Great Extermination, Big Nation, Little Minds?

SUPERIOR MILITARY BIG EMPIRE MAKES, BUT NOT CIVILIZATION:

  It’s 9/11, so we should celebrate, I mean commemorate, right? It’s not as if someone like me did not see it coming. I don’t have to commemorate in silence, because I have lots to say that is relevant, to avoid much greater horrors, looking forward (concentrate on Fundamentalist thermonuclear USA sponsored Pakistan for a hint).

 Thus I commemorate by telling the truth about the aggression of Washington DC against the Republic of Afghanistan, starting in the mid 1970s and related, more fundamental, conflict generating issues, such as foaming at the mouth nationalism, as made pathetically manifest in the deluded 2012 democratic and republican conventions.

  When nationalism blinds understanding, it’s evil. The plutocrats, and the corporations they own, irresistibly attracted by the minerals of Afghanistan, have first operated discreetly to create mayhem in central Asia, and then played USA nationalism as a violin, to get what they want; the greedy terror state they own and pay for.

  By coincidence, a day after I criticized Obama for fantasizing about the “USA is the greatest nation” Robert Kaplan published the major article in the weekend Wall Street Journal about why the USA is such a great nation. One would expect the Wall $treet Journal to extoll furiously the grandeur of the USA, and the glory of capitalism, and its armies, as Obama and Biden did last week, in an orgy of imperial self satisfaction. Well, think again. Most people don’t become rich by being idiots 24/7.

  Kaplan says that the pre-eminence of the USA is a lot about occupying a big, wonderful, special place. So make a note of this: while democrats, supposedly on the left, are screaming their heads out that the USA is a great, incomparable Reich, thanks to the intrinsic genius of its great race and its plutocratic ways, the Wall Street Journal, yes the journal of Wall $treet, more humbly conclude that it is all about enjoying the pleasures of treasure island. Kaplan observes:

  ” The U.S. itself is no exception to this sort of [geographical] analysis. Why are we the world’s pre-eminent power? Americans tend to think that it is because of who we are. I would suggest that it is also because of where we live: in the last resource-rich part of the temperate zone settled by Europeans at the time of the Enlightenment, with more miles of navigable, inland waterways than the rest of the world combined, and protected by oceans and the Canadian Arctic.”

  The resources of the USA have indeed proven, so far, practically infinite. No doubt, the wasteful habits of the culture of the USA come from that. And no doubt wasting resources has proven a profitable multiplier. Such as when wasting the buffalo, which, in turn, starved the well armed Plains Indians, a helpful factor in their genocide, that movie goers who watched “Dancing With Wolves” may remember.

  For most of the age of oil, the USA was the world’s primary oil producer. Not because USA citizens are geniuses, but because there is oil in the USA from the North-East, to the Los Angeles Basin in the extreme South-West. It’s something about the ground, not the hogs.

  This generosity with oil was most useful to clients of the USA plutocrats and corporations, such as Adolf Hitler, and his thousands of tanks and planes. Hitler started his invasions propelled by Texas oil…(Sold to him in spite of the Neutrality Acts. ) That was crucial to the self described “French-haters“. In geography is not just reality, but the impact of past and present philosophy:

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WORLD LARGEST COUNTRIES BY LAND AREA:

1 Russia: 17 million square kilometers.

2 Canada: 10 million sq kms

3 USA: 9.6 sq kms

4 China: 9.6 sq kms

5 Brazil: 8.5 sq kms

6 Australia: 7.7 sq kms

7 European Union: 4.3 sq kms

  The first six largest countries are all recent empires established by military power (whereas the EU was established by debate). About two-thirds of Chinese territory was conquered over people who have fought the Han (most of the PRC’s population), for millennia. The Tibetans, for example, controlled much, or most of “China” for centuries. So did the Mongols and the Manchu. No wonder the Chinese government is not open to minority rights, self determination, and floods the exterior regions with Hans.

  The case of China is not the one where military invasion is the most conspicuous, because, after all, the Chinese have been fighting over China for as long as Rome existed.

  Russia was bottled west of the Urals until 1700 or so. Now Russia controls a land area four times larger than the entire European Union. Russia will be able to hold onto this immensity either by becoming part of the EU, or by deploying (extremely) excessive military force indefinitively (in other words, fascism at home).

  Let’s look at the other four. If one goes back 250 years, one notices that the ethnic composition of the land masses above changed completely over these centuries. The original inhabitants were (mostly) wiped out. Compare French New Caledonia, half made of descendants of the original population, and Australia next door, where the aborigines are mostly gone and the object of genocidal policies even in the 1960s or 1970s. By the official definition of genocide, which applies when one separates children from their parents. Canada used the same genocidal policies, just as recently. The USA had physically eliminated the Indians much earlier.

  One can classify the large empires in three groups. One, made of China, is actively oppressive. that means China did not yet exterminate the 100 or so ethnic groups that cramp the acts and empire of the dominant Han. Another, group, Russia, Brazil, is a mix of invasion and elimination (remember Stalin’s massive, murderous deportations). There are still natives left, and a tension in the air. The rest, made of Canada, USA, Australia has, in practice, eliminated the natives (except in a few zones, where they are shown as counter-examples of little consequence). Ethnic cleansing, at its most thorough.

Some will say that’s instant history. But yesterday’s history makes today’s philosophy. 

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IF WE KILL THEM, THEY WILL GIVE US WHAT WE WANT: 

  How do we abstract that? Holocausts work. Can we propose a more general abstract from this? FORCE WORKS. That’s not surprising, but the fundamental fact of human evolution.

  Some who know basic classical mechanics will shrug that such is the definition of work: the application of force over an extent of space. This is an example where the categories found by deep thinking in the hard fact sciences can be readily used in the “soft” sciences.

  People on the “left”, would be “progressives” and similar types, do not like to be reminded of this principle, that force works, nowadays. Their excuse is that the fascist, Bolshevik style revolutions, which naturally abused force, being fascist proved to be, well, fascist, and abusive. To the point that they made a bad situation worse: it’s unlikely that the Czar’s regime would have been as bad as what Lenin put in place. By a very long shot. Indeed, fundamentally, it’s the Prussians who attacked Russia on August 1, 1914, who ended up putting Stalin in place. It would never have happened otherwise.

  But the truth is otherwise. In truth, they have learned to be happy to be pawns. Forgetting to apply force is inhuman. One does not have to go bloody in the streets, Lenin style. The most important revolutions are spiritual, mental, brainy.

  Thus the Indignes (Indignados, reduced semantically to “Occupy Wall Street” in the USA) movement is (was?) a good thing. Do we need president Romney to resuscitate it? Well, except for a severe degradation of the economy, there will be no president Romney. just singing the praises of Obama whatever he does not only will not bring progress, but an ever deepening regression down the hell of plutocracy. opening up like a giant, civilization devouring caldera.

  And just as the idiocy and jingoism of the Athenian People brought the defeat of Athens, and ultimately democracy, so it would be again.

  Mental force can be as quiet. A teen age French physicist made sparks in his father’s lab, and observed carefully how an electric circuit reacted. Thus, in 1839, less than 200 years ago, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel discovered the Photo Voltaic effect. So is real innovation: a deep affair of the mind.

  In 2012, the USA will install about 2,500 Mega Watts of Photo Voltaic panels, more than two nuclear reactors. Solar power is now 20 times cheaper than it was when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on top of the White House (Reagan had them removed, because he hated the sun, as pertains those who love the Dark).

  Thanks to Monsieur. Becquerel’s innovation.

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MENTAL FORCE IS THE GREATEST FORCE:

  Human beings are spiritual creatures. Most of what they do, they do, thanks to their minds. Obama, for whatever reason, some tied to his inexperienced, babe-in-the-woods, background, advantaged the banksters, the Military Industrial Complex and other dark forces in his first four years.

  Some will scoff, they will sneer that the Military Industrial Complexes are what allowed the creation of the world’s largest empires (exposed above), so the MICs are important creative forces (for good, or evil). They create facts on the ground. Those who disagree are just enemies to be, at best, ignored and despised.

  Empires create facts on the ground, thus in the minds.

  Indeed, it is important to realize that force can be applied to spiritual structures, not just material ones (the connection between both notions has to do with the fact that the spiritual world is actually brain based, that means, based in physical structures in the brain).

  Just as force can be applied on mental structures, so can inertia. The main problem of the Obama presidency, so far, has been that, instead of impelling momentum towards the forces of progress, it has, wittingly or not, imparted momentum towards the forces of Darkness. (And his debates about health care and banks, or Afghanistan, were shrouded in fog, mirrror, smoke and impenetrable committees. For example, what’s the name of the Death Panel at the White House? And if it kills citizens, it clearly has turned the executive branch into the executor branch, and overlaps another branch of government, Justice…)

  In all this I am not faulting necessarily Obama. After all, he was just parachuted into the presidency. But where is the rest of the progressive troops? Who is pushing Obama to the left? The Tea Party elected many representatives (Ryan an example). Where are the representatives representing “Occupy Wall $treet“?

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WE’RE HYPER NATIONALISTIC & IGNORANT, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

  A typical  pseudo progressive commented on my preceding essay:

  “…corporations are behind everything this writer [Patrice Ayme] says is happening. This is one big worldwide mob at work. Obama is just a tool of corporations, as have Presidents been before him. My husband & I have made scathing remarks about Obama and how he didn’t deliver on many things he claimed he would. But the level of scathing remarks of this person [Patrice Ayme] clearly shows a bias and hatred. …even though people are lulled by the rhetoric of positive speech, it’s still positive speech that people need to hear to jerk us out of fear, hopelessness and apathy. Our thought processes need to be elevated. …America is both the greatest nation on earth, from the standpoint of innovation, technology, and conveniences. At the same time, we are also the most corrupt and damaging force in the world. You cannot have one without the other in this world of opposites unfortunately. “

  Pseudo progressives tend to confuse “bias and hatred”, for what is simply… extremely firm advice to my good friend Obama (one voice against a mob of banksters and sycophants!). The text above is typical: after calling Obama a mobster, I am pilloried in the name of… an orgasm of wishful thinking and crazed jingoism.

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USA AS INNOVATION GREATEST? THINK AGAIN!

  In truth, the USA has not been as innovative as the leading Western European nations. As far as the key breakthroughs. It’s mostly the huge USA market that makes USA products successful. Germany and Britain flew jets before the USA.

  It’s only by distorting reality that the USA is made to look more intellectual that it really is. A lot of USA superiority is not just from dominating a big virgin continent, but also, simply, by having a big market. For example the neon tube was invented in France, but even the French visiting Vegas do not know this, and the French inventors did not win the patent battle with the USA exploiters.

  At least Steve Jobs had the honor of thieves: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”—PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, 1996. I have met Venture Capitalists-engineers, in the Silicon Valley who told me the same, smiling that most of their jobs was to go to Europe and steal ideas in the smaller markets there.

  OK, some major innovations arrived too early, for the USA to play a role. Such as French Hugenot and doctor Papin, inventing the piston steam engine, and the first heat engine powered vehicle.

  Papin’s inventions the English stole for their greater renown, so we measure power in Watts and not Paps (17 C). This is all the more spectacular as it is a French lady  Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who definitively demonstrated the concept of energy (the core of modern physics). Even Newton did not find anything that important.

  As her lover Voltaire said to Fredrick II of Prussia, du Châtelet was “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”. Also French. So the Anglo-Saxons are on their knees singing the praises of Newton, they don’t even know why, just that it is civilized to do so. A man. White. English. Master of the Mint (he switched England to the gold standard).

  So the France played the crucial role in the domestication of energy. The first cars (truly steam tanks commissioned by the French royal army), were followed by the first balloons (in Versailles) and a century later, the first motorized airplanes (Avion I, II, and III, of Ader, also a military program).  Irène Joliot-Curie, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner (1935), for the transmutation of elements followed this by discovering the nuclear chain reaction, that is nuclear energy, in 1937.

  Once again, for reason of quasi rabid anti-French bias, the discovery of nuclear energy is attributed by the dominant Anglo-Saxon plot, eager to make the French pass for simpletons, to those to whom Irène Joliot-Curie taught the reaction (although with lots of difficulty, because Hahn and Meitner were not as bright, and the former’s relation with Nazism far from klar).

  The French nuclear bomb program, started in January 1938, had to migrate to England and then Manhattan (Manhattan Project), for obvious reasons.   Later Anglo-Saxon political leaders (Churchill, etc.) thought about caging all French top physicists, because, in their anti-French rage, they thought they would tell Stalin how to make nuclear bombs. The scientific leader of the project was Italian Enrico Fermi, another non USA, anti-fascist Nobel Physics winner.

  And so it is for a lot of innovations. Photography, both black and white, and color was invented in France (the French government bought the patents, and put the discovery at the disposition of mankind”). 

  Basically all the basic ideas in cars were developed in France and Germany, from the internal combustion engine (Swiss with hydrogen, then French with gasoline, and then patented to Daimler) to front wheel drive (Citroen) and radial tires (Michelin).

  Same with planes (and that’s why much of the aircraft vocabulary is French)

  The same extent to science. And it’s not just about the Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot engine and the basics of thermodynamics.

  Let me say in passing that it is astounding how much the French did for energy, practically, conceptually, and mathematically, I discovered when writing this! If one adds the discovery by Laplace of the Laplacian, core of modern physics’ manipulations, the French pretty much discovered everything important about energy.

  Most of the ideas having brought the big physics breakthroughs (Relativity, Quantum), came from France (Relativity principle, Quantum principle), Germany (Quantum of Light, Gravitation as curvature), Britain (Atom model, QED), with important Irish (Equations of Relativity) and Dutch (Lorentz) contributions. The significant USA contributions were Michelson-Morley (no ether drag, although that was known from French Fizeau too) and the (accidental) confirmation of De Broglie’s deep inspiration.

  USA propaganda twists reality badly. During WWII Nazi cruise missiles sank even Allied battleships. Why? Germans had discovered Germanium (I am not making this up) transistors in the 1930s… So even the transistor was as much an invented in the USA as apple pie.

  What’s left for a great Americano-American innovation? The laser. But there again, it turns out Europeans did the heavy lifting, and USA citizens put up the last decorations. Thanks to Einstein’s discovery of optical pumping, on paper, and its practical invention, with directed stimulation of radiation by light, in Paris, rue d’Ulm, by Alfred Kastler, and his group.

  Kastler got a solitary Physics Nobel in 1966 for that key invention, which made the laser quasi obvious (although that near trivial consequence, the laser, got discovered at Columbia U in New York, and a Nobel was attributed, there was a legal fight, and the one who did not get the Nobel got the judgment in his favor!)  

  I do not want to denigrate the USA as all too many in the USA view as a mission from god (that would be Wall $treet) to denigrate France, but the USA is a society less carried away by deep thinking. Some will scoff, and point at all the Nobels and the classification of universities, from Shanghai University. But those notions are related, big time and non linearly, to plutocracy.

The Nobels are not just given by Sweden, a nation that collaborated with Hitler and its Anglo-Saxon plutocratic sponsors as early as the 1930s (see the Assange affair for how low Sweden can sink, although the collaboration with Hitler was so great that France and Britain had decided to invade Sweden in 1940). The Nobel committee in Physics, for example, is mostly made of USA physicists. Same in economics. And all intellectuals dream of being paid by the hyper rich USA plutocratic universities, so they are anxious to please those potential clients for their wares.

The process is self feeding and vastly overestimate the intellectual prowess of plutocratically managed countries.
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GEOGRAPHY IS NOT JUST PHYSICAL, BUT HUMAN:

  As Kaplan puts is in the Wall $treet Journal:

“As a way of explaining world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics, globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of imagination.

But this is nonsense. Elite molders of public opinion may be able to dash across oceans and continents in hours, allowing them to talk glibly of the “flat” world below. But while cyberspace and financial markets know no boundaries, the Carpathian Mountains still separate Central Europe from the Balkans, helping to create two vastly different patterns of development, and the Himalayas still stand between India and China, a towering reminder of two vastly different civilizations.

Technology has collapsed distance, but it has hardly negated geography. Rather, it has increased the preciousness of disputed territory. As the Yale scholar Paul Bracken observes, the “finite size of the earth” is now itself a force for instability: The Eurasian land mass has become a string of overlapping missile ranges, with crowds in megacities inflamed by mass media about patches of ground in Palestine and Kashmir…”

  That, to make it clear, is an allusion to 200 millions fanatical, thermonuclear armed Pakistani, and their best friends have been the plutocrats of the USA. USA plutocrats brought with them immensely greater gifts. than the Greeks could ever imagine. (Ironically, it’s USA plutocrats, Goldman-Sachs, who brought gifts to Greek crooks. Curiously enough the eurocrats, so good at making European People suffer, have forgotten to visit pain onto Goldman-Sachs. Actually Goldman got rewarded, as two super Marios, Monti and Draghi, are now piloting Europe, among other Goldman alumni.

  Pursues Kaplan: “Even so seemingly modern a crisis as Europe’s financial woes is an expression of timeless geography. It is no accident that the capital cities of today’s European Union (Brussels, Maastricht, Strasbourg, The Hague) helped to form the heart of Charlemagne’s ninth-century empire. With the end of the classical world of Greece and Rome, history moved north. There, in the rich soils of protected forest clearings and along a shattered coastline open to the Atlantic, medieval Europe developed the informal power relations of feudalism and learned to take advantage of technologies like movable type.”

  It was also technology. The mastery of steel of the Gauls (and thus the Franks) was such that the very heavy ploughs necessary to dig in that heavy soil could be constructed , pulled by bio engineered oxen and giant draught horses, harnessed in new ways.

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CIVILIZATION IS SUSTAINED, LONG TERM, BY, AND ONLY BY, CORRECT PHILOSOPHY:

  An area where the USA lags increasingly is anything touching to the philosophical. This area, of course is, by far, the most important to allow the continuation of civilization. For example, as the Maya went down, because of drought and ecological devastation, instead of thinking deep, they went to each other’s throats.

  And we have counter examples. When Rome fell to the Gauls, the entire Senate put on its most magnificent clothes, ivory staff by the side. All the Senators sat on ceremonial seats, in a vast courtyard. They took the thinkers’ pose, pinching their chins in their right hands. They stood standing completely still.

  The Gallic warriors , shock troops, armed to the teeth, covered with fine  steel mail, and light steel helmets, with their giant steel swords, the world’s best, invaded the courtyard and with their horses clinging with the brand new tech of Celtic iron shoes. The Gallic shock troops were stunned. All of Rome had been open, and evacuated, except for the fortress of the Capitol hill, symbolically held by a garrison.

  Why were all the Senators there? Why is this courtyard? What did they want to prove? And why this ridiculous pose, anticipating Rodin’s thinker by 23 centuries? What were all this most prestigious leaders of Rome thinking? Striking a pose? What were those past consuls trying to show to the finest Gallic warriors?

  The eldest Senators of Rome were trying to show to themselves, to all of Rome, that they had failed, that they had collectively failed, that the mental system, the strategies that they had advocated, for decades, were drastically erroneous. a global re-think was in order. The top mental leadership of Rome had got to be decapitated.

  They were there to offer their lives, to sacrifice them to the cognitive failure that they had committed. The Gallic warriors milled around, astounded, feeling. deep down that something immense was in evidence.

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9/11: FRUIT OF THE DELIBERATELY ERRONEOUS WAYS OF USA PLUTOCRACY:

  The increasing imbalance is demonstrated by the rising inequity and inequality in the USA, all over the place, not just wealth and income, but also in health, justice, and education.

  This is not just a USA story, as USA clout is such, and the control its plutocracy exerts on allied plutocracies, all over the world, is such, that the cancer started in the USA has become globally metastatic.

  Hey, it’s 9/11, so we should celebrate, I mean commemorate, right? So I commemorate 37 years of the war of the USA against the republic of Afghanistan, with a particular thought for Prince Harry who is keen to demonstrate that it is a patriotic duty for a plutocratic Brit to shoot Afghans to death from his big armored helicopter, while occupying Afghanistan.

  2,700 died on 9/11, whereas more than a thousand times as many Afghans were killed since the beginning of the armed USA intervention in Afghanistan. USA plutocrats and their agents are poised to recolt trillions in minerals, as long as the USA military stay in Afghanistan, after NATO much advertized departure in 2014 (The French, disgusted, are already removing their attack army, they will leave only advisers).  

  As Obama put it: “We work harder and smarter than anybody else.”

  Error for the many, profits for the few.

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MILITARY MEANS ARE ULTIMATE  TO DOMINATE GEOGRAPHY:

  Here is Kaplan again:

  “If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don’t read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government’s aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources.

  Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources…

  In this very brief survey of the world as seen from the standpoint of geography, I don’t wish to be misunderstood: Geography is common sense, but it is not fate. Individual choice operates within a certain geographical and historical context, which affects decisions but leaves many possibilities open. The French philosopher Raymond Aron captured this spirit with his notion of “probabilistic determinism,” which leaves ample room for human agency.

  But before geography can be overcome, it must be respected. Our own foreign-policy elites are too enamored of beautiful ideas and too dismissive of physical facts-on-the-ground and the cultural differences that emanate from them. Successfully navigating today’s world demands that we focus first on constraints, and that means paying attention to maps. Only then can noble solutions follow. The art of statesmanship is about working just at the edge of what is possible, without ever stepping over the brink.”

  Well, we are going over the brink.

The human engineered poisoning of the atmosphere with CO2 and other, even more vicious greenhouse gases, has a superexponential character to itself, that will become very obvious, all too soon. The Military Industrial Complexes have a great future, coming up.

And another thing. All too many, especially on the supposedly progressive left, but also on the self satisfied right, behave as if caring what’s all it takes. Yet, to really care, means to be aware. And of the harsh realities, first of all. If one wants to act well, one needs the facts good.

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Patrice Ayme

Tags: Great Nations, Military, Resources, Rome, Territory