Civilization & Its Mad Haters


Anti-West Propaganda: Dumb Yet Unexamined In Causes and Extent:

There is colossal anti-West propaganda going on. I will give a striking example here: asinine graphics from no less than “The Economist” (I had noticed it when it came out, but now it has gone viral). Propaganda is not just made of systems of ideas, but systems of moods. For example, racism or ‘esclavagisme’ are certainly moods. So is nationalism. The mood that civilization, in its present form, did not blossom in Europe, is just counter-factual… And as we will see below, insane, serpentine, base and villainous. And self-serving to a malevolent elite.

Anti-Western propaganda is also anti-civilizational propaganda. Many will disagree with this; because they have been thoroughly molded by anti-Western propaganda. But actually, it is pretty clear: the United Nations charter is the French Declaration Des Droits, written large… (The various US “Bills” and “Independence Declaration” or “Constitution” are not far removed.)

Who would have interest to undermine Western ideology, also as known as civilization? Those who want to undermine correct civilization. The one and only. And replace it by plutocracy (evil boosted oligarchy).

So what did The Economist do? It published these cute, authoritatively spoken of, yet viciously lying graphics:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/10/daily-chart-9

Just restricting Europe to “Italy” means nothing. For most of the history of the place presently known as “Italy”, “Italy” did not exist. Here is the real situation before Charlemagne conquered Eastern Europe (including the Avars in Hungary).  

Europe 800 CE, Before Franks Conquered Eastern Europe. The Franks reconquered Britannia in 1066 CE, giving birth to the present polity there.

Europe 800 CE, Before the Franks Conquered Eastern Europe. The Franks reconquered Britannia in 1066 CE, giving birth to the present polity there. (Yes, they called themselves “Franks” or “Europeans”.)

The description given by The Economist incredibly shrinks Europe, by comparing provinces of Europe, with giant multinational, multireligious empires. “The Economist’s” brain-molding will work only for those who know nothing of the history of the Indian subcontinent, nothing of the history of “China” and nothing of the history of Europe. Comparing two empires, India and China, with portions of the European world and its colonies is both stupid and biased, to the extreme.

So the entire idea of The Economist’s graphs (‘China back on top!’) is silly: It is little more than comparison of demographics. And wrong demographics: implicitly identifying “Italy” as its own power in 1 CE is exhibiting a total ignorance of Roman history and politics (the Gallic tribe of the Senones had captured, centuries earlier, Northern Italy, and defeated Rome; in 1 AD, Gallia Transalpina, North Italy, was still administratively, part of Gaul).

If one wants Western GDP in 1 CE,  one has to look at the entire Roman Empire, and add Britannia and Germania.  That would make for the world’s largest GDP (Rome had already 25% of the world’s population, then, more than 60 millions, and the richest areas, like Syria (!); East Asian populations would explode later, from new rice cultivars producing two harvests a year).

In the West, the (legal, political, civilizational, linguistic, imperial, spiritual!) successor of Rome was Francia (“Imperium Francorum”). It was synchronous with Tang China, and comparable in population, extent and GDP (Tang controlled a gigantic desert far west of not much import on GDP). Tang was a high point of Chinese civilization complete with empresses (like Francia!) and printed paper money.

So why not consider just GDP within the Central China Plain, if one wants to compare with portions of Europe?

China, to this day, is made, officially, of one hundred ethnicities (several times more than Europe). China was rarely united in the last 4,000 years. When Genghis Khan’s army invaded “China”, “China” was actually made of several empires with different languages and religions.

Ditto with India (many parts of India were independent nation-states with their own languages, alphabets, religions, for most of their history).

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Ironically Enough, Those Who Promote Civilizational Decay Bemoan ‘Shrinking Europe’:

That Europe is shrinking, there is no doubt. As soon as Europe finally orders Apple Inc., the world’s largest market cap company, to pay more than 1% tax, Washington screams, and then right away retaliate by ordering Deutsche Bank to pay 14 billion dollars in fine. What does Europe do? Bleat. Even the anti-Euro Stiglitz admits that we are dealing here with a “fraud”. “Frauds” like that undermine Europe, by undermining the tax base of countries such as France, hence the French or British military and defense financing, hence system, thus all what’s left of European defense, and so on. (In the next step, naturally enough, Europe makes humiliating treaties with the Turkish Sultan, as Europe does not have the military will, let alone the military strength to go re-establish order in neighboring Syria!… and leaves the Russian and American empires in control, free to extend the mess ad nauseam).

In “Charlemagne”, The Economist pontificates that: “Unshrinking the continent: Europeans see themselves as mouse-sized. They need to man up…output in 11 EU countries has yet to recover to 2007 levels. Large economies, like France and particularly Italy, are struggling. The IMF has downgraded its forecasts for the euro zone, warning of the risks posed by Brexit. Unemployment remains over 10%, twice the American rate. And there is precious little thinking about long-term challenges like ageing, infrastructure or education. ”

Why would one to “man up”, when one is told one was always insignificant, wrong, colonialist, exploitative, cruel and degenerate? Did not insignificance and all these other wrongs work pretty well? In the fullness of time?

In truth, Europe spread civilization by the sword, and then the gun (against all sorts of established plutocrats, often, not always, to put in place neo-plutocrats). Field guns were developed by southern French to win the “100” Hundred Year War against Northern France and England… A bit earlier, the Mongols used rockets rather than guns. Later the giant “Ottoman” guns which fell the walls of Constantinople were actually made by hungarian engineers…

Civilization without guns, that’s called pasta.

Implicitly, “The Economist” concludes the same:”Hormones Needed”. Yes, well, hormones, the right hormones, come from the right moods. And that comes, in turn, from a correct version of history. The right moods come only from a correct version of history, in the individual, as much as in a civilization. 

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Why So Much Hatred Against The West, In The West? Why So much hatred Against Civilization?

The bottom line is that civilization has always been victim of a chronic disease, plutocracy. Plutocracies rest on ideologies, including self-serving religions (Islamism and Christianism are examples).

The adversary of plutocracy is, always, the optimal civilization (OK, sometimes it is not easy to imagine how a civilization like that of the Aztecs could have quit the man-eating habit, considering the context).

What is this optimal civilization? The one closest to human ethology writ large: liberty, equality, fraternity. At a given technological level, in a given ecology there is pretty much just one. Those who hate civilization, In other words those who aspire to rule over others, using whichever ideology comes in handy, the plutocrats. This is generally how plutocrats come to power. Chains control rebellious bodies. Erroneous ideas and misleading moods control minds, eschewing the potential for rebellion altogether.

An example; the first two presidents of the USA, in the Eighteenth Century, signed a document, the first international treaty of the USA, stating that “the USA has nothing to do in any sense with the Christian religion”. Perfect. And the motto of the USA was “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of the many, One”, a verbal version of the Roman and French Republic fascist principle). However, in 1954, apparently inspired by the Nazi SS, the US Congress replaced it with “In God We Trust”. That was a perfect mood to accompany the USA’s superficially pro-Islamist policy (pro-Wahhabist, pro-oil, pro-Saudi, anti-French, anti-British, pro-Shiite, anti-democratic Iran, etc.).

Telling us constantly that European civilization was weak trash, throughout history is self-serving propaganda on the part of those who hold (most of) the media, the plutocrats. They want We The People to be weak. So they persuade We The People that it was always weak. We have seen all before, when the Roman Republic, and, later, the Greco-Roman empire imploded. The best of the Greco-Romans, the Neo-Platonists, were told, again and again, that they were enemies of God. And often submitted to abuse, and sent to torture, or death (see Hypatia).

We don’t need to see it again. The world seems at peace now, as it seemed to be in May 1914. However, and differently from 1914, a huge catastrophe, the greatest in 65 million years, is gathering steam. That could heat up the situation quickly, in all sorts of unexpected ways: cornered, overcrowded rats tend to become very aggressive. And not just rats. When a situation gets tense, war hormones go up, and small provocations can lead to irreversible combat.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

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15 Responses to “Civilization & Its Mad Haters”

  1. Gmax Says:

    There is a whole cottage industry of despising the West and that is what Trump is banking on. I dunno if I call it “hatred”, but sure looks like it.

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  2. Paul Handover Says:

    I read this with a combination of anger, shock, awe and fascination. What jumped out at me was learning about that declaration in the early days of the USA vis a vis no religious link. Amazing! (I label myself as a secular humanist which is a softer alternative to being an atheist!)

    But Trump or no Trump, the levels of anger appearing in many countries bring to mind the saying: “Never under estimate the power of unanticipated outcomes.”

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    • Gmax Says:

      The leftist intellectuals have betrayed the left, and everyone

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Trump indeed is riding a wave, he is not the wave.
      Anyway Paul, glad you liked my essay!
      The anti-Christian sentiment in the USA before the American Revolution was very strong among those who wanted a revolution. Even stronger than in the Washington-Adams generation! (Reference: a book called “Nature’s God” by an eminent US scholar…)

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      • Kevin Berger Says:

        Timely reminder about the “Moral Majority”‘s origins, from a recent article :
        http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
        (To add some irony to that, one should keep in mind Ronald Reagan’s probably sincere faith… in New Age and pop esoterism à la Manly P. Hall).
        I’d also need to find back that book review, about how, back in pre-WWI early 20th Century, US big business supported the notion of “Christian Nation”, along with a nativist message, in order to push back against workers rights and unions supported by migrants.
        Anyhow the relationship the USA as a Nation entertain with Christianity is a weird mix, its religious DNA partaking from its roots being at once : a run-of-the-mill 18th Century “illuminist” project, les Lumières, secular humanism, BS occultist tropes about the “New Atlantis”, the New Jerusalem,… (the founding fathers, the ones I know about at least, were pretty much in that mould, IE culturally Christian, but in no way whatsoever “Christian” as per today’s US religious right criteria); a ruthless business giant undertaking; and a crucible for all the crackpots fleeing Europe’s increasing secularization, with the added toxicity of Protestantism and its irresistible tendencies toward splintering and self-serving hypocrisy.
        This is one crazy witch brew, classical liberalism meets Anglo exploitation meets Ancien Régime-type Biblical mindset.

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          The aim was complete confusion on the left, and it has been achieved.

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          • Kevin Berger Says:

            Je suis à la fois verbeux et imprécis, j’ai toujours du mal à exprimer mon gloubi-boulga d’idée, désolé.

            Ce que j’essayais de décrire dans mon broken créole avait surtout rapport avec ma perception des EU en tant qu’hybride taré de la civilisation Européenne. La Gauche, je m’en fous, qu’elle crève – de toute façon, elle n’existe plus ou est au minimum à ré-inventer -, surtout la Gauche française, vu que l’Allemagne, l’Italie,… je m’en contrefous.
            Quant à sa confusion, rien de nouveau, non? La gauche thermidorienne de gouvernement égoïste et bourgeoise, ou la gauche “révolutionnaire” qui ne rêve que d’ailleurs (URSS, Chine, Chavez, maintenant les complexes psychosexuelles et raciales US… bonjour amis “racisés”!)… Des bigots servant des intérêts étrangers, des traitres parmi d’autres, dans une scène politique qui n’en manque pas, certes. Poutine en sauveur, les vertus spirituelles de la Russie, quelle rigolade. Enfin, bon.
            Aux USA, la gauche a été il me semble proprement “gérée” dans les années 60, JFK, RFK, MLK, MX,… un travail de qualité qui dure, avec victoire par KO du “reaganisme/thatcherisme” dans les “moods”, y compris et surtout celles de la Gauche.

            Sinon, sur ce texte et le précédent, il serait intéressant de savoir si l’abrutissement (barbarisation?) de la civilisation “occidentale” et cette espèce de stase intellectuelle, culturelle, militaire,.. de tout ce qui n’est pas “bankable” et “merchandisable”, si ce tarissement civilisationnel n’est pas dû à cette usurpation? Une usurpation même pas par la simple “nation de boutiquiers” que sont nos cousins d’outre-Manche, que nous ne haïssons d’ailleurs pas à leur juste valeur, mais par leurs pires représentants, mêlés aux pires aspects de la pensée religieuse, une anomalie devenue la norme.
            Disons, pire que vos plutos qui tuent la civilisation par stratégie, des plutos qui la tuent par nature, parce qu’au fond ils sont “l’anti-civilisation” stérile et rien d’autre – comme aurait pu l’être le marxisme-léninisme d’ailleurs (autre symptôme d’une évolution cyclique à laquelle nous n’aurions pas échappé de toute manière?)
            Partant de là, il n’y a plus rien à sauver, tout est à reconstruire, sinon à ré-inventer, avec le temps qui presse, et aucun bout de commencement d’idée pour savoir comment sortir la civilisation (globale si vous voulez, européenne peut-être, française en tous cas) de cette impasse historique, en quel état, voire même simplement savoir si cela est tout bonnement possible. Above my paygrade, indeed.

            Enfin, voila, j’arrête de me ridiculiser.

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          • Patrice Ayme Says:

            Malcom X was a pretty good guy, it seems. I came across statements of him which were really excellent. JFK, LBJ, RFK were also good (as managers, not theoreticians as MX was). OK, LBJ got stuck in Vietnam. However, the Vietnam US strategy started in 1945, when the USA armed Ho Chi Minh AGAINST the FRENCH. Nowadays, the USA and Vietnam are military allies, and the Vietnam war, in retrospect, functioned as it was started: to KICK the FRENCH OUT, and replaced them with Uncle Sam.

            The Thatcher/Reagan thing was actually started by Nixon. Nixon launched HMOs, thanks to his friend Kaiser. So here is again a “tendance lourde”. The USA started to instrumentalized the USSR with Lenin. Lenin joked about it. See how he jokes now.

            Got to run. Idea start is DIRECT democracy. As my exchanges with many of my friends show, they are all into invectiving Trump, trying to out-Trump. Instead of debating ideas. The main asset of Trump is a will to abate GLOBAL plutocratization (which is totally out of control). That’s an excellent idea the left, pseudo or not, should embrace. But of course guys like Krugman are the highest priests of global plutocratization as an ultimate good…

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          • Patrice Ayme Says:

            A way I look at it is that the exploitative mentality (= greed = free market = “capitalism”) is viewed as the ultimate motivator for the economy. Whereas, in truth it is not, at least if operated optimally. Love, care, curiosity, intelligence, etc. are also independent motivators, independent of greed, and not just more noble, but more human. A socio-economy motivated by greed alone (or the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) is intrinsically feeble, like a 6 cylinder engine where only one cylinder works.
            However, in the case of the USA, other cylinders are working: Obama has practiced MERCANTILISM on a huge scale. And the Europeans have not noticed. Maybe he read me all too carefully… 😉

            Colbert Good, Keynes Not So Smart

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  3. Gmax Says:

    I think you have a typo in last paragraph, war instead of world?

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  4. indravaruna Says:

    “USA’s superficially pro-Islamist policy (pro-Wahhabist, pro-oil, pro-Saudi, anti-French, anti-British, pro-Shiite, anti-democratic Iran, etc.).”

    Pro-wahhabist and pro-Shiite at the same time? Are you working for Israel, dear Patrice? American foreign policy is just about making a mess in the Middle-East and achieve Zionist goals.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      The US coup against Iran’s democratically elected PM Mossadegh used Khomeini Shiites, inspired, financed, excited and instrumentalized by the CIA.
      It is so well known, even Obama presented the excuses of the US. The idea was that the US needed an absolute pawn-king as an ally in Iran, just as in Arabia. (Something similar was tried in Iraq, with the Iraqi Shiites, but, this time, not to grab the oil, but to prevent the oil!)

      The US was pro-Wahhabist in Arabia, then Egypt, etc.

      GREAT BITTER LAKE CONSPIRACY

      I explained in plenty of essays over the years, that the US policy was about getting control of the oil (in contrast to having the UK and France in control). More recently it has been more of making a mess, to get the price of oil up, to develop US fracking.
      So anyway we mostly agree, surprisingly enough…

      Except about the fact that this was a Zionist policy. It certainly did not originate that way: when the USA started to support Wahhabists and Muslim Brotherhood in the 1830s, those were allied to the… Nazis (as the USA de facto was!). The US was not Zionist until the fall-out between Israel and France’s De Gaulle in June 1967. Actually the US was anti-Zionist in 1956, etc. This is something Jews should meditate upon more, namely who is using whom for what exactly…

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  5. oatmealactivist Says:

    Why should we be anything but pessimistic? [Western] Civilization has been denigrated by the media and in public education for decades. Few Americans could identify its distinct qualities or explain why they are preferable to any alternative, instead opting for the lazy comfort of moral and cultural relativism. As we are no longer producing new citizens who are cognizant of our history, appreciative of our culture and committed to its survival as a force for freedom and prosperity, the future indeed looks grim.

    I’m ostensibly of the left, but am appreciative that the Trump phenomenon is highlighting the hidden fault lines in our political coalitions – the people vs the plutocrats – and perhaps forcing the realignment that has been a long time coming.

    I’ll cast my vote – a gay, Jewish, west LA, millennial vote – for him and against her in November.

    P.S. One dispute: Significantly lower taxes on Apple; significantly raise taxes on Tim Cook.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Yes, it is a weird situation: nearly all the plutocrats support Hillary hysterically. Only one plutocrat I know of supports Trump, namely himself…

      I consider myself hyper-progressive, very anti-racist (my family is mixed in three ways) and I gave years of my life campaigning for (my friend) Obama. I was not amused by the Obama administration’s betrayal (say on QE, Obamacare/Romneycare, etc.). I am not amused by Clinton veering full left in the last few days (how believable is that, indeed?)
      I was not amused by the biased “moderator” at the debate either (his repeated insistence and harassment that Trump wanted to invade iraq in 2002, on the basis of one interview, which sounded planted in accord with the Clinton campaign)

      Even the French socialist government has decided to lower corporate tax (it is at 33% in France, 35% in the USA). So basically the present, French SOCIALIST government is applying now one of the key elements of Trump’s programme!

      Civilization and plutocracy, or the organism and the parasite which can kill it. Not new, but now a disaster with greater potential than ever.

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