Order Of The Day: Elated Or Discouraged? (Pondering Éric Vuillard’s L’Ordre Du Jour)


Abstract: a small French book got the French top literary prize for exposing partly, and on a very small, (carefully?) biased, amputated scale, what yours truly has blared about in a much larger, all-encompassing, exuberant manner: Nazism was not just about, and born of, Germany, but a much more global and sinister phenomenon… Still at work today, arguably, more than ever! The idea that the few, intrinsically superior, should reign over the many. Thus not just a matter of plutocrats and corporations, but a way of thinking, or, rather, not thinking… Nazism’s fundamental principle was that the few has the right to do as they pleased with the many (the essence of the evil side of colonialism; justified, like the most vicious colonialism by a version of evolution, of Darwinism, dating back from Papal pronouncements in the Middle Ages!)

Hence Nazism was not a “populist” movement: that was what the three millions “SA” were led to believe, hiding the truth. 

Verily, it was the elite, and to a crucial enabling extent, the Anglo-Saxon elite (some straight from Wall Street) which propelled Nazism. Globalists want this fact to be hidden absolutely, lest an enlightening perspective throws a sinister light on the present rise of inequality. 

(Realizing that banks such as JP Morgan enabled Nazism would lead to reconsider the same banks, or banking in general, more severely today; This has to be kept in mind as popular movements everywhere are accused of fascism and “populism”; the fascism of the 1930s was actually energized by the elite, from Japan, to italy, to germany. In the latter two cases, US involvement was crucial.)

My point of view, that the elite engineered fascism, (not surprisingly, as it is intrinsically fascist!) is gaining ground! Should I be elated, to see my viewpoint progress, or discouraged, as others get famous prizes for saying only a fraction , however valuable, of what I say yet… as it, what the prize gatherers say, is carefully engineered to leave the elite ideology sustaining the present evil socio-economy in place?

Éric Vuillard wrote a historical narration about the shady deals, business, social or military, behind the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938.

I have written plenty on the involvement of the powers, of the “elites”, that be, in the deadliest conflicts of the Twentieth Century. I claimed that those massacres, including various holocausts,  didn’t happen by accident, but by elitist conspiracies, in plain sight (whereas textbook versions prefer to claim that World War One was an accident, and WWII sprung out because of the Versailles Treaty, both egregious lies). It doesn’t mean that I believe the elites plotted the death camps… But very close to it: they conspired to make them possible: they breathed together to make something like that possible. And the best proof is that, when they knew about it, for sure, they did nothing about it (bombing, or simply speaking of the ongoing holocausts was not hard to do… they didn’t, because they were on to it!)  

Vuillard lifts up a tiny piece of the bloody veil. It will help the selling of his book in the USA, the world’s largest market, that no American was hurt or endangered in Vuillard’s exposition. (In truth one can allege that the main force behind WWI and WWII, besides German idiocy, was US manipulation, a manipulation by the world’s wealthiest and most manipulative men… And the “moral persons” they brought up… which still rule…)

Those massacres of the world war 1914-1945 happened mostly because the way we are, our ancestors were, trained to think and feel, or not to think and not to feel, by the elite brings us to injure ourselves, as intended. We are imprinted to desire to injure ourselves, even as we desire to read what we do. The so-called representative “democracies” we are subjected to, are part of the plot. Actually they are just a front for raw plutocracy.

Hitler and British Prime Minister Chamberlain in Hitler’s Munich apartment. Eva Braun giggled when she saw such pictures, saying that Chamberlain couldn’t imagine what happened on that sofa. The entanglement of British high society and hyper nationalistic and business circles in Germany, was only outclassed by the US financial, technological and economic entanglement. It resulted in the British-Nazi Treaty of 1935, and the US refusal to seriously oppose Nazism, until Hitler declared war to the USA, December 11, 1941, 4 days after Pearl Harbor… The British and US American elites, by hindering the French Republic, were arguably even more helpful to Hitler, than the German elite (an allusion to Churchill’s 1929 threats against France, pre-Nazism, when France discovered that Germany was secretly re-arming, violating the Versailles Treaty… or the 1935 Naval Treaty…)

Should I be discouraged, or encouraged that a tiny fellow birdie, singing a song reminiscent of mine, was rewarded for his little tweeting, while my thunderous orchestra against conventional thinking and deviant, plutocratic-serving history is ignored on the grandest scale?

Well, it took centuries for Confucius to be noticed out of the complete obscurity his work enjoyed (not that Confucius should have been noticed; he got noticed, precisely because he served a certain type of establishment, which didn’t serve China very well, as was noticed several times by Chinese leaders, in the last 24 centuries…).

Great thoughts, like great stars, take a long time to reach out and enlighten humans… It’s not that we didn’t die, we always do, it’s how we thought, which makes a long-term difference.

***

A novel look at history in novel form:

I rarely read so-called “novels”, those works which allow some people to make a lot of money, and others to forget reality, or, even learn to enjoy the worst it has to offer: the Harry Potter novelist in Britain made more than a billion pounds, dollars, or euros. Harry Potter (I am no specialist) seems to be a glorification of the British class structure (plutocracy), installing it upon the non-demystified science of witchcraft (British plutocracy used to rest strongly upon Christianism, but that’s full of cracks). Thus Harry Potter was very useful to the establishment, on both sides o the Atlantic, and was naturally promoted as indispensable to form well-balanced youth, ready to serve their better.

France has a prestigious book prize, the Goncourt. The Goncourt is a sort of internal to France Nobel of literature; it may be less corrupt than the Nobel Prize itself… although that’s not a tall order: prizes with the name “Nobel” attached have been immensely corrupt: the literature Nobel is shaken presently by a huge corruption scandal, et prizes such as the one in economy are devoted to the Neo-Liberal order of things, the exact same one ruling today… As the latest Goncourt itself concludes…

What, isn’t the Goncourt given to novels? The Goncourt 2017 was given to “L’Ordre du Jour” (The Order of the Day”). It is described on its first page not as a novel (French ‘roman”), but as a  “ récit” (a narration; the sense of “tale” for récit, as some dictionaries have it, is too restrictive). And a narration it is!

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The Order of the Day:

February 20, 1933, under an icy sun during a harsh Berlin winter: a meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry, Krupp, Von Opel, and heads of Siemens, Allianz, Bayer, IG Farben, with senior Nazi officials is held secretly in the plush lounge of the German Parliament, the Reichstag. Nazi officials, at the invitation of the Reichstag president, the mesmerizing Hermann Goering, a famous WWI ace, want funds to help the National Socialist Party, already in power, to win more elections, increasing the power of its Chancellor, Hitler, even more. This opening scene sets a tone of respectful, dignified consent to the worst abuses of power, and thus to the worst possible repercussions, no questions asked. Plutocracy at its best: see no evil, hear no evil, talk no evil.

Krupp. Top prize, for a tiny piece of Nazi history, and a very limited analysis. Yet, Vuillard drives some important points across: the entanglement of the elites, and how easily it should have been to stop Nazism…

(As it is, the Marxists long considered that Nazism was the fruit of a conspiracy between “monopoly capitalist” and the Junker class (typically old Prussian aristocrats, often known as “Freiherr”).

The book describes the encouraging consent of German captains of industry to Nazism in 1938. It misses entirely the gigantic and crucial financing of the Nazis by Henry Ford and other US corporations and powerful financiers, as early as the early 1920s… Or even prior, the crucial influence of important Anglo-Saxon intellectuals (Keynes) or leaders (Wilson). (Tellingly, the Marxists missed that one too… because they also profited from US plutocracy in Moscow… It would not have looked good to let it be known that the Soviets were US plutocracy propelled… As the Yalta Treaty made it lain for all to see, and nobody to observe, but for De Gaulle and assorted French…)

The argument I made, as forcefully as I could, was that Nazism was not just about, and born of, Germany, but a much more global and sinister movement… Still at work today, more than ever. And not just a matter of plutocrats and corporations, but a way of thinking, or, rather, not thinking… A principle that the few has the right to exploit the many (the essence of the evil side of colonialism).

***

The vicious, arrogant and manipulative Joachim Von Ribbentrop, long a top social feature in London. Von Rib was hanged slowly at Nuremberg (good!) In the 1930s, UK Prime Minister Chamberlain rented his London residence, a sumptuous apartment at 27 Eaton Square, to Nazi Ambassador von Ribbentrop. This seems extraordinary, and exemplifies the connivence of the plutocrats Nazi or British (Von Ribbentrop and Chamberlain, who grew sisal in the Bahamas, both had extremely wealthy families.)

***

The Nazis were bottle-fed by Anglo-Saxons capitalists, politicians, and Lords:

Lord Keynes, pillar of the Neo-Liberal order, invented in 1919 the racist and Nazi thesis that the Versailles Treaty would be disastrous for the economy in general and the universe, in particular, considering the obvious subhuman status of Poles, and Czechs, relative to Germans. The Nazis, once born, thanks to Ford, gobbled that one up. US students are still running away with it, as the headless chickens they all too often are.

Famously, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher was detained for 18 months in World War One, and was otherwise restricted by authorities for insisting in writing that Europe would be better off, ruled by the Kaiser, and submitting to him. He considered democracy no better than “to uphold the inherent canine right of running on the pavement (democracy)”.… And considered wise and glorious to act just as the 24 captains of German industry did with Goering: bend to the will of the mighty (that was self-serving, as Bertrand Russell was one of the mightiest Lords in Britain).

Nazism was even procreated by a collective effort of many of the mightiest Anglo-Saxons: not only was Henry Ford a virulent anti-Jewish racist, but US president Wilson, a power on the side of the racist, imperial Second Reich, made possible a prolonged World War One (by feeding vital materials to the Kaiser’s fascist, war criminal military machine, for three long years, before taking possession of the Franco-British victory of 1918, with a timely betrayal of his fellow racists…). In the 1920s, Germany was thoroughly penetrated and managed by US agents (Dr. Schacht)  and their plans.

The Dawes and Young plans profited spectacularly to Germany, by injecting capital in the German industry, while hobbling the French one, by starving it of coal… many French coal mines had been destroyed by the Germans in WWI, so the US alleviated the compensations Germany should have paid; by 1926, thanks to the US Wall Street and government combined, German steel industry dominated Europe, and Germany was flushed with US capital… The half-brother of PM Chamberlain, also called Chamberlain, got the Nobel Peace Prize, with Dawes, for the plan which made Germany a super power as early as 1926, ready to crush France. One has to realize that Weimar was still called the “Second Reich” and was not really a Republic (whereas France was). 

***

The march of Nazism was anything but straightforward:  

March 12, 1938, a bitterly cold day, the annexation of Austria is on the menu, Hitler is shivering with excitement: A grotesque day intended to demonstrate the march of history to the entire planet. The thousand-year Reich: the newsreels capture a formidable motorized army on the move, a terrible, inexorable power. But hidden behind Goebbels’s splendid propaganda, an ersatz Blitzkrieg unfolds, the Panzers breaking down en masse on the roads into Austria, have to be pushed to the side to let the delayed motorcade of a contemptuous Hitler pass.

The “Ordre du Jour” looks behind the bland official scenes found in conventional, unreal, soporific books everybody knows… which are designed to further the propaganda that the Anglo-Saxon elites (Churchill!) saved the world (whereas it’s just the opposite, they betrayed civilization, and they were much higher in the hierarchy of power than Hitler…) Vuillard’s book shows (part of) the manipulation, hubris, and greed that together led to Nazi Germany’s mad drive to world war, and its rage to destroy all in the way.

(By the way, I have a wonderful explanation, so far published only in Quora, explaining the astounding Nazi mass criminal madness: the Nazis knew they had lost, as early as September 3, 1939 (!), when the democracy with the strongest army, the French Republic, and the one with the strongest Navy, the UK, declared war to Nazism. It meant death to Nazis, something they didn’t expect, they felt betrayed… In great part because of Von Ribbentrop’s assurances, that the British would not go to war (and thus France won’t dare, as in 1936, when the Nazis invaded Spain). The whole idea of British diplomacy in the 1930s was that the Nazis would be free to go enslave the Slavs, who, as their name indicates, are made for slavery. Keynes, the Neo-Liberal hero, a linchpin of the Anglo-Saxon elite, to this day, a lynch-pin, had written an anti-Versailles Treaty, anti-French pamphlet, prior to the creation of the Nazi Party, by several years, explaining that the racial inferiority of the Slavs would ruin Europe, if those Slavic slaves, in particular those base and messy Poles, were not ruled by Germany.

On September 3, 1939, the Nazis suddenly realized that they faced extermination: how could they resist France and Britain? That certainty that they were going to eliminated like insects drove the Nazis lethally mad, all they wanted thereafter was not to win a war they were sure to lose, but to cause as much damage as possible (whereas France and Britain fought the war with the intent to win it in the long run; as it turned out they were overconfident on May 10, 1940, and paid a heavy price: a long-term certain win turned into a disastrous defeat, in just 5 days…)

The “Order of the Day” is mostly centered on the last few hours before and during the annexation of Austria. It dismantles the myth of an effortless victory. Instead it accentuates the plutocratic conspiracy in control, which made it all possible… but barely.

And it’s not different now! The “Ordre du Jour” offers a dire warning for those indifferent to our current political crisis… said present crisis is driven not just by the same forces, but the exact same actors, the same “moral persons”, truly giant corporations with their own greedy minds (“moral person” is an ironical label, some would erroneously say). And worst of all, by the same ideology, the same ways of not thinking upon what is really important, and, instead, concentrating on stupid escapism (considers all the money and propaganda on media sports). Those “moral persons” drove the world then, as they do, now… Indeed at the end, the author points out a number of German corporations, more powerful than ever, all of which made Hitler possible. Then… for the same reason they have now.

But are these corporations just and only “German”, as Vuillard (implicitly) has it? Just German? (This Vuillard position is straight from the old position of the French Communists and their ilk, in the 1950s… At the time, few dared to vocalize US involvement in Nazism, it was definitively not PC, and the situation has not changed much: Vuillard charges the British, but not the US; when Austria was annexed, FDR had nominated pro-Nazi ambassadors… Especially in London and Berlin…)

The most significant truth about Hitler: Hitler was crucially made possible not by his connection to just Britain, but, more insidiously and importantly, to his connections with the USA, and they went both ways. This is so embarrassing, everybody wants not to know about it… However, one can’t understand today’s global plutocracy without understanding which evil order,between the US plutocracy and the Nazi plutocracy, was vassal to the other… Hint: size matters… (And Vuillard has become part of this obscurantist plot, whether he knows it, or not, by talking only of a few Brits connected to the Nazis… Much, if not most of the Nazi economy was US built… Certainly most of Franco’s fascist economy was US built…)

The careful readers of this site will scoff about ignoring the USA. What made World War Two possible, what made a number of Nazi victories possible, what made possible the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazis and their allied regimes were two things.

One of them the bad luck of the French army (bad commander with a foolhardy strategy as his second in command pointed out before the disaster, plus strokes of genius on the part of Hitler, and Nazi generals Von Manstein and Guderian, plus plain extreme bad luck). But extreme French bad luck during five days in May 1940 (May 10 to May 15) doesn’t  explain the occupation of Europe: France had lost a huge battle, all it best armies, but its Navy and Air Force were mostly intact, and the Nazis had suffered severe losses. French forces could have evacuated to North Africa, and fight from there indefinitely.

And the second thing which led the French to ask the Nazis for a cease-fire (just a cease-fire, a temporary, localized cessation of hostilities, not even an armistice; as it happened, hostilities between the Nazis and French forces restarted within two years, spectacularly, at Bir Hakeim, even before the first shot between US and Nazis…) was the attitude of the cowardly, calculating and amoral USA (the highest principle of which was to take care of its commanding plutocrats; the media, plutocratically owned, had made the US American people hostile to those who were hostile to Hitler… like the French). The way many leaders of France, for example Marshal Philippe Pétain probably saw it: why would France fight fascism to death again, suffering enormous losses, depressing French demographics, killing or wounding most Frenchmen, while the USA watched sanctimoniously, ready to steal victory again? (As it was, the total French losses in lives were much higher than the US were, especially as one considers, as one should, the entire French empire, not just Metropolitan France; total number killed, in the entire French empire, from Morocco to Indochina, Norway to Libya, was probably over 3 millions; the USA lost 418,500 lives, total, mostly soldiers as only 1,700 civilian were killed.)

Here is the fundamental question: Second World War: cui buono (for whom does that feel good)? It is the attitude of the USA which brought the French Republic to ask for a ceasefire. And the USA, far from being driven by a love for peace and quiet, as was alleged then, and is alleged in textbooks, was driven by the exact same actors or their ilk, who were driving Hitler, and whom  Éric Vuillard’s “L’Ordre du Jour” doesn’t mention. At all. Will to please the Hyper Power, the USA, or just plain ignorance? Or both? Would Vuillard have got the Goncourt if he had mentioned US plutocrats? Is that same greed and respect for order who drove the 24 supporters of Hitler, resurfacing?

Instead Vuillard charges British PM Chamberlain to the max. Chamberlain has become a safe villain of history. Chamber-villain? Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement with the Nazis was revealed in 2011 to have gone much further than textbooks had it (in 2011, secret service MI5 documents came out of secrecy, revealing some more of what had been hidden when Chamberlain worked up to 1938 with the Nazis to make said nazis more enticing to UK public opinion… BTW, the link contains minor factual secondary mistakes, such as Churchill always opposing appeasement: he didn’t… in the 1920s…)

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Einstein Saw “No Hope” Coming From Appeasement:

Some will say insight is easy. But actually, the march to folly of the German Reichs was very clear to Nietzsche in the 1880s, and to many other intellectuals. In 1919, at the Versailles Peace Conference, the Second German Reich had understood so little, it mulled going back to war (as if it could wage it!). Clemenceau, the French PM said: mark my words, the Germans will attack us again within 20 years.

Albert Einstein wrote from Princeton, USA, on October 11 1938: “You have confidence in the British and even Chamberlain? ‘Oh holy innocence’… Hoping that Hitler might let off steam by attacking Russia, he sacrifices Eastern Europe. But we will come to see once more that shrewdness does not win in the long-term… In France, [British PM Neville Chamberlain] pushed the left into a corner and, in France as well, helped give power to those people whose motto is ‘better Hitler than the Reds’. Now he saved Hitler in the nick of time by crowning himself with the wreath of love of peace and inducing France to betray the Czechs. He did all this in such a clever way that he deceived most people, even you (unfortunately). I do not have any hope left for the future of Europe.”

Conventional Wisdom presents PM Chamberlain often as clueless. He was not. Chamberlain was deliberately following orders from the Anglo-Saxon elite. Chamberlain deliberately fostered the British and US elite, at the cost of all the rest. Similarly Churchill, who was half-US born, fostered US-UK rule with an extremely attitude hostile to the French Republic in the 1920s, when France saw Germany was re-arming, and pondered taking action to stop that nonsense. (Although the bilingual Churchill loved France, he threatened to bomb France in 1929 if France attacked Germany! In 1944, he would have his sadomasochistic wish, with giant, useless bombings of French cities, such as the annihilation of Le Havre, after Paris had been liberated. Annihilating Le Havre with 80,000 tons of bombs killed more than 5,000 civilians…)

Like his half-brother, PM Chamberlain was part of vast, entangled conspiracies the Anglo-Saxon elites engineered to instrumentalize Germany to serve their own rule…

Whether they all did it deliberately is another matter; let’s just observe that the British elite was racist and anti-Republican, and the US elite was racist and exploitative; none of these psychological auras mixed too well with the official credo of the French Republic, libertéégalitéfraternité. A meta-psychological Anglo-Saxon conspiracy of a form of meta-racism: the Nazis were much inspired and encouraged by the way US Americans had “treated” the American Natives, it was their plan to do the same. The Nazis were much encouraged by the 4,000 or so, official “lynchings” US racists directed to “colored people” and their supporters. What the Nazis, and proto-Nazis didn’t realize is that, doing so, they crossed themselves and became the ones targeted to exploitation, and a useful stage for world domination by smarter than them…

***

The true behind-the-scenes account of the Anschluss reveals a patchwork of minor flourishes of strength and fine words, fevered telephone calls, the most vulgar bullying and life threatening threats, propelled by the absurdly gigantic powers a few men have been endowed with, so they can abuse them.

Not just Hitler is endowed with giant powers, but the Austrian PM and President, but also British PM Chamberlain… And it should have been easy to stop: why didn’t the French Republic declare war and attack? (Well the answer is that France was afraid of the… USA, not Hitler! Displeasing the Nazis was nothing: they deserved to die… but the USA was France’s own child… At least, so I think, in my national psychoanalysis… If Macron and Trump had been leading France and the US in 1938, Hitler would have been finished in three weeks!)

The real picture presented by “The Order of the Day” is an abomination, mostly caused by these enormous powers a few individuals have been conferred with (Hitler started as an elected Chancellor, below an elected President, Hindenburg).  

Thus history reveal a starkly different picture. It is not strength of character, justice or the determination We The People that wins the day, but rather a combination of intimidation and bluff which impresses We the Sheeple so much, they go bleating wherever their leaders have decided they should go.

Vuillard points out the Nazi tanks are mechanically unworthy, tin cans with little armor, and all too small guns… What he doesn’t say is that they won in 1940, mostly because of sheer luck. And genius. Hitler’s evil genius, gambling the Reich on stabbing the French army from behind…

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“L’Ordre Du Jour”, A Good Lesson Missing The Main Point! US!

With this small portion of a vivid, compelling history, Éric Vuillard wants to warn us against the peril of willful blind acquiescence, and offers a reminder that, ultimately, the worst is not inescapable (the Nazi machine could have been easily destroyed at this point; Vuillard touches on that when he describes the pathetic Nazi tanks; Vuillard doesn’t say, but it’s true, France had three times as many tanks as Hitler, and the French tanks were often incomparably better; only an extremely faulty strategy brought the French defeat during 5 days in May 1940…).

Yet, Vuillard misses the main point: the extent to which truly global plutocracy was involved in the ascent, and ephemeral triumph, of the Nazis. Yes, that means US!

Vuillard doesn’t mention, probably because he doesn’t know, US conspiracies, hidden behind prestigious titles, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute, which directly funded Nazi eugenics projects in the early ’30s?

That’s not excusable. By omitting the main Anglo-Saxon promoters of Nazism, Vuillard, and conventional historians omit some of the main causes of Nazism. Worse: he omits the causes which escaped discovery and destruction, and are running rampant today. Even Lenin himself let it be known that the capitalists were so greedy that they would sell the rope to hang them up with (although some contest that Lenin said it that prettily, words to this effect were found in his personal papers, evoking “suicide” rather than a rope).

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US Plutocrats loved all fascists, red or black, color blind:

The early USSR was supported crucially by US capitalists such as Armand Hammer or the Harriman Brothers…. All of them from the Democratic plantation!  Such plutocrats indeed made up the Democratic Party (Hammer, a promoter of Nixon, promoted the Gore family, father and son, who became Senator and VP of the USA…)

The Harriman brothers’ banking business was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who was a financial backer of the Nazi party. The Thyssen group was all-powerful then, still is now. The Brown Brother Harriman banking business helped make the Nazis all they could be, and had 5 trillion dollars under management now (2018). The Roosevelt family was closest friends to all these characters, hence explaining President FDR singular ineffectiveness at opposing fascism, and his hatred of the French Republic.     

FDR loved Mussolini: “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'”FDR was not kidding: his advisers were gushing about Mussolini’s policies.  Implicit US support is exactly why the “admirable Italian gentleman” attacked the French Republic in June 1940, breaking his teeth on the Maginot Line, and why the admirable gentleman was hanged from an US gas station in Milan by the Italian Resistance. A plethora of the US largest corporations splurged through the fascist regimes of Europe, from the USSR, to Franco’s Spain, fascist italy, Nazi Germany. Franco, a general promoted by Hitler and Mussolini, superficially, was, actually the tool of US plutocrats, who enabled him to seize power. That was so true, that, after killing millions of Spaniards, Basques and Catalans, Franco knew his true sponsors would win, and played a sly double game in World War Two (enabling thousands of precious Allied pilots escape from France, by cooperating with the French resistance, rather than Hitler)  

Eric Vuillard touches barely a small aspect of Nazism, and restricts international considerations, or, more exactly, international conspiracies, to Chamberlain renting his flat to Von Ribbentrop. Actually Great Britain collaborated with the Nazis to a much greater scale than that, to such a scale that the British elite was an active accomplice, of Nazism, until it got the feeling it was on the wrong side of history, and got the courage to throw out the Nazi king in 1936 (but Hollywood movies turn the turn of Britain away from Nazism into a problem about stuttering and a divorcee, thus creating a new generation of imbeciles)

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Six Months After Hitler Invaded Austria, UK PM Chamberlain Gave Czechoslovakia To Hitler, with implicit US Approval:

Hitler said he would only take the Sudentenland and if Czechoslovakia falls apart, then he would govern it. The other three agreed to this. Chamberlain went back to London with the piece of paper, securing “Peace in our Time”. Once again, France couldn’t go to war without even US, or British moral support. If France had declared war, alone, with the Czechs for allies, only, France would have lost moral supremacy. However, militarily, France + Czechoslovakia could have probably held back the Nazis: together they had four times the number of tanks of the Nazis, and much much better ones. Moreover, the French had shared their weaponry with the Czechs, so, after the Nazis took control of these weapons, not only did their armaments doubled, but they learned French military tricks and equipments…

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Can one seduce evil? The collaborators of evil pretend it can be done, and so did Bertrand Russell:

In 1915, in the middle of a war planned and launched by German plutocrats and their chief, the grandson of Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm, and sustained by the USA’s crucial material support, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, imagines a situation in which British people, having been thoroughly educated in the principles of passive resistance, opposed their civil and moral fortitude against the brutal force of German occupiers. There would be a few killings and many injustices, but far fewer than in the present conflict, the active resistance by democratic armies to the Kaiser’s aggressing dictatorship, since, Russell pretends with an obscene naivety: “there would be no glory to be won, not even enough to earn one iron cross. The Germans could not congratulate themselves upon their military prowess, or imagine that they were displaying the stern self-abnegation believed to be shown by willingness to die in the fight”.

(All Russell shows here is that he finds most natural to be motivated by glory… thus Russell is unwittingly psychoprobing Russell, uncovering the fact that vainglory was his main motivation… that would explain his womanizing, among other things….) After some time, having realized that they couldn’t govern without the consent of the indigenous population (!), the invading Germans would have to leave and go home, said the elite, thoroughly deluded and deluding philosopher. Russell, self-hypnotizing, persuaded himself that, confronted to crushing British dignity, the dictator who launched a world war would have no choice but to turn back home…

Unfortunately for that idiotic flight of fancy, German occupation happened in many countries, and killed millions. Bertrand Russell was, on this subject, a dishonest creep, who should have been, and was put in jail: the attack and invasion of Belgium, in August 1914, killed under atrocious circumstances, thousands of Belgian citizens, deliberately, some as young as two years old. Russell, Mr. Philosopher, should have read the newspapers…

But, of course, the 24 plutocrats Vuillard talked of, believed in the dignified fortitude Russell advocated: it is a convenient excuse. So did the US government officials who turned back, to their death, thousands of Jewish refugees.  

***

We desire to see you tortured to death… Bear with us…

As Bertrand Russell put it in his Nobel acceptance speech:”All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.”

(Right, and this is exactly how I can know what motivated Lord Russell… By knowing his desires, we can backtrack his reasons).

All human activity is prompted by desire. Yet, desire can be taught. People prefer to read the made-up mysteries of novelists.

I gave the Vuillard “Order du Jour” book to my ailing mom in her clinic. She read it within hours, but didn’t comment. She knows how my writings on WWII. She knows all too well she saved more than 100 Jews then, and was pursued by the Gestapo. She knows of people who were arrested, tortured to death, and of others who were saved, and should have died instead. She knows of fortunes who were made, saved in part by her actions. She always refused to take any action to get herself and her family the  Juste parmi les nations” חסיד אומות העולם, Hasid Ummot Ha-‘Olam. She just wants to forget the horrors. It’s her ultimate desire. So she prefers to read Mary Higgins Clark.

***

Humans love to think of killings and killers, as long as it looks respectable, like Mary Higgins Clark:

As long as the world reads and fancies mystery murder novels instead of the real thing, reviewed and corrected as what really happened, we are in trouble. Wealthy author Mary Higgins Clark, 90 years old, is often asked why she’s still writing. The suspense murder novelist gives two answers: “One, I love to write. The second is I get very well paid to write.

Top thinkers never got paid to write. Not one cent. Their motives were much more sinister. It was, it is, to promote not just evolution, but re-evolution, revolution. Top thinkers communicate because they like to think about problems, solve them, and share the proposed solutions in the hope of getting more clues. Knowing full well they are promoting neurological mayhem. Top thinking is not peaceful, but, first, shattering (as Christ observed!)

Instead, money makes the world of fools turn. Ms. Clark is still writing two books a year. Her fast-moving mysteries often feature a sharp, intelligent heroine who helps to discover the killer after a few false starts. The killer? What’s so interesting about killers? I thought the SS were looked down upon! Precisely because they killed! Is the hoi polloi big time confused? Liking what it hates? Ms. Clark’s broad commercial appeal has generated more than 50 best sellers… Why is that so interesting, people? Why is it interesting to discover the “killer”?

Clark’s latest murder mystery out this month called “I’ve Got My Eyes on You,” opens with the murder of an 18-year-old girl sunk at the bottom of a swimming pool after a party at her parents’ house. Among the suspects: her boyfriend and a neighbor. Ms. Clark never includes overt sex or foul language in her books. Even though she writes about murder, she won’t describe the actual killing in graphic detail. “It is off camera, I like the impression of building up suspense so the reader does her own thinking.”

An ardent Catholic, Clark claims that her protagonists have a strong moral code. “The morality is always there,” she says. In “I’ve Got My Eyes on You,” her heroine, the mother of a boy with brain damage, often prays with a rosary. Count the beads, you will occupy your brains, because your brainless religion sure is not enough…

Ms. Clark finds murder thrilling, writes dozens of books about murders she invented, but she has a strong moral code? Only a Catholic worshipping torture as they are all supposed to do, praying at the bottom of a cross, looking up, watching blood of the innocent flow, with a deep sense of approbation, would hold such a thing…

***

Want murder mysteries? Seize history! You may even learn something deep, for a change!

Real history has plenty of murders: hundreds of millions of them actually. Each of them a riddle, but a riddle whose solution will save lives, looking forward. One should learn from the lethal accidents of history as one does from the lethal accidents of aviation.

Want a mystery? Consider the assassination of Julius Caesar, March 15, 44 BCE. At first and especially second or third sight, that murder makes absolutely no sense: Caesar was supposed to leave Rome, at the head of the most formidable army Rome ever had, four days later. The aim was to solve the two security problems civilization had: the Parthians over Alexander’s empire, and the Germans, over Eastern Europe. Caesar a popular (head of “Populares”) progressive (Caesar believed in technology, quite the opposite of the Roman emperors to come) stupendous general was out to save Rome (and had already brought Gaul and Egypt as gifts…) Still he was assassinated by the likes of Brutus (his real, or quasi-adoptive son… although not his heir, and therein perhaps the explanation…)

So you want a mystery? Dig there! You will have to dig deep in human souls and how supposedly ultra smart people (those who wanted to restore the Republic by killing its top magistrate) accomplished the exact opposite of what they claimed to want…

***

Reality, in all its horror, especially in all its genuine horror, is the harsh teacher, we, students of deep things, need:

Chaplin almost nixed his own movie, The Great Dictator, as the extent of Nazi atrocities in Europe became obvious. Chaplin didn’t find the Nazis funny anymore. President Franklin Roosevelt heard of Chaplin’s intention to scrap the film. The president sent an aide to tell Chaplin. “Make this film”. Roosevelt promised to use his influence, ensuring none of America’s allies banned the movie. (As usual FDR was playing his double game, trying to steer Nazism, and the war, the business, the business of war, it was brining, just right…)

Filming began in 1939, lasted more than a year, and the movie was released in October 1940, when the Nazis and their allies, occupied most of Western Europe. Hitler demanded a copy—and screened it in his private theater in the his gigantic, spectacular Alpine chalet, the Berghof, no less than thrice! In the middle of a world war!

Hitler once extolled publicly Chaplin as one of the greatest performers of all time. There were rumors that Hitler was heartbroken to see Chaplin’s cruel impersonation of him (Hitler was most sensitive, that’s why he cried so much about the Versailles Treaty and could not stand the sight of… meat anymore… And became a fanatical vegetarian, ruining his health…) In one key scene, Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel character bursts into tears after his balloon globe pops. According to a member of Hitler’s inner circle, Reinhard Spitzy, the Nazi leader found the film amusing. (Spitzy suggested that Chaplin had inspired Hitler’s toothbrush mustache!)

Hitler screened Chaplin’s films even though Germany had banned the actor’s works owing to his alleged Jewishness. (The origin of Chaplin was never solved, at least “racially” speaking, he could very well have been, like Hitler himself, a “Jew”) The Nazi propaganda book “The Jews Are Watching You” labelled Chaplin a “disgusting Jew acrobat.”

Morality of all that? Hitler had to be stopped by horror, the horror of reality, not jokes removed from reality. Ultimately heavy bombing over all German cities helped, as giving the Soviets crucial equipment and intelligence… Same story in Japan, or Italy. Only horror can stop horror (although imperial Japan may have killed 40 millions, its losses were only 6% of that… However the Japanese couldn’t stand even that relatively small horror… Finding horror, even much smaller horror, all too horrible…)

***

Forgetting Horror On A Geopolitical Scale Is Not The Best Desire To Cultivate, Should One Want To Prevent Its Return:

(Thus those who deny that Nazism is a worthy object of conversation and meditation passively accept its return, or the return of a similar abyss!; Massimo Pigliucci, a professional “stoic” philosopher has told me that any comment of mine on any sort of fascism would be censored; paradoxically, he talks a lot about Trump, whom he views as… fascist)

“L’Ordre du Jour” is an excellent book, and it’s also excellent to see a (fundamentally) non-fiction book be rewarded by a literary prize: because reality always beats fiction. To a pulp.

However, I knew all what was in the book, except for a few details (such as there was a famous tennis player called Tilden, who didn’t lose a match for 5 years; Von Ribbentrop at a reception with PM Chamberlain and future PM Churchill, used Tilden, and other never-ending conversation, as a way to delay PM Chamberlain response to the Anschluss, which was literally going on during dinner…)

Yes, I knew it all, except for a few small details like that, and I have written much deeper and incisive things, yet, they will be contained under the obscurity of the force of desire for escapism.

It’s also discouraging to see that a much broader deeper analysis of what went wrong, under the form of essays, will never endanger the established order… although it’s the only thing which could. Yes, people, why didn’t the USA confront Hitler in 1939, as Canada did, coming to the help of its creators, France and Britain?

That US Americans just thought what their capitalist owners told them to think and feel was not an excuse then, and shouldn’t be one now. Instead, it should be a lesson to meditate, a vaccine to inject… But that will not happen, if one doesn’t debate the subject.

They all go around, those people who want others to think good about themselves, saying: love, love, love… But what is love? Does love incorporates chastisement? And if it doesn’t, how does one implement error correction? And if there is no error correction, at all, or then error correction too late, as in World War Two, there will be death, mass death, and is that loving?

We do things we do, including think as we do, because we feel that way. And therein the paradox of reason: to find out where it comes from, one needs to examine emotion, and then adjudicate it, in the name of higher wisdom. Yet emotion is best explored by emotion itself!

America has been afflicted by an ideology that doesn’t work, says professor Joseph Stiglitz, one of the interesting Nobels in economics. This ideology has been acting up for more than a century now, mostly by forming minds. To dismantle it, one has to understand what it got away with, historically.

This is why it is so important to explore history emotionally. By getting to know how it was like, we can emotionally explore what no fiction would dare imagine. Informed what victims went through, be it death camps victims, slaves, Protestants under Louis XIV, Giordano Bruno (tortured to death by the Vatican for…. seven years… for imagining exoplanets), children under Republican Rome, Mesoamericans eradicated under the Conquistadores, etc. Or, for that matter, the torturers running high, such as Von Ribbentrop running circles around British high society… All have to be imagined, to serve as the foundations of, and motivations for, the correct logics we need.

Reading history is no fancy: it should be part of the correct foundation of the moral code. Learning history is not just memorizing what those on a stipend, or with a class agenda (Keynes, Russel, all old textbooks, most Nobels) said about history. Learning history means, first, learning to love and debate history, and even, and especially, to debate it passionately. Only by weighting history, not just logically, but emotionally, can one learn to profit from history, and, first of all, how not to repeat history, in the most fateful way.

Patrice Aymé  

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8 Responses to “Order Of The Day: Elated Or Discouraged? (Pondering Éric Vuillard’s L’Ordre Du Jour)”

  1. G Max Says:

    Wow. So much to munch on! Thanks, depth is what we need! Was that longer than the incriminated book?

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dunno… The book gives some in depth vignettes on a very peculiar subject, the Anschluss, the invasion of Austria by the Nazis… Some particular vignettes. I sort of do fundamentally the opposite: the broad picture, first, the vignettes as support.

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  2. SDM Says:

    Again, as you often do, you show how history provides the backdrop for many current problems afflicting society. So often, however, history is shrouded in lies and propaganda, so the casual observer never gets the real story. This is an ongoing, even worsening, problem with plutocratic control of media. Major media journalists are well paid to ignore the truth and perpetuate lies. The internet is a double edged sword as there is truth out there but getting to it becomes more and more difficult.
    Truth tellers are quickly banished from major media outlets. Those who manage to be heard are attacked and marginalized. Manufacturing consent is the name of the game and most people
    just accept the “news” as told. Those who do not accept one narrative can choose to follow an equally false narrative from another outlet while believing they have found the truth.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Indeed SDM, indeed. Thanks for appreciating!
      A very good example is the attitude on the Versailles Treaty. Krugman, a Jew self-conscious of his rooted out Jewish nature (he himself observed!), embraces what is the Conventional interpretation of the Versailles Treaty: it was horribly unfair to Germany and the main cause of Nazism. That thesis was INVENTED and published by British plutocrat LORD Keynes, the ultimate SAINT in the Neo-Liberal Pantheon, in 1919. So Keynes, the founder of Neoliberalism also founded the main self-justification of Nazism, and both the author and his thesis are embraced by today’s Neoliberals! This is extremely telling: one can argue that the ruling socio-economic ideology is Nazism without the racism!
      That’s why I insist so much on that one system of thought.
      As the plutocrats own or control media, worldwide, thus create the big data, which, in turn, form the small minds of “We The People”, we obviously can’t have People-Power, Demos-Kratia, as the Demos is imprinted with plutocratic compatible robotic minds, by said vicious media…

      Truth tellers are indeed banned, even when they tell only half the truth: see what happened to Dan Rather (banned from big media for having produced nefarious innuendoes about G. W. Bush, insinuating that he maneuvered not to be sent to Vietnam… An undeniable fact… On the face of it: although a pilot and captain, he, indeed, didn’t fight in Vietnam… Rather was banned on detailed assertions… which may, or may not have been correct… But on the face of it W didn’t go to Vietnam, a fact…)

      “Social networks” are deliberately engineering emotional and intellectual fascism, making money from tribalism… Indeed…

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  3. Bill Gorrell Says:

    I know so many people who hate history. I look at it as a collection of stories, but American schools fixate on dates and such instead of narrative.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      French history is arguably even worse, as the admiration for creeps such as Joan of Arc (!), Louis XIV and Napoleon is intense, ingrained, automatized and grotesque, resting, as it does, on entire universes of facts, ignored. Each of those creeps led to the deaths, the criminal deaths, of many millions… But they are objects of cults…. Even worldwide cults….

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  4. Jake Hamby Says:

    “We do things we do, including think as we do, because we feel that way. And therein the paradox of reason: to find out where it comes from, one needs to examine emotion, and then adjudicate it, in the name of higher wisdom. Yet emotion is best explored by emotion itself!”

    Jake Hamby: The trick is to get on the right drugs to generate the best spectrum of emotions (or get your body to generate the right endogenous drugs)

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