Proposed US “Socialism” 2020 Would Have Been Viewed As Extreme Right Wing In 1950

Alexandria Oratio Cortez (AOC), 29 years old, newly elected Congress Person from New York, one these little tyrants representing 700,000 of us, has suggested the New Green Deal, and, generally, has not hesitated to tell truth to power. Excellent. It even looks democratic. Meanwhile, satanic power (plutocracy) shall tell the truth to all the other 700 little tyrants out there, who lead the USA (and the world) into the sort of hell only plutocrats and their obsequious servants enjoy. AOC is too young to be president. However, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sanders are running. Warren, the blonde represented in the cartoon below, ex-Harvard Law professor, is derided as “Pocahontas” by Trump (long story), because she has some Native American ancestry. In my opinion, her proposed program is the bare socialist minimum. it’s significantly less than what was the governmental mainstream for US Republicans in the 1950s (see cartoon for a few glimpses). It turns out that the USA, by today’s US standards, was a socialist country in the 1950s. I have said that many times in the past. I am happy that this notion is reaching the mainstream, to the point cartoons are made about it.

An example of “socialism”, by today’s plutocratic standards, is the US government in the 1950s. Compare:

The USA went so right wing and pro-plutocratic in the last 70 years than what used to be unimaginable right wing is not unimaginable left wing

The ignorant will retort the USA is not a socialist country. And of course, they would be wrong. They are talking in prose, and don’t know it. The USA is a socialist country. Just look at Social Security, Medicare, VA, Bank Insurance, Unemployment Insurance, etc… All countries are more or less socialist, as they are all, more or less plutocratic. Even Trajan’s Rome, was partly socialist.

What is revealing is that the plutocratic ideology has progressed so much, it has become an evidence. For example in France the nominally left government of Macron wants to privatize the airports of Paris (ADP). The airports are profitable, but the Macron types love their privates, because privates pay their elitist kind more. Privatizing airports is an idea that would be considered crazy right-wing in the USA. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area,  all the bridges and airports are (local) government property. However, plutocracy sloshes around the globe like a never-ending tsunami of moral devastation, intellectual dissolution and freedom degeneracy. Once ADP has been privatized, in “socialist” France… the, argument can be used that even “socialists” privatize airports, the sky is the limit.

REPUBLICAN President Eisenhower brought up the top tax margin rate from 91% to 93% (DEMOCRATIC president Truman had put it at 91%…)… Also Eisenhower built a giant freeway system, which is still indeed, free, and used the army to enable all children to get desegregated education.

Earlier the GI Bill had insured that 16 million GIs get a free university education, up to whichever level, paid by the government.

It’s really telling that Warren and Sanders rather modest proposals are viewed as rabid Marxism. The chairman of the Federal Reserve bank just pointed out that the WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION RATE is the lowest ever. He concluded that an important part of the young US population has fallen out of the economy, not to say the society. Then he pointed out at the deadly opiates and benzodiazepine epidemics. and added, implicitly, that it looks as if they were falling out of life too. He didn’t mention the reduction of life expectancy, since Obama’s reign. But he could have.

That the chairman of the US central bank points out that the US socioeconomy is dramatically malfunctioning to the point of causing the unemployment and the death of millions is unprecedented.

Veering away from socialism and democracy, while plunging into plutocracy was the drama of Rome, and why Greco-Roman civilization failed… And many others. Even the grandson of Genghis Khan, having seized Baghdad with his Mongol, Frankish Armenian and Georgian allies said as much to the Caliph he was soon to crush inside a carpet.

Putting plutocracy back in its place is a matter of survival for civilization, hence the biosphere, not just justice and optimizing happiness over the many. To get there, we have to reset the global mood. When Obama was president, he professed his admiration for Reagan. What he forgot to point out is that Reagan and Bush Senior were more left than Obama. Faced with a financial crisis of smaller proportion, the Saving & Loan crisis, Reagan and his VP and Successor, Bush Senior, nationalized 2,500 banks. Faced with a much more severe crisis, caused by the Clinton deregulation of finance, Obama nationalized none.

It’s high time that the democrats stop being demoncrats, plutophiles like Obama’s VP, Biden, and, instead of selecting candidates who can be elected, select candidates who talk truth to power and about power. AOC said as much. La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants. 

Yes, there is less racism now than in the 1950s. At least in the USA. That implies that progress can, and did, happen (and it happened most when Marxist US president Eisenhower sent the troops to enforce school desegregation; the Rosa Parks bus thing was just a sideshow). But progress on skin color has been used obsessively to mask the regress of the devolution of power to just the few who (mostly) inherited it (yes, even Bill Gates).

Want progress? Learn to apprehend the truth, first. 

Patrice Ayme

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[Thanks to Alexi Helligar for the cartoon.]

Shakespeare Versus Sade

Why were the English, or even the Spanish and the Portuguese so much more successful in establishing a world empire than the French? On the face of obvious facts, it’s curious that France did not do better. Nowadays Latin America speaks Spanish or Portuguese, entire continents are English-speaking. Only some of the wastes of Africa speak French. How come? Why did France not grab a continent for herself? Was France… too civilized? Is too much civilization an infection?

France was the most powerful, most populous, most innovative, most central, not to say most belligerent, of the European countries, for at least 13 centuries… Besides being the creator of Europe since 360 CE (election of Julian). France led a healthy reaction against Christian terrorism, and became the center of military and imperial power which made Western Europe one (rather united, “Christian”) civilization.

Too Much Civilization Goes To The Wolves

And, precisely, more civilization and more centralization may have been the problems, which made France come short. If one is too civilized, one may respect the Natives so much, that one may forget to take their place. This is clearly what happened to the French in Canada. The French civilized and settled the Hurons. Then the Iroquois Confederacy came down from the mountains, and exterminated the pacified Hurons. And so on. Turkeys cannot built a civilization under the watchful eyes of lions.

If one is more centralized, while civilized, one will be unable to exploit the Natives as required for a successful settlement, in a timely manner.

True, Louis XIV, the famous Sun-Tyrant, made “legalized” slavery in the French West Indies, with the “Code Noir”. However, there was no slavery in French Canada and Louisiana, while slavery was lawful in English colonies, starting with Massachusetts…to immense economic success: some English American states were mostly people by African slaves cultivating tobacco, under the white whip, terrorized by their white masters. Tobacco had made English America profitable.

So what the difference in the imperial patterns of various European powers? Moods. Basically, the French had too little too late, of the … Dark Side. I mean real Dark: the king of Portugal harassed the Pope to obtain a Papal authorization to enslave Africans (Frankish law forbid to enslave Europeans explicitly, and Charlemagne had created the Papal state). Their Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand harassed Borgia, a fellow Spaniard and Pope to authorize the Inquisition (then used to exterminate Judaism and Islam in the Iberian peninsula). Portugal and Spain were then ready to lash out. A planned crusade to exterminate Islam, was redirected more profitably towards the conquest of the Americas.

How come the greater friendliness of the English government to the Dark Side? Not coincidentally,  the rise of Shakespeare and of the West Country Men was simultaneous in England. And they were entangled: the (ex-Scottish) King James I, one of the West Country Men (basically) supported Shakespeare. (As Dominique Deux said) the success of Shakespeare comes from his parade of monsters.

Shakespeare, just as Allah in the Qur’an (following Yahweh in the Bible), made monstrosity honorable. Thus monstrosity became a strategy at the ready, something normal to do.

One may object that it’s not clear why monstrosity worked so well for the English and not so well for the Muslims.

Well, as a metaphysics of war, Islam was superb: the initial Muslim empire went from France, through Spain, North Africa, all the way to Central Asia and India, within 89 years of its launch in 732 CE. On the way it defeated the two most powerful empires outside of China, annihilating one, eating more than half of the other.

The feat was renewed later: in the Eleventh Century, the Turks, a decade or two after converting to Islam, defeated three large empires in West Central Asia, including a mauling of the Roman empire (which called the Franks to the rescue, launching the crusades).

So Islam’s monstrous side is excellent to motivate primitives for war.

This is proven as we speak: yesterday and today, January 7 2016, two Jihadist attacks in France (some terrorists tried a car attack against soldiers, no doubt inspired by happenings in Israel, and another attacked policemen with a meat cleaver, screaming “Allah Akbar”, and carrying a fake explosive belt, he was shot to death).

However, fanaticism does not rise to the motivation and power of free, knowledgeable men, as Islam’s crushing defeats at the hands of the Franks (starting in 721-732-748 CE), would prove in the next 13 centuries). Or the reconquest of Ramadi from the Islamist State by the Iraqi army and Sunni tribes.

So how come the English were so successful: it’s simple: in the case of the English, monstrosity was an adjuvant. I was listening to the Queen’s 2016 message the other day. She charmingly, succeeded to quietly claim that her family invented Christmas (a 4,000 year old tradition). She was completely unfazed by the monstrosity of her claims. (One could easily imagine her claiming Macbeth invented Christmas, just as unfazed.)

Monstrosity worked well as an adjuvant to other, more democratic structures in society, such as Common Law, Parliament, the Monarchy, with the oath to it that all males had to take at 14 of faithfulness to the King. In the case of the Qur’an, the Qur’an was all there was. Interpreted literally, the Qur’an is unbalanced monstrosity 100% of the time (with the major inconvenience that everybody can be suspected of apostasy, something punished by death).

Admiring Macbeth’s statement that life… is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, is a perfect slogan to go kill Irishmen (as the West Country Men did). And then American Natives (as the colonies founded by the West Country Men in America soon did).

Make no mistake: the Bible is full of genocides. Just as the Qur’an, which it inspired, it enables major monsters, bent on holocaust, to claim they are doing God’s will. Shakespeare is a secular version of the same mood with which to handle the world.

In the USA, many a school children spent an entire year studying Shakespeare shaking his spears all over human society (Shakespeare himself made jokes about the spear in his name, wanting it as his coat of arms).

Some could sneer that Sade wrote worse things. True. And actually I do think that writing terrible things is not just good, and instructive, but fights boredom, and feeds the mind. However, the obsessive exposition of Anglo-Saxon children to Shakespeare (or the Queen and her grotesque lies), while presenting that author as the epitome of classical humanism is deeply wrong.

Sade did not claim to extol classical humanism as he described horrors with relish. He was actually highly critical. Differently from Shakespeare the bard, about whom we know little, we know very well that Sade played a major role in the 1789 Revolution (including instigating the attack against the Bastille). Not just that, but he personally saved thousands (and got nearly executed for his troubles, escaping at the last moment thanks to the coup against Robespierre).

Sade’s main theme is that man is (potentially) immensely cruel, and politicians even more so, as they need cruelty, just to relax.

Power is cruelty, and absolute power is absolute cruelty.

A society where spears are shaken all the time, does not just shoots itself in the foot, or the head, very much. It also shoots everything that is in the way, all too readily. Shakespeare is viewed by the Anglo-Saxons as classical, while some of what is viewed as his most classical parts is just as bad, if not worse, than the worse in Sade (who, at least, was conscious of cruelty, while extolling it). The same objection can be made, and should be made, against the devout followers of the Bible, the Qur’an, and other various books of horrors. They say it’s classical, and should be respected.

No. Those books are classical, they should be known, but then they should be debated, fiercely, and dragged in the mud, as needed. Identify, condemn, and cut off the gangrene, the gangrene of the mind, as needed.

The West Country Men, powerful plutocrats as they were, sent soldiers and “endured servants” (white slaves) to America to make a profit. The French founded Canada for the “Mission Civilisatrice” (mostly). The West Country Men, operating in connivence with Justice, sent derelicts and miscreants to America. The French government carefully selected a moral elite to go to America, help the Natives.

However, in the real world, the sheep, however clever and cultivated, does not vanquish the lion. The former eats grass, the latter, sheep. It’s as simple as that. One lesson? Instead of just criminally prosecuting Africans, the International Court of Justice in La Hague should think about engaging a procedure against ex-president G. W. Bush, for instigating so many war crimes in iraq. Then, logically, the ICJ should move against the Saudis and all those businessmen doing business with them.

Indeed. Think about it. Culture without claws and fangs, and the will to use them, is only a betrayal of civilization.

In the Sixteenth Century, the Conquistadores enslaved the Indians, made them dig for oil, grow food for them. After they exterminated the Indians this way, they brought African slaves. When, finally the Frenchman Charles Quint, Spanish king and Roman emperor was forcefully appraised of the extent of the Holocaust by men of conscience (Bartolome Las Casas, etc.), the emperor autocratically ordered a halt to the Conquista (after a supreme tribunal got hung up). Otherwise all the Americas would be speaking Spanish.

Then Charles V retired. His son, Philip II, was less French. When Philip learned of French (Protestant) colonies along the “Carolina” coast, he sent an armada to exterminate them to the last French baby. A French relief fleet was dispersed by a hurricane (showing that god, were it to exist, is not friend of goodness). The French babies got killed, down to the last one (although some may have been rescued by Indians).

Not defending goodness with fang and claw surrenders it to the wolves. The good human is not an inert human. Goodness cannot just be lauded, it needs to be defended. Being inert, is inhuman.

Patrice Ayme’

Trumped: Hillaryously Cruzing To Hell

Trumped by the hilarious Hillary Clinton, the USA may be cruising towards Ted Cruz:

Looking at the possible future presidents of the USA, one is left with nervous ticks. The only one I like is Senator Sanders. Contrarily to his reputation of wild radical, he is anything but. Long time Senator of Vermont, Sanders supports the availability of guns so Americans can shoot each other, a fundamental right, and Sanders supports the F35, the most expensive, corrupt military project ever (it’s a flying Maginot Line, except the Maginot Line worked, and the F 35 does not).

Sanders: “I want to end the international embarrassment of the United States of America being the only major country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all people as a right, not a privilege.”

Clinton, second greatest recipient as a Senator behind Rick Santorum, of health care industry dollars, of course, is using weasel concept (“we have to be careful, how can we afford it?”) to sustain the health care plutocracy, one of her main supports. Fortunately, God, or Satan, whoever rules heavens, has a direct line to a much more inspired candidate:

Senator Ted Cruz Does Not Need The Message From The Messenger Muhammad, He Has God In His Head

Muhammad said he had a vision, in the desert, and a professional Christian monk, cousin from Muhammad’s very rich first wife, told him that he had encountered Archangel Gabriel. Muhammad was not going to contradict an expert. Now, in 2016, Americans will have the opportunity to elect the new Archangel Ted. It cannot be an accident that His name means “Cross”.

Now, craftily, Cruz propagandists say that Ted Cruz may never have said such a thing. Exactly. Instead he said it in bits and pieces: “Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this country… I am blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures. And God speaks through the Bible.” Cruz presents himself as the Christ specialist: “will simply show up and vote our values, we’ll turn this country around. We can turn our country around, but only if the body of Christ rises up.”

Divine Justice: Health Care, Ted Cruz’s Style

Cruz was booed off the stage for his frantic support for Israel. He accused those who disagreed of being “consumed with hate” concluding, “If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.” I guess Cruz is not bringing back the Inquisition any time soon.

All the other candidates to the presidential election are caricatures from the Dark Side.

To recapitulate: in the 1990s, president Clinton, an ignorant, yet conniving schmoozer who used empathy as a weapon of mass domination, followed the orders he got from Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, and “deregulated” finance. Basically Clinton took all the work from President Roosevelt on finance, and flushed it down the toilet of history. Financiers were given carte blanche to do whatever they pleased.

On the other hand, Clinton “never had sex with that woman“. At least before DNA.

Now Hillary Clinton, who declared herself “broke” after the presidency (imagine: everything is paid for you, and then one gets a measly 450,000 dollar tip on top of that!), is the proud owner of at least 50 million dollars (just in case she has a problem remembering her “friends” when she becomes president). Hilarious Hillary repeated the far right talking points against single payer health insurance which both Sanders and Trump favor, attracting the furor of the health care plutocrats (apparently Obama got 350 million dollars from them in 2008).

To understand Clintonphobia, you have to understand that, in the existent fractional reserve banking system, private banks create money (through credit). Deregulation allowed banks and their financial accomplices to create as much money as they please, for their managers, stakeholders, and accomplices, and buy the world with it. Including politicians and administrators as found inside the USA and the EU (or Britain, or China, Russia…)

The maneuver was comparable to stealing candy from baby.

So now here we have the “dangerous” Trump perilously suggesting the USA needs single payer health insurance, or even, horror of horrors, “Socialized Health Care”, as in “Scotland”. Trump is really a horrible man, a mad man.

It goes without saying that the pseudo-left, the so-called “liberal with a conscience” are hysterical against Trump. Gee, with Obamacare, 30 million go without health insurance, and prices of drugs keep on creeping up (+ 4.5% last year). That’s all real progress, sing the likes of Krugman from the rooftops, while watching little students below pay $70,000 dollars to listen to the great masters of the dark art of economics…

While the “left” focuses its ire on Trump, it feels ready to accept anybody-but-Trump. This fostering of the mood of anybody-but-Trump fosters whom plutocracy much prefer. Not a traitor like Trump, but an obsequious servant.

Senator Ted Cruz says worse than Trump, calmly, and much more crazy, but nobody notices… Aside from the likes of Goldman Sachs. Ted has made already 4 million dollars. Having his wife work at Goldman Sachs cannot hurt.

Senator Ted Cruz makes Trump sound reasonable

Glenn Andrews: I was thinking exactly the same thing. It Trump were elected, other world leaders might detest him but they would at least understand what he was. With Cruz, they would be left scratching their heads.

So what is going on at this point? Cruz says that talking to god in one’s head is fine, and, by looking most reasonable, advocating this, he advertises the very mood which makes Literal Islam, and crazed out Christianism strong. Cruz makes jihadism honorable. Hillary Clinton, not to be undone, said that Trump was helping the Islamist State. Trump responded strongly to Clinton’s debate statements over the weekend, calling her a “liar.” “It’s just another Hillary lie. She’s a liar and everybody knows that.”

Fact checkers said there was no public evidence to support the comments Clinton made during the Democratic debate on Saturday. Hillary Clinton subsequently changed her music.

Trump says socialized medicine may be the answer.

For all these years, we have listened to Obama, who basically said nothing, as he droned on, smothered by the impotence of reasonability unchained. Now we have Cruz, a new Ayatollah Khamenei, who, likes Hitler, and unlike Ayatollah Khamenei, wants to be elected, while praising god. As Cruz does this show, common Americans are told it’s OK to be crazy with god. Trump’s message is strikingly opposed: he wants to bar those crazed with god.

Plutocracy has learned to reign with decoys. In France, Marine Le Pen calls to national thoughtfulness are derided as fascism. So one does not have to debate the fact that France needs a massive devaluation of the Euro, or that some of the points of David Cameron against the present European Union constitution may be reasonable. Properly managed, Trump becomes a decoy to free the path to the major insiders of plutocracy, Hillary and Cruz.

We are hilariously cruzing towards more the same, just worse. As time goes by, the mood that plutocracy is here to stay feels ever more reasonable. Now the future president is inhabited by god. What could go wrong?

Patrice Ayme’

Nazism: A Paradigm

Some cackle that whenever one mentions Nazism, one has lost the debate (Godwin’s Law). Verily, of chickens today we talk.

Is the idea that nothiAdd Mediang compare to you, oh, Nazism? As in love songs? Nothing compares to Nazism, oh (my love?) Assuredly we are living in strange times. Yet, reality is even stranger.

Nazism, for want of a better word, is firmly anchored in the German mood, from way back. So much for Nazism being an “accident”, caused by “one” gangster, Hitler, who made Germans kill, purely accidentally and without any inclination to do so, 70 million people (make that more than 100 million, when counting the first round, World War One, and associated distraction, like exterminating Native Namibians).

The first pogroms of the Middle Ages started when the herds of Crusaders, during the First Crusade, reached German speaking lands. (Although the Crusade was launched from French speaking areas, and this, by the Pope, personally.)

Luther made countless declarations calling to burn Jews, destroy them, torture them, and rejoice in their lamentations: “I wish and I ask that our rulers who have Jewish subjects. . . act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying three thousand lest the whole people perish.”

This murderously racist, not just racist, mood persisted, over centuries: Prussia had anti-Jewish (and also anti-Polish) laws, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

Geeks who subscribe to Godwin’s Principle will never know any of that, as they will declare that their history professors have lost the debate, as soon as they mentioned Nazism.

Meanwhile, geeks are preparing to make us all slaves of skynet. They can now take control of cars at a distance. Something I experienced years ago when, more than once, uninvited forces took control of computers of mine at a distance, big time.

That obscurantism of making Nazism incomparable, never to mention it, that God Win Law, is well named: Let me please introduce GOD, who is all about ignorance, that’s how those who promote him WIN.

The Godwin Law is strong in the USA. This encourages young Americans not to enquire about the troubling pattern of USA based plutocracy in supporting Hitler.

Let me put it in one sentence: if the USA had helped the French Republic by declaring war to Hitler in 1939, or in the first half of 1940, neither the Holocaust, nor the full horror of World War Two would have happened. That is, of course, a terrible revelation. It is a more comfortable strategy to  block the conversation before it starts.

Geeks spend all day programming, they have to replace the culture they never had, with a cute appearance, in search of some intellectual dignity. Deliberate buffoonery masquerading as superior wisdom, enables them to cover-up their crass ignorance, especially to themselves.

Once again, in connection with their attempt to build Skynet, the not-so mythical system where machines control everything (as found in the movie Terminator), and their demonstrated past relation with NSA and other occult organizations, this is quite troubling.

If nothing compares to the worst baddies, so they should never be mentioned, will geeks extend their desinvolte courtesy to banksters? Mention banksters, people, and you have lost the debate? This is de facto what is happening: Greece is all over the Main Stream Media, but the connection between said crisis, and its genesis in banking, rarely mentioned.

The original name of god in Hebrew was: The-One-whose-Name-Shall-Not-Be-Uttered. Thus by refusing to name Nazism, one makes it divine, in the old biblical way.

I propose the exact opposite. I propose Nazism is a paradigm of nationalism and socialism gone wrong. I propose that Nazism was the culmination of a process.

I propose that much of the German mood was Nazi, from 1815 to 1945. At the very least (considering Luther, it should rather be, from 1515 to 1945). After all, the racist and vicious “legal” crackdown on the Jews started in 1815, after French rule was terminated (and Europe broken by an economic system that benefited Britain).

(That Germany did not really exist in 1815, is besides the point: German speaking areas existed, and Metternich, in cooperation with Prussia, set up the anti-Jewish (Nazi) laws.)

If I am correct and Germany was Nazi from 1815 until 1945, refusing to talk about Nazism is refusing to talk about Germany, from 1815 to 1945. How to buttress my case?

Bismarck had a strong socialist bend. He imposed national health care on Germany in 1863. He was also an expansionary nationalist successfully attacking Denmark, Austria, France, while keeping Poland under the Prussian boot. The German dictatorship lived very well while treating the Jews badly.

By 1900 CE, the principle of mistreating people for their (alleged or not) race had been generalized to a holocaust in South-West Africa, of a type never seen before. How come? Maybe the cult of Kant explains much. Kant was, in practice a racist and an enslaver. That was Kant’s most practical impact: he advised European and American politicians to enslave inferior races. : “The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”

In 1914, the Germans launched a world war outright, thus committing the exact crime which condemned the rich wine merchant (and foreign minister) Von Ribbentrop to hang slowly at Nuremberg. Germans also committed, during their blunt attack many other war crimes. Enough to hang most of the top German generals, at the same justice been applied in 1919 as in 1945. The worst crimes were thoroughly documented.

A two year old Belgian girl who was bathing in a river was killed deliberately by German soldiers. That was thoroughly documented, as were the cold blooded killing of 160 civilians in the same area that day. Why? The Germans, in this third week of August, in this war they had launched, had been unnerved by a violent French counter offensive. That day 27,000 (twenty-seven THOUSANDS) FRENCH soldiers died in combat. How did the Germans react? By killing two year old little Belgian girls.

The big mistake the allies made in 1919 was not to find out, judge and hang, enough of these criminals. Instead, they were let go, and were basically told it was cool to be monstrous, when one is German. So they did it again, even more blatantly, twenty years later.

A lot of the commanders of 1939 already commanded in 1918 (Goering led the Von Richthofen squadron, after the death of the Red Baron; in 1939 Goering, son of his father the war criminal, commanded the entire German airforce, and, naturally enough, engaged in war crimes).

The deliberate, conspiratorial attack of August 1914, was certainly nationalistic: the initial mission was to destroy the French Republic, to make space for German plutocracy. Moreover the German Socialist Party, the SPD, some of whose principals made a show of their ignorant hatred for the Greeks, fully cooperated. In two words: National-Socialism again.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazis in all this? Just a bouquet final for German Nazism. This is the mood which resurfaced in the anger against the Greeks. Make no mistake: anger can be very good. But only when directed to the real culprits, not the innocent bystanders. In the Greek crisis, the real culprits were banks, plutocrats, Goldman Sachs, German regulators (who allowed the Drachma in at twice its rate). But the average Greek?

Tribal German madness started way back. Way before Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) applied the (ill-defined) concept of “race” to nationalist theory, thereby inventing ethnic nationalism. Bad German philosophy, widely admired, all the way back to the ill-fated Teutons, and the ill-fated Arminius (“Hermann”).

Germany was unified by the German Franks, precisely because the Confederation of the Franks rejected primitive tribalism, and embraced tolerance. It’s never too late to remember the past.

The moods at the root of Nazism, tribalism, and the social instinct, are strong, and can be excellent, given the appropriate circumstances. That, per se, makes it not just very important, and always a temptation, but also very dangerous. It needs to be counterbalanced with a strong will to disorder.

Meanwhile BMW recalled discreetly two million cars (because they could be taken over at a distance). Skynet, the taking over by the machines, will be ineluctable, if what we prefer is order. What’s more ordered than a machine?

Patrice Ayme’

Mandela, Algeria, Zizek, Truth

ALGERIA’S DISASTER, SOUTH AFRICA’S SURVIVAL:

I wrote an essay celebrating Mandela using truth as hammer with which to pulverize hatred. This was Mandela’ s primary mission, and it succeeded.

That was not obvious. Look at Algeria. In 1960, Algeria was richer per capita than South Africa, and enjoyed (on paper) more freedom (apartheid, although practically observed in Algeria, was not imposed with the force and arrogance it was in South Africa; the first universal suffrage vote happened in (French administered) Algeria a third of a century earlier than in South Africa.

At first sight, it should have been easier to make Algeria into a democratic commonwealth in 1951 than to achieve this in South Africa in 1991 (the year Mandela was released from detention). However:

War Slashes Souls

The weight of the past can be overwhelmed, though. Mandela showed that. So why did it not happen in Algeria? Intellectual failure. All over.

The situation in Algeria turned out catastrophic, because no man, no leader, spiritual or political, in France, or Algeria had the philosophical, and political stature of Mandela (Camus did not reach Mandela’s philosophical understanding). As I pointed out, Mandela understood something that was not understood, or proclaimed, before: the Will to Truth can overwhelm the Will To Power.

The problem with the Franco-Algerian civil war, was not just that there was no Mandela. But that the whole political and intellectuals landscape was full of short sighted hateful dwarves, full of racism, on the left or the right, on one side of the sea, as on the other (yes, I include De Gaulle, the OAS, the FNL, and all Franco-Algerian intellectuals, Camus excepted, in this global condemnation).

The vicious Franco-Algerian war had hardened hearts, and left only draconian mentalities in power (Draco gloated that most offenses were worthy of the death penalty, 2,615 years ago in Athens).

Mandela avoided this. He avoided vicious war, the type that feeds mostly hatred. As Mandela talked, in his jail cell, with South Africa’s top (white) general, he told him:“General, in this war, you and me are both generals. Whatever happens, at the end of this, we will have to meet, and negotiate. How we treat each other then, depends upon how we treat each other, now.”

In the early 1990s, 19% of South Africa was “white”. Nowadays it’s 9% (the poor tend to reproduce like rabbits, everywhere).

In Algeria, upon so called “independence” 15% of the population fled (including lots of Jews, whose ancestors had arrived in the area 2,100 years before, 8 centuries before Arabs and Muslims invaded by the sword). Many of the Jews ended in Israel, as the French Republic had been, naturally enough, Israel’s main sponsor.

It was independence from Paris, but not from hatred and other vicious habits many of them learned there (such as the pseudo-leftism clamored by hypocrites such as Jean-Paul Sartre, the pseudo-philosopher, and his ilk of ill disguised collaborators).

In the full light of history, one may wonder if Africa and Numidia (in the Roman geographical sense) will ever recover from democratic Carthage’s monstrous demise, and the just as monstrous Arab-Muslim conquest of the Maghreb (647-709 CE)

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SILLY ZIZEK:

I mentioned that, ideally, Mandela would have told a few truths that needed to be told, and, first of all, that wisdom pays, and only wisdom does. Long term.

Second, that wisdom arises from a wealth of knowledge, and only from that: Mandela, a king, was also a lawyer, a boxer, and someone who learned Afrikaner as an adult.

The average salary of an employed black man is eight times less than that of a white employee. But Mandela would have shrugged:”Do you have anything better to propose?” Zizek thinks so, but he is just posing:

Slavoj Zizek, the famous European (Slovenian) philosopher, psychoanalyst and social theorist at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London, wrote an incisive essay for the New York times”Mandela’s Socialist Failure“. The essay is transverse to my “Mandela, Truth Philosopher”. I do not disagree with its spirit. Just the details, where the most pernicious devils lurk.

Zizek says: “South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” — but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished”…If we want to remain faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter, old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn’t disturb the global order of power.”

Amen to this. Zizek ought to realize though that Franklin D. Roosevelt (from plutocratic background) and Eisenhower (Republican president) were conducting policies way left than anything proposed by the democratic party of the USA, or any “left”, “socialist’, or “labor” party in the West in the last 40 years.

Those who are serious about debt reduction ought to follow Republican president Eisenhower’s drastic remedy: bring up the highest margin tax rate to 93%.

In general, most of today’s economic and social ills would disappear if one returned to the conservative fiscal methods of the 1950s. Those would allow to keep in good functioning order the welfare state established in the period 1933-1965.

Roosevelt and Eisenhower would have certainly presented themselves as free market liberals, pro-capitalists. And they were. So, Zizek, it’s not about “capitalist mechanisms”.

It’s about having forgotten the wisdom of the past. And it’s about intellectuals who, like Zizek, do not go inside the machinery enough to make a cogent critique of what went wrong.

Mandela did not do such a mistake: he had the Algerian disaster in full view, and tried to avoid it. This, Zizek does not see.

And it’s going wrong all over, in newer ways: witness the suicidal rise of fossil fuel companies’ influence, in the last 15 years. Something never seen before, and that no socialists of the past could have envisioned, in their worst nightmares.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note: 1) Millions died or fled from the Algerian War. Nearly all the population of Algeria suffered, and the suffering extends to this day.

2) The accusation of racism against De Gaulle is amply documented. Through many statements. On 5 Mars 1959, he confessed the following to Alain Peyrefitte : « Si nous faisions l’intégration, si tous les Arabes et Berbères d’Algérie étaient considérés comme Français, comment les empêcher de venir s’installer en métropole, alors que le niveau de vie y est tellement plus élevé ? Mon village ne s’appellerait plus Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, mais Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées ! »

Translation: France is so rich, all Algerians want to come here. So we will not do integration. Down with Mosques.