Was It Criminal For The USA To Attack Afghanistan In 1979? And Why Still Unexamined? Comparing With The Nazis’ War of Aggression

On July 3 1979, Democratic president Jimmy Carter gave the secret order to attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan which had been created by a coup in 1978 which put an end to the Afghan monarchy. The idea of Carter’s advisers was to create a Vietnam for the Soviets on their doorstep, and put an end to the French collaboration in exploiting the considerable mineral resources of the country. My family was a direct witness of what happened.  

The US population is completely unaware of this, and, when exposed to it, tends to accuse the teller, rather than the facts (it’s a psychoprobe experiment I made many times). In an example of mass deliberately organized mass delusion of crowds

The US administration unleashed client regimes, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani ISI (Inter Service Intelligence) and the SIA (Saudi Intelligence Agency; it’s know under several other names) were launched against Afghanistan. The latter recruited Bin Laden, and that’s actively denied by organizations such as FactCheck.Org, by quoting approvingly the perpetrators. In general, when even ex-FBI directors write memoirs with damaging information on the US Deep State, active disinformation blurs reality completely, and the public stops being interested. 

US Air Force bombs Tora Bora In Afghanistan, twenty-two years after Carter gave the order to fully attack Afghanistan. The Afghan War was an American show throughout: concept, financing, screenwriting and production.

Often the effort against Fundamental Islam seems so incompetent that cynics will believe it is deliberately so. Actually some CIA operators have basically said this, including Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer who directed the battle of Tora Bora represented above.

“I did not inform CIA headquarters that I was doing this. I did everything possible to initiate a battle without asking for their permission because I was very concerned that they wouldn’t authorize any of it… There would have been a slew of questions. I didn’t want any questions. I didn’t want to hear anything from anybody.

“And quite frankly I didn’t trust the seventh floor of the CIA to do the right thing, because they had not done the right thing for a number of years before that. And I didn’t care if I was fired or relieved either. I was just going to do it.”

the Afghan War to the Soviets: it is repeated all over in the media it owns and influences. The BBC, E-International Relations all keep the myth going.  Attributing the Afghan war to the Soviets…when it’s actually the US which started it… The Soviets were counterpunching. The Muslim adversaries can’t admit to that, they are caught in the lie, and that explains the rage of so many Muslims, including Bin Laden, who know it, but see it so efficiently denied by the world plutocratic media.  

 

In any case, the US mercenary Bin Laden, who had intervened in the Afghan war launched by Carter and pursued by Reagan, with an Arab army of 35,000, contributed to the death of millions of Afghans. How many millions? Several. The numbers are not published anymore and it’s hard to find serious evaluations with search engines… Please do not wonder why: Davos plutocracy likes to kill discreetly.

Confronted to the question Was It Criminal To Attack Afghanistan? The pre-cooked answer is to point out the fact that the Taliban refused to surrender Bin Laden and his accomplices after 9/11. That, indeed, was enough of a casus belli. Agreed. 

However, the full truth requires that for the sake of cognition and ethics, one needs to fully identify and sort out the causal webs which leads to action, and mental positioning. The Taliban… the “students” in Patchou… were themselves, the Pakistani government claims, creatures organized and financed by Saudi Arabia, which was anxious to foster Wahhabist Islam. Now, in the Twentieth Century, nothing the Saudis did was not approved if not outright instigated by Washington.   

Hence the conclusion, one way or another, is that the US Deep State was the fundamental cause of this Afghan mess. It is more than troubling that the opposition to Trump and the organizations supporting it (for example Fact.Check.Org), actively deny this.

What it means, then, is that they still approve enough of the war in Afghanistan enough to refuse to establish who, and what caused it. The war in Afghanistan was a butchery: several million people got killed. It was deliberately engineered in Washington to drag the Soviets in a war they couldn’t win. The Afghan war was a war of aggression in the name of… aggression. Meaning that the reasons for the aggression were both themselves aggression: one, against the USSR, just because they could, and the other, to foster an homicidal version of Islam trying to go back to its most obscurantist form. The interest of the latter was very simple: it would divide the world. Instead of worrying about increasing plutocracy, We The People would have to worry about homicidal fundamentalists…

It worked. And it has worked because it has not been explained to We The People. Homicidal Wahhabist Fundamentalism as a tool of plutocracy, fruit of a conspiracy? Ridiculous the pillars of the establishment will say: show me where it is written down. So we have to point out the obvious: conspiracies, con-spirare, breathing together, as in Davos, does not mean an explicit plot one writes down.

Conspiracy are precisely made to go undetected.

For example, Adolf Hitler did not leave personally one single sentence, not even one single word about the Holocaust he directed and ordered. His underlings did the same, although they had to persuade many top German officials to not get in the way of the mass murdering campaign, which contradicted the Nazis’ own laws. So they tried to do it verbally, or around magnificent tables laden with excellent victuals. The plan was that, if they won the war, the Nazis would simply never talk of the subject again, and nice Nazis would be elected president and their names would be Joachim Von Biden. 

For those who don’t get the joke, the Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, was executed at Nuremberg for “war of aggression”. Now, the Nazis had good reasons to be angry against the Versailles Treaty: it had cut Germany in two, because it returned to the legitimate Natives vast lands the Germans had conquered over various Slavs and Austrians in the preceding two centuries. 

The United States of America, though, had not been cut in two by anybody, not even the Soviets. There was no deep hatred justifying entrapping the Soviets (whereas many Germans had good reasons to hate the Poles, Czecks, French…) Nor promoting Fundamentalist Islam of the worst type should have been a priority… for a honest civilization.

Both attacking the Soviets and promoting enraged Islam were part of a calculation to create a deliberate mess, similar to the mess the US created in 1914 by (discreetly, but crucially) supporting the homicidal dementia of the Kaiser, his goons, and the cornered German plutocracy underneath… And similar to the mess the USA created by supporting the worst demons of Germany, starting in 1919, and then directly financing Hitler (something Jew-hating plutocrat Henry Ford initiated).

Truth shall make you free, and lies shall enslave you. The truth of what happened in Afghanistan, and the responsibility of the US Deep State, has been completely hidden from the US public, turning Americans into slaves of some sort. This is a truly remarkable achievement of Deep State. It indicates how firmly in command the Deep State is of American minds. As mind molding is the task of the plutocratically owned media, SYSTEMIC PLUTOCRACY can celebrate its Afghan subterfuge as a colossal achievement [1]….

The US Deep State and its greedy plutocracy attacked Afghanistan in 1979 for reasons so shallow that there is bound to be another, deeper reason. And that is one well known of the Ancient Greeks, the reason which defeated Greece, hubris. Human beings are made to live dangerously. The leaders of America, visible or not, were bored, so, full of hubris, they organized themselves a war. Beats golf, any day. They got away with it.

Patrice Ayme.

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[1] Systemic Plutocracy hides behind a slew of mostly imaginary problems, such as systemic racism, police brutality, or right wing violent fascism… I have been victim of the three of them, by the way, and I think these issues should be remedied. However, they are not as grave as systemic racism… which spawns and then promote them… as distractions. In that sense the entire Afghan war was planned as a gigantic distraction… not just a trap for the Soviets, as ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, claimed it to be…   

 

USA: Bezosed And Besotted. Bezos makes $13 Billion In ONE Day.

… And pays no tax. As with sucking Zuck, paying no tax is of the essence. This week, in one day, Jeff Bezos made 13 billion dollars. Yes, in just one day. Considering the average US family makes 60 K, in a year, that’s more than fifty million US families made that day.  Considering total US yearly income in 2018 was 17 trillion dollars, that means Bezos, in one day, made 1/1,000 of that. Too bad Obama is not president: he could give Bezos the Medal of Freedom…

Jeff Bezos is the owner of the Washington Post (“WaPo”). The WaPo is a prominent member of the anti-Trump propaganda machine. Trump is president of the USA… But not just this. Trump started a career in electoral politics by running for president. Like Kanye West, he ran against Reagan in the 1980s. At the time Trump, a major Democrat and Democratic donor ran against the Democratic mainstream, which was supporting Reagan’s reforms. Reagan was an ex-actor, ex-governor of California, whose most telling exploit had been to introduce tuition to the University of California, a public institution. Reagan embraced with enthusiasm the globalization movement, according to which US multinationals became global multinationals taxed where there was little or no tax.

White Face Extreme Multibillionaire Zuck electrically surfing in front of his Hawaiian property. Will sucking Zuck succeed to buy his own Hawaiian island, as billionaire Ellison did? Security detail is very close by on a big boat, and pro-electronic surfers are accompanying him. All these monopolist leeches are riding technology they didn’t invent, and couldn’t have invented because most of their knowledge is concentrated around greed, and how to satisfy it… Zuckerberg owns a 700-acre plot of land on the north shore of Kauai, and has apparently paid others to buy land, so that they will sell it to them…

Billionaires developed strategies to pay little or no tax. One trick used by the one who bought one of the main Hawaiian island, the boss of Oracle, is to borrow with his billions of stock as collateral: no tax on loans. The Zuck who sucks gives shares… to a tax free institution he created for himself, and which he 100% controls…. Zuck was just following the strategy of the Gates of Hell, to whom Obama, their pet president-boy, gave, supreme irony, the Medal of Freedom.

Make no mistake: I am a tech fanatic. Moreover, I am a scientist, and none of these vultures are so endowed. Their tech monopolies actually kill technological innovation and progress, because they had their pet-boy president pass a law destroying the Patent System so as to serve them. So now the real inventors can’t be rewarded anymore… and innovation is stagnating in its main engine, the USA.

The Patent Law was supposed to be changed last Fall. Fortunately for the tech monopolies, the impeachment of Trump for confronting with weapons the Russian in Ukraine (or so it looks to me) intervened just in time…

Bezos announced a ten billion dollar “charity” for climate change. As with Gates and sucking Zuck, this all means their POWER escapes taxation. In a healthy democracy, the world’s richest people wouldn’t be able to painlessly make a $10 billion donation to “initiatives” they control like the tyrants they are. Their fortunes would be mitigated by tax collectors; antitrust laws would constrain the growth of their encroaching POWER. Instead of relying on a tycoon to bankroll the national response to existential crises there would be national responses, International we the People initiatives..

Billionaires will emerge from the pandemic with a major surge in their wealth….. And not just because their overall tax burden as a percentage of their wealth plummeted by 79 percent from 1980 to 2018 (in 1980 it had already plummeted from the 93% on top margin rate, Eisenhower, a Republican who desegregated schools, introduced).

The very structure of the banking system directs money at the wealthiest… And the more wealthy, the more money. That’s how Jack Dorsey, another Trump hater, made many billions with out having his company earn any money through earnings…

If the hating of Trump triumphs in November, one can be sure that the Patent System hostile to small inventors will persist… And inequality will keep on jumping ahead [1]. It’s crucial that inventivity keeps on going up, to avoid falling in the ROMAN TRAP… That is, so much Intellectual Fascism that necessary inventions were not made.

Bezos has replied that Blue Origin, his self-financed rocket company, is his most important work. Fair enough, and he has got a point there… somewhat reminiscent to that Elon Musk has made. However, one man cannot replace millions of small inventors…

In the case of COVID, Bill Gates has unwillingly demonstrated that his Tax Free Foundation extends his power… But not our prospects. Gates may be thanked by his client Xi, but all of Gates’ power is as much that was drained away from proper foundational government programs, be it in research or cure…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] By looking at the indicators carefully, one can argue that elements of inequality, such as the employment number, went in the sense of a decrease of inequality under Trump; inequality certainly went up under Obama… Only thing that

 

 

 

 

 

Stock Market: Roller Coaster With More of A Brain Than It Looks

Robert J. Shiller, a 2013 Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at Yale University and the co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index of US house prices. He is the author of Irrational Exuberance, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (with George Akerlof), and Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.

Professor Shiller is baffled by recent stock markets antics:

NEW HAVEN – The performance of stock markets, especially in the United States, during the coronavirus pandemic seems to defy logic. With cratering demand dragging down investment and employment, what could possibly be keeping share prices afloat?

The more economic fundamentals and market outcomes diverge, the deeper the mystery becomes, until one considers possible explanations based on crowd psychology, the virality of ideas, and the dynamics of narrative epidemics. After all, stock-market movements are driven largely by investors’ assessments of other investors’ evolving reaction to the news, rather than the news itself.

That is because most people have no way to evaluate the significance of economic or scientific news. Especially when mistrust of news media is high, they tend to rely on how people they know respond to news. This process of evaluation takes time, which is why stock markets do not respond to news suddenly and completely, as conventional theory would suggest. The news starts a new trend in markets, but it is sufficiently ambiguous that most smart money has difficulty profiting from it.

 

NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 18: Traders and financial professionals work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at the closing bell, June 18, 2019 in New York City. U.S. markets surged on Tuesday after President Donald Trump announced that he plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss a trade deal at next week’s G-20 summit in Japan. Guy on the right was probably short…(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Prof Shiller:

There are three separate phases of the puzzle in the US: the 3% rise in the S&P 500 from the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, on January 30, to February 19; the 34% drop from that date until March 23; and the 42% upswing from March 23 to the present. Each of these phases reveals a puzzling association with the news, as the lagged market reaction is filtered through investor reactions and stories.

The first phase started when the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus “a public health emergency of international concern” on January 30. Over the next 20 days, the S&P 500 rose by 3%, hitting an all-time record high on February 19. Why would investors give shares their highest valuation ever right after the announcement of a possible global tragedy? Interest rates did not fall over this period. Why didn’t the stock market “predict” the coming recession by declining before the downturn started?

… The second phase began when the S&P 500 plummeted 34% from February 19 to March 23, a drop akin to the 1929 stock market crash. Yet, as of February 19, there had been only a handful of reported COVID-19 deaths outside of China. What changed investors’ thinking over that interval was not just one narrative, but a constellation of related narratives.

What changed is that the Turin-Milan region, the economic powerhouse of Italy, had to lock down, following the extremely severe lockdown in China. It was obvious that the world was going to lockdown. Indeed, Shiller admits the crisis was terrible:

…”some people in locked-down China reportedly were reduced to searching for minnows and ragworms to eat. In Italy, there were stories of medical workers in overwhelmed hospitals being forced to choose which patients would receive treatment. Narratives about the Great Depression of the 1930s flourished.” Some people were also caged in their houses in Wuhan, with bars added to their windows…

“The beginning of the third phase, when the S&P 500 market began its 40% rise, was marked by some genuine news about both fiscal and monetary policy. On March 23, after interest rates had already been cut to virtually zero, the US Federal Reserve announced an aggressive program to establish innovative credit facilities. Four days later, Trump signed the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, promising aggressive fiscal stimulus.

Both of these measures, and similar actions in other countries, were described as resembling the actions taken to counter the 2008-09 Great Recession, which was followed by a gradual but ultimately huge increase in stock prices.”

And professor Shiller to conclude with his trademark:

“In all three phases of the COVID-19 stock market, the effects of genuine news are apparent. But price movements are not necessarily a prompt, logical response to it. In fact, they rarely are.”

Here is my comment, I see cleverness and logic, where Shiller is lost and baffled (but he got his irrational exuberance Nobel, I didn’t!):

This roller coaster seems all very logical to me. In the first phase, the epidemic seemed a blip. The important news was that the Trump impeachment was a hoax, which had failed. Trump and his light taxation, and capital repatriation, good for earnings, and the future US economy, were marching to re-election. 

Then it turned out that the world was confronted to a nasty, unstoppable pandemic, the world economy  was going to crater, thus so would earnings. Earnings doomed to crash, stock markets crashed. 

Then, in phase three, a financial miracle and cosmical bonanza was discerned, by the wealthiest, for the wealthiest. The central banks, and even Germany, decided to make and distribute enough free money to get the biggest companies to keep going, even if their standard earnings had mostly disappeared (say airlines). Call that synthetic earnings, but earnings nevertheless. 

Also the way out of the pandemic is to innovate (so the tech heavy NASDAQ took off). 178 vaccines are under development. Some biotech will, and have, scored (especially as quinine + macrolide antibiotic is neglected).

So now what? More of the same. There are tweaks, though, as some trends are increasingly blatant: small companies are getting less help than the big ones. Some countries (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, dreaded China) are mostly industrially intact because they mastered the pandemic. Many other emerging countries will get submerged, having lost their money making exports (and no central bank will save them). Some sectors (fossil fuels) seem doomed (as investment goes down, fields perish). 

All of this new reality is reflected in stock valuation trends, worldwide. The US presidential election guarantees that central bank money will keep on flowing. TINA: There Is No Alternative. Just don’t invest in what is dying. 

By the same token, if Biden gets elected, standard health stocks and green stocks should go up… And notice the market is smiling…

***

We are in a logical world. If some of us don’t see the logic, it does not mean its’ not there… And yes, free money goes to the wealthiest. They are those the wealthiest (central banks, and large “private” banks) lend to. Not easy to change, and there are easier ways to improve the lives of We The People…

Patrice Ayme

Systematic Plutocracy, Not Systematic Racism

So we are now supposed to be all excited by a wild goose chase, for the systematic racist. Did you meet a systematic racist recently? By the way, if he was so racist why did Chauvin paired up with a non-white cop? Actually he even looks like what is outrageously called “black” in the USA (where color is everything, and attributed absurdly). Chauvin’s wife, Kellie Chauvin, competed for the title of Mrs. Minnesota in 2018 with the hope of becoming the first Hmong winner. Does that sound like the choice of a white supremacist racist? (She is filing for divorce, change of name…)

Kellie Chauvin, wife of the officer charged with second degree murder, and vilipended around the world as a systematic racist… how many of you, vilipenders, denunciators of Chauvin’s alleged racism, are married to someone of another “race”?

On the face of it, the assassination looks more like a hit: let engage on a little flight of possible fancy. Chauvin wanted Floyd dead, because they worked as security in the same shady nightclub, and one of them, or both, had gone one deal too far… Hence the attempts by the officers to get the cameras turned off (they were only partly successful, yet threatened some spectators). In that case, it would be first degree murder, but that would require a careful inquiry, and the Police Department will not be anxious to go that route, as it would end up with four officers accused of first degree murder, or aiding and abetting such…

Torture was involved too… Hidden behind that car… too bad there were all those smart phones… Interesting those cell phones, they reveal lots of atrocities: as David Horn, a 77 retired black police captain, agonizing, live on Facebook, bleeding to death… He had been protecting a friend’s pawn shop… None of the spectators came to try to help him (say by compressing the wounds to slow the bleeding, which seems to be what killed him). There are better angels in our nature, but also abominable ones… And only the work of the latter is definitive. 

As it is, the four officers could get 40 years… Each.

The murderers of Mr. Floyd. How many races represented? Where is the “systemic racism”?

So much for the little, uncomprehending people. But the big guns have rolled out. 

Both W. Bush and Obama came out with statements accusing “institutional racism” or “systemic racism”.  They both were in the White House eight years… How come they couldn’t at least tell us what the institutions of racism where, and how that racist system worked? Show me the money as the saying goes… Oops, sorry, for revealing it all by accident. This is all about money. “Black” president Obama made 100 million dollars… So he wants to talk about “systemic racism”, instead of, say “systemic kleptocracy”.

Serious George and Barry: If one can’t even vaguely describe what an enemy is, how are we supposed to fight it? We will go into the bushes and thickets, looking desperately for all those racists, while you make millions a year, from selling the presidency? Tell me, oh wise owls. Two of the assassins of Mr. Floyd were non-whites. Are all the races conspiring to kill blacks in that “systemic racism” of yours?

Many mention the death of that lady in her bed. They forgot to mention that her boyfriend had a gun licence and fired at the three kevlar armored police officers, mistaking them for “intruders”… who returned fire. Yes they were intruding, but they had a no-knock warrant (because of drug suspicion). So here we see a mix of problems: no-knock warrants for drug trafficking, thus police-judicial violence, boyfriends sleeping with loaded guns, etc.  I doubt the color of the victims was analyzed in the dark… Just the flash of the boyfriend’s gun.

***

So the basic problem is not be racism, especially not “institutional or systemic racism”. But sheer violence. Or then, if institutional, what about Biden instigated “New Jim Crow” act of the 1990s. I know how hard that is. I contributed to getting Obama to reduce the sentence of the father of three condemned by Biden sponsored laws, to a life sentence, for carrying… a pipe. It took months of work for a top law firm partner… So who has come across a racist recently? If not ‘racism” then what is it? Simple: well-paid police are enabled to use brutality. To do what? To foster violence in society, to inure the population to the violence of the plutocratic system, one where the resources of the socioeconomy are leveraged, using the banking system, to create more than 600 billionaires, many of them loud on the “Democratic” side.

Not everything was negative in what Obama said: he urged people to “remember that this country was founded on protest — it is called the American Revolution.” Actually it was an outright war, complete with superpower intervention: without the French ammunition factories, and the rest, the US Revolution would have failed. At Yorktown, the British army had to surrender. The British army was besieged at sea by the French fleet (!), and two French armies had converged on Yorktown. When the British commander surrendered his sword, he offered it to the French commanders (Rochambeau and Lafayette), who redirected him to general Washington.

So the French revolutionary spirit, in evidence since the foundation of the French state by Clovis in the Fifth Century, was communicated to the American Founding Fathers, most of whom stayed years in paris, imbuing themselves with French “lumieres” (lights; enlightenment).

Obama also suggested what I suggested prior, that every cityhall in the United States review use-of-force policies and aggressively pursue an eight-point slate of police reforms that include mandatory de-escalation of conflicts, a ban on shooting at moving vehicles, timely reporting of violent incidents, and a ban on some forms of restraint used by the police.

Obama, sitting in front of a sparse bookcase, spoke Obamese, a strange mix of reality denied and wishful thinking imposed: “Chokeholds and strangleholds, that’s not what we do” . Well that’s precisely what police departments do. And not just in the USA, there is a notorious case in France, since 2016, with officers still uncharged…

“In a lot of ways, what has happened in the last several weeks is that challenges and structural problems here in the United States have been thrown into high relief. They are the outcome of not just an immediate moment in time, but as the result of a long host of things — slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and institutional racism.”

Well, he forgot to mention the “New Jim Crow” laws, long record supporting the war on drugs and mass incarceration instigated and passed by no less than Joe Biden, who is celebrating 50 years of his paid elected politician career in the USA…

Obama also systematically forgets to mention as a structural problem the sort of economic, religious, state and justice systems which made possible the extermination of many Native American nations…. Although that was a larger crime than slavery: a good slave was a live slave, but a good Indian was a dead Indian. From there flows much of the brutality of US society, especially as many powerful today profited from the genocidal trick of their ancestors, establishing great fortunes over the generations.

Racism is a consequence, now, of something affecting 99%, plutocracy… used as a coverup thereof. Any observant “white” will have witnessed police brutality, experienced plutocracy. So do something about the latter, instead of pointlessly accusing others of racism.
Patrice Ayme

 

 

Is Plutocratic Violence Hiding Behind Racism?

So three police officers sit on a man for nine minutes. He dies. This is interpreted as, first of all, a problem with racism. Ex-officer Chauvin is white, but the officer watching nervously the smothering, is Asian. 

This is a hint that racism may not be the main problem. Racism is just an assumption which is rolled out as a motivation all the time, by manichean self-described “liberals” (they are supposed to be pure, like the puritan of old). Such a traditional assumption, that everything has to do with evil, obvious racism is so traditional, precisely because of racism. 

Federal Security Guard killed by deliberate automatic gunfire at the Oakland federal Court House, May 30, 2020. His colleague was grievously wounded. Dave Patrick Underwood was a Bay Area native from Pinole. The US Department of Justice determined the assassination was “Domestic Terrorism”

Assuming other people are racist, is metaracism. This is compounded by holier than thou attitude, namely, I am so good, I can tell you you are bad, even if I don’t know you, because, you see, I know you, based on the color of your skin. This sounds as an attitude is straight out of a comedy, but it’s not, it kills. It’s the same attitude which enables a white woman in finance to threaten a law abiding citizen (when she is not), by telling the police he is threatening her life, when all he is doing is asking her to abide by the law.

“The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.) 

What DiAngelo is saying is the penultimate step before what I am saying, which goes much further. Racism from the police is not as much the problem as outright violence by the police and justice system to buttress the established order.

Police, in the USA is very well treated as far as salary and total compensation is concerned. Here is San Francisco, for basic police officers: 

Salary $89,856 – $135,096/year

A Police Officer works 40 hours per week on different shifts and overtime may be required. San Francisco offers excellent benefits and the current starting salary is $89,856 per year. After seven years of service a Police Officer may earn up to $135,096 per year. You will receive comprehensive training, at your full starting salary.

After age 58, an officer can retire on 90% of last salary.

The police chief of San Francisco is a very black African-American, by the way. In the same city, Mayor Breed, who is also “African-American” earns a base salary of more than $338,000…

Thus the servants of the establishment are well paid… So well paid that, like the Bidens, Obamas and Clintons, they do little more than pay lip service to justice. Biden was actually the author of extremely de facto racist laws in the 1990s. But such is the control of the establishment through perverse media that older “blacks” are persuaded of the opposite… 

So there is racism, but as Di Angelo said, it’s camouflaged, hidden as its opposite. Very few US families, outside of multiracial areas, and even then, are genuinely multiracial…  

Both the killer and the victim worked as “bouncers” in the same nightclub. The owner said that Chauvin, the killer, had been violent in the past, and that she told him she will not tolerate it anymore. A violent occupation, fitting well in a violent society. Racism is enabled by violence… which takes many aspects, one of them consisting in having to pay for basic rights, be it habeas corpus, or health care, or the right to an education. 

Thus racism may only be a fig leaf hiding the plutocratic phenomenon. There is a precedent: Rome. Rome had many emperors who were not Italian. A dynasty was even from Africa. An emperor was an Arab (Philip the Arab). Rome was not racist, but declined and died from plutocratism gone rabid.

Evil Power (Pluto Kratia) is more subtle than goodness, this makes it invisible to the vast mass of the gullible, and how it rules. Obsessing about racism is a shiny object which enables to forget what is worse about the order of things, and thus core to said source of most evil.

Divide et imperare: divide and rule, the Romans used to say. Divide with racism, rule with plutocracy. What could go wrong? A thousands infernos, this is what could go wrong…

Patrice Ayme

GENERALIZED PLUTOCRACY Rules, Or Why We Are Heading Towards Mass Extinction

WHAT IS PLUTOCRACY? Literally, EVIL RULE! The Notion of “Plutocracy” Is Thus Crucially More General Than Is Usually Suspected. The Present Political System Is Intrinsically Evil… Something Rather Foolhardy In The Thermonuclear Age!

This essay is not just about plutocracy in the way it is usually understood. Because therein is, once again, pointed out the fact that “representative democracy” is a contradiction in adjecto, and what we really have, when we talk of “representative democracy”, is plutocracy light, and calling it “democracy” is joining insult, irrealism, to injury.

Plutocracy light, at the local level, this so-called “representative democracy” sustains and supports what we have, de facto, potentially the greatest plutocracy, ever, in the history of the known universe. The maximal rule of hell, ever. As a result, the history of history may turn out rather short.

Verily, “Representative Democracy” is neither “democracy”, nor “representative”.

Plutocracy is instigated by the monopoly of power, made possible by the domination of an evil mentality (“Pluto”). A trivial example is Hitler, Stalin, Augustus, Ceausescus and hordes of other dictators, who, having monopolized outrageous power, could only keep alive with ever more mass murder and mass atrocities. 

Indeed, this is true even at the individual psychopathic level: the crazed neurology of the low lives serial murderers craves for ultimate power, that of destroying others, and even oneself. Fatally, the same exclusive craving for that same subjugation characterizes most of those who aspire to the highest positions of power [1]. 

Plutocracy is the monopoly of power. All the more dangerous, as power becomes ever more powerful, to the point it makes minds as it wishes, logically, cognitively, emotionally. Thus, in an age where monopolies grow, and when monopolies grow on minds, so does plutocracy. 

Plutocracy lives from the assent of the upper classes, which, as in the fascist Roman empire, are part of it, profits from it, and are occasional victims of it (see Putin’s Russia for the clearest examples). 

A US cartoon from 1911 (when the US still had a class struggle consciousness). The Pyramidal Organization of Plutocratic Society. This not human, because humans are not ants, bees, or termites. Humans are not meant to live at the bottom of the pyramid.

It is illustrative that, as the French Republic just took tax action against the tech monopolies, a bipartisan effort in US Senate screamed “injustice”. This bipartisan defense of monopolistic plutocracy shows how much sold to plutocracy and monopolies, US politicians are that they find French politicians unfair to US plutocracy, and want to legislate [2].

The full concept that the word “plutocracy” depicts, is not just what is usually assumed. That assumption, per se, is misinformation. According to a partial, and actually minor, interpretation of the concept “Pluto” as the god of wealth, plutocracy would just be the rule of wealth. 

For example when the Macedonian fascist Uber dictator Antipater, senior successor of Alexander took control of Athens, he decided that only wealthy individuals could vote… On the surface, that looks like just this: only the wealthy took part in government. But, actually, it meant that those not part of the oligarchy, such as non-collaborating philosophers, such as Demosthenes, were executed at will. So the government of a few wealthy ones was extremely bloody. And so it always will be, as human beings are not made to be treated as things.

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Thus, in full, PLUTOCRACY IS THE RULE OF HELL: 

This is clearly the case etymologically and historically speaking: Pluto is the god of hell, not just wealth. Plutocracy, rule of hell, corrupts everything, not just finance and the economy, but also psychology, morality, an even rationality, cognition, and motivation. How one wants to move, what moves someone, is different under plutocracy.

Conventional wisdom constrains the concept of plutocracy to only be the rule of the wealthy. Then plutocracy is only viewed as “excessive wealth disorder”. Viewed this way, plutocracy has mostly economic impacts. Big money has been able to imprint the multitudes with big lies, capturing the judiciary, misinforming about global warming, immigration, fossil fuels, the ecological crisis, even nuclear energy (which is not a friend of fossil fuels). 

Plutocracy is much more than a type of economy, or politics, it’s a power obsessed sadomasochist mental derangement so friendly to oligarchy that only perfusion with the Darkest Side makes it sustainable. 

So naturally, plutocracy verses in the cruellest activities, such as torturing youth. As the second Roman emperor, Tiberius, adoptive son of Augustus, did on the island of Capri. Or as billionaire Epstein, a personal friend of Clinton or Trump, did on the island of Manhattan [3]. Media (such as the New York Times) don’t understand why Epstein left so many proofs of his illegal tortures of children… but absolute power is made to be flaunted absolutely. Only then does it subjugates.

Real wisdom, in full cognizance of the mental panorama at our disposal: Plutocracy is much more than the rule of wealth, it’s the rule of hell. 

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A bit of revealing etymology: 

How the word plutocracy, in Greek “ploutokratia” arose is tells much. Initially Πλούτος (Ploutos) means wealth in Greek. Πλουτων or Πλουτωνας (Plouton, Ploutonas) was means “he who gets rich/wealthy” and was another name for Hades the God of Underworld.  “Hades”, the god of the underworld, acquired such a terrible reputation, that no decent Greek would dare to utter His original name anymore… However the wealthy were obviously felt to be hellish, so the word “Pluto” came to be used… to designate Hades. It all made sense in more ways than one: wealth was associated with precious stones and other underground riches. 

Associating hell, wealth, power, the underground and obscurity was not new: Angra Manyu, the Babylonian god of obscurity, the Dark Side, had been fighting Ahura Mazda, the god of Enlightenment, for millennia, right in the middle of Mesopotamia. (The equivalent Jewish concept is Satan, and it was passed to Christianism and Islamism through the Bible.)

A characteristic of Pluto is that he can make Himself invisible. So, naturally, its contemporary admirers denies the Dark Side, Pluton, is of any importance; nothing to see here, move on: the free market is an intrinsic good.

Jesus declared the wealthy had as high a probability to end in paradise as a camel through the eye of a pin. Summing up, all the mythologies of the Dark Side agree that wealth and hell are intimately tied together. 

Philosopher scientist Hypatia teaching a class. The philosopher was destroyed by the divinization of the spirit of Roman plutocracy grandly called “Catholic Orthodoxy” (Common Opinion Universalism), Christianism, then in full bloom. Christianism brought us extremely close to the total destruction of civilization in Western Eurasia.

How does the tie up between wealth and hell work? 

Money is part and parcel of power: it enables us to get other people or institutions to do what we want them to do. Thus huge money is huge power onto others. Reciprocally, huge power is the equivalent of extreme wealth. 

However, having huge power onto others is a violation of fundamental violation of the conditions enabling normal, evolutionarily anticipated human behavior: human beings didn’t evolve to do whatever other human beings wanted them to do. In other words, huge power on other human beings is intrinsically evil… by god given, that is evolutionary given standards.

However, there is a side of human nature which, given huge power of some individuals on humanity, makes matters much worse: human beings come equipped with a Dark Side… more or less present, according to individuals. 

In other words, although human beings come equipped by standards of good and evil, there is a meta system controlling simple goodness and badness, where all values become inverted. Good becomes bad, bad becomes good. This is how the divine species, Homo, prevents Homo to ruin it all for us, by massacring enough Homo, as needed. In other words, not only is demonicity strong in human beings, but, like Pluto, it is buried and knows how to make itself invisible. Moreover, it appears preferably as a bait and switch. 

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The present political system selects for psychopaths, perfect operators for plutocracy:

All variable natural phenomena, are situated on a Bell Curve (exp – (x^2)). For the examples at hand, plutocracy and demonicity, this means that the evl streak is more or less represented in human beings. However the Will to Power itself acts as a filter: it will be stronger in the most evil ones. 

For example, many individuals become billionaires because they want power onto other individuals more than normal people do: the Dark Side, the Will to Power Onto People, is stronger in them (think of the characters at the head of the Galactic empire in Star wars; human history is full of them; actually in Star Wars the head of the Senate conspire to become emperor… just as Octavian really did when he became Augustus…). 

Enabling, and a fortiori encouraging, the occurrence of immense wealth, and immense power thus fosters the Dark Side, Pluto, Hell, in part by encouraging preferentially psychopaths to reach the greatest power. It is only natural: exerting maximum power onto others is intrinsically evil, psychopaths fit the job description best. 

The psychopathic leeches who lead us (to Armageddon and Mass Extinction) enjoy their power on us, including that of playing with the law, throwing basic decency to the winds. Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein… seriously why has nobody noticed this? because they didn’t want to notice we are under plutocracy, the power (kratia) of evil (Pluto)… The pundits who massage and brainwash our minds are paid for us NOT to notice, or even suspect this. Like they didn’t notice that Obama landed in a big private jumbo jet in another tax free private island next to Pedophile Island… Clinton was accompanied with up to ten secret service agents on some of the Lolita express flights….

The characters so encouraged are often going to be among the silliest of men, most full of themselves: Trump is an example… but, once again, history is full of them: most monarchs had that streak of self-obsessed babyhood (it’s not just Caligula and Nero, it’s also Constantine, etc.)

That sort of organization percolates down society. The Nazis called it the “Guide Principle”… but it’s not just the Third Reich which is organized that way. Lack of Direct Democracy is thus pervasive in the entire socioeconomic organization… which depends upon a hierarchy of little chiefs all the way down. One problem with that is that the collapse of the biosphere is everybody’s business. Another is that Artificial Intelligence and the concentration of Instruments of Mind Manipulation threatens to turn all into slaves, without them even suspecting it…  .

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Remedies: Limit Absolutely Wealth, Power, Privileges…

Accordingly to the preceding fundamental observations, the Roman Republic limited both power and wealth strictly, and at a very low level. This is probably why it lasted 5 centuries in unadulterated form. 

However, globalization, from Roman military conquests enabled the wealthiest Romans to go overseas and escape Roman law, stricto sensu, as this extended only over Italy (not Spain, nor Africa, nor Gallia). Thus the limits on wealth and power were circumvented. Roman  plutocrats thus created, became so powerful, they were able to make it so that anti-wealth laws were not applied anymore. Then their power increased to the point they could employ private armies and kill progressives (such as the Gracchi). 

Plutocracy is an effect of the power chain reaction which enables a small elite to enslave the majority, thanks to the intrinsic leverage that civilization provides. Thus, it’s a danger in all and any civilization, at all and any time. 

Once again, plutocracy is, first of all, a psychological, one should say spiritual, phenomenon. Plutocracy corrupts minds, often by example. As most people see what the higher ups get away with, they themselves engage in something similar, to the much smaller case that is their adobe.

 

Hence, after Roman emperors came to be seen as living gods, and then representants on Earth of the one and only god, most people tried to emulate them in Christian fanaticism… and go further (see the death of Hypatia by torture, at the hands of a Christian mob).

Civilizations die from plutocracy. Any civilization is a balance between the necessities of the multitude (law, order, etc.), and the human ethology, which evolved for small human groups. Plutocrats can only enslave the multitude by persuading it, brain washing it, conditioning it, to not think and feel right. Thus, an effect of plutocracy is that the entire civilization it affects is impacted in all ways and methods which require reason, and a correct sentiment.  

A civilization with metastatic plutocracy is thus unable to handle any crisis: it becomes as stupid as possible. So plutocracy is characterized with dementia; all sorts of bad decisions are taken. It is even worse than that, because the will to stupidity is deliberate under plutocracy: the way plutocrats see it, bad decisions distract people, and are actually good, if they subjugate, hurt and weaken We The People.

In particular, a plutocracy will have a bad economy, as plutocratic Rome got, in the Third Century CE. A further example is the Late Roman empire, which became such a plutocracy that it was too stupid to solve around 200 different crises which were allowed to fester… and then the Roman empire was fatally weakened by a resource crisis and pressed by the Germans themselves pushed by the Huns… Another example is the Maya, struck by a very severe drought, who took the wrong decisions, making the ecological crisis worse, bringing total war.

The usual concept of plutocracy needs to be generalized, to see it for what it is: plutocracy is a rotting of minds. Only rot makes it possible, only ever more rot makes it sustainable.

Society could be organized differently, say as real Demos-Kratia, real People Power, with Referenda all over the place. Thus, one further question is why do people tolerate to be living like worker ants, insignificant termites? 

In other words, why nihilism, sadomasochistic society, etc? Because human beings are made for these behaviors. The Darkest Side is always how ecological overstretch was handled. Lebensraum for real. A result is that human beings are, potentially, to some extent, Machiavellian in the worst possible ways [4]. Moreover, a plutocratic mood, as presently pervades society, encourages the darkest of the Dark Side.

And this is why we have “Launch On Warning” (LOW)… and nobody of significance seems to care, let alone even seems to know about it…. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] … With the quasi-exception of those who really purely crave to implement some progressive political Revolution. Solon, the Gracchi, Marius, Caesar (!), Emperor Julian, Queen Bathilde, Charlemagne (!), William the Conqueror (!), Henry V, Henri III & IV, Louis XVI (!) are such possible counter-examples… The point is not that they didn’t destroy people (perhaps more than one million Celts in the case of Caesar… however he didn’t start it…), but that those means were imposed on them, and the ends they aimed for were laudable (and partly achieved; Caesar, as head of the Populares, had identified Rome’s most major problems: Germans and Parthans).

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[2] US President Trump ordered an investigation into France’s tax on tech monopolies – a move that could result in retaliatory tariffs… with full approval of the so-called “Democrats”.

The tax will target around thirty (30) firms such as Google and Facebook with a 3% levy on revenue made inside France. The tax is expected to raise about €400m ($450m) in 2019. Any digital company with revenue of more than €750m – of which at least €25m is generated in France – would be subject to the tax.

“[Mr Trump] has directed that we investigate the effects of this digital services tax law and determine whether it is discriminatory or unreasonable and burdens or restricts United States commerce,“

The inquiry was welcomed by Republican Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the panel.

Senior Democrat? Senior People-Power person is all for tech monopolies which pay no taxes?

“The digital services tax that France and other European countries are pursuing is clearly protectionist and unfairly targets American companies in a way that will cost US jobs and harm American workers,” they said in a joint statement. Protectionist? US companies, including the GAFA are crawling all over France, where they have achieved monopolistic powers, tax exempt. So much for “Democrats” being against plutocracy. 

The digital tax is a risk for France, for the country at the origin of the Human Rights Charter, is now isolated. Talk of a Europe-wide tech tax, faltered thanks in part to opposition from countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg or even the Netherlands, which benefit from being able to attract tech firms to set up quasi tax-free bases through which to launder their world profits. This is reminiscent of the plutocratization of the Roman empire.

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[3] Wealthy plutocrat Epstein connected to the greatest,was condemned for among other activities, soliciting sex from 12 year old girls: 

in full knowledge of what he was doing, Epstein was on first-name terms with two presidents, Bill Clinton (“Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist,” Clinton once said) and Donald Trump (“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Mr Trump said almost two decades ago, in a wink to pedophilia). 

Since Epstein was charged in 2006 both commanders in chief distanced themselves from Mr Epstein. However, shortly before that, Bill Clinton had taken at least 26 trips on the “Lolita Express”, Epstein’s private jet. Top democrats (Cyrus Vance, etc.) intervened on behalf of Epstein to reduce his status of sex offender. It’s not just Tiberius who tortured people on his island of Capri… Much of the present highest level society is entangled with sex trafficking… in no small reason because individuals such as the obscure and mighty Maxwells are pulling the strings. (As PM Shamir of Israel said when Maxwell senior was buried, he couldn’t reveal all what he did; Maxwell owned media and made a killing from huge margins on scientific publishing… One more way in which the university system reveals itself to be plutocratic as public funds are used to finance astronomical private wealth…) 

The world in general, and the US in particular, should reconsider the enormous powers it institutionally gives to psychopaths… 

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[4] As Balances of Good and Evil, Human beings are intrinsically Machiavellian. So Machiavellian, they play themselves, and only by some of their distant acts, sometimes, their true nature is revealed… to themselves 

Many love some of the advantages plutocracy provides, or could provide them. So they pose as if they were pure, fanatical opponents of the system, but actually are there to sabotage opposition, by exhibiting crazed fanaticism.

Politics is a war, not just of classes, but of ideas. Not all ideas of Trump are bad and against the times. French socialist PM Michel Rocard said: France can’t welcome all of the world’s miserable people. 

Enabling mass immigration to the West is not the panacea, the global solution for billions of people living in less fortunate circumstances. One can’t just say: it’s criminal to reject those who have no legal right to live here. 

Similarly, in a country which doesn’t provide free healthcare, why should unlawful immigrants, and the whole planet be told, in advance, that they would be treated better than US-born citizens? 

Such silly declamations will insure a Trump victory. Way worse: they are will foster ever more plutocracy. The way to insure progress is by focusing on a few points, such as Medicare For All, or a Public Option… A wealth tax, a transaction tax, breaking monopolies, etc. while leaving alone outrageous racist accusations and the like.

Posers who are keen to destroy any chance of serious progress, know they will be rewarded by the powers that be. That’s why they pose. Treachery and backstabbing, to be sustainable, has to be well rewarded…

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Yes, published on July 14, 2019… 230 years after seizing the Bastille, symbol of executive privilege… 😉

 

 

 

Separating Children From Parents: A Crime. Not Fixing Guatemala Also A Crime

In my general semantics, plutocracy is exactly what that word says: the evil (Pluto) power (kratia). Plutocracy, the Dark Side ruling, is not just about money ruling (it’s a point on which I am in agreement with the mythical Jesus…) Sob story in New York Times about a mother separated from her son, then sent back to Guatemala, while her son, 8 years old, is left in the tender loving care of US judges. (Horrendous stories about babies and toddlers crying on the floor by the hundreds, torn from their deported parents, are circulating in the comment section of the New York Times.)

‘I Can’t Go Without My Son’:
A Deported Mother’s Plea
As a growing number of families are being separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported without their children.

US tender loving care as its typical best. An officer at a detention center gave Elsa Ortiz a phone number to get in contact with her son, but said she was deported before she could use it. CreditMarian Carrasquero/The New York Times

To separate children from parents was practiced by Canada and Australia less than 60 years ago. It is recognized, by the United Nations’ law as a crime against humanity. It is especially horrendous when babies and toddlers are concerned.

Famously, the USA refused entry to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Nazi Germany, including Jews, in the 1930s and 1940-41. Most got stuck in France, and when France fell to the Nazis attack, dozens of thousands of these refugees were hunted across occupied France, found out, and then deported and assassinated by the Nazis.

However, Guatemala is not quite Nazi Germany. Yet if it is too much a place of criminal state activity (as the mother of that child asserts), it should be the duty of the US government to do something about it, at the government level.

Once again what happened with Nazism should be a guide: not only France accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Nazis, but, finally, France declared war to the Nazis (September 3, 1939). That, unfortunately led to the fall and occupation of France ten months later (and death of many refugees, as I said). Yet, there was an overall beneficial effect: the Nazis were not ready for war in 1939, and thus ultimately lost it (in 1945… when the Nazis had initially intended to go to war, with enough weapons).

Conclusions: separating parent and child is borderline crime against humanity, no ifs and buts. However, a strong deterrent, indeed. A better, and much less controversial deterrent would be to bring US power to improve matters in, say, Guatemala, by bearing onto the government there. That’s absolutely needed! Precisely by bringing enough power, including economic sanctions against higher-ups, to change things there for a tolerable level, or, at least, mightily push in that direction!

Some will whine it didn’t work with Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and now Venezuela. But that’s not right. Gentle pressure worked well in several of these countries, and also Peru, Columbia, or, for that matter, South Africa. Law enforcement is a global problem. By letting plutocrats roam free and arrange the world to suit themselves, we encourage global crime.

Arguably, it’s even the other way around: take Mexico. Under the guise of privatizing, the Mexican government gave Carlos Slims, a fifth generation plutocrat, the national telecommunication company, for pennies on the dollar. Slims became the world’s wealthiest man (and greatest owner of New York Times class A shares…) So doing, corruption blossomed at the very highest level of Mexican government, hence encouraging it at all levels. Meanwhile the new class of power addicts in the USA got drugged on cocaine (as Obama proudly flaunts in his pseudo-auto biography), creating a huge demand for organized crime networks to export said cocaine in the US. Hence a gang war in Mexico, which killed more than 100,000, and incited many Mexicans to flee to the USA.

So the US can do more than put innocent eight year olds in prison, making them into orphans: instead, send US drug addicts of the highest type to prison, the sort which crow about their addiction in print … and push to clean Mexico, in part by doing so…

Patrice Ayme

Note 1: Attorney General Sessions claimed that illegal immigrants coming with children is a deliberate tactic, as it more than tripled in a few years, from 14,000 to 71,000… Hence the need for a crackdown. BTW, there is a Federal Law which says one can’t separate parent from child for more than a few days… Except for good judicial reason… Otherwise it’s definitively child abuse.

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Note 2: DHS claims 10,000 children presently in the care of HHS (they are transferred from DHS to HHS within 72 hours) were sent separated from their parents, with strangers, and that’s how separation happened. Policy already existed under Obama. Trump says he “hates the policy”, asks Congress to change the law. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, says that 14,500 children came recently, WITHOUT PARENTS… And more than 11,000 are now under custody. (Total number of people arrested average 15,000 a month.)

250 children are caught a day… and send to school…

Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of Roman Empire” In Pluto Context (Fall of Rome Part 2)

The British, yet French educated historian Edward Gibbon explained that he accomplished the work of “philosopher” in his justly famous “Decline and Fall of Rome” (DFR). 3,000 pages of dense text! Gibbon explained that the art of the “genius” historian was to select, as a “philosopher”, among a morass of facts “which are just facts”, those of higher significance. The irony, of course, is that his life’s work eschew highest significance, although he himself pulls the curtains for a brief instant, flashing the reality his work misses entirely…

To detect facts of the highest significance, and make them speak, is the fundament of the art of highest thinking. (This is true for all of philosophy, including of the natural sort, as Albert Einstein pointed out.).

Under Trajan, the Empire was at greatest MILITARY & territorial extent, when Gibbon starts his story. Later, the empire would extent much further, spiritually speaking through the concept of “Christian Republic”.

Trajan also introduced welfare and taxes on the richest. He could have gone further, but bemoaned he was too old to emulate Alexander (who didn’t introduce welfare and taxes on the richest, BTW…) Indeed he promptly died and his successor Hadrian was not cut from the same cloth, and precipitously evacuated much of the empire Trajan had conquered. (The map above shows clearly that the German barbarians were too close from the heart of the empire, just north of Italy, and sure enough, Marcus Aurelius spent his reign repelling them there; his ignorant son, Commodus withdrew further, Hadrian style…).

Under Augustus, legions reached Ethiopia and Yemen, but Augustus was full of avarice, and the notion of a world civilization didn’t appeal to him. In any case, he had none to propose. So he pulled the legions back from Germany, Africa and the Indian Ocean shore, and left a will, read in the Senate, advocating a shrunken empire, the exact opposite notion from his great uncle, Julius Caesar….

The “Decline and Fall of Rome” embraced not just the Roman empire from 100 CE to 1453 CE, but also Islam, and the Crusades. Gibbon, rightly, wrote an entire history of the West, from 100 CE, to 1500 CE!

Indeed, the idea that Rome survived the Decline and Fall of Rome was not a new observation: the empire of the Franks, the Imperium Francorum, was, de facto, Rome: it used the latest refurbished (Justinian legal code) Roman law, etc. It could be argued that the Frankish Empire was more Roman than Constantinople, because it spoke Latin, not Greek. By 800 CE, the Imperium Francorum proclaimed itself  “RENOVATION of The Roman Empire”..

Thus, then, of course, Gibbon, by his own implicit admission, should have called his book: The Decline, Fall and Resurrection of Rome! When Gibbon was writing his book, the British empire was much larger than the Roman empire, and arguably better organized and centralized. The French empire was not far behind, and, by his own admission, Gibbon recognizes that the Russian empire dwarfed Rome, in some sense.

Something even stranger is that Gibbon recognizes the obvious: most of the Roman Empire was created under the Republic. And it was because the soldiers defended their rights and their properties. Whereas, in the period Gibbon considers, when the Republic has been replaced by what he calls a “monarchy”, soldiers were motivated by greed, obedience and “religion”.i

Thus, however broadly he encompassed the history of the West after 100 CE, Gibbon could only miss the true cause of the corruption which he bemoaned, and caused the decline and fall of the Roman State.

But there was no choice: for 8 years a Member of Parliament (where he was “mute”), Gibbon enjoyed fame and clout in the British plutocracy. Gibbon could not sing the praises of the Republic. All the more as he made clear, in 1793 CE, that however admirable French artillery was, the valor of French soldiers deserved a better cause (or words to this effect). Gibbon had seen the conspiracy and alliance of European plutocrats attacking the French Republic. Gibbon had actually seen a battle (and was part of a militia ready to defend England against a French invasion, a rather ironical matter, as it was France which was invaded by everybody from the gang of all “aristocrats” united, not England!.

However deliciously informative reading him is, Edward Gibbon was deeply biased. So was all of history, ever since “politics” was founded. “Politics” means “looking at the City-State”. That look was not friendly, because most Greek City-States had democratic characters lost, ever since. To the sort of regimes Gibbon admired… and was a part of.

Gibbon didn’t draw the obvious conclusion from the sketch, in a few lines which he made of the Roman Republic, or how the Roman Empire came to be. His entire “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is biased, from context alone. From the universe which he chose to consider.

Today the British Parliament voted 326 to 290 the previously named “Great Repeal Bill” overturning the law from 1972 infeodating  British law to European law (by accepting the supremacy of the latter). This displaces sovereignty on 12,000 laws.

It’s as Mick Jagger put it in an excellent video “England lost”. In it a dishevelled English gentleman loses his mind from imagined frights, and dashed hopes to turn England into Singapore. At the end, the Briton runs straight into the sea, then stops, dazzled. A black man helps pull him out. A terse blonde 14 year old.girl tells him:”where do you think you could go?..pull yourself together”.

Clearly, by the time of Gibbon, the delusion was going strong. We don’t harbor it here. To understand the Decline and Fall of Rome is to understand the decline and fall of the RESPUBLICA Romana. It’s the Republic and its republicans which built the empire, not the evil imperial baboons the English plutocrat Gibbon is fascinated by…

Patrice Ayme’