French Already Too Corrupt To Care If President Is Corrupt?

Plutocracy is to civilization what metastatic cancer is to individuals. It kills just as well, with malignant growth. How this cancer appears and generalizes as the new normal is of the essence.

France has a new, 39-year-old president. The younger, the more they can be influenced. When that president was in his twenties, after doing ENA, a school for those who want to order around the baffled French populace, Macron was named inspector of finances, an elite government group. That group should now fall under extreme suspicion. That inspectorate of finance, a body of half a dozen “untouchables” chosen each year, is in apparent charge of making sure that the extremely wealthy don’t pay taxes, and that the poor tremble in fear at their sight. This way the French contemporary nobility perpetuates itself. As the common rabble crumbles under crushing taxes, they don’t pay any, and some enormous corporations have stayed in the same families for centuries (yes, since before the Revolution of 1789!)

The Republic Is Dead, Long Live the Plutocracy!

Macron’s father was a neurologist, so the plutocracy found a nerve to strike: Macron declared he had to become wealthy before engaging in politics. Henry Hermand, a small-time but lively plutocrat, offered to the young, civil (self-) servant, an apartment in Paris worth  around a million dollars (550,000 Euros when the Euro was much higher than now). Hermand was operating all around Africa, and was part of this pseudo-left which condemns “colonization as a crime against humanity, a barbarity” (Macron, April 2017, speaking from Algeria)… While those same plutocrats were exploiting Africa way worse than they could have done under a colonial administration (the whole idea of proffering “left” ideas, while cashing in!)

When a “civil servant” accepts a million dollar gift, in his twenties, plutocracy knows it has found an ideal tool. Once he knew how to cheat taxes by giving the right phone calls, Macron went to Banque Rothschild to earn 50,000 Euros a week (that we know of).  

Small fries, said the French electoral process. Now, I am not too naive to believe corrupt individuals cannot do good. After all, Montaigne, the philosopher himself, was very close to ultimate power in France (he was in the highest circles around Henri IV). In Russia, characters such as Czar Peter The Great did lots of good, even though Peter personally broke some people he knew all too well, on the wheel, all by himself, in spite of their pleas.

And corrupt Caesar, the most corrupt of them all, may well have saved the Roman Republic, had he lived.

However, Macron seems to be no Caesar. It seems unlikely to conquer Rothschild, Goldman Sachs and their ilk. Rather like Obama, he looks anxious to cash in. Apparently Obama, not content with getting 400,000 dollars from Cantor-Fitzgerald, got just as much, in exchange for talking with an “historian”, says presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She informs us that Obama was “in very good spirits”, while he talked to them wealthy historians, for 400,000 dollars. Indeed, if every time he opens his mouth he gets 400,000 dollars, he should be in good spirits. Far removed from us the times when President Truman retired: he then asked ten, or twenty dollars for a speech. “Otherwise it would demean the office of the presidency”, Truman said.

There was a time for true men.

Now is the time for fake men.

To go along with fake news, fake cognition, fake wisdom.

Macron spent his youth going from one “pere de substitution” (substitution father), to another (this “substitution father” concept is a quote from French State TV, Antenne 2/Tele 5 Monde, May 8, 2017, I am covering my legal butt! Macron hooked old men, they said…) Hooking up with these elder gentlemen, including the famous philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and a galaxy of the powerful in Paris, enabled him to navigate for his personal best. The ultimate value, Obama told us.

But not a value the earth, let alone civilization, can afford.

Indeed, financial corruption, and the corruption of politicians, a class which should not exist in democracy, ultimately creates intellectual, even mental corruption. Including the inability to know what corruption is. Or to guess what reality could be. Thus, a corrupt political system in the end make idiots of the whole population. And the more corrupt, the more idiotic. So the corruption and the idiocy go hand in hand, down the abyss of dysfunctionality. When that corruption has weakened the civilization enough, a slight breeze is enough to bring it down. Idiots will, of course, accuse the breeze.

Patrice Ayme’