Evil-Power, Pluto-Cracy English American Style

Evil-Power, Pluto-Cracy English American Style is the dominant form of governance nowadays, despite the Kremlin’s pathetic efforts to impose again its time tested, religiously propelled evil power. The Kremlin’s evil, triumphant mentality, and subsequently its colossal empire, arose from an opportunistic adaptation by collaborator Alexander Nevskii to the Mongol conquest. 

The American form of evil is even more primeval, therein its strength.

US plutocratic mentality also arose from somewhat similar circumstances to that of Russia: genocidally propelled continental grab. (The French, who insisted on moral standards and tender footed colonization through equitable trade, failed miserably, although France was then the dominant superpower: French evil was not up to snuff!)

In either case, conquering continents had moral consequences on the mentality of the conqueror, one of them being hypocrisy, using the Christian fable to claim one’s aspiration to sainthood, and thus one’s holiness. Nevskii is a saint of the Russian Orthodox religion… And much of US anti-intellectualism arose from a strategy of not looking too closely how and why bad things happen, and thus why they perdure. All very good to achieve the world as we know it, but in need of some tweaking looking forward… 

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European colonists of the (London-made) “West Country men” persuasion, free ranging from a lack of adult supervision during the Seventeenth Century, established a society in America which first survived and soon thrived… but only through barbarous methods.

(We have a control experiment: the most moral and Catholic “Nouvelle France”… which failed, under English assault, from too high moral standards, lack of slavery and tobacco…)

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As early as 1609 CE, the military establishment of (West Country Men founded) Jamestown made it clear that the Natives had to be eliminated: this was the plan all along (which unfolded in the next three centurie). In 1622, that was clear enough for the Natives around Jamestown to make a determined attempt to kill the settlers to the last.

The exasperated Americans try to eliminate Jamestown in 1622. Failed in part because of a warning by Natives who were too friendly with some of the English. However, US mentality was forged one massacre at a time…

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Up in New England, slavery of Indians and Africans had been already engaged. by the local authorities Now of course, there had been a precedent. English indentured servants could be horribly tortured to death by their wealthy masters for hunting pigs on their own, without explicit authorization… And American white cities paying for Indian scalps was next. 

After that, it was further downhill… As new sorts of evil not seen before were successfully introduced, making the land wealthy and productive. 

Judicially justified racism, English American style, had few parallels in human history. Even when the Islamists conquered their gigantic empire in the Seventh and Eight centuries, although they treated non-Muslims very badly, and could execute them for nearly no reason, they left open the possibility of becoming Muslim. 

Not so with the color of the skin in English America. 

Indeed English American judges established that colored people were aliens, so aliens that they couldn’t hold property and, in particular, slaves. So colored people became enslaved (there were exceptions). d

US plutocracy is of a particularly vicious, highly controlling sort. It controls the legislative process, so plutocrats pay very little taxes, ensuring that their power always grows. As they control the world, including up to very recently Russia and China by extending to them the self-dealing plutocratic largesse of international trade, this is a serious worldwide problem. 

The argument can even be made that both world war one and WW2 were to a great extent US plutocracy driven (European fascists were often US financed and the Japanese invasion machine was fueled by US oil for a decade).

US plutocracy is particularly vicious, because of its origin in slavery (of blacks) and genocide (of Natives). US plutocracy has inherited and been molded by stealthily cruel ways which don’t bear the qualitatives they deserve.

Class is not just about class, just like caste is just about caste, or the sort of slavery the USA had was just about slavery. Slavery has existed in most societies, but the sort of slavery the US suffered was clearly worse than any from Greco-Roman, or for that matter, Babylonian antiquity. US slavery was anchored in skin color, and slaves were rarely freed (freed Babylonian and Roman slaves could reach the top of society). 

Where does so much cruelty come from? Ecology. Man has always culled man. Wealthy and abusive families and individuals are both the cause and consequence of human evil… And evil as an absolute good, of evil as what humanity needs to be kept in check. Hence it’s not just the pathetic spectacle of the hyper powerful not being worthy of their position, which is celebrated. It’s also the evil power, the power of evil to be the ultimate giver of all destinies.   

Hence it’s not just the pathetic spectacle of the hyper powerful not being worthy of their position, which is celebrated. Evil power is also celebrated, evil as the ultimate giver of destiny.  It would be crucial progress to recognize this. 

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And what of the future? If the future is to be steered optimally, the past, which gives not just the instructions, but the initial conditions, must be understood as well as possible,

The USA, differently from most other countries, is driven by strong immigration (directly related to the genocide, that’s the cynical angle). Thus yesterday’s mentality does not have to lead the future without sharing. Better, and even more cynically, the reason why the supremely barbarous couple of centuries of English America achieved… supremacy… over the French precisely because barbarousness is better at war… All other things being equal. .

Politically Correct people, now called “woke”, and once “pacifists”, or “isolationists”, who sobbed at the prospect of war with Hitler, have tended to ignore the fact that brutality wins, all other things being equal. This is why free trade doesn’t work without ensuring that RIGHT IS MIGHT.

When North American Natives learned of Christianism, they laughed at the silliness of that fable. They knew better what the real world was made of: cause and effect, not effect masquerading as cause. North American evil power inherited this truth from the Natives, too, something primeval, and thus very powerful.

Evolution tells us that evil in the service of goodness is called humanity… Maybe the ends do not justify the means, but the means cause the ends… Go complain with whom created God.

Patrice Ayme 

 

 

Too Much Civilization Can Kill Civilization

The French government was too civilized thus lost to the savage, cruel, and self-righteous British plutocrats and land speculators (the so-called “free enterprise”), fully supported the British monarchy: such is the best and most faithful description of what happened in North America, when France, once smartest mistress of the continent, lost Canada, and then Louisiana. 

There was no slavery in the gigantic continental lands controlled by France, Native Americans were not genocidized, and colonization was very low key. Something similar happened in India. Collaborator Pshakkottai, himself of Indian descent, points out that: In India…”The French were too civilized and lost to the British“. Civilization in excess can kill!

India was conquered by a plutocratic British company, the East India company, gone rogue… And deliberately so, a method inaugurated in Ireland in the 16C, and then pursued in America… And it would give enough propellent to racist German fascism to destroy European supremacy… in a trick which has not been officially observed yet by paid historians from the most prestigious plutocratic universities…

Once in Africa, as a child, I travelled from Senegal, an ex-French colony, to Gambia, an ex-British colony. In a ferry station of the Gambia, on the main thoroughfare, there were two large sets of toilets. I was stunned: a hundred feet to the left were the toilets for “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” of the master race. Far to the right were the toilets of the “Males” and “Females”, the male and female primates whose ancestors had dwelled on that continent for millennia.

The territories around Hudson Bay were lost to the British after the disastrous war of the Spanish Succession, which brought France nothing but losses of territory, including in Europe. That war and his treaty of Utrecht was the (still) much admired homicidal tyrant Louis XIV’s ultimate disaster, the root of which was his genocidal policy against Protestants. Don’t expect to read this in French history textbook, which are still forgetting to cut Louis XIV’s head, more than three centuries after his Hitler-like atrocities…

To be allowed to go live in Canada, French citizens had to demonstrate superior moral standards to the French administration: females condemned for loitering or prostitution didn’t qualify, nor did vagabonds. The English, by contrast, sent their worst, their convicts, often sparing them hanging from a rope. There were plenty of these lowlives in England: whereas French peasants owned their land, however small and miserable, the English did not, but were working for lords. When they didn’t, they joined the cities, and if they didn’t find employment there either, they would be homeless, and that was illegal. So they were deported to America. The same game was played, two centuries later, with Australia. Meanwhile, France, which used to have more than three times the population of England, saw its population advantage disappear: French peasants were keen to leave inheritance to their children, and that meant fewer heirs, so they practiced contraception.

Friend Stephen Jones objected to having such a thing as too civilized a behavior:

“Huh? Let’s have less civilization?

Is your premise that civilization itself is responsible for genocides and wars?”

I answered as follows: Dear Stephen Jones: That to “have too much civilization” can lose wars is not my premise, but my conclusion. The premise that “civilization itself is responsible for genocides and wars” is an idea so ridiculous that it took Rousseau, that crafty prostitute, to launch it successfully. This tenacious philosophy has been popular with mental retards of academic persuasion, as it enabled them to triumph

Ancient Republican Romans knew how ridiculous the idea was, thus Plebeians, more often than not, voted for better educated “Patricians” to lead them: the Plebeians viewed the Patricians as more civilized. The nefarious mood that civilization was nefarious was picked up by Marx, who advocated “dictatorship of the Proletariat”, and then by various advocates of blood red flags, including Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler (who devised the Swastika, this spider gorged with blood, deliberately so).

And then the mood from Rousseau that civilization was nefarious was amplified further by what US plutocratic universities call “French Theory”. That’s basically the nihilistic theory that there is no such thing as civilization. Only idiots who have never nearly stepped on a snake as I did while running yesterday (I knew it was snake weather, but when I had a momentary lapse of reason, a snake dashed; somehow, while squealing my leg stayed up in the air while the other provided supplementary lift… Snake survived, barely…)… only idiots believe all cultures are identical. Many times I was brought to hospitals in pretty bad shape, in Africa, Europe, America, and thanked the gods of humanity for medical care, civilization… 

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The French Mission Civilisatrice Was Destroyed By British Slash and Burn:

The French arrived in North America a century before the British. When they consulted with the Native Americans, the French leaders were told that trading was welcome. However, Native American leaders informed Jacque Cartier that settlers were not welcome. Nearly a century later, arriving at the exact same spot as the Mayflower settlement a few years later, Champlain observed that Native American settlements of the land were so extensive that it left no room for French settlers.  Within a century, most of North America was under French control, as “Louisiana” and “Canada”. But it was military and trading control, and the “mission civilisatrice” was in full swing. However the French had not launched a colonization program.

Along the Atlantic seaboard, the English colonies had implemented a genocide against the Natives, as early as 1609 CE:

As Chief Powhatan said:

“Your coming is not for trade, but to invade my people and possess my country…Having seen the death of all my people thrice… I know the difference between peace and war better than any other Country.”

As early as 1610 CE, the two commanders of Jamestown, Thomas Dale and Thomas Gates viewed Native American presence strictly as a “military problem”. Then they decided they couldn’t solve it militarily. As the colonists were about to head out into the open sea, they were met by the incoming fleet of Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr. Taking command as governor, de la Warr ordered Jamestown reoccupied. He plotted annihilation of the surrounding tribes. In July 1610 he sent Gates against the Kecoughtan Native American nation. “Gates lured the Indians into the open by means of music-and-dance act by his drummer, and then slaughtered them“. This was the First Anglo-Powhatan War. The English, led by Samuel Argall, captured Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, and held her hostage until he would agree to their demands.

Shortly after, the colonists in Massachusetts introduced slavery in North America (alerted to this by yours truly the New York Times then started their “1619 Project”, to draw attention to what really happened during the foundation of the English colonies.

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Alternate History: Could history have been different?

To redraw history is complex: the French would have needed to change towards a colonization mindset, and send their degenerates, thugs and derelicts to America… Or their Huguenots… And that was actually attempted in the Sixteenth Century. This happened in the Carolinas (named this way by French settlers). But then the fascist war criminal Philippe II of Spain annihilated those colonies, down to the last baby.  Bad luck intervened: the relief French fleet was destroyed by a hurricane. Or why the USA speaks poorly pronounced French…

Should history be redrawn?

As it is the USA is a giant United Europe. It was founded in blood and gore… But arguably, not much more blood and gore than what was needed to make the “mission civilisatrice” proceed. similarly to what the new city of Rome achieved until it massacred the population of the neighboring Veii, largest and wealthiest Etruscan city (396 BCE). the genocide at Veii was followed, within six years, with very bad behavior “contrary to the laws of nations” say Livy, of its envoy, the Fabii brothers. Outraged, the offended Gauls attacked, routed the Romans, and conquered Rome (390 BCE).  

Were history to be redrawn, it would have to be redone in such a way that the French would have been able to build a strong enough civilization in North America. That would have required tougher ways, those one calls “less civilized”. 

“Less civilized” ways have to be well targeted. If the idiot known as the “Sun King” had directed his energy towards the conquest of North America, instead of destroying the French elite (not just the Huguenots), and making little plots in Europe (war of the Spanish Succession), France could have civilized America… instead of letting English plutocrats (and their tobacco slave plantations) do it. But then Louis XIV was following well established French ways: the French elite had known about America and its “Indians” for more than 150 years, in great detail: a massive “Indian” fair had been held in the early Sixteenth Century, and even the king came. But the consensus in France was that trading with the Indians was fair, and so was the “mission civilisatrice” but not much beyond that was. And the mission civilisatrice backfired as the French-civilized Indians were killed by people of the fiercer sorts (including English land speculators a la George Washington)…

When the Anglo colonial imperialist genociders pushed west, some of their fiercest opponents were descendants of French “coureurs des bois” and “trappeurs”. Resistance to US imperialism in Colorado was led to such French (five resisting brothers were all killed by the US). The same sort of thing happened in Canada. As it happened the French mood and French methods of trading, civilizing, and interbreeding won in the end (but too late for comfort). They were used in parts of the USA. Collaborator Don Kemerling points out: 

“I grew up in Missouri. There are no reservations. The deal was that individuals could own land and attend schools. I grew up next door to an Indian family who owned land, and were our best family friends. My father mentioned their origin a couple of times, associating the skills of the father at hunting and fishing with his ancestry. It didn’t mean much to me then, but I went to see his widow with my mother and grandmother once, and was suddenly struck at the family portrait, which clearly showed their darker skin and associated features.

They fully assimilated, marrying white people. One son was my supervisor at a company where I worked, for a while. There was no mention of it. It was not an issue. I like to think that instead of genocide, there was much more such assimilation than is recognized. Of course, many died of disease too, but I expect that intermarriage strengthened their ability to survive disease.”

Interbreeding indeed increases resistance to disease. American Natives were mostly isolated from the Eurasiatic-African land mass, a biological supercontinent if there ever was one, for at least fifteen thousand years: only a few hardy, healthy, thus non-contagious, mariners came across the Pacific and the Bering Strait. Thus their immune system got selected to be leaner and weaker. European diseases devastated them. Both in North and South America, the arrival of the Conquistadores was preceded by the death of much, when not most, of the population. The same happened after Champlain’s expedition: the area where the Mayflower would make land was mostly empty when it arrived. However there were still lots of Natives alive, and they learned fast. The English colonies had to conduct a systemic policy of invasion, translocation, and extermination. Several US presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Jackson) became great practitioners of the art of cancellation of the Natives.

If he read those lines, the Chinese dictator Xi could say: ‘I told you so, I need to be tough enough to gather enough power!’ Indeed Qin united China by force, 22 centuries ago. However, Qin succeeded because, like Rome, Qin claimed and practiced more than most, the rule of law. The one and only law, human and humane law. 

Xi is forgetting that crucial characteristic. Communist Party forever dictatorship is not sustainable. Ultimately, China failed as a state in the preceding millennium, because it was too dictatorial (the very dispersion of authority in the European Feudal System made it less dictatorial, and less intellectually fascistic: free thinkers could generally find a sympathetic potentate… at least outside of places where the Catholic Inquisition exerted its terror, as a crutch to despicable dictatorship as found in the Iberian peninsula, or the Vatican). 

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Intelligence Does What Is Necessary Best, Including Violence As Needed:

And last, but not least; ultimately power rests on mental power. Dictatorships are less good at creating mental power than democracies. They make do with theft (see the USSR, Putin Russia, Xi China). But stealing goes only so far: it makes one nastier, not more intelligent. Both the Roman state and various Chinese dynasties found themselves in situations when their mental expertise was not enough to solve the problems which crushed them…

 

Individuals who have been indoctrinated by nihilists and jealous inferior thinkers to hate civilization object to the very notion of “civilization”. However, civilization means to live in cities. Cities have high human density, so they require high human dispute resolution. They require intensive agriculture. This is exactly what the French promoted among the Native Canadians. It worked. The Hurons and fellow nations, adopting French agriculture, learned to live in farms. That enabled the Iroquois confederacy, then allied and armed by the British, to swoop down and massacre them all. French Jesuits didn’t thank the Lord. 

The French leaders never saw the conquest of America as the military problem it was. Their mission civilisatrice failed  for a number of reasons, including the fact France’s longest ruling monarch, Louis XIV was a barbarian and criminal against humanity. But, overall, France was too… Zen. Letting British plutocrats run amok happened, in part because the French aristocracy despised merchants and thieves… instead of putting them in the lead (as Queen Elizabeth already did with Drake and company, who made the kernel of what became the Ireland conquerors, the West Country Men…)

So the verdict? 

It’s all a question of balance. Civilization needs to strike the right balance. Talking to the Nazis or the Japanese imperial military-industrial complex with flowers didn’t work. What worked were bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we know know, were highly successful… considering the alternatives prepared by the Jap High Command, and, inevitably the Allied (mostly US) High Command, which had anticipated them… without the Japanese surrender following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic bombings next to the beach heads (as planned), gas (as planned) were not needed… Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also warnings to the future: see and consider what happens after atomic bombings. The two atom bombings were just the right amount of craftly designed savagery to hasten Japanese surrender (the third planned Plutonium bombing, against Sapporo, was delayed by US generals… Marshall (Joint Chief) and Groves (head of Manhattan Project: they were obviously not too keen to destroy civilians as if they were cockroaches…).

Where I am presently, in North California, we are experiencing what can only be described as nuclear winter, as the vegetation of California is turned into smoke, under climate change, as I predicted would happen, long ago…

Another thing that nobody believes, erroneously, is that the gigantic nuclear arsenals (mostly in the US and Russia) are of no consequence… When it is known, by anybody having read on the subject enough, that a short circuit can terminate civilization as we enjoy it now.

Some, baffled, may wonder: What is the connection with violence? A Norwegian Parliamentarian today nominated  Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize (for a peace treaty between the UAE and Israel). What is urgently needed is a bit more mental violence… to reduce the number of nuclear warheads below a total number of one thousand thermonuclear warheads… Enough warheads to be ready to detour a rogue comet, or smash an uppity dictator sneaking around with WMDs… But not so many warheads as to be able to destroy civilization… So quite a bit more violence here, now, is needed against the ideas and moods which lead us… to forecasted disaster.

Patrice Ayme   

A Cover-Up: ThanksGiving (To Holocaust!)

“Thanksgiving”, in late November, is a US family celebration where thanks are supposedly given to the Native Americans for having made possible the colonization of America [1]. At Thanksgiving, the gullible, grateful Natives would have fed the starving colonizers who thanked them by serving dinner. All was good in the best of all possible worlds. Although the French had been around North America much earlier than the English, by a full century, the Gallic thinkers had forgotten to kill everybody in the name of civilization. English colonists soon remedied this oversight.

According to the apparently frank, yet subtly manipulative in the most devious, and plutocratic serving way History.com:

“From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier — the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world — became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.”

Full of Indian nations all over! The French said that was a problem… they had to trade, couldn’t colonize. The plutocratic English investors of America, though, had a FINAL solution, the same one they used in Ireland…

As the excellent Charles Blow puts it in the New York Times in”The Horrible History of Thanksgiving”: 

“And this says nothing of all the treaties brokered and then broken or all the grabbing of land removing populations, including the most famous removal of natives: the Trail of Tears. Beginning in 1831, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. Many died along the way.

I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.

I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.

But I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.”

Thanks Lucifer (Enlightenment Bringer), here l am… Harsh truths foremost…

Having most profitably cleared North America of its original inhabitants, English America, the USA inherited a mentality of profit at the potential cost of extermination. This goes on to this day: Obama opened the US Federal lands to fracking, and, thus, his name is holy. I never met (yet!) a US citizen revolted by Obama’s fracking. No wonder: most Americans are gas guzzlers, and crisscross their continent sized country at the slightest pretext, including at Thanksgiving, fittingly enough…

Nevermind a large part of the continent will be destroyed from it. It’s as was done to the Indians, done to the land. By comparison, the French Republic outlawed fracking… Although France would have 100 year of gas to frack…

War, war of the hardest type, annihilation war, presided to the creation of the English colony. According to the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, Puritan inhabitants did not settle in Connecticut because of the “3 or 4,000: warlicke Indians”.  The war-like Indians refer to the Pequots. Destroying the Pequots thus became a primordial objective. Soon the Pequot war settled this. By 1637, the Pequots were annihilated. One memorable feat of the war included the entire surprise burning of a Pequot fortified city, at night in winter, killing 1,000 or so; those who tried to flee were shot. (I have read ridiculous contemporary racist cartoons for children misrepresenting what really happened to make the English Puritans look righteous.)

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French Half-Breeds led the resistance to US plutocracy in Colorado. Edmond Guerrier above, reported the Holocaust to US Congress and the US military (those institutions gave a slap on the wrist on the perpetrators; yet they classified some actions in the Colorado War as “genocide“). Others French half-breeds fought, and were executed. Such Frenchmen had lived for generations in North America, blending with the Natives… The famous “Coureurs des Bois“…

Getting to know what happened when the English imperial system colonized America is an essential moral and cognitive step… for the entire world. Because the USA became the dominant country (in large part because of the Holocaust of the original inhabitants). How this all consuming greed mentality, ready to destroy all, was generated by the initial venture capitalists who viewed North America as a profit generator is a world problem.

(Same attitude, having originated in England, holds to some extent, for Canada, where the French, not just the American aborigines, were eradicated from many areas… Also Australia, South Africa.) Indeed it is how the mental foundation of the USA was generated. In particular, the holy “Founding Fathers” logico-emotional framework.

Once as a child, I went to restrooms in Gambia (an ex-English colony). I was struck that there were toilets more male/female (for the “colored”), and some for ladies/gentlemen (for the whites). Coming from French Black Africa, that was shocking.

The usual story of Thanksgiving is that the Puritans thanked the Indians. Whatever happened later was ordained by God and Indians. Not the fault of those who gave thanks, and keep on giving thanks… That version of Thanksgiving “history” absolves the Puritans of the criminal mentality which mostly defined them. Thus what is acknowledged and remembered in the US about Thanksgiving is mostly myth. 

Here is an example, let’s come back to the quote I gave above, where reality and lie are mixed in an easily absorbed poison:

“From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier — the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world — became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.”

The latter statement is true. The 1,500 wars, more than any other invader against the natives, all the Natives, of an entire continent. And they were wiped out. Actually  the USA was founded on a holocaust, full ethnic annihilation. The idiotic Nazis tried, deliberately, to follow the US model of massacring the Natives… Not realizing how much guile had been put in the Anglo-Saxon American racial annihilation. 

So the part “U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.” is true… 

However, the part:”From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier — the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world —” became a shared space of vast, clashing differences.” …contains several grievous lies. There was no “untamed natural world”: native Americans were growing corn, a man-made plant, and getting most of their calories from it, in many parts.

Massive extermination wars created English New England. Hey, the savages resisted civilization. Slavery was of great help, not just scalps. Still, in modern US lore, one is much more ready to talk about the Salem with trials, than about the Holocaust of the North American Natives. Had the French been in charge, none of this would have happened…

There was nothing “natural” about the giant empires of the Andes, the Amazon, and Mesoamerica. The hint that only “white men” were civilized is not correct: the Mesoamerican civilizations were quite advanced in many ways. It is known that Spanish priests, a century before the Anglo-Saxons landed and massacred in North America, had a hard and interesting time trying to persuade Aztec thinkers of the error of their ways.

It’s true that the Conquistadors misbehaved against many of the empires and states they met… even seeing the rogue 1529-30 campaign of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán attacking a state, west of the Aztecs which had nothing abusive about it and had carefully avoided any confrontation with  the Europeans…. However that was highly controversial in Spain at the time (16th Century), and the main perpetrator, Guzmán, was arrested in 1536 and spent the rest of his long life trying to justify his attack… And that attack was no holocaust: although lake Chapala (80 kilometers long) is the largest lake in Mexico, is lays in very productive region with a very nice climate (at 1500 meters). Although colonized by the Spanish, the local Nahuatl population remained primarily Amerindian through the next several centuries. 

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1508: When the French Government of Louis XII Became Fully Aware of the Riches of North America: 

The French, arrived much earlier than the Anglo-Saxons in North America: in 1534 for Cartier in Canada, and even earlier, in 1508-1527, with various French explorers starting Thomas Aubert’s ship called La Pensée, for Verrazano… who went back for more on a French ship commandeered by the French government of Francois I. The French explorers discovered Nouvelle Angouleme, aka New Amsterdam, aka New York… 

As Aubert official report put it: American regions “pouvaient fournir de riches pelleteries, que les mers voisines abondaient en morue et que la pêche de ce poisson serait un élément inépuisable de richesse par les bénéfices qu’elle procurerait.” (American territories could provide wealthy fur industries, surrounding seas were crowded with cod, providing inexhaustible wealth.) 

Although tempted by the wealth of America, the early French explorers of New England, Canada and the Eastern Seaboard HOWEVER reported to French society and government that the Natives told them that trading with them was great, but that they were NOT WELCOME to settle and colonize. 

Now, at the time, France was the super power, with the highest civilizational level, the biggest, best army, and several times the population of England, long the other super power. France had an ongoing military conflict with England, which believed, due to dynastic considerations, that it owned France, and France was also engaged in war with expansionist, fascist, crusading, vengeful Spain, which had been busy expelling the French from Southern Italy and Mediterranean islands, which the French had reconquered from the Muslim invaders… three centuries earlier. Ironically enough, both England and Spain owed their existence to France. In any case, had France unleashed her power in conquering North America, she would have made short work of it. Why didn’t she? 

Yes, why didn’t France conquer all of North America? It was not out of military weakness: France was the world top military power. The war between France and Spain would end up, after two centuries, with the crushing victory of France (and part of it was the “80 year war” which created the Netherlands). It was very simple: France didn’t conquer North America the hard way, the Natives were willing to tolerate trading counters, but not much more than that. The French could have landed with canons (after all it’s with that French invention, the field gun, that the French had ended the “100 year war”, two centuries earlier)… Cortez’s way. 

In consequence of this situation, the reluctance of the Natives to be colonized that the civilized French established a trading, civilizing model which eschewed massacres.  When Champlain showed up exactly at the same spot as the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, in 1600, and went on to explore the entire region, he reported that there were too many Natives already installed to enable settlement of the French.

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So, contrarily to what US mythology traditionally claims, it’s not true that as soon as Europeans started to arrive, so did the massacres, and Holocausts. This is a pathetic lie to justify the Anglo-Saxon massacring colonization model (still in power today). 

The English colony was founded in a military-capitalist venture founded by the “West Country men”. Those plutocrats had made a fortune by over-exploiting Ireland. The governor there had alleys lined with Irish skulls, to instill the proper attitude in various guests.

Slavery had been made unlawful in 655 CE by Queen Bathilde of the Franks (truly an empress). In 1066 CE, the Franks outlawed slavery in England. Yet, the Anglo-Saxons colonists reintroduced slavery in 1619 CE. Shortly after, after the holocaust of the Pequot war, New England cities paid for Indian scalps.   

The Anglo-Saxon colonies soon made a fortune by growing tobacco, thanks to armies of slaves (sometimes more than 90% of some states were just slaves). 

The violence and brutality of the Anglo-Saxon colonizing model enabled it to beat the French and the Spanish (who were much friendlier to the Natives, and bred with them). All of this was justified by the Bible…which is a text which justifies, makes holy, colonizing the promised land after killing all the Natives: that’s how “God” orders it to be… If one obeys Him well….

Such is the paradox. The very evil of the “West Country Men” invading and holocausting colonization insured iits success. The French became victims of the all too advanced “mission civilisatrice” they abided by. Just an example: resistance to the US human right abuse in Colorado was led by five French half-breeds. They were all hanged (I searched the Internet in vain for that story I was familiar with, when I lived in Colorado, decades ago; another example of how the Internet buries reality to make it serve the established order).

***

Morality 1: Thanksgiving as usually represented is a manipulation of the grossest order… but it works. Talk to US children (as I do) and they will tell you the Indians happily fed the “Pilgrims”. Those “Pilgrims” have got to have been really nice. Not that said “Pilgrims”, morally justified by a strict reading of the Bible, stole a continent from its occupants… by killing them all [2]. Worse: US children have internalized the greed, profit, at the cost of the basest morality, fully. Watch the children (including my own daughter, nota bene) go around threatening “tricks” if they are not given “treats” at Halloween… And if you are skeptical, well, you are anti-American, anti-children inhuman, you will be “cancelled”. And then children are fully formed by the likes of “Frozen” were a self obsessed queen engineers (unwittingly, of course, it’s always… “unwittingly”) a climate catastrophe… [3].

***

Morality 2: There is a flaw such as being too much civilized, when one wants to advance… civilization, at some point, it has to get dirty. Amusingly, the Anglo-Saxons, when they got down to it, pulverized Hitler loving German cities: they applied to Germans the way that had been so fruitful for conquering North America. The Nazis were not eliminated with negotiations, but extermination. Nothing else could have worked.[4]

The colonization model of the French in North America, or elsewhere around the world failed, because it was too gentle.

Just an example: French women who wanted to go to Canada in the Seventeenth Century were only allowed to do so, if they were Catholics in very good moral standing (prostitutes not welcome). By comparison, English justice sent the homeless to America, as “endured servants” (slaves). England had plenty of homeless, as the plutocrats owned most of the country… whereas French peasants owned their land (however modest), so France suffered less homelessness than England. Something similar happened in Tasmania, Algeria. In New Caledonia, more than 50% of the population is aboriginal: compare to Australia, or Tasmania next door. Had the Tasmanian natives received the French more kindly (instead of ambushing nude French sailors)… Their descendants would still be around today. [5]

Want civilization? Prepare to win the war. Whatever the war, it’s coming. Moral righteousness won’t prevent it. This is what the history of Thanksgiving shows. Doing it the English way was too criminal, doing it the French way, not criminal enough. Only survival is perfect.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The 1619 arrival of 38 English settlers in Charles City County, Virginia, concluded with a religious celebration as dictated by the group’s charter from the London Company, which specifically required “that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned … in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest, which the Pilgrims celebrated with Native Americans, who helped them get through the previous winter by giving them food in that time of scarcity.

***

[2] Yes, the aborigines didn’t died just from genocide. There was also disease; however, not just distribution of smallpox blankets… Virulent Eurasiatic contagious disease struck the hardest was at point of first landing, most civilized Mesoamerica: by 1600 CE, 95% of the aborigine Aztecs were dead, mostly from disease. Yet, if one goes to Mexico now, individuals with mixed European-Aboriginal genetics are thick on the ground. Bolivia is more than 90% descendants of the population pre-Conquista… In the USA, aborigines’ genetics was mostly extinguished… and Pocahontas-Elizabeth Warren gave an unwitting proof of this…) 

***

[3] I was condemned to watch Frozen II, the first movie during which the whole theater laughed several times when I saw nothing funny whatsoever, and, another first, I fell asleep (the movies was busy rectifying the lack of PC of the first “Frozen”, in a thoroughly pathetic way, getting the opposite effect). Fortunately, the power then blew up in the entire theater complex, 4,000 people got evacuated and Lucifer was saved from having to suffer any longer that insufferable obscurity…  

***

[4] The French were the first to bomb Berlin in WWII, showing some Gallic ferocity… But the Brits (under PM Chamberlain) had prepared gigantic fleets of long range bombers (which the Nazis didn’t have neither technically. nor industrially; when Hitler travelled to Finland on a long range “Condor”, the plane caught fire on landing… At a time when the Brits had long been launching entire armadas of night bombers, including over Berlin…)

***

[5] What of New Zealand? Aren’t there Natives there? Well the British governor there, Fitzroy (of the eponymous mountain), bent over backwards to save the Natives, enabling them to deal directly with the English settlers, and allowing for Maori law, judgment from Maori chefs… The British Plutos back in London were furious, and recalled Fitzroy after a decade (Fitzroy, depressed, later slit his own throat)

Why The Anglo-Saxon Rage Against France

CROSSROADS OF THOUGHT, OR WHY THE FRENCH ARE SO SMART:

Another day, another explosion of a luggage full of high explosive in a public space, courtesy of Islamist terrorist, Oussama Z., a primitive Moroccan screaming “God is great” in Arabic. He tried to terrorize Brussels’ train station, but law enforcement spotted him before he could organize properly his devilish terror weapons. The fanatical barbarian was promptly shot and killed by officers. The Islamists have good reason to be enraged against France, and anything French-like, such as Belgium, ever since they attacked France in 715 CE… And got whipped. Before they invaded again, in 721 CE, to be whipped again. And again, in 732 CE. Some are gluttons for punishment. Islamist feel that the more punished they get, the closer to God. Which is great, probably because He is a homosexual in denial, who detest women. Different people, different nations, different mentalities.

***

France Alleged To Be “Liberticide”, Latest example of Anti-French rage and Hypocrisy:

Recently various major Anglo-Saxon media, including the crooked New York Times, preventively trashed new proposed anti-terrorist French laws as dictatorial. This is more than hypocritical. Those proposed French laws are nothing of the sort. Whereas US practice is beyond dictatorial, they are more police-state like (8 millions are under “Judicial Supervision” in the US!) 

For example a proposed French law says that the police could ask drivers of vehicles to have those inspected when they want to enter a security perimeter around major events (such as the “Tour de France”). This is a measure against car bombs. However, if the driver refuses an inspection of his or her car, to see if it carries a huge bomb, the driver can leave, no question asked. Try that in the US: you will be shot at, and everybody knows it (so nobody tries!) Everybody in the US knows that when the police gives an order, either you obey, or you get shot.

How “liberticide” is that? According to the crooked New York Times, enormously so (New York Times is crooked because it has banned me during the 2003 Iraq war, and for the last 6 years, although it denies it does, a further lie!)

By the way I have driven cars in the USA which way inspected for car bombs. Turning around was not an option, as I was dealing with the ladies and gentlemen of the US Secret Service, and that was nine years ago already. Major US media didn’t write editorials about it. I also found this to be no problem at all (because my car was not equipped with a car bomb!) I didn’t feel my right to carry a car bomb was trampled underfoot.

***

Conflicts between nations and versions of civilization arise from different mentalities:

These different mentalities do not just arise haphazardly. They often originate for a number of incontrovertible reasons. For example Fernand Braudel found that the desiccation of the Middle East brought increasingly dictatorial regimes, necessary to organize the enormous, increasingly complex hydraulic systems necessary for the survival of civilization. Thus the Pharaoh became “shepherd of his flock” (as official Egyptian propaganda put it, copied by the Bible a millennium later). Not surprisingly, Egypt, long at the forefront of civilization faded away as an engine of mental creation.

***

Why The French Are Like The Franks Who Became Like The Gauls:

It’s a curious thing that the same mentality inhabits France now as it did even before the Romans showed up. The population changed significantly in the meantime from massacres, immigration, emigration, etc. Centuries before the Roman empire, though, the 60 states of France each had their own treasury (and currency). And, in many technologies they were best in the world. Much of the Roman military equipment was purchased in Celtic Spain and Gaul (light metal helmets, swords). Five centuries later, the 37 arsenal of the Roman empire made their own weapons, right. But that was five centuries later, and by then Gallia was arguably the strongest piece of the Roman empire, and with a mind of its own (there was even a “Gallic empire” within the Roman empire, for a while).

France: trade routes from Med to Atlantic, and from Med to North Sea, and from Med to Germany! Melting Pot Max!

So why the same? Precisely because France was the original melting pot, the three main trade routes between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe being there. A crossroad of trade and especially mental trade. The Gauls actually used Hermes, also known as Mercury, as their main imported deity. That was the god of commerce, and communications

***

Why The Clashing Mentalities Between France and the Anglo-Saxons?

England has been in conflict with France since, paradoxically enough, the highly successful invasion and colonization of England by a French army led by the Duke of Normandy. As the latter and his barons took control on the other side of the channel, the new king of England, namely aforesaid Duke, became a vassal of the king of France. The king of Francia was not any king out there. After the de facto secession of the Western Franks from the rest of the “Renovated” Roman empire, the king of France was officially “Roman emperor in his own kingdom”.

This status of vassal went on for centuries. The situation became worse when the “Louve de France”, the She-Wolf of france, daughter of Philippe IV Le Bel of France, became absolute monarch of England. She was succeeded by her son Edward III, grandson of Le Bel, legitimate king of England and France. At that point, the leadership of England could claim that Paris was vassal to London, and the 475 years war (so-called “100 years war”) was on.

Another problem is that the Duke of Normandy had to persuade the English that it was in their best interest to be ruled by him. First, of course, the french outlawed slavery in England, something that the 20% of the population who were slaves, loved. But William had to make We the People stakeholders in their nation: England had been crisscrossed by civil wars and invasions, with all sorts of Angles, and Saxons, and (“Fair”) Viking from Norway, and Dark Vikings from Denmark, for 5 centuries… Thus William of Normandy installed a sort of more direct democracy which was frowned on by the more traditional Franco-Roman plutocracy on the other side of the Channel. That “English” trick was increased in following centuries, for example when other (French) aristocrats tried to be elected king by the (English) Parliament, and hoped to do that, by first increasing the powers of said Parliament.

In any case, as France was much more powerful than England then, with several times the population and riches, and a closer connection to Roman inheritance, the leadership in England could survive only through more devious and militarily efficient means than those used by the French from France.

In the end, England became basically a more efficient version of France, and that included a mentality that the French could see as more pragmatic, less principled, more perfidious and hypocritical.

As French supremacy lasted until 1815, the English had to try much harder until then, with a more underhanded mentality. In 1815, the English monarch renounced his claim to the throne of France (a claim started by Isabelle and her son Edward III, and later reconfirmed in an accord to end the “100 Year War” which Joan of Arc and her operators would violate, relaunching the war for another 375 years).

After that, France was clearly the junior partner in the way of world empire… But not as a land power, where the French military stayed the most powerful in the West, most of the time, until May 1940.

The German empire was the world’s most powerful military in the period 1871-1914. However, in September 1914, it was nearly annihilated by a French counterattack at the First Battle of the Marne, shattering the conspiracy to take control of the world. The reason for french military might can be tracked all the way back to the Third Century, when the Confederation of the Salian Franks was created, and Franks went up Roman rivers in what would become the Viking style, five centuries later. The alliance between Romans and Franks arose from these earlier conflicts, when the Romans, and in particular Caesar Constantine, realized that Frankish military might was best co-opted, rather than fought.

The ascent of the Franks was defined by them militarily defeating all and any enemies who tried to encroach on present day France. The list is nearly never ending, and includes the Huns, the Goths, and the Berber and Arab armies of the three invasions of Francia by the Umayyad Caliphate (715-748 CE), which brought its demise in 750 CE (as the bones of its armies laid in France). The switch from “Franks” to “French” happened in the Twelfth Century, and the first unelected French king was Jean I, an infant who ruled 5 days, before being probably poisoned (by Countess Mahaut of Artois; now a region of pseudo-independent Belgium).

Thus the French are frank and aggressive. On this civilization grew and multiplied. Frank, to know and transmit the truth, which is the core strength of war. Aggressive, to impose the truth. Why so much war? Because France is at core of Europe, where the easiest main three trade routes pass (going across the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Balkan Mountains or the Caucasus, all East-West ranges, mostly, is best done through… France!)

More details of European topography, showing better that the easiest trade routes indeed go through France… South of Massif Central (the volcanic range in the middle of France), going west, and up the Rhones valley.

The French state is the direct descendant of the Roman state. There is actually no discontinuity whatsoever, militarily, legal or otherwise. The first well-known elected French king, Clovis, was also Roman Consul and Imperator of the Roman army. Clovis succeeded to do what the Roman state couldn’t succeed to do in the preceding 150 years: Clovis crushed and evacuated the Visigoths (Battle of Vouillé, in 507 CE). Thus Francia and Constantinople, all the way to the Tenth and Eleventh Century, viewed themselves as part of the same Romanitas (resulting in common military campaigns, as when the Eastern Roman fleet operated on the French Riviera in the Tenth Century, in cooperation with Frankish armies in the interior, to extricate the Muslims who had been terrorizing Western Europe, in still another invasion; the First Crusade, 150 years later was the reciprocal courtesy…)

The philosophical method William the Conqueror used is exactly the same which Clovis used. And that’s not happenstance. Notice that, in both cases, those methods were quite opposite to the cool massacres, and thorough holocausts enacted by Julius Caesar when he conquered Gallia (Gaul).

However, the gigantic French empire was the object of US greed by 1914, and the envoy of hyper racist US President Wilson (a democrat, ex-president of Princeton University, a famous plutocratic university) conspired, encouraged, abetted and talked the German Kaiser into launching a world war, which he couldn’t win, with the result that, in 1945, the US was in perfect position to grab both the British and French empires, in the guise of decolonization.

This crowned the “American Century”, this worldwide empire, in the glory of which we are all presently basking.

So why the “Anglo-Saxon” anti-French rage?

This anti-French rage is a preventive measure, lest all the preceding be found out.

And should we be Zen-like, satisfied with this cognitive cover-up, organized in great part by the glorious US plutocratic universities? No. Why? Because we are getting through what promises to be maybe the greatest extinction of the biosphere ever since Snowball Earth. The simple US greed mentality is completely insufficient to deal with this crisis. Americans emit 16 tons of CO2 per capita, per year, in no small reason because they are such glorious, sensitive people, having attended their glorious super smart universities of greed, and they need to drive big truck as soon as they are 16 years old. By comparison, the French emit 6 (six) tons of CO2 per capita, per year. Because they are such losers. But, precisely, we need to learn to lose gracefully the battle of mental comfort and venal stupidity, to win the next war.  The ultimate war. The war of biosphere survival. A war against all of yesteryear’s mentalities.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Colonization All Over. So Why So Bad?

It goes without saying that colonization was a terrible thing, whine those who want to look good to themselves and other whiners. Colonization was a crime, they insist. At least that’s what PC people howl on every roof, as part of their unwitting campaign of rage against civilization. Because civilization, which was not civilized, caused colonization, this evil of evils, they crowe. Right.

We the descendants of the colonized shall howl from every roof what victims we are.

We the descendants of the colonizers, shall howl on every roof what criminals we are.

We the bipolar paranoid schizophrenic stand as accused, and may as well be mowed down by Islam driving SUVs, trucks, jumbo jets, and non sense, all over us.

***

Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, who does not descend from colonialists and colonizers?

All the Americas were colonized.

All of Oceania was colonized (twice at least).

Was the colonization of Australia by aborigines (who are part Denisovans), 50,000 years ago, a bad thing? It killed a lot of marsupials!

Sénégal: Organized, unified, but never really colonized! A very rare case!

Japan was colonized (twice at least). Japanese civilization started for real, when the archipelago was colonized. By the Chinese.

Some will say China was never colonized. Well, there used to be 100 nations with 100 languages in China, as recently as three centuries ago (the emperor himself recognized then, in a very sophisticated intellectual exchange with the Jesuits; and he expressed both his will to respect that, and his incapacity to do otherwise). However, nowadays, Mandarin (just one language) is taking over, all over. And all Chinese are forced to assimilate with the Borg in Beijing. That’s colonization therein. Is it bad? My daughter is learning Chinese, or, more exactly, Mandarin. She will be able to talk all over.

Madagascar was colonized (thrice; from Indonesia, Africa, France). Even Greenland was conquered by the Inuits, who pushed away the Vikings… (On their way, the Inuits had annihilated previous denizens in the northern Canada archipelago…)

Most of Africa was colonized multiple times. By descendants of Neanderthals (!), Bantus, Phoenicians, Greco-Romans, Arabs, etc.

All of Russia is a huge colony, all the way to Kamchatka. “Russ” initially means Eastern Swedes.  The Eastern Swedes, Viking style, invaded the huge placid rivers of Eastern Europe, all the way down to the Black Sea (where they could trade with the Romans). In the Tenth Century, Vladimir of Kiev conquered Crimea from the local Khan (Mongols who had themselves conquered centuries earlier the Greeks, who had conquered a millennium prior, etc.)  

Even China was momentarily (a few centuries here and there) conquered by Buddhists, Tibetans, Mongols, Mandchous…

Arabia was greatly colonized by Persia, much later Turkey (Ottomans) for centuries.

Europe?

Europe, shortly before Rome rose, was invaded by the Celto-Germans, who covered up the entire continent, all the way to Anatolia. When Caesar invaded, Gaul (“Gallia”) was made of 60 nation-states.

Much of India was invaded, colonized by white men coming from the north, central Asia, four thousand years ago, or more. That’s why India and Europe enjoy the same Indo-European language family.

Egypt was invaded by the Arabs, more exactly by Caliph Omar’s army. Never recovered (whereas Egypt had recovered from colonization by Black Pharaohs, Nubians, Sea People, Libyans, Greeks and Romans). Egyptians themselves had to decolonize the Sahara desert and concentrate on the Nile Valley and adjoining oases.

***

A real question is: which places in the world were not colonized?

Paradoxically, much of West Africa is one of the most pristine, uncolonized places.

West Africa is generally viewed as having been a French, British, Portuguese colony, and that’s superficially true.

West Africa also exported a lot of slaves (to the Americas).

However, West Africa was one of the much untouched places. (Contrarily to whiny repute!)

Not like Europe: all old European languages were wiped out by the Indo-European, Celto-German invasion (or close to it: Basque is a tiny remnant of what once was.)

And don’t brandish southern Europeans as old stock: the Middle Easterners came from the Fertile Crescent, with their futuristic crops (wheat, etc.) and their genes, 9,000 years ago. Another invasion to run over the many Sapiens invasions all over Europe, in the last 100,000 years. Neanderthals made it to North Africa, big time, and their genes to South Africa, but apparently not to West Africa.

***

A real question: when is colonization good, when is it bad?

From the point of view of the invaded, one will guess that colonization is often bad. Yes, but not always. The invasion of Gallia by Caesar would end up creating the strongest part of the Roman empire, Francia, and the Birth of the West. Viewed that way, it was a good thing. And it sure is a good thing if there was no other way to get that good thing. Was it? We don’t know. Was Caesar innocent of the invasion? We don’t really know.

***

“Colonization” in West Africa was mostly a joke, or more exactly, civilizing: ten French officers ordered around 5,000 Senegalese soldiers who, truly, conquered Sénégal. So, in truth, Senegal conquered Senegal under French management. In truth, there were basically no colons in Senegal: the land stayed property of the Senegalese (compare with the USA, where Indian lands were nearly completely distributed by the colonial government in Washington to the European colons!)

A big argument for the “colonization” of Africa was the eradication of slavery, which was endemic, pandemic, chronic, extensive and ubiquitous in Africa (the globalization of African slavery to the Americas, escaping the long arm of European law, has not been properly characterized…)

Here are the national languages of Senegal:

Balanta-Ganja Hassaniya Arabic Jola-Fonyi Mandinka Mandjak Mankanya Noon Pulaar Serer Soninke Wolof

Some of these languages are tonal, some are not (making them a different as latin and Chinese!) It goes without saying that packing such different nations in so tight a space (less than 200,000 square kilometers), result in mayhem, just to keep the population stable. So Senegal has, rightly so, just one national language.

***

Colonization is good when it brings lots of progress, and less mayhem:

This should go without saying. However, the usual interpretation of (hard) multiculturalism is that all cultures are equally worth of respect. This thesis implies that progress does not exist. So we may as well regress, and have plutocracy.

So we see who these proponents of hard multiculturalism were trying to seduce: the powers that be.

By refusing to see when, how colonization has been, and could be, good, they refuse to bring reason to judge destiny. A silly attitude, considering how fast destiny moves these days.

But of course fundamentally hypocritical.

At least, nobody can accuse me to be a hypocrite. I don’t under (hypo) criticize. It’s much more fun, to over-criticize… And criticize all over… Colonization: assess, but don’t deny, its crimes, just as its merits. And remember the fine lines between colonization and immigration.

Patrice Ayme’

Syria, Garden Of Torturous Delights

What is going on in Syria? A zoo of human passions, and traditional patterns of history. A war is going on. There are simple wars, and complex ones. Syria’s war started simple, one dictator against his subjects, and it is now very complex, having become the war of all against all.

Big Bombs: Western Coalition Air Strike, Syria, 2015. The Islamist State Buries Underground

Initially the calm and secular Syrian society came of age, and a consensus was reached: the hereditary dictator got to go. However, the dictator, a trained doctor, son of tough and crafty tyrant, did not want to go, and those attached to him, all the way to Western Europe, in particular the City of London, did not want to go. Chess, Go, and other games people play have rules. War does not. War’s limit as those of the human spirit.

Don’t believe me? Remember then the Obama’s administration “signature strikes”: killing gatherings because terrorists also gather. On the face of it, the theory was as barbarian as anything in known history. Even Genghis Khan’s forces would massacre, but only after a fair warning: ”Surrender, or we will massacre you!” Even the Nazis, who did worse in secret, on a much larger scale, did not dare claim to be as vicious, for all to see.

Thus, definitively, progress is not a quiet, long stream. Instead it can go in full reverse.

Actors in Syria are now many: much of the Western world is involved, including Russia. Yet the motivations of Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, US, Britain, France, Assad, etc.., are all different.

So what does Assad, initial master of that game, want? Initially, dictator Assad wanted just to stay in power, as all dictators do. But then, his strategy to free the Qur’an fundamentalists worked. He helped them, be it only by purchasing “their” oil, just like Turkey did (and sent back weapons, in the case of Erdogan; some people writing this in Turkey, got five years in jail, just for writing this…).

However, Assad is head of the Alawites. Alawites have their own Muslim religion. As the Qur’an promises to kill apostates and unbelievers, worshipping Mahomet and his god differently from one’s neighbor, is a grave, potentially lethal, fateful tragedy. Romeo and Juliet is nothing in comparison. The end result was that the Alawites were badly treated until the French showed up. Under the French, they quickly reached the highest spheres. Alawites have been reluctant to leave them ever since, especially considering that it’s not just a question of social status, but of survival.

Assad was able to get away with his savage repression of pacifist, secular civilians. Then he was able to get away with his manipulations of Islamists, freeing them and endowing them with enough power to become a justification to his brutal, homicidal rule.

Then a new mood surfaced: why not to just eradicate Non-Alawites?

How do I know (correctly guess) that such is the main motivation of Assad now? Too many strikes on schools and hospitals rather than enemy soldiers. That’s called reading between the facts.

So Assad is a monster, in the line of perfectly respectable historical monsters: just as Alexander the Great, or Little Father of the People Stalin, Assad sounds perfectly reasonable. Not to say that the “West” is not also an accomplice. In other words, it’s not just Putin who is a collaborator of genocide (Putin did save Palmyra, so he is not all bad… Far from it, on this subject).

And of course, Assad does not stand alone anymore than Hitler (or the Kaiser) did: when Cameron, France and the US stood ready to strike Assad, British MPs, copiously paid by the sort of fake prosperity the likes of Assad and his family bring to England, voted against striking him, blocking PM Cameron. Thus giving the pusillanimous Obama such cold feet, he had in turn to betray the French…

As we may see next, the mood of the so-called “West” is divided on the subject of striking monsters in a timely manner. In Syria as in many other places. Under the pretext of loud anti-”colonialism”, genocide is authorized… As it is perfectly compatible with the plutocratic doctrine, that evil should rule. Thus anti-”colonialism” is a fig leaf to hide the most significant naughty bits, namely free reins for torturous delights, hidden by tortuous denials.

Genocide of the mostly Sunni population of Syria is a delight many secretly savor. Too bad for the collateral damage.

Patrice Ayme’

How Civilizations Go Down. Why There Is Hope

Gloom and doom go only that far. A number of commenters, or authors such as Machiavelli, entertained pretty abysmal considerations on humanity and its future.

In the case of Machiavelli, pessimism was understandable: he rode two horses condemned to decline and fall, namely the Republic of Florence (which was turning into a plutocracy), and Caesare Borgia, Cardinal at 18 years of age, who later resigned his church position in an attempt to seize power in Italy, a place where Spain had invaded the south (freed centuries prior, by the Franks, from the Muslims), France was trying to hold onto Naples (but lost because the Spanish general in command was too good). Most of the peninsula was covered by forts and domains which had feuded for centuries.

Nowadays, we have grounds to be optimistic. I will explain why below. However with a caveat: history is now flowing extremely fast, as we are approaching a technological and computational, thus theoretical singularity.

We Already Have A Better Understanding Of What Brought Rome Down The First Time, We Can No Doubt Avoid It, The Second Time, With Even More Understanding

There are three reasons why civilizations collapse: invasion, ecological collapse, plutocracy.

I use all the time analogies with Rome’s Decline and Fall, yet on a much grander scale than Edward Gibbon. I root firmly the Decline and Fall as starting in 200 BCE, with the rise of plutocracy. There are a lot of deep analogies between what happened then, and what is happening now.

Yet we also enjoy major differences with Rome. To avoid Rome’s fate, we have to cultivate these differences. (And our gaze turns towards the European Union.)

Rome was a quarter of humanity, and Roma was ALL the civilized, and Republican influence zone. Yes, China, India, Persia, and well before Egypt, were civilized. But only the only drowned and expired Sumerian cities could pretend to have a high Republican index: Sumer invented the bicameral system still in use today. Persia did not, China did not, and, as far as I know, neither did India.

But Rome, like the top Greek cities, was a Republic. However, most Greek cities crashed and burned within a century or so. Rome built a huge empire, and lasted so long, it’s not clear it ever stopped. Although it declined, and fell, it got up again, as the Franks engineered and observed. Thus Rome founded the present political system

Persia was advanced enough to seriously bother Greeks and Romans, it was only or equal civilizational level for a fleeting moment under Darius, and in the late Sixth Century (thus, 1,000 year later). (This is my own observation/theory, sure to rile up some out there!)

All the neighborhood of Rome was vastly inferior. Although the Celts were superior in ocean going ships and metallurgy, and even captured Rome in the Fourth Century BCE, their abominable religion was quite a drag.  Actually, it was such a drag, the Celts embraced Greco-Roman civilization even before Julius Caesar showed up with his ten legions.

The Persian religion, Zoroastrianism was very advanced, arguably more so than Christianism (which copied many of its elements, in particular the obsession with truth and the logos, thanks god). The Middle East got tied down by the instauration of “hydraulic dictatorships” all over. The Persian/Iranian/Mesopotamian ensemble was a vast military mess which never recovered imperially, thus politically, from the People of the Seas invasions.

Now the situation is quite different.

First, the USA is a EUROPEAN COLONY.Rome was not a colony; it was initially occupied by Etruscans, themselves one of the People of the Sea. But, at the same time, the Etruscans civilized Rome. Rome also got civilized by the “Magna Grecia”, the Great Greece of Southern Italy, stating in Nea Polis (Naples).

Second, the mother ship, Europe, gave birth to a gigantic empire. It’s not just that European colonies control the Americas and Australia. France, the USA and Britain Exclusive Economic Zones, EEZs, covers much of the world’s exploitable oceanic depths.

Although weakened by its own crazies (Prussia/Germany/Nazis, Mussolini, Franco, Lenin/Stalin and their subordinates), plus major American plutocratic maneuvering, and in a bad state presently, Europe not quite done yet. After all the good guys (French Republic and British pseudo-monarchy) won. Now the French Republican systems, and monarchies to the same effect, cover Europe. Germany is sister republic to France, in particular.

Third, the Roman Republican system spread way beyond Europe and her colonies. China and India, and most of the rest of the UN have actually adopted (and adapted) many of WESTERN civilization’s better sides. However, China is still a dictatorship, and (partly) India a mess.

Another difference with Rome starts with a similarity: Rome got in a huge ecological crisis, starting around 100 CE. The Romans could not understand what was happening. They said:”The world is getting old”. Well, what was happening is that Romans had exhausted the soils, and the mines. However we know what they did not: tremendous technological progress can enable to change exploitation regimes.

Thus, the fourth difference with Rome; a huge CO2, GHG, Climate Crisis is incoming, but everybody knows about it, and fixes are in sight. A crisis is an opportunity as the Chinese would say.

Hope? People have to learn from history, and that means, the real history. Hyper maneuvering by USA plutocracy happened in much of the Twentieth Century, and is still ongoing right now. People can’t understand that, as long as they don’t realize that, without American plutocracy, Hitler just won’t have happened. At least, not happened as catastrophically as he did.

But there is hope that people, thanks to the Internet, realize that they have been manipulated in both what they know, and what they can hope to achieve. In particular, Direct Democracy is in the best position to succeed ever. The Athenian Republic found difficult to achieve Direct Democracy, because it did not have the Internet. The average Athenian voter was one day’s travel away from the voting booth. Nowadays, the average voter has her, or his hand on the voting device, namely the smartphone. No more excuses.

Objections can be raised. The preceding was a partial answer to several commenters on this site, John, Aaron, GlouconX, Eugen… The latter jumped on Machiavelli to object to Direct Democracy; however, Machiavelli was not just an author and philosopher. Like Plato, and especially Aristotle, he was a vested ACTOR of the disasters he described, and thus deeply biased, all the way to the greatest depths of the human soul. People who have interest to be stupid, will be stupid. Be it only to forget the fools leading us by the nose. Direct democracy is the answer to stupidity.

However, there is snow outside and further comments will be delayed until enough snow will have been mastered by the imperialistic author of these lines. Hey, it may be the last snow ever, let’s enjoy a cold El Nino, while it lasts! Non-Linearity is ready to ambush us. Let’s build memories while we can, be it just to be melancholic later… being of many minds is what intelligence is about.

Patrice Ayme’  

Could We Colonize Mars?

Yes. There are no show stoppers. The main problem is how to get there fast, cheap and safe. That, in turn is an energy source problem. We need to go beyond chemical rockets (which were invented in China nearly a millennium ago).

Mars is a tempting prize. Mars colonization will double the extent of land humanity live on. Indeed the Red Planet is endowed with nearly as much surface area as all of Earth’s land surface combined (145 million square kilometers for Mars, 149 x 10^6 sqkm for Earth’s continents).

Mars’ rotation axis, over the eons, wobbles impressively. Right now, it’s half way (same inclination as Earth’s). But when the axis is fully inclined, my bet is that the poles melt. Then Mars has got to become much warmer, and wetter: the atmosphere would be full of H2O, water, a powerful greenhouse gas. Maybe life blossoms. Hence Mars is even more interesting than it presently looks (one could imagine life adapted to these super-summers).

Smaller, But Inhabitable Even Before Terraforming

 

Could we conquer the seas instead? Sure, we have to. However, it’s more difficult. How could it be more difficult to conquer the ocean? The average terrestrial ocean is 3,688 meters deep. This means that we have to handle, to live there, a pressure difference of 370 atmospheres. On Mars, as it is, the pressure is 1% of one atmosphere; that is just one atmosphere difference. A light spacesuit can handle Mars. But just going down 20 meters in Earth’s sea doubles the pressure problem we have on Mars.

Radiation on Mars, and getting there, is a problem: a year stay, with the trip, would augment the probability of getting cancer by 5%. NASA, and radiation workers’ limit is 3%. The average smoker doubles his cancer habit from his gaseous drug habit. Thus, by only sending smokers to Mars, and thus preventing them to smoke (the fuel debris smokers smoke clog air filters), one would vastly diminish their probability of them getting cancer.

The problem with Mars is how to get there. Getting in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is already (very) difficult, expensive, chancy, and will stay so, barring huge advances in material science. We need better engines, better airframes, and, or, a space elevator. Work is going on, in a number of ways, from perfecting launching rockets from planes, to airbreathing reaction engines, to the simple Ariane 6 solution of switching to solid rockets (French and American ballistic missiles are 100% dependable, as they sit in submarines stuffed with thermonuclear bombs).

Some hope that space tourism (one day in LEO for $50,000, say) will provide incentives for cheaper ways to leave Earth. Maybe, but university departments working on materials built atom by atom, better get lots of money (such materials, for example nanomaterials such as graphene, can be hundreds of times stronger than steel; we need to make them work on a large scale).

Given energy, rocket fuel can be made on Mars in a number of ways. Thus, plenty of energy, plenty of fuel. There is plenty of water on Mars (the Curiosity rover found between 2% and 3% in the soil). At least, at the poles (and perhaps all over). Some universities are already bioengineering mosses and other plants to survive on Mars.

With existing technology, and materials, we (or, rather, robots) could build a Space Elevator on Mars. So Mars could turn into a very convenient outpost, while terraforming proceeds.

To get to Mars fast, and to have the plenty of energy we need there to fuel robots, which, in turn, will be able to dig in the ground and make vast caverns and the like (etc.), we need a concentrated energy source.

The only one imaginable energy source would be from small thermonuclear reactors. A number of companies and universities are working on these.

There should be a crash program  on these (while pursuing steadily ITER).

Mars had life and an ocean, for probably at least a billion years. Not having a core nuclear reactor, hence a protecting magnetic field and plate tectonic, Mars lost liquid water, warmth and most of its atmosphere (Venus has the same problem, although Earth sized). Mars is waiting the human touch to smile with exuberant life again. Colonization can expand diversity as it most often does (will cynics add perfidiously). Besides, a Mars polis would be an insurance policy.

The only way to not being able to colonize Mars? If civilization collapses first, it won’t happen. Unlikely? This is exactly where abusing fossil fuels is leading us.

Patrice Ayme’