Localism, Democracy, Empire: Hand In Hand

Local Minds Are Weak, and Will Be Decapitated in Solitude

France and the USA are conducting airstrikes against the terror organization Daech (= “Caliphate”, ISIS, ISIL). France had soldiers on the ground for weeks in Kurdistan, in a desperate attempt to stop Daech (it worked; superior guns helped).

Three notions, related, yet different: localism, democracy, empire. Did they reign together before? Yes, they cohabitated, for centuries, in the Roman state. They are the essence, the secret, of why Rome worked. And worked it did: most of the world GDP was Roman, for centuries. And peaked just as Augustus established his fascizing, plutocratic republic (not a coincidence).

Greek Democracies, United, Defeated Persian Plutocracy

At that time, the other great power was Carthage. Although Carthage paled relative to the 50 million (?) Persian empire. Rome was just a city-state under a constitution similar to Athens (but evolved independently).

Verily, Athenian Roman cities had a great degree of autonomy (and their status varied, depending whether they were colonies or not, for example). That sort of autonomy reappeared during the millennium of the Middle Ages.

Alex Jones: “I consider all powers should be devolved down to localities, so that even issues of tax would be decided at the local level with no structure above it such as Californian governors or the European Union voting it out. The idea of localism as I see it is that the state or nation or entities like the EU or UN would be abolished.”

Dominique Deux disagreed icily. So, as I said, did Rome.

The Persian Achaemenid empire (“Parsa”), under Darius, although fascist and plutocratic, practiced a great extent of localism: it was pretty much an union of Greece sized plutocracies (the satrapies).

The Achaemenid empire was not democratic at all: it was all about leaders of armies making deals among each other, when not killing each other. Still, it was powerful: it nearly made it all over the Mediterranean. But the Athenian phalanx charged at Marathon before the Persians could get well organized, and that was the undoing of the empire.

Democracy means the power of the We The People. We clearly don’t have it now. Of course, there are graduations. The system we have now is closer to the Achaemenid empire than to the Athenian democracy.

It can even be measured (as I have explained).

So how was Persia defeated? By creating the GU, the Greek Union. The 200 or so Greek city-states got united. The point is that, to defeat an empire led by one man, one needed a more powerful union.

Thus the EU, to confront Putin, and Xi. Xi is the absolute chief of 1.3 billion, Puttin reigns over 17 million square kilometers… And wants much more, he says.

Notice that Alex Jones does not suggest to dismantle the USA. It’s not really a choice. A proposed referendum to split California in six states of six million each did not gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. Who proposed that? A plutocrat, of course. He spent millions to buy the signatures. Now he is going to court.

Plutocrats like it small, because they are big, and the weaker We The People, the stronger the satanic impulses.

The UN, the United Nations, is the implementation of the Enlightenment, of the ultimate rights of man. Maybe “UN” ought to stand for “Ultimate Naturality”.

And what of the Greeks? After uniting against Persia, Greece dealt Persia three crushing defeats. Emperor Xerxes, son of Darius, barely escaped with his life (he was afraid his bridge above the Bosphorus was going to be cut by the Greek fleet after Salamis). Persian plutocracy then changed tactic and paid Sparta to cause trouble (offering Sparta a fleet to beat Athens with!) In the fray, Athens got nearly destroyed. Half of the Athenian population died. Sparta saved Athens at the last moment from vengeful other cities.

In the dizzy period that followed, Thebes beat Sparta. At this point, Greece ought to have got united. But it did not. The philosopher Demosthenes saw the truth. He screamed on every rooftop how dangerous the fascists in the north were, thanks to their gold mines, who made them filthy rich enough to raise a dangerous army. In vain. Small Greek city states kept refusing to unite against Philippe of Macedonia, the Putin of his times. The Xi of Greece.

Philippe then moved, Alexander annihilated Thebes. Demosthenes committed suicide at the last moment. Democracy was only brought back to Greece, 23 centuries later, thanks to the European Union. Does Alex Jones understand this? Why would one prefer NSA/CIA supported Greek colonels, worshipping at Goldman Sachs, to a European Union?

Right, the battle against Goldman Sachs is not finished: one of its partners, from Portugal, was just named at the European Commission (EC). Sadly, the battle against the fractional reserve system, the collusion between state employees and private bankers, has not even started. Why? Because people  minds which are all too local can barely see beyond their garden. Burning kittens make them vibrate, five million Africans killed for cheaper smartphones are not even on their radar. You want local, and you want local to be fair? Then you need a just empire. be it only to tell you what’s up (as Obama has been doing about the self-declared “Caliphate“)

A just empire is how democracy and localism are protected.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: democracy, empire, Greece, Localism, Persia