EugenR: “ Patrice, I agree 100%, emotions are the prime reasons driving the human acts and also human history. And since human emotions are unpredictable and uncontrollable …
I do agree that human emotions have been, mostly unpredictable, to this day. However, the whole interest of studying Systems of Moods is that emotions follow systems and thus are much more predictable than has been asserted in the past.
For example, after I saw Obama associate with the miscreants from the Clinton era (Summers, Clinton plutocratic ex-chief of staff, Eskerine, or whatever his name is, etc.), hyper plutocrats (Buffet), banksters (Dimon), and go work at an hedge fund, November 5, 2008, I had an ominous feeling.
That feeling got ever more ominous, considering particular family events that happened after that. At that point I got depressed, and was depressed for two years. Now I am grim. I will bear witness to that period, hopefully. Perhaps, like Plutarch, it’s my version of events that will enlighten the future about the present reign.
The amusing thing about Greco-Roman history is that few writings and authors were preserved. Perhaps 95% of Aristotle was lost.
Tiberius is described as a monster by the few surviving Roman authors. Yet, careful analysis of the facts reveal otherwise: although he may have done horrible things (as alleged), we have very few hard facts justifying this.
On the facts strictly, it’s hard to attribute to Tiberius a single fully unwarranted execution (although his son Drusus was poisoned by conspirators, and it took seven years for this to be revealed. Maybe, much earlier, his other very popular son Germanicus, also the topmost general, was also poisoned, by the same assassins, with a very determined agenda of self-aggrandizement).
Compare with the assassin in chief. The one who selects civilians to kill by drone, worldwide, on tiny grainy pixelated screens. Naïve, ignorant, unwise, poorly advised creature, soon to be excoriated as a debris of history (see above).
Why was Tiberius so hated by later thinkers, that they dragged everything about him in the mud, even accusing him of private torture sessions in his Capri villa?
Probably because, after Augustus died, nobody knew what the status of the state was. Tiberius was the top general and heir apparent. But heir to what? Nobody knew.
The Senate waited, Tiberius waited, Rome waited. It lasted months. At this point, Tiberius could have cleared his throat, and declared that one would try to make the Res Publica more democratic.
Instead, when finally the Senate begged him to take action, Tiberius progressively, insensibly, stepped in Augustus’ shoes. Thus definitively not solving the problem of the non-defined nature of the Roman state, and of the problem of succession of the Princeps (technically just the “first” in the Senate).
Tiberius made a stealthy coup, in ever slower motion… To avoid any adverse emotion, that could have precipitated a confrontation between him and the partisans of a return to a full and real Republic. Tiberius was a cancer of the soul, slowly smothering democracy.
Emotions everywhere.
We do not know what the future is made of. But the present tells us what the future could be made of. By deciding not to re-establish the Republic’s government, Tiberius veered to dictatorship. The first republic to be re-established would be Venice, about 750 years later, under the protection of Roman emperor Carlus Magnus (“Charlemagne”). So, yes, it could be done.
That was all the more meritorious, as Venice had a huge fleet, a low hanging fruit.
Venice was soon followed by several other republics, and countless de facto independent cities or counties, often under local democratic government (Genova, Firenze, and other Italian republics, but also Dauphine’, Escartons, Toulouse, the Swiss Cantons, etc.).
When Obama decided to kill apparent civilians by his personal fiat, and drone, all around the world, he set the conditions for the sort of future depicted in the movies “Terminator”. Hopefully, history will remember him as an incomparably worst monster than Tiberius.
Obama crossed a moral Rubicon that Tiberius was careful never to be even seen to approach.
I say: “Hopefully”, because, otherwise, the abominable state of affairs we have presently when an autocrat, Obama his name, go kill civilians around the world, and everybody respects him, will endure, and that’s the gate to the worst emotional hell.
Pontius Pilatus did not know if Jesus was innocent or not. He just allowed a judicial process to proceed. We all do know that these people in that wedding were all innocent. And we know who ordered their assassination.
Tiberius did not try to bring back the Republic, Obama does his best to lose it. This is the emotion of the thing. Comparisons are not always flattering.
***
Eugen R: the break-out of WWI. Nobody predicted it and there was no rational reason to start it.
Quite the opposite. I have described in excruciating details, that the attack of World War One had been planned officially (yet, highly secretly), from December 10, 1912. See my “Plot Against France 1912-2013”. In it you find:
Here is the report from Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller (the chief of naval operations):
“His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II said: …if we attack France, England will come to France’s aid, for England cannot tolerate a disturbance in the European balance of power. His Majesty welcomed this message as providing the desired clarification for all those who have been lulled into a false sense of security by the recently friendly English press.
His Majesty painted the following picture:
‘Austria must deal firmly with the Slavs living outside its borders (the Serbs) if it does not want to lose control over the Slavs under the Austrian monarchy. If Russia were to support the Serbs, which she is apparently already doing…war would be inevitable for us. But there is hope that Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania—and perhaps even Turkey—will take our side. …If these powers ally themselves with Austria, it will free us up to throw our full weight behind a war against France. According to His Majesty, the fleet will naturally have to prepare for war against England…’
As I explained, the German plutocracy was stuck between Russia (democratizing and modernizing fast, thanks to French help and capital), France (a democracy, republic, and world empire, whose economy was improving by leaps and bounds) and the German Socialist Party (SPD), which dominated the German Reichstag, and wanted out with the plutocracy.
In June 1, 1914, the envoy of the president of the USA, himself, Colonel House, proposed a satanic alliance…against France (!)
Thus the attack of 1914 was not irrational. The plutocrats knew it would neutralize the socialists. And it did. It worked, as anticipated. Oh, OK, it’s the American based plutocrats who mostly profited. Well, big crocs eat little crocs.
Now, a century later, the French republic, has lost her empire, but has won… Europe. Germany is a sister republic governed by the … SPD.
The attack of 1914 was perfectly rational for the monsters who ordered it, just as killing innocent civilians by robots is perfectly suitable to enact the climate of worldwide terror those who order it wants.
However, the emotions that guided those monsters were, and are, all wrong. That’s why, history did, and will, hopefully, vomit them, again and again.
Patrice Aymé
Tags: Assassinations, Drones, Emotions, Obama, Plot, Terror, Tiberius, World War I
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
January 7, 2014 at 2:27 pm |
What is so different about these times, so different from past times, is the way that people and their ideas connect. Those connections allow the sharing of passions, of truths, of ambitions in ways beyond reach of the ‘old’ ways of power and control. The global Transition movement is a wonderful example of that.
So in a sense, one might argue that the greater the level of corruption the better. It will be exposed and the real power, the power of unintended consequences, will deliver justice.
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January 7, 2014 at 4:46 pm |
Dear Paul: With all due respect for the errors of youth, your point of view reminds me a bit of my reaction when Reagan was elected president. I thought, and said:”Excellent! Now we can be sure there will be a revolution!” Instead, what happened, is that there was a successful counter-revolution.
The point of view that one can be revolutionary by just mimicking Reagan completely invaded the minds of individuals such as Barack and Michelle Obama, and much of their entourage. So here we have a “Black” Reagan, Obama, doing stuff more to the right than Reagan himself (see sequestration). Meanwhile, Reagan’s revolutionary point of view that “forests cause pollution, too”, if not official policy, is definitively in the air.
Right now the insidious power of pseudo-liberals (Stiglitz, Krugman), and pseudo-democrats (Pelosi, Obama, Clintons) is in power, and the entire USA left drinks the poisoned cool-aid, because it’s drunk on it!…And, unfortunately, because of sheer size, the USA still leads the march of folly…
But I must confess that life without optimism is still worth living.
PA
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January 7, 2014 at 9:31 pm |
The link to full text of my comment.
Dear Patrice,
Let me partly oppose you this time. You brought up the pro war mood of German generals and the Kaiser and their war plans as a prove that WWI was well planed and rational, yet i think plans for war doesn’t mean automatically war. I don’t remember who said it “If you want peace prepare for war”. Just few years before WWI William II represented as his major political achievement the 40 year peace in Europe.
My personal experience is that all the generals at times of peace use their extra time to prepare for war.
Of course the German and also the French generals made a very lousy job with their war planning, if they were both surprised by the effect of automatic machine guns, introduced by all the European armies just few years before. Then the machine guns killed in very first month of the war about a million soldiers on both sides.
Not surprisingly it was very hard for the politicians on both sides to withdraw from the war without to present to the public an evident achievement that could justify this sacrifice. (for French it had to be Alsace-Lorraine, and for the Germans a completely new world order under German leadership.)
The main problem of Roman dictators and the same can be said about the German – Austrian Kaisers and the Russian Czar was absence for leadership change in their political system. (The two kaisers ruled their countries for more than half century at the outbreak of the war).
To my opinion the democratic systems success is not based on the perfect choices made by the electorates, (viz. Warren Harding the good looking gambler president), but on the fact that the democratically elected leaders are elected for limited time, and the new elected leader will have the chance to correct their predecessors mistakes.
On the other hand the dictatorships rather accumulate the mistakes, as it happened in Rome, when Tiberius, knowing that Caligula will be more hated by the public than he himself, has chosen him. And this is also an other aspect of dictatorship. The system naturally tends to chose less and less competent leaders. At least this is what happened in USSR.
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January 7, 2014 at 10:06 pm |
I would like to add some correction to what I said. I said “The dictatorship naturally tends to chose less and less competent leaders.”
I would oppose myself and correct. In dictatorships as in democratic systems occasionally an excellent as well as disastrous leader can overtake the leadership, but the disastrous dictators are always more prolonged and with much more horrific consequences, while the excellent dictators tends with the time to be corrupt and with it become disastrous.
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January 8, 2014 at 1:53 am |
Democracy, or, more exactly, isegoria, or isogoria, insures that all minds can contribute, so better ideas will be exposed. https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/no-use-hiding-behind-the-bush/
Dictatorship, or autocracy, is just the mind of one… quickly driven to psychopathy because of its unique exposition, if not that way to start with, thus motivated to step into madness, some more.
PA
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January 8, 2014 at 2:41 am |
Wilhem II had ruled since 1890, the Austrian Franz-Joseph, indeed since the inception of Austro-Hungary.
Wilhem II was all over the map psychologically, thus Molkte and his co-conspirators sent him incommunicado to a vacation home in July, with a crafty lie. They were afraid that, at the last moment, the Kaiser would stop the attack.
It seems to me that you belong to the it’s-not-100%-the-German-plutocratic-dictatorship’s-fault camp.
I reply in another full post.
PA
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January 8, 2014 at 8:46 pm |
Just to remain to you The Kaiser was hailed in N.Y. Times as peace maker in 1913.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9902E1D8143FE633A2575BC0A9609C946296D6CF
Click to access 100627675.pdf
http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2011/volume_3/number_4/on_the_avoidability_of_world_war_one.php
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January 8, 2014 at 10:37 pm |
Sure. Why so sure? It’s not that much of riddle, considering my main thesis, much rehashed. I will point out the answer in another comment, to avoid nestling.
PA
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January 9, 2014 at 2:22 am |
Doesn’t anyone suspect the BRITISH for having pushed Germany into starting WWI? After all, Germany was on track to out-produce Britain in Dreadnought class ships very soon, thus challenging her lock on world trade which was the cornerstone of the empire. And Germany had accomplished all this in a few decades.
Pretty scary if you look at it from across the channel.
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January 9, 2014 at 4:25 am |
Dear OGP: OK, that does it, I’m going to have to carpet-bomb that subject again.
“Doesn’t anyone suspect the BRITISH for having pushed Germany into starting WWI? After all, Germany was on track to out-produce Britain in Dreadnought class ships very soon…”
No, there was absolutely no way that the Kaiser could catch up with Britain in battleships. Why? Because Britain had basically no army. All British military spending was on the Royal Navy.
Germany had the world’s mightiest army, made to crush and encircle the formidable French army, the world’s second mightiest.
I explained, in the “Plot Against France” what happened. There is nothing like “the British” and “Germany”. “Germany” did not exist. Not as a nation, just as an hysteria. “Germany” was a dictatorial plutocracy of the spastic and delirious type. Britain was a plutocracy under a thick representative democracy’s layer.
I excruciatingly explained that the American leadership goaded the Kaiser into war. The USA had interest for an attack of “Germany” on the rest of Europe. Britain, or France, had none. Moreover those democracies could not organize a conspiracy, and the fact is, they did not.
The handful of men at the head of “Germany” could conspire, and they did. We have the documents, we have the facts. We have the attack. “Germany” attacked, “Germany” did the war crimes, starting a few days later.
The analysis by Molkte and company, is that “Germany” was losing the economic, hence military race.
PA
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January 9, 2014 at 5:37 pm |
Why is it so hard, Dear Eugen and OGP, to get that Germany was a bloody, Nazi abomination (Namibia!) and dictatorship that attacked the world deliberately (see the 1912 document Patrice brought to the fore)?
As Patrice says, it’s a question of being tenderly attached to emotions of long ago.
There is no symmetry between Germany’s dictatorship and the democracies. Time to get that 1914 was a furious evil assault by what was a plutocracy if there ever was one!
Regards
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January 9, 2014 at 8:48 pm |
GMax: I’m preparing, in answer to resistance from Eugen and OGP, another pass to the whole subject, accenting the imprinting character of it all. Namely what people have been exposed to first, they believe more deeply.
PA
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January 9, 2014 at 11:56 pm |
[…] explained, in the “Plot Against France” and in “Emotions Prime Reason II” what happened in 1914. The concept “the British” and “Germany” are NOT comparable. […]
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