Why The Crusades Were Lost: Saint Louis’ Racism Against The Mongols!

Islam came to near annihilation in the Thirteenth Century as Franks and Mongols unified and took the Islamist capitals, Baghdad and Damascus. A little known episode. At the time, the overall Mongol Khan was a woman (another little known episode!) But she didn’t cause the problem. Instead Saint Louis’ jealous racism, and unbounded hatred of “infidels” made the difference.

Richard the Lionheart lived in France, where he was supposedly vassal to the king of France, Philip II Augustus his companion in arms (who left the so-called “Holy land” after a while, leaving his soul mate Richard, in charge). Richard may not have lost major battles. But, a century later, Saint Louis, Louis IX of France, did, and ruined France in the process.

It became clear nothing good was achieved by all this crusading. On top of that, the climate started to wobble. Instead, the French switched to the trading model with Islam (rendered possible by treaties consecutive to the Crusades). Immense fortunes were made (Jacques Coeur, born a commoner, became the richest man in France by trading with the Levant in the fifteenth century, and soon, master of the mint, and a most important European diplomat).

Arab chroniclers used the correct term, “Franki” (Franks) to qualify the Europeans trying to (re)conquer the Middle East from the religion of Islam, which had smothered it.

By the time the Crusades were launched, direct Muslim aggression against Europe has been continuous since 715 CE, a full four centuries (the word “Europe” was used first by the Franks in the context of the Muslim invasions). This continual Muslim attack was viewed, correctly, by all concerned, as the continuation of the war of Islam against Rome. (Naturally so, as the Franks so themselves as “Rome”. By 800 CE, the Franks had officially “renovated”, as they put it, the Roman empire…)

Painted in 1337 CE. Notice that the Franks are covered in armor, and the Muslims are not. Obvious technological superiority. The Romans already bought light steel helmets in Gaul! Muslim tech superiority is a lie. In plain view.

There is plenty of evidence that the Franks were more advanced than the Muslims in crucial military technology, as early as 715 CE. How could they not be? The Muslims were just coming out of savage Arabia, all the technology they had, was stolen, or, let’s say, adopted from others.

Four terracotta hand grenades, with “Greek Fire” inside, used by the defenders of Constantinople against the Turks. Greek Fire had many variants, some secret to this day. The Chinese developed dry versions, with salpeter, which turned into black powder later.

The Franks, who had been the crack troops of the Roman empire, as early as 311 CE, had better steel, better armor, better steel weapons, and giant war horses capable of wearing armor themselves. That’s why the Franks were able to defeat the Muslims, overall, in the first phase of the war with Islam, which was in Europe (711 CE, attack on Spain, until the counterattack on Jerusalem, 1099 CE).

This European technological superiority was obvious during the Spanish reconquista. An armored Spanish horse was like an intelligent, indomitable battle tank, which would charge again and again, rarely seriously wounded. By contrast, Muslim cavaliers wore little armor, their relatively small Arab horses were excellent but all too little (I used to ride my own very combative Arab stallion in Africa, which nobody else would, or could, ride… Its name, appropriately chosen, was Napoleon…).

Horse archers were not effective against heavily armored cavalry. They could bother it, but not defeat it. This is why the Mongols decided wisely not to attack the Franks again, after invading, suffering huge losses, Hungary, and Croatia. The Mongols debated what had happened to their ancestors the Huns, eight centuries earlier, in France (annihilation spared only political decision). The Mongols used rocket artillery.

Noah Smith wrote “Why Did Europe Lose the Crusades?“. Said he: “A little while ago, I started to wonder about a historical question: Why did Europe lose the Crusades? The conventional wisdom, at least as I’ve always understood it, is that Europe was simply weaker and less advanced than the Islamic Middle Eastern powers defending the Holy Land. Movies about the Crusades tend to feature the Islamic armies deploying fearsome weapons – titanic trebuchets, or even gunpowder. This is consistent with the broad historical narrative of a civilizational “reversal of fortunes” – the notion that Islamic civilization was much more highly advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, there’s the obvious fact that the Middle East is pretty far from France, Germany, and England, leading to the obvious suspicion that the Middle East was just too far away for medieval power projection.

Anyway, I decided to answer this question by…reading stuff about the Crusades. I read all the Wikipedia pages for the various crusades, and then read a book – Thomas Asbridge’s “The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land“. Given that even these basic histories contain tons of uncertainty, we’ll never really know why the Crusades turned out the way they did. But after reading up a bit, here are my takes on the main candidate explanations for why Europe ultimately lost.”

He pursue by fingering “lack of motivation” as the main cause of the loss of the Crusades. That is true, in part: Europe opened to the ocean. However, the Crusades won in important ways (opening up trade). But the Europeans also really lost, when it would have been easy to win.

Noah Smith’s analysis focuses only on the English (so to speak) aspect of the Crusades. He does not quite say that a rogue frankish army seized Constantinople in 1204 CE. And then he omits completely what happened in the Thirteenth Century (because Richard Lionhearted was then dead, and history is all about the Anglois?).

For politically correct reasons, some of them ten centuries old, some more voguish, allegations have been made of the superiority of Islam (or China, for that matter). These (often self-serving from racist self-declared anti-racists) assertions are not grounded in fact.

By 1000 CE, the Franks had the highest GDP per capita in the world, and its history. European technology was, overall, the most advanced. Europeans were stunned by how little the Chinese used machines and animals.  

The Arabic numbers were Greek numbers perfected in India, where the full zero was invented, and were reintroduced through central Asia. Out of the 160 major work of Antiquity we have, 150 survived in European monasteries, the universities of the time (and the ten remaining were saved by the Persians, initially).

The Middle East, long the cradle of most invention, has been clearly a shadow of its former self, ever since Islam established its dictator, intolerance and war friendly terrorizing culture of god obsession.

Crusades in the Middle east until 1204; The image Noah Smith uses, which misinforms the reality of what happened…

Europe didn’t “lose the Crusades”. Saint Louis did. Europe didn’t just decide the Middle East was hopeless, in all sorts of ways. Europe had got reopening of the Silk Roads from Saladin. Meanwhile in 1244, the Khwarezmians, recently pushed out by the advance of the Mongols, took Jerusalem on their way to ally with the Egyptian Mamluks. Europe shrugged (by then “Roman” emperors such as Frederick I Barbarossa had used a Muslim company of bodyguards… So there was strictly no anti-Muslim hatred and racism… contrarily to what happened with the Mongols, see below…) 

It is also true that Saint Louis, a weird mix of a dangerous religious fanatic of the worst type, and a modern, enlightened king, lost its entire army (to a woman, the only female leader Islam ever had!) in Egypt. Saint Louis was taken captive at the Battle of Fariskur where his army was annihilated. He nearly died, was saved from dysentery by an Arab physician (impressed Arabs offered for him to rule them). A huge ransom had to be paid, comparable to the French budget. Then Saint Louis died in front of Tunis, in another ridiculous crusade (1270 CE).  Louis fell ill with dysentery, and was cured by an Arab physician

The Seventh and Eight Crusades were disastrous military defeats

Saint Louis, a racist, was the direct cause of the survival of Islam. The Mongols, allied to local Franks had destroyed Baghdad (siege of the Abbasid Caliphate) and Damascus (siege of the Umayyad). The Mongols asked respectfully to make an official alliance with Christianity, and eradicate Islam.

Instead the Pope called Nestorian Christian Mongols heathens, and him and Saint Louis promised excommunication to all and any Frank joining the Mongols in war. Thus the Mongols attacked Egypt without Frankish help, and were defeated by the Mamluks Turks.

Dejected, the Mongols decided that they were Muslims (Islam has no pope, and the Caliphate had been destroyed by the Franco-Mongol alliance ) Under Timor Lame, they would carve a giant Mongol-Muslim empire all the way into India.

This is just a fraction of the common operations of the Franks and Mongols, when they were allied against the Muslims, destroying Baghdad, seizing Damascus. Saint Louis and his pet the Pope saved Islam by calling a halt to the cooperation. Mongols and Franks actually took Damascus together, and the commanders entered the conquered city, side by side…

The Spanish were more serious. They, Isabella, Ferdinand and their advisers, planned to pursue the reconquista by extirpating Islam from North Africa and the Middle East.

The extremely well-trained, battle hardened army was prepared, but then the Americas had just been discovered, and war with France for the control of the world in general and Italy in particular, became everything. Spain engaged in a war with France it took nearly two centuries to lose. The conquest of the Americas changed the world, though. The reconquest of the Christian empire from the Muslims was given up…

It could have been done: the Spanish occupied many cities of North Africa, including Algiers and Oran. Power was divided between Ottoman pirates (“Barbarossas”) and the kingdom of Tlemcen. In any case, in 1525 CE, while Cortez was conquering Central America, defeating among others, the Aztecs, pirates retook Algiers in the name of the Turk Selim 1. At the same time, Selim defeated the Egyptian Mamluks, taking control of the Levant, Mecca, and Egypt.

Islam, a pretty deleterious religion in its literal, Salafist form, survived. North Africa and the Middle East, previously long the world’s wealthiest place, is now the poorest and most war-ridden…

And the war goes on, the ideology of Salafist, literal Islam, being fundamentally antagonistic to civilization.

For the USA, the Iraq war has been an enormous victory: it boosted the price of oil for a decade, enabling the massive deployment of US fracking. Now the USA is again the world’s number one fossil fuel producer. Also French and US military forces are fighting from Mali to Afghanistan, maintaining economic and military control over an area still crucial for energy production (although it will soon become economically irrelevant, from renewable energy).  

All the regimes from Mali to Afghanistan, are, officially, friendly to civilization. So why does the war goes on? Because the ideology is islam is centered on Jihad, no holds barred. Thus Islam gives a ready ideology to those who want to make no holds barred. This is why the Turks converted to islam. Within a generation, they had invaded a huge swathe of Central Asia, and overran very old civilization: Georgia, Armenia, and the Oriental Romans (“Constantinople”).

Then Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem were massacred (up to 10,000 at one time) by various Muslim potentates. Constantinople, having lost half of its territory, to the recently converted, ferociously invading Turks, asked the “Occidental” Roman empire to come to the rescue.   

In 1095 Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in a sermon at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military intervention for the so-called Byzantine Empire and its Emperor, Alexios I, who needed desperately to stop the westward invasion of the migrating Turks colonising Anatolia.

Morality of all this? What people think they know about history has little to do with what really happened. The forces presently in conflict have been in conflict ever since Islam exists, as Muhammad wanted it. The Quraish, in Mecca, the dominant tribe Muhammad belonged to, didn’t trust Muhammad: he was an analphabet and an epileptic. To boot, Muhammad succeeded in life by marrying a wealthy business woman, and then switching from caravan trading, to caravan raiding.

Just before he died, Muhammad led the first attack against the Romans (who had not attacked him, and refused combat). War is the great arbiter of human destiny. The enormous Roman field army, horrendously led erroneously, was annihilated on its third day of battle at Yarmouk against the Arab Muslim army. Emperor Heraclius, a great general had not been present, he was in Alexandria.

War is a great arbiter, but it is also extremely fickle. Crucial battles are won, and lost, which should never have been won, or lost. Sometimes by sheer happenstance, sometimes from hubris, sometimes by having top generals with top armies not considering the worst imaginable case (as happened to the Romans when fighting the Arabs at Yarmouk, or with Yamamoto at Midway, or the French mid May 1940…).

To learn from history, it has to be learned in full. Civilization missed a chance to eliminate the Islamist war ideology when it aborted the natural alliance with the Mongols. But it’s not very surprising: the overall leader of Europe, then, was Saint Louis. Saint Louis invented the modern justice system, and put his mother, Blanche de castille, in charge of France for many years. So he could be viewed as non-sexist and all for justice. He is represented to this day, rendering justice below an oak. However, Saint Louis was also a savage. He really believed that unbelievers should be killed painfully. Interestingly, Saint Louis came to believe that the Muslims were believers: his fanatical rage was oriented towards Jews and those who, in Christendom, did not believe. So it’s entirely natural that, by considering the Mongols heathens, and forbidding a further alliance with them, he would, in the end, save Islam!

It’s not just that Saint Louis burned 12,000 Jewish manuscripts in Paris, in 1243 CE (5 years before he led the disastrous Seventh Crusade). Saint Louis wrote abominable descriptions of the atrocious ways in which he would kill infidels (I read it in the original texts long ago; however, I was unable to find a source today…)

We have Jihadists around, ready to kill the innocent nowadays, because Saint Louis was actually one of them!

Patrice Ayme’

Islam – Religion of Peace or Totalitarian Ideology?

PRESENT DAY ISLAM IS A LIE, SAID AISHA:
I lived my childhood in Muslim countries, from the age of two weeks. Islam was then never a problem, it was a very tolerant and tolerable part of the landscape. I never had a problem with the call to prayer, anymore than I had with church bells. Both of them could be heard, as the places I grew up in enjoyed diverse version of “Sufi” Islam. “Sufism” is actually immensely varied. In West Africa it meant not only women didn’t wear a veil, but were going bare chested.

Now things have completely degenerated: Saudi and emirates’ wealth, discreetly propped by divisive Western plutocracy, have imposed a variant of Islam which was basically unknown when not outright outlawed eight centuries ago in the places of higher civilization (Sultanate of egypt, Abbasid Caliphate, Persia).

This unamusing version comes straight out of the Qur’an written by Uthman, Third Caliph, which Aisha, the child-bride wife of the Prophet, condemned and went to war about because, she said, it was a pack of lies and fake representations of what Muhammad thought. Interestingly, Aisha fought Ali at the Battle of the Camel, so she is hated by the Shia, too. Thus Aisha condemned both Sunni and Shia Islams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha

Picard, named after the Star Trek character, for his humanitarian logic, is a frequent commenter on this site and the author of the site “Defense Issues” has produced his own critical essay on Salafist Islam. (We are all severely criticizing, following Aisha’s notoriously free spirit!). This breath of fresh air is reproduced below.

Trump: US “Not innocent…Got A Lot Of Killers”

Ask pseudo-democrats and pseudo-leftists, so noisy nowadays, and they will speak as if the history of the USA in the Middle East started on 9/11. They will generally not know that 9/11 was engineered by an Islamist conspiracy initially instigated by the USA. (Actually several Islamist conspiracies were instigated and entangled by the US Deep State; the main engineers were “Democratic” presidents Roosevelt and Carter.)

Please consider, for Carter’s villainous attack:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/

Yes, Carter killed millions, in the end. The war he and his goons directly engineered killed at least two million Afghans, five million refugees, and turned the country into an Islamist nightmare. And that was just the beginning. Millions more would die, in further consequences of great humanist Carter’s exploits. Carter can go, build houses with his bare hands to look good helping the poor: hopefully, history will nail him and his ilk.

Using Islam as a modern weapon of mass destruction, was, partly, an US idea (expanding on the genius of the Saudi family, associated with Wahhabism, Literal Islam, since the 1700s…) President Roosevelt was that engineer, in his last strategy, before he croaked, and after giving half of Europe to Stalin (divide and conquer!)

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/great-bitter-lake/

Jews! The French! In Afghanistan! What of the US? After Destroying the Democratic Republic in Afghanistan, the US turned it into an Islamist State, Similar to Saudi Arabia. After 9/11, the USS recreated an Islamist Republic in Afghanistan, as it Had In Pakistan Next Door.

Young US citizens are imprinted to believe that “conspiracy theorists” are deranged, and to stay away from them. Thus US youth stay away from any representation of a conspiracy. Their appreciation of history is reduced to screaming USA USA USA USA. Or if of the pseudo-democratic indoctrination, nowadays, to call everybody they don’t understand a “racist” (just as the Nazis did!)

When someone set to move the world, that someone is never alone, though. And, especially when they are up to no good, their mindset is not for the whole world to know. Instead they together-breathe (con-spirare) with a small group.

Example: the US government secretly decided to attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1970s. Afghanistan had been previously peaceful, open, safe. However the potential development of its mineral riches by French and Russian interests threatened US hegemony. Notice that this was not about Afghanistan itself. It was about the US fighting France and Russia.

So the US unleashed the Islamist Republic of Pakistan’s ISI. When that was not enough, Carter ordered the CIA to attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (July 3, 1979) and then Saudi Arabia, and, finally Ben Laden.

The “official” reason given to the French by the Carter National Security Adviser, was that Islamism would destroy the USSR. Knowing there was a defense treaty between the Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan made the Carted White House confident that the USSR would be drawn in. From the point of view of the Carter and then Reagan White Houses, attacking elementary schools for girls was a sure method to draw the Russians in (yes, Afghani elementary schools for girls were recommended even as a target for Bin Laden’s goons).

Before the full-scale US attack on the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the country was definitively not Islamist. Consider the “Old Jew” of Picasso, in French, as an Afghan national stamp (above). 

Notice the US used Islamism as a weapon. First through Pakistan, then through the CIA, then through Saudi Arabia, then through Ben Laden.

This is why the US Deep State was careful not to punish the Saudis for 9/11: the Saudis were acting as tools for the US. Some mercenaries (GIA, Bin Laden) went rogue. So what? It always happens with mercenaries: consider Carthage (and what happened to Carthage when its mercenaries rebelled during the Second Punic War). Consider the European Middle Ages, when rogues mercenaries constituted entire armies. (Moreover, the GIA inflicted damage to Algeria and France, which is always a good thing for part of the mentality of the US Deep State inherited from Roosevelt!)

US support for Islamism has consequences. Just to consider the case of Algeria, the so-called war of independence killed a million, and the second war, in the 1990s, against the GIA (Groupe Islamist Arme’) killed 200,000. The GIA guys trained in Afghanistan. The Franco-Algerian civil war was the long born fruit of Roosevelt’s hatred for the French empire. Roosevelt wished to replace it by the US empire; and overall make the European influence world into a US dependency (FDR was very explicit on this to his baffled aides, who did not get the plutocratic picture; differently from FDR, who was a top plutocrat, from a dynasty of plutocrats)

We have to face what we want to change. Here is an interview of the US insurgent president, two weeks in his presidency:

O’Reilly (FOX News): Do you respect Putin?

President Trump: I do respect him but —

O’Reilly: Do you? Why?

Trump: Well, I respect a lot of people but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get along with him. He’s a leader of his country. I say it’s better to get along with Russia than not. And if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS, which is a major fight, and Islamic terrorism all over the world — that’s a good thing. Will I get along with him? I have no idea.

O’Reilly: But he’s a killer though. Putin’s a killer.

Trump: There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent. You think our country’s so innocent?

O’Reilly: I don’t know of any government leaders that are killers.

Trump: Well — take a look at what we’ve done too. We made a lot of mistakes. I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.

O’Reilly: But mistakes are different than —

Trump: A lot of mistakes, but a lot of people were killed. A lot of killers around, believe me.

***

What you can’t face, you can’t change. Trump is facing US governmental criminality.

This is an important step. Forward. Progress.

What you can’t face, you can’t change.

Pseudo-leftists on plutocratic payroll, reaching new heights of dishonesty, already construed the preceding as Trump’s support for Putin! How unreal can one get?

Real leftists can only approve president Trump’s admission about the culpability of the US. Above I explained how Carter engineered the war in Afghanistan (not just for hegemony, but also as a continuation of the Pakistan policy of the US, itself meant to handicap India). In many essays, I have exposed the abysmal machinations of the US Deep State, ever since June 1914. Those machinations helped make the US (white) population the richest in the world. To function properly, they had to kill millions of people, as James Baldwin also said.

Actually, the number of people killed was rather in the dozens of millions; see the wealth of details I rolled out to explain how the US plutocracy turned World War One and World War Two into cash cows… After crucially instigating them, just so.

Many cans of worms the ruling plutocracy wants the rabble never to visit: they explain too much, otherwise mysterious and crazy, history. Trump’s revisiting of history, from a more realistic angle, is something plutocracy, cannot live with. Literally. For realists who want progress out of today’s morass, it’s the exact opposite.

So, indeed, Trump is fessing up. What is there, for true progressives, not to like?

Patrice Ayme’

Reciprocal Perversity

Reciprocal altruism is a well-known notion. What of reciprocal perversity?

Reciprocal altruism consists in a class of behaviors which are short-term adverse to an animal, yet profitable to others then, while, in the long-term, bringing a profit beyond the initial sacrifices consented.

In reciprocal altruism, overall profit blossoms. Reciprocal perversity brings the opposite effect: tit for tat escalates into Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Reciprocal perversity is of the foremost importance. Indeed, when one looks at history, one sees not just a lot of altruism, but a lot of perversity. Civilization is all about industrial strength altruism. A well-functioning civilization is an altruism machine. It can also turn into a perversity machine (think of the Ottoman empire forbidding printing).

Indeed sometimes civilization are devastated by a foreign enemy. Yet most collapse into utter destruction involve perseverance into perversity. Into self-amplifying perversity. The Maya, Moche, and to a great extent, Rome’s the Sassanids’ and the Spanish Visigoths collapses being obvious examples of inner strifes being exploited by a foreign invader (the Islamists in the last three cases).

Large scale, civilizational scale viciousness, has often been in evidence, it is the most dramatic part of history, so often renewed: the Muslim invasion (in Spain), various Mongol attacks and, lately the vicious fascist regimes in Germany, Italy or Russia. China in the Twentieth Century was no walk in the park either. In all these cases mass perversity became the dominant behavior, self-amplifying, devouring the civilization: watch the most capable Roman leaders of the Late Empire being assassinated (Stilicho, Aetius, Boetius, etc.). Consider Qur’an 4; 145:

Hypocrites Are Among Those The Qur’an Condemns To The Fire: Surah 4, An-Nisa; Ayah 145

And then, there is the abominable situation we are living through now. Of course. The planet is endowed with the most perverse leadership, or lack thereof, ever. A leadership hell-bent to turn the entire planet into Jurassic Park. Without the animals. Nor the plants. Maybe without much of the plankton. In the next few decades. All the leadership the planet had before, was provided by evolution, which is intelligent and one could even say conscious (as animals are). Yet evolution was not satanic (doing evil deliberately). Doing evil deliberately implies covering that will to hurt. Most of the present leadership of the planet has the effective will to hurt or even destroy, the biosphere as we know it. Instead of practicing reciprocal altruism, our present leaders practice selfish viciousness, to a scale never seen before, since there are men, and they ponder morality. Since there are men, and they ponder morality, has there ever been a greater sin, than the will to destroy everything?

Confronted to such a perversity unique in the history of animality, one can only wonder. Wonder not just about how perversity arises, but how to detect it in the leaders who present themselves, all over, and seduce us with mellifluous chatter.

I do believe that the Dark Side, deliberately called upon, was one of the main architect of human evolution: it helped evolution speed up to physically destroy the less clever hominids. Eating the enemy beats waiting for it to be all discouraged, and fade out on its own.

Admitting the existence of the Dark Side is a key feature of Abrahamism. The religions of Christianism, Islamism, Buddhism and Confucianism criticize fiercely a number of behaviors. However leaders, and practitioners of those moral codes are often in complete violation with them. Such is the problem of hypocrisy, at the core of the main moral systems: their main proponents, to a great extent, lived in exact opposition to what they preached (consider “Saint” Constantine’s murderous activities; Buddha, to some extent, himself detect this deviationism into hurtfulness, against himself and the like, and thereafter, moderated himself).

One of the main engines of perversity is hypocrisy. Uncontrolled perversity and hypocrisy cannot be tolerated in an army. This is why it is so severely criticized in the Qur’an, and graced with “the fire”. (The Quran gives advice on how to detect hypocrites; I will try to improve on that in a future essay, by considering what one could call “neurological volume”.)

The two candidates for the presidency of the USA are plutocrats. It is of the essence to find how likely the depictions they make of their positions are far removed from the truth (hint: more so with the tightly controlled Clinton, watch her eyes controlling what effect she makes on crowds, than with the erratic Trump, who says it, as he feels it).

More generally, one needs to assert the same degree of truthiness, or lack thereof, among leaders and makers of world public opinion (say when we are presented with ecological solutions… which are often the exact opposite of what they are claimed to be… such as when president Obama presented the methanification (“natural gas“) of the USA through fracking as a “bridge fuel”. It is actually an ecological disaster on a planetary scale).

Only when We The People realizes how much we are lied to, will things move in the right direction. Polls show that 2/3 of Americans believe the USA heads in the wrong direction. Still, there the USA heads, because the entire society is entangled with perverse lies, let alone vicious conspiracies (such as multi-billionaire, state supported, hedge funds managers paying fewer taxes than the “nurses and truckers I saw on I-80“, as Hillary Clinton herself belatedly admitted… when Bernie Sanders was breathing down her neck. She may have “forgotten” this statement, since…). 

In the last few weeks of the Nazi Reich, just putting out a white flag brought the death penalty. Average Germans had no choice, but vicious choices. If they tried to surrender the place where they lived to the advancing United Nations armies, they risked their lives and those of their loved ones. Similarly, if they helped the desperate Nazis.

When a society becomes vicious enough, most actors therein, just to survive, have to turn vicious. This is why civilizational collapse proceeds generally through previously unimaginable horrors. Not only victims can turn against each other (as victims in Nazi death chambers would), but the main perpetrators have interest to live no one alive behind, so that vengeance would be impossible. Consider the so-called “Augustus” killing his young relative Caesarion (son of Cleopatra and Augustus great Uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar). Consider the utter destruction of Baghdad by the Mongol, Armenian, Frankish, Georgian and Chinese army in 1258 CE (total eradication of the Muslim population, end of Islam with brains, and its “House of Wisdom”). The perpetrators wanted no avenger looming in the future. Committing perverse acts leads to further, greater perversity: such was the main moral trajectory of the Nazis.

Just as the greenhouse effect launched by man feeds on itself, so does perversity always. This is why democracies have to strike their own perpetrators hard. From time to time. The French Republic did well to condemn to death the famous Marshalls (Petain), hero of Verdun, and condemn and execute many others, including ex-Prime Minister (Laval), World War One heroes, and a celebrated writer (Brasillach), for fascism, racism and treason, in 1944-46.

Next time France gets invaded, collaborators may evoke the precedent (of up to 50,000 executions which happened for betrayal of the Republic and, or human rights; the official number, found in De Gaulle’s memoirs, volume 3, is 11,000) to justify greater moderation in their action.

None of this is pie in the sky, something which happened in the past and will never happen again. Quite the exact opposite. The threat form perversity unchained has never been greater. (A small living example is the blossoming, worldwide, of the financial plutocracy engineered by the Clintons, and ever since pushed further by ulterior agents.)

The present technologies we have are completely unsustainable (just contemplate phosphates destroying the seas, insecticides destroying the pollinators, drinkable water running out, greenhouse gases building up, acidic seas, etc.). Sustainably, and limited to the present technologies, the human population would have to be strictly less than one billion. The transition from more than eight billions to less than one, will be rather perverse. The nice solution is to develop more advanced technologies (and, foremost, advanced robotics, which could help considerably with making agriculture more sustainable, say by destroying noxious insects one by one; or thermonuclear fusion, which would allow to conquer the solar system, terminate fossil fuels, and make obnoxious stuff off-Earth).

The perverse solution, the one chosen today, is to let perversity run its course, by electing ever more perverse leadership by perverse individuals, or perverse systems of thought (“Austerity”, Globalization of Plutocracy, Salafism, various hyper-nationalisms). And this is exactly why the two main candidates to the job of president of the USA are so perverse. It is a case of evolutionary adaptation to an increasingly perverse environment.

How could Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD have evolved, biologically? Well, the devil is in the little details that, ultimately, one species, or tribe, or race, gets completely eradicated, and the other, not quite so much. Often this results in opening vast ecological niches to survivors, favoring their descendents, and even further speciation out of their descendancy. Watch nasty little mammals eating morbidly cold dinosaurs’ progeny (not proven, but likely).

Thus MAD is one of the main engines of evolution.

Patrice Ayme’

Charlie Manson & The Qur’an

Madness, A Mood, Can Be Contagious:

Madness is not just a disease, but also controlled, and impelled, to some extent, as a mood. Moreover, tolerance to madness is itself a contagious disease.

One modern proof? Some forms of madness in individuals can be mitigated by drugs. However, the patients’ state is improved if they undergo “Cognitive (Behavioral or not) Therapy”. They can learn that they are subject to madness (and when it’s coming), and learn to mitigate their crises..

Madness in individuals is not viewed as madness, in a mad society. Believing that the “Free Market” was a civilization, belongs to the same general tolerance to madness as the Qur’an is a civilization. A youngish French pundit (totally white and not at all Muslim, but a vague leftist) just boldly asserted on ONPC, one of the most popular show in France, that the Islamist State had nothing to do with the Qur’an. Clearly, he never read the Qur’an. I propose that he goes to Raqqa and teach the Qur’an to the Islamist State, this way, the world will be safer: what is more dangerous that unfathomable stupidity?

Smiling Manson: Thought Criminal Convicted To Nine Life Terms For Thought Crime Inducing Lethal Inclinations

[The BBC published this photo, after erasing the Swastika, weirdly enough. That shows a drastic lack of culture on its part: just as Hitler found his “Fuererprinzip” in the Qur’an (see below), he found the Swastika in Indian religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism(s). Hitler was apparently better read than (some at) the BBC.]

One ancient proof that madness arise from culture-wide moods?

Watch the Romans dissecting chickens before a potential battle, to see if it should be engaged. That was obviously idiotic. One of the first Roman admirals was told by the local Imam (‘augure”) that the sacred chickens would not drink, a bad omen, and thus that battle should not be engaged, according to the respected Roman state religion. Irritated, the admiral grabbed the chickens, and threw them in the sea:’Now they will drink!’ (He lost the battle.)

Ultimately, the superstitious Roman religion was put in doubt by the tolerance extended to all the non-human sacrificial religions: the Roman saw that religions could be anything. However emperors could also see that Monotheism, started by an Egyptian Pharaoh, then amplified by the Jews, would be most useful to their rule.

Monotheism extends the Fascist Principle to the universe: everybody has a chief, everybody obeys that chief absolutely. Adolf Hitler may well as found in the Qur’an (as Sura IV, Verse 59).

“O Ye Who Believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.”

Charlie Manson was a Californian sect leader who was accused to have indoctrinated followers in such a way that they engaged in several deadly attacks (the eighth month pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, the actress Sharon tate, was butchered alive in one of these). Manson was condemned to death (commuted later to life).

The prosecution argued the triggering of “Helter Skelter” was Manson’s main motive. Manson had been impressed by a song in the Beatles’ White Album. References to that song were left (pig, rise, helter skelter). Manson predicted that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of “pigs” on walls in victims’ blood. Manson was viewed as responsible, although he was not at the crime scene, nor gave direct orders.

It was all completely insane. But human minds are fragile. As long as criminally insane discourses are held in books claiming to be orders from god, one should not be surprised that the unsatisfied and frustrated will find all the excuses they need there to get on a rampage.

This has now happened several times in the USA. The terrorism in San Bernardino, by a couple who pledged obedience to the Islamist State, is the latest example.

We are victims: everywhere an ambiance of terror is rising (schools, for example, have to prepare for the worst, a worst that was unimaginable in the 1960s: only the Nazis attacked schools). It brings up the police state.

And all this because a religion of hatred was preached. Several Imams in France and Switzerland, are, suddenly, under criminal investigation (at least three were financed by Saudi princes)… for preaching the sacred book, as it is. Why did it take so long? Because the mood was that Islamophilia was anti-racism?

What is the difference between a “sacred” book full of hatred and explicit orders to kill, with Charlie Manson’s  rambling, viciously aggressive discourses? Philosophers want to know. All right, I am unfair to Charlie Manson, who was not convicted for giving explicit orders to kill. The general mood Manson created was viewed as responsible enough, of the murders which happened.

The French president, last week, in stroke of Enlightenment, declared that the present war was not a clash of civilization:

“We are not committed to a war of civilizations, because these assassins don’t represent any civilization,” Hollande said. “We are in a war against terrorism, jihadism, which threatens the whole world.”

A religion was indeed never a civilization. At least in the West (be it only because, in the West, there were always several religions, Judaism one of them, in spite of centuries of frantic mass murdering by Christian fanatics.)

“Christian Civilization” never existed: the law used in Europe, except in the most savage parts and times, was actually ROMAN LAW (or Frankish/Salian law… which had been written by Roman lawyers, in Latin). Saint Louis wanted to kill Jews and Unbelievers (!), but he recognized that was against the law, he wrote. Roman Law itself was pretty much independent from Roman Superstition (aka Roman Religion). When Roman emperor Justinian ordered a refurbishment of Roman Law around 540 CE, he explicitly ordered to separate the religious/superstitious aspects from SECULAR LAW.

So, indeed, “We are in a war against terrorism, Jihadism, which threatens the whole world.”

Yes, and please remind me who wrote, and where is written, the theory of Jihadism? And why is that theory of Jihadism, that those who kill as ordered by Allah go directly to Paradise, still preached? You want safety? Make it unlawful. Or, more precisely, just apply existing laws against hate crimes. And then punish it so hard, that it will stop.

Patrice Ayme’

Love Without Wisdom: Ruin of Humanity.

Love without wisdom is only ruin of humanity? Lying, too, is the ruin of humanity, which is truth, if nothing else.

Lying about Islam will not seduce youth. Just the opposite.

If there is no love of wisdom, there is no wisdom in love.

Attack of the day, this time Al Qaeda on Bamako’s most prestigious hotel. Ten Muslim Fundamentalists versus 200 guests and 30 employees. What could go wrong? “God is great!” screamed the gun totting Radicals. Therein were airline crews from Air France, Turkish Airways, and many Members of Parliament from many countries, including France (of course), Senegal, Quebec, etc.

Human Spirit Is Indomitable

Well what could go wrong is that there were 40 French gendarmes from GIGN (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale) plus French and U.S. Special Forces in the immediate area. The siege got resolved very quickly with only two dozens killed.

The deepest problem we are facing is philosophical. There is the Islam we have, and then there is the Islam we wish to have. The Islam we have, is the one in the Qur’an. Nobody reads the Qur’an, everybody talks about it, as if they had. Well, nobody reads it, except for the Islamist State, and other Muslim Fundamentalists, or “Radicals”

The West says:”The Islamist State is not Islam, it’s terrorism”. The Islamist State, and other Muslim Fundamentalists reply:”Just read the Qur’an”. Young, dissatisfied people (rightly dissatisfied from austerity, discrimination, inequities, etc.) then decide to make a little experience for themselves: who is right? They read the Qur’an and discover that the Muslim Fundamentalists told the truth: the Islamist State is the Qur’an, unadultarated. As long as the leadership of the West (political and intellectual) lies in a blatant way, and is easily caught lying, it will have no credit, and will only enrage youth ever more. (Maybe that’s what they want? As war serves plutocracy well?)

Islamism Is Terrorism, Wisdom Is Love

It’s as simple as that. Don’t agree? Well read the Qur’an oh you silly ones who talk about books you never read and were mostly told lies about. Before reading comprehension, one needs reading. Right, normal people prefer reading novels than reality.

In the Qur’an it is famously said that who kills someone, kills all of humanity. Never mind that Muhammad himself killed more than 1,000, including an entire tribe of Yathrib (now Medina). Yet, the Qur’an says this. However that verse is ABROGATED by tens of later verses which order all sorts of people (remember that later verses take precedence over earlier ones):

Imams bemoan “Radicalism”. But “radical” means about roots, and in the case of Islam, it means the Qur’an. Radical is the Qur’an. The Qur’an itself is a fabrication of Uthman, not Muhammad, as Aisha pointed out. Entire pieces of it were removed (notably the famous “Satanic Verses”).

So why not rewrite the Qur’an in a new version, the “Real Message of God According to Muhammad, Which Uthman And Others Hid From You”?

That will allow to remove the verses in the Qur’an which are in conflict with civilization.

Meanwhile the comedy of stupidity unchained, keeps on unfolding. I showed an educated lady from California hyper-threatening verses from the Qur’an, which should be unlawful, just because they are hate crimes. She quietly told me: ”Oh, there is the same in the Bible.” She has been a professional woman earning her keep as an engineer for decades.

‘So the pan is hot?’ Say who pass nowadays for smart, well-balanced people. ‘No problem, the fire is hot too.” Surely, the argument that we should be happy with the Qur’an, because it is similar to the rule book of the Inquisition belongs to those who hope keenly to bring back the Inquisition.

If there is no love of wisdom, there is no wisdom in love. It’s not enough to love God. You have to check first it’s not the Devil, as the Cathars pointed out.

The Vatican had the King of Paris (also known as “France”) annihilate the Cathars, using a Bible Fundamentalist army. One million dead. And all the Cathars’ writings.

But not, as you can see, all their ideas.

Meanwhile in Algeria, the local dictator, Bouteflika, had cartoonist Tahar Djehiche imprisoned 6 months in jail for cartoons ‘insulting the president’ -https://t.co/nJ9tF5xafX”. When the mood is around that insulting the Prophet deserves death, surely insulting the president deserves 6 months. Islam is the bed of gory dictatorship.

Who is Bouteflika?  A terrorist who became a general. He is one of the original principals from the FNL, a terrorist group to whom the French dictator (the one who dictated), De Gaulle, gave power in… 1962. De Gaulle, a famous racist, thought that Bouteflika was perfect for Algeria. De Gaulle thought he could keep “Muslims” or North Africans at bay, and away, by giving them to the wolves. That mood persisted, although its racism had to morph a bit. So the children of the North Africans who fled to France, or Europe, were mistreated by austerity (no schools for you, Muslims, the Qur’an is good enough, and selling drugs, too). So here we are. (Fully describing the relationship between France and North Africa deserves 1,000 pages, I am myself a byproduct; this was just an appetizer…)

If there is no love of wisdom, there is no wisdom in love. People are born from love, and thus have a capacity, and a need to love whatever, including evil. Love is not enough. Love without wisdom is only ruin of humanity.

Patrice Ayme’

Perspective: Islamophobia Is Not Racist

Truth depends upon perspective. Yet, that does not mean there is no truth in perspectives. Global Truth? The union of true perspectives.

One perspective cannot oppose another, it complements it.

Islamophobia is just, literally speaking, the fear of Islam, an ideology. How could fear of an ideology be racist? (I am not talking about fear of people who happen to be Muslim; I have many Muslim friends! And I joke with them, instead of going below the table, trembling abjectly.)

Well fear can be racist, if fear is unjustified. Yet, with Islam, it is not.

Look at Hadith 41;685: …”Allah’s Messenger… : The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will FIGHT against the Jews and the Muslims would KILL them…”

Caliphate Salad, 9th Century. Different Before, Different After. At War, Always.

[Maybe I should have used another map; this one depicts a Carolingian empire reduced to France; In truth, with its “March States”, it covered most of Western Europe; Also “Byzantium” called itself “Roman”.]

Of course, one has to know what a Hadith is. Israeli voters apparently do, and they gave Netanyahu, 50% more seats at the Knesset. The Hadith above is part of the “constitution” of Hamas.

Identifying the color of skin to race has proven genetically erroneous (even Israel recognizes this, sort of). But we are living in intellectual times. It is about the race of thoughts.

We know, perhaps, of the order of 10,000 religions which have graced humanity. Most condoned human sacrifices. All are feared and condemned by all our contemporaries, except for a handful of these 10,000 that are practiced nowadays.

Why, if 9,979 “revelation”, “prophet” based religions have proven erroneous and condemnable, those practiced today are better?

The answer is simple: the religions still in existence today have been secularized. Christianism, to roll out example number one, as practiced today, is nothing as what its founding texts make it to be. Christianism in 2015, even by its fiercest fanatics, is closer to Secularism, also known as the Republic, than to Christianism practiced and imposed by its authorities in 400 CE (when Rome was ruled by bishops: the bishop of Milan imposed his will onto emperor Theodosius, an ex-general, a very fierce mass homicidal tyrant who mad a war to philosphers).

Christianism, or, as it was then known, Catholicism, was secularized after the Franks took ever greater power between 450 CE (Attila’s invasion) and 507 CE (defeat of the Visigoths by Consul Clovis).

This went on until 1097 CE, when the invasion of the Orient by the Turks, recently converted to Islam, passed a tipping point.

Until then, Frankish counter-attacks had repelled Islamists from Southern France (they raided all the way to Switzerland, Northern Italy). A Frankish army had freed Rome from an Islamist army.

However, Islam, interpreted literally, as found in Qur’an and Hadith, is a perfect war religion. Making war into a religion (Jihad!) helped the Turks invade what was left of the “Pars Orientalis” of the Roman empire. A huge massacre of 10,000 Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, plus calls for help form the Eastern Roman government (Constantinople) launched the counter-attack of the Crusades.

Fascism is the mindset that optimizes war making. Whatever the good reasons to launch a massive crusade, it resulted immediately in the rise of massive Christianofascism. Jews east of the Vosges mountains were the first victims. The ultimate victim was philosophical Secularism: in the following centuries, Christian Fundamentalism killed millions (after warming up with tens of thousands of Jews killed, if not hundreds of thousands, Christian Fundamentalism killed a million Cathars; after that four centuries of mayhem between various Christian sects and with those who protested brought increasing mayhem.

So the rise of religious killing madness has been seen in Europe before. Twice.

The first rise of Christianofascism brought down the Roman government.

That is rather ironical. The imperial government had launched the Christian derangement to start with, so Rome was punished by its own fascist instrument.

The second rise of Christianofascism was a smoke screen behind which the secular power of rabid plutocracy hid itself. Roughly the same mechanism as the first time

And what of “Islam”, meanwhile?

Islam was specifically designed for war and conquest. That certainly was not exactly the full intent of Muhammad. But he is not the one who wrote down the Qur’an and the Hadith. Soon after his death, “Islam” became an astounding, giant war machine. The Qur’an was (mostly) written twenty years later (although some parts are even more recent).

As I said countless times, that led to war between (self-declared) Muslims (and so the many Caliphates above, and this is just one picture in time, Caliphate kept on coming, and going, all over the place).

In truth there was never an uncontested “Caliphate” (it means a succession).

The Caliphate is a myth:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142379/nick-danforth/the-myth-of-the-caliphate.

The preceding article focuses on the Turks, who became Muslims only 1,000 years ago, and put Islam as war religion to good use, by quickly building a giant empire that put the Romans in Constantinople on the ropes.

The Caliphate was a myth, from the start. Right away, some thought Ali should have succeeded Muhammad. But Ali became only the Fourth Caliph, in an ambiance of religious war, and his sons and his followers got massacred (as Shias remember all too well).

So “Islam” never knew peace. Neither external, nor internal. At least in the Middle Earth (of course, most Muslims are in South, and South East Asia, but that is another story).

As, in the Islamist model, according to the Guide Principle (Qur’an Sura 4, verse 59), the state is identified to one man, there were never institutions, nor continuity thereof.

Contrarily to the West: the Catholic church had continuity, and even Roman administration pretty continued under the Franks, and so did Roman secular law.

So what, looking forward?

Well, maybe one should look at France. Genetic studies show many French in the South and South-West, are (partly) of Berber, and, or, Arab descent.

Muslims were not discriminated against in Europe during the recovery of invaded territory (except, tragically in Spain around 1500 CE, at the end of the Reconquista).

So the solution is to secularize. Do to Islam what was done to Christianity. And don’t go backwards, as has happened in the USA since the 1930s.

I have said this for years. The New York Times just discovered it in “A Christian Nation? Since When?”:

“AMERICA may be a nation of believers, but when it comes to this country’s identity as a “Christian nation,” our beliefs are all over the map. 

Just a few weeks ago, Public Policy Polling reported that 57 percent of Republicans favored officially making the United States a Christian nation. But in 2007, a survey by the First Amendment Center showed that 55 percent of Americans believed it already was one. 

The confusion is understandable. For all our talk about separation of church and state, religious language has been written into our political culture in countless ways. It is inscribed in our pledge of patriotism, marked on our money, carved into the walls of our courts and our Capitol. Perhaps because it is everywhere, we assume it has been from the beginning. 

But the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.”

Then the New York Times exposes how American plutocracy found that the Christian god (the “Allah” of the Qur’an) was all the help they needed.

As the New York Times reveals to the baffled masses:

“Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity. 

The two had been described as soul mates before, but in this campaign they were wedded in pointed opposition to the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal.”

One should take this seriously. Islamophobia is a timely attitude, yet, Christianophobia has been neglected all too long.

The fight for secularization is also a fight against not just Christianization, or Islamization, but also against plutocracy itself.

One has also to remember that the very principle of plutocracy, a few having everything, especially power, is another description of fascism.

And that fascism is intimately related to war.

And that war arises from limited resources. Even in chimpanzees.

And that nothing will limit resources as much as climate change, acidity change, nitrogen change, and all other changes were are visiting on Earth. With a wild abandon, which plutocracy is no stranger to.

Recent pollen analysis in French beehives showed thirty-one (31) different insecticides. For some reason, French bee populations are collapsing except in remote islands, and non-chemically treated mountain areas. Bees are fundamental to the biosphere, since there are flowering plants, and they bear fruit. Verily, we need more than those fruits greed can bring.

Real seriousness is multidimensional, variegated, observant. And does not pose for a popularity contest.

Find, oh you wise ones, as many perspectives as possible, and the deepest ones, while not trusting blindly those popular yesterday.

Patrice Ayme’

When A Child Fights Evil Well

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2014 peace prize on Friday to Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi of India. Excellent. The teenage Pakistani known around the world for fighting sexist terror, and an Indian veteran of campaigns to save from slave labor  “tens of millions of children” were celebrated jointly.

A sober moment: only three countries or so do not recognize the right of children NOT to work (be it only so that they can concentrate on studying). The USA is one of them. One of the violators of this UN law. Obama, who can’t close Gitmo, a prison where people are held unlawfully, and force-fed as if they were geese, did not even have the force to evoke that gross violation, in the six years he spent being honored as a great leader.

Hey, otherwise the agriculture of the USA would not be as profitable!

Have You As Much Courage? As Much Brains? That’s What The World Needs.

This 2014 Peace Nobel is obviously a good award. Not a half silly one as the BLUE LED award in physics (why did the inventor(s) of the green LED not get the Nobel, and even earlier, those who invented the RED LED? Oh, because the Nobel clowns don’t give more than three awards? Do you have any other superstitions to impose on us, Nobel guys, to educate us further in the irrational?)

Ms. Yousafzai, 17, the youngest recipient of the prize since it was created in 1901, got a bullet in the head, courtesy of the Islamist terrorist known as Taliban, for advocating secular schooling, rather the medieval superstitious stupidities they read in the Qur’an and the like.

To announce her award, she was taken out of a chemistry class, in Birmingham, where she was treated for her grave injuries and stayed, ever since. (There are probably Taliban foaming at the mouth in gleeful anticipation of pumping her with more bullets.)

The committee’s chairman said: “The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism…”

This is wishful thinking: troops from Pakistan and India exchanged artillery and machine-gun fire across their disputed Himalayan border in the last few days. The last duel killed 11 Pakistani and eight Indian villagers.

“Children must go to school and not be financially exploited,” Chair Jagland pursued. “It is a prerequisite for peaceful global development that the rights of children and young people be respected. In conflict-ridden areas in particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence from generation to generation.”

That’s the problem of the Islamists: as women are maintained in a state of oppressive violence, subjugation, stupidity, torpor, and ignorance, they bestow these qualities to their children. That’s why the Muslim empires have been down and out for at least eight centuries (occupied by Franks, Mongols, ruled by Turks, liberated by the French, British… and now invaded by the Jews, in a supreme irony, considering the anti-Jewish character of the Islamists’ most sacred texts. All of this humiliation and degeneracy submitted constantly under indigenous plutocratic overlords.)

Malala has much more intelligence and courage than the many pseudo-intellectuals in the West who have imposed the wrong mood (“Islam is peace”) by sheer greediness (Political Correctness sells!), cowardice, and blatant ignorant stupidity. Some variants of Islam are peace (say West African Islam, circa 1950). But the Qur’an is not. Consider the (extreme, astounding) Violence In Holy Qur’an.

Patrice Ayme’

Obama Right On Syria

Might does not make right, but right needs might.

My frienemies at the New York Times thought smart to pose as superior moral characters with two front pages editorials today on Syria, both entitled “Wrong On Syria”. They lambasted president Obama for doing what I told him to do (at last someone who listens to me!). What did I tell him to do? Bomb (the bad guys in) Syria. First I wanted to do in Assad the Plutocrat, but I admit that the Caliphate is an even juicier objective.

Once upon a time a Frankish-Mongol army entered Damascus (that was not long after the same characters, with Armenian and Georgian help, had destroyed the Caliphate in Baghdad). History does not just repeat itself, its very rich.

Civilization has to be defended. Obama has understood this. Annual spending, in constant dollars, by the Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear weapons research, development, testing and production:

Morality & Justice Without Force Are Not To Be

[It’s all right that you be wrong, as long as I can flatten you.]

One does not want to make the Roman mistake of edifying what came to known as the “Limes”… The limit of the empire, a succession of walls, forts, garrisons, and legions, all around the Empire. Thus, when the bad guys broke through the limes, there was nothing to stop them: the interior of the Empire was essentially defenseless. Very rich, and very defenseless. When the Goths rampaged through Roman Asia, the Balkans, and Greece, in the middle of the Third Century, it took years to send a Roman army after them (they immediately fled).

On December 31, 406 CE, the Rhine froze so thoroughly and suddenly, that entire German nations galloped across. Among them, the Vandals. By then, thanks to an austerity program, the Roman army was actually the Frankish army. The Franks, who had beaten the Germans several times in years prior, in Bavaria, were taken by complete surprise, thanks to this freak weather event. After a torrent of German nations (reminiscent of the “torrent of German tanks” of May 1940) pierced through the Alsatian plain, there was nothing to stop them. The Vandals charged through Gaul, and then Spain. They soon invaded rich and completely defenseless Africa, which had known peace, the famed Pax Romana, for 5 centuries.

Italy, and Rome, never recovered from this.

History exists, to inform us. Syria and Mesopotamia used to be part of the Roman empire, so Obama can argue we are back home.

Even earlier in history, recent, 2014 genetic studies show that Mesopotamian, Fertile Crescent farming came to Europe under the form of the farmers who knew how to do it. This result was obtained by genetic analysis of Greeks… who are therefore, at least, partly, Iraqis.

So the West ought to relax: the Middle Earth is where it’s coming from. Russia is eleven time zones across, but Mesopotamia is just a time zone away from Paris and London. It’s the suburbs. Time to take care of them, by subjugating the awful systems of ideas that festered there (without naming it, of course, some of the critique of Obama at the UN could be viewed as pointed straight towards the Qur’an, which contains therein an evil system of thought, in no way less Satanic than the one in the Bible, as the Cathars no doubt noticed).

The New York Times editorials stupidly argued that Obama and Hollande had no right to bomb Iraq, and needed a UN Security Council authorization. That’s doubly dumb: first, common sense, human rights, the teaching of history, can override the UNSC. Although India just successfully sent a probe to Mars, the UN, and is predecessor, the SDN, were fundamentally French ideas which were finally implemented by the USA in 1944 (San Francisco, Bretton Woods).

Secondly, of course, Iraq is a sovereign nation. So if the legitimate government of Iraq wants France and the USA to bomb the bad guys on its territory, that is its sovereign prerogative. And that’s exactly what happened.

OK, the situation is extremely messy: there are bad guys all over. But that does not mean goodness ought to sit on its hands. That was the mistake made in 1936, when the rogue African army of general Franco attacked the Spanish Republic. France announced loudly she would intervene, and then backed-off, while the Nazis and Italian fascists got emboldened. In the end, Franco and his professional killers assassinated millions of Spaniards, and the Nazis and fascists got trained in all sorts of ways. Meanwhile, the Western democracies got used to the idea that it was better to do nothing.

This time, the show of force is a lesson to the world. Obama said at the UN that force was the only language the killers understood. Yes, right. And one of these killers is Putin. The Kremlin dictator stands warned: if he wants war too much, he will get it.

Using extreme violence is not the best outcome for superior morality, but it is sometimes the one and only optimal outcome, as far as civilization is concerned. This is such a case. The New York Times can pose all it wants, it’s as wrong as it was in 2003, justifying the invasion of Iraq.

Patrice Ayme’

Demonic Empire & Bliss

Traditionally, there are those who are for empire, and those who are against it. Also there are those who distinguish good empires (the Athenian empire, the French “mission civilisatrice”; English Commonwealth) from the disgusting ones (say UK’s anti-Boer South Africa), to the very bad ones (plutocrat Leopold II’s Heart of Darkness Congo), or the outright demonic ones (the Kaiser’s holocaustic Namibia).

However, Manicheism goes only that far. I am going to suggest a completely different form of analysis, and approach, to the concept of empire.

An empire has subjects, just as a predator has preys. This is the conventional view. And, yet, it contains its own overcoming. Indeed, just as there is a mathematical entanglement between predator and prey, there is a philosophical entanglement between an empire and its subjects.

Good Empires Rest On Holy Wisdom; Ἁγία Σοφία, Constantinopolis

“Imperium” depicted initially the absolute, life-and-death ordering capability from top Roman generals. (Roman “emperors” inherited that capability, as they were always the commanders in chief, at least on paper.)

To this day, an empire is supposed to be all about a few ordering the many (thus, intrinsically “fascist”). Yet, even this Roman military root is endowed with subtlety: imperium does not reduce to fascism.

Why? The semiotics of fascism is, fundamentally, not just about the many being strong by tying up together. It’s about the law, and the law is absolute: Dura Lex, Sed Lex (Law Hard, But Law).  So the many are tied by an absolute.

Roman generals were obeyed absolutely, only when they inspired an aura of absolutism, that only vertiginous respect could confer them.

A professional special force killer was sent to assassinate Marius (seven times Consul, who triumphed in Africa over Jugurtha, and Gaul, Piedmont over invading Germans). He found the elder Marius in a room. Marius, unafraid, addressed the would be-assassin with his stentorian voice: ”Soldier, are you going to kill your general?”. Trembling, excusing himself, the assassin fled, and Marius’ enemies gave up on the notion of killing their all too respected foe.

In other words, imperium worked best when the soldiers loved their generals. After all, soldiers were armed to the teeth, trained to kill, and not to fear death. Generals need to be loved, the law does not. So imperium is an intrinsically milder notion than fascism.

Thus it’s not enough to say there are good empires, and bad ones. More generally, there are good empire-subject entanglements, and bad, unjust ones. It’s not all about just about the empire, it’s also about the subjects, and it’s also about the interactions of the one, with the others. Moreover those entanglements can be asymmetric.

Let me give an example. The Roman empire was the ultimate empire. Arguably, it’s going on, stronger than ever, 27 centuries after its founding (long story). For at least a millennium, the Romans interacted with the Celts, Jews, Egyptians, Greeks and Mesopotamians.

It was the same Roman empire, however, the outcomes were very different, and drastic differences are reflected to this day: the West became Rome, and Mesopotamia is still wrecked by war without end. By far the most complex interaction was with the Celto-Germans. It was pretty much antipodal to what happened with the Jews and the Mesopotamians, and, one can even claim, with the Greeks.

In Mesopotamia, and against the Iranians, Rome and its successor regime (“Constantinople”) struggled in vain for seven centuries. Nothing came out of it, except so much morbidity that, in the end, the Arabs overwhelmed both Persia and most of Rome.

The Jews, or rather, domineering Jewish fanatics, who made no sense whatsoever, in two formidably suicidal wars, rejected Rome. The first of these killed a million Jews, much of the population of Israel, then. It started by the cold blooded killing, inside Jerusalem, of 600 legionnaires of the Roman garrison. The strategic objective was unclear, and soon at least three Jewish factions were fighting each other, to death besides engaging the Romans.

The Romans had a sense of humor, and catapulted thousands of pig heads inside Jerusalem (I presume that they let them rot carefully first). On the less amusing side, the legions devastated forests throughout the region to build gigantic works for the siege of the holy city.

Egypt did not care about Rome one way or another. That mood of pragmatic indifference was contagious: while the titanic struggle of the Judaic War unfolded, just over the horizon, the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Alexandria did not raise the smallest protest.

Greece had been severely mistreated by the plutocratic Roman Senate, by 146 CE: Corinth was destroyed as a warning that republican independence of Greek City-States will not be tolerated. That was mass terrorism, and it marked Greece for centuries to come, as intended. Greek democracy did not recover, until the EU chased out the pro-Washington dictatorship, 21 centuries later.

And then there were the Celts and the Germans.  Those were not united, they relished their complicated world. They had adopted many traits of Greek civilization, even before the Romans showed up. Their metallurgy was second to none, and a major export to Rome. Ultimately, after 16 centuries of tragi-comedy, and all sorts of happenstance, the Celto-Germans became Rome (officially, in 800 CE).

It’s actually a curious thing: after a terrible war when Caesar intervened (Caesar was accused by some in the Senate and some historians, to have caused much of the problem), nothing anti-Roman ever happened again in Gallia. Even when the so called Gallic Empire ruled, later, it was not to reject Rome, but to improve it.

Differently from what had happened in Greece, the Romans did not rule Gaul through terror (although the war with Caesar had killed and enslaved millions, it had been a very complicated, messy affair, nothing like the cold blooded holocaust at Corinth) . Far from it. Even Latin was not imposed. In the Fifth Century the bishop of Lugdunum (= Lyon) preached in Celtic. Latin replaced Celtic completely, well after the legions were gone (that happened in 400 CE, a decision of Rome, taken when, for budgetary reasons, Rome put the Franks in charge of defending the two Germania and Gallia). Phasing out the three Celtic languages happened when the Franks, who came to rule Gaul completely in the early Sixth Century, completely gave up their own Low Countries German for Latin.

The Celto-Germano-Greco-Roman civilization became a symbiosis ruled by the Franks. Why a community of minds there, and not with Israel, or Mesopotamia? It’s obviously an explanation that involves many factors. The Celto-Germans and the Greco-Romans had a very long story, with fair intellectual trade, in both directions: by the time Caesar showed up, that intense trade was at least a millennium old. The Roman army was equipped with Celtic metal works for centuries.

Celts and Romans had important principles in common, like a quasi-religious dislike for kings, and, certainly, hatred of tyranny. This dislike was so strong that Armanius (Hermann) a once-Roman officer who treacherously annihilated Roman general Varus and his three legions (plus supporting troops, and fellow travellers), was later killed by fellow rebels for behaving, it was alleged, like a king.

Yet, as Rome became a fascist dictatorship, the Germans became more sympathetic to fascism, and kingship. Clovis, elected king of the Franks, his father, Roman imperator Childeric I, and his grandfather Merovius. Thus, Western Europe (or, at least, the elements if Western Europe which came to re-establish an empire) was pretty much evolving as one mental unit.

Such bliss of a common spirituality was not shared in the Middle East. The Jewish God symbolized tyranny made divine. Persians and Mesopotamians needed to kneel abjectly to all the plutocrats they could find. Lack of water had led the civilization of the Middle East to dictatorship. The hydraulic dictatorship (Fernand Braudel) implied “Oriental Despotism” (Karl Marx).  Fascism, cruel and demented, the “Right of Sword”.

Darius, who fought from Ethiopia to Ukraine, exhibited a clear case of the “Right of the Sword”. That existing mood was embraced 11 centuries later in the Qur’an. Unbelievably, the Sword is still festering today: arguing for the Right Of The Sword, Arab plutocrats are agitating, in 2014, to have Justinian’s Cathedral, Ἁγία Σοφία, “Holy Wisdom“,now a museum, been converted again to a mosque, so that the depiction of the real world represented therein be covered up again, as reality offends Islam.

This is an example of the persistence of moods and systems of ideas. Cynics will also point out that their genesis, namely the desert, only got worse.

Well, whatever: if we understand the situation, we can probably fix it. No empire, no law. Thus it remains to make the empire good.

Today the European Empire’s 28 heads of state approved Jean-Claude Junkers as head of the European Commission (the EU’s executive branch). The European Parliament is widely expected to elect Junkers next week. The 28 elected chiefs used the occasion to sign on the Free Trade and Association Treaty with Ukraine and Moldavia. Justly unsatisfied by this slap to Putin, they also sent Vlad the Impaler, back in Moscow, an ultimatum. Yes, an ultimatum. Electing the head of the EC is a furthering of democracy in the European empire. But democracy is naught, if it can’t bite.

The 28 EU leaders demanded that separatists return border checkpoints, release hostages and start talks to implement a peace plan drawn up by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko by June 30. Failure to do so will result in “further significant restrictive measures” against Russia.

Vlad The Invader has three days to obey. It may be time for him to remember what happened when his preceding supporter of minorities through annexations, Adolf Hitler, refused to obey. Unbelievably, France persuaded Britain to declare war.

Wisdom without doom is only gloom.

Patrice Aymé