German Aggression: Atavism Straight From Teutons?

A coalition led by Germany persists in trying to prevent Greece from having enough money to operate its economy or, even, health care. Yes, I know, there are many reasons to be teutonically furious against Jews, or Greeks. Yet, inhuman behavior is inhuman behavior. And stupid is stupid. I think it’s timely to give Germans a heads-up, about themselves, that mood they still harbors: the Greek crisis is a good occasion to reject it.

The German State did not pay either the debts it incurred in World War One, or World War Two. Germany paid only for a fraction of the damage it deliberately inflicted in World War One, and finished doing so only a few years ago. Germany did not pay any reparations for the humongous damage it caused in World War Two. Does this make Germans debt specialists?

German Aggression Is Not New: Teutons’ Attack On World, 120 BCE

In 1900 CE, Germany had the highest literacy rate in the world, ever. Still, for all to see, it was falling into barbarity, organizing the holocaust of the Natives in Namibia, under governor Goering, father of WWI’s war hero (who was condemned to hang at Nuremberg).

Thus encouraged by general tolerance, for this special mood, literate German barbarity, Germanofascism went further: a deliberate conspiracy of the top Germans for a surprise world war. A world war conceived to happen so fast, that it would enable a succession of quick victories.

France was to be crushed in weeks, by invading neutral Belgium. Before the vast Russian army could make a serious dent in Prussia. Then Russia was to be destroyed.

What was supposed to happen rather clear: Britain’s Royal Navy could not be defeated (as the Battle of Jutland would demonstrate). Moreover Britain enjoyed a huge empire, let alone a “special relationship” with giant USA. At best, it looked like indefinite war for Germany. And no victory.

Or am I overlooking something? Much of the British elite was pro-German, and pro-Kaiser Kaiser Wilhelm II, Victoria’s grandson, may have imagined that it could come to some agreement: the philosopher Bertrand Russell, heading a herd of cowards and traitors, advocated surrender to the Kaiser so stridently, he was put in jail for 18 months.

Similar insanity nowadays: crushing Greece will bring no victory. Throwing Greece out the Eurozone will make the situation, and the spending, only worse: Greece, like Britain, is in Europe, and won’t go away to Mars, or the South Pacific.

Still a few top Prussians ordered 121 million German speaking people, to war (against France, which had only 38 million citizens). Instead of rebelling against those revolting orders, the Germanoid robots goose stepped, in full order (even the SPD, the “socialist” party)…

Five weeks after the surprise, abominable, war-criminal attack on the world, and invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Prussian violence met a greater violence. A well planned French counter-attack at the Marne demolished the German dream of taking over the world by force. Quick retreats prevented annihilation of the German armies. The armies stayed entrenched for the next 4 years (when massive French artillery, French and British tanks, and the incoming Yanks, chewed up the German lines).

How did Germany get so crazy? It’s a long story, and a complicated one. Even the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Napoleon and the French Revolution played a role (and not a simple, nor the expected one!)

In the end, one has to go all the way back more than 21 centuries, when the Ambrones, Teutoni and Cimbri decided to attack.

At the last minute, with the last Roman army, brought back from Africa, Consul Marius, ably seconded by Sylla, annihilated the three northern German tribes. To this day, the memory of these formidable battles lives around Aix en Provence, in the names of a formidable mountain, and villages.

Modern Germans claim to be obsessed by order. And it is indeed because of order, also known as fascism, that they could fancy to attack and destroy the world, in 1914, or 1939. However, all what the German obsessive fascination with order as a meta-principle, no other country in the world has caused as much of a mess since 1853 (when Prussia attacked Denmark).

It’s high time to quit the habit. Not enough money fabricated by the European Central Bank, is creating misery and a mess. It may please increasingly senile old Germans that they are the only ones with money. But they will not win that war, so they better surrender now.

Give Greece the money it needs. Don’t forget “aid to Greece” was actually mostly aid to French and German banks. You can read it in IMF documents published already 3 years ago. What’s your problem? Literate, but maybe you can’t read what disturbs your New Order?

Thus, please, stop, hysterical, plutophile austerians, lying like ignorant, malevolent beasts. Think, if you can, about the little Greek children.

Patrice Ayme’  

From Ivan The Terrible To Vlad The Mad: Putting Up With Putin

A Continuity In Horror, Terror and Infamy:

Russia is by far the largest state on Earth in the expanse of land it owns… And it is weird, and why it is weird is directly related to how it became so big. This colossus spread across eleven time zones, until Putin a few years ago reduced it to nine, by putting more zones under Moscow time.

Russia is 70% larger than the other very large countries: Canada, China, and the USA. With a bit more than twice the French population, Russia controls more than 30 times the land area, with a total wealth that is not even half that of France.

Russia, as a state, is superior mostly in weapons and military power. Aside from its supergiant empire, and its oil and gas, sheer physical force, threatened or applied, is what makes Russia powerful. That, and the conquests of imperial Russia.

Saint Michael Cathedral, Kiev. It Survived the Mongols, Not Putin’s Soviet Teachers

[The cathedral was destroyed by Stalin in 1935, and rebuilt identically in the 1990s. Although against religious fanaticism, or precisely because of that, I am for the safeguard of beautiful religious buildings, and that includes a lot of magnificent mosques.]

On the face of it, one should say that Russia is a classical example of military imperial overstretch: bloated land control, vast military, little else.

On April 17, 2015, Putin just gave a public conference that lasted 4 hours. Then he talked some more informally with the press outside. He denied the obvious, that his aim was to reconstitute the Russian empire. The lying bear with his beady, untrustful eyes, denied he would ever eat again.

Old nations such as Russia have long traditions. Ukraine is more than a millennium old, and was launched as a Christian state in Crimea, by Vladimir of Kiev around 990 CE.

Ivan III, predecessor of Ivan The Terrible, the latter much admired by Putin, beat the Mongols, a bit more than 5 centuries ago, and united three states. Moscow subjugated Novgorod and Tver. This makes the Muscovite state half the age of Ukraine (although it is possible to argue Russian history descended from Alexander Nevsky, and the republic of Novgorod; Nevsky’s son founded Moscow).

Ivan III’s grandson, Ivan The Terrible, launched many of the Russian state’s worst traditions. The growth of the Muscovite state was spectacular. Many who were in the way died horribly at the hand of special secret services. Unsavory ways got enshrined as normal, or destiny (in particular torturing to death and otherwise killing individuals next of kin to the ruler). That was all more terrible, because Ivan was successful, making sure that those ways would become forever the ways of the Moscovite state. Horror, terror and autocratic madness had triumphed, creating an enormous empire, and ensuring itself as a superior moral system.

Ever since then, Russian rulers come to rule, persuaded that Ivan’s terrible ways are intrinsically Russian, intrinsically good, and on objective grounds, how to have a successful nation. Indeed, which nation is bigger? Ivan is now being rehabilitated under Putin.

Russian propagandists now say that official history about Ivan the Terrible, was only terrible “Western” propaganda against Russia.

Why such bad faith? Another Russian tradition is the West’s bad faith. The fall of Ukraine and elements of Russia, to the Mongols, in the Thirteenth Century, without any West European attempt to save it, is still resented.

According to the Mongol generals themselves, they could not beat the Franks in Western Europe, in part because of the unfavorable ecology, which did not allow the Mongols to use their bows to their best, or to maneuver around the heavily armored knights. (The Franks were on top of all things military. Once the Franks/French got their hands on gunpowder, they quickly evolved field guns… That is how the “English” were thrown back to the sea… All the more as the knights had previously surprised and annihilated the Welsh archers.)

The fact remains that the Franks were (mostly) allied to the Mongols (!) and an expedition to free Ukraine from the Mongols was not suggested.

Moreover, the conquest of Constantinople by the Franks in 1204 weakened Kievan Rus. The Mongols attacked in 1236.)

In some ways, Putin is more xenophobic than the worst leaders of the USSR.

Stalin treated Crimea very badly: he threw out most of its Natives, the Tartars, and exiled them far away. Yet, Putin dared do what even Stalin had not dared to do: invade and annex Crimea.

Putin has created trouble in many zones peripheral to his supergiant empire. Not just south of the Caucasus (where he occupies parts of Georgia, a nation much older than Russia), but all the way to the Carpathians (West of Ukraine).

The obvious reason is that Putin’s regime is unstable if not united by the fascist instinct of rising against a common enemy. So Putin’s regime is stable, if, and only if, it has enemies.

Thus, the more one tries to accommodate Putin, the more one reduces the enmity he faces, and thus the more anti-Putin one is. That therefore requires Putin to attack, threaten, and invade more, to re-establish the enmity he needs to reign.

So it has been with many tyrannical regimes in the past. However, Russia has profited from this, so far. This is why it is Earth largest empire, by far.

Just like Hitler was the more popular, the more Nazism he engaged in, because the Germans thought they did not have a choice, but to abandon themselves to hatred, expect the same with the nationalist regime in the Kremlin.

Putin said in his call-in that the USA “doesn’t need allies, they only need vassals” and that Russia would never accept that role. Too often those who mention a notion embrace it.

Well, the Republican Congress just gave full powers to is president Obama full powers to negotiate fast (“fast track”) the TPP, the Trans-Pacific-Partnership. From what I hear, that treaty, which excludes China, in its present version, would allow corporations to sue the government of the USA (something corporations cannot do now).

So who is the boss, Putin? The “USA”, or the plutocrats and their corporations? And tell me how your crony plutocracy differ from that?

Some would argue that Russia became Russia, that giant empire, well, precisely because it had all the traditions of an empire, and that means the ability to get down to the hard and dirty. American traditions say the same. This is why both Russia and the USA ended with forts in California. Since then the American power has grown, propelled by the will to empire, and helped by more democracy than in Russia.

Democracy is not a luxury. It’s a weapon. Just go ask the Spartans (the Lacedaemonians and their civilization mostly disappeared… from too much discriminating against others). Or just ask the giant, multi-ethnic plutocracy of plutocracies, Persia. At Marathon, the giant Persian army was charged by the Athenian phalanx. Athens was a direct democracy, with around a tenth of one percent of the Persian empire directly charging, the elite units of the undefeated, largest empire in the world. And Athens won. Not just that day, but that way. The way of democracy, that became the way of the world.

It would be smarter for Russia to get over its Mongol complex, and join the way that wins, instead of embracing the desperate way of losers.

Patrice Ayme’

Arm Ukraine, Disarm Bankers

Before scoffing that both subjects have nothing to do with each other, please be informed that they do. And the name is Putin. The kleptocratic regime in Moscow has been using elements of Western high finance and banks to launder the money it steals.

And not just through Cyprus’ banks. This, in turn, means that much of Western high finance is penetrated not just by Mr. Putin’s goons, but also by Putin’s spirit of ultimate greed and ever more gigantic empire, in total disregard of anything else, just to fill up empty hearts. If Putin can get away with exerting so much force, why cannot we do the same? Say the bankers. And they preen. Reciprocally, as Putin enjoys collaboration from Western plutocrats, Putin feels that plutocracy and civilization are the same.

It’s a vicious spiral of mutual encouragement.

I was astounded this week when I saw Putin declare, apparently seriously, that NATO has a “foreign legion” in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin, surrounded by enthusiastically approving and nodding generals, declared to students in St Petersburg that Ukraine had a few divisions fighting in Eastern Ukraine, but that “trying to contain Russia was against Ukraine national interest“. Then Putin added:

“In effect, it is no longer an army but a foreign legion, in this case NATO’s foreign legion, which does not of course pursue the aims of Ukraine’s national interests”.

Putin’s Volunteers Are Streaming West

The way it was said, in conjunction with Putin’s recent admission that Russian “volunteers” were fighting in Ukraine, is basically a declaration of war. On top of this, the head of the Eastern Ukraine rebels declared that he was raising a 100,000 men army. This means he expect tens of thousands of Russian troops (Putin’s “volunteers”) to cross the border.

This is not contained. Putin is billowing out of control, all by himself. One has to see what the combination of Putin’s dictatorial powers, media control, psychology and sinking economy leads to. Let me spell it out.

Once Putin has conquered Ukraine, he will push for more: he is already partly occupying Moldavia, WEST of Ukraine. Putin is also messing up with Hungary: there were street protests about this, just yesterday, in Budapest. Putin uses the fact that Hungary is extremely dependent upon Russia’s fossil fuels. Merkel, who desperately wants to avoid war with Putin, flew to Budapest in emergency, to sort the situation out.

Says the New York Times in “Putin Resumes His War”:

“American officials acknowledge that Russia has repeatedly violated an agreement, reached in Minsk in September. The agreement called for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine, the removal of foreign forces and the establishment of monitoring arrangements to ensure that the border between Ukraine and Russia would be respected.

In recent weeks, Russia has shipped a large number of heavy weapons to support the separatists’ offensive in eastern Ukraine, including T-80 and T-72 tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems, artillery and armored personnel carriers, Western officials say.

Some of the weapons are too sophisticated to be used by hastily trained separatists, a Western official said. NATO officials estimate that about 1,000 Russian military and intelligence personnel are supporting the separatist offensive while Ukrainian officials insist that the number is much higher.

Supported by the Russians, the separatists have captured the airport at Donetsk and are pressing to take Debaltseve, a town that sits aside a critical rail junction.”

An argument, a self-contradictory argument, deployed by the cowardly, is that Putin may raise the stakes, if he sees Western modern weapons coming to the help of Ukrainians. In other words, appeasers are saying: Putin is Hitler, so let’s not irritate him, let’s make friends instead. The argument is self-defeating: if Putin is Hitler, as they insinuate, why to appease him? Did we not try that before? With Hitler, of course, but also with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who launched World War One: the Americans traded with the Kaiser, for years, through the Netherlands, enabling the crazed dictator to pursue his war (and then the Netherlands got savagely attacked by the Nazis in 1940!)

(Notice that I did not mention Stalin: although Stalin was a monster, he mostly respected international agreements. It’s not Stalin’s fault that Roosevelt gave him half of Europe at Yalta. Not only did Stalin respect Ukraine’s historical borders, but the Soviet dictator gave Ukraine a seat at the UN… Although many Ukrainian had risen against him during WWII.)

I, personally, saw enough: Putin is Hitler. New and improved. A craftier version of Hitler, with nukes.

Putin was very clear that he wanted to invade Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The “New Russia” invaded by Catherine of Russia… Truly old Ukrainian territory… for a millennium.

If we let Putin invade half of Ukraine, as he wants to do right away, he would be propelled, by the logic of war, aggression and the concomitant collapsing economy, by the same exact forces which pushed Hitler to want always more, always faster.

The robbing of the Jews Hitler indulged in, was directly related to the sinking of the German economy under the weight of intense militarization. To make his followers richer, Hitler redistributed the Jews property. (“Kristallnacht, and the like, 1938.)

From total media control, Hitler saw his popularity soar. Hitler, initially a divisive figure favored by only one German voter out of three, reached 85% approval rating. Exactly like Putin now.

The worse things got, the more popular Hitler got. As the Reich was collapsing, crushed by carpet bombing, with more than ten million soldiers invading it from the west and the east, Hitler was at its most popular. (If you disagreed, some SS were ready to kill you on the spot, that helped the monster’s approval rating.)

Putin’s economy is imploding. Just as Hitler’s was.

So it is tempting for the dictator to reproduce the exact same program. After Munich, in 1938, Hitler was given the part of Czechoslovakia where he claimed Germans were living. In short order, he had occupied the whole country, and enslaved its weapon industry.

Then Spain finished falling to the fascist, and Hitler attacked Poland. At this point Britain decided to support France, and World War Two was on.

It is absolutely certain that a similar situation will develop. Putin admitted that the real problem is not that he annexed Crimea (and now wants a land bridge to it), but that “I can be in Kiev in two weeks”.

Arming Ukraine enough to enable it to resist now will break Putin’s plan, and not let him turn into the irresistible victor he would otherwise pass for.

If we lose Ukraine, we will lose peace. A new world war will start. This time, with nukes.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/survival-trumps-tolerance/

Putin is a dictator passed the tipping point into ever more violence. Should he conquer all of Ukraine (which he himself defined as “his real problem”), he would militarize Russia even more than it already is, and make the economic situation even worse. So only more aggression would then stabilize his regime.

This pattern has been seen throughout history: militarization and invasion stabilize the augmentation of dictatorship.

Thus, piece by piece, Putin is exactly following Hitler’s playbook. He is just more careful, because he knows Hitler went too fast. We have to give him an unambiguous warning that he will be stopped. The earlier, the less costly.

One of the factors encouraging Putin is that the West is poorly defended.

In particular, the USA has no appropriate air superiority fighter: from corruption, 55 billion dollars has been spent on the F35, a plane that does not work, cannot work, and, moreover, is already at least eight years late.

Austerity is not just a way to make the small suffer, but a way to insure we are defenseless.

AUSTERITY FOR THE SMALL, WEALTH FOR THE BIG:

Krugman wrote an editorial about the fact that long term worries about potential deficits in the distant future, are killing today’s economy in ”The Long-Run Cop-Out”.

On Monday, President Obama will call for a significant increase in spending, reversing the harsh cuts of the past few years. He won’t get all he’s asking for, but it’s a move in the right direction.”

Notice that Krugman is now admitting that Obama was an austerian, a Tea Partier, a whatever was not too good for the USA economy (and it’s true!)

Well austerians are also killing equality, education, and defense… While allowing crooks such as Putin to launder all the money he wants in the West (and thus capture Western media).

Private banks are money creating machines. They create money through the credit they extent, to those they like. Banks (and so-called shadow banks) caused the crash of 2008. However, the deregulation of finance that allowed them to transfer huge amount of wealth to the wealthiest, before, during, or after the crash, was not corrected.

Instead, misleading discourses were deployed to accuse other actors in the economy of this astronomically large swindle: little guys borrowed too much, they had been living too large, etc.

Thus the banking system as a machine to make the wealthiest even wealthier, was left as it was before 2008: financial derivatives monopolize even more wealth than they did before 2008. Namely 12 times world GDP.

Banks are machines to create injustice and inequality have suffered no significant disruption, and their profit margins at this point are the highest with those of Big Pharmaceuticals. The graph is in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/no-taxation-without-decision/

Banks are free to give to their friends and their class. More than ever.

The entire “austerity” drive is thus not to reduce how much money, hence power, the wealthiest possesses. It is about reducing how much money and power the non-wealthy possess. Thus “austerity” is a trick to augment the relative wealth and power of the wealthiest.

The problem, for the wealthiest and most powerful, is to disguise that true reason for austerity, which is greed. So they made up stories, and they could be anything, as long as they are misleading, to fascinate We The People with. Long term doom and gloom is best, as it looks very serious.

The more serious the economic inequality becomes, the easier it should be to make the case that inequality is the principal economic problem. However, the “austerity” drive has to be shown first to be the problem, instead of a solution.

Todays’ situation is developing increasingly parallels with the 1930s. A first crucial mistake in 1936, was not to react to fascist aggression against the democratically elected Spanish Republic. Mussolini and Hitler were left free to send their armies into Spain.

Time to not repeat history.

The democratic Ukrainian republic needs help from the fascists. Give it. And give it first efficiently, and under cover, to make it more difficult for Putin to escalate quickly. For once the CIA and its ilk could become useful. (The predecessor of the CIA, the OSS, was extremely efficient in WWII.)

Putin plays dirty, democracy cannot play clean and nice.

This is an occasion for the timorous Obama administration to show that it has some courage. It is an occasion for Obama to show he was not just into assassinating innocent civilians with drones, thus making a bad situation way worse. Can Obama stand up to the man?

Patrice Ayme

Putin’s Problem: “Kiev In Two Weeks”.

In a closed session of the EU leaders the following was revealed (and later leaked). Told by the head of the European Commission that, according to NATO and Kiev, he had thousands of combat troops in Ukraine, Putin replied: “The problem is not this, but that if I want I’ll take Kiev in two weeks.”

Putin’s problem is that nobody is stopping Putin. Putin himself says so. Somebody needs to help the man. Somebody needs to show him that civilization has taken a stance. Hitler’s leitmotiv used to be that the democracies were weak, corrupt, riddled with “plutocrats” (sic!). Putin has obviously the same opinion, and it’s a big part of the “problem“. The problem he has.

The New York Times says that Obama is hesitating about what to do In Ukraine. It’s the exact same mistake that was committed in Syria: timidity in the face of blatant evil. If a lot of vicious force had been used right at the outset against Assad, when the latter was faced with peaceful protest, the situation would not have degenerated as it did. Basically, when Assad crossed the line of eliminating civilians, on a massive scale, for his personal rule to persevere, he should have been informed that he would be eliminated, should he not get out of the way (of civilization).

(Don’t ask me, about further imaginable details, I do not run the CIA and the like. But I am sure some reasonable general(s) could have been found in the Syrian army to replace the Assad family exaggerated plutocratic dictatorship).

There is a model for all this.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936. A quartet of Spanish generals, in the name of crown and church, rebelled in Spanish Morocco, and the Canary Islands. The French government was headed by a Jew, Prime Minister Leon Blum. The French government announced loudly that it would help the Spanish Republic with weapons.

Predictably, there was a fascist outcry, from Hitler and Mussolini, joined by the USA (which had the secret agenda to do lots of business with Franco and his friends), and its British poodle.

What did the French do? They backed-off into confused timidity (arranging instead insufficient weapon procurement through obscure, deniable deals). What did the fascists do? Lying that France was doing it too, they provided massive support to the Spanish fascists. In the next three years of official war, and another four, unofficially, many millions of Spanish civilians would get massacred.

It worked, though: strong from American plutocratic support, Franco’s fascist regime survived some of his sponsors’ defeat of 1945, and the regime he established is still around, in democratized form.

Putin was encouraged by the timidity of the West in Syria. So were the Islamists. There is no contradiction: they feed off each other, just as the Nazi fascists fed off the Soviet fascists in the period 1916-1945 (although the labels changed, not so the personnel: Stalin and Lenin were launched by German fascists during World War One). It behooves Assad, Putin, and the Islamists to be allies of each other (not necessarily in plain sight): they all emanate from the same brutal fascist mentality.

When the good guys have no force for the good cause, the bad guys can promote the bad causes, and have no reason to stop.

The Islamists in Iraq post on the Internet their hatred. They boasted to be the “hell of Christians and Apostate Muslims”, namely those who are not using enough Al Furkaan, the discrimination between Salafism and bad Islam. (Notice that the USA craftily let them post the Salafist venom, all over the Internet, a necessary first step towards squashing them next. Brother Obama is getting smart. I don’t see why the summary executions cannot be freely seen on the Internet: showing Auschwitz would have stopped Auschwitz.)

Even the German Chancellor just realize that the situation in Iraq is no good, in terms that the French Prime Minister ought to have used in 1936 against Hitler.

Merkel is sending weapons to those who fight the Salafists. Good. At some point, talking is made best by sending weapons, for real, and for all to see. That’s the mistake the French government did in 1936.

If the French government had intervened directly in the Spanish Civil War, it could have soon observed that the Nazi Luftwaffe (Air Force) used superior tactics. And France would not have been surprised as she was in May 1940.

Even simpler: what was the point of the French Republic giving time for Hitler’s evil regime to grow in military strength?

Like all tyrants out of control, Putin won’t stop, because he can’t stop. He is filling up the vacuum left by the increasing destruction of the civic spirit in the West.

The latter effect is in turn caused by the increasing power of Western plutocrats throughout civilization, due, in part to a perverted and diverted banking system. Putin thinks he knows plutocrats, he knows what they want, and how to domesticate them, be they Russian, or their Western colleagues.

Meanwhile his reign is threatened by the very mode of operation which supports it: censorship, central control, corruption. That has led to an increasingly lousy economic performance, and social inequality. As all dictators in difficulty, Putin needs to make stronger the very factors that cause the difficulties he is in. (Such as the Russian mothers who asked what happened to their sons who serve(d) in Russian Airborne divisions (such as the 76th based next to Ukraine).

As all dictators in such a quandary, finding scapegoats, and directing anger and causation, towards foreign powers is the only way out Putin can see.

So Putin will not stop, anymore than Hitler could stop. Once he has made it to Kiev in two weeks, as he just boasted, to the head of the European Commission, he will keep on going, because the problem he now has with Russians, he will have even more with Ukrainians. Then he will remember that Catherine The Great‘s troops used to be 80 miles from Berlin, making Poland a land naturally in need of Russian liberation.

All this is compounded by Western Europe’s dependency on Putin’s fossil fuel energy: a lousy deal between an addict (Europe) and a perpetrator (Putin). That subjugation encourages Putin to become ever more abusive, if he does not get what he demands.

“Putin”, of course, is just a label. He is a marionette instructed at the KGB in the spirit of Ivan The Terrible, one of the fiercest autocrats of all times. Ivan himself followed the mood his ancestors had found could be the Tatars, whom they served until they were ready to stab them in the back.

Civilization needs policing; it won’t be nice, it has never been nice to defend it, when one waits too long.

Three days ago, a French building exploded because of gas, Russian gas: eight dead. (Or maybe it was Algerian gas, a detail; in any case, most of Europe lives off Putin’s gas.)

How many civilians directly killed by nuclear energy in France, ever since the French government launched a nuclear military program in January 1938? (Yes, 76 years ago, time flies!) Yes, zero.

Although U235 nuclear energy is a problem, it kills enormously less than fossil fuels. Or Putin (and yes, Hitler attacked Poland because of the oil therein.)

Since January 1938, fossil fuels have killed millions, from their fossil waste, a form of tar, in France alone (plus more than 3 million from tobacco, directly; once again, in France alone!).

However, a vast conspiracy insisted that it would be much more ecological to depend upon Putin than to build modern energy systems (including state of the art, non-militarized Thorium based energy). Now comes the bill. The bill has boots, and a problem: it cannot stop itself.

The sooner we pay it, the nicer. Just letting Putin lead the orchestra, as Hitler did until September 1, 1939, is no solution, but escalation. Read his quote above, again: the man is asking for help, he has a problem (For those who don’t know, on September First, 1939, France and Britain sent an ultimatum for Hitler to get out of Poland, Catherine The Great’s old possession… Aside from Novorossaya and Crimea.)

The French government announced finally that it will not deliver the aircraft carriers which Moscow had ordered, and already paid for. Good. But it’s high time to remember 1936, and send modern weapons to the legitimate government in Kiev. Weapons to stop Putin, that is.

Patrice Ayme’

(Note: the immediate necessity is to gain time, before the Ukrainian military can become strong from all these sophisticated NATO weapons coming their way (I hope); deploying military muscle in Iraq/Syria is timely; lest some don’t know, Assad has supported his “enemies” the Islamists, by buying them oil, among other things; Belgium has announced it may have to conduct black-outs this winter… as it’s running out of nuclear energy.)

Emotions Prime Reason II

EugenR: “ Patrice, I agree 100%, emotions are the prime reasons driving the human acts and also human history. And since human emotions are unpredictable and uncontrollable …

I do agree that human emotions have been, mostly unpredictable, to this day. However, the whole interest of studying Systems of Moods is that emotions follow systems and thus are much more predictable than has been asserted in the past.

For example, after I saw Obama associate with the miscreants from the Clinton era (Summers, Clinton plutocratic ex-chief of staff, Eskerine, or whatever his name is, etc.), hyper plutocrats (Buffet), banksters  (Dimon), and go work at an hedge fund, November 5, 2008, I had an ominous feeling.

That feeling got ever more ominous, considering particular family events that happened after that. At that point I got depressed, and was depressed for two years. Now I am grim. I will bear witness to that period, hopefully. Perhaps, like Plutarch, it’s my version of events that will enlighten the future about the present reign.

The amusing thing about Greco-Roman history is that few writings and authors were preserved. Perhaps 95% of Aristotle was lost.

Tiberius is described as a monster by the few surviving Roman authors. Yet, careful analysis of the facts reveal otherwise: although he may have done horrible things (as alleged), we have very few hard facts justifying this.

On the facts strictly, it’s hard to attribute to Tiberius a single fully unwarranted execution (although his son Drusus was poisoned by conspirators, and it took seven years for this to be revealed. Maybe, much earlier, his other very popular son Germanicus, also the topmost general, was also poisoned, by the same assassins, with a very determined agenda of self-aggrandizement).

Compare with the assassin in chief. The one who selects civilians to kill by drone, worldwide, on tiny grainy pixelated screens. Naïve, ignorant, unwise, poorly advised creature, soon to be excoriated as a debris of history (see above).

Why was Tiberius so hated by later thinkers, that they dragged everything about him in the mud, even accusing him of private torture sessions in his Capri villa?

Probably because, after Augustus died, nobody knew what the status of the state was. Tiberius was the top general and heir apparent. But heir to what? Nobody knew.

The Senate waited, Tiberius waited, Rome waited. It lasted months. At this point, Tiberius could have cleared his throat, and declared that one would try to make the Res Publica more democratic.

Instead, when finally the Senate begged him to take action, Tiberius progressively, insensibly, stepped in Augustus’ shoes. Thus definitively not solving the problem of the non-defined nature of the Roman state, and of the problem of succession of the Princeps (technically just the “first” in the Senate).

Tiberius made a stealthy coup, in ever slower motion… To avoid any adverse emotion, that could have precipitated a confrontation between him and the partisans of a return to a full and real Republic. Tiberius was a cancer of the soul, slowly smothering democracy.

Emotions everywhere.

We do not know what the future is made of. But the present tells us what the future could be made of. By deciding not to re-establish the Republic’s government, Tiberius veered to dictatorship. The first republic to be re-established would be Venice, about 750 years later, under the protection of Roman emperor Carlus Magnus (“Charlemagne”). So, yes, it could be done.

That was all the more meritorious, as Venice had a huge fleet, a low hanging fruit.

Venice was soon followed by several other republics, and countless de facto independent cities or counties, often under local democratic government (Genova, Firenze, and other Italian republics, but also Dauphine’, Escartons, Toulouse, the Swiss Cantons, etc.).

When Obama decided to kill apparent civilians by his personal fiat, and drone, all around the world, he set the conditions for the sort of future depicted in the movies “Terminator”. Hopefully, history will remember him as an incomparably worst monster than Tiberius.

Obama crossed a moral Rubicon that Tiberius was careful never to be even seen to approach.

I say: “Hopefully”, because, otherwise, the abominable state of affairs we have presently when an autocrat, Obama his name, go kill civilians around the world, and everybody respects him, will endure, and that’s the gate to the worst emotional hell.

Pontius Pilatus did not know if Jesus was innocent or not. He just allowed a judicial process to proceed. We all do know that these people in that wedding were all innocent. And we know who ordered their assassination.

Tiberius did not try to bring back the Republic, Obama does his best to lose it. This is the emotion of the thing. Comparisons are not always flattering.

***

Eugen R: the break-out of WWI. Nobody predicted it and there was no rational reason to start it.

Quite the opposite. I have described in excruciating details, that the attack of World War One had been planned officially (yet, highly secretly), from December 10, 1912. See my “Plot Against France 1912-2013”. In it you find:

Here is the report from Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller (the chief of naval operations):

“His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II said: …if we attack France, England will come to France’s aid, for England cannot tolerate a disturbance in the European balance of power. His Majesty welcomed this message as providing the desired clarification for all those who have been lulled into a false sense of security by the recently friendly English press.

His Majesty painted the following picture:

‘Austria must deal firmly with the Slavs living outside its borders (the Serbs) if it does not want to lose control over the Slavs under the Austrian monarchy. If Russia were to support the Serbs, which she is apparently already doing…war would be inevitable for us. But there is hope that Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania—and perhaps even Turkey—will take our side. …If these powers ally themselves with Austria, it will free us up to throw our full weight behind a war against France. According to His Majesty, the fleet will naturally have to prepare for war against England…’

As I explained, the German plutocracy was stuck between Russia (democratizing and modernizing fast, thanks to French help and capital), France (a democracy, republic, and world empire, whose economy was improving by leaps and bounds) and the German Socialist Party (SPD), which dominated the German Reichstag, and wanted out with the plutocracy.

In June 1, 1914, the envoy of the president of the USA, himself, Colonel House, proposed a satanic alliance…against France (!)

Thus the attack of 1914 was not irrational. The plutocrats knew it would neutralize the socialists. And it did. It worked, as anticipated. Oh, OK, it’s the American based plutocrats who mostly profited. Well, big crocs eat little crocs.

Now, a century later, the French republic, has lost her empire, but has won… Europe. Germany is a sister republic governed by the … SPD.

The attack of 1914 was perfectly rational for the monsters who ordered it, just as killing innocent civilians by robots is perfectly suitable to enact the climate of worldwide terror those who order it wants.

However, the emotions that guided those monsters were, and are, all wrong. That’s why, history did, and will, hopefully, vomit them, again and again.

Patrice Aymé

Rome Did Not Fall

Happy New Year To All Those Worthy Of My Affection And, Or, Consideration. (Such as those kind enough to comment on this site!)

The tradition of celebrating the Winter Solstice as the start of the year, complete with cut fir trees and gift giving goes all the way back to Ancient Greece, and thus, by osmosis, to Rome (Zoroastrians, thus Iranians, celebrate the New Year in Spring). The Romans were a bunch of dung plastered peasants educated by the Etruscans to the north and the Greeks of Magna Grecia to the south. In the end, Rome got “renovated” by the Franks.

The Franks Renovated The Empire, Wiping Out Other Invaders.

Early on, Roman peasants learned to learn. The first thing the Romans learned was that big time plutocrats such as Etruscan lords and Tarquinus Superbus, the last formidable king of Rome, were the ultimate enemy.

The Romans also learned that much less rich aristocrats (“the best who rule“) could be crucial to a revolutionary public-thing (res-publica). The natural conclusion was to make a “mixed” constitution, where the People would make the laws and the Senate (held by the aristocrats) would give “counsel” (“Senatus Consulte”). To avoid plutocracy, kings were strongly hated in Roman culture. Moreover, wealth was confined to the equivalent of a few millions dollars. Having more was, just, unlawful.

All this changed completely when, after the catastrophe of the Second Punic war, when much of the old ethical aristocracy was killed in combat, avaricious plutocrats broke down the anti-hyper wealth law, and took over. Under the Principate (=Early Roman empire, the weird contraption set-up by Augustus, officially a republic, but also a dictatorship), a Senator with a yearly income of only two million dollars, was viewed as poor.

In truth the Decline and Fall of Rome all started when the Gracchi tried to force the plutocrats to obey Rome’s anti-plutocracy laws from the Fabian era (around 380 BCE). Rome suffered horribly from plutocracy after more than 5,000 Gracchi and their supporters got killed. This was followed by Sulla’s dictatorship, two generations later.

The horror went on, until it turned into full degeneracy, civilization and population collapsing. Finally the Franks got control in the West, between 400 CE and 507 CE, and put an end to the collapse… Where it is more important to end it, that is, militarily. The Franks, being German, were much more equalitarian, so they stopped the plutocratic implosion of civilization.

However Frankish control was quintessentially Roman control. The Imperium Francorum was just a rebirth of the early principles of Rome. It’s not just that the Franks, or their law, spoke Latin. Or that  they were put in charge of the defense of a huge chunk of the empire in 400 CE. Quintessentially, the Franks lived like the early Romans, like farmers, albeit on a much larger area. This facilitated the anti-plutocratic spirit of the Imperium Francorum. To boost their numbers, the Franks showed even more tolerance than the Romans. By 600 CE, everybody was a Frank. A few decades later, slave trading was made unlawful.

By 800 CE, the Roman empire had officially been “renovated” (Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, and had just one emperor, from Northern Spain to Northern Germany, and Armorica to Constantinople: Carlus Magnus, Charlemagne (Constantinople was under a local regency at the time).

This is the simplest fact. Yet, for ideological reasons, it’s ignored. What are those reasons? They have to do with the exploitative spirit of the “West Country Men”. Admitting that the Franks reconstituted Republican Rome, complete with public government imbued with public service, and were astoundingly successful that way, is the exact opposite of what (Wall Street inspired) plutocrats want people to believe.

After being “renovated”, the empire fragmented. It became an empire of fragments. Yet, even in this highly fragmented state, the empire proved impossible to conquer (differently from say Ancient Rome, Oriental Rome (“Byzantium”), China, or India)… To this day.

Indeed, look for example at the Huns: they got to Orleans and Toulouse. However, in both cases, they were severely defeated for this insolence. Their descendants the Mongols got to Hungary, and even the Adriatic. However, they suffered heavy losses, and, by fear of the Franks, went no further. Tellingly, they made a long term alliance with said Franks.

By comparison, the Mongols conquered China, and established a durable dynasty, the Yuan, after toying with the idea of … eradicating China. Similarly the Manchus conquered China.

Observe the contrast between the Imperium Francorum and Late Rome: by 400 CE, the Franks were put in charge of defending the limes (= frontier) in the North West empire (Gallia, Germania Inferior, Germania Superior). However in 406 CE, a huge Germanic coalition galloped across the frozen (!) Rhine, surprising the Frankish army that had mauled them in years prior.

The consequence of that invasion was that the Western empire fell militarily, and, from there, demographically and economically (the Vandals cut off the Western Mediterranean, and Rome’s food, after conquering Africa).

The Franks though, had lost a battle, but not the war. By 507, at the battle of Vouille’, the Franks, army of Rome, destroyed the Goths, something the Romans had been unable to do for the previous 250 years. The same Goths that had humiliated conquered and devastated the city of Rome itself, 97 years earlier.

The regime that the Franks put in place reconstituted Rome fully by 800 CE (and more). By 1204, the Franks actually broke the “Oriental Roman empire”, by conquering Constantinople (that was the real fall of Constantinople: 1453 was just the final nail in the coffin).

By 1066 CE, the Franks had reconquered Britain. French (and thus, English), is little more than degenerated, simplified and Germanified Latin. The basic framework of law, in the West and at the UN, is technically Roman, but in the spirit of the Lex Salica of the Franks. So we can safely say this: the Greco-Romano-Franco-German imperium is still in power, and that power is worldwide.

What of the Hebrew god, in all this? I was reading a 2013 book by an American historian, who claimed that the Hebrews taught the West… equity, equality. Thus that clown demonstrated that some historians had paid for the grossest propaganda.

In truth, it’s the Greeks, the Romans and the Germans who came up with these concepts of equality and justice. Social policies, like welfare, were invented, and implemented, in Athens, and especially Rome.

Verily, it is rather the other way around: the Hebrew god’s monstrosity was a huge part of the Decline and Fall of Rome. Don’t look at me funny: I did not invent the idea. The Cathars (from the Greek catharos, pure: the original Puritans!), came up with the idea in the Twelfth Century (probably building up on the ideas of Abelard and his admirers and students). It was their main idea. The Cathars considered that the Hebrew god was, actually, the devil, and the Old Testament even worse than Hitler’s Mein Kampf (if you will forget the anachronism).

The Church of Jesus Christ and the latter days religious terrorists took that very badly, and killed millions of innocents to eradicate Protestantism (and Judaism too). So much for the Hebrew god.

Jesus was born sometimes in Spring, the early Christians believed. Yet, when the “Founding Fathers of the Church” a trio of fascists flourishing by 400 CE discovered that there was no way that they could eradicate the Greco-Roman Winter Solstice celebrations, they moved Jesus’ birth to the solstice. (In the same spirit, much of Christianity was just stolen from other religions). Now Christianity survives mostly in the religion of the Saracens (that Islam was a form of particularly dangerous Christian cult was the diagnostic of the Frankish intelligence in the Seventh Century, when the Franks got ready to stop the fanatical armies that had embraced that cult).

Rome never fell. Rome just metamorphosed into the most advanced form it needed to survive.

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: It is amazing how ignored the Franks are, because they are the direct junction between the Greco-Romans and us. There is no other junction. No just this, but the Franks surpassed Rome around 1,000 CE in some crucial ways (food production: heavy ploughs, better agriculture, beans, sustainable energy from wind and water mills, etc.).

The Franks (meaning free or ferocious) were actually a confederation, a sort of mini EU of the time, armed to the teeth, that appeared among Germans in a zone of heavy Roman influence. Unknown Romans(?) or other intellectuals had a heavy influence on them, as their Latin written law was much more advanced than the Roman one (more lenient). Initially they talked a sort of Old Dutch. Then switched to Latin.

The fact that the Franks are ignored by conventional historians is a testimony to their lack of scholarship, and servitude to a plutocratic agenda with a twisted mind of its own.