That was the second day when the Nazis surrendered. The true capitulation, without conditions, had been made May 7, in Reims, France. (The Soviets insisted to conduct another ceremony in Berlin, the next day… and they celebrate it the 9th…)
As the French Republic had declared the Second World War, the surrender in Reims was appropriate. At the time when France declared war to Nazism, the USSR was allied to Hitler (and it as also, de facto allied to the USA, as the president and congress of the USA took sanctions against France and its belated ally, Great Britain… on the ground that those two parents, direct genitors of the USA were “belligerents“).
The rendition of Nazism was celebrated with extreme seriousness, and the same spirit, in France and Germany, on May 8, 2015.
France, Joined By USA Sec. Of State John Jerry, Celebrate V Day, May 8, 2015
[Republican Guards Horsemen.]
May 8, 1945, is also the same exact day the Franco-Algerian war started, with a wound that was pretty much fatal. Both facts are related. French civilization (and lack thereof) was central to both facts. While racial fascism was smashed in Germany, for all to see, it exploded on French soil (in an atrocious contradiction).
Let’s recapitulate.
1) The leaders of the French Republic knew, as early as 1919, that there would be another war with Germany. That was mostly caused by the hyper-nationalism, racism and fascism mindset which reigned in Germany. Also Germany had been immensely successful industrially, technologically, economically, leaving both Britain and France behind.
That very successes of German fascism (under Bismarck and then the Kaiser Wilhelm II) seemed to prove that fascism was a system superior to the degenerating democracies of Britain and France.
2) France, all along, prepared for the third round with German racist fascism. However, Great Britain and the USA had opted for the opposite approach. It is of course insufferable for contemporary citizens of the UK and the USA to read that their countries aided and abetted the Nazis (some come to scream about that periodically on this site).
However there is a deep lesson there, a warning for tomorrow: British and American plutocrats drove the collaboration of the UK and the USA with the racist and fascist mindset. So doing, they set-up the conditions for the violent death of more than 70 million people, among other inconveniences. Indeed, if the USA and the UK had made a block with the French Republic, in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the fascists in Italy, Japan and Germany would not have had the possibility to dream that they had a chance in the land grabs they envisioned.
Actually the plutocrats which helped the fascists so much were nearly as culprit as the crazy, murderous tribal nuts they encouraged.
Lessons? Plutocracy can manipulate not just the minds, but history itself.
When democracy stand divided, tanks can roll all over it. Something to remember with Putin. Those who cannot stand firmly for democracy, encourage fascism.
3) War can turn badly, unexpectedly. The Nazis use insane, desperate, strategies which turned around the mightier French army and its slow poke little British bulldog. This military disaster of May 1940 is nearly impossible to reproduce in war games.
Lesson? Don’t underestimate the ability of fate, incredible stupidity, really very bad luck, to surprise even those who felt the best prepared.
This is valid now more than ever. A few nuclear bombs could bring losses comparable to all of World War Two, within hours. North Korea is arming itself to the hilt, and threatened to use its nuclear devices, even against the USA. This should not be taken lightly.
The Franco-Algerian Massacre in Setif:
As in places all over France, there was a massive demonstration of joy in Setif, Algeria. A young demonstrator carried an Algerian flag. He was killed by a gendarme. A first wave of retaliation led to the death of a few dozen colons (or more). The later, in further retaliation, supported by the French army, tanks, even planes, killed in turn tens of thousands of Algerians.
Philosophically, this was a tribal reaction not substantially different from Nazism and the like.
This event is not commemorated enough (neither the French state, nor the FNL, which became the Algerian state, but got started in a different mindset in 1954 are anxious to remember it).
It exhibits a lot of warnings about human nature. It needs to be analyzed more. How could the French forget 15 centuries of tribal tolerance? Because they just finally defeated the Nazis, they could act like them? Inhibitions were lifted for a day? Well, whereas France and Germany are now (re)united, and now share a common fraternity, much work remains to be done in the case of France and Algeria.
A work of truth. Thorough truth.
And that’s not just about Europe and Africa, and the USA. Establishing, and imposing the methods to elucidate, uncover, and make everybody admire truth, is the general first order strategy to deal with the world’s ills.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: 8 May 1945, Algeria, France, Kerry, Lessons, Nazis, USA
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
May 9, 2015 at 2:08 am |
What prevents people from considering the truth? That they will often go to extreme and obvious lengths to avoid it?
That it is dangerous to their sense of well-being. Not necessarily their actual well-being, but their predictions and understanding of what might happen.
People are incredibly complex, but still they are as motivated by the very basic polarities of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental, as are the most basic life forms.
So the question then becomes as to how you go about objectively presenting that which people reject, in an objective fashion?
Light rather quickly turns to heat, when its been reflected around a few times.
Much like bacteria racing across a petri dish, there is the prisoner’s dilemma of individual goods adding up to collective bad.
Then there is the elemental psychology of dominant personalities will invariably herd more pliant peoples around, both for good and bad and intricate combinations of both.
You will find it is turtles all the way down and each layer is based on elements of some deeper set of circumstances.
So then it has to become a job of deciding what are the goals and what will it take to achieve them.
Say the goal is toward a stable relationship between humanity and the planet.
As argued, what drives people are hope and fear. The current predilection for intellectual reductionism and blind desire for all things has created the religion of money, as the distillation of hope to the most basic unit of acquisition.
The resulting rat race cannot be stopped or slowed, but the possibility exists that this energy can be leveraged and is in fact being used to drain the world economy of its quantized value. Basically the financiers are draining the oil from the machine.
In organic terms, the result is going to be a massive heart attack.
Think of all that corruption as fat collecting in the main arteries. So the central banks compensate with quantitive easing, which is analogous to high blood pressure, trying to force flow out to the extremities of the larger economy. Meanwhile the big banks, as main arteries, only collect ever more fat.
So it would seem the current system is self destructing in a way that does not directly involve major wars and conflict, though could lead that way.
So there will be this window, as humanity stares into the abyss and before it actually falls in, that alternate views of reality will be able to shine through the cracks of the failed institutions.
The question then becomes as to what those multitudes of generally intelligent, but otherwise pliant people, those not obsessed with or fanatically committed to the various apocalyptic visions, will be willing to see as some greater truth, that will lead them to reach out to others and not draw ever tighter into the closest cocoon?
For one thing, it will have to involve refining money as the social voucher system that it is and all real value has to be effectively stored in communal relations and the environment. Then those seeking to game the system would be due explicit punishment.
Just as private government has its limits and we have made significant strides to government as public trust, which those with enormous wealth seek to turn back, now we are faced with the task of turning this economic circulation system into a public trust as well.
That will be the task of this generation as several succeeding ones as well.
Meanwhile life on this planet will contract, but then eventually, it will expand back out again, even if it takes a million+ years.
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May 9, 2015 at 5:12 am |
Power structures are most often connected to the official version of the “truth”. For example the correct history of the involvement of the USA in WWI and WWII would show to the People of the USA that the two world wars were greatly caused by manipulations of the elite of the USA. That revelation, in turn, would be extremely dangerous for said elite, as we speak.
Thus the elite universities of the USA are very careful to always repeat the same canned versions of WWI and WWII, carefully omitting exactly what the USA were doing, most of the time.
[The total length of WWI and WWII, as far as France and Germany were concerned, were about ten years, ten years of combat. A hint: the USA was in combat against fascist Germany only three years…]
Good analogy between QE and high blood pressure.
If people knew how unfair and imbalanced the fract. reserve system was, they would revolt, but they don’t, so they won’t…
What maybe ahead would be an excursion out of what passes for humanism that will make Nazism itself look like child’s play…
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May 9, 2015 at 9:51 am |
Or undermine the primacy of narrative, by showing time is an effect of activity, with events coming and going, not us traveling a single flow of time and in this thermodynamic state of the present, there are narratives and clocks for every point of view and the ultimate state is balance.
Then that any apex of wealth and power is only the crest of a passing wave.
That a spiritual absolute could only be the raw essence of being of which all life is possessed, like the same light shining through us all, not some father figure deity empowering those at the apex of society.
Take away those legs of the structure and showing money to be a communal voucher system, not a form of personal property, would be just a small step.
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May 9, 2015 at 3:26 pm |
France suxxx.
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May 9, 2015 at 4:24 pm |
Yes, for all Nazis, racists, fascists, anti-Semites, Jews haters, hyper-nationalists, military adventurists, and their fellow travelers, the fact that the French Republic destroyed Nazism and fascism is an ever painful tragedy, too hard a pill to swallow.
Not just that, but the French Republic made the German Republic to be just like itself, and ever more so. The Frenchization (so to speak) of Germany is progressing apace: the German nationality code has given up completely on the German “blood right” of lore, and adopted the French system (upon French insistence)… That French nationality system was also adopted, long ago, by the USA (right of soil and descendency combined).
Germany also adopted recently a minimum wage, just as high as the French one (much higher than the one spottily adopted in the USA).
France has proposed (and sometimes unilaterally adopted) very advanced progressive measures (which had an adverse effect on the French economy). But it’s not excluded some will be adopted at the Paris world conference on ecology, at the end of the year. French diplomacy has been gathering supporters worldwide, especially in Asia…
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May 9, 2015 at 5:35 pm |
The biggest French haters I ever met are American Zionists and israelis.
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May 9, 2015 at 9:47 pm |
Although mine is not a scientific study, either, I did meet extremely francophobic American Jews, telling absurd lies. I have also come across, and befriended very closely a number of Israelis, from one who had been a paratrooper/commando, to some who refused to serve in the army (and got lots of problems for it: they dislike Israel rather intensely). Those Israelis I knew were all Israeli born, and very well educated. All of them felt Israel and France were the deepest friends.
The young military officer/commando knew very well that 5,000 French technicians working in the desert, had given Israel the (thermonuclear) bomb in the 1960s…
Now, as far as some American Jews from New York are concerned, I think their attitude has more to do with New York than with France or Israel. I still remember a woman, completely hysterical, who told me France had given rockets to the Arabs to destroy Israel…
What has happened is that American Jews support the annexation of the West Bank… And France does not. The position of Washington is murky. My own position is unknown, even to myself… 😉
PA
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May 9, 2015 at 5:30 pm |
http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/5/7/evil-synergies
Jacques Attali, an important Jewish consultant, claimed at the 2014 meeting of the Jewish Global Congress that a Western “Muslim bourgeoisie” shall be created. Muslims lack serious leaders, Attali said, and the Jewish community should help them: “in England, the Jewish bourgeoisie already funds imams.”
Is that altruism? Yes, provided that one accepts Attali’s own definition of altruism: “intelligent egoism.” His apparently pro-Muslim strategy aims at putting them under the higher patronage of the Jewish organized community and avoid violent anti-Semitic upheavals from them. Attali–as probably everyone else at the Global Jewish Congress–doesn’t care at all about the integrity of European countries—they care about creating a balance of power where they will have the upper hand. That strategy includes the abandonment of a majority of young Whites by civil society. The organized community doesn’t care at all–or more likely feels a certain schadenfreude while seeing the result of their policy.
The strategy of creating an alien “diversity” elite seems to combine two features: the creation of a new balance of power, with multiculturalism dividing the inhabitants of Western countries, and a deep revenge against the European man who dared to rebel against the oh-so-bright Chosen People.
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May 9, 2015 at 9:56 pm |
Hmmm… Long subject. I was myself completely crushed by some of the anti-democratic absurdities Attali proffered recently. He indeed basically said that the problem with Muslims is that they had not created networks yet, and, once they will, a sort of balance of UNFAIRNESS will be established. (He did not say unfairness, but that’s what he meant).
BTW, please avoid nestling too many comments: people tell me they can’t be read on smart phones.
The worst about Attali is that he is very clever, and a great force in France, or in Europe (Macron the French economy minister, from banque Rothschild, was launched by Attali). He is certainly not a religious Jew, and I think he is just an arrivist (who did not arrive at the very top… Although Jews have been at the top in France, even way back…). I have never met a Jew who believed in the “chosen people” silliness… Although plenty of American Jews obviously do…
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May 9, 2015 at 5:54 pm |
France is a progressive country. Too bad it slipped in Algeria. What’s not surprising is that fascists and anti-Semites hate it.
It is hilarious, but also sad to see French haters comment here. You are very patients answering them and their sewer rats ignorance. Too bad Jews (?) like Eugen don’t protest with their own comments. If Jews don’t fight for Jews, who will? The French?
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May 10, 2015 at 4:23 am |
Well, we will see. Yes, France is now making herself the champion of Israel again. Was bound to happen.
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May 9, 2015 at 8:06 pm |
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.654700
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May 10, 2015 at 12:15 am |
Yes, but notice carefully the context…
Haaretz:
‘France is selling out Israel – just like it abandoned Czechs in 1938
Just as France betrayed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, it wants Israel to abandon territory and buoy Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State.
By Moshe Arens 01:00 04.05.15 22
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius intends to propose a UN Security Council resolution that would present a framework for negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framework will include the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiations on the border between Israel and the future Palestinian state.’
So what does that say? Just as France was the protector of Czechoslovakia in 1938, France IS the protector of Israel, NOW.
France. Not the USA.
So, implicitly, this is very flattering to France.
And everybody knows France learned from the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Actually France has the finger on the trigger to call off the nuclear accord with Teheran. That would be in total opposition to the USSR (aka Russia) and the USA.
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May 9, 2015 at 11:41 pm |
The basis of polytheism was tribalism. That the spirit of the tribe was a single entity.
Underlaying the liberal impulse to the universality of monotheism, is the conservative tendency to slip back into this tribal theology, with an absolutist, monolithic twist.
Nations, as geographic entities, lose out in the increasing migrations of people, so populations will revert to tribal attachments.
The only contrast to religious and monotheistic spiritual models we are given is atheism, which really doesn’t address the communal reasons for religion.
Now capitalism has hollowed out many of the organic economic relations people in communities develop and replaced them with the reductionist medium of money.
As this increasingly hollowed out world society crumbles, people are going to coalesce back to those ritualistic social institutions because they have nothing else.
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May 10, 2015 at 12:08 am |
Tribalism is hard to sustain during globalization. Japan is very tribal. But the effect is going to be quick demographic collapse.
Germany is actively compensating demographic attrition by immigration. The UK had a huge immigration in the last few decades.
Islamism is strong, because of tribalism, indeed, and that’s ironical, as Islam has global, universal pretense…
So what to do? To increase the Republican spirit. Make it into a religion.
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May 10, 2015 at 12:40 am |
Make people see the spirit is what bubbles up from within all of life, not just chosen peoples or species.
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May 10, 2015 at 3:31 am |
I just got blocked on SS again: I am “trouble to understand”… So I have not been “chosen”, ha ha ha. I guess they should just buy themselves popcorn and go watch a Barbie cartoon, that should be less “trouble to understand”… In a similar vein, Paul Krugman just recognized he was not very smart in economics (as he did not see the 2008 crisis coming; I did and had even argued with him about it, and the amplification derivatives allowed, on his blog…)
Unfortunately for the simple ones, higher thinking is not democratic, it’s not even meritocratic, it’s just less wrong.
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May 10, 2015 at 12:36 am |
Patrice,
I think that under the surface, Japan has been doing a fair amount of resetting over the last two decades. The fact their economy has been stable/not growing and their population has been declining will likely prove to have beneficial effects. Yes, there is a growing elderly population, but that is a situation which will resolve itself in the next couple of decades.
It seems in our popular understanding, either we have economic growth, or war. I think people and societies can turn inward and start to heal themselves and that a lot of what we are supposed to believe is just hype, by those trying to turn all of the rest of humanity into their serfs.
Expansion and consolidation can both be good and bad.
If the premise of monotheism could be argued to be more a political construct, than spiritually founded, i.e. top down, rather than bottom up, it would take the air out of Islam as well. Especially since Islam is the most doctrinaire form of monotheism. As Judaism is still strongly, genetically tribal and Christianity has serious pantheistic undertones.
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May 10, 2015 at 3:24 am |
Japan’s demographic projections are that the population ought to be cut by half within a generation. the problem: no immigration, and no tradition to accept it nicely (as Koreans will testify).
Germany has gone French, or British, and is now FULLY open to immigration (in the last decade).
War is generally not a choice in the tradition inherited from the Franks (that is Western Europe and its colonies, like the USA). If the USA goes to war against North Korea, it will not be by mostly choice, let alone pleasure, nor because of the Rare Earths there.
Turning inward is not a choice. The entire Earth is relatively smaller than a piece of France to the French, two centuries ago. A nuclear war in South Asia would probably become a world war quickly.
Christianity was created by meshing, mixing and juicing up several important religions, from the Great Mother Cult (Mary) to the Cult of Mithras (all the stuff around Jesus). Then, when the Franks took control, they engineered it their way. Judaism looks like the core, but it’s not even the case, just the pretext, a ready made book.
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May 10, 2015 at 9:57 am |
Patrice,
It will reset to a lower level, one way or another. I do think there are ideas which might help people transition emotionally to a different reality.
Much of western thought is of a top down, platonic ideal, linear, mechanistic, form oriented variety and there are other ways to look at things. The current SS conversation is a good example of fairly narrow minded thinking. My post was rejected, which I saved;
“It would seem the first step to exploring a possible ontological reality would be to identify and compensate for any cognitive biases.
Our mental functions operate by extracting patterns from this melange of activity in which we exist. So it would seem somewhat of an intellectual bias to assume structure/relations/objects are more fundamental than the dynamic activity running through it all.
What if we were to consider it from the opposite perspective; That there is only this blur of energy and activity, with patterns and structure as the emergent effects? The more distilled and static manifestations, which we can conveniently measure and observe with our pattern identifying thought processes?
Consider various of our important organs, digestion, respiratory, circulation, are primarily a function of collecting and processing forms of energy to propel this cognitive thought process forward.
Then consider the vast majority of our mental comprehension involves framing very specific modes, models, snapshots, distillations, reductions, etc. of this energy in which we exist.
There are many other organisms more devoted to the collection and expression of this energy, in cycles of expansion and contraction/consolidation, with the ordering and measuring thereof a consequence of the flows of energy. So it would seem patterns are more the effect, than the cause.
So, from my Main Street view, this seems to be a somewhat constricted framing of the broader reality in which I, as a living being, find myself.”
The rejection of which I replied by email;
“Dan, Massimo, Phil,
If you don’t see the relation, it would be futile to revise the same point.
“The ontic structural realist advances a metaphysical thesis to the effect that structures and relations are the fundamental components of the world; objects are secondary—”
It’s not that complicated. The mental function is to extract order from our situation, so my question is whether this, in itself, creates a bias.
Having argued these issues, between the theoretical map and the territory being described for quite a few years, much of it for the last seven on Foundational Questions Institutes forums, blogs and contests, it does seem the engineers, those who have to use the maps to navigate the territory, have a much better grasp of the problems, then do the theorists, those who draw the maps.
Their annul contest, in 2012, asked the question; “Questioning the Foundations: Which of our basic physical assumptions are wrong?” http://fqxi.org/community/forum/category/31418
Here were two of the more interesting entries;
This is more conceptual;
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1372
While this is more technical;
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1344
A philosophy of science, being science theory, if too narrowly envisioned, would seem to magnify the intellectual bias toward the gathering and organization of information, the map, as foundational to reality, rather than correct for it. Now I know Massimo has expressed skepticism of the MUH, but it does permeate the field far more than seems to be appreciated.
Maps have their uses, but they are still maps.
Should you come down out of the Ivied tower onto Main Street, you might notice there are many side streets and back alleys as well. While they are not always well lit, or neat, they do contain quite a bit of knowledge and few advocate for anything as extreme as multiverses. Though obviously, anything is possible.”
I tend to be somewhat fatalistic as to whether anyone listens to me. I’m at an age where most of the people whom I really wanted to impress in life have died off already and the rest are as opinionated as I am, while the younger generations will learn what they learn.
You might say I’m waiting for the wall to crack some more, before I try to bang my head on it any harder.
Regards,
John
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May 10, 2015 at 11:35 am |
Certainly “things [could] reset to a lower level” as Nazism demonstrated.
Now as far as Scientia Salon is concerned, it makes itself unwittingly into a demonstration of serious exclusion of the imagination.
The current paper on exhibition there (I went to read the original) is a compendium of what is bad in academic philosophy of science. Not that it is wrong, but it’s so ill-informed. Also there is a whole crowd of them out there opposing epistemic and ontic, etc. Epistemic being what we know, ontic what there is. And various epistemic systems, etc.
None of this is completely wrong, just amateurish [for example the whole crowd out there track back to Poincare’… Whereas the “manoeuvre” in question comes clearly from Descartes (as I showed in the comment they let through)].
One of my point is that the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis ought to replaced by the Mathematical Mind Hypothesis.
The other, which I will make in the next essay, and I made in my SS comment, is that mathematics itself is LOCAL. (What that means I will explain.)
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May 10, 2015 at 12:09 pm |
I got a further canned rejection from SS. I increasingly suspect that the founder of the site is using it for disguised commercial purpose and self-advertizing.
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May 10, 2015 at 3:13 pm |
Patrice,
“One of my point is that the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis ought to replaced by the Mathematical Mind Hypothesis.”
That is as I see it. Our minds function by organizing forms. It is thought.
Meanwhile the physical basis is the energy. The form of a wave is its frequency and amplitude, but that is not its basis. The energy of the wave creates frequency and amplitude. So form is effect and energy is cause.
‘The other, which I will make in the next essay, and I made in my SS comment, is that mathematics itself is LOCAL.”
By that, I see all such framing devices as inherently subjective. There is no such thing as an objective point of view and without a point of view, there is no knowledge.
I’m not sure what their agenda is and I will likely keep following it, but not make it a primary use of my free time. As I said, there is no such thing as an objective frame and they are free to set the limits and definitions of their own efforts. If it is of some monetary purpose, that seems an overriding focus of many people.
Having argued with otherwise very intelligent people who were unwilling to accept that tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns, as opposed to time as some metaphysical dimension, I’ve come to realize how little logic means when there is an agenda to uphold.
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May 10, 2015 at 4:17 pm |
“There is no such thing as an objective point of view and without a point of view, there is no knowledge.”
For instance, space as three dimensional is really just the xyz coordinate system and multiple such systems can be used to define the same space.
Consider the Israel/Palestine situation is different people using different maps/coordinate systems to define the same space, backed by different narratives.
The problem is there is no “God’s eye view,” no objective frame to mediate, because the structure is bottom up. There is no ideal form to aspire, but an essential state to which it will reset.
The absolute is not an apex, but is equilibrium.
Meanwhile, over at SS, they are debating whether form is objects, or structure, or relations
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May 10, 2015 at 4:45 pm |
There was a time when I took form for granted, but after decades of watching what I’d taken for granted break down and dissipate, as new forms pushed up through the widening cracks in the old, I now see the dynamic cycling as more fundamental.
When a form is at its most established, is when it is at its peak, like the amplitude of a wave.
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May 11, 2015 at 5:47 am |
Thea = view. Horan = to see. Theory = to see a view.
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May 11, 2015 at 5:45 am |
The agenda is a logic.
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