Perverse History, Perverse Civilization.

Civilizations, like people, have moods, and act accordingly. Kremlin Russia’s successfully vile and hyper violent history has brought us minds like Putin’s, vile, hyper violent, claiming there are only “sovereigns” and “colonies”.

In 2016, Putin asked students if they knew where Russia ended. A boy rose and stood:”Russia ends at the Behring Straight, Mr. President!” “Wrong,” replied Putin. Putin corrected the miscreant:”Russia never ends!” 

President Vladimir V. Putin views himself as carrying on the task of the Russian czars. Sprawling back in an armchair, spread like an octopus, basking in chuckling self-satisfaction, Mr. Putin started a televised meeting with young entrepreneurs in Moscow on Thursday June 9, 2022, by reflecting on Peter the Great’s 18th-century conquest of the Baltic coast, describing that land as rightfully Russian.

“He wasn’t taking anything away — he was returning it,” Mr. Putin said of that territory, before hinting that he was doing the same thing in his war in Ukraine. “He was returning it and strengthening it. Well, apparently, it has also fallen to us to return and to strengthen.” And he laughted. A scared old 5 feet 5 inch, anti-western, backward looking, regressive poisoning weasel, compares himself to the young and unafraid Peter the Great, a 6 feet 8 inch, forward looking, fanatically pro-western, forward-thinking progressive fighting to death the religious establishment and all old ways, who succeeded to change Russia from the past into the future.

The Baltic nations, then, are next to be “returned”. Thus, like Ukraine in Putin’s estimation, those Baltic nations are not nations at all, but confiscated Russian territories… Just like Ukraine, which Putin has insisted, is not a country, but a piece of Russia ruled by Nazis. According to Putin it seems as if Eurasia should have just one country, to which everything has to be “returned”.

That reasoning was rejected, even by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. That, arguably infernal, trio knew well that the Moscow led empire could survive only if the nations that the Czars had conquered were given a lot of autonomy. So Ukraine joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a “republic”… And, as a “republic” was one of the 40 founding members of the UN. 

Contrast this with Putin’s position, expressed June 9: “It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, were talking about an union of republics, thus recognizing a measure of democracy, individuality and autonomy. Putin is just talking about “Russia”. And “Russia” has “no fences”, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. Putin: “Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.“

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And what does “Russian” mean? In a nutshell, around 12 centuries ago, Novgorod hired Swedish warriors to rule itself, and those warlords promptly went down and conquered what became Ukraine, an exceptionally wealthy land, for agriculture and minerals. Rus was thus created, and then expanded eastward. However, by the 1200s, the centrifugal forces which had affected Novgorod 4 centuries earlier made themselves manifest again: Rus was too extended, too wealthy, too diverse… Unfortunately at that point of disunion, the invading Mongols show up, asking for submission, in the footsteps of their ancestors the Huns. 

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Putin in presidential transcript, June 9, 2022: We visited the exhibition dedicated to the 350th birth anniversary of Peter the Great. Almost nothing has changed. It is a remarkable thing. You come to this realisation, this understanding.

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.

… Narva is in Estonia… I sent the following to the New York Times which had claimed the door was shutting with Russia, and it was sad. It was censored, showing, once again the complicity between new York oligarchy and Russian oligarchy:

Moscow’s autocratic run, launched with Ivan I “Moneybags” started with a cynical collaboration with the Golden (Mongol) Horde, as tax collector for all Russias. It was highly successful, creating the world’s largest empire, colonizing many nations and religions.

However, overall and in the fullness of time, democracy has proven more adept to create the civilization we need to exist. Now, though, tyrants can muster greater powers than ever before. And the planet has become very small: rockets can go around in an hour or so. A final confrontation looms, as Biden correctly pointed out, many times.

Just today Putin declared that Peter The Great was “returning” the Baltic nations to Russia in the 1700s, not conquering them… and that he, Putin, was doing the same. 

As many a tyrant through history, and Kremlin rulers for seven centuries, Putin is distracting his oppressed population with a foreign war which enables him to declare all his opponents, “traitors”, “Nazis”, “criminals”, etc. Nothing new here… Except for one thing Putin has been leveraging: nuclear weapons. This is the first time in history a tyrant can, and threatens to destroy the world, if he does not succeed to conquer. 

A sad moment, for sure. But also a moment that cannot be denied.

We are confronted to the choice of submitting to the will of one man, his vision of humanity, or utter destruction. It is crucial that this one man doesn’t get his way: other tyrants, starting with Xi, would follow his path. It is not a question of imposing democracy, but surviving this.

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Putin wants to do the same as Peter: getting back what was Russian all along… Notice that, right now, Russia occupies Prussia, something even Peter the Great didn’t do.

How did Russians become the way they are? Because tyranny has ruled Russia, and Kremlin led tyranny has been so highly successful… as a tyranny and land gobbler The enormous physical size of Russia has created imperviousness to other influences, which have been kept at a distance. The mood created by the tyrant in Moscow ruled without a rival, or even an awareness. Russia’s enormous geography made it isolated, and propicious to intellectual and mental fascism. It was all so suffocating that Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, created a new capital far from Moscow and its Kremlin, a kind of fortress full of churches.

In the rest of Europe, the situation has been different: diversity ruled, very different ways of thinking and even emoting have been entangled. As Blaise Pascal put it in the 1600s: Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Truth before the  Pyrénées, error beyond them.  When Pascal wrote this, France and Spain, separated by the  Pyrénées, were in the middle of a war which lasted more than 2 centuries, creating the Netherlands and finishing with the Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s second-eldest grandson, becoming Philip V of Spain in 1700. Louis XIV had ejected 10% of the population of France, the Protestants who kept on protesting at a distance, creating elites in other countries who hated French autocracy. That in turn caused the next monster war, the war of The Succession of Spain, which brought enormous losses of French territory, and immense misery, especially in France (although the grandson stayed in place, and the present king of Spain is a descendant…)

In non-Russian Europe, it has become impossible to be unaware of opposite points of view and how maddening the differences could get… About nothing much. The Franco-English war, the so-called “100 years war” which lasted nearly 5 centuries (1300s until 1815), originated as a civil war, French plutocrats against French plutocrats… They called themselves aristocrats, power of the best, but they were not good for the majority of the population.

Now Europeans, outside of Russia, understand that differences enrich, and otherwise do not matter that much, and one shouldn’t go to war about them. Indeed the price for not understanding Vive La Difference is atrocious wars. And their consequences (100 millions killed by the so-called Spanish flu of 1918)… At least differences do not matter between Europeans… and their cultural descendants… and, in some ways, ascendants, the Americans. I said ascendants, because Europe learned quite a few things from the Americas, not just tomatoes, potatoes, and rubber… But also the Nature God and various ecological, or martial ways. 

Russians also learned a lot, and maybe too much, fighting the Mongols, Tartars, Tatars, and other bellicose nomad nations. Nomads have to be bellicose, but, ultimately, once the nomads have been pushed away, aggressivity from a civilization becomes perverse.

It is traditional among the woke and other pseudo-progressives to criticize European imperialism… But careful studies show that the reality was more about empires of the weak proposing deals that the Natives could not refuse, either because they were dead from Euro-African pandemics, or because said deals were irresistible. This is what I have long believed and it is now found in an academic book  “Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order”.

Actually, one should consider that the greater degree of democracy of Europe facilitated directly (nicer power) and indirectly (ideological, scientific, technological) European domination.

Although some of these aspects also applied to Russia (for example Behring was a German officer employed by the Czar), the bottom line in Kremlin Russia stayed the mood set up by Prince Alexander Nevsky and his grandson Ivan Danilovich Kalita. The mood was not to stand for progressive principle and democracy, but instead for power at any cost. Alexander was installed as the Grand Prince of Vladimir (i.e., the supreme Russian ruler) in 1252… by the Mongols. Alexander, made previously Prince of Kyiv by the Mongols, faithfully supported Mongol rule within his domains. In 1259 Alexander led an army to the northern city of Novgorod, an independent republic (at the origin of Rus), and forced Novgorod to pay tribute it had previously refused to pay to the Golden Horde.

Some will say that Alexander had no choice, that the ends justified the means. Maybe or probably. But the fact remains that, with Russian civilization in balance, Nevsky and his grandson Ivan I collaborated with evil. A traditional mentality was founded, of reverence to an evil leader, often wholeheartedly supported by many Russian intellectuals. And that mood was made sacrosanct: Alexander Nevsky was canonized in 1557 CE. These observations have not escaped Ukrainians, and they are starting to remove statues of Alexander Nevsky and various famous “Ruscist” (Russian + fascist) writers.

The situation with imperial Russia is completely different, and deeply perverse from the rest of Europe, because aggression was used as a method of extermination, relentlessly, for centuries, against fellow MASTER CIVILIZATIONS (Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.).

As Putin put it on June 9 2022: ” I promise that I will try to respond to all your proposals and ideas. It is easier for me to do this than for you. I just give instructions; you need to come up with ideas, while I just need to listen to you and give instructions. (Laughter.)”

Return it all! It’s all mine! We Russians own all of this, Peter said so! I have no ideas, just instructions!

This is why the Kremlin dictatorship has to be crushed: the model of one smart idiot giving instructions to everybody, according to a perverse vision of history he erroneously claims to share with Peter the Great (who tortured and killed his one surviving son… one of many people Peter was very familiar with and had to kill in very torturous ways… Some of them he argued with as they were dying, broken by him)… has to be crushed. 

Maybe Peter had to do all this killing and fighting: surely he couldn’t let the Swedes won at Poltava… But Putin did not have to cause mayhem. Comparing himself with Peter the Great, a two meter tall giant, Putin, in his shortness of vision, forgets that Peter had many excuses, excuses which Putin does not have, and three centuries have extinguished the context in which Peter thrived… with a real Swedish invasion and before that, extremely obdurate Christian fanatics, the “Old Believers“, organizing conspiracies, plots, and coup after coup… who had to be broken at the wheel just so the country could live. Instead, Putin is allied to the present day version of the Old Believers…

With its gigantic territory and interesting civilization, Russia has a lot to offer… especially while the planet warms up. But, as it strays into nuclear plated fascism, democracy can’t make any quarters… Should we falter in our defense of democracy it would surely be our ride to hell!

It goes without saying that similar charges can be made against the English American colony’s descendant regime, for somewhat similar reasons. Many of our essays have adressed this.

Perversity brought domination of the beholders. But now this is not a sure thing anymore. Times have changed: they are more subtle. It is time to understand this, what role perversity played, and why, and thus how to transmogrify it.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The core of the present essay, found in italics above, was censored by the New York Times propaganda machine as a comment to an article on June 9, 2022, written by a Russian, who claimed it was so sad that the door was closing between the US and Russia. Never mind that it is Russia which is slamming the door to democracy, while Putin is playing Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, with the twist of threatening to blow up the planet… It stays troubling that the newspaper of record in the USA keeps on rejecting isegoria and parrheisia…

Rome Genetics Varied Considerably, Apparently Carrying Culture With It. Right Or Wrong.

Among Other Things, The SWITCH OF ROME TO DESPOTISM WAS ACCOMPANIED BY A SWITCH TO AN ORIENTAL POPULATION: 

Ancient Rome was the capital city of an empire that encompassed at least 70 million inhabitants, maybe a quarter of humanity at the time. Genetic studies suggest that, just as all roads may once have led to Rome, so did a great many European and Middle Earth genetic lineages also converged there. Genetic studies reveal a dynamic population history from the Mesolithic era (~12,000 Before Present) into modern times, which spans the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Genetic studies do even more: they show a connection between those genes and the cultures they carry.

No, I am not tying up genes and mental capabilities, as the Nazis and other racists did. Instead, I am pointing out that it seems cultures are carried by physical people.

When one looks carefully, this is astounding: Caesar’s ancestors had nothing to do with those of later Romans… Republican Romans are a completely different population from that of the fascist empire.

It is now well established that, as advanced farming with all its human selection engineered grains, spilled from the Fertile Crescent… literally brought by farmers from the Middle East. So basically Mesopotamian farmers with advanced technology settled Italy, nine thousand years ago. We knew the grains came in. We didn’t know the farmers who cultivated these grains had come with them. Nobody would have guessed this, 50 years ago. But now we have DNA sampled from ancient skeletons (in the latest study,127 genomes from 29 archaeological sites in and around Rome).

It turns out that population dynamics, even in the last two thousand years, is much more spectacular that one could have ever guessed. Consider: “Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean.” One sees in Rome people coming from all over… this corresponds with historical political events. (The study was headed by the Stanford University team in collaboration with the University of Vienna and Sapienza University of Rome.)

Big History, Big Genetic Mixing

The samples sequenced fell into three distinct genetic clusters. “Mesolithic hunter-gatherers; early farmers (Neolithic and Copper Age individuals); and a broad historic cluster encompassing individuals from the Iron Age to the present…The oldest genomes in our dataset are from three Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (10,000 to 7,000 BCE) from Grotta Continenza, a cave in the Apennine Mountains.” The DNA analyses confirmed at least two major migrations into Rome, as well as several smaller but still significant population shifts over just the last few thousand years

The findings indicated that as the Roman Empire expanded around the Mediterranean Sea, immigrants from the Near East, Europe, and North Africa migrated into Rome. This significantly changed the faces, literally, of the ancient world’s greatest city.

A pictorial representation of where the populations came from, as represented by the blue arrows.

The first major ancestry shift occurred between 7,000 and 6,000 BCE, coinciding with the transition to farming and introduction of domesticates including wheat, barley, pulses, sheep, and cattle into Italy…. And their farmers: Europe didn’t invent colonialism, actually, it was colonized to start with! 

The second major ancestry shift occurred in the Bronze Age, between ~2,900 and 900 BCE … During this period, major technological developments increased the mobility of populations. Advances in sailing technologies enabled faster, safer, easier and more frequent navigation across the Mediterranean. By the time of the founding of Rome, in 753 BCE, the city’s population resembled a mix of modern European and Mediterranean peoples.

Another look

The establishment of the fascist Principate, starting with Augustus, saw a huge shift in the ancestry of people who lived in Rome, now suddenly primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Hence Rome became Oriental. Thus one understands better the switch of Roman emperors towards a cultural obsession with all things Oriental: Isis, Judaism, Christianism, Manicheism, Mithraism, and, most of all typically Oriental Despotism. Traditional historiography pondered the fascination of early emperors such as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero with the ways of the Orient. An obvious reason was that, since they were despots, they imitated the ways of the imperial despots they knew of, and those were from the Orient. 

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(There was nothing genetic about the love of the Orient with despotism: the Orient was desiccating, while being the cradle of advanced agriculture; the optimal way out was to establish “hydraulic dictatorships”: big armies to protect big hydraulic works built by armies of slaves.)

Now we can understand why the appeal of the Orient was so strong on the Princeps: the leaders of Rome were suddenly ruling over an Oriental population, fully indoctrinated with the religion of Despotism, with their mothers’ milk. 

It’s not just that the Orientals migrated to Rome from the dense Middle East: the ravages of the Civil Wars had been so great that much of the old Roman and Italian population had been decimated (when Octavian and Antonius engaged the war against Brutus and Cassius, Caesar’s main assassins, they had 43 legions. They finished with just 28 legions. Entire legions, like the famed “Martian” legion ended at the bottom of the sea)… 

“During the Imperial period … the most prominent trend is an ancestry shift toward the eastern Mediterranean and with very few individuals of primarily western European ancestry”, the Stanford-Vienna-Rome team wrote.

The same process of decimation of the population happened in reverse, when the Late Empire collapsed, and ironically enough, Europeans moved back in, as the Franks “Renovated the Roman Empire”.

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“It was surprising to us how rapidly the population ancestry shifted… reflecting Rome’s shifting political alliances over time. Another striking aspect was how cosmopolitan the population of Rome was, starting more than 2,000 years ago and continuing through the rise and dissolution of the empire. Even in antiquity, Rome was a melting pot of different cultures… within each time period, individuals exhibited highly diverse ancestries, including those from the Near East, Europe, and North Africa… These high levels of ancestry diversity began prior to the founding of Rome and continued through the rise and fall of the empire, demonstrating Rome’s position as a genetic crossroads of peoples from Europe and the Mediterranean.”

Hence the Romans, up to Caesar, had a different ancestry, a European, culturally rebellious ancestry, than the Romans, after Augustus’ long reign, whose ancestors came from the culturally submissive Middle East (Islam, to appear as the straw which broke the Roman camel’s back, in the Seventh Century, actually means “Submission”). 

Modern morality? Immigration is not just about changing genetics. Roman history tends to indicate it fosters dramatic cultural shifts. Sometimes for the best (Agriculture), sometimes for the worst (Despotism).

Thus, contrarily to the cultural defeatism grandly promoted by most self-promoting European intellectuals after World War two, and considering carefully the Roman cultural collapse into despotism, one may want to be more careful at denying that genetics can’t propagate democratic collapse. 

Patrice Ayme

 

Latest Pluto Brexit Outrage: Dictator Johnson Suspends UK Parliament

BORIS JOHNSON WILL SUSPEND U.K. PARLIAMENT, HINDERING BREXIT REBELS

LONDON — Unelected Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday announced plans to lengthen an upcoming parliamentary break, an expected maneuver that would make it harder for lawmakers to prevent Britain from exiting the European Union without an agreement with the Union.

Mr. Johnson said Britain will leave as French Napoleon Macron scheduled on Oct. 31, with or without a deal. Economists say such a “no-deal” exit would be chaotic and economically damaging, and could plunge Britain into a recession, but Mr. Johnson and the hard-line pro-Brexit faction in Parliament insist that it would be fine.

Opposition politicians — and some of Mr. Johnson’s fellow Conservatives — reacted angrily to the news.

Dictator Boris needs the approval of the dictating hereditary Queen to enact his plot. The two miscreants need to conspire together.

Brexit was a non-binding referendum, whereas the referendum for entry of the UK in the European Community, 45 years ago, was first legislated to be a binding legislation. Brexit was retrospectively made binding, a blatantly anti-democratic measure. Had the Brexit referendum known to been binding to start with, many would not have voted for it. Instead, Brexit was interpreted as a non-binding protest vote, so many voted to “leave” when they didn’t mean it.

In front of Westminster, the UK Parliament (above), is a statue of Richard the Lionheart. King Richard, symbol of England, spent more than 90% of his life in France (aside of time he spent in the Middle East, much of it representing his suzerain and companion of arms, Philippe Auguste of France). Richard was born and died, in France, and became king with the help of Philippe. Europe is one, that’s what the Lionheart statue in front of Westminster means. Brexit idiots don’t know this.

Now two unelected individuals, a hereditary (non-elected) queen, and an ex-journalist are going to act together to prevent any semblance of debate by elected “representatives”, while the UK decides to make economic, financial and fiscal war to its neighbors. 

Notice in passing that when Germans and Franks were led by kings, 15 centuries ago, those  were elected. Non-elected monarchs appeared relatively recently in European history, while wars augmented,

Some may not understand what I just said, let me explain in more details: the UK is a major tax haven. The EU was, increasingly, squeezing out tax havens. UK based plutocrats, coming from all over the world, but nominally based in Britain or its tax-free “dependencies”, couldn’t take it, and decided to have their tax haven, Britain and more than 15 tax-free dependencies, sail away.

So now we can contemplate what “representative democracy” has become: not even a fig leaf for raw global plutocracy anxious to keep its tax-free status.

What the world needs is real Demos Kratia, People Power, and that means People directly voting, and being clear on what they vote for (and not packs of lies like Brexit).

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Does the preceding means I am a Remainer foaming at the mouth? No. (Some Brexit fanatics have told me I inspired them to launch Brexit, believe it or not…)

Actually, Brexit may help Europe, if it results of a bit of competition Europe needs. Let me explain: Direct Democracy in Switzerland has made Switzerland wealthy, productive and innovative. In the best possible Brexit strategy, Great Britain would mimic Switzerland (as the EU should do). That, in turn, would force the European Union to do the same…

Moreover, the UK will have to keep on cooperating militarily with France.

So Brexit doesn’t mean all the bridges are cut with the other side of the Channel… Far from it. In catastrophic scenarios where Scotland leaves the UK, because the UK left the EU, British nuclear subs, presently based in one spot in Scotland, are supposed to be based in France (France has four strategic nuclear subs based in their special base in Brest; and six 100 meters long attack nuclear submarines based in the deep rade of Toulon; the UK has three strategic “Trident” nuclear subs… the USA has 14 “Trident” nuclear subs, core of US Defense)…

Big History View Of China, How It Relates To Hong Kong

How did China get united, 22 centuries ago? Under the rule of law. The state of Qin grew, over the centuries, from relentless application of the law, just like the other greatest civilization, Rome. This mood, of the rule of law being paramount, is why the generals of the First Emperor were able to conquer China… Very similarly to what the Roman Republic did, at exactly the same time, and for the exact same reasons: Rome won, and Qin won, because people accept to be ruled by law, if it is fair and clairvoyant. The Mission Civilisatrice is no lure: it wins wars. Superior war fighting capability comes from superior philosophy. Inferior philosophy brings extinction. 

In the end, the First Emperor slipped, and led China astray, for millennia to come, when he ordered the books of 100 philosophy schools destroyed. Right, records, science, medicine were preserved… So the disaster was not as great in China as the Christian generated destruction of the Greco-Roman heritage in the West. (Yet, in the West, the Franks, a minority, took over, and, as a minority, they had to be smarter, and thus domesticated Christianism, rendering it innocuous… for the next five centuries… before it rose its ugly snout again…)

However, that Qin instigated wanton destruction of higher thinking, and the respect thereof,  set-up in China a mood of embracing a lack of wisdom and tolerance for exotic thinking, which, in the end, had ethical consequences (and from there, social, economic, and ultimately, military). That mood of irreverence for higher thinking out of the box, prevented China to learn to treat individuals as well as they were in the West.

In Francia, in 655 CE, the government of the Imperium Francorum led by queen Bathilde, a former English slave, outlawed slave trading; this was imposed all around Europe. For example in 1066 CE, when the Franks conquered England… and freed the slaves, 20% of the population. As Aristotle pointed out, if one had no slaves, one would need machines. The Franks developed those machines. European visitors to China. around or before Marco Polo, were struck by the fact that cutting trees in China involved hundreds of people carrying those trees around… when similar tasks were accomplished by a few in Europe, thanks to various tech tricks. 

What Xi wants to be, when he grows up? Hopefully, the Present Masters of China Will Learn That This Is All Over Now: Xi Can’t be Qin Shi Huang!

(Huang, emperor, maybe, Shi, first, certainly not…)

Treating individuals better in the West, as was imposed under the Merovingians and Carolingians, brought up a technological, and even bioengineering explosion: human muscle and multitude had to be replaced by mechanical advantage or specially bred animals (for example hydraulic hammer to forge huge iron beams, hence the cathedrals… and, a bit later, field artillery). [1]

An indirect result of this tech explosion was Western military superiority, which was so great, even the Mongols left Western Europe alone (after conferring among each other about why their ancestors the Huns had been defeated in France, eight centuries prior). Thus Western Europe was unconquered, for two millennia, insuring independent ferocity of thinking and self-worth, spurring inquiry of the indomitable human spirit, with more freedom than occupied China.   

Indeed, in contrast, in the last millennium, China spent most of its time ruled by foreigners (Jurchen, Mongols, Manchus). Mongol generals even proposed to annihilate China, demographically (holocaust) and even ecologically (turning northern China into a steppe) The rule of law, intellect and science suffered in China, from this foreign occupation.

In the Twentieth Century, China reacted, mostly by adopting Western ideologies: rule of law, then Marxism, then the sort of mercantilist, tech led development leading Western powers, used in the Nineteenth Century; powers such as the USA, Germany, UK, France… even Japan (a new honorary Western power!)

So far, so good. 

However to lead, one needs to create ideas, not just mass produce goods. Western European supremacy was born out of human rights (when the Franks put back monotheism in its place, by replacing Christianism by tolerance and pushing back Islamism, after outlawing slavery). If China doesn’t learn to drive the rule of law from human right, it will just become one more dangerous super power, like Prussia, and the Second, and Third Reich of Germany.

Democracy and Human Rights are not just fair. Humanity in full, is made for fairness, and blossom fully that way. Democracy and human rights are how one maximizes mental creativity… And thus military superiority. Hence, should the Chinese dictatorship decide to crush democracy, once again, it is Chinese security that it is also crushing, long term.

Hong Kong is an irreplaceable gift to China, an antidote to Chinese intellectual and governmental fascism: it forces China to learn to become more tolerant to thinking outside of the particular box which pleases at this moment the present emperor (right now, Mr. Xi). [2]

Destroying that gift would instill an even more ignorant mood.

But ignorant moods are exactly what plutocracy loves.

Lack of construction for homes and dearth of living wages, have been a chronic disaster, throughout the West. It’s particularly bad in Hong Kong, but also in all top producing metropolises, such as Paris, San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo, etc. Not only are homes unaffordable for the jobs at hand, but the economy suffers from the unaffordability crisis.

Then We The People, observing the collusion between plutocrats and government, revolt… by asking for more (real, that is direct) democracy. And that goes through decreasing the power of tycoons, so precious to governments. Ironically enough, what is Xi, but a super-tycoon, a super-typhoon putting equality to waste?

OK, Xi was an abused child, an abused princeling, abused by the Cultural Revolution. Xi suffered a past of violence. But that’s a diagnostic, not an excuse.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The cognitively challenged friend of monopolist plutocrat Bill Gates, Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) didn’t understand any of this, that the husbandry of Europe over nature was not the product of chance, but human will, deployed over millennia (although in his latest book, Diamond shows flickers of progressing wisdom, as he ponders successful cases of government intervention… more or less mangled by his data management…) All the riches of Western Europe were greatly the fruit of will, indeed. The same holds for China (or Kerala)… But, as I point out above, and why, to a smaller extent. And the Beijing hysteria about Hong Kong is a case in point, that Chinese governmentalism, however glorious, fundamental and effective, can’t be the whole story:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/synthesis-found-governmentalism/

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[2] France is another example where centralism, and the accompanying governmental, social and intellectual fascism has run havoc. Louis XIV, a bloody stupid monster, threw 10% of the French population out, so that it could better terrorize the rest, and please his fascist god. That was aggravated by his grandson, Louis XV, and Napoleon…

Zhōngguó, Central State, is the most common Mandarin name for China in modern times. The first appearance of 中國 on an artifact was in the Western Zhou on a ritual vessel. It is formed by combining the characters zhōng (中) meaning “central” or “middle”, and guó (國/国), representing “state” or “states”; in contemporary usage, “nation”. Prior to the Qin unification of China “Zhongguo” referred to the “Central States“; the connotation was the primacy of a culturally distinct core area, centered on the Yellow River valley, as distinguished from the tribal periphery. Hence the common mistranslation as “Middle Kingdom”.

Dispelling Lies Exalting 1776 To Smear 1789.

It’s traditional among Anglo-Saxon historians and pundits of the sort who get on the payrolls of the “best” (that is, wealthiest, most plutocratic) universities, and top media, to spite the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, and propagandize against it…

While celebrating the US Declaration of Independence of 1776. It’s condemning apples to celebrate death caps. 1776 was anti-plutocratic, right, yet tribal: it didn’t free the slaves. 1789 is universal, and did free the slaves. Ironically, the US Constitution also appeared in 1789… but was not as universal as the French constitution, so that US ersatz has been hardly mentioned ever since as a competitor to France 1789… Most US citizens, pundits and propagandists don’t realize the French and US Constitutions were elaborated simultaneously in 1789… And everybody knows about the French one, because of its universal claims.  

Typical of the plutocratically inspired spite for 1789, is this from the New York Times, July 4, 2019: Robespierre’s America

We need to reclaim the spirit of 1776, not the certitudes of 1789.

You mean we should forget the certitudes of the United Nations’ charter? And the New York Times to insist: 

“Armed with the ‘truth,’ Jacobins could brand any individuals who dared to disagree with them traitors or fanatics,” historian Susan Dunn wrote of the French Revolution. “Any distinction between their own political adversaries and the people’s ‘enemies’ was obliterated.” 

Amusing, if said in elementary school, by an exalted toddler, but not funny if considered to be serious scholarship. And even less so when it is used, as it is, to smear the entire French Revolution. When one speaks of the Terror one speaks of a period during which the French Republic was at war with the rest of Europe, which was controlled by bloody plutocrats threatening to kill millions, and boasting of it, to further their rule of terror. The counter-terror of the Republic festered only during a short period in 1793, and part of 1794… and it arose for reasons exterior to France. The word “Jacobin” was initially an insult, and was invented well after 1789.[2]

Pseudo-humanists can say whatever catches their fancy, completely irrelevant to any sort of reality: this is how the United Nations Charter was born, at Valmy, September 20, 1792… Thanks to superior French explosives… And the Republican élan…

The French Revolution of 1789 was such an excellent thing that the Charter of the present day United Nations is founded on it. However, in their will to hatred, and plutocracy, many smear the Human Rights and Citizen Rights Proclamation of 1789 with what happened in 1793: total war, invasions by several monarchies, the Jacobins tearing each other up, the Terror, 17,000 executed. They also omit to say that, in the meantime, all of Europe monarchies had attacked France in 1792, promising Paris “military execution”, and that the king and queen had betrayed the country, France, that they had been put in charge of leading. [1]

Smearing 1789 with 1793, omitting 1792, is conducive to… hatred. Hatred for progress, human rights, etc.. Thus smearing 1789 is to embrace the love of plutocracy, inequality, fracking, excess CO2, over-exploitation of resources, disregard for human rights, or even human lives (see US life expectancy going down, ever since the latter rule of Obama the Great), etc. Exactly the agenda the English North American colony leaders tended to exhibit and cherish since 1610 CE.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] On the Valmy Battle, September 20, 1792: After threatening Paris with “military execution”, the coalition plutocratic army invaded France. France was still a monarchy, and France was still led by the king who launched the revolution, Louis XVI, who had been king for EIGHTEEN (18) years.  

The military execution threat was made in July 1792, raising the stakes of the total war of plutocracy against the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/how-genocide-starts/

Just over half of the French infantry were regulars of the old Royal Army, as were nearly all of the cavalry and, most importantly, the artillery,[3][5] which were widely regarded as the best in Europe at the time.[6][7] These veterans provided a professional core to steady the enthusiastic volunteer battalions.[8]Combined, Dumouriez’ Army of the North and Kellermann’s Army of the Centre totalled approximately 54,000 troops.[9] Heading towards them was the Duke of Brunswick’s coalition army of about 84,000, all veteran Prussian and Austrian troops augmented by large complements of Hessians and the French royalist Army of Condé.[9]

 

The invading fasco-plutocratic army of proto-Nazis handily captured Longwy on 23 August and Verdun on 2 September, then moved on toward Paris through the defiles of the Forest of Argonne.[6] In response, Dumouriez halted his advance to the Netherlands and reversed course, approaching the enemy army from its rear.[3] From Metz, Kellermann moved to his assistance, joining him at the village of Sainte-Menehould on 19 September.[6] The French forces were now EAST of the Prussians, behind their lines. Theoretically the Prussians could have marched straight towards Paris unopposed, but this course was never seriously considered: the threat to their lines of supply and communication was too great to be ignored. With few other options available, Brunswick turned back and prepared to do battle.

 

When the Prussian manœuvre was nearly completed, Kellermann advanced his left wing and took up a position on the slopes between Sainte-Menehould and Valmy.[6] He centered his command around an old windmill, which he quickly razed to prevent enemy artillery spotters from using it as a sighting location.[11] His veteran artillerists were well-placed upon its accommodating ridge to begin the so-called “Cannonade of Valmy“.[3] Brunswick moved toward them with about 34,000 of his troops.[9] As they emerged from the woods, a long-range gunnery duel ensued and the French batteries proved superior. The Prussian infantry made a cautious, and fruitless, effort to advance under fire across the open ground.[3]

The French troops sang “La Marseillaise” and “Ça Ira“, and a cheer went up from the French line.[12] Confronted to this discouraging and thoroughly unexpected élan, to the surprise of nearly everyone, Brunswick broke off the action and retired from the field. The Prussians rounded the French positions at a great distance and commenced a rapid retreat eastward.

Never doubt the efficiency of the Marseillaise…

The First French Republic was proclaimed the next day in Paris, as the news of the victory arrived.

French troops soon struck forward into Germany, taking Mainz in October. Dumouriez once again moved against the Austrian Netherlands and Kellermann ably secured the front at Metz…

***

[2] I studied on the exact street from which the word “Jacobin”, initially a put-down, comes from. There was an old Catholic institution partisans of the secular Republic took over, to work from. It was on rue Saint Jacques… So the enemies of the Republic called the secularists that way, to make fun of them, as if they had embraced Saint Jacques (now, as in 1789, French topmost high school and the Sorbonne bracket the rue Saint Jacques).. 

French, Mandarin, Indo-European Languages; Why Multilingualism Brings Higher Wisdom

Multilingualism is a basic human capability, long honed by biological evolution. It may be necessary to achieve the highest mental capabilities, as multilingual speakers learn to adjudicate between modes of expression, the most advanced form of thinking.

So which languages? Excellent article by my frenemy Mehdi Lazar, summarizing well most of the situation with French:”The New Dynamic of French In The World.”. To point out that French and Mandarin are the most important languages (with English, de facto lingua franca) is crucial. Indeed, French is basically the core language of Europe: it is grammatically impoverished Latin bastardized with German prepositions, where many words have been phonetically and alphabetically simplified from the Latin originals. English was an afterthought. French is a fast evolving language (hopefully to go with fast minds).

This understates reality: for example North Africa spoke Latin for 900 years before the Arab invasion. Modern Latin, that is French, is widely understood, practiced and spoken in the Maghreb (in spite of efforts by local dictators of Islamist inspiration to kill it). Africa, light green, has to speak Latin derived languages (including English), because there are way too many native languages (or slave derived languages like Swahili)

Compare say the French “opital” from the original Latin “hospitalis”… English, which is actually more conservative than French, is in between with “HoSpital”: the H and S are still pronounced in English, not in French. The french found that the aspired H in the beginning, the S in the middle, and the “IS” at the end, were all useless, so they dropped them!

English, although technically classified as a “Germanic” language is mostly poorly pronounced French, and the more so, the more sophisticated the vocabulary is (85% + of words in common). Naturally, per its central position in Western Europe, French is then a happy medium between English and the other “romance” languages.

Now the baby elephant in the porcelain shop is that unruly child of Great Britain and France, the USA. Ironically enough, the dreaded “Anglo-Saxons” contribute to French by often going back to the Latin, that is, the original French, and creating words that way.

Here is an example: impact. The word appeared in English circa 1600, for “press closely into something,” from Latin impactus, past participle of impingere “to push into, drive into, strike against”. The word appears in French science and technological vocabulary only in 1824. But not just that, it’s an extremely important word, as it expresses the transmission of force (= how things act upon each other). Thus, in US English it has come to be used, since the 1990s as a… verb. As in: this essay impacts linguistics hard.

Thus it’s only a matter of time before the French verb “impacter” appears… and it would be a very useful verb… created as words should be created in French, going to the original Latin.

Another view: this time more of Africa shows up. Erroneously, but it’s a traditional error, English is not viewed as a Greco-Roman language (although it is fundamentally Greco-Roman, with more than 85% sophisticated words basically French…

Multilingualism is natural, humanity evolved as multilingual: our brains are made to learn several languages, and it enables us to better learn to adjudicate thoughts and forms of expression.

How so? Transportation was extremely difficult in the world of the past, except in those few places with steppe (like the Eurasian steppe, which goes from Hungary to Korea, that enormous freeway in the middle of Eurasia). Thus people evolved many languages even over very short distances. An example is Senegal: in this small countries, seven languages evolved, and some are tonal (Serer) and others not (Wolof). This is typical of the past, so human beings had to be multilingual.

However, there are only that many languages one can learn: French and Mandarin are the great linguistic anchors of the world, a continent apart.

But not just this: except for deplorable episodes such as the ephemeral collapses of the Greco-Roman and Chinese states under the invasions of various savages, Western Europe and China have long been at the forefront of civilization, spearheading progress. Learning basic Chinese arithmetic is fascinating: the Chinese found more rational ways to do it.

The state of Qin and the contemporaneous Roman Republic were remarkably based on the same principles of law, reason and technological progress… and that’s why they founded great empires (alive and well to this day, as descendant regimes). Actually the present inchoate world government embodied by the United Nations rests on Roman Republican legal principles, or even the letter of the Roman law (that’s similar to the Qin obsession with law… which was even applied to one of its most ardent proponent, a famous Qin PM who finished quartered by horses, as the law prescribed for the sort of corruption he had unfortunately engaged in…)

China understood the importance of intellectualism (the “Mandarin” examination system) and science… And that is why China was so successful, and the anchor civilization of East Asia (Japan and Vietnam used to employ Chinese character… Although the French switched Vietnam, and japan evolved a bit on its own…) Thus, from all this will to advanced thinking, China invented many technologies the world uses now. Even in the Nineteenth Century, Chinese drilling for natural gas, one kilometer down, or more, was the world’s most advanced.

The Frankish empire, both Merovingian and Carolingian, soon renamed itself “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”. Indeed, it “renovated” Rome on way better principles: no more terrorizing, stupidifying, sordid Christian fanaticism… and, soon enough, no more slavery: Saint Queen Bathilde outlawed the slave trade in 655 CE… Throughout much of Western Europe. So when the Franks invaded England in 1066, they freed the 20% of slaves there. These philosophical changes had huge economic, social and military impacts… 

Thus learning French and Mandarin is not just about speaking what many speak, and will speak. It’s about learning what made civilization what it has become… including learning the grave errors which made it so much better.

The “mission civilisatrice” is not over, it’s just starting. It’s not just a matter of feeling, and being, superior, it’s a matter of surviving. And not just for this species, but for the entire biosphere. You all will learn to think better, or you will learn to die, sordid. Go multilingual!

Patrice Ayme

Trump Was A Warning To Plutocracy. Warren Is What Is Really Needed!

EINOs: Elite In Name Only. This is the entire problem. No more than 10,000 people decide of the fate of the USA, the West, Civilization, eight billion people, and even the fate of the biosphere. 10,000 have captured the planet. Who are these experts in heist? Who are these gods? Mostly a self-nominated elite. OK, not all from the same place: after all, Putin was nominated by the KGB, and Xi Jinping is the son of Xi Zhongxun, nominated by the Politburo.

Yet certainly China’s elite became part of global plutocracy. Here is an example: corrupt armies ransacked Congo for rare earths enabling China to make phones for Apple, which “optimized” its own taxes into quasi-nothingness, by a combination of Caribbean tax havens and an EU-illegal deal with Ireland.   

It is this global plutocracy which rules the world. It talks one way… precisely to be able to act the opposite. Biden is the centerfold of this, even more than the transparent Obama, and the blatant Clinton. In the 1990s, time and time again, Biden fostered the plutocratic coup against civilization, the crux being the destruction of the Banking Act of 1933, thus giving free reins to the world financial plutocracy.

All is tied up: Obama fostered a fracking rampage thus the US produces twice more fossil fuels than Russia or Saudis, poisoning Earth… But 1% of US CO2 is from US subsidized private jets.

Only one way out: as the Roman Republic did. Put an ABSOLUTE limit on wealth. As Warren suggests to do (de facto). Warren’s revolution can defeat Trump’s revolt.

***

The preceding commented on the New York Times “Joe Biden and the Party of Davos

As a pillar of the ancien régime, Biden is ill-placed to overturn Trump’s revolution,” opined Roger Cohen in the New York Times.

My, my, my… How the Times they are changing. Just a little while ago, Trump was reviled, and not hating him, a grave moral failure, let alone a revolution. Calling Biden and the revered Obama ancien régime was a sin. Biden was arguably the most prominent engineer of plutocratic legislative installment in the 1990s: he reversed women rights, instituted mass imprisonment, demolished the Banking Act of 1933. [1]

 

Obama: “Can you believe those idiots? They really think we are not on the same side! I just smile, and they believe me!” Trump:”yeah, well, we better give those losers a bit of slack!”

Truth is Trump is not that bad, especially considering what the ancien régime has done, and not done. The US unemployment rate just reached (May 2019) a 50 years’ low. Trump brought tariff on 200 billion dollars worth of Chinese goods to 25%. Seeing those facts, global plutocracy screams high treason. I say: why doesn’t the European Union not do the same? Because it’s neither European, nor an Union?

Cohen goes on:

“Is Donald Trump an aberration? If he is, Joe Biden is the perfect Democratic candidate to defeat him next year, the steady hand that can restore decency, steer a middle course between Wall Street and Main Street, and reinvigorate the shaken liberal democratic order.

I don’t think Trump is an aberration. On the contrary, he’s the face, however duplicitous, of a revolution against the Party of Davos, the network of elites whose economic and cultural prescriptions came to be seen by myriad voters across the United States and Europe as camouflage for a self-serving heist. Biden has been a regular attendee at Davos.”

The present economic expansion is the longest ever. Trump has argued with the Fed about letting the economy run; the Fed has argued it “wants to take the punchbowl away”. The Fed is clearly wrong in a globalized economy… Now, of course, Trump has been de-globalizing more than a bit… As needed…Now here is Cohen going on with more of what I have been saying for a few years. Actually I said it, years before Obama enraged Trump enough, and made him realize anybody could become president, as long as they lied big enough, deep enough, and frequently enough, that Trump decided to run for president. As I pointed out in August 2016:

“USA As A Police State

Many rage against Donald Trump, while singing the praises of Obama. They overlook that the Donald duck is what the Obama cat dragged home.”

Therein the graph of the incarceration rate in the USA, much of it having to do with Biden’s work, as the head of the relevant Senatorial committee in the 1990s:

Thanks to Biden’s reforms, incarceration doubled. Under Reagan, it’s the Democrats who passed the laws to incarcerate, as all the end all, be all laws needed…

Here is Roger Cohen again: [Trump] “could say the unsayable. He could disrupt. He could restore violence to a wan political stage of PowerPoint slides. He could take on the China that had put millions of people to work on the cheap in its factories and so, from the Midwest to the British Midlands, de-industrialized much of the West.

If people felt like nobodies, felt abandoned, felt there was not only growing inequality in wealth but inequality of recognition, felt their very language had been anesthetized by all-knowing elites more at home in global capitals than in the provinces of their own countries, then somebody could speak for liberalism’s disappeared — and maybe even win. Steve Bannon saw this. Trump grasped this and did win, not as the creator of a movement but as the media-savvy messenger of a groundswell.”

This revolution is not an American phenomenon. It is much wider…”

Roger Cohen observes the obvious:

There’s been a movement in people’s minds, a radical change in the way people live, perceive and conduct their politics. The old paradigm won’t work… whatever Biden’s early lead in polls. He’s ill-placed, as a pillar of the ancien régime, to overturn the revolution. This is not personal. It’s societal.

For all his Scranton blue-collar beginnings, Biden will be pilloried as a faithful servant of the Party of Davos that secured impunity for the financiers behind the 2008 meltdown, a heady growth in inequality, China appeasement and the arrogance of money-wooed Democrats estranged from their working-class constituency. Unfiltered politics, technology’s dubious gift, will hurt him. These politics prize agility more than honor. The world has moved on. Whither I’m not sure, but it has. Things shift. That’s the way of the world — inexorable as biology.

One of the most significant exchanges so far of the fight for the 2020 Democratic nomination came in the last few days when Biden said of China: “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” To which Bernie Sanders shot back that the United States had lost three million manufacturing jobs to the 2000 China trade deal. “It’s wrong,” he tweeted, “to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors.”

Not only economic, I would add. China is set on an implacable course to run the world in the second half of this century. If that is not precisely what you want for your children, thinking that “they’re not competition for us” is precisely the wrong place to start. It’s lazy thinking

Cohen then evokes Macron, who went one carbon tax too far. Macron was preoccupied by the end of the world. The Gilets Jaunes replied they were preoccupied by the end of the month. Cohen, optimistically said that Macron learned. Our banker learned? Of course not really. All Macron learned was to fly, one burning cathedral at a time, just dumping enough Pluto baggage, to get over the next hill.

And finally Cohen draw the conclusion I have drawn in the past:

“…among Democratic contenders, Elizabeth Warren is listening most closely. Her proposed tax on the super wealthy reflects that — while billionaires, like China, get a pass from Biden. Trump is not an aberration. Only the innovative will beat him.”

***

From Repression To Barbarization:

Other opinion makers at the New York Times are also condemning Biden, even if they don’t say it aloud, but use euphemisms. In “Imprisoned for Trying to Save His Son. Mass incarceration was America’s biggest mistake over the last half-century.” Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, on May 4, 2019,

“America’s biggest mistake over the last half-century arguably had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam or Iraq, or with Watergate or Donald Trump. Rather, I’d say that it was mass incarceration, fueled by the war on drugs.

The United States used to have incarceration rates similar to those of Europe — and then, beginning in about 1970, we increased the number of people behind bars sevenfold. About as many Americans now have a criminal record as have a college degree. Mass incarceration shattered America’s family structure, magnified race gaps, left millions of people marginalized — and has been brutally unfair.

Years ago I wrote about a case that still haunts me. Dicky Joe Jackson was a Texas trucker whose 2-year-old son, Cole, needed a bone-marrow transplant to save his life. The family raised $50,000 through community fund-raisers, but this wasn’t enough — so Jackson tried to earn the remainder by transporting meth in his truck for a distributor. He was caught and sentenced to life in prison.

The prosecutor himself thought the sentence unjust, saying of Jackson: “He didn’t know of any other way to take care of his kid.”“

***

Mass incarceration was itself a manifestation of a much deeper disease: the control of the USA by its wealthiest class, even when civilization was. and is, at stake. Those who know too little history will say the USA declared war TO Hitler. No. Hitler declared war TO the US (Dec 11, 1941). The USA had the plan to NOT go to war in 1942. Fortunately, the stupid fascists couldn’t resist.

USA’s worst lie, and worst mistake, for those who care about lives, humanity,  and its standards: not to recognize the value system which led it to fight too late against Nazism, or even more basic, that the deepest flaws of US society, still in power today, led it to not declare war to Hitler. Obscuring this vile story hides US Pluto power (US plutocracy!

It’s all tied up together into an all too evil mood…

No more than 10,000 people decide of the fate of the USA, the West, Civilization, eight billion people, and even the fate of the biosphere. 10,000 have captured the planet. Some could argue that they are busy destroying the planet, precisely to hide their heist, by fostering great destruction, making it impossible to understand who, what, started the holocaust, the burning of everything…

Anyway, good to see the Times they are changing…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Relative to Biden, Obama was just a poser: his Obamacare, however helpful it has been to the healthcare plutocracy, pales in insignificance relative to Biden’s hellish reforms of the 1990s… 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/obamascare/

Of course TARP was very much in the spirit of Biden’s finance reforms of the 1990s:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/tarp-transfer-of-assets-to-rich-people/

We Are Scared, Thus We Are British Versus We Are French, And Why We Are Revolutionaries

REVOLUTIONS AFTER REVOLUTIONS: THE HISTORY OF FRANCE. FAR FROM A CRAZY REVOLUTIONS ARE CIVILIZATION BUILDING!

And Why Islands Such As England, Are More Peaceful, Thus More Tyrannical:

Afraid of their own establishment, all too established, the British are. That made them obedient, sometimes even obsequiously, to their plutocratic masters (hence the polite goofing off below and around “Royals”). Hence the British world empire, now a world empire of the English language, a form of poorly pronounced French, and Anglo-Saxonia (understand plutocracy friendly, or more, precisely, the spirit of the West Country Men, see below, for this ignominy which has metastasized, worldwide). 

The right way to make Brexit: change the EU, tearing it out of the clutches of a corrupt establishment, using force . To riot or not to riot? French violence, over the last millennium was the icebreaker English trade and society meekly followed behind… To great profit. English tyranny, more stealthy and efficient, tended to use what worked best to exploit better. See the note about Philippe IV with Henry VIII as consequence…

This is exactly why the Revolution of Human Rights of 1789 happened in France, not Great Britain. In France, peasants owned their land (however small). In Britain plutocrats, the top ones elected to Parliament, owned all the land, and controlled the country so thoroughly, including the legal and justice system, revolution was impossible.

Thus plutocrats made the laws in Britain. In practice, it meant that landless, unemployed rural denizens flocking to cities could be arrested, and condemned to death for vagrancy… Except, of course, if they asked the judge to be deported as slave to North America (exact title was “endured servant”) Hence England was able to stuff North America with colonists, and make the colonies profitable (especially adding slaves and tobacco).

By the 18th century, a British admiral was famously hanged “to encourage the others” as Voltaire put it. He had been culprit of lacking enthusiasm in battle. Only a deeply inhuman, fascist system ruled by mighty Plutos could engage in such violence.

Revolutions in France: they started by the 12th century with the Cathars, and arguably even earlier by 1026 CE, when the Vatican used the first mass burning of revolutionaries to repress the nascent rebellion against Catholic fascism! When the French army got to England in 1066 CE, it outlawed slavery, as per Frankish law, seducing the 20% of the English population which was enslaved.

One may wonder why France was always that icebreaker, jumping from revolution to revolution… of all these revolutions, the only pacific one was that of “Amour Courtois”, in the middle of the Middle Ages, when influential ladies started, successfully, a “me too” movement for the times…

The answer is simple: England is an island. England suffered only one invasion since 1066 CE (and that one was pretty much an insider affair, the so-called “Glorious Revolution” when Orange took power… “Orange” itself being revealing of his true origin, Orange, in France…)

Whereas France, in the Middle Of Western Europe, was always a war country, exposed to invasions, and keen to engage in counterattacks… all the way to Algiers or Moscow… Being armed to the teeth, and culturally friendly to war, the French apply those principles inside. All the more as the military leadership of France had to depend upon We The People to engage in all these wars, so We The People of France is always more or less on a war footing.

So both the French leadership and the French people have always been bellicose, and being bellicose is a fundamental property of France which enables the existence of France as a polity. Thus bellicosity is perceived deep down inside in French mentality, as a positive.

War also had a huge scientific effect. The “100 year war” (part of the nearly 5 centuries war) between France and England finished when French engineers, the Bureau brothers, introduced field guns, a world first. At the battle of Castillon, French guns obliterated the English army (which suffered 4,000 killed, while the French had only one hundred dead).

Gallic military engineering supremacy dated all the way back to the Roman Republic, when the Celts provided superior metallic military equipment to… the Roman army.

An example is the Grenade GLI F4, an instantaneously explosive tear gas which makes an explosion of 170 decibels to render We The People deaf (Grenade lacrymogène instantanée) fabricated by SAE Alsetex (groupe Étienne Lacroix). The grenade contains a TNT charge, and explodes so violently, it has torn hands of French gilet jaune demonstrators, more than a meter away.

The World Financial Order explodes contradictors, because violence works, always had. Here a French demonstrator torn, one of many, in 2018, by explosive TNT grenade , made in France (not China!) Even Foreigners and Belgians get exploded.

While the plutocratic French monarchy is busy exploding and terrifying French contradictors of the established Rothschild order…

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/macron-bankster-executioner/

… the People Republic of China launched a rover to the Far Side of the Moon, a world first. (It required to put in orbit another satellite around the Moon, first, for communications.)

https://www.space.com/42665-china-launches-moon-far-side-lander-rover.html

Thus, thanks to Manu the First and Last of His Name, unpopular King of France, allied to the plutocratic globalocracy, and the most repugnant philosophy, French military technology against We The People of France, is progressing by leaps and bounds… While several other nations plan to further technology in more productive ways, by establishing bases on the Moon.

We don’t need solitary, arrogant clown brainwashed by Heideggerian (that is, Nazi) philosophers, programmed by the French Republic Inspectorate of Finance and its sponsor, Banque Rothschild, to lead us into oblivion, so as the present version of the “West Country Men” can profit so much, they will forget. their own ignominy. What we need is progress, that is, revolution. It starts with more equality.

There is no steady state. Never was, but now, less than ever. Civilization is an ongoing revolution. The Ship of Civilization is propelled by revolutions. And it better be right away, or the humanely sustainable biosphere will die.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

England, institutionally speaking, was mostly created by Frenchmen:

starting with the Franco-Norman colonization. According to Frankish law, slavery was immediately outlawed (so 20% of the population loved William). William then introduced the sort of oath and direct relationship between king and people characteristic of that between Roman imperator and soldier. Clovis had done the same, but only in the Frankish army, as it was, after all, a Roman army (this was enforced by the famous Soissons Vase incident, where Clovis executed a Frankish warrior, for disobedience, as if he were a vulgar Roman soldier… which he was… unbeknownst to him).

Frenchmen launched reforms kept on coming: the Magna Carta, the puffed-up role of Parliament (Duke of Lancastre/Lancaster).

***

French Revolt Against Papacy Led To The English One:

Around 1300 CE, Philippe IV Le Bel, “emperor in his own kingdom”, in concert with his English vassal, the King of England, waged war against the Pope. The Pope surrendered, agreeing to taxation. Still Philippe got him arrested, and dead.

After that, it was easy to do what Henry VIII did, 240 years later, creating a reformed church in England.

***     

Then came the “West Country Men”… Top English investors who terrorized Ireland, before establishing a highly profitable, slave driven colony in America… When evil works, nothing else can do as well:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/sometimes-all-you-need-is-war/

The Revolution in France is a revolt against the West Country Men spirit (which amusingly was best exploited by German Jews, the immigrants who adopted the name “Rothschild”…)

Physics Needs Strong Philosophy More Than Ever: Scandal of the 5%!

And it has to do with the rule of the 1%! 

Philosophy is often dominated by weaklings. Sometimes, centuries of weaklings. Let’s avert our eyes from the Nazi Heidegger: fools love Heidegger, because fools love Nazi style of thinking. So does those who favor the rule of the few, because Nazi style thinking has to do with fascist thinking, thinking according to a few ideas and a few men (“Jesus”, Constantine, Saint Augustine, Muhammad, etc.)

Perhaps the most prominent example mixing barbarity, philosophy and stupidity is the Christianized Middle Ages: Epicurus wrote 300 books. All were meticulously destroyed by Christians. Only three letters of Epicurus survived… What was Epicurus writing about, why did Christians hated him so much? Atomic theory. The Greeks considered it highly probable, they thought they had experimental proof. They also had mechanical computers and very advanced elements of mathematics and physics which the Christians also eradicated. It requires some effort to go back to barbarity!

The Christians hated atomic theory, which denied the whole transmutation of bread and wine into body and blood of Christ: Christians “thinkers” wrote millions of pages on the divine transmutation, using Plato and Aristotle’s fishy onanistic theories of the universe. (For Plato that there was a realm of pure “forms”, nothing real, and for Aristotle that there were ten categories, including “essence”; Middle Age philosophers used those heavily… ironically my own SQPR re-institute Dark Matter as essence: my DM interacts with matter some, by causing “spontaneous collapse”… but let’s not deviate from the subject at hand…)

The first thing a decadent civilization does, is to spite philosophy, spite the lovers of wisdom: decadence springs from brute force, not wisdom.

Real, deepest physicists were, and are all philosophers:

Inventing new ideas enables to discover the intricate logic of the world. Invention starts with being a friend of wisdom: why is it that I think, what is it that they think they know and take for granted, and why? Is there a more precise, better informed way?

Anti-philosophy of pop scientists is partly a consequence of the success thus domination of the “shut up & calculate” school. Top physicist Feynman, despised the philosophers he knew. But he, himself, was a philosopher, and it showed up even in what he considered a valid reasoning to be (Feynman had a peculiar way of reasoning; same with Einstein, De Broglie, etc.) Feynman’s son became a philosopher. Physics describes no more than 5% world, it needs strong philosophy!

The other reason why pop philosophers and pop scientists are also anti-philosophy? Because their masters, those who pay them and advance their careers, are themselves in the employ of plutocrats and their organizations, who hate wisdom… as it would be lethal to them, and their organizations…

And physics needs stronger, more subtle logic!

It has always been clear to me that, on a cosmic scale, Quantum Theory makes no sense: basically physics as we affect to know it, is local. However, Quantum Theory speaks as it the world was global. This leads to a contradiction, which has surfaced in the prestigious journal Nature for all to see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06749-8

“Nature News 18 SEPTEMBER 2018
Reimagining of Schrödinger’s cat breaks quantum mechanics — and stumps physicists
In a multi-‘cat’ experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim.”

Logic is ever more subtle. Consider the following cartoon from “Philosophy Matters“, a consortium of US academic philosophers (which at some point told me my smarts made me insufferably obnoxious, or words to this effect):

Cute, first order correct, but subtly wrong!

Actually, if people are already dead, they can’t die anymore. People who don’t breathe could be already dead, thus can’t die. Because one doesn’t die again. Hence the second cartoon should read: people who stop breathing, die. Context: not everything, but most of the thing!

The same goes for partisanship: people love the frenzy of the herd they belong to, and the simplistic logic it leads to.

Actually Trump has ordered the FBI to make a full inquiry. But an investigation, except for the grossest things (crime against humanity), can’t be made correctly 36 years later… Defense is automatically at a disadvantage against false memories. (BTW, Republican Senator Flake, a blonde, after been cornered in an elevator by irate women, called for the FBI inquiry, saying he would vote against Kavanaugh otherwise.)

Cute cartoon. Indeed, Justice has got to be a blonde with pink skin: always was, always will. However cute, not the whole truth, which is much more tragic. Namely it’s far from being only the so-called “Republicans” who smother justice. “Partisanship” is not the solution. The entire legislative system needs a re-think. Towards direct democracy.

“Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
NBC News incorrectly reported (as usual) that I was limiting the FBI investigation of Judge Kavanaugh, and witnesses, only to certain people. Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion. Please correct your reporting!”

Right. Let’s seriously investigate the fashion, and age old tradition, in the USA, of getting drunk, especially among young people, damaging their brains, and using alcoholism to get away with the basest behaviors, and habits. This goes both for the accuser and the accused here! (By the way, frazzled by his elder brother dying of alcoholism, Donald Trump does not do drugs, including alcohol.)

One can’t have the better, and progressive civilization needed for planetary survival, when too many brains of the leadership are damaged by drugs. It’s not just a question that their performances are inferior to have they could be, or should be. The mood that drug addiction gives a sense to life brings forth the tendency, the overall mentality, that the mind should be overwhelmed by out-of-this-world modes of operations, which enable the brain to forget reality as it is. And what are the greatest out-of-this-world neurohormonal regimes? All these having to do with violence, fight or flight, and will to power.

OK, those can be correct to use, but only if one knows what one is playing around, and in the full knowledge of the associated causations. And what of those 5%? They relate to the proverbial 1% who own the world. Both are able to do so because common people are tolerant of theories which explain very little, and are impossible to understand: why is gigantic economic equality necessary, how can it be deemed to be compatible with democracy? Well, look at physics: there a theory is called Theory Of Everything, and it explains not even 5%. Similarly modern economics sustains mostly 1% and is just as impossible to understand. They are made to each other, sustain the same mood of mystification!

In the Middle Ages, persons with lots of character, knew all too well that many of the official (Christian) theories were wrong: Beranger de Tour, a church authority, held that reason was god, and thus that the church should obey to reason. The pope was not amused, councils were organized to castigate Berenger, excommunicate him and deprive him of authority. But Berenger held his ground, in spite of the fact heresy could bring the death penalty, until the natural end of his life, in no small part because he was discreetly supported by the ultra powerful Duke of Normandy, a superman in more ways than one.

William the Conqueror was known to hold that the Earth turned around the sun, and mention it during banquets. Heliocentrism, even with the empirical science of the time, was pretty obvious (the small thing, the Earth should turn around the big thing, the Sun, plus, obviously, the Sun didn’t turn around the Moon, thus the Earth-Moon system; the ancient Greeks knew how to measure those distances, using shadows…) William was not afraid to mention it: once, in combat, he vanquished 15 knights. Alone. Mental courage and physical courage are two faces of the same coin.

We need stronger philosophy, the medicine of civilization. Failure of enough of a meta-critical mentality allowed the rule of ideologies which brought us the 1%, thanks to modern economics, and the 5%, thanks to the “shut up and calculate” ideology in physics. “Shut up and calculate” is exactly the ideology defended by Barack Obama in his pseudo-autobiographies, in the service of what he called “navigation” (or how to get to the top). 

Just as genes can go across species, moods can go across fields of mental activity. The overall mood of Ionian and Greater Greece and Athens before they got broken by the Peloponnesian War, was one of inquiry, that means, maximum criticism. After that, and while, and because the great fascist regimes of Rome, Carthage and Macedonia grew in power, the spirit of inquiry shrank: Greek mathematics forgot about NON-Euclidean geometry, and concentrated upon Euclidean geometry, which is much more fascist (it has stronger axioms… restricting mental freedom). Amazingly, although Pytheas of Marseilles had computed (accurately!) the size of the Earth, 23 centuries ago, after the great fascism of Macedonia and then Christianized Rome, arose, the very possibility of spherical geometry became a scientific impossibility, so intellectually fascist the minds became, for 2,000 years…

The Aztecs were defeated because, instead of being legalistic like Qin China. they were into mass cannibalism, and Cortes’ 450 men found hundreds of thousands of local allies who were strongly motivated by their desire to escape barbecues. When the Qin empire collapsed, the Han took over, and repeated Qin mentality in detail, this time to last centuries as a giant empire. And much of Qin mentality survives to this day. (All too much, come to think of it… And yes, amazingly, this essay will be read in China’s People Republic… Qin famously practiced censorship of bad philosophy, ordering the destruction of the “100 schools” (it failed), but spared what was viewed as scientifically, legally and historically significant…)

Each civilization has one mood, it pervades all. It evolves in time, not always for the best.

Patrice Ayme

MARX: For Tyranny All Along. Why Fighting Plutocracy Is Better.

Abstract: Little, yet maximally pernicious philosopher Karl Marx was born two centuries ago. He has to be taken seriously, because of the gigantic, awful and awesome consequences that his musing had. Marx claimed that “Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it“. Yet his angry philosophy changed it largely for the worst: the 40% of humanity who lived under Marxist regimes for a lot of the 20th century endured famines, gulags,  dictatorships, and even holocausts (under Marxist dictators Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot).

Marx claimed that his “dialectical” “science” predicted a rosy “communism”. Wrong, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the sort of welfare his enemy Proudhon promoted won the Twentieth Century, while fascism, red and black, can be directly raced back to Marx’s hysteria.

Marx’s influence keeps on going. By misunderstanding capital, Marx condemned civilization itself. By wishing for “dictatorship”, under a pseudo-scientific varnish, Marx endowed the worst plutocratic horrors with respectability, including all variants of fascism.  By recommending “terror”, Marx paved the “left” tolerance for all tyrannical fun and games, including the worst Jihadism.

Arguably, civilization has been handicapped in its necessary fight against plutocracy, by the omnipresence of vengeful, tyranny and terror friendly “Marxism” and its ilk, as an object of reverence. Actually, one can argue that the collapse of the Roman Republic under the “Second Triumvirate” of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Caesar Augustus), Marcus Antonius (“Mark Antony“), and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, formed on 27 November 43 BCE, that this Second Triumvirate was the mother of all “Marxist” like revolutions, yes, revolutions, with the usual consequence: tyranny, increased plutocracy. A Marxist revolution more than 20 centuries ago: who would have thought (you read it here first!) The collapse of the Roman Republic inspired Marx (whether he realized it, or not) And if not Marx directly, certainly the French lawyers who engineered the “Terror” of 1793-1704 (nearly 16,000 executed)… And that sure inspired Marx in turn.

Marxism is so bad for the “left” that it is no wonder that, during World War One, the fascists and German financiers around the Kaiser, and not only around the Kaiser, got the smart idea to help Lenin, and his entourage, be all they could be, ferrying them, under German military escort, from Switzerland to Russia in a special train…. Spending even a night in Frankfurt! The top fascists in Germany knew very well they were spiritual brothers (the alliance went all the way until June 1941, when Hitler treacherously attacked his colleague Stalin… (Lenin made numerous allusions that he was funded by top “capitalists”… )

The so-called “left” will stay a toy of plutocracy, as long as it does not free itself of the poisonous ideas of plutocrat Engels, and his bushy beard employee, Karl Marx…

***

Garbage In, Marxist garbage out:

“Capital”, “Bourgeois”, “Class Struggle”, these are terms all know and all use, yet, those basic concepts of Marx are ill-defined, self-contradictory, outrageous, or hypocritical . Worse, in the end, those terms, because they bring in very deep contradictions weakened considerably the discourse of progress (that is rather ironical as Marx himself was keen to point out the “contradictions” of “Capitalism”).

There are many problems with Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit.

It is not that the Marxist thesis is completely absurd. But close to it. Marx sometimes makes any sense… but then he is not original.

***

Karl Marx: “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Really? Whereas God Doesn’t exist, Capital is everywhere:

First, Marx talks of “capitalism” all the time… like I talk about “plutocracy” all the time. However, “plutocracy”, the power of evil, in my book, is a well-defined concept. Evil can be objectively defined: atom-bombing Hiroshima was evil…. Yet, if not necessary, given the initial conditions, optimal. “Evil” can be defined by acts… or neurohormones, and other brain activities. 

I use “plutocracy” in a maximally broadened sense (broadest sense often enables mathematicians to go to the essence of a logic… where the logic is the simplest!) 

Capital though, is a much broader concept than evil. Basically, all social animals have capital, namely their own society. A worker bee is not evil, yet it contributes to the capital of the hive, which is not restricted to the honey, but also includes the beehive, the honeycomb structure and even the queen bee herself! If capital happens pretty much in all societies, why should we focus on “Capitalism” alone? If “capitalism” is the ideology enabling the possession of “capital”, “capitalism” pretty much identifies with civilization: no capital, no civilization. Think of it: cities, agricultural systems, constitute capital. No capital, not even a society is to be had, because all and any society requires a territory.

The other day, I followed, for a very long time, two magnificent sea otters, payfully swimming along the Californian shore. All sorts of sea birds got very alarmed, screamed shrilly, and faked dive bombing when the otters came up on various rocks. Even crows joined in, flying over the sea, something they are not known to do, to help various sea birds try to bother the otters (who ignored superbly that impromptu air force, apparently playing dumb, in the hope of suddenly grabbing one of the insolent volatiles). So even the sea and recifes are viewed as vital territory. (I have seen many documentaries about otters; they omitted the undeniable fact those long and sinuous sea mammals  obviously raid birds’ nests…)

Land, a territory, a volume of sea, or air, constitute capital… do they make us wealthy? Or do they just enable us to survive, as thousands of invertebrate and vertebrate species more or less instinctively believe, when they defend their territory? If property theft, as Proudhon said, all social animals are thieves… And that is why tribes of social animals are so prone to fight each other to death(Proudhon later said he didn’t really mean it.)

Marx’s superficial little theory. However, the robots are coming. Thus, not only will common people be deprived of profits, capital, but even of… work. Just as happened in Rome.

Indeed what is “capital”? Property we own which makes us wealthy? Caves, houses, cities, dams, roads, sewers… Roman roads and sewers ,built more than 2,000 years ago are still, properly modernized, still in use? That’s capital! Even entire landscapes have been manufactured, and not just in the bocage of Normandy. A lot of the steppe was engineered, worldwide, for herding… thus the steppe itself is capital. Africans burn entire landscapes to cultivate on them…

Astute observers will argue that what Marx MEANT was “excess capital”. Yes, maybe Karl Marx meant that, making him as smart as that Fourth Century Italian, Saint Jerome (see notes). However, that’s not what he said. And Marx is not interpreted to be a sort of excited poet, like Sade, Nietzsche or Victor Hugo. Instead he is viewed by his admirers as a kind of dead serious “scientist” of sort, because, as Freud would later do he pretends to speak “scientifically”. The fact Marx used self-contradictory concepts

Can Marx please define wealthy? Wealthy like his friend Engels, who made Karl Marx possible? Engels, a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, eldest son of his textile manufacturing father, provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books… On the face of it, that’s rather suspicious. Engels was severely multinational, preferring “Irish stew” to all other meals. Nowadays, Engels would have been a member of the global plutocracy, jet setting in Davos.

If we restrict property to human artefacts, or the know-how to make them, and define capital that way, then, pretty much there would be no civilization without capital, and reciprocally.

Marx has a tendency to speak a lot, to say nothing intelligent. He claimed: “capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself”. Where is an example?

In the “Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Karl Marx and company, would you please define “Bourgeois”? The concept and word “bourgeois” arose in the Eleventh Century in the wealthiest parts of France, such as Normandy. It comes from the Frankish word “burg”, meaning a city. “Bourgeois” were free of the staus of serf (30 days did it!) The word “bourgeois” came into general usage around 1700 CE to designate the city dwelling middle class (whose descendants, typically lawyers, and doctors, engineered the Revolution of 1789).

Marx and Engels mumbo-jumbo above is erroneous: those professions above were not “converted”. How do Marx and Engels thought they earned a living earlier? Nor did they become despised. 

Proudhon was the first (and self-declared) “anarchist. Marx and Engels appropriated to themselves Proudhon’s intellectual capital, and, to make sure naive readers would not suspect their theft, insulted Proudhon in the process for good measure. However, the influence of Proudhon’s writing on events in the mid-Nineteenth Century, and its drift towards “socialism” was enormous.

The problem with inequality is not “Capital”, or “Capitalism”, per se (except for the fact capital tends to grow exponentially, as I have explained so many times, so those who have more capital grows it ever faster than those who have less). All civilizations knew this, except for the ridiculous tyranny Lenin imposed on Russia. However, that doesn’t mean the distribution of Capital shouldn’t be controlled. Quite the opposite. All societies redistributed capital, as needed; even Neolithic societies did this: when a great Plains Indian chief died, his thousands of horses would be redistributed. Vikings and Indians too did redistribution, including sending girlfriends of the chief, up in smoke.

The Roman republic, for centuries, had found an elegant way to insure capital was not just in a few hands:

https://patriceayme  .wordpress.com/2017/09/28/no-limit-on-wealth-no-democracy-roman-limit-22-million-why-rome-collapsed-part-iii/

Relative to the subtleties of authors such as Sade, Saint Ambrose, etc (see note)…  Karl Marx is just a brute. Therein his influence.

Marx, 1948, wrote in a newspaper: “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary TERROR.”. (Soon after, shirking destructive terror, the much more famous Proudhon was constructively elected to the National Assembly of France… Thus earning Marx’s hatred…) 

A (justly, but all too irritated) Karl Marx in the final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung reacting to the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (18 May 1849)”Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Vol. VI, p. 503. Background: Yosemite.

Another example: …”Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction.”

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League”, 1850. This sort of writing in Marx is ubiquitous:

“Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

— Karl Marx, 1852

(At the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev declared an end to the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the establishment of the “all people’s government“…)

[To tell the entire truth, Dr. Karl Marx’s republican writings were violently opposed by the Prussian Dictatorship (which had been in hoc with the Czarist government, and established a racist, anti-Jewish, anti-Slav government, after the defeat of France…]

Marx’s advocacy of violence, even “terror“, made him popular with tyrants like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu… & that’s why we are stuck with Marx: he is an echo of horror, a muddy thinking, which, by saying nothing clear, enabled everything murky… the power of the Dark Side.

Marx has polluted, not just social leaning individuals, worldwide, but the left, the “progressive” ideology. It’s not just that Marxism-Leninism brought us the USSR, and its ilk, and the thirty million dead or so, that, a drunk Stalin, chuckling, attributed to himself to a stunned Churchill. And Mao did the same.

Karl Marx taught first, in the widest, most ethereal way: ideologies promoting “terror” are good. Thus fascism, ultra-violent, terrifying fascism is good. Actually Marxism is a form of fascism in a generalization of the original, Romans, sense of the term: all We The People, united like fragile reeds in a bundle, a fasces, around the axe of justice.  

Hence the mood of Marxism was conducive to the mood of all other fascisms…. Because he had broken the ultimate official taboo: terror, yes terror, is good, “terror is the way”. Mussolini was, first, a professional Socialist. Hitler deliberately came out with a number of tricks to attract Marxists and “Communists”, from the red in the flag he invented, to the term “Socialist” in National-Socialism, to his party’s name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP, to, of course, the entire basic ideology of Marx, serving the “German Workers”, including raging against… “plutocrats”. Nazism was all about “the People” (Volk; from mass paid vacations, people car (“Volkswagen”), to mass public works, to the suppression of luxury clubs, etc,)

ADOLF HITLER said: “From the camp of bourgeois tradition, [Nazism] takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism“… Including the Marxist idea of imposing terror, massively: more than 10,000 enemies of Nazism assassinated in the streets of Germany in 1932 (just before the elections the NSDAP won, enabling Hitler to become Chancellor)

***

And the poverty Marxism brought was not accidental, but deliberate:

In Marx, one finds plenty of quotes such as this:

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization. Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty.” Yes, poverty. Stalin would implement that for dozens of millions in the USSR.

***

Why We should be fighting plutocracy, not just “classes” and “means of production”, and especially not “capital”; the example of Russia, Macedonia, Athens, Rome:

To discern what to do, one should look at history. Greco-Roman antiquity originated, and collapsed, in tyranny. Marx believed, stupidly, that tyranny was the solution, whereas it was the problem. Marx wanted to cure appendicitis with tyranny.

The point is that violence has enormous inertia, including mental inertia, precisely because it is the employment of force, including not just physical, but mental force.

[Force, F = ma means acceleration a which leads to high-speed v, and energy, E = 1/2 mvv. That energy E can in turn only be brought to zero by another force f exerted on a length l; that’s pure physics, but it translates into mental force and mental inertia, because, after all, neurology is all physics.]

Thus, once violence is launched, more violence is not necessarily the solution, as Marx believed, but can make the problem worse. A perfect example was the Czar’s regime: it was bad, violent, disgusting… however, it was also getting better, more democratic, and was making the Russian empire wealthier, and more modern at an accelerating pace (urged and financed by France, and her little investors and savers). Lenin and Stalin, clearly, made an improving country into something way worse (the details are complex as World War One was a crucial factor).

Another example is the Roman Republic: in its last 120 years, it became a plutocracy. After their leader, Caesar, got killed, the gigantic, best trained army Rome ever had, turned against that plutocracy, and imposed terror under the triumvirs, Antonius, Octavius and Lepidus. The Roman soldiers, led by their centurions imposed the sort of terror Marx dreamed of. Ultimately, though, this led to the stupidity of military dictatorship, thus mental dictatorship, thus collapse of intelligence and imagination, and, in turn, the collapse of the Roman State, in the West, five centuries later, and near collapse in the East, 650 years later.

It would have been better if Caesar’s army had not turned against Roman plutocracy, unleashing further, and more extravagant evil ways… But it went “Marxist”, and exerted terror (OK, it’s the other way around: Karl Marx duplicated the mindset of Caesar’s soldiers… although he posed it as the example to follow, whereas, what happened with Caesar’s army was mostly an accident, the unforeseen consequence of Caesar’s treacherous assassination!)

Macedonia, especially the dictatorship of Antipater, launched the Hellenistic regimes, all about tyrannies and terror… All sorts of progress faltered: in the Late Empire, stupidity was exploding, intellectual imagination, collapsing. What came to be the essence of the Soviet Union. In the end, looking at Russia nowadays, we see a dearth of intellectual capability, relative what could, and should have been… just like what happened with Greco-Roman antiquity, as tyrannies progressed.

We have seen Marxism before.

***

Understanding plutocracy enough to steer it:

Musk and Bezos, are both engineers and multibillonaires (Bezos’s personal wealth, 16% of Amazon, is greater than the yearly GDP of 130 countries already, and growing). They are total plutocrats according to the usual definition of the word (and I have complained about the support SpaceX got from NASA). However they both believe that the conquest of space is vital…. And they are doing an excellent job, because they had the imagination to realize that re-usability was the key to space conquest, and the knowhow to implement it. So plutocracy can be a good thing, if steered well (yes they don’t treat their employees super… but don’t insist on that too much, because robots are in the wings…)

And the fact is, under all Marxist inspired regimes much more tyrants and mini-tyrants, without checks and balances did way worse, from having way more power. At least Musk and Bezos have to abide by Labor Laws…

So if Marxism is so bad, a self-defeating, lethal distraction, advertising against civilizational progress,  what to replace it with?

The theory of plutocracy, and how to limit the latter.

The theory of limiting plutocracy is not restricted to capital and its means of production, or pre-existing social classes. It aims at limiting all abuses of power that a combination of the Dark Side and civilization can bring. Including abuses from the judicial system. 

This is not new: already, more than 25 centuries ago, the semi-informal constitutions of Rome and Athens tried to limit the powers of magistrates in crushing citizens… Roman tribunes, who were sacrosanct, sometimes interposed themselves between citizen and magistrate! However, in Marxism, the magistrate, namely Marx, is supposed to exert “dictatorship”… as Stalin demonstrated!

For a better and more advanced revolutionary spirit we should get rid of the terror and mass murdering credo found in Marxism, which keeps haunting the minds of all too many “progressives”. Second, we should get rid of the tyrannical credo (no more dictatorship of the proletariat). Third, having observed that capitalism, or, at least, capital, is unavoidable, one should focus on preventing its excesses: prevent the accumulation of wealth, when it becomes tyrannical, per se, by concentrating too much power within too few hands.

There again the Roman Res Publica had found the way!

All of this to dispel the dangerous, and, ultimately, ineffective spirit Marx wrought, and embrace a more sustainable, and fairer way.

Fairness is something all social primates understand. Marxism does not. And that makes it an ideology too primitive for primates. And an intoxication for civilization: Jihadism, without God. Fifty years ago exactly, the best thinkers of May 1968 in France understood this, that Marxism had been a delicious, yet lethal poison, for progress, fairness and civilization. But that deep mindfulness was driven underground by arrivistes and opportunists, let alone Thatcher, Reagan and their spiritual children…

Now the “market” rules, in other words, how much we can sell you, or. at least your soul, since those who have all the money & power know everything about it. The stupid crime of believing that Marxism was clever came fully around, injecting poison in the tail that wags the dog.

Marx, prodigiously financed by hereditary plutocrat Engels, did socioeconomics and politics the way Ptolemy did astronomy: a fake, stupid theory to please his simplistic and cruel masters… which sets understanding back for 14 centuries (in the case of Ptolemy)…

Patrice Aymé  

***

***

Notes: 0) Make no mistake, I am not saying Marx is bad all over. He believed that the way people lived made up their minds. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. [Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewusstsein bestimmt… Physiocrats, for example Adam Smith had a more general, thus more correct, notion of “mode of production”]

1) Marx condemned inequality, rightly so, but that doesn’t exculpate him from his grotesque, criminal, deviant and hopelessly distracting excesses, those very excesses which made his fame, his uses, and, besides, hundreds of millions, including most prominently the Roman Republic, Buddha and Christ had done so before: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.”

2) Marx had no deep understanding of banking (he complained just of the monopoly of “banks”). Arguably less than his contemporary, president Jackson of the USA, who did his utmost to keep European style financial plutocracy out of the US. He said it was his proudest achievement. Jackson hated Rothschild, who boasted publicly that he was the power behind the throne.

2)  In 1797 the Marquis de Sade’s in his novel L’Histoire de Juliette: “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft”. (That was famously parroted by Proudhon:”Property is theft!”. Later Proudhon tried to explain: “I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion… Property is freedom. … In respect of property, as for all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself….”

To appreciate Marx as one appreciates Sade, or Nietzsche, or Rabelais, or Machiavelli, is fine: but most “Marxists” appreciated Marx as if he were Muhammad, and there were Wahhabis… And that’s not OK. Actually serious Marxism proved much deadly than Jihadism, in the last few centuries (and includes the Armenian Holocaust).

Interestingly, Saint Ambrose (circa 400 CE) taught that superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen).… (Yes, we see everything in these writings of mine, even Saint Ambrose, usually reviled, quoted with deep approbation! That Saint Ambrose got it right, and Karl Marx didn’t is telling…)

The point here, that inequality is the problem, not capital itself, was well-known in the Roman Republic: wealth of families was capped absolutely. Such laws were passed in the Fourth Century Before Common Era, that is 24 centuries ago. (Why can’t we do it, now?)

I have written about this many times before; the so-called Roman sumptuary laws failed because of (Roman) globalization: see the link I gave above.

Globalization? … One of the exact same problem we are afflicted with.

However we have several advantages now: first the sorry example of Rome collapsing from Republic to Tyranny (“Principate” then “Dominate”). This example has been increasingly explored by recent historians… And lessons can be drawn. Those lessons were already drawn, to some extent many times before, by the Franks, the Normands, the Middle Ages… But now we have a much more detailed and thorough picture of what it takes to collapse civilization. Not to say the risks are not higher than ever: they are, especially from nukes. 

Second we pretty much have a world empire now (the UN, led by the Security Council), so we don’t have to worry about the wars which distracted Rome and served as a pretext to be led by generals, thus military and political fascism, facilitating economic fascism (the 1%!), and then all sorts of fascisms all over.  

3) Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, said “I hope we shall crush […] in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country” Notice Jefferson’s precision: he is not attacking “capital” in general, but wealthy corporations. So were the early founders of the USA. Times have changed…