Football Teaches Russia A Lesson

Plutocrat Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev looks dejected, while the president of Croatia celebrates.

President Croatia celebrating. Medvedev, a football fan (on the lower right) is experiencing pain.

I call Medvedev a plutocrat, be it only because he has been very powerful, for all too long, doing Putin dirty business. Also it has been alleged in detail, from different sources, that he is personally wealthy. An internationally renown bat researcher claimed he had to flee Russia for stumbling on Medvedev’s properties under construction, which destroyed caves in the Sochi area. A video by anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny purports to show “the vast trove of mansions, villas and vineyards accumulated” by Medvedev. Putin ex-wife, who had no discernable income or inheritance, ever, is also a multi-millionaire, with one property alone…

Friends again, at least for the next few minutes…

Russia has long felt rejected by the West. And reciprocally, many Muscovite leaders intentionally rejected the West to such an excess that others (say Peter the Great) forcefully tried to westernize Russia (this is why Peter founded his capital on the Baltic Sea).

In a sense Muscovite Rus was always from the east, because of the considerable influence of the Mongols. Yet, the Rus leaders, who founded Kyivan Rus, which came first, were Swedes from eastern Sweden. Still the oldest human stock of Rus was, paradoxically, German. This is highly confusing, as a current of thought in Germany came to despise “Slavs”: Germans used to live in the area more recent Germans considered peopled by Slavs (slaves). Indeed, slaves comes from Medieval Latin Sclavus (circa 800 CE). Vengeful folk etymology turned that into “Slava” (Glory).

So the ancestry of Russia is a mix of Swedes, old Germans, and more recent Mongols and other Easterners (look at the Asiatic style eyelids of Lenin, Brezhnev, Putin…)

Viking colonization followed the network of mighty rivers of Russia, all the way to the Black Sea. Trade flourished, northern furs against all kinds of goodies from the south, Rome or the Muslim empires. It’s Ukraine which founded Rus, and then expanded east. Republics, such as Novgorod, appeared. Ukraine had seized Crimea from the Tartars, who, themselves had seized it from the Greco-Romans. Vladimir of Ukraine converted to Catholic Orthodoxy, eastern style.

The Russians were able to stop the eastward expansion of the Teutonic Knights. However, not the assault of the Mongols. The Mongols occupied Russia, massacring away. When the Mongols pushed further west, Western Europe united militarily, and the Mongol victories came with a heavy, unsustainable price. Then the Mongols remembered what happened to their ancestors the Huns when they invaded Gallia: they were utterly defeated, and owed their survival to the duplicity of the Roman commander Aetius (who had lived with the Huns prior). The war techniques of the Mongols were not adapted to wet,cold, forested areas. The superb bows would lose their snap, it would be impossible to move fast, etc.

The Mongols reached the Croatian coast and turned back (pretexting the election of the next Khan beckoned).

For many centuries Russia was occupied by savage invaders…

Yet the Golden Horde stayed in command of Russia, using Moscow as a tax collector. Ivan the Terrible would make Russia independent again. In the Russian psyche, a question looms: why didn’t the West call a Crusade to free Russia from the savages? First it was a problem of distance. Anne of Kiev, daughter of the Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev and Novgorod had married the king of France, Henri I in 1051 CE, and acquired a tremendous importance (she spoke 6 languages and found the French court uncouth; the king proudly signed his documents, mentioning Anne approved of them…). She had four children, including the next king Philip I of France. All subsequent French kings were her progeny. She made a scandalous second marriage (the husband, not her, was excommunicated). Anne never went back to Kiev (she was too important in France, but also it would take forever to go across Europe by land: the success of the Greco-Romans was maritime, sea transport being very fast and very cheap, relative to land transport.)

***

A refined analysis shows that the Cyrillic alphabet itself and the distanciation of Eastern Christianity from the Western one were deliberate: the Bulgarians and Constantinople wanted bad relationships with the Franks, they wanted to get, and keep them, alienated, and it worked!

Those Franks were the Eastern Franks, dominated by the Saxons whom Charlemagne had vanquished… And had become the pillars of the “Renovated Roman Empire”. In a further testimony to human frailty, after the alienation with the Franks was launched, Constantinople reached the apex of its power, around the year 1,000 CE. However, things turned quickly for the worse, and by the end of the Eleventh Century, the Franks had been called to the rescue, launching the First Crusade. Conclusion: alienation for alienation’s sake, should be avoided…

It is high time to bury the hatchet.

Football/Soccer helps, and that’s good.

Croatia beat Russia, barely, during the session of goal kicks. The Russians learned something again: that it is good never to forget: a nation of four millions can beat one of 144 millions (a lesson learned the hard way when Finland won quite a few battles against Russia in 1939-1940; then the USSR suffered five times the casualties of Finland, nearly 400,000…)

Russia found one more reason for paranoia in the 1990s: the US proposed its help, the best possible help, the one from places such as Harvard. But Harvard is, at least in the humanities, including politics and economy, is, at best, a conspiracy: it is there to make things better for the world plutocracy it partakes in. So the advice to Russia was to constitute a plutocracy founded on new stock issues. In my thought system in socioeconomy, Stalin’s rule was also a plutocracy, a plutocracy of the tyrannical type (tyran = unique): one man commanded the USSR and was the ultimate capitalist. The advice of Harvard was to constitute a diversified plutocracy (many plutocrats, not just one). Thus many Harvard professors and their ilk were able to profit (there was never a special prosecutor for that scandal).

The reaction was the ascent and popularity of Putin… And Putin military expansionism, the first such madness in Europe since Adolf Hitler’s pathetic little adventure.

The solution is diversification in very advanced technology… as China is doing. Paradoxically, China can do it better, because it’s more dictatorial… Also China believes it is high-tech for a few millennia. Putin had, long ago, proposed a strange alliance with the European Union, complete with Russian guns to protect Europe. This ignored the fact that the USA is not just a West European colony, but twice the child of France (through Great Britain, and also directly). Instead, Russia should remember it started as a European colony too. One of the reason of the spectacular ascendency of the USA has been enormous injection of financial capital, in the nineteenth century, and human capital, in the last two centuries, straight from Europe.

So Russia, should it want to develop must open to European immigration, technological, human and financial and to open to Europe in general: that could actually alleviate the migrant problem Europe is facing (a mild problem so far; but that could change).

The world cup is an open hand, and Trump, a practical man, is coming with another. Let the occasion be seized… And remember to reduce the number of nuclear warheads, this should be the top priority: an accident could happen so fast… The nuclear arsenals of Russia and the USA are oversized. The French Republic, with its 600 (300 only announced, in a slight of hands) thermonuclear “oceanic” warheads has enough to decapitate all the major powers, together. So why do the US and Russia need ten times that?

Russia can, and should make friends with the West: with 70% more land area than the next continental sized countries (Canada, USA, China), and a warming climate, there is a lot to develop… With 1.5 billion Chinese ready to help, otherwise, as Stalin suddenly noticed to his own horror, when he finally understood what Mao was up to…

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’

Free Speech Versus Islamist Fellow Travelers

Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly, was given the American PEN Freedom of Expression Courage Award. Nice and courageous for PEN to do this. During the attack against Charlie Hebdo in January, 12 victims were killed, including two practicing Muslims (one of these Muslims was the Charlie Hebdo “correcteur“, a supervisory editor; the other was a police officer who had come to the rescue).

The gunmen were killed later, but an accomplice of those two  killed (in the back) a (black) police woman, and then a number of patrons in a Jewish supermarket he held hostage (before being killed by police).

Love Stronger Than Hatred: “Cultural Arrogance of the French Nation?”

The PEN gala came two days after two Jihadist gunmen opened fire at a Texas competition to draw cartoons inspired by Islam. Hard core Islam does not tolerate drawing the creatures of Allah, be they beasts, or men. A fortiori, prophets.

Accepting the award, Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard said that the magazine’s shocking and sometimes (gently) offensive content helped combat extremists angry against free speech. “Fear is the most powerful weapon they have,” he said. “Being here tonight we contribute to disarming them.”

Secularism was not the enemy of religion; it simply said that the state had no religion, Biard persevered. “Being shocked is part of the democratic debate. Being shot is not,” he said.

Honoring Charlie Hebdo bitterly divides the literary community of the USA: 200 members of PEN signed a letter claiming: “there is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.”

This is hogwash. Show me, literary men of little merit,  just ONE cartoon of Charlie Hebdo which is “not acceptable”. Just ONE. Or are you upset about guys kissing guys? And let’s talk about it. Insulting without explicit example to back it up, is just hate speech.

Those literary buffoons of the vicious type, also accused Charlie Hebdo of “cultural intolerance… All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation…“.

A really hilarious charge for anybody familiar with French and USA societies (the French are much more tolerant: homosexuality was legal in France, in the Sixteenth Century already, and Senegalese were French citizens, under Louis XIV; moreover, slavery became illegal in the Frankish empire, at the time when the Qur’an, which mandates slavery, was written for the first time! There was never any legal racism in France, whereas racism is still official in the USA: just look at the census bureau’s methodology! Among other “racially” aware tweaks… Some racist ways which are perfectly legal in the USA, to this day, are punishable in France with prison!)

Notice also that francophobia (obvious in their denunciation of “cultural arrogance of the French…”) is not racist, according to those fellow travelers of the most violent form of Islamism.

Satire is more than 5 centuries old in France. Satire is viewed as central to civilization. Some French regimes fell, just because of satire, even centuries ago, before the USA was constituted. Charlie Hebdo is just one of several French satirical publications. They have no equivalent in the USA, as they are too “shocking” for the USA, where the respect for authority (including tax-free superstitions) is highly ingrained.

Humor is central to intelligence formation.

To become more intelligent, we have to envision more of all the possibilities imaginable (within the boundaries set to free speech by the law). This is all what cartoons are about.

The irony is that Charlie Hebdo is fanatically anti-racist. It was made, to be fanatically anti-racist. Biard and Congolese author Alain Mabanckou told the PEN audience that Charlie Hebdo was and always had been “anti-racist”, a reply to the criticism that the magazine portrayed French racial and religious minorities in a stereotypical way. “Charlie Hebdo has fought all forms of racism since its inception,” Biard said.

Jean-Baptiste Thoret, who received the prize with his colleague Briard, told Charlie Rose that Charlie Hebdo is “absolutely not the same” as the Texas contest because the magazine does not specifically target Islam. It is true, that, over the years, Catholicism has been more of a target. Overall, Charlie Hebdo is focused on politics, not religion, so politicians are the first victims of Charlie Hebdo’s harassment.

I am personally of the opinion that the empire of Islam upon vast parts of the world, is the MAIN cause of their poverty and on-going mayhem, just as Christianism was in Europe, in the Middle-Ages. Same problem.

And it has the same solution: just as Christianism was domesticated by civilization, and this is called secularism, Islamism too, has to be domesticated.

Those who claim to refuse to understand secularism is better than Islamism are actually closet racists. What else? They want Muslims to keep on being oppressed, subjugated, victimized, mutilated, humiliated and decerebrated by the ideology of Islamism. And especially the women (whom the Qur’an views legally as a fraction of the worth of men, at best).

Salman Rushdie lived under a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for a decade for writing the supposedly blasphemous Satanic Verses. This means that Salman Rushdie, for mentioning a part of the Qur’an, was condemned to death, by Ayatollah Khomeini, who ordered all and any Muslim in good standing to go, and kill Mr. Rusdie, so that they could be rewarded by Allah.

My opinion is that this was an International Crime, as Khomeini was then the dictator, the head of state, of Iran. A warrant ought to have written for Khomeini’s arrest.

Mr. Rushdie described those who opposed the PEN’s award to Charlie Hebdo as “fellow travelers” of the Islamic extremists who murdered the Charlie Hebdo staff, and argued on Facebook: “I fear some old friendships will break on this wheel.”

Let me repeat slowly: those who claim that there is everything good to be living under an Islamist dictatorship are racist. (Living under Islam is supposed to be living under an Islamist dictatorship , according to the Qur’an itself). The Qur’an is one of the most violent books anywhere: see “Violence in the Holy Qur’an”. I don’t have anything against violence, if and only if, it is fully justified, and the only solution. But ordering to kill ill-defined “unbelievers,” as the Qur’an has it pages after pages, is not acceptable. To me. And that’s true for Catholicism, Protestantism, or Islamism.

It’s not acceptable to Islamists themselves, as it drives them lethally crazy: millions of them spend most of their time wanting to kill each other, and acting on it. That may have been OK in the Middle -Ages, but nowadays, with Weapons of Mass Destruction easy to make, this attitude is not compatible with the continuation of civilization. Thus we cannot afford indifference to it.

We are at war, whether we want it, or not. Those who do not understand this are traitors to civilization, just as those who did not understand the danger of Nazism, and that tolerating Nazism was intolerable, were traitors to civilization, in a very similar vein. And this is not just an accidental analogy: Hitler was a loud supporter of Islamism (the Nazi dictator loudly admired Islam’s violence and war-mongering, while despising the softness of Christianism).

Those who love Islamism, just as those who loved Hitlerism, are not just cowards, but ill-informed, and not very smart.

Patrice Ayme’

Of Jewish Europe & Mad Germany

Jews lived in Gaul before the invention of Christianity. So Judaism is the oldest European religion in existence. The problem of Judaism in Europe originated in the Middle East, so fleeing back there, as Netanyahu suggested, is counter-intuitive. That Jews should flee Europe would of course profit Israel. Americans tend to find everything worse in Europe than it really is. It makes them feel better. Moreover, the more intelligent immigrants to the USA, the stronger, richer the USA.

I was just telling a few truths to a site managed by Jewish Americans who installed themselves in contemporary Germany. Those truths are generally either unknown, or deliberately ignored. Revealing that, in various ways, including antiquity, Judaism is more European than Christianism itself, is sure to ruffle a few feathers! Yet, it is the truth. And it means, practically, that to be anti-Jewish is to be fundamentally anti-European. Many “European” ideas are actually Jewish, starting with, well, Christianism (mythically founded by a crucified rabbi).

So how come Nazism?

“Wir Sind Adolf.” Mass Criminality, Germany.

Long story. As long as Christianism? Even longer. The Roman imperial state had problems with the Jews from Jerusalem, not fully of its own making. Shortly after Emperor Julian started to make up, he was killed (in present day Iraq). But let’s go back to 20C Germany.

I was listening to a show on the rise of the Nazi engineered holocaust. In passing contemporary professors were claiming that Germany was the most intellectually advanced, the most literary, the most civilized nations on Earth.

Heidegger was presented as the world’s most advanced philosopher of the Twentieth Century. He is nothing of the sort. At best, Heidegger was Nietzsche’s mentally retarded parrot. (Heidegger stole a lot from Friedrich… In the rare cases he has something valuable to say.)

Heidegger was proud to have kicked out all the Jewish students and professors from the university he led (Nazis are leaders… And all too many leaders suffer from the same sort of occupational hazard…)

In the SS and the like, top German intellectuals were recruited. Heydrich was an expert violonist; his father owned a music school. Goebbels was a German PhD (something long and hard to get at the time). In literature.

And here we see the problem: intellectuality, as defined in Germany, was an erroneous notion. The attack against the Jews, under the Third Reich, was mostly an enormous mass theft organized by the state. By stealing the Jews, riches and businesses were redistributed to Nazi supporters.

Roosevelt, trying to hide that he prevented Jews to come to the USA (except celebrities) decided to organize a conference. Nobody wanted to host it.

Finally, in Évian-les-Bains,, France, 32 countries, and many organizations came to a conference to accept the “refuges” from “Central Europe (namely, the Jews expelled by the Nazis, nobody wanted to name a car a cat).

Hitler agreed. The mustachioed inferior mental, and cultural retard pontificated that: “I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships.”

Canada, the USA and the UK decided to do nothing. Some added refined cruelty: Australia declared officially that “we can’t accept Jews, because we don’t want to encourage anti-Semitism”.

Canada did better declaring: ”One Jew is too much.” (“Un. C’est trop”)

Switzerland did was tops, declaring that “no Jew was already too many Jews”.

The Confederatio Helvetica asked the German State to mark the passports of Jewish Germans with the letter “J”, for Jew; non-Jewish Germans were welcome to Switzerland, not the Jews! Although of course, their money was welcome.

In the end, nearly all countries closed their borders to the Jews. It was the time of the Great Depression, and Jews left Germany without a Mark: the Nazis took all their property, not just houses, but bank accounts. (The Nazi state allowed 60,000 Jews to migrate to Israel.)

After the Evian conference, Adolf Hitler spewed his contempt: “It was disgusting to see democracies oozing pity about the poor Jewish People, and then do nothing when it came to helping them.”

This is why Hitler could not believe it when the hereditary enemy, the French Republic, sent him an ultimatum on September 1, 1939 (Britain joined France, but Britain was not ready for a world war, having no significant army; France was, and was to take the brunt of the clash with the Nazis.)

Well France did a lot for the Jews, accepting hundreds of thousands. But France fell to the Nazi army in June 1940 (in part because Britain could not engage enough planes and tanks, in a timely manner).

If there was one cause in this whole tragedy, what is it? Intellectual self-satisfaction. Glorification of German culture then. All of this tragedy happened because Germany, then, was viewed (and still is!) as towering mental, cultural giant. In truth, it was a country so idiotic that it let itself be led by the lowest of the low.

What was glorified then was one of the worst culture, and meta-culture, ever.

Were there ever lower mental forms than the top Nazis? Well, of course, in Germany at the time, most Germans were unable to think.

Mass book burning started in May 1933. This was a demand from German students TO Goebbels (as he visited some universities). Goebbels was stunned, charmed and persuaded. Goebbels was a fanatic anti-Semite: a beautiful Jewish girl whom he had courted, had rejected him (instead he found himself married to his wife, a crazed out assassin of children).

How come Germany had got so idiotic and base? Reading Nietzsche shows that the problem had exploded sixty years earlier, under Bismarck. Nietzsche dissected the German mind, vomiting it thoroughly when he realized what he had swallowed all too long.

Nietzsche observed that the clash between Jews and Anti-Semites had become so fierce, that the only solution was to force out the Anti-Semites, so that the superior race, the Jews could grace Germany in peace. But that seemed unlikely as his own sister married the top Anti-Semite.

Nietzsche observed, again that Germans had become “Herd Animals” (“Herdentieren”)

Herdentieren, Herd Animals, are not smart. And they charge, all going one way. So the problem of Germany in the 1930s was not that it was on top, mentally and culturally, but instead was hugging the bottom, as a vast herd of stupid animals. Yes, 1930s Germany was a stupid herd.

It is high time to understand this. Be it only because the lesson is timely.

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’

Deluded Leaders: Eurogroup, Saudis, Netanyahu. Obama?

Obama is asking Muslim leaders to “do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam, that there is an inherent clash in civilizations.”

Sure, there is no clash of civilization. Civilization is one. Islam is just a religion. One of a great many. Islam itself is many variants, at war with themselves. To define a civilization from the religion(s) it harbors is not just abhorrent, it is silly.

There is no civilization but civilization, and reason is its messenger.

Verily, reason is not everything, experience is both its prophet, and its ground.

Some countries are led by savages. They can call themselves judges, kings, whatever. Savages them all. A savage judge, or a savage king, and a savage intellectual or doctor of the faith, are all, still, savages.

Can we share our small Earth with savages, in the age of nukes? Likely not a sustainable proposition.

Charlemagne Was Most Ferocious, But Magnus, Indeed

[Charles the Great, with his nephew, Roland, on the Parvis de Notre Dame.]

Saudi Arabia is owned by some of the world’s most savage Plutos. Raif Badawi was condemned to 10 years in jail, to be struck a thousand times with the whip, and a huge fine. His lawyer, for daring to defend him, got 15 years.

What is Raif’s crime? He wrote: “Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists are all equal”. Raif protested the religious authorities who wanted to condemn astronomers in general: in Islam, the Moon is not a physical body, but a signal from god (the savages got that from the Pagan religion in Mecca, before Islam; it was centered on the Moon, accompanied by 360 deities… hence the “Satanic” verses).

The Saudi authorities said that astronomers relativize everything (a charge made by the Christianofascists to burn, alive, after piercing his mouth, astronomer Giordano Bruno four centuries ago). Relativizing everything makes Sharia impossible to apply, whined the Islamofascists in Arabia..

So Raif got 50 lashes of the whip. He has only 950 lashes to go. That’s lenient, if the authorities had decided he was an apostate, he would have got death.

Is somebody in Saudi Arabia culprit of adultery? The punishment is stoning to death. Don’t fear for Jihadists: they can grab and rape whoever they want. They just call their prey a “battlefield bride”.

Hey, Muhammad, the “Messenger of dog god”, showed the way: he took many “battlefield brides”. Including the seventeen year old Safiyaah, and the twenty-year-old, Juwayriya, both Jewish girls.

Islam is not a civilization. It’s just a superstition.

So what is Obama talking about? A clash of civilization with a superstition has happened before: twice Christianity had to be crushed into submission. The first time by the Franks, over a period of four centuries, which culminated when the Pope “surprised” Carolus Magnus (Charlemagne) on Christmas 800, by crowning the imperator of the Franks, Roman Augustus (“Roman emperor”) in Rome.

(As Constantinople did not have an Augustus at the time, Charlemagne was technically single emperor of the entire Roman Empire, a feat that infuriated leaders in the Greek speaking part, the Pars Orientalis.)

Juncker, the organized criminal who heads the EC, has received the letter from the democratically elected Greek government. Juncker transferred, over the years, trillions of euros of tax evasion from We the Peoples of Europe, to plutocrats and their private jumbo jets, islands, foundations, palace, etc.

“If we break our mutual trust, we break Europe,” croaked German finance minister Schauble. He added, trying to sound perfidious: “I have compassion for the Greeks as they have an irresponsible government.” Me, I have compassion for Schauble, and want to push his wheelchair around the Grand Canyon’s rim, as I discuss the error of his ways.

Inside the Eurogroup. Varoufakis screamed to the Dutch finance minister that he was a liar. Ministers of the Eurogroup feared that the two were going to come to blows.

Is the Dutch finance minister a liar? Certainly so. The Dutch finance minister probably wants a cushy job offered by Wall Street, as all his peers and predecessors did, so he would say whatever it takes to please Goldman Sachs, a plutocratic USA government entity which got 60 billion dollars from the government of the USA in 2008 (which it later reimbursed with more money given under the table by another agency of the government).

The European leadership is crawling with High Finance employees, past and future. It should be as high a priority to put them in jail as Jihadist. Indeed, they caused the later. Hey, even president Obama said this!

Obama said that poverty alone doesn’t cause terrorism, but “resentments fester” and extremism grows when millions of people are impoverished.

“We do have to address the grievances that terrorists exploit including economic grievances,” Obama said.

And who has caused the global economic crisis? Foremost, High Finance. Fundamentally, it’s the same mood that brought us slavery, and the worst imperialisms and colonialisms, let alone holocausts.

Obama also revealed one of my favorite themes: no single religion was responsible for violence and terrorism. By this he means that, in the fullness of causality exposed, the violence of Islamism is just an amplification of the one that made the fortune of Christianism.

Obama wants to lift up the voice of tolerance in the United States and beyond, he said. Well, there is a name for that: Laicity.

***

THE ELECTED MOISE OF THE ISRAELI GHETTO?

Israel PM, Netanyahu wants all Jews to come to Israel. Apparently his model for the future of Judaism, is something in between the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz. Maybe one should present to Netanyahu another part Jew (suggested the governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank).

Netannyahu does not know history enough.

There were Jews in Gaul, three centuries before the first Christians showed up. Later, for something like seven centuries, in the empire of the Franks, and the “Renovated Roman empire” that followed it, people were free to convert from Catholicism, to Judaism. As Catholicism was rather ferocious, entire European villages converted.

Thus Judaism is more of a European religion than Christianism itself.

After the mad return of Christian fascism around 1095, with the First Crusade, which started with massacring Jews in Germanic lands, many Jews converted to Catholicism (whether voluntarily, or not). Thus many Europeans have Jewish ancestors.

To say that “the majority of Europeans were complicit in the attempted annihilation of the Jews,” as Roger Cohen did in the New York Times, is a heavy accusation. My own family saved more than 100 Jews, at enormous risk, barely escaping a hunt by the Gestapo, and I just don’t believe that, at least not in Western Europe (for complicated reasons, Eastern Europe, with the exception of Poland, was different).

Most French Jews survived: of the 75,000 Jews deported and killed in France, most were central European refugees, that the USA had refused to admit.

Now as far as the Great Leader’s ardent invitation to all Jews, the following problems arise:

1) Where to put them? In the rest of the occupied Left Bank of the Jordan river?

2) The inhabited part of Israel, so far, is very small. Half a dozen H bombs would annihilate all the population there. Thus, if the Great Leader assembles there all the World’s Jews, he potentially creates the ultimate ghetto, the ultimate extermination place for Judaism.

Supporters of Chelsea football club (7 to 8 blacks, owner, a Jew) ejected from a Paris subway carriage a French citizen, Mr. Souleymane, because he is black. They started to sing: We are racist and we like it. Other black passengers left the carriage, including a woman.

Souleymane brought a formal complaint, Scottland Yard and the French police are inquiring. Meanwhile a group of teenagers were arrested.

Meanwhile Obama said: “We have to confront the warped ideology, [the “extremists”] attempt to use Islam.” He added: “it’s not a clash of civilization. That the West is in war against Islam is an ugly lie.”

Indeed, there is no clash of civilization. Please, don’t tire me by calling the Greco-Romano-Frankish civilization “Christian”. It’s ignorance to do so. The Imperium Francorum had no state religion. Nor did the Renovated Roman Empire, starting in 800 CE (nor does the USA, by the way).

The Franks picked up what they wanted, or invented, in Christianism. Two centuries, but a universe, separate emperor Constantine, and Consul Clovis.

Christianism was never the state religion of the West. OK, not quite: the deluded plutocrat Louis XIV (War Be Upon Him! WBUH!) established a state religion in France, Crapolicism Catholicism, while destroying the country, and his name ought to be dragged in the mud, and burned through the sun of Enlightenment,  five times a day, by Western civilization patriots. (Instead of gawking around some monuments the maniac erected, with gaping mouths.)

Even Saint Louis, who ejected the Jews, had to admit he could not kill the unbelievers as he wished, because that was against the law. Even Louis XI, two centuries later, who cracked down on the heliocentric theory of Buridan (1320 CE), protected the Protestants, using his soldiers and force (yes, that was before Luther’s birth).

On day one of Islam, Muslims started to kill each other about what Islam exactly was. That’s when the divide between Shia and Sunni started.

Well, civilization has an answer: Islam can be all it can be. As long as it is compatible with civilization.

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’

Localism, Democracy, Empire: Hand In Hand

Local Minds Are Weak, and Will Be Decapitated in Solitude

France and the USA are conducting airstrikes against the terror organization Daech (= “Caliphate”, ISIS, ISIL). France had soldiers on the ground for weeks in Kurdistan, in a desperate attempt to stop Daech (it worked; superior guns helped).

Three notions, related, yet different: localism, democracy, empire. Did they reign together before? Yes, they cohabitated, for centuries, in the Roman state. They are the essence, the secret, of why Rome worked. And worked it did: most of the world GDP was Roman, for centuries. And peaked just as Augustus established his fascizing, plutocratic republic (not a coincidence).

Greek Democracies, United, Defeated Persian Plutocracy

At that time, the other great power was Carthage. Although Carthage paled relative to the 50 million (?) Persian empire. Rome was just a city-state under a constitution similar to Athens (but evolved independently).

Verily, Athenian Roman cities had a great degree of autonomy (and their status varied, depending whether they were colonies or not, for example). That sort of autonomy reappeared during the millennium of the Middle Ages.

Alex Jones: “I consider all powers should be devolved down to localities, so that even issues of tax would be decided at the local level with no structure above it such as Californian governors or the European Union voting it out. The idea of localism as I see it is that the state or nation or entities like the EU or UN would be abolished.”

Dominique Deux disagreed icily. So, as I said, did Rome.

The Persian Achaemenid empire (“Parsa”), under Darius, although fascist and plutocratic, practiced a great extent of localism: it was pretty much an union of Greece sized plutocracies (the satrapies).

The Achaemenid empire was not democratic at all: it was all about leaders of armies making deals among each other, when not killing each other. Still, it was powerful: it nearly made it all over the Mediterranean. But the Athenian phalanx charged at Marathon before the Persians could get well organized, and that was the undoing of the empire.

Democracy means the power of the We The People. We clearly don’t have it now. Of course, there are graduations. The system we have now is closer to the Achaemenid empire than to the Athenian democracy.

It can even be measured (as I have explained).

So how was Persia defeated? By creating the GU, the Greek Union. The 200 or so Greek city-states got united. The point is that, to defeat an empire led by one man, one needed a more powerful union.

Thus the EU, to confront Putin, and Xi. Xi is the absolute chief of 1.3 billion, Puttin reigns over 17 million square kilometers… And wants much more, he says.

Notice that Alex Jones does not suggest to dismantle the USA. It’s not really a choice. A proposed referendum to split California in six states of six million each did not gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. Who proposed that? A plutocrat, of course. He spent millions to buy the signatures. Now he is going to court.

Plutocrats like it small, because they are big, and the weaker We The People, the stronger the satanic impulses.

The UN, the United Nations, is the implementation of the Enlightenment, of the ultimate rights of man. Maybe “UN” ought to stand for “Ultimate Naturality”.

And what of the Greeks? After uniting against Persia, Greece dealt Persia three crushing defeats. Emperor Xerxes, son of Darius, barely escaped with his life (he was afraid his bridge above the Bosphorus was going to be cut by the Greek fleet after Salamis). Persian plutocracy then changed tactic and paid Sparta to cause trouble (offering Sparta a fleet to beat Athens with!) In the fray, Athens got nearly destroyed. Half of the Athenian population died. Sparta saved Athens at the last moment from vengeful other cities.

In the dizzy period that followed, Thebes beat Sparta. At this point, Greece ought to have got united. But it did not. The philosopher Demosthenes saw the truth. He screamed on every rooftop how dangerous the fascists in the north were, thanks to their gold mines, who made them filthy rich enough to raise a dangerous army. In vain. Small Greek city states kept refusing to unite against Philippe of Macedonia, the Putin of his times. The Xi of Greece.

Philippe then moved, Alexander annihilated Thebes. Demosthenes committed suicide at the last moment. Democracy was only brought back to Greece, 23 centuries later, thanks to the European Union. Does Alex Jones understand this? Why would one prefer NSA/CIA supported Greek colonels, worshipping at Goldman Sachs, to a European Union?

Right, the battle against Goldman Sachs is not finished: one of its partners, from Portugal, was just named at the European Commission (EC). Sadly, the battle against the fractional reserve system, the collusion between state employees and private bankers, has not even started. Why? Because people  minds which are all too local can barely see beyond their garden. Burning kittens make them vibrate, five million Africans killed for cheaper smartphones are not even on their radar. You want local, and you want local to be fair? Then you need a just empire. be it only to tell you what’s up (as Obama has been doing about the self-declared “Caliphate“)

A just empire is how democracy and localism are protected.

Patrice Ayme’

Geo-historical Civilizational Logic

Abstract: Geography can dominate history. Examples abound. Civilization cannot just clash: it has to be defended by the sword, and by ideas which are even sharper than steel. Unfortunately plutocracy hate to see force, physical and intellectual, in command of We the People. This betrayal from class interest is how top civilizations go down: when plutocracy gnaws into civilization as the gangrene it is. The death blow is then given by the savages who are sure to come circling like hyenas. The latter is a symptom of the former.

Such hyenas brought down the Roman and Chinese state. Lest we be careful now, the Union of Savages and Thugs, with big titles, like president of Syria, or Russia, or the “Caliphate”, will engulf civilization. Let’s crush them when we still can (the “Caliphate” is only 20,000 strong, so could be literally exterminated, at this point). But we will crush them better if we also extinguish our plutocratic form of government.

Not Conquering Germania Magna Was The Proximal Cause Of Rome’s Failure

THE TEUTOBURG FOREST DISASTER:

The plutocratized Roman republic (aka “Principate”) suffered a psychologically shattering defeat at the Teutoburg Forest in 12 CE (just left of the G in Germania above).

Rome, as a real republic and democracy, had suffered much worse, even terrifying, defeats. However it was then, being a direct democracy, of a much stronger, much clearer frame of mind, and it rebounded with astounding efficiency.

Instead the Teutoburg defeat marked and accelerated an irreversible decay, as the Roman polity was taken in a pincer between exterior enemies and interior plutocrats. An army led by “princes” is much less effective than an army by the people, for the people… As the conquest of Germany required.

Some will object that the Franks, who conquered Germany after 507 CE, were led by kings. Right. But those kings were elected (more or less by the people). Nobody elected Augustus. Moreover, Frankish society was submitted to the equalitarian principle: the richest Frank was often elected king, but there was, or ought to be, no “nobilitas” notion among them; that point was made to the Pope around 740 CE by the son of Charles Martel, Pepin Le Bref.

Notice that the traitor (he had been a Roman officer) Arminius and his German army chose the location and time of the battle (which lasted three days). The miserable rain hindered the usage of Roman artillery; a swamp and a rise, the Kalkreise, prevented the maneuvering of the legions.

The treachery of it all (the legions were trekking back to their winter quarters) took Varus’ army was complete surprise.

GEOGRAPHY IS HISTORY:

The steppe which goes from Manchuria to Hungary allowed the Mongols to spill at least three times, in nine centuries, all the way to Central Europe (thus, having gathered immense power, they were able to build a giant empire, all the way to India, Japan and Indonesia).

Isolation from the Afro-Eurasian hyper continent, or, should I say, cesspool, meant that the Americas were not going to win the biological war between the former and the later. And so on.

I explained that a lot of the effervescent mentality which has festered around the place presently known as France has to do with the three giant trade routes between Southern and Northern Europe. The Alps and Carpathians, mighty mountain ranges, extend to the east over a thousand miles, blocking the way. Until the crisscrossing of wide rivers in the Ukraine-Russian plains. That, also blocked civilization’s penetration until the Vikings (“Rus”) used the waterways to enable profitable trade between Scandinavia and “Rome” (meaning Constantinople).

Nowadays, we are confronted to an old fashion modern Genghis Khan, Vladimir Putin, playing fast and loose, in a calculus where human lives are nothing. Putin has said a great number of things which should be taken literally: that Kazakhstan was not a state, that the Baltic countries had been a gift to the West, that the disappearance of the “Big Country” (USSR) was the “greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century“, etc. His agenda is clearly to reconstitute the empire of the Czars at it maximal extent: he said as much, he will keep on coming for as much as he can get. This is not the “Cold War“. This is not a drill, either. This is war.

HISTORY AS A STAB IN THE BACK:

Scotland’s push towards independence from the London plutocracy is related to the struggle of Ukraine against the age old, vicious mentality in Moscow. That viciousness is how Moscow grew against, but also thanks to, the occupying Mongols (aka “Tartars”, or “Golden Horde”). Now that viciousness needs to be destroyed, as it is only compatible with a world war.

As facts of preceding centuries, even millennia, determine the flow of psycho-history, looking forward, it’s important to find out what those facts exactly were. In particular the exact history of the giant Greco-Roman republic-empire and its innovative successor, the “Imperium Francorum”-Renovated Roman Empire, is paramount.

Exactitude reveals that things could have turned completely differently, from small details: that’s known as the butterfly effect. From the flapping of a butterfly, a hurricane started (that’s probably impossible, for Quantum reasons, but let’s ignore that).

Out of the many penetrations by sharp objects which put an end to Julius Caesar’s life, only one was lethal, said his personal physician. Had Caesar survived, the history of Europe, and, probably, the world, would have been very different. Caesar had been on his way to a very ambitious military campaign which, knowing him, and his army, the best Rome ever had, may well have succeeded. The anticipated result was the extension of Rome over Persia, and all of Europe, west of the Caspian Sea.

THE MORE EXACT HISTORY, THE MORE FASCINATING:

Here is Eugen R Lowy, commenting on my site along these lines:

“The tragedy of Europe was caused by its two major rivers, the Rhine and the Danube. Since The Roman times it divided the Continent. Charlemagne was the first to unite Europe across the Rhine. Unfortunately it was not long lasting. The next one who would try to do it was Napoleon. But he was too eager to fight wars. Unfortunately at the time bungee jumping did not exist, that could potentially have pacified him.

The 20th century brought three unification experiences, the WWII of Hitler, then the Soviet- Stalin ( SS ) experiment, and the last one, the EU. Fortunately this one was the only successful one.

Let us hope that this time the [European] unification will thrive in spite of all those short sighted, petty minded but loud speakers.”

Eugen has it right, at least as far as the conclusion is concerned.

But the devil is in the details. Napoleon was tough: he charged at the head of his troops when his plan against the invading British was enacted at the siege of Toulon (1792), and was severely wounded in hand to hand combat. Later, as self proclaimed “emperor”, he took great risks, and had horses killed under him no less than 19 times.

Real history is often all too different, from what legends have it: the Romans were established across the Rhine, for centuries. As the Salian Franks were from one of the zones the Romans controlled (more or less), one could argue that they never left.

But, indeed, the (lack of) junction between Rhine and Danube was a huge military problem (especially as it extended the “Fulda Gap”: go ask Putin what it is, he knows!).

The Franks, three centuries before Charlemagne, had already united most of Franco-Germania, across the Rhine. What Charlemagne did was to mop up the last resistance in the most distant part of Germany, among the Saxons, and to push the frontier of Europe as far as (much of) the present European Union to the East. That made the European frontier short and defensible, stopping indeed Genghis Khan’s Mongols (the Central Asiatic invaders penetrated Poland, and Hungary, but collided there with united European forces, and, although they won in memorable battles, suffered unsustainable losses).

Calling WWII and Stalin “unifications” is farfetched: they were standard occupations and not the nicest. The situation with Napoleon was more complicated. Although he was a scum, he did not get the catastrophe started. Even greater scums, such as the pseudo-philosopher Burke, got the ball rolling.

WHY DID ROME NOT EXTEND MUCH INTO GERMANY?

The first Roman to cross into Germany was Caesar. He build a bridge across the Rhine, and went in to punish the Germans for having raided Gaul. He did this twice. However, the perpetrators tended to flee deep inside the immense forests.

Caesar thought about it, and rightly deduced it would never end. So he decided to catch the Germans from behind. A conspiracy of corrupt, idiotic plutocrats inside the Senate decided otherwise. 300 years later, the Goths were at the gates of Roma, the city of Rome herself (they finally conquered Roma another 160 years later).

Caesar’s grand-nephew and heir, Augustus, went back to the unimaginative method of the slow grind. The Roman penetration extended well beyond the Rhine, and even Danube. When three legions (18,000 elite legionaires, plus the supporting army) were annihilated by Arminius (“Herman”), they were going back to their winter quarters, and that trek back, along a narrow path, was in extreme Northern Germany, exactly were the hills met the immense swamp which preceded the North Sea. Over three days, in very bad weather, hindering Roman artillery, and a geography that prevented their maneuvering, the legions fought, until they met a final trap. Those survivors who had not escaped or committed suicide, were assassinated in human sacrifices.

So what happened after that?

Three things:

1) Augustus plunged into a nervous breakdown, losing his composure completely. He butted his head on the wall of the palace, begging general Varus to give him back his legions (Varus died at Teutoburg).

Against all common sense, Augustus counseled his successors to not try to control all of Germany. Yet, Germanicus (grand nephew Augustus, nephew and adoptive son Tiberius) knew better. He overruled the recommendation of Augustus to stay on the Rhine. Beyond the orders he got, he drove deep into Germany, with eight legions, and defeated Arminius for years. However, Germanicus was poisoned (by Sejanus; that was revealed only 15 years later, although widely suspected at the time, making Tiberius the object of hatred).

2) Increasing plutocracy in Rome meant ever less power for the army: that was evident by Marcus Aurelius’ reign (180 CE), when new German nations tried to break through the Danube towards Italia. Soon pieces of the army, starting with the Pretorian Guard, behaved increasingly like occupying and plundering bodies: this was the situation after the demise of the Severus dynasty (“Barrack emperors” period).

That enfeeblement, in turn, made the Germans ever bolder. By 250 CE, the Franks were raiding from ships, Viking style, throughout not just Gaul, but Spain and even North Africa, where they struck the populations by their appearance of blonde giants.

At the same time, the Goths commandeered a fleet of non-sea worthy ships, and rampaged for years all around the Euxine Sea (Black Sea), and even all the way down to Athens (which they plundered and burned).

3) Why were there so many Germans? Obviously agriculture in the North was getting more and more productive, allowing to support more and more people. At the same time, exposition to the Greco-Roman empire had partly changed, and militarized the German savages, and they yearned for civilization and the wealth of Rome. Spectacular victories over the Roman army inside the empire persuaded the Germans that the empire was richer, and weaker, than expected. The Persians deduced the same simultaneously, invading Mesopotamia and Armenia.

***

WE ARE ALL ROMANS NOW:

It’s nice to philosophize about the demise of the Greco-Roman fascist plutocracy known to itself as the republic. What is the morality of all this, looking forward? Two main things:

1) The strength of Rome was its republic, its direct democracy, before the lamentable Augustus tinkered with it to transform it in a military dictatorship. The real, original republic, was a direct democracy.

2) Vladimir Putin is much more dangerous than the Europeans realize. Not just because of himself, the quickly expanding forces at his command, and the will he has proclaimed to establish a much larger empire all over Eurasia (which he calls the “Eurasian Union”). But also because he demonstrates to the world that Europe is much richer, and much weaker, than it was thought to be. And it makes the entire world, including the Europeans, used to this idea.

Fortunately some in Europe understand this vaguely: the French sent to the Kurds very effective, easy to use armor piercing weapons, that were used very effectively by the Peshmerga. French military advisers are on the ground. The Americans, who were not exactly born yesterday, are in the lead this time (differently from the Saturday when Obama made an about face about bombing Assad, while French pilots cooked in their cockpits).

A question is what can the USA do to help rise the bellicose spirit of Europeans?

The answer is to advantage the French Republic and loudly cooperate with it, for all to see. When the Germans and other neutrals realize that France is getting rewarded because of her effective role in defending civilization, they may be keener in following suit.

There is also no way that France can play an important military role while being held back by the 3% deficit Eurozone spending rule (the USA turns around the deficit through Quantitative Easing, a stealth nationalization of much of the economy that does not augment the deficit, technically, while having the same effect, under another name, balancing the Fed’s books).

Ultimately, who decapitates whom at will, is what history is all about. Facts don’t have to be nice, they can just stand there, impervious.

It will be European Unification, under a superior philosophy, or it will be war, under superior barbarity: Putin knows this, and opted for the latter. That’s how professionally trained assassins tend to be.

One may ponder why it is that Augustus took the wrong turn. First he wanted peace and control. Second, he did not have a grand plan (as his reaction to the Teutoburg massacre showed).

Institutionally, Augustus decided little besides making Tiberius his heir (under (one of his wives) Livia’s influence). That was informal, and for many weeks which dragged by, after the Princeps’ death in 14 CE, nothing was done about the exact status of the Roman Republic: a nervous Tiberius, although the top general did not dare say he was taking command (“of the Senate”: Princeps), before he was begged to do so by an official delegation.

Some historians have suggested the obvious: the (informal) Roman Constitution was made for the City of Rome, not an empire with a fourth of humanity. The only way for the empire to go on was to militarize and dictatorize the Republic as much as necessary, as Augustus did.

That’s not true. The empire actually morphed in a galaxy of local cities and provinces which were rather free. The central Roman administration was very efficient. However, when the central state could not pay for the armies, trouble ensued (and this was true by 150 BCE). The armies did public works, not just defense. Augustus did not fix the problem of paying for a Republican army, instead he instituted a moral decaying dictatorship.

That moral decay presided the fall of Rome is not just my opinion: emperor Decius, in the Third Century held it, and asked the Senate to re-establish the office of censor: Valerian got the job (Valerian became emperor later, and made history by becoming the first and only captured Roman emperor; he was rumored to have become the stool Sasanian emperor Shapur I used to mount his horse).

FREE AS A PEACEFUL BIRD:

On the positive side, the strength of Rome was local self-determination, and the ensuing peace: before the Goths rampaged in the central empire (Illyricum, the present Balkans, and Greece), the region had known three centuries of peace.

This is why letting local nations (Scotland, Catalonia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kurdistan) being free is important: it was one of the ingredient of the Roman success. Notice also that the Franks duplicated that regionalization later. Yet, the Franks did the latter to excess: regionalization got so extreme, that it led to alienation, nationalism, and finally, war.

This is what the European construction wants to correct: a millennium, or more, of alienation. But it will not happen without weapons. Intellectual weapons, but also, against thugs such as Putin, real weapons.

Intellectual weapons are the most powerful: when Bush’s USA destroyed the Iraqi republic of Saddam Hussein, it fostered the sort of thugs that now reign there (the expression “Iraqi republic” is similar to the one, “republic”, that the Greco-Romans used to qualify the Greco-Roman state for centuries after Augustus). This was highly predictable for anyone with enough of a brain.

Republics work, but only when they can strike in their defense. Nowadays, whether know-nothing Americans, and half boiled Europeans realize it, the republic has no borders, it’s all over the planet.

It’s easy for Germany to be tired of the French deficit (4.4% predicted, whereas Germany is at 0%). Germany’s fate, and course correction, was determined by bombs, not deficit.

Work works, but, in the ultimate cases, war is irreplaceable.

Consider the invasion of China by the Mongols over 60 years. The Jin dynasty, Western Xia, the Dali Kingdom and the Southern Song (which fell in 1279 CE) worked hard, and were on the top of civilization (the Xia was the most powerful Buddhist state ever). Their successive defeats were not caused by lack of industry, but by lack of military skill caused by the asinine stupor a lazy plutocracy prefers in the People they subjugate (that observation was made by Mongol generals themselves, again and again).

That, in turn, was caused by the wrong ideas all over.

Wrong ideas are all over nowadays. Examples: the fact that children should be less educated in the West than in Shanghai; that the Qur’an is a book of peace; that international law does not apply to Moscow (or George Bush), and that’s not a civilization threatening event; that we are not at war with Putin; that there are (military) borders; that banks are not public utilities, that the fractional reserve system is not a subsidy to plutocrats; that Quantitative Easing is not communism for the wealthiest; that greed will solve everything; that Earth’s biosphere is not in the greatest crisis in 65 million years; that the parliamentary system in most of the West can be called “democracy”. And so on.

All these very erroneous ideas need to be beaten into shape.

Without getting the right axiomatic first, we won’t know where, or even why, to strike. This was the problem Rome had after Augustus. This is why most of Europe is supine, as threats add to injury. That’s why Obama admitted he had “no strategy” in Iraq and Syria.

That was, at least, honest. Let’s give him a hint: hit the enemy in Iraq and Syria, while extending peace feelers to the ex-supporters of Saddam Hussein’s regime (thus splitting the enemy). That’s the most moral thing to do.

The most moral thing to do, is always the best strategy.

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