’s friendliness to those who caused the crisis. A horrendous confluence of disastrous factors is building up.

Even the Late Roman empire’s situation was balmy, comparatively to the torrid events building up ahead.

Only the Mayas faced such a bad entanglement of evils, when a multi century drought struck, and their bickering, plutocracy riddled society, imploded in strife, wars, flames, mayhem. The means of maintaining alive 90% of the population were destroyed. The multi-millennial Mayan civilization imploded, and was still a vaporous shadow of its former self, when the Castillans showed up, six centuries later.

The governments of the West are not reacting appropriately to the present crisis. What we are truly engaged in is a war against the worst elements. All of them; but for tribal racial fascism… so far.

So what we need is a tremendous effort, all together now, and just going on with the plutocracy, while depressing economic activity by cutting spending and evoking “competitiveness”, as the USA and the EU insist of doing, is the exact recipe for disaster. Indeed what we want to avoid is the war of all against all (as happened in the 1930s).

Cutting which spending, and what does that mean? Ultimately, money is a signal of activity. What we need right now is more, not less, activity. And activity has to be well thought out. The free market has proven unable to manage even its own speculation, so it should be put out of its misery, by making it much less free.

The strong hand of careful wisdom should now steer the free market, just as it should steer civilization. Start by noticing that “competitiveness”, all too often, means just war against the People.

Nobody is “competitive” against, no competition helps against, a rising acid sea, or competitive against ever more expensive energy.

So the notion of competitiveness, drummed up by the stupid leadership in the USA and the EU is besides the point. Beating other people will not help. The genus Homo is made to fight adverse elements. But recent civilization, which created those adverse elements, is made to foster them, not to defeat them.

Why? Mostly because, just as in finance, the major decisions are taken by a few self serving idiots in the shadows, using levers (such as the fractional reserve system), which are not on the radar of befuddled masses’ cognitive powers.

The leaders of the “representative democracy” we have today would be acting idiotically, even if they were smart, because they do not use the major advantage of democracy, which is serious public debate.

(Obama just fakes it, as he showed in furthering the mayhem in Afghanistan, or with health care, or with financial reform, or with his non stimulating stimulus, etc.; each time those big decisions were taken in secret, without public debate.

The EU does not even bother to fake public debate, at least under Sarkozy and Merkel.

It is no happenstance that finance is the paradigm of anti-democracy. As one of the Rothschilds, a family of bankers, noticed two centuries ago, he was the real power behind the throne, because he created money, and directed it to go wherever he wanted to. In other words he directed the (economic) activity of men for all to see. So he was a slave master, without whips and chains, having seized the muscles of the multitude. (President Jackson of the USA was aware of these facts, and hated the Rothschilds,  and big bankers in general.)

In the present world, it’s much worse, because the likes of Murdoch not just tell the multitudes what to think and what to feel, but, even, what to worry about (celebrity, not profundity). When some plutocrats, the Koch brothers, decided to create a fake protest party, the Tea Party, supporting the plutocratic cause, it was easy. It was even easier to make a campaign against the significance of a quickly raising CO2 level.

The beggar in chief proclaims he will put a billion in his can, for greasing the wheels of his next election, and experience shows that he will only listen to the biggest contributors. The latter, being obsessed by greed, are a selection of the dimmest.

Yes, a selection of the dimmest, because the money of the plutocrats is often inherited (Murdoch, Kochs, etc.). And, when it’s not, the passion to dominate other men is often the main driver of these plutocrats. So by accepting plutocracy, we accept to be led by the hand of fate (inheritance), and, or, by those devoured by the lowest instincts, and keen to devour us in turn.

Plutocrats direct the very hearts of the minds of the multitudes, to satisfy their masters’ lust.

Europe  has already known such a crisis: after the year 1000 CE, plutocracy grew irresistibly until inequality and inequity, distracted by religious fanaticism, led to the centuries of strife, that characterized the late Middle Ages and the so called Renaissance.

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SEMANTIC  SWITCH FROM RECESSION TO DEPRESSION, Following Yours Truly:

Paul Krugman is embarking on the depression bandwagon, in “The Lesser Depression“. He used to call the unfolding disaster the “Great Recession“. I have proudly brandished the notion that we are in a Greater Depression, years ago, for reasons I will make manifest, once again,  before this essay is over.

I mention this is not because I want to crow about my intrinsic glory, but because the unfolding catastrophe was foreseeable, long ago. My basic insight is that the “Great Depression” of the 1930s was a conjunction of several accidents, like a few waves coming together, whereas what we are facing now is several towering tsunamis, barring the horizon, the result of enormous, inhuman forces unleashed. The mental dwarves who lead us understand this not, and are not up to the challenge.

What we have now is more of the fundaments of what happened in the 1930s, but we cannot say it’s accidental, this time. The way to prevent said financial accidents was deliberately removed by people acting according to an ANTI-PUBLIC IDEOLOGY. How can one have a republic when the leaders have an anti-public ideology? This is an old quandary, already blatant in Rome, 22 centuries ago.

We  also have new structural disasters in the making, such as using more ecology and energy than we have at our disposal with present technology, poisoning the biosphere with greenhouse gases of several types, some of them with extravagant names and industrially manufactured. So the seas are rising and acidifying, droughts are wrecking the planet, and the poles melting, while the Earth’s climate is switching to the hot mode which brought saurians to Greenland and dinosaurs to Antarctica, 100 million years ago.

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DROWNING IN CONTRADICTIONS:

Everybody knows about Mr. Obama: when he could, and should, have removed the tax loopholes of the hyper wealthy, he did not. Instead he went on a crusade, killing Afghans and Pakistanis, in violation of the laws of war, in the later case. Now he has killed lots of Afghans and Pakistanis, it cost a lot of treasure, lives, and limbs, and he has nothing to show for it, because he was engaged in one side of an Islamist civil war, which ought to be none of the business of the secular West.

If not a great humanist, Mr. Obama is, at least, a great humorist. For two years, he could have augmented the margin tax rate of the hyper rich to 99%. But, instead, he made taxes on the hyper rich lower than they ever were. So now he has a deficit, and he points at the newly elected republicans. He calls politicians “irresponsible”. But who was responsible of the USA, in the last 30 months? Mr. Obama could have taken thousands of decisions in the first few months. Instead he claimed that he was going to change Washington with cool love, and waited for the republicans to love him, and approve of all he might perhaps want to do, first, before he would try to do it. 

Now that Obama cannot ask the hyper wealthy to pay as much tax as the middle class, guess what? He claims that he wants to do so, to reduce the deficit. Or so he says. Darn, he forgot to do it when he could. Is he just phenomenally stupid, as some commenters in the New York Times are now finally suggesting? Or is he greedy like Clinton, and faking his supporters out, while conducting an effective policy on the right of the Tea Party? Or is it both?

Now Obama makes noises about hitting the brakes, the middle class, Social Security, Medicare. He says that’s because, a government is like a family, and has to watch its money. I guess the adults like him and his friends the financiers and plutocrats, get to spend as much as they want, while the children, the rest of us, are on a tight budget.

Obviously, Obama does not even know that he does not how money is created in a country. Otherwise he would not claim that a government is like a country, with him as the father of the nation. Government delegates authority to private banks to create most of the money. The government itself starts the process, namely the government itself creates money. Families don’t create money out of thin air, Mr. Obama, governments do.

In truth, as Krugman says: “Even if Washington and Brussels succeed in avoiding immediate financial catastrophe, the deals being made will surely make the broader economic slump worse.”

OK, the Europeans don’t have the excuse that Obama has, to be officially financed by Wall Street. The development of the month is that the French, also known as the “Europeans” came out with another half baked (thus indigestible) plan to rescue “Greece”, that is, themselves. States will lend 108 billion Euros to Greece so Greece can pay what it borrowed before, and, this time, finally, the banks are taking a cut of 50 billion euros or so. (The latter point thanks to Merkel, who seems to be waking up).

In other words, this plan crosses a psychological Rubicon: It is a PARTIAL DEFAULT OF A COUNTRY, Greece. It’s like the first rock coming down, symptomatic of an avalanche. By the way, the private bankers were also at the EU meeting. That’s more honest. But who elected them bankers? Just in the case of France, the French national debt will augment by 15 billion euros (~ 22 billion dollars), just to rescue Greece, a little country with 11 million inhabitants.  

Bankers ought to be in jail, or out of business, and their property redistributed to those they stole. Instead, they are at the table, feeding at the trough, talking big with the representatives of the People.

Somehow, what’s called “Greece” is a bunch of banks many of them in France (so France wanted a special “solidarity” tax on banks), or in Germany (and Germany found less painful for exposed banks to take a little cut). There is a French habit to have “taxes on solidarity”. The Germans fear the French imperial approach of making a super-state of the style Napoleon and his imitators visited on them in the last two centuries.

Then there is the real Greece of taxpayers, and small incomes, suffering while the super rich plutocrats, including the Orthodox Church, do not. The least the Greeks could do is to pay taxes, as they are in deep sh.., IMF director Strauss-Kahn pointed out, a few days before he himself got in deep sh…

To enhance my considerable popularity, I would propose a tax on Mount Athos, a vast private peninsula where the female gender is forbidden by the monks. Hey, please, one never knows, especially when a long deprived monk comes across one of these tempting sows, the help of the Lord could not be enough, and he could turn into a real Strauss-Kahn, grabbing whatever can be grabbed on a sow… Mount Athos is adorned with some extravagant new monasteries financed by those immensely wealthy and honestly hard working Russians…

So the Europeans came up with a Statement By The Heads Of State Or Government Of The Euro Area And EU Institutions (pdf). The fun part is, more of the old stuff, the famous 3%:

“All euro area Member States will adhere strictly to the agreed fiscal targets, IMPROVE COMPETITIVENESS and address macro-economic imbalances. Public deficits in all countries EXCEPT those under a programme will be brought below 3% by 2013 at the latest.”

Greece, is under a “programme”. The Greeks had insisted to convert the Drachma, dramatically, into the Euro, at too high a rate. That made Greeks instantaneously rich, but long term uncompetitive.

Speaking of competitiveness, Obama and the EU leaders views “competitiveness” as a panacea. Everybody will outcompete, beat up everybody else! Beating others up, is the wrong obsession. We saw what that one leads to, in 1914. If one improves competitiveness too much, worldwide, we will be at each others’ competitive throats. The improvements to be made ought to be phrased differently, from the EU to Washington.

It will be interesting to see how many European countries end down under a “programme”. The will expressed by the two big dogs, France and Germany, to reduce deficits under 3% is to be taken seriously: that is what they did in the 1990s, and Germany squeezed very hard its working class to become more competitive. It did it harder than France, and came out better.

So now we have a two speed Euro group: the big dogs pulling ahead, the colonies in tow. Nothing wrong with colonies, in my book. Better a big empire, than a big mess. (That does not mean that empires which cause messes are welcome, quite the opposite!)

***

SELF FEEDING FINANCE IS AN EXPONENTIAL TO PLUTOCRACY:

There are more than analogies between the crises in Europe and the USA. There is a common fundamental cause to most of the troubles of Western politics: the PRIVATE-PUBLIC MONEY CREATION SYSTEM THROUGH GOVERNMENT INSURED FRACTIONAL RESERVE LEVERAGED PRIVATE LENDING (thereafter to be called, as financiers do, “fractional reserve banking”). OK, it is more than a mouthful: it is a brainful, if you will forgive me this neologism.  A brainful which made us all sufficiently stupid, so that this exploitative system can perdure.

The very fact that fractional reserve banking is a brainful explains why we are stuck with it: nobody who is enraged enough to want to destroy it, understands it, and most of those who understand it will not complain about it, because they profit from it. “Fractional reserve”  is basically a banking system which makes the rich who are in finance richer, without much effort, if they are allowed to use it for their own profit without retinue, in connivance with the elected officials.

Fractional reserve leverage lending allows private individuals, unelected, unsupervised, to create money. Out of thin air. Differently from families. For some reason, those individuals, the bankers, also create politicians. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse: all the money they create is invested, not in the real world, but in a parallel universe they themselves defined, which allows them to claim unearthly profits.

Banks ought to NOT be allowed to speculate in finance, just in the real economy. Even Sarkozy said that at Davos, to the obvious rage of his audience of plutocrats (not that Sarko himself is not plutocratically connected: he is, very well, in several ways; just he was seduced by the truth for a moment).

When banks are allowed to speculate in finance, they create a self feeding loop, familiar to musicians using amplified music, when the sound of loudspeakers feeds back into a microphone. One cannot say this enough: the public has to understand it, to force their leaders to do something about it, to block the plutocracy’s conspiracy to capture civilization (whether this conspiracy is conscious or not, whether some are really plotting or not, is irrelevant: they have to be stopped).

***

EURO CRISIS, OR CONVENTIONAL BANKING GONE POLITICAL:

Critiques may point out that, indeed, non linear self feeding is the problem with American banking, but preventing it would have not saved French and German banks from slip shot investing in “Greece”, “PIIGS”, and the like. Correct. But the bankers invested in the European equivalent of American subprime mortgages, in connivance with the elected officials, knowing full well that bankers could do whatever, and they would be rescued by the friends they made sure got elected, by using the new serfs, the taxpayers. It was a win-win combination: the worse it got, the worse off the serfs would be, augmenting the bankers’ glory.

Because, at best, glory is most of what the plutocrats are about. Glory allows to forget the rest, the frailty of the human condition.

The self feeding financial speculation loop was the fundamental problem which led to the crash of 1929. Since then, every country has dealt with that situation differently, just as the meaning of “Central Bank” has differed in different countries. For example the safeguards in France prevented French banks to be caught in the 2008 meltdown. However, many French banks are getting caught in Southern Europe, more than banks of any other country, because of standard lending.

As the Germans went through a purgatory in the 1990s, accepting lower salaries, and lower profits, to build the future, they could to do it again. But watch France, because, if the economy cracks there, the People will rise in revolt. Also do not forget that there are large stimulus programs on, privately financed, government steered, at least in France. Thus the situation of France and Germany is not the same as that of the USA. As long as the center, Franco-Germania, holds, nothing much will happen in Europe, in the way of revolt.

***

WHY GREATER DEPRESSION? LET’S REPEAT SLOWLY:

Let’s revisit again, in a bit more detail, the causes of this Greater Depression.

The present state of affairs is afflicted with most of the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is also adorned, with new ones.

An example is oil: it was becoming the new energy source in the 1930s. Right now, we have NO NEW ENERGY SOURCES. Oil will start running out badly in 2016, as both new and old fields prove very onerous.

What about renewable energy? Well, most of that is hydraulic. Solar could be a game changer in the South West USA, but has not received the support required from government to develop it massively.

Why is it that we have new massive energy source? Because we are led by irresponsible plutocrats, and, just as many Roman emperors, they fear really new technology (not all Roman emperors were so: Hadrian, for example, was an amateur architect, who had more than an hand in the construction of the Pantheon, the world’s most advanced building; but other emperors paid engineers to not reveal their inventions, on the ground that they would be socially disruptive!).

The reasons for depression found in the 1930s that we do not have presently are the collapse of international trade, the bankruptcy of thousands of American banks, and the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia. Those were accidental circumstances and consequences, which transformed a severe recession into a sharp calamity. Right now, we have the obverse: an irresistible catastrophe, not to be saved by any accident.

True, some of the old errors have been avoided, this time. But worse errors are being committed.

Leaving in place the financial crooks , idiots, and scams who caused the crisis is exhibit number one. In the 1930s, many crooks and their thought systems were promptly evacuated. By 1935, all countries were expanding strongly. Some (USA, Germany) started in 1933, thanks to revolutionary means. Yes, FDR was a revolutionary (for the better). Hitler was also a revolutionary, for the worse (but some of the methods were the same, namely going over the money economy, directly into the activity economy, by government fiat; Hitler did the freeways in the 1930s, Eisenhower did them, in the 1950s; now China is doing high speed trains, all over, all too fast).

Under the guidance of the self interested, crooked bankers, everybody in the West has turned into Barack Hoover Obama, father of the overspending family. Activity is cut back, just when it should be spurred. As long as the White House is not set on fire, that sounds smart.

Another new error, is a rise of fascist and plutocratic propaganda within the Western democracies themselves. In the 1930s, in Britain, France and the USA, the fascists tried to seize power (in France and the USA through insurrection, in Great Britain, by having the pro-Nazis discreetly steer the British state). They were rejected with lethal force in France and the USA, and Britain came to its senses, threw out the pro-Nazis, and aligned herself with France by 1938. It is true, as I always say, that much of the western plutocracy was allied to Hitler. But that was subterraneous. American GIs  were left unaware of the help American plutocracy gave to those who were trying to kill them.

Right now we have this strange situation that forms of fascism have gained traction in the  USA, ever since 1979, when the White House attacked the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.  A succession of “wars of choice“, in other words, wars of aggression, where engaged in, starting with the Afghan war (I know the propagandist in chief says the opposite: he says what he was told to say). All these wars are susceptible to earn hanging to their authors, according to the precedent of Nuremberg.

The most famous propaganda feat was the attack against Iraq, which concluded a ten year siege, supported by the massive propaganda from Rupert Murderoch, CCC, and many other loud speakers of the plutocracy.

Propaganda, in the West, and especially the USA, was made against human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and for torture, injustice, and war crimes (such as strikes against civilians without due process, using robots in foreign, sovereign countries). This enormous reversal against the tradition of the Enlightenment is working: polls show that young people have been seduced by it. As Hitler put it (paraphrasing him):”I don’t care about you, your children already belong to us!”

Some will say that I mix everything. No. They would say that because they have a small, handicapped, mutilated definition of plutocracy. Plutocrats are not just about wealth. They know they cannot enjoy wealth forever, because they basically STOLE it. They can only enjoy it, and their descendants, if and only if they demolish human rights. That is why they support wars of aggression, fight human rights, and support the tabloid mind. Plutocrats have never met an instinct they found base enough, for their evil purposes.  They even support the Greater Depression, because, with a bit of luck, it will bring the best fascism ever imagined.

The Patriot Act, Guantanamo, etc. threw large parts of the Constitution and tradition of the USA below the plutocratic, imperial bus. Moreover, whereas the bankers were left free to jump from windows in the 1930s, this time they are getting all the money they want from their political pals…. So that they can stay on top, and feed their pals again. Another self feeding loop.

So, although the exact same fundamental causes as in the 1920s are lined up now, differently from the 1930s, those causes have been left unpunished, at least in the leading countries of the West. In the 1930s, the bad bank managers were removed by bankruptcy, leaving banking cleaner and smarter thereafter. Nowadays the vultures are fed, and revered:”My friends!” say the president when he evokes them. (Whereas Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin FDR, were independently wealthy, and their minds had not been captured, or made, by the plutocracy; Teddy Roosevelt became president from the assassination of McKinley, by an anarchist; so Teddy was fully aware that things had to change, after a 20 years depression at the end of the 19C).

Another cause not found in the 1930s: the West is struck by globalization, which has become a weapon the plutocracy manipulates with gusto (in the 1930s, American plutocrats only manipulated Germany with gusto).

Globalization is turning into reverse colonization. Indeed Western serfs are left increasingly with no job, but pauperization.

In the 1930s, the world’s greatest industrial and technical power was the USA, the self, but accurately described “arsenal of democracy“. Thus the “Great Depression” was just a slow-down, a momentary adjustment to a more socialist system, from unsustainable plutocracy. Right now, the USA is losing its supremacy in nearly all ways. Not just this, but it is riddled with plutocratic disease. The USA looks more like the head of the rotting fish.

That is why the present economic malaise it is a Greater Depression. It is not just economic and financial, it is moral and mental, and even cognitive. How many people are aware of the outrage of fractional reserve banking? (It’s no accident that Switzerland put the toughest conditions on its fractional reserve banking, by rising the reserve of tiers one capital to 20%; Switzerland is more of a direct democracy, that’s why it does not want to have to come to the rescue of its banks!)

Delusion and self deception only makes the Greater Depression worse. In the 1930s, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pointed out that “we have only one thing to fear, it is fear itself“. Now the ecology is giving way, the energy is getting unsustainably expensive, the water is getting scarce, and the industrial, educational and motivation systems are failing, at least in the West. We have much to fear. And, first of all, we have to fear stupidity itself, against which, the Gods themselves contend in vain.

***

Patrice Ayme

Aphorisms, July 2011

The More Fascist, The More Indignant:

China is upset. How dare Obama receive the Dalai Lama, that Tibetan monk in red? Blood is much better than red. Much better to shoot to death Tibetan refugee children in the back, as they try to escape the dictatorship in Tibet. Too bad there were dozens of mountaineers to witness that, and record it. Or may be it was good, as everybody could see China meant business; if you don’t like it here, you leave, in a coffin.

And remember: the fascism you see is only a symptom. The real disease is deep down inside.

***

Coherence Wanted:

Murderoch and his lackeys are heading to jail. Hopefully. OK, only a few thousands plutocrats and their lackeys to follow them. Some of the charges could be the same as for the Nuremberg trial: promoting war of aggression. Others would be new: promoting publicly torture and inhuman treatment, something the Nazis did not dare to do.

Let us be clear: Nazism was repressed with ferocity, but not soon enough to prevent the death of 70 million (yes, seventy millions, it was not just about Jews).

Nazism was a mental, civilizational disease that struck Germany progressively, over a few generations. It developed, in a place, Germany, which was initially pretty pacific (but for Prussia). Racist fascist plutocracy developed to mass murdering proportions, because it was not struck, in a timely manner. Nevertheless, advocating torture and wars of aggression is something that even Nazi Germany knew was a bridge too far.  So, in a way, thanks to Murderoch and his friends, imitators and collaborators (that would include Tony Blair), the situation is philosophically worse now.

By not striking its plutocrats now, the West has been weak. Obama has been irresponsible. Which makes him now responsible of any further decay, looking forward.

Now that Murderoch and his salaried criminals are been exposed for what it was clear they were, over decades, a new dawn can be seized. It is an occasion to get out of it clean. At some point, civilization has to be defended, or one will go down the ethical drain, as Rome did.

And that means writing down bad banking investments, and punishing the bankers when it turns out they invested the way they did, from corrupted practice; corruption is the defining word of the Murderoch empire, and its propaganda. The so called financial crisis, a paroxysm of exploitation by the plutocracy, is entangled with Murderoch, and his ilk.

So is the war in Afghanistan, started by the USA in 1979, against a secular republic. Now the self described democrat in chief is allied to a narcotrafficking, Islamist regime, thoroughly corrupt and rotten, and NATO is supposed to spend 15 billion dollars a month there (officially), let alone all the maiming and murdering… That is progress, and civilization, only in the Murderoch sense.

***

The Education Of Effort:

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, harassed by cancer, is going back for chemotherapy in Cuba. “I find myself before my highest mountain and my longest walk,” quoted Chavez from Nietzsche’s treatise “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.” Nietzsche’s philosopher-prophet (con)descended down from a mountainous retreat to mix it up with humankind.

That Chavez quotes regularly from an All European philosopher is a good sign. Never call Nietzsche “German“, he would have resented the insult. Nietzsche was the first to say that he was anything but German (although he wrote in German). If you insist, you can call him “Polish”, he said.

A beautiful steep and vertiginous path up from the sea next to Nice is officially named after Nietzsche, who hiked it regularly. Nietzsche, a solo mountaineer, even on ice, even when (lethally) sick, was friendly to reality. And reality is encountered in the mountains, or at sea, or in the wilds, not in saloons and high society. That is why Nietzsche resigned from the university: he wanted freedom of thought… and emotion.

Nietzsche’s strident warnings about the lethally violent mood which was going metastatic in Germany, were not heeded enough by enough people of the German persuasion.

French and German socialists made a last hour, coordinated effort to stop World War One, with a general strike. Tragically, the effort came to an end when the most famous French tribune, Jean Jaurès, himself a top professional philosopher who became a leader of the socialist party, was assassinated by a French nationalistic fanatic. Otherwise we would have had a show down between democratic progressives and  fascist plutocrats, rather than between Prussian and French armies.

The great showdown between democratic progressives and  fascist plutocrats, has no happened yet. Throughout the 20C, that fundamental civilizational reset was diverted into side issues, such as Communist fascists against racist fascists, or democrats, against fascists. But the full causal confrontation has never happened: at Nuremberg, many more should have been sitting, many of them not German. Many of them Western industrialists and bankers, who had financed Hitler, or even done his job before he was in power.(For example by creating the monster IG Farben.)

At first sight it seems strange that Nietzsche, an advocate of the “Will to Power” would be followed by the socialist leaders. But it’s not: you need lots of will to climb. Nietzsche was angry against the transformation of the German people into an unthinking herd, manipulated by newspapers. The socialists had the same problem.

We, the world, have had the same problem, as the plutocrats were authorized to Foxify the world. Fox, owned by Murdoch, is the dominant TV channel in the USA, with an unending parade of beautiful people pounding Nazi logic, for the whole world to learn by rote. Crafty as a fox, it lives off red meat, as it, and its friends, scavenge, worldwide.

***

The Hypocrisy Of Social And Financial Success:

Now what to think of beatifically happy authors such  Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, another French philosopher who became a success author of gnan gnan theater? (Schmitt has been translated in 50 languages, and basks in it.) I appreciate his theater (literally and figuratively). But not his philosophy, which is most dangerous, because it lies.

Schmitt claims that “anger is utter stupidity“. Well, he is neurologically wrong, and an hypocrite full of himself, besides. I guess that the declaration of war of September 3, 1940, of Britain and France against Hitler, an act of astronomical anger, was also “bêtise compléte“, to quote Schmitt in his original French.

Schmitt ought to make us angry, no wonder he does not like anger. Schmitt was born in Lyon. Why did Schmitt become a Belgian citizen? Obviously, to avoid high French taxes. That’s a well known trick which many who come into money in France practice (other authors flee to Ireland, where authors are not taxed at all (!), and corporations pay only 8% tax; no wonder France, Germany and Britain feel that Ireland is exploiting them… and their banks).

Why are French taxes much higher than in Belgium? France has a serious army and an expensive military-industrial complex, whereas the profession of Belgium is to not defend democracy.

That hypocritical defenselessness was the main cause of the Franco-British defeat against Hitler in May-June 1940, as the sudden switch of the Netherlands and Belgium from Hitler-friendly to lamentable victims, and their strident calls for help, completely disorganized the French and British armies, which rushed in to help, as Hitler had hoped.

So Schmitt smiles beatifically, but this deformation of his face, truly a mask, has no value. He went to Belgium, not out of goodness and giving, but out of selfishness and anger. Yes, anger. The anger of a man who had to pay his share, and refused to. Acts can talk louder than smiles. Better the smile from an angry man, it’s worth something. The smile from a mask is worth nothing. The most recent neurology shows that the only way to shake the brain into shape is with strong emotions.  And anger is the prime strong emotion.

***

Better Late than Never:

After more than 3,000 French bombing strikes on Kaddafi’s mercenary forces, the Libyan National Transitional Council, NTC or CNT, has finally been recognized by the USA, July 15, as the legitimate Libyan government. France recognized the NTC March 10.

Force for the better? Force for the better. If democracies live on their knees, soon they will eat dirt. France has fought hot wars against Qaddafi, on and off for four decades, it’s time to finish him off.

The French national Assembly voted to pursue the war in Libya, 482 votes for it, 27, against. All the Communist deputies voted against. (Thus those Americans opposed to the war in Libya are French communists, aligned with Moscow! I am trying to be funny, because the hour is grave enough.) Some of the communists argued that Syria was treated better. This is not correct. Just Qaddafi killed twenty or thirty times more, relative to the population, than Assad has so far, before French bombers bombed.

France is trying to do the transition right, in Libya, to anchor the righ side of the Magreb. Algeria was told to stop sending petrol to Qaddafi. And that will be stopped, one way, or another.

Have no silly hope: should Assad persists in his evil, Pluto inspired way, and engage in much further, Qaddafi like behavior, he is next. Once again, we are not in world where democracy can sit peacefully, next to fascist regimes getting bloodier everyday, without compromising its own survival. (And that sibylline declaration holds for Israel too!) Besides bombings, weapons can be sent, some of them from planes landing in the desert, as the French do in Libya, putting anti-tank missiles in the hands of the Berbers… (in a touching re-enactment of the Algerian war).

The French PM argued that “la solution politique commence a prendre forme“. Kaddafi’s chief of staff was received by the French president. Negotiations work better at the point of a gun. (As pointed out by Bruce Willis in Besson’s movie, “The 5th element”.)

***

More Faces Than Janus:

“The Economist”, the magazine which used to celebrate Pinochet and his friends from the CIA, is definitively less sanguine about the USA. It revealed that the French government was, rightly, shocked, after massive war efforts in Ivory Coast, Afghanistan and Libya, to hear from the departing Secretary of Defense of the USA, that the Europeans were not doing enough in defense.

Quite the opposite, the French, and other Europeans, noticed that the Americans made a puny effort in Libya. Now, of course, Libya is strategic for Europe, whereas Afghanistan is nothing to Europe. Europeans are in Afghanistan by solidarity with the USA, to help them catch their ex-mercenary, the rebel Bin Laden. I wonder how that is going.

American defense is huge. But it’s not just a giant police operation, the USA policing the world for what they view as the better, it’s also a military-industrial complex which takes care of its business by never ending a war too soon. The situation in Afghanistan is a disaster mostly because the main agent of the war since 1979, the USA, made it so. Including with its importation of bin Laden, to Afghanistan. It was a made into a deliberate disaster (as it was advocated to be, at the start, by Gates and Brzezinski), again and again. The interest of that was to keep a reason to be (there) militarily.

After 9/11/2001, the USA could have easily killed bin Laden, be it only by grabbing the situation at Tora Bora, a mountain range were bin Laden was besieged. The USA could have also imposed on Afghanistan a secular constitution, the best way to return to the pre-1980s situation, and separate the secular forces from the Islamists.

That which was not done in Afghanistan, imposing a secular constitution, can now be done in Pakistan, and OUGHT to be done. It was just done in Bangladesh.

***

When The USA Ought To Swallow Its Own Free Trade Medicine:

“The Economist” also ran an article drifting my way on an important point of American defense. Namely it observed that the F35, the new American fighter, ten years after it was decided to build it, is turning into a radical failure. The least of its problem is that it will see service not before 2016 (a full decade after the more performing Rafale).

Among other problems, like being slow, and having little cargo capacity, the F35 carries only two missiles inside (the only way it can pretend to be stealth). The F35 is so under-armed, that American generals, “The Economist” informs us, wake up at night in panic, covered with sweat. American analysts have concluded that the F35 was no better than the F105, a plane shot down in great numbers in the early stages of the Vietnam war, before it was replaced by the more performing F4 Phantom.

The French rival to the F35, the Rafale, has been engaged very successfully in combat in Afghanistan and Libya (the Rafale is a multipurpose aircraft: it does air superiority, interception, bombing, ground attacks, and reconnaissance).

The Rafale can carry more than its own weight in ammunitions, and 250% of its weight with supplementary fuel and electronics, because  they can hang from 14 hard points below its vast, but compact dart style wing, helped by a  big forward canard, full of stealthy, reactive electronics. It also has twice the combat radius of the F35 (combat radius is crucial for carriers, and the combat radius of the F35 is abysmally too small, only 1,000 kms).

The Rafale is protected by active stealth (it makes anti-radar), so it can be metallic and fast. Anti-radar works so well, that it is unlawful in cars.

Rafales attacked Qaddafi’s tank columns while facing fully operational and active modern missile systems some mobile, some fixed, at point blank range, in the desperate, last minute defense of Benghazi. So effective were the Rafales that they covered non stealth Mirage fighter-bombers operating with them.

This action in Libya definitively proved that active stealth works (passive stealth, American style, is known NOT to work, as was demonstrated during the war against Serbia: A Czech system imitating modern radio astronomy was able to detect F117 stealth planes, and direct cannon fire appropriately… All modern warplanes, since 1940, that is, since radar exists, have had stealth coverings, by the way. So American style stealth is as old as radar. Active stealth is a completely new technology, only the Rafale has it.)

“The Economist” says that the USA ought to scale back the F35. But it does not notice that the USA ought to swallow its own medicine. If the European Typhoon and Rafale, especially in light of the “Meteor” ram jet missile development, which they are made to carry, are better, why should not the USA buy those? Is this not the key advantage of free trade?

The British, especially, and the French, quite a bit, have bought in the past American weapons. Although the Americans refused to buy European made, superior air tankers (which the Australian and British have bought), the French, to this day, use American air tankers (KC35). And have used in the past American fighters (the Crusaders).

The Brits use American strategic missiles and submarines, which they bought (France makes its own, completely independently of the USA). Could it be that the Americans refuse to reciprocate? And use their military-industrial complex not just as an indirect instrument of imperialism, but, directly, as a way to prevent others to have one? (Small production lines being very expensive.)

Justice, economy, and the belief in the free market, should lead to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be for the USA to give up on the F35, and replace it with Rafales.

Some would whine that this would be the end of American defense. But not at all, quite the opposite. It would improve American defense. The USA could concentrate on its strengths, if it cooperated more with the Europeans. Trade American flying robots against Rafales. The French would be interested (as they are debating buying American drones, with their more advanced tech).

The Americans are way ahead in drones, and other aspects of electronic warfare. Reinforce that advantage. Moreover, an adequate defense for aircraft carriers against ballistic missiles is crucially absent, and tempts rogue elements in the Chinese military to hope that they could keep American carriers in the middle of the Pacific, far from the puny 1,000 kilometer range of the F35.  That mesmerizing possibility will make them more aggressive than if they had no hope.

As the American defense budget shrinks dramatically soon, European cooperation in developing hyper expensive weapon systems ought to be welcome.

***

 When An Army Is Right, Militarism Is Moral:

Eva Joly, candidate to the presidency from of the ecologist party in France, thinks there should not be a French military parade on 14 Juillet. This has created some controversy, as Joly has double nationality, and became French 50 years ago. The French PM let it be known that this showed her French culture was not that deep.

I do like and esteem Eva Joly a lot, and admired her work as a tough investigative judge against the French plutocracy, made, in the face of death threats. However she is completely wrong on that one.

Now, of course, I am myself a fanatical anti-militarist. Still, civilization needs to be defended.

In 1940, France and Britain came to the rescue of Norway, after Hitler attacked it. Joly was born in occupied Oslo in 1943. The Nazis committed atrocities in Norway (war crimes).

if France and Britain had done nothing against Hitler, Hitler would have gone east (he had an accord from 1935 with Great Britain to this effect). France and Britain could have waited as everybody else in Europe was having a fight to death with Nazism. That was the American “isolationist” model. The model of Eric-Emanuel Schmitt, in other words: no anger, it’s an utter stupidity, gnan-gnan reigns.

Michel Foucault, the philosopher, made fun of the sentence “civilization needs to be defended”. It is fashionable to view such an idea as deeply reactionary. However, one has to be careful to not be an opulent exploiter of a system, while decrying it. Condemning the cake, and those who want more, while eating the cake and splurging, makes one into a liar.

So it all depends. If it is to fight Hitler, no bomb is big enough. If it is to fight strikers (as happened in the past in France, or the USA!), the military ought to stay in its barracks. Thus the present author is against the war in Afghanistan (mostly because of its history, and the fact that, in turn, created an irreversible gangrene), but for the war in Libya (not only are the rebels on our side, but their ideology is correct, being ecumenical, and non Islamist).

Anchored deep in the French psyche is the tremendous sacrifice of anti-fascist wars, with the huge losses they entailed.  The verdict is not that the wars ought to have been avoided, and France should have disappeared, or turned Nazi, but that the wars should have been won at a lesser cost.

Nietzsche screamed loud, about German hyper nationalistic racist fascism, but people paid attention too late. To this day, idiots teach haughty lessons about WWI having been caused by other factors, spread all around Europe. What France learned is that, when Prussia attacked Austria, it ought to have intervened. And Britain learned the same, when Bismarck connived to make it appear that France attacked Prussia. France and Britain learned that one had to make a stand against fascism, and the earlier, the better.

***

Historical Chaos:

Of course the onset of WWI could have turned differently if Jaurès and the German socialists could have pulled a last minute strike to avoid war, as they tried to do (but Jaures was assassinated by a French fanatical nationalist). This means that millions of the workers knew that the war was a plutocratic plot, and a fascist one, too But not enough knew it, and they did not disobey enough.

By being anti-militaristic, Jaurès was anti-fascist; and he was right to be so; in the end it’s half a dozen plotting fascist generals at the head of the Prussian Army staff which created WWI.

***

Too Soft A Philosophy, Too Drastic, The Consequences:

In a way, there was a first war, which France, thanks to Voltaire, refused to fight. That was the Seven Year War, against Great Britain and Prussia. As a result most of the world French empire was lost, and, ironically enough, the Lingua Franca of the world became English (the old “Anglo-Normand”).  

That’s when France shrank, and the Anglo-Saxon empire became giant. There are three ironies in this:

1) that French self imposed defeat led to French vengeance, and the creation of the USA, and weakened Great Britain so much that she could not be of much use to France at the start of WWI and WWII (although Great Britain was of some use, in WWI, as the ten or so divisions of the British Army of general French (sic) played a role on the Marne).

2) although the Anglo-Saxons attribute their superiority on the French to the subtlety of the English laissez faire, the truth is the exact opposite: they won because of their militarism, an attribute generally bestowed, ironically, on the French…

3) France and Britain, long the same country, are again quite the same. But their creation, the USA, the fruit of their discord, has some wild tendencies which need to be addressed, and harnessed, lest the Atlantic turns into an insufferable split, and lest the advantages one could find in this gifted child be denied.

***

On Bastille Day, 14 Juillet, a French soldier was killed in Afghanistan in combat. The day before, 5 French soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. From a suicide bomber Afghan soldier, during a sura.

A lot of morals in this. First, how come the French have been inside Afghanistan since 2001? Was not that a war started by Carter on July 3,1979? Somebody explains that. Why does not carter fight his war alone? After all is not his Nobel peace prize just for that?

Second, the hare brain plan to give power to the Afghan military seems prone to unforeseen explosion.

Third: the big mistake, in Afghanistan, was to fail to separate friend and foe. How could have one done that? By imposing a secular constitution. It was easy to do in 2001/2002. But I forgot: Bush was preoccupied with allowing his (ex?)friend bin Laden to escape.

That was just done in Bangladesh, and the Islamists went rabid in the street. Religious fanatics always do that, it’s part of the process of calming them down. But the Islamists are not represented in parliament, and secularism ought to weaken them further.

So, practicality in this? Insist that all and any theocracy is no democracy, and sanctions apply. That would, of course, include Afghanistan. So give an ultimatum, and evacuate.

***

Warning To Egypt:

Standard Islam and its standard Qur’an was created by a military regime, twenty years after Muhammad’s death. A civil war started, among diverse interpretations of Islam, to this day, 13 centuries later.

In a way, what we see presently in Egypt is a continuation of that history. The war will go on, until secularism triumphs, as it did in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.

***

There is lots of value in post thunderstorms sunsets. As we come to appreciate their beauty, we come to appreciate the apocalypse, any apocalypse, &, thus, to transcend it. thereafter no fight is too hard, no mountain too high, no martyrdom too cruel (esp. if visited upon others.)

***

***

What’s so hot about being cool? The snake is cool, the mind is hot. So, is it not cool to have a mind? A burning subject in cold semantics.

***

Yes, of course the real problem is not the banks, which only claim to be suffering. It is the consumer debt. And the debt cannot be fixed, except by winding it down further. Thus, the government has to create jobs to compensate. Instead, the cutter in chief only intends to cut, cut, cut.

Later Obama will switch to the progressive stuff, he said July 15, so progressives should support him. Presumably after the country has died from a 1,000 cuts…

***

Save the banks, say the plutocrats, and they smirk. Instead, banks which require public help ought to be nationalized, as Reagan and Bush Senior did during the failure of 2,000 Saving and Loans.

***

Obama claims to be a democrat. Hope he can believe in. When he was in full power, with the full Senate, and the full Congress behind him, he could easily have done away with tax breaks for billionaires. He just did not think about it, darn. And he could have done rising taxes on billionaires, even after losing the elections in November 2010. But that would have been cutting the branch on which he sits proudly, isn’t?

Thus Obama waited safely for the republicans to be in control of Congress. Then he claimed he wanted to tax billionaires, while going, hand in hat to Wall Street, to beg who he defined as his “friends” for money, lots of money.

No doubt he will get it. Because his friends on Wall Street see no contradiction. They know their boy’s service is always impeccable, and stylish, besides. The boy has got class. Maybe he could be rewarded as well as Clinton.

***

No, they don’t know what the truth is, and they don’t care. They are not looking for it. Truth, for them, means power. They just laugh as they get ahead, trampling us all on the way (spoken form one who has had direct evidence of the caudillo maximo…).

Why this, why now? Because it gets in the air, and a civilization goes down thus; rots by the head. Leaders have their own society, they don’t see the rest.

***

Living on the road to happiness does not beat having a home there. Paid cash, from the savings one made, avoiding bad investments.

***

Israel Outlaws Boycotts Against Israel: more stunts like that and swimming across the Med will become a priority. The old Jerusalem kingdom was supported by West, until it was not anymore. Then it disappeared quickly. Without Western support, Israel is not viable. So be nice. Behave.

***

Paupers Don’t Make A Country Richer:

The Washington crowd thinks pauperization motivates people. It does not. They will find that out, the hard way. People work if there is profit in it. Otherwise, they may as well hang out, go on welfare, and food stamps (which is what is happening).

The minimum wage in France, or Germany, is more than twice that in the USA, and those economies are roaring at this point relative to the economy of the USA, which is stagnant, especially if one counts that only the metastatic financial sector is doing well (instantaneous German expansion is around 6% at this point, France is at 4%, the USA is folding over).

***

Truth, BTW, even in formal logic, is not fully elucidated. (For more on that search for “Tarsky”, a late Polish-American logician, and “truth”). No wonder truth is hard to find in political life…

***

Patrice Ayme

Sometimes REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION.

IMPERIALISM, PLUTOCRACY, FRANCE, USA.

Abstract: One of my American readers is under the impression that I insult my American readers. I try my best to show below that his objections are not as deeply grounded as my observations. I am basically replying to his short note with visions of enormous contexts which change the debate completely. Put an ant in orbit, and its vision of things should change. Thus wishful thinking makes happy.

The concept of “emperors”, and plutocracy, are given meaning through some of the detailed history of Europe, America and the world.

Here are a few of the notions explored: 1) imperialism is, fundamentally, fascism at national, or civilizational level. It just extends military order over a vast territory. Sometimes it is necessary for the continuation of civilization, and there is nothing wrong with that. Europe was mostly at peace during the Middle Ages because of the Imperium Francorum, a gigantic empire with strategi depth that Rome dreamed of, and which kept the savages at bay. When that empire waned, and nation-states rose, so did war.

Fascism evolved as an instinct because it was the only way for groups of savannah dwelling, meat eating primates to survive, as super organisms, when struggling for life was the only way out. So fascism, intrinsically  is not any worse than teeth, because one can eat people with them (don’t smirk: at the battle of Cannae, at least one Roman legionary with disabled limbs, left only with a functioning jaw, but still inhabitated with the offensive spirit, ate through his Punic enemy).

2) Most Americans know nothing about plutocracy, because they have been brainwashed into ignoring it, except to pay their respect (every plutocrat has to be called a “philanthropist” by Very Serious Americans). Hence the lamentable show, a sort of Godfather movie, on a continental scale, with everybody paying their respect to the hyper rich. Most American critiques mimic sheep who have never seen wolves, and don’t know what those big teeth are for.

The number one safeguard of plutocracy is to persuade the sheep, that there are no conspiracies, no plots. They live in the best, of all possible worlds. Whereas the evidence to the contrary is astounding. The CIA recruited bin Laden in 1979, the year Carter attacked Afghanistan. Murdoch, the plutocrat from Australia, and England, for years, has been rampaging through minds with his lies, lies which advantaged the plutocracy. And so on.

We even just learned that the FBI was harassing Hemingway. Few noticed. Only Hemingway knew, and his friends thought he was crazy, because he knew, and they refused to know, as good, Very Serious Americans, learn to do, early on. In other words, Hemingway’s friends became a way to drive Hemingway crazy, thanks to the FBI (they tried similar tricks with King). In all these naiveties, the lack of real history in America shines brightly.

But now America has stepped into the flow of history, and ignoring history is tantamount to be carried away by its furious flow. For example, CIA agents encouraged bin Laden to become an abject creature in the 1980s, far away. But that had some consequences in 2001, and thereafter, closer to home. One can pique history, but it may come back to swallow those who riled it up.

Differently from Americans, Europeans lived through history, and bask in its relevance. Or irrelevance. Sometimes too much so (as when the Flemish celebrate frantically a battle Philippe IV of France lost in 1302, which make them cling to a provincial mind set of the sort which could only welcome Nazism with open arms, in 1940; it all started with too much taxes requested by Philippe’s government on the textile industry, to annoy the Anglois; French nobles led a revolt, in 1302, and nowadays the Flemish seem to have gone crazy with the idea of their selfish mini state).

In France, since 1789, the People and the plutocracy have been at war always. This is one of the fundamental truths of France. It is more true than wine, cheese, and, of course, this is not the sort of concept which is brought to the attention of the American populace, with the urgency it merits.

Hostility to hyper wealth does not make France a welfare state, just the opposite: it makes France less of a welfare state for… the hyper wealthy (so they flee to Belgium, see above!) It also makes the country pretty nice, causing, paradoxically, a flocking of world plutocrats to buy real estate in France (making French property the most overvalued real estate in the world, among significant countries).

***

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HOW GEOGRAPHY INFLUENCES PSYCHOLOGIES, AND THE HISTORIES THEREOF:

Countries have psychologies, arising from their geography, their histories, and the solutions they found to address them. Some countries are even more than that: they achieved the status of full civilizations.

Egypt was the first such a case: it was clearly both a country, and a civilization. That it was all along an incredible serpent of fertility unifying Nubia (i.e., Black Africa), the Mediterranean,  Arabia, Mesopotamia and the Levant is no coincidence. It is a small example of why Europe became so superior later: as a nexus of ideas. One cannot just be a nexus by sitting there, though. One has to have the appropriate software. Egyptian fascism became too much at some point, and Egypt was taken over, as fascists often are, when they cross the line.

I am not embracing the Jared Diamond’s drift in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” that it was all a lucky accident that the beasts, the plants and god know what else, came to serve the Europeans (who, therefore, got plenty of lucky breaks they had nothing to do with). Actually Jared Diamond changed his music when he wrote “Collapse“. That later book was more philosophically correct (so it became less famous, did not get any Pulitzer prize, etc.).

In “Collapse”, Diamond observed that, faced with ecological collapse, during the Middle Ages, Europe and Japan reacted appropriately with strong governmental intervention (as usual with Americans, Diamond talks a lot about Germany, although the measures taken by the much stronger government in France where much fiercer, and have been unparalleled before or after, except may be in some Polynesian islands;  people were interdicted from some regions, to let nature replenish itself, an old Polynesian trick).

My thesis, indeed, is that mental activity of the superior type is necessary, and often sufficient to insure civilizational survival. In the case of Egypt, too much intellectual fascism (perhaps necessary to resist the “People of the Sea” invasion) led to a mental collpase, and then sneaky subjugation by Libyans, and a slow descent into irrelevance. Plutocracy, a form of fascism, can lead to irreversible intellectual fascism.

Imperialism is still another form of fascism. Actually it is the generic fascism of countries and civilizations. But, as we will see below, it is a different notion from plutocracy. Amusingly, in the case of Rome, Roman plutocracy, having lost all control, killed Roman imperialism. Both were replaced by the Franks’ Imperium Francorum (which conquered, or reconquered, most of Western Europe, Jerusalem, and even Constantinople in 1204!) where imperialism long kept plutocracy in check.

What caused Roman decline? Very simple. In the USA the plutocrats and their lackeys in Congress do not want to pay for infrastructure and Medicare, Medicaid, schools, etc. So it was with the Roman plutocrats (it’s called the “Curial” crisis). But Romans plutocrats went further: they refused to pay for the army (and hid behind their private armies instead). Hence the invasions, and the need for the central government to… hire the enemy (and even to hire the Huns!)

China, or India, were other examples of countries which were civilizations. But that is also true for smaller ensembles, such as Japan, Vietnam, or Siam (Thailand), or Indonesia, were other examples of small, but full civilizations.

Some civilizations have known foreign occupation (China, under the Mongol yoke with the Yuan), or denaturation (Egypt, first under the Libyans, then the Greco-Macedonians, then the Romans, and finally, the coup de grace, under the Muslim Arabic overlords).

Other civilizations, of course were annihilated (the Mongols annihilated one Muslim empire, and the strongest Buddhist civilization ever).

The case of Europe is more complicated than anywhere else. Europe is a land of invasions and immigrations (differently from China, or even India, Yuan and Moguls excepted). The many peninsulas, mountains, seas and rivers, smack in the fertile, temperate center of the world (OK, a bit to the side), favored a wealth of mini civilizations interacting (quite a bit similarly, but on a much larger scale, to what had led to the supremacy of the Sumerians, or the Cretan-Egypt-Hittite complex, or the Greeks themselves; Greece had many of the characteristics of Europe, on one tenth the scale).

The Greco-Roman empire did not suppress the myriad of local mini civilizations. It accommodated them; that was central to the genius of the Roman empire. Cities were pretty much independent, as the Roman administration was incredibly efficient.

In the Late Roman Empire, the situation became even more diverse, by a strange twist of fate. The plutocrats basically refused to pay taxes, and it is not the People, addled by Christian fanaticism, pacifism, and a passion for the apocalypse, which was going to contradict them. Christianism acted as a form of anesthesia imposed by the plutocrats to common sense. So the central government made treaties with many small German nations. Some, like the Franks, a vast and multiple confederation, did not stay small very long: for them things were looking up, and they reproduced like rabbits.

Europe had to live with the interaction between local mini civilizations, and invasions, and evolved meta principles, long held ideas and emotions, which allowed the necessary  compromises to flourish. This created a mood of openness intrinsic to Europe.

Reading this, Pericles would say:”I told you so! We already had that in Athens, what I called the Open Society!” OK, right, but it did not start with Athens. and also Athens completely contradicted that mood during her long war with Sparta, as she massacred small cities, just because, she could, as she argued at the time, in a rarely attained mix of idiocy, inconscience, and mass criminality.

The Franks were careful to never do such a thing (although, under Charlemagne, three centuries after Clovis, they mass deported some particularly obstinate Germans, from Northern Germany, to South Western France).

Europe’s habit of mixing things up may have started way back, when the Neanderthals fraternized with Africans (their descendants spread all the way to China and New Guinea!)

During the Neolithic, farmers from the Fertile Crescent (Levant plus Mesopotamia) migrated to Italy with their bioengineered plants (we know that from genetic studies). Greece itself was nearly annihilated by steel armed Dorians. Around the same time Etruscans moved from Asia to Italy. And according to legend, Romans and Franks escaped from a burning Troy, also located in Asia. Some will say:”Now you use legend to buttress your arguments?” Well, my point entirely: the Romans and Franks advertized heavily their alleged Trojan origin precisely as a celebration of diversity.

Later Germano-Celts invaded most of Europe. A lot of philosophy came with the Celto-Germans, that the Romans were deprived of (for example the attitude to women). After Caesar invaded the 80% of Gaul that the Romans were not controlling yet, a compromise was found. What came out was a genetically and philosophically mixed civilization.

A point here: Julian (the anti-Christian Roman philosopher-emperor), in an often quoted remark, pointed out that Western Europe was not inclined to philosophy or geometry. However Parisians troops elected him “Augustus”  (supreme emperor, instead of just “Caesar”). And that made tremendous sense.

What Julian, a Greek, did not see, was that the philosophy of the West was founded in common sense. One could read all the philosophical treatises one wanted, but if they extolled superstition, or sexism, they were of no use to the Franks. Anyway, they did not read, that came only later. Common sense was the greatest force, as it spared the West from the worst of the Christian insanities, endless debates about this, that and the other thing about Dog God (said insanities directly inspired the Muslim insanities, a few centuries later, although the Qur’an kept them simple; the Qur’an is no more crazy than its direct inspirer Saint Augustine, who believed, and wrote, that most people would go to hell… Augustine did not reveal his sources, but he was believed… even by the Muslims.)

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AMERICAN RAGE AND SUFFERING:

One of the commenter who graces this blog, John, took some umbrage from my latest essay. First he quoted the conclusion of the essay:

” France, of course, made a real revolution against its own outrageous plutocracy in 1789, and, ever since, French plutocracy has known that there are boundaries not to be trespassed before the People goes into the street, and all hell breaks loose.”

Then John blasted away:

“…ever since…” Oh, you mean as in the Empires of EMPERORS Napoleon I and III?

How stupid do you think we are? Both these naked imperial plutocracies (Emperors, duh) were only terminated by military defeats for the French. And initially both Napoleons’ military adventures had been ecstatically supported by the French public.

The French even tried to install an Emperor in Mexico in 1862. A Hapsburg, no less. Why? For exactly the same reasons the US is reviled now- economic and political hegemony in a faraway region with plenty of resources and a supposedly docile population.

Then there was the suppression of the Paris Commune- all hell broke loose that time all right…how did that work out for your “People?”

Don’t treat your American readers like fools. It’s insulting.”

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IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK:

I replied to John in the comments, presenting excuses for giving the appearance of treating my American readers like fools. I don’t see what the interest of that would be. I am honestly searching for the truth. Why France ended with an uncle and his nephew calling themselves “emperors” is a long (his)story.

I have always been highly critical of Napoleon. Like Sade, and a whole current of thought with him, I thought that it was a mistake to try to ram down the French revolution all over Europe (although it worked in many places, such as Italy and Poland, see below). But the revolutionaries had been driven a bit crazy from the attempted extinction of the French Constitutional Monarchy in 1792, by a general alliance of all of Europe’s plutocrats.

John seems unaware of the full context in which the French “empires” arose. For a number of reasons to be evoked below, Napoleon was viewed as anti-plutocratic. Indeed, during the revolutions of 1830, people were crying out, in Paris, Belgium and Poland, for his son, the handsome Napoleon II, a colonel in the Austrian army, to become king of their respective countries. Plutocracy, like democracy, is relative.

There are no excuses for Napoleon III’s coup. However, Napoleon III, an utopian socialist, played an important revolutionary role in Italy, pushing back and out, both Austria, and the Pope’s secular power.

In France Napoleon III’s economic role was quite positive. That he was eaten by a bigger fascist fish (Bismarck) was unfortunate, in light of further developments… Nevertheless, of course, the nephew could have done all this by staying French president. On the funny side, he was the only Swiss national to have reigned over France.

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THE WORST IN THE HISTORY OF FRANCE DOES NOT HAVE TO COME FROM FRANCE:

Well, that’s even true for the Germans and Nazis! Murderous anti-Semitism, generally viewed as a typical Nazi characteristic, is really, at the root, a Christian story. Hitler was preceded by 15 centuries of rabid anti-Judaism from the Christian churches. It’s important to know where ideas, especially the nastiest ones, come from.

France being in the middle of Europe, in more ways than one, has a lot to do with whatever goes on in Europe, and gts in a lot of problems, just because of her geographical position. Standing in the middle of the most hyperactive continent is not just exciting, it can be deadly.

Not every nation can enjoy the peace and tranquility of having an entire continent to itself, as the USA does (the real natives having been helped out of this suffering world, to enjoy the pleasures of the great beyond, as explained in the Bible).

in those times when France had the dubious pleasure of suffering two emperors, two kings, and two republics, during the Nineteenth Century, the USA was mostly standing out of history. Now the USA, just like France for 15 centuries and Gaul for three millennia (or the Franks for even longer if you believe them with Troy), is standing in the middle of history.

I am going to give an even more extensive answer to gentleman John here. It is hard to know where to start. Why? History is not just about facts, but how to link them in a logical network, of causes and effects. History has always a psychological aspect. Emotions become an integral part of history.

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EMPIRE AND PLUTOCRACY ARE DIFFERENT NOTIONS:

Let me remark first that one should not confuse the notion of empire and the notion of plutocracy. In the original Roman meaning, imperial command was just ultimate military command, which was really very ultimate in Rome. Once, in the dying days of the republic, south of rome, two imperators (one of them the young and famous Pompey) greeted each other, a smile on their lips, with the title of imperators, thousands of legionaries standing behind each.

Caesar, viewed later as the first Roman emperor (he was made “dictator for life“), was the head of the “Populares“, and, although immensely wealthy, embarked on genuine works and reforms benefiting the People. He was assassinated just as he was embarking on an immensely ambitious military plan to secure all Eastern frontiers of Rome, in one stroke of genius.

Since Caesar had by far Rome’s, and the world’s, best army, ever, just then, Caesar’s planned jaunt through the Caucasus could well have worked. The insecure Eastern frontiers, in Germany and Mesopotamia, were probably the most prominent ingredient in the ultimate demise of Rome (so Caesar was right on that one, and his grand nephew of a successor, Augustus was wrong).

The Franks struggled for three centuries of continuous wars to secure the shortest Eastern frontier of Rome the Imperium Francorum in Europe. Exactly where Caesar wanted to have it. That work was completed by 30 years of continuous campaigns by Charlemagne (who got all the credit from those who don’t know the history).

Napoleon I, Napoleon III, and Hitler, all presented themselves as popular, anti-plutocratic leaders. That was the major part of their appeal, as far as the People were concerned. They made very clear declarations to this effect. Whether this was true or not, is a complicated question. It should be answered by noticing that plenty of non plutocratic emperors have existed. Many Roman emperors fall in that category. So do many Frankish kings and queens, or Charlemagne, Genghis Khan (not Kubilai Khan!), or Peter the great of Russia.  All those characters tried genuinely to improve the condition of the People (certainly Marcus-Aurelius or Charlemagne, who were constantly at war, on the battlefield, did not wallop in luxury!)

Right now, clearly the West has an empire, a world empire. Various leading countries (USA, Britain, France, Germany, Japan) play the roles of the major cities of the Roman empire. Others play secondary, but still crucial roles (Canada, Australia, all of Latin America, South Africa, Singapore). Others are crucial allies (India). Some are ambiguously associated (Russia, China).

There is nothing wrong in having such an empire. There is actually everything right. Humanity cannot afford just one major rogue country, at this point in technology and ecology. That is one of the reasons why it is important to get rid of mad dogs, one by one (Kaddafi’s days are numbered, and then the pressure can be brought onto Assad’s dictatorship: Assad had plenty of time to make compromises! Attacking the French and USA embassy is not the right route; the French had to fire their weapons.)

What is wrong, though, is that, far from being a world empire of the People (the explicit aim of Rome, by the way), this de facto world empire is turning, as in Rome, into a de facto world plutocracy (see Murderoch, Rupert).

The turning of a society into plutocracy, as I try to explain, is a phenomenon which can, and will happen, in any isolated post Neolithic society, if it is not deliberately and explicitly contradicted (and ALL durable Neolithic societies had anti-plutocratic safeguards, even to the point of involving human sacrifices).

Unfortunately, under Obama’s pseudo democrats, all the levers are on full plutocracy, even more than they were under his predecessor the war mongering torture oriented plutocrat Bush. Obama can explain that whichever way he wants, the plutocratic facts speak for themselves. It is hard to fight plutocracy in Saudi Arabia, when it is venerated, like the new Golden Calf, in Washington and Manhattan.

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PSYCHOLOGY, OR WHY THE MONGOLS ALLIED THEMSELVES WITH THE FRANKS:

When the Mongol reached the shores of the Adriatic in the Thirteenth Century, they had defeated, so far all Iranian, Georgian, Russian, Muslim and European forces they had met (and all the Central Asian and Eastern Asian forces too).

Only the army of the king of France and his vassals stood between the undefeated Mongols, and the Atlantic. However, the Mongols decided to push no further. Why? Because the Mongols remembered what had happened to their direct ancestors, the Huns: they had been crushed in “Francia”.

Avoiding Paris (“Lutetia“), Attila’s Huns had pushed as far as Orleans (“Aurelianum“), which they seized, and in which they suffered a severe defeat, the same day. Thereafter the retreating Huns, laden with booty, were shadowed by the army of the Franks, which hindered them until the Visigoths, and the main Roman army, could join the effort. The Frankish-Roman-Visigoth coalition inflicted a terrible defeat to the Huns.

Only the double game of the Roman commander Aëtius, saved whatever was left of the army and nation of the Huns, the next day. Aëtius maneuvered to persuade the Visigoths to leave the battlefield, and refused to let the Franks and the Romans mop up the Asiatic invaders. (Over the next few years, what was left of the Huns was defeated in Italy, and then thoroughly exterminated by the Germans as a military force.)

(Interestingly the Wikipedia articles in English in July 2011, on the subject of the Huns, mostly ignore the Franks, at the cost of a few blanks in the history; I don’t think that is an accident, it’s too blatant; the American anti-French racism has got to the point where the history of France is written, by American historians, about one of the two most important battles in France, without mentioning the Franks! Wow. I am not going to bother trying to enlighten Wikipedia further at this point: been there, done that. Working from inside has its limits: many Jews enrolled in the Wehrmacht, or even the SS, 163,000 of them, in the wehrmacht alone, to try to stop the Nazis from inside: it did not work too well…)

There were eight centuries between Attila’s smashing in France, at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, and the Mongol invasion under the overall command of Genghis Khan! Thus the Mongols, through eight centuries of oral history (they had just acquired writing and an alphabet) drew lessons, and remembered them well. All the more since their victory in Hungary against all sorts of European knights came close to disaster.

In the end, the Mongols made friends with those Franks they respected so much, manu militari. The Mongols conquered Damascus and Baghdad with Frankish armies (this is often discreetly ignored). The Franco-Mongol alliance melted away, because the Pope and the French king were furious, and refused to accept the entreaties of the Mongols (on completely racist reasons caused by racial physical repulsion, as far as I can see; the fact 2 Mongol tribes were Nestorian Christian did not help; there was nothing the Catholics detested more than another version of Christianity).

The Mongols tried to defeat Egypt’s Mameluks alone. Instead, it’s them who got defeated. Then they did the next best thing to becoming Christian, and became Muslim instead (as the Pope had refused to send enough missionaries, in spite of official Mongol requests).

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PLUTOCRACY IN FRANCE, & THE REVOLUTIONS IT LED TO:

Colossal plutocracy, closely tied up to the banking systems, was the essence of Francois I of France and Charles V (the latter was a Bourguignon, that is a “French”, sort of; in any case Charles V’s native language was French). Charles V had been elected emperor of Spain, and he soon ruled over all of Europe except France and England.

The private banking system’s entanglement with politics originated just then, as it allowed François I^er and Charles V to spend more than they had (in exchange for making the bankers ever more powerful; in the following century, no less than two Medicis, that is, daughters of bankers, became reigning queens of France, that is leaders of what was, with Spain, the most powerful state in the world; France was actually more powerful, as she was in the slow process of defeating Spain, an 80 years war which (re)-created the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy).

Colossal plutocracy in France, ever more outrageous, proceeded unabated until 1789 CE. The finances of the French government were broken, thanks to the war of creation of America, but fabulous fortunes were all over France, starting with the Catholic Church. (For a contemporary analogy, look at the Greek Church, immensely rich, and untaxed.)

Extravagant plutocracy in France was made blatant by the “Affaire du Collier“, when a besotted cardinal offered a tremendously expensive necklace to an impersonator, a well endowed countess, in the darkest gardens of Versailles, at night, believing she was the Queen he was enamored with (thanks in part to a fabricated correspondence). The thieves were arrested. King Louis XVI allowed the grave mistake of a very public trial.

Louis was less smart than Obama, who hid carefully the miscreants’ shenanigans, their immense thievery, and, for others, violation of human rights, and the laws of war. Just by prosecuting them not. A solution Louis XVI had refused. By honesty. Clearly, he had lost his head, would today’s plutocrats smirk.

In one case, the theft of a necklace. Prosecuted. Consequence: a revolution. On the other hand, 230 years later, astronomical theft, incredible violations: no prosecution, no revolution. So far. But, sometimes, there is worse than revolution, namely stagnation, devolution, decomposition, dissolution, annihilation. That’s where no revolution, ever, leads to. Hubris is not protective, far from it.

The French People did not believe the conclusion of the Affaire du Collier trial, which exonerated the Queen, and, in any case, the People could see the extravagant wealth and corruption in the upper reaches of the Court, and Church.

(By the way, although I gave a link to Wikipedia on the “Necklace Affair”, Wikipedia’s account claims that the Countess de la Motte, the main perpetrator, was not branded. That is not true. La Motte was branded. Just, she struggled so much she got branded on her voluminous breast, instead of her shoulder, so maybe Wikipedia averted its eyes, being American, and that a felony, no doubt; then La Motte bit the executioner, before fainting; these details are well known, and are even in a Dumas historical novel.)

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REVOLUTIONS ALL OVER, ALL THE TIME:

The Revolution of 1789 corrected French plutocracy in part. As French and European revolutionary armies later headed by Napoleon expanded all over Europe, the old plutocracy got irreversibly trashed. The old plutocracy tried to reconstitute itself when Napoleon was brought down for good in 1815. But it did not quite succeed. The revolutionary spirit kept on simmering all over.

The July Revolution of 1830, immortalized, even for Americans, by the famous painting of David, Liberty Leading the People, spread its spirit throughout Europe. Belgium revolted against the Netherlands, and became independent in bloody street fighting. Then occupied Poland revolted against Russia. The following year, the Netherlands invaded Belgium, defeated the Belgians, but had to retreat when confronted to a French army sent by the (constitutional) July monarchy.

By the way, Poland had been destroyed by Prussia and Russia in 1795 CE. However, Napoleon recreated it as a state, the Duchy of Warsaw, and that state was, in turn, destroyed again in 1815 by the anti-Napoleon coalition. Poland would be recreated by the Versailles treaty in 1919 (to the horror of German fascists and their American friends), re-destroyed by Hitler in 1939 (with crucial American plutocratic help). Hitler actually tried to exterminate the Poles (first by starving them to death, secondly by creating Auschwitz… The Jewish extermination there was just an afterthought, a sort of multitasking).

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WHY PLUTOCRACY WENT OVERBOARD IN FRANCE, BUT NOT ENGLAND:

France was a co-inventor of the modern era, while, like the rest of Europe, been saddled with extravagant plutocracy. France was bigger, and richer, so her plutocracy was bigger there than the one in England. England had gone through rebellions, revolutions, and even a republic, before being saddled with an oral constitutional monarchy of foreign origin in the 17C!

When the English King called Louis XIV of France to the rescue, the latter refused to send his army, the most powerful in Europe, to England. An uneasy alliance was established between the Dutch invaders and the English plutocrats, and soon Dutch and Jewish financial engineering funded on debt and the fractional reserve system, was reigning supreme in the British isles (the leverage provided by financial engineering is much of how France was defeated, as Great Britain was able to muster greater financing than its much smaller economy gave it naturally. In a way, a craftier plutocratic plot defeated France! The Rothschild were on both sides of the deed…)

Great Britain did not return the favor consented by Louis XIV, in 1792. Contrarily to what Louis XIV had done, or, rather, not done, Great Britain invaded France, although the French constitutional King, Louis XVI, had not asked for a British intervention. Of course, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and countless other plutocratic forces were invading France at the same time too. Nobody had asked the British to invade France in 1792, except for the old fashion international plutocracy, the so called aristocracy, which was exasperated by the French revolution’s redistribution of wealth, and the lamentable example it presented to the rest of the Peoples of Europe.

The Prussian army was defeated at Valmy, not far from Paris, by French artillery, using new, secret technology (September 1792). The republic was proclaimed. In the south, a Corsican captain would take care of the British.

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PLUTOCRACY: ONE WAY IN FRANCE, THE OPPOSITE IN THE USA:

The recent history of plutocracy in France and the USA is completely different.

The case of the North American English colony was the exact opposite of that of France. It took nearly three centuries for America’s first billionaires. And the earliest of them, Carnegie, had a strong social conscience. Carnegie held that fortune ought to be taxed a minimum of 50%, with a strong inheritance tax, not the 17%, with no inheritance tax, which Obama’s pseudo democrats have made the law of the land.

Rockefeller agreed with Carnegie. But soon, not to be outdone, the wealthy Teddy Roosevelt, youngest American president ever, head of the republican party, embarked the USA on a seriously “progressive” agenda, busting trusts, and advocating enough income for the average American.

Teddy, a cousin of FDR, represented the late father of his spouse as their marriage. So they were close. FDR realized that the banks had violated the fiduciary monopoly they have to create money by leveraging government money, by creating money not for the economy, but for themselves, the banks, directly. That excellent system installed by FDR, was dismantled thanks to the hard work of Summers, Reagan, and Clinton.  Obama, understanding nothing, hopefully, about the whole thing, advised by his close friends the kleptocrats, put Summers in power again. The most gigantic transfer of money from the poor to the rich in the history of manking ensued, very discreetly.

All the money which has not been going towards the average American, is now going to the hyper wealthy. The English colony in America, was, for centuries, the richest territory in the world, per capita. For the first time in its history the average real income has been going down, for more than a decade.

How did we get there? The American street, and unions, used to be strong. “May First”, known worldwide, as “Labor Day” celebrates a revolt in Chicago by the workers, and its bloody repression, where the judicial system was used to accuse, and execute, innocent progressives that the rich wanted to get rid of.

Now Labor Day has been moved to the other side of the year (but only in the USA), and Chicago is feted with economic Nobel Prizes to dignify a para-fascist economic doctrine which says that all good things of civilization will follow from  tremendous financial profits of the few, and the fewer, and the more tremendous, the better. Obama was intellectually polished there. In that very university. Surprise: he thinks like them.

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WHATEVER FRANCE DOES, IT’S IN A MULTI-MILLENNIAL CONTEXT:

French children study history throughout their education. France has much more varied, deeper, older, and fiercer traditions, than the American English colony. That’s a problem with being just a colony, and leaving it at that. The Americans ought to consider that European history is also their history, because it is much more instructive. Besides, it’s the truth.

France has been a great power for at least 15 centuries (and much more if one considers the Gallo-Romans, and the Celts before that). That is plenty of time to be duped by elites, and to constitute an entire library of the ways and means according to which one can get duped by the elites.

What do I mean by this? Here is an example, an inverted example. Just when Caesar conquered Gaul, a wealth of experiences on how to be misled was gathered. For example, a peace was  brokered. A young aristocrat, Vercingetorix, disagreed with older leaders, including in his closest family, and restarted a war with Caesar. On paper, he had much larger forces, as Gaul, united, dwarfed Rome, or, at least the forces the Romans could put in Gaul. But Rome, and the bloody Caesar, were on the correct side of civilization. Sure enough, in spite of much higher numbers in his armies, Vercingetorix had to surrender to Caesar. The majority of Gaul had refused to support him. Instead the majority embraced Rome, and rejected the Druids. The majority had embraced the superior civilization.

It would have been a mistake to go all out with Vercingetorix, against the progress of civilization. The wisest Gauls knew this. (The myth of the cartoon “Asterix” is the exact opposite of what truly happened; although Gaul would stay the most unruly part, within the empire, a nexus of revolutions and rebellions; emperor Claudius was born in Lugdunum (Lyons), and soon Gallic senators were elected; thereupon, Gallia was simmering; no doubt that made the symbiosis with the rebellious Franks very easy.)

Another example; in the 16 C, France knew no less than seven religious wars. How did one get there? It is an immensely complicated story. The regency by the Catholic Catherine de Medici has something to do with it: when the daughter of a banker is in over her head, that’s what you get.

Initially the empire of the Franks, although it was led by very rich men, was not a plutocracy, as inheritance was divided equally. Differently from the Roman elites, who deliberately limited their births and intermarried, to foster their own power, the Franks did not care; when they were rich enough, they lived life, and provided for their many children equally, a per the law (this sort of law, of equal inheritance, and loving attitude to life, persists to this day in France, differently from the USA, where the dog can inherit everything, and Prussian style puritanism is still big).

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FRANCE’S PERMANENT REVOLUTIONS:

The situation after the colossal French intervention in the American war of independence was extreme: France had won everything, but there had been strictly no profit in it. It’s a bit like the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: the USA has, at best, won a colossal defeat. Or two.

By 1789, thanks to investing in America, France was broke. Something had to be done. The Estates-General, having mutated themselves into a Constituent Assembly, found that a remedy was to break the hold of the plutocracy.

In 1789, plutocracy became the official problem of France. As I said, ever since, if lines are crossed by the French plutocracy, the People go in the street, and rebel. Most of the population did not see the revolution of 1789 as finished. After all the monarchy of 1815 was imposed by foreign powers. Cossacks, strutting down the Champs Elysees.

The Paris Commune is the most famous example of these revolutions. There have been four other examples of massive rebellions/revolutions/national cleansings, since the revolution of 1789. And I am not counting minor problems such as the Dreyfus Affair, and the Franco-Algerian civil war, although they were perceived at the time as near, or in the later case, literal, civil wars… When French troops left for Vietnam, in the early fifties, demonstrations were so violent, people got killed.

The Franco-Algerian war caused the death of hundreds of thousands, and the exile of millions. Many French people in full evidence today, quintessentially French, are actually some of these Africans in exile, or now their descendants. My own father was born and raised in Africa. The first time he visited continental France, he was in his twenties, in uniform, with a helmet, and a gun, having known already combat in Italy. Americans have no ideas about those things, nor the fact that Soviet and American intervention in Algeria, much behind the scene, some at the UN, evolved things the way they got. They were helped by de Gaulle’s confused racism (for want of a better word).

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THE PARIS COMMUNE DID NOT FAIL:

John above seems to gloat about the failure of the Paris Commune. Failure? That is not clear. Supposing, for a moment, that Jesus existed, it’s not because Jesus died, that Jesus failed. Actually the whole point of that Christian myth is the opposite: sometimes the only, or best, way to succeed, is to die for the cause.

This notion of martyrdom was fully absorbed by the Christo-Islamist tradition, and is perhaps the main reason why this religion dominates the planet.

Even obdurate atheists such as yours truly, subscribe to many of the theses of Christo-Islamism; now, of course, martyrdom, for example, was fully understood, and endured by the Spartans at Thermopylae: thus a lot of Christo-Islamism just brandishes what was there before. Christianism embraced many notions which preceded it, and made them into religious notions. (An even more spectacular example is that Christianism embraced the central notion of Greek philosophy, the logos, namely, logic, as God, to ingratiate itself with the Antiquity’s main philosophical current. This strategy avoided a frontal shock between Christianity and Greek philosophy; if that had happened early, Christianism would have probably been wiped out.)

The Paris Commune was repressed in tremendous blood, true. Nothing to be proud of, for the conservatives. As many as 50,000 may have been executed during the savage repression, in one “semaine sanglante” (which was made in the name of the occupying German army, by the way… It was not that the French suddenly had an inspiration, and tried to kill as many French as they could. The Second German Reich had just been created in Versailles, subjugating both France, and Germany! See what happened in Bavaria…)

The number of people killed to crush the Commune was worse than in the Revolution of 1789. However, the futuristic measures voted by the Paris Commune were implemented later, worldwide. Those measures inspired not just revolutionaries such as Marx, and Engels, or Lenin, but all the democracies, starting with France.

So, ultimately, the Commune was a success. We all profit from it, to this day. The French Third republic admitted that much, by discreetly freeing, a few years later, all the Communards it had so severely punished. Louise Michel, deported to New Caledonia, with another 7,000, went back to France, and were reinstated. Crucial measures of the Commune, such as the separation of church and state, free secular education for all, were made into law.

Something called… Communism, even had some success, for a while. Many of the ideas of communism came from the Commune, were recycled all over Europe, before reaching the USA.  The Commune worked very well, for all the People of the world. Premier Chou En Lai, or Chairman Mao, and Deng XiaoPing, or Lenin, explained that themselves. In truth, most of the ideas of the Commune are pretty standard nowadays.

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NAPOLEON WAS AN IMMUNE REACTION TO BRITISH AGGRESSION:

John also evokes Napoleon, and brandishes him as an example of plutocracy. Well, not so fast. I personally despise Napoleon. However, if Great Britain had not attacked France in 1792, Napoleon would have not become a dictator. PM Lloyd George admitted that explicitly, more than a century after this tragedy happened.

The British invasion of Provence led directly to Napoleon’s fulgurant ascent. The British held Toulon, and the plan was to march north towards Paris. The French army around Toulon, a city surrounded by extremely sharp limestone peaks and cliffs, had been proven unable to dislodge the enemy. Napoleon, just an artillery captain, came up with an amazing plan. It was implemented, Bonaparte was wounded severely in combat, and the British navy had to flee.

To claim that Napoleon was “ecstatically supported by the French People” is not correct. Napoleon did execute and imprison many. Some were great men. Napoleon was put in power by the bourgeoisie, not the People. He was your basic military dictator, sustained by an oligarchy. He was extremely hated by a large part of the French revolution. During several of the revolutions I alluded to above, the Vendome Column, with Napoleon on top, was brought down.

However Napoleon was long perceived as a friend of the revolution and the revolutionary spirit, because he spent several years, in his early career, in what were basically counter-attacks against the rest of European plutocracy. The fact that Napoleon himself had turned into a plutocracy was such an improbable turn of events, it dawned only slowly on the French people. It would be a bit as if Obama turned into a Tea Party plutocrat, and saved the country by taking out Medicare and Medicaid.

I am unfair: Napoleon introduced many structures of socialist type, which have survived, to this day. Before Napoleon consolidated power, many had advised to not try to export the French revolution throughout Europe. One of the loudest was Sade, already one of the main actors of 1789.

The invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812 was forced by the on-going British blockade, which required the continent would act as one. The invasion turned badly, in part, it has been recently said, because of typhus. His army was mostly a pan-European army. Although his army had been annihilated, Napoleon revealed to Metternich, the French losses has been slight. No doubt that, if the West European forces had controlled Russia, Tolstoy, and other Russian nobles, would have been forced to free their serfs: Tolstoy could pose as a patriot all he wanted, but morality was not clearly on his side.

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NAPOLEON III WAS A MIXED BAG:

It is easy to look at Napoleon III’s big disasters and spite him (as Victor Hugo did: he moved in England rather than staying under the dictator’s boot). However, it’s not that simple.

Napoleon III, who used to sit on the knees of his uncle Napoleon I, was elected president, but, later, grabbed illegal powers. Napoleon III, although bad, was not as bad as people imagine him to be, even at his worst. He plotted with Italian revolutionaries for decades, taking great risks. Finally Napoleon III defeated Austro-Hungary in a tremendously bloody war in Northern Italy, allowing the creation of an independent Italy, for the first time since Rome. Otherwise, it is possible that Northern Italy would still be under the Austrian yoke.

There was much blood at the battle of Solferino between 156,000 French and Piedmont-Savoy troops on one side, and 160,000 Austrians, on the other. 40,000 casualties, in a few hours. That was after the battle of Magenta when a French army defeated an Austrian army, with only a few thousands killed. The Swiss, alarmed, by this bloodbath on their doorstep, created the Red Cross. Napoleon III was himself deeply shaken. This may explain why he let Bismarck gobble Austria next.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE USA & EUROPE:

I am not treating my American readers as fools. I am not even more anti-American than I am anti-German, or anti-French. Although I vaguely despise people who admire Napoleon, that does not make me anti-French. Ever since Napoleon became Consul, there has been a sizable part of the French population hating Napoleon.

The USA left the mainstream of history in the 17C, when England, shaken by civil war, left the American colony to its own instruments (England returned, at the point of a gun, after 1700). That made the USA stranger, and less European, in some important ways, than, say, South America (because South America stayed under European control until the 19 C… except for Haiti… where Napoleon distinguished himself by his brute stupidity and the thorough defeat visited upon him Haiti has not recovered from, to this day).

The Paris Commune fought for the future. The roughly contemporary American Secession war fought for against something completely different. A horrible zombie from the past, devouring humanity and civilization. The American Secession war was the attempt to correct a huge historical mistake, a genuinely American mistake, the American institution of slavery.

Slavery was created in 1619, in Massachusetts. The same state were, soon after, the city government paid for Indian scalps. (Thus the French cannot say that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is treated unusually bad! He is just an alien, Wall Street wants its scalp!)

Slavery was peacefully outlawed under the governance of the Merovingian queen, Bathilde (who was herself an ex-escaped slave, later purchased by the King, who then married her, a tale which says a lot about the strangely republican characteristics of the Imperium Francorum). That was in the middle of the seventh Century, a full millennium before the Europeans who had immigrated to America reinstated slavery there.

Why so much psychological and civilizational devolution? Europeans, by invading the deep woods of America, and running with the savages, became themselves savage. It’s not all bad: sometimes savagery resets the priorities right. It’s an important part of American psychological inheritance.

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REVOLUTIONS WORK:

The American revolution was more a rebellion than anything else. De facto, the English American colony was already run as its own republic. It was just a question of expulsing the occupying army. A real revolution changes society deeply.

When asked about the impact of the French revolution, Premier Zhou Enlai (the guy who was running China while Mao frolicked with nurses, and his wife plotted revenge) famously told an American delegation:“Too early to say.” It was assumed he talked about the French revolution of 1789. 1789 too early to say? That would have been a bit surprising, since the Revolution of 1789 is all over China, all over the United nations Charter, and all over the world. Zhou Enlai, who had been educated in revolution in Paris itself, with so many of his colleagues, knew better.

Indeed one of the American officers with Kissinger at the time has just revealed, 30 years later, that Zhou Enlai was referring to May 68. May 68 spread to Prague, and led to the Soviet invasion of August 1968. That event, like the crushing of the Paris Commune, may have looked like a failure of revolution. In truth it was reculer pour mieux sauter (backing up, to further jump). After the Soviet 1968 invasion, a meek form of the bloodbath of the Suez-Hungary invasion (40,000killed in Hungary), Soviet fascism had lost all and any moral authority.

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MAY 68 WORKED:

May 68 did have an impact on Europe. It ushered a new, more thorough critique of society. The old left (of the Communist Party and “Internationale Socialiste”) came under as much condemnation as “capitalism”. Ecology was taken seriously, old framework of thought, shattered. The impact of European construction was immediate, and very deep.

The American supported dictatorships in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece) were definitively rendered contemptible and intolerable. They were forced to integrate the European Union as democracies, not American CIA playthings.

And that was just the beginning. Many of the ideas of May 68 led to farseeing efforts in Europe to curb ecological abuse. The USA refused to follow suit (and so did, initially some of its lackeys, such as China; although now clearly China knows that was a mistake, and is going the other way). Actually the USA has been going in the opposite way to May 68 in nearly all ways. But of course, the USA did not go through May 68. There was enough of a spirit of revolt in the USA for Johnson to say he would not run for the presidency. And there were riots. But, differently from France, the entire country did not go on strike, as France did, for four weeks.

World history is complex, it’s not just about nationalistic schemes, and whether America is tops, or bottoms. For example Chancellor Bismarck, who brought down Napoleon III, was himself a fascist. However, Bismarck was not as much a fascist as those who succeeded (and overthrew!) him. Bismarck introduced free, universal health care, in a way which worked, in a way which works to this day, and which was much less plutocratic than Romneybama care. American readers should learn about it, to would feel less foolish. And to try to understand why they great progressive leader treat them less good in the Twenty-first Century than Bismarck treated Germans in the Nineteenth Century.

Right now, in the best French tradition, people have protested in the streets in Greece and Spain. France is eerily calm, as the economy is doing pretty well, and the People understands that things are not simple. The French see even the reviled Sarkozy trying to implement reforms, worldwide, which are blocked by worldwide plutocrats. Ditto with Cameron, who has kept some of the anti-plutocratic measures of his predecessor. Hence London financial pirates are fleeing to Geneva… Now the Swiss can be squeezed into submission, all right, but it won’t help, as long as plutocrats can flee to Singapore, or buy New York justice.

We need anti-plutocratic revolutions more than ever. Rothschild explained, nearly two centuries that, individuals such as himself, who created money, were the real power behind the throne. That creation of money is a monopoly which was kindly given by the People to those peculiar individuals.

I do not like USA president Jackson ( he was as bloody and empire minded as Napoleon, but, of course, his imperial invasion was a success). Jackson was ferocious, and he is one of many American early presidents who saw through bankers’ tricks, and did not let them invade the USA. Instead Europeans financed canals.

Meanwhile plutocratic finance has captured the USA, as FDR’s silent revolution, the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass-Steagall”) was overturned by the silent coup instituted by Wall Street, using individuals such as Summers.

A new revolution is in order. But to work, it will need a lot of technical knowledge on derivatives and high frequency trading. Most opposition figures are blissfully unaware of these concepts (not Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a top university full professor in economics, which may explain the furor of New York media against him: when the master indicates irritation, his dogs bark  against the offending individual).

As long as most people are, blissfully unaware, nothing will happen. Except, of course, if enough people get infuriated, and start to break things, which is what happened during the Revolution of 1789.Peopleo ideas have to win. Mastering all too high high frequency trading is easy: just impose a financial transaction tax. If one can get enough votes to bomb out mass murdering dictators, one should be able to get that passed at the United Nations.  Mastering derivatives would be more refined in the details, but there, too, just as with Tax Heavens, the UN should be most helpful.

Right now, pirates have taken control of finance. Democracy needs to put them out of commission, and recover mastery of its economic destiny. In an important, it is indeed too early to know if the fight against outrageous plutocracy started in 1789 has been a success. Right now, with its capture  of the American mind, and of the American political system, it looks like a failure, as other plutocrats are all too ready to point out that, should they be left behind, their own countries would be left in the dust with them.

And what is wrong with the idea of a Flemish mini state? Simple: one of the main reason of the defeat of 1940 was the neutral Netherlands, and neutral Belgium. In truth, they should not have been neutral, because they were democracies, and clearly, in danger of being gobbled up by the racist dictatorship next door (which had gobbled up several Germanoid territories). But they were neutral, because they thought France could take care of Nazi Germany, so why should they make any effort?

Hitler, though had a plan taking into account French empathy. So he attacked Belgium and the Netherlands with even more brutality than he had attacked Norway (where war crimes had been committed). The French command, in a debauch of astounding stupidity, sent its mobile reserve army, seven armored divisions better equipped than the ten Nazi Panzer divisions, through Belgium, into the Netherlands. That was a trap. The real Nazi thrust was way south.

When Churchill flew to Paris he asked the French commander, genral Gamelin (an idiot):” Où est la masse de manœuvre?(“Where is the strategic reserve?) To which the idiot replied, and it was the truth:”Aucune”.(“None”) The reserve had been sent to the ingrate, anti-French Flemish, or thereabout, celebrating 1302 CE.

The situation would have been very different if Belgium and the Netherlands had been allied, a few months, or even a few weeks, prior. Similarly, if Sweden had not been busy selling high grade iron ore to Hitler, and 88 mm guns, Hitler would have had no tanks, no guns, and would have been much deprived.

(Britain having an army would have helped too. Let alone some American growling, which would have scared German generals into submission, before they were irreversibly stained by war crimes the Nazis induced them to commit.)

Nowadays France and Britain are squeezing the juice out of Kaddafi, and the bloody Assad is next. However small European countries don’t help much. Their reasoning is the same as in 1940: let France and Britain take care of the local fascists, in the meantime we shall be rich, because we shall pay less tax. Oh, and this time the Americans are in it too, so why us worry?

This is exactly the sort of reasoning which was the proximal cause of the fall of the Roman empire (hyper fascism and Christianized fascism came later, after enough defeats): the fewer taxes, the less army, the less civic sense, the better. Fortunately, this time, the USA stands with France and Britain, yes. However, their resources are not infinite, and they may have to pay themselves, some way. (The French and American ambassadors just displeased Assad by going to visit one of the cities the Assad family already killed more than 20,000 people in recent decades.)

Although it does not look so, there is a global organization of the planet. Here is an example of a global conspiratorial plot. Pakistani nuclear scientist gave North Korea (and Kaddafi, among others…) the means of building nuclear bombs. In turn, USA plutocrats (such as G. W. Bush) directly used U.S. taxpayer money to develop Pakistani nuclear BOMBS. So, basically, through a little intermediary, the military-industrial complex of the USA financed North Korea to threaten the USA, allowing then to have a pretext to build a very expensive anti-ballistic missile system to protect the West Coast of the USA. Just like with bin Laden, but bigger and subtler.

Stand reassured: anti-ballistic defense probably will not work, and that will be an even bigger surprise than 9/11.

Sometimes revolution is the only solution. And not just in Egypt.

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Patrice Ayme

Anti-French Racism III, The Origins

THE REAL CRIMES?

HISTORICAL PROBLEMS AMERICAN OLIGARCHS HAVE WITH FRANCE:

Abstract: Not only did France create the USA, but French philosophy and law have been insisting, even before the birth of the USA, that American oligarchs should uphold ever higher civilizational standards.

However this French arrogance has interfered with the pursuit of happiness of said oligarchs, starting with the insistence that they should give up on slavery.

As the New World is turning into an old world, American reactionaries have reacted hysterically, as demonstrated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (because the aims were what, exactly? Put Iran in power in Iraq, and start a war with Pakistan?)

The oligarchs also demonstrated that they would rather return to savagery, for example by reinstating the sort of law practiced during the Middle Ages. Living in the woods too long would do that to you.

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As the grotesque interference of the New York oligarchy with the French presidential election keeps on going, like a chicken running around without a head, a pornography of brute arrogance, it is natural to ponder where the rage comes from.

We are living in a strange world where plutocrats are trying to subjugate the democracies brazenly. The tax debate in the USA is typical. By using legal tricks, the 400 richest taxpayers in the USA pay only an average of 17% tax (this is a fraction of the historical average; whereas many in the upper middle class pay 50%, when local and state taxes are added to Federal tax).

Obama, now that he does not control Congress, claims to want to mitigate that, by making some of these outrageous tricks illegal (which he could have done in five minutes the day he became president, but he was too busy lifting his chin up). It costs him nothing to try it now, as wall Street knows well, and he may even seduce some of the clueless, and hide cost savings with Medicare, Medicaid, whatever is anti-Reagan out there, behind a cloud of rhetoric blowing the other way.

The financial pirates scream to high heavens, that this would be the end of the economy as we know it, and their lackeys in Congress concur. Indeed: if you want to call piracy an economy, it would be a step towards the end of that, and the intrusion of more democracy.

 In Great Britain, “News Of The World” is a part of the worldwide Murdoch media and propaganda empire, Newscorp (Murdoch, aka Murderoch, the ardent propagandist for the invasion of Iraq). “News Of The World” hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl abducted in 2002, apparently interfering with the investigation in her disappearance, erasing evidence. She was later found murdered.

Not content with doing the same with victims of terrorism and families of soldiers, the Murderoch people even collaborated with murder suspects, providing sophisticated equipment to allow them, the murder suspects, to spy on the detectives inquiring on them. Newscorp also admitted to paying police.

In a pirouette, James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, announced that “News Of The World” would be terminated Sunday (but Newscorp owns “the Sun”, which has no Sunday edition… so far).

The scandal should reveal, even to the dumbest, an aspect of what I have been talking about, in terms even the dumbest can visualize. Interfering with murder inquiries is seriously criminal business. SO IS WAR MONGERING.

There is a web of conspiracies, plots and corruption between the plutocracy, the politicians and law enforcement, including. This is not new. The Murdochs’ empire is one example out of many. It overplayed its hand with the Strauss-Kahn affair, but this is a small peccadillo, relatively to their enormous propaganda for various wars, which killed millions. Literally.

Clearly, inquiring whether the Murdoch empire is compatible with democracy in the West should be put on the front burner. But Murdoch made a career of supporting so called “conservatives”, in many countries, so the powers that be are in no rush to withdraw the propaganda support they enjoy.

In the USA, the hotel Sofitel director insisted that Nafissatou Diallo, one of his maid, was above any suspicion. However, it turned out that  she was such a notorious prostitute pulling tricks inside his hotel, that she kept on pulling them, even under police protection. The Sofitel chain is owned by friends of Sarkozy, the bling bling president, and twice more people intended to vote for Strauss-Kahn than for Sarkozy, in the next French presidential election.

(No, I did not forget my main thesis that Cyrus Vance was financed by Wall Street, and enjoys the support of a so called “finance committee”, and thinks and acts accordingly: ‘united plutocrats of the world’ is a sad reality. All too many rich capitalist owners and partisans of the rule of financial piracy are one and the same.)

Where does the anti-French racism in the USA come from? Even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal admitted that “Francophobes” were one of the main forces in evidence.

OK, the American plutocrats hate France for showing that there is a less plutocratic way to do things, and it works better. But are there causes lurking deeper in the American subconscious?

The USA was created, thanks to a French war against Great Britain. Without a massive war against Britain, the USA would never have become independent. Americans would be celebrating Kate and William, and Pennsylvania would be a duchy.

The French  intervention happened in three stages: first agitation among American colonists, then, after the rebellion started, sending weapons (as France is presently doing in Libya, including by sending ammunition, anti-tank weapons, missiles, and tanks! The Russians were not happy, but France told them to shut up.)

90% of American cartridges were made in France, during the Revolutionary War. Finally, France outright declared war, and was lucky enough to defeat the British fleet, thus blocking any relief for the main British army at Yorktown, which the French army and Washington’s rag tag rebels were besieging. The British army had to surrender, and the French forced it to submit to Washington. (After the courageous aircraft carrier Yorktown was sunk at Midway, having contributed crucially to the destruction of the elite Japanese carrier fleet, tellingly, American propagandists were careful to name new carriers in meaningless fashion, such as “Ronald Reagan”, the guy who acted with a chimp; much safer to remember chimps, than how one came to be!)

The French war which created the USA cost a fortune (many trillions of constant dollars). Its true cost had been hidden by the King, in secret books, but the French economy, overwhelmed by debt, and a volcano, collapsed, and the King had to convoke a special national assembly (“General States”), which then turned itself into a Constituent Assembly, bringing the French Revolution (La Fayette, head of the French army, refused to fire on the protesters).

In any case, the USA ought to say:”Mom!” when addressing France. That hurts. So France is not often so properly respected, as the USA insists to behave as an unruly teenager who demeans his mother, just because.

Or is there more to it? When the American revolutionary leaders came to Paris to get support and instruction, they were told, by the King’s police, that they could not have slaves, that was against French law. They had to pay their slaves, and treat them as employees, not slaves. And let those employees go, if they so wished.

In other words, the American oligarchs were told that they were not civilized. No doubt a big, bad American humiliation, to this day not properly digested.

After the war, La Fayette tried to persuade his friend Washington to free his slaves, but Washington, while professing to admire La Fayette’s noble spirit, did not. Mr. Jefferson, third president of the USA, a three pence philosopher with beautiful words he stole from others, pretended he would free his slaves, too.

Jefferson even promised the slave child he was having sex with, that he would free her after they got back to the USA. She, and her brother, wanted to stay in France to be free. But Jefferson hypnotized them, or something, and they followed him back to the USA, where their master did not free them, far from it. Honor may be a French concept, but it certainly is not a Jeffersonian one.

Jefferson promised he would free his slaves at his death. He did not do that either. Too busy killing Indians, robbing vast swathes of native territory, and running tremendous debt, I guess. Beautiful Jefferson memorial in Washington, though. All resemblance with today’s events is not coincidental, either.

In any case the French point of view about slavery was finally implemented with the most murderous civil war known, the Secession War (more than 650,000 killed). So the French were proven right, once again, but the price was sky high. Another reason of sorts, to resent France.

One day in August 1914, crazed Prussian generals attacked four countries, including Russia, France, and  neutral Belgium. Everybody was taken by complete surprise (including probably the Kaiser, who had been put to pasture, so that he would not interfere).

The French government was in vacation, Britain, which had been consumed by the Irish question, ‘had no army’ (said Lord Kitchener, who was made War Minister). However, within a day, Earl Grey, the Foreign Secretary, observing that civilization was at stake, got parliament to approve a British declaration of War against the German Second Reich. Canada, Australia, the British empire followed suit.  

The USA did not come to the rescue of its mother. Nor was “the special relationship” with Britain of any import, either. Good things come to those who wait. By refusing to distinguish between democracy and fascism, and between its parents and alien predators, the USA prepared its world hegemony.

In the following years, the USA used the occasion of WWI, to invade Mexico, before finally flying to the rescue of victory in the last four months of the World War (the French army and its serb allies had cut off Germany from its food sources to the south, so Germany would not have passed the winter without starving; a point rarely mentioned).

The Versailles Treaty was to a great extend a failure, because the USA refused to allow France to take all the measures necessary to defang German fascism. Retrospectively, considering what happened next, American plutocracy conspiring and plotting with Adolf Hitler, it looks like a plan, at least subconsciously.

The half baked Treaty infuriated German fascists, though, and they were left like wounded bears, instead of being properly punished, as they should have, as the war criminals they were. Indeed the two top generals of the Prussian army, Hindenburg and Ludendorff,  were the most direct actors in the rise of Nazism. (Full disclosure: I am very distantly related to the plotter in chief of 1914, but enough so, for that ominous figure to have haunted my childhood as a moral question…)

Clemenceau famously claimed that the war with Germany would restart within 20 years. (And it did, and Germany was 2.5 times the population of France.) By 1933, France prepared for war, against Hitler, and the USA started a sort of cold war with France, culprit of planning to disrupt its private garden of the beasts, Nazi Germany, where American plutocrats could roam freely as the biggest predators around.

In September 1939, many nations followed the joint French and British declaration of war against Hitler. To Roosevelt’s hypocritically professed regret, the USA, instead, declared France and Britain to be “belligerent countries“, object to sanctions. American plutocrats and corporations rushed supplies, investments and technology to allow Hitler to keep on fighting mighty France and Britain. Finally, at the very end of 1941, Hitler followed Japan, and declared war to the USA.

In the ruins of extermination camps, where more than ten million died, in an Europe which suffered more than 50 million dead, everybody could see that France had been right all along to oppose Hitler fiercely. Even the Germans came to that conclusion (as Germany suffered about ten million killed, and  lost of all her territories to the east).

On July 3, 1979, the USA’s president Carter decided (secretly) to attack Afghanistan. A few million Afghans dead later, plus lots of American self pitying whining, that war is still going on, thirty-two years after it started (and Obama wants to make it another three years at least). All Americans repeat every day that the war started by surprise that day, on 9/11, 2001. They are just twenty-two years off. But who is counting? That’s too intellectual.

Now we hear from the government of the USA that keeping people in cages without a judicial process is OK (that is what “Guantanamo” means). We hear from the USA that torture is OK. Those who ordered it, keep on writing, in the most powerful media, that it was a good thing, and they are not prosecuted in any way.

We hear from the USA that attacking countries under false pretense (as was done with Iraq) is OK.  It is OK, since the perpetrators have not been pointed as such, let alone indicted (as Bush was told he would be, if he showed up in some European countries, as he is suspected of ordering war crimes).

Amusingly, Hitler and his goons would have claimed to be outraged by any of these concepts: detention without justice, torture, war of aggression. Outraged, officially speaking, that is. By advertizing plublicly this return to savagery, the USA, though, has gone where even the Nazis did not dare to go. This can only cause great ongoing damage to the subconcious, let alone the strict letter of civilization.

The Nazis, officially applied the judicial process (they got French judges to cooperate with them to execute hostages in France, for example; judges love to serve the established order!)

Officially, the Nazis did not torture (they tried to protect Jews, and those who drove the Germans furious, they said, loud and clear). Even as Hitler attacked Poland, the Nazis fabricated an elaborate set-up to pretend that it was Poland which had attacked (it fooled only the despicable, Nazi collaborating governments, such as the Irish, or the American).

We have been hearing even more: the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair was the occasion for American DAs and judges to proclaim that the French are the new Jews, and, apparently, the American justice system is the new Gestapo. All French are to be punished and discriminated against thereafter, because, once, an Auschwitz survivor born in Poland, acted badly with a child. And it’s somehow France’s fault, although the American judicial authorities have been unable to present any justification for any country, or Interpol, to bring up an arrest warrant against the gentleman. That is why Switzerland let him go, and there are no international warrant of arrest against him.

OK, France can defend herself against the American oligarchy. Since Wall Street caged Strauss-Kahn, France imposed Lagarde in an instant. But can the USA defend itself against its own oligarchies? Germany proved unable to do so.

Once detention without justice, torture, wars of aggression, discrimination on an ethnic basis, and prosecutors, or judges, financed by the rich, collaborating with organized crime, have been admitted as guiding principles of the republic, by the entire populace, fascization can proceed further. This is how the Nazis did it (they even used referendums!)

The (American) credit evaluating agencies played a nefarious role in the financial crisis. In exchange for money, they deliberately undervalued the risks, presenting as AAA investments and loans, investments and loans they knew were worthless (and some of their associates were betting they would collapse, as part of that vast conspiracy and plot). Now one of them has evaluated Portugal as great credit risk, in a self fulfilling, but blatantly absurd prophecy. Probably, as they were before, their rich friends were forwarned. Portugal has less debt per GDP than the USA, and a plan to get out of it 9which the USA does not have). So what was the pretext? With characteristic impudence, the credit rating company claimed that the european Union had not offered enough money to private banks!

Those private agencies ought to be framed much more carefully by the law, as Strauss-Kahn proposed. Dangerous creature that Strauss-Kahn. Good that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called him a “sleaze ball” (July 5, 2011, editorial), while wishing to dear god that he won’t become president of France.

Who was behind the Nazis? The American and German plutocracies. Who is behind the fascization of the USA? The American plutocracy. Thus the problem with France.

France, of course, made a real revolution against its own outrageous plutocracy in 1789, and, ever since, French plutocracy has known that there are boundaries not to be trespassed before the People goes into the street, and all hell breaks loose. That is a lesson American plutocracy has not learned yet. But, some day, it will be learned. It may be learned, the old fashion way, the hard way.

***

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Why did France foster the rebellion of English speaking colonists against Great Britain? Because Great Britain had become too powerful. One should not forget the British monarch had just finally incorporated Scotland, a French Celtic ally, into its empire (an old dream of the Romans, who always failed to do so). The British monarchy kept on insisting that it ought to rule France (the essence of the “100 Years War”, which started in 1337 CE, when Edward III, grandson of Philippe Le Bel, tried to recover his rightful inheritance), a claim it would give up only in 1815.

France had lost a world war, the “Seven Year War” of 1756, against Great Britain and its opportunistic lackey, Prussia. In no small part because the philosopher and friend of Louis XV, Voltaire, claimed that it was not worth it, dying for a few “arpents de neige au Canada”. Sometimes idealistic philosophy is too idealistic by half.

Earlier, the first European colonies in North America were founded by French protestants, in the Sixteenth Century. They were exterminated by the Spanish dictator, Philippe II (himself son of a Catholic Bourguignon, Charles V). That is why the first English colony, much later, was hidden hinterlands.

***

Hysterically Bad Pseudo Feminism

BAD WOMEN EXIST.

REAL FEMINISM, YES, HYPOCRISY & GOLD DIGGING, NO.

***

FEMINISM IS NOT ABOUT CALLING MEN MONSTERS, AND WOMEN SAINTS:

Real feminism treats girls and boys, women and men, as equally as genetics allows it. And enjoys the differences of whatever cannot be reconciled.

Pseudo-feminism consists into taking advantages of some feminist appearances to further the same old sexist agenda, where women, instead of being the direct agents of power, manipulate men into what they want. Thus the viper is made to look like whatever it is crawling upon. Pseudo-feminism is not just an hindrance. It is outright hurtful to true feminism.

***

CHARGE FIRST, THINK LATER:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn (“DSK”) has been charged with seven felonies in New York. A plotting, organized crime character accused him of a sexual aggression. Implausibly, he is small, old, weak, overweight, she is big, young and strong, and the silent (!) deed took less than 20 minutes. The punishment for inventing it all is a misdemaneor (as small a crime as possible). How convenient.

Everything indicates that the lady was in the habit of servicing clients, on a very personal basis. However, in this particular case, she deviated from the usual script. “Don’t worry, I know what I am doing, this guy is full of money“, she would have told a boyfriend in jail in Arizona, the next day.

The aggression was completely implausible, and the IMF head was protected by his diplomatic immunity. The IMF head  is one of a handfull of world public servants elected worldwide, and protected that way, when on official business (which DSK was).

However, the DA in New York breathes together with the fat cats on Wall Street, and, like a well meaning housecat, was anxious to bring back an interesting catch for his masters, who, he knew (what are cocktails and dinner parties and fund raisers for?) had long suffered from the macho aggression of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as director of the IMF, and even before that, many times. A little known example: when the cruel DSK saved the Hungarian currency from the New York based speculators. The fat cats on Wall Street and their servants have to be dirty, or they would not be.

Let’s notice in passing that the IMF head is a public banker, not a private one, like the fat cats in the fat, for profit banks. True, the IMF used to be at the beck and call of private banks (as the U.S. Fed is). But that changed under Dominique Strauss-Kahn. That made him into a convict. Convicted to have crossed the plutocracy.

***

QUICK, PLUTOCRATS, LET’S ROLL OUT ANOTHER CRAZY:

Now the rumor has it that a French woman, another pseudo-feminist, will accuse DSK of attempted rape, nine years after the alleged (he-said-she-said) “facts”. As there is a quickly rising probability that DSK’s hostage situation in New York at the hands of the corrupt government will come to an end, it was possible that DSK could, after all, run for the French presidency.

Thus it was of the essence that this French woman, who writes for… Sarkozy, complains about DSK’s greedy, and magical hands (he unhooked her bra below her black “col roulé”, she claimed, while admitting that said turtle neck “turns on guys” and laughed!)  

That woman, who made a joke of the little fable she recounted, hilarious, on a TV show, is suing Strauss-Kahn for “attempted rape” (instead of just sexual aggression). More than eight years later. She looks anorexic, so not all is well with her. It’s pretty obvious she is affabulating and lying, listening to her various interviews.

For instance, just one of many, she gloats that she knew all about DSK’s reputation as a “chimp in rut“. Proof of that? According to her, only a “nearly 60, overweight secretary” could resist DSK (so Banon is not just gloating about turning men on, but she is ageist!) Then she goes to interview DSK, holding hands, then arms, etc., in a secluded apartment? Supposedly knowing very well what would happen, because she is writing a book, just about that?

In 2004, on another TV show, she accused somebody else of sexual aggression. And she forgot to mention DSK! OK, that was in Morocco, with a (male) maid of her mom. So many sex aggressions to remember, so many TV shows to be filmed because one is the youngster Tristane Banon, with nothing to show except being the daughter of Ms. Banon, another (financially) well endowed politician and, of course, that polo neck sweater which drives “mecs” crazy…

Verily, Banon is an example of the celebrity culture, famous for being famous, and well connected to TV show hosts, so she can be seen a lot on TV. Verily, there is not much to look at, another reasons to claim all the chimps are excited, I guess.

If that accuser of DSK is laughed out of court, what next? DSK sexually aggressing unwilling aliens, who, traumatized, fled to another galaxy, so we have no proof, as New York prosecutors cannot get there since Obama cut the space budget?

I am not particularly in love with DSK, but I am in contempt for outrageous stupidity and aggression masquerading as feminism. I lived in many countries, and saw the law being used for aggression, routinely. That is what happens in banana and baboon republics.

***

SORRY, HYSTERICAL PSEUDO FEMINISTS, BUT BAD WOMEN EXISTS:

 Even after the accuser against DSK had been exposed as a gold digger, and a liar who, at the very least, engaged in multiple criminal activities with the help of organized crime, enough to send her to the slammer, Maureen Dowd, one of the editors of the New York Times, called DSK a “predator” (“When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator“, July 2, 2011).

How does she know? Did she conduct a jury trial in her head? Is she a fellow predator in the know? Or does she, as racists do, know because of genetic factors tied to DSK? (DSK is a man, born in Africa as a French Jew, and Dowd always crow about her Irish origins.)

According to her colleague Nocera, a man, at the same through of Manhattan high finance as Dowd, and most of New York high society, the American justice system is right to ethnically discriminate against the French, as he explains in an article July 4, 2011. And he adds that “for the life of me” he sees nothing wrong with that. He patriotically concluded he much prefers to live in the USA, than in France. Indeed in France, he would be probably viewed as an overweight racist, eerily reminiscent of Goering, and his facile verve. Nobody would have anything to do with his craziness.

So it is with Wall Street and its mignons: racism is cool (another article in the New York Times, July 3, basically said that all French complaining about anti-French racism are anti-American, since apparently anti French racism is All-American). But let’s go back to the pseudo-feminists.

***

I SCREAM, THEREFORE I AM:

Some self declared feminists seem to consider that, when a woman screams, some man, somewhere, is a criminal. And that whenever a woman accuses a man, she is a victim. Well, that remains to be proven. Those who have studied in primary school know the difference between “accuser” and “victim”, even if New York Times editors do not.

I am an extreme feminist myself. Actually I know no one as extremely feminist as myself (this is a challenge!)

As Ms Parisot, the head of the larger employer union in France puts it: “Sexism is racism” (New York Times, July 2). Thus I know that this sort of absurd imbalance, where women are viewed at the outset as victims, and men as predators, can only hurt feminism. Actually it is sexist, thus racist. All those screaming after DSK, just because he was a man, and they were legions, were racist (and doubly so, when they added anti-French sentiment to that!)

There are criminals who are women. By telling everybody that, whatever a woman says about a man, he is a “predator”, and she is a “victim”, criminally minded women are encouraged to act up, and those who are into a quick and dirty buck are encouraged to follow suit. Hence pseudo feminism encourages the debasement of women, and prepares a backlash (which could be tremendous). One may guess that this is what the pseudo feminists want, as they prefer a sexist world. They are traitors to progress.

***

SOME OF THE GREATEST CRIMINALS IN HISTORY WERE WOMEN:

Pseudo feminists tell us that women are sheep, and men are wolves. Reality is nothing of the sort.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Transylvania, killed, with horrible tortures, more than 650. (OK, the king owed her lots of money, so things were a bit complex; she finished her life, imprisoned in a set of rooms; her closest accomplices, all women, were executed; two were burned alive.) I do not know of a man who tortured to death, one by one, 650 victims. Even emperor Tiberius, a notorious sadist, comes short.

Catherine Deshayes, “La Voisin”, a central figure of the “Affaire des Poisons” in France in the 17C, recognized the murder of at least 2,000 children. She was burned alive, and did not like it a bit, I am pleased to report.  She struggled so much on the way to the stake, and vituperated so foully during her fiery dissolution, that the public was stunned into silence by so much vindictive viciousness.

Nor did several of her wealthy female accomplices who jumped from one fire to the next liked it very much either (as the Marquise de Sévigné put it; 34 were executed, and the inquiry was stopped because many of the wealthiest and closest plutocrats to Louis XIV were involved, such as his lover, mother of four of his children, the Marquise de Montespan).

Amusingly the well deserved punishment of some of these criminals is sometimes presented as a proof that poor witches were victimized in 17C France, and it is alleged to be a sexist crime. It was nothing of the sort. Under Louis XIV, witchcraft was knocked out as a crime; I don’t like, and even often despise Louis XIV, but facts are facts; sometimes he acted well.

In truth, the main story of the “Affaire des Poisons” was mostly about young women who wanted to inherit the fortunes of their older husbands by sending them to Hades, ASAP. It turned out that there was a huge demand for these services, and La Voisin became very rich, while diversifying in other criminal activities, such as child killing witchcraft, the old fashion way (spilling the blood of the innocent during a “black mass“)..

Louis XIV would have acted better if he had let the inquiry of the Affaires des Poisons” proceed further, and charge La Montespan, and her extremely high class ring. A famous writer noticed at the time that:”The enormity of their crimes protected them from prosecution“. Too big to jail. The same can be said of the financial scam artists which control the USA nowadays. It’s useful to know history.

(Cynics will say that, if Louis XIV had allowed the inquiry to reach higher, the monarchy itself would have been wounded, maybe fatally. This is what happened with the “Affaire du Collier”, a century later. The People of France then realized how rich and corrupt the plutocracy was. Result: the revolution of 1789… which happened in the world’s most powerful country… Then.)

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HORRIBLE ROMAN WOMEN:

Messalina was emperor Claudius’ wife. No outrage was high enough for her. She slept and conspired all over Rome. In the end, not content with living the life of a “august harlot” (Juvenal) by spending nights in brothels, “offering herself to all comers” (Juvenal), she led a conspiracy to kill and replace her husband.

Claudius was weak with women, so they were emboldened to abuse him: after Messalina’s decapitation by an army officer, he betrothed Agrippina the Younger, who poisoned him (with mushrooms, say the antique sources) so that her own previous son, Nero, could become emperor (instead of Britannicus,  Claudius and Messalina’s son).

Conniving, self pitying women have existed before. Shortly before her execution, Messalina was moaning and weeping, and her own mother had to tell her: “Your life is finished. All that remains is to make a decent end“.

Pseudo-feminists need to be told the same: you cannot live as you used to, playing damsels in distress, while asking for equality. Can’t have the cake, eat it, and throw it in the face of the cook. Too many wishes spoil the dish.

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PSEUDO FEMINISTS & THEIR MESSALINA TRICKS:

Nowadays what we hear from pseudo-feminists everywhere is that, each time a woman screams: “rape!”, she is a victim. Well, maybe she is a victim: that remains to be proven. The only thing which is sure, is that she is an accuser. Being an accuser is not free of charge.

Pseudo-feminists always come and whine that rape is a most unreported rape. Well, reporting crime is never easy. For some reason, I appear to have well determined enemies, and I was several times the victim of crimes which I did not report to the best of my ability (including a near lethal attack in which my neck was partly broken from behind, and a bomb attack).

The reason is that I knew who my assailants were, and they were mighty; having a judicial fight is not as efficient as removing oneself from the area, if survival is the objective. In these cases, I could remove myself, so I did. Trying to involve the police and the judiciary, as much as one could, sometimes make things more difficult, or even backfires. I agree that this is not a very heroic attitude. But heroism is not always the most pacific way to resolve a conflict. (These crimes did not happen in the USA, by the way.)

Right now, for example, some nasty types seem to have taken control of my computer and use it to send what I suspect is unlawful material (I know this from MAIL DAEMON returns). I am in the mountains so replacing the computer, or cleaning it from the offensive virus inside, is not easy. However, if what is sent is child pornography, I could have trouble with the authorities (unlawful material planted in a computer is the 21C equivalent of planting drugs in someone’s luggage). But I don’t even know who to report the crime to. (So I will report it on the web to start with.)

With all due respect, pure rape, in the absence of any other violence, is not, in general,  the worst of crimes (although it is very severely repressed, in France or the USA). Pseudo feminists will howl, reading this. But it’s the truth. As Jack Lang pointed out in France (bringing howls, as intended):”Il n’y a pas mort d’homme” (“No human being got killed”… Not “No man got killed ” as it got mistranslated in the USA).

Pure neck breaking is incomparably worse than rape. One cannot put everything having to do with rape in the same bag. Crimes committed with weapons, or against children, ought to be repressed with the utmost ferocity. But injury-less, he says-she-says sexual scenarios between roughly equivalent adults, ought to be dismissed by justice, in the name of feminism, and privacy.

In the name of feminism? How so? Indeed, much of the hysteria about rape assumes that a fully grown woman is intrinsically an easy prey for a man, thus it assumes explicitly that women are inferior, helpless creatures who need to be defended by the authorities. People holding that sort of drift, ought to consider immigrating to Saudi Arabia, where men with guns will take care of them.

Rape hysteria cultivates the inferiority of woman, and even imposes it, as it says to all little girls: oh, if a male attacks you, don’t defend yourself, play victim, and then tell it all, people in black robes who take themselves very seriously will take care of you. Just like in Saudi Arabia.

When the mediocre Maureen Dowd (who had rushed to judgment against DSK, and insulted him gravely) interviewed Christine Lagarde (new IMF head, the French answer to the plot cum conspiracy against DSK), she asked her if she was ever assaulted by a man.

Lagarde answered she was too tall (5-10), too muscular, and too fierce. Any man taking liberties would be slapped or punched. And men knew that, so they left her alone. That was the correct answer. Dowd, in her stupidity, did not realize that Lagarde was implying that DSK did not do it, in view of the formidable physique of his accuser. If a towering Tyranosaurus Rex tells you that, in 15 minutes, it was forced to provide sexual service to a small overweight old panda, something is amiss. (Lagarde announced all along that she would meet with DSK, as new IMF director, whether he was in jail or not.)

As I just alluded to, I have a great expertise as victim: I lived around the world, and people come to readily hate me for my ideas. Some of the countries I lived in were official dictatorships at the time. I have a practical philosophy that assaults come readily in situations like that (I received some threats, on the phone, last week, and it bothered me for a few days; the threat was not of bodily harm, but of putting a number of people together who would accuse me of something; the threat did not originate in the USA, but in Europe.)

Looked at it another way, I am a mountain climber, and I had several close calls (once I survived in a way I do not understand to this day, and would never believe if someone else told me the story; it was the very definition of “miracle”). I lost many friends to the mountains.

However, I am not going to accuse the mountains. We got too much of what we played with. I like to play with fire, too. Once, over confident by a campfire, I got severe burns. A lot of “rape” is a bit like that. The Banon case is typical: from what she was saying, she was pretty sure that DSK (whom she had already met) would try something. And she wanted to put that in her book. That’s why they held hands, then arms, then… (She says.)

I face my music, as a philosopher at war, and all real feminists should face their own music too. One cannot want to be like men, and not be ready to assume the occasional bruise, or to engage in combat.

If rape, or sexual aggression or disrespect, is really a problem, then fight back, as Lagarde said. If he touches you, and you don’t want it, then slap back: the police will have something to look at. If one is too small, too weak, too sick, too old, then it’s something else. But, in the case of DSK, that was precisely the converse: the accuser is an enormous gorilla (for want of  a better word with a less racist connotation). However, she brought the DA to tears, we heard from Nocera, because, in his addled mind, the DA saw her as a tiny victim, just because she was female, instead of observing the towering inferno she is (later when she rolled on the floor, doubts appeared).

Or rather: the DA thought he could get away with pretending that an aggression was plausible, because of the gender of the alleged victim and tried to use that to ingratiate himself to the authorities on Wall Street who financed him. Instead, they are going to be embarrassed, and take a wide berth.

The fact remains that Americans do not see the problem of a racist justice financed by fat cats. (The DA is elected, thanks to Wall Street money, at least in New York, will I repeat slowly, to make it very clear.)

*** 

SEXUALIZING PURITANISM: AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY:

Screaming wolf, wolf, wolf, each time one sees a man acting as a man, is a mental disease. Moreover, it often turns out that, the louder individuals denounce a behavior, especially in sexual matters, the more they secretly engage in it. Reading Maureen Dowd’s violent obsessions of victimization, one gets the impression that she wants to be grabbed by men with big hands, thrown on the floor, and violated in ways she will find delicious, until she can complain about them in her next editorial.

Pseudo feminism tends to claim that men are always ready to metamorphose into “predators”. It vilifies male behavior, even when it is very healthy. So doing, pseudo feminism accentuates gender differences.

Real feminists, instead, would refuse to acknowledge the gender of people, except in privacy. Glorifying  male behavior, just as we glorify female behavior is OK. Nevertheless, anti-sexism will also require a dose of anti-sexualism. The systematic sexualization which has happened in recent decades, when lots of noise is done about sex and when groups claim that some sexual practices make them “gay”, whereas others, presumably are sad, is beyond grotesque; it is offensive, and promotes sexism. What to do with over active seducers (such as DSK allegedly is) is not clear.

I personally despise sexualism. Sexualism consists into viewing other people primarily as sex objects (it’s a neologism of mine). Thus sexualism tends to make the other gender into (sexual) objects, and goes hand in hand with sexism (which views the other gender as inferior). That’s why I don’t like it. 

In a similar vein, it is highly offensive that the depiction of nude cherubs, which was viewed as innocent for centuries, is now viewed as a sexual offense by those who presumably use this sort of distraction to avert their eyes from the delirium of the plutocracy. As a famous king of England (and France! It was Edward III) said:”Honni soit, qui mal y pense!” (“Shamed be who evil there think”).

The human eye sees a lot with what it sees inside. The evil eye mostly sees inside, and paints what it found there, onto others, as Edward said. Suspecting other people of evil, just because one imagined it, condemning them without proof, this was exactly what was so nefarious about the worst mass criminality of the Twentieth Century.

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ANTI-SEXISM IS SUPERIOR, IDIOTS ARE INFERIOR:

Feminism is important: it repairs the injury that millennia of imperial civilization caused to the natural mental equivalence between males and females. Pushed too far, though, it will invite masculinism. A warning occurred when, under Nazism, women were suddenly subjugated back into baby factories. The irony is that there were a lot of fanatical Nazi women (remember Ms Goebbels assassinating her 6 children, so they will not have to live in a non Nazi world?)

Some will say that this is impossible. Well, the only thing that is impossible is the impossible. What has happened before, clearly is not. The subjugation of women would have sounded incomprehensible to paleolithic hunter-gatherers. But it happened, worldwide, in the Neolithic. And women became relatively stupid, from the subjugation they were submitted to.

The situation corrected to some extent, as the less sexist societies had more clever women, who educated smarter children. This was perhaps the main secret of the West: more equal, thus superior, women. This came from the German tradition rather than the Greco-Roman one (and the Franks nailed that point heavily).

A drastic example was the Dark Ages of Greece, when women carried the entire Greek civilization to the children they had with the invaders who had killed their husbands and raped them.

This phenomenon has been amplified recently: most countries know that the road to smarts go through smart mothers. Thus sexism is ever shrinking. But ongoing progress depends upon women rising to the occasion. Instead of using it to make a fool of themselves. As so many did in the DSK affair.

Scratch the surface, find the worst: so it is all too often with human beings (see the characters above, oozing with racism and villainy).  OK, maybe they did not examine themselves very carefully before (as Socrates would say). Or maybe, simply, they did not have mothers who were sharp enough. Feminism which wants us to be all stupid is just another form of prostitution serving the established order. Serious women, and there are many in close orbit around DSK (such as the head of the socialist party), will take a wide berth from hysteria.

Hysteria has its uses. However, hysteria is traditionally viewed as the major problem of females, as its etymology indicates. Thus hysteria is precisely the sort of behavior the modern female brain will be careful to use with parsimony.

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Patrice Ayme