Marcus Aurelius Was An Ass

… Rome needed more than an ass to be pulled out of the ditch.

Stoicism is the most ubiquitous philosophy: wildebeest eaten alive by hyenas, practice it in the open plains of the Serengeti. We all die and suffer, so, at some point, we have to be stoics. But Stoicism as a daily regimen makes a civilization degenerate. Stoicism fostered by Roman emperors made their disgusting evisceration of the republic easier to swallow. As this pillarization of society was not enough (stoicism derives from stoa, a pillar), Roman emperors later fostered the slave religion which recommended turning the other cheek, whenever slapped..

Marcus Aurelius has been Stoic in chief for 18 centuries, a Taylor Swift for swifties singing in the praises of the  subjugation to plutocracy through appeasement. Marcus loved to write down notes expressing Greek Stoic pseudo-wisdom. The disingenuous opinion below that truth never hurts anyone is typical: those used to roll out really new truth know all too well that truth hurts. Genuinely new truth hurts those who proffer it and also those who receive it. So what Marcus Aurelius tells us by pretending that truth never hurts is that he never came across it. Nor should we. The truth about Marcus is that he was up to no good, and worse than his immediate predecessors. So Stoicism is just a gig leaf for gross incompetence. Let me elaborate.  

Writing notes to oneself regarding well-known wisdom was the fashion at the time: superior minds were supposed to jolt down these notes. Marcus Aurelius had top Stoic philosophers as teachers when he was extremely young, while he was the adopted son of emperor Antoninus Pius. Pius had a remarkably calm and long rule (138 CE to 161 CE, 23 years)… Pius didn’t harass Christians.

Stoicism was allowed to thrive during the Hellenistic dictatorships, because it was an innocuous philosophy which advocated to bear and grin through it all. Even Domitian, who hated philosophy for excellent personal reasons, tolerated Sotciscm, most of the time. 

In truth Marcus was an ass: he gave his 5 year old heir Commodus, the title and prerogatives of “Caesar”. I have long asked myself why he did this, when it blatantly contradicted the Stoicism that had been pounded into him. The usual explanation is that the throne was threatened (there were attempted coups). But to discourage this, Marcus had just to name full grown successors. This had been the case since Vespasian (with the exception of the anti-philosophical Domitian, who was assassinated). 

The explanation I found calls upon twisted psychology: Commodus was probably not Marcus’ biological son, or at least it could be thought that he was not… as it was notorious that Marcus’ wife Faustina the Younger slept around with gladiators and loved human blood flowing in the arena. Annia Galeria Faustina was the daughter of Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius (so, formally the adoptive sister of Marcus).

Imagine: you are the master of the world, and your wife, who you can’t touch because of her pedigree, which is even more impressive than yours, is making fun of you and your stoicism. And you can’t do a thing about it… 

So what do you do as a good Stoic? You pretend that what is going on is not going on, and you punish all those who know about your humiliation by imposing the bastard son onto them. 

At 16, perhaps to keep the appearance that Commodus was really his biological son, Commodus gets full imperial powers as “Augustus”. This was a violation of a tradition established after the Flavian dynasty, a century earlier: the best was supposed to become emperor, not just the biological one. Marcus had a full contingent of generals to succeed him, including two who were superlative. One of the two, Pertinax, once a professor, would succeed Commodus. Also Commodus’ much older sister, long an Augusta, was left to try cleaning the mess Marcus had left, and lost her life in the attempt, thanks to Commodus. She was married to the other superlative general.

With so much superior choice at his fingertips, to replace him in the imperial function, that Marcus Aurelius chose the deranged Commodus as tyrant for Rome is truly baffling.   

Making a small child leader of the world was a complete violation of even the most outrageous Roman imperial traditions. It didn’t even happen under the most grotesque episodes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (famous sons had to prove their worth and some died while in command of armies!)

Marcus’ unbalanced personality showed up in other ways: Marcus executed Christians for Christianism… whereas emperor Trajan, a general without pretension to elevated thinking had explicitly forbidden, 70 years earlier, to bother Christians for their Christianism. Under Trajan, Christians were able to exert their cult, as long as they didn’t break the law. 

Also it turns out that Marcus was an ass as a commander in chief: in 170 CE, the Rio Tinto mines, which were crucial for the entire empire, were overrun by the Mauri. This went on back and forth for a few years, and Rio Tinto didn’t recover until the modern era (the Franks, successors of Rome, conquered and found metal mines in Eastern Europe).  

Marcus courageously fought invading Germans… But he didn’t force the plutocrats to pay for the war. Marcus could have cracked down on the tax evaders: some of the top generals, and certainly Pertinax, an intellectual and son of a slave, were not too friendly to the hereditary plutocracy.

Marcus Aurelius is a celebrity, a poster boy of stoicism. Marcus’ stoicism helped him to not try hard to influence events which needed to be influenced. Trajan was not like that, but Hadrian and Antoninus Pius were. And Rome peaked under Trajan. Or at least the crucial metal production. 

What Marcus wrote was good, but Rome deserved better. And needed better to survive. Marcus, like today’s European Union, was basically a poser. He wanted himself to feel that he was a good person, probably because he knew he was not. Marcus, like contemporary Europe, struck philosophical positions advertizing goodness to hide the privilege, corruption and enfeeblement, which he empowered. 

Patrice Ayme

France Made The US, Biden Betrayed France, And Democracy, With AUKUS

The AUKUS treachery replaced state of the art AIR-INDEPENDENT super silent submarines using fuel cells with noisy old all too large US nuclear attack subs. Moreover, the US subs use HEU Highly Enriched Uranium (bomb like)… which is arguably unlawful for Australia to have… And moreover Australia doesn’t have the nuclear military know-how, so AUKUS makes it completely dependent upon the USA. … With a would be tech which incites, per its weakness, the Chinese dictatorship to attack. 

The motivation for the treachery was purely nasty nationalism: Australians speak English, so we, the US led by Biden owns them, Aussies have no right to make a gigantic sub contract with France. The proof of this is that the US can’t even take care of its own attack subs.

Wall Street Journal: Here’s an ominous illustration of America’s growing security problems: U.S. Navy attack submarines are excellent weapons for devastating America’s enemies, but the fleet doesn’t have enough boats and is in serious disrepair. Republicans in Congress are right to ask President Biden to address this crisis as part of a deal to sell subs to the Aussies. For more details, see appendix below

The super silent air independent diesels were derived from state of the art nuclear attack Suffren class. Suffren uses jet propulsion, which is one thousand times more silent than propeller propulsion. Suffren can operate while its nuclear reactor is basically shut down. In the old propeller driven Virginia class, the nuclear reactor is always circulating coolant and making plenty of noise.

Several powers, not just France, developed air-independent diesel electric subs. These subs stay underwater for at least a month without coming close to the surface. They’re more silent than conventional nuclear subs. This is why France developed the Suffren class, which usually works in silent mode, purely electric.

Biden thought smart to torpedo the French nuclear industry, but actually his 33 nuclear attack subs are very far from state of the art, and China is scrambling to deploy an air independent hybrid diesel electric fleet which could make short work of the large, noisy, old Virginia class (Suffren like technology will be introduced by the US in 2030s, in SSBN).

The two independent nuclear armed democracies with independent Military Industrial Bases are France and the USA. It’s sad and scary that Biden behaved relative to France in a way that weakens the West.

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The naive Jeffrey Solomon interjected:

Don’t really care a bit about France, but if this Suffren class technology is as good as you indicate (without analyzing potential negatives such as expense, maintenance, etc.) then it would be interesting to learn why is isn’t being integrated into the U.S. Fleet.

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Tyranosopher:

This is all about the perfidious AUKUS!

Well, as the United States would not have come into being without the huge help of France ($6 trillion in 2023 $), plus the fact nascent US and French philosophy and politics were entangled in the century and at the time the French and American republics were created (the constitutions came within weeks of each other in1789!), any US citizen should have a reverence to France as the creator country (England is also in a similar situation relative to France).

The Defense Industrial Bases have been an essential part of the military of independent countries since the Bronze Age. During the US war of independence, for many years, more than 90% of the ammunition of the US army was made in France, and shipped across the Atlantic, fighting the Royal Navy. Without the French DIB, there would not even have been a US war of independence.

The West now counts only two independent DIBs: that of the US and that of France. The UK, also a nuclear power, uses a majority of French and US equipment for its crucial systems, so is not DIB independent.  

It is in the crucial survival interest of the West to maintain at least two DIBs. The AUKUS pact was a sordid affair, the sort of behavior many have suspected Trump was capable of… But it was Biden who did it.

The US DIB wants all the money it can possibly imagine. Competitive French systems with French electronics are a greater threat than Putin (who is actually a friend of the US Military Industrial Complex, the DIB). A DIB can also create bounds that last: the F35 is a poor interceptor, but all countries which buy it engage into a Faustian bargain with the US Deep State. Biden tried the same with AUKUS… Except that the F35 is state of the art in some ways, whereas the Virginia class is obsolete.

Most Americans in good standing repeat like deranged parrots that US tech is vastly superior to all and any. In particular, French. However the Barracuda class has pump jets, which are a thousand times more silent than propellers. The US will have pump tech in the 1930s for the future Columbia SSBN class. Also Suffren above, a nuclear sub, can go completely electric… which is more silent than nuclear. Now the important point is that AIP, Air Independent Propulsion, can just use fuel cells and electric… And that’s extremely silent! Several countries, not just France, are developping that tech, and this includes India (from a French tech transfer)… But also of course China!

This is the slight problem that has not been considered in the case of a possible invasion of Taiwan: Chinese AIP subs may be capable of imposing maritime dominance. Australia, by opting to buy immensely expensive, obsolete, gigantic nuclear subs from the US… which builds only one of this subs each year, not satisfying its own needs by a long shot… Australia is inciting China’s Xi to attack… And maybe that’s the idea all along… If not an explicit idea, maybe an implicit one…

Patrice Ayme’

Monster Putin Kills Children As Young As 5. Blockade His Enablers.

Abstract: The advertized ferocity of Putin’s attempted annihilation of Ukraine is unsurpassed. There is now direct declarative admissions from RUSSIAN commanders that small children are deliberately killed, to foster the esprit de corps a la Putin. Even the Nazis didn’t sink that low for all to see.

But fancy Western electronics still makes its way to Putin’s mass murdering machine. Historical examples show why one should blockade the countries which provide Putin with advanced electronics he needs for his weapons.

While excesses such as Athens’ annihilation of “neutral” Melos have to be avoided, violations of blockades by pseudo-neutrals or outright allies, enabled fascist Germany to make wars for years. Twice. 

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Denial and illusions must be rejected: Putin’s war is not just a fight between human democratic nature and the fascist instinct Russian orcs learned to leverage. 

It’s a struggle for the survival of humanity.

The Russian Private Military Corporations Wagner ordered killing children as young as five (5) years old [1]. This is an old infamous trick, already found in Carthage: killing children is an excellent mental glue among perpetrators.  See follies that bind: God ordered Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham agreed, because obeying the boSS is the ultimate principle of fascism (as promoted by the Bible). 

World war indeed: More than 50 democracies help Ukraine militarily. Democracies have recognized that oligarchies armed with nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence are not the future.

So it is high time to act as if we were in a struggle for existence, because we are. Yet, Russia heavily relies on Western electronics for its more advanced weapons systems. Advanced French night vision, sold after 2014, is found on the most advanced Russian tanks.AMD, Analog Devices, Infineon, Intel and Texas Instruments shipments came after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Intel kept at it until April 2022…

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BLOCKADE TRAITORS TO DEMOCRACY:

Tyranosopher: Powers favorable to Putin, and, or Xi are hostile to democracy. If they actively help the tyrants by sending them advanced Western tech, as is presently the case, they should be considered enemies of democracy and thus of humanity having a future, and treated accordingly. 

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The Melian Objection: 

Simplicia: Those with a passing knowledge of Greek history may object that you are suggesting to make the mistake of Athens with the island city-state of Melos. In 416 BCE, in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, Athens sent a fleet to Melos and ordered that the Melians join the Delian League (Athens’ empire) and pay a tribute to Athens (the tribute corresponded to the upkeep of a trireme for 18 months). The Melians refused to submit, arguing that they were a neutral state, not part of the Athenian Empire, and of Spartan descent.

The Athenians then laid siege to Melos, and after six months, captured the city, killed all the men and enslaved the survivors. The Athenian historian and general, Thucydides, records the events in his work “History of the Peloponnesian War”. The Athenians showed no mercy to the Melians, despite their pleas and their claims of neutrality. 

This event was couched in a famous dialogue by Thucydides, and is often cited as an example of Athens’ overreaching ambition and her willingness to use ultimate violence to assert her dominance over other city-states. The Athenians’ treatment of the Melians was seen as a violation of basic humanity by the principle of “might makes right“. Ultimately, Athens’ harsh treatment of Melos may have contributed to her downfall, as many city-states started to fear and hate her.

Tyranosopher: Thucydides explained that the purpose of conquering Melos was to demonstrate the strength and sternness of Athens to discourage the island territories of her empire from rebelling, in light of Sparta’ s ferocity. Moreover there were technical strategic reasons pertaining to trireme war for forcing Melos [2].

Simplicia: So aren’t you proposing to exhibit strength and sternness? And have the West antagonize neutral powers?

Tyranosopher: No. Melos, although ancestrally Spartan, did not obviously help Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. Melos looked neutral, while the truth was more nuanced: Melian non-help of Athens hindered the democracy [2].

Powers helping Putin are definitely NOT neutral, they help the child-killing tyrant crucially, and they can’t claim Russian ancestry (as Melos claimed Spartan ancestry). Moreover, the idea is not to submit Putinophiles militarily, just to extend the tech blockade to them, as if they were part of the Russian empire… because not only they are, but this is crucial to defeat Putin.

Simplicia: Still, I maintain, your proposal to extent war to neutral seems foolhardy. Didn’t work for Athens, and look where we are, still no direct democracy. 

Tyranosopher: What sank Athens was not the Melos story, however tragic. 

Simplicia: Yes, but that “strength and sternness” impelled a mood of ferocity, and that led in turn Athens to attack Syracuse and execute her successful high command, in totto… And those were the enormous errors which made Athens lose the war.

Tyranosopher: OK, you look correct about impelling a mood of excess. However, Athens had big excuses. The stakes were so enormous, we feel the consequences to this day. So Athens may have been rendered mad from other reasons. Sparta was a bit like Putin: so as not to lose, Sparta made an alliance with dictatorial Persia, which financed Sparta’s fleet, the fleet which ultimately defeated Athens. Executing all the generals and admirals, though, was worse than a crime, it was Athens shooting herself in the head. And that led directly to defeat and devastation.  

I am not advocating hubris or madness, nor attacking Armenia or Georgia. I am advocating a high tech blockade, with extremely stiff prison sentences if violated on the Western side. Launch trials for high treason. 

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When A Tyrant Attacks And A Democracy Defends, There Is No Neutrality:

Historically, many world wars have started slowly, typically because the good guys defended reluctantly whatever it was worth defending that made them good. Cynics and lump-thinkers will sneer that I am naive to believe there are good and bad guys, war is always bad, blah blah blah; but actually not just that, there are good and bad guys, but there are also good and bad issues [3].) The propaganda in the fascist Kaiserreich had been Between the start of the invasion of China by the Japanese military and stopping US oil making that invasion possible, a full decade elapsed. During that decade, Japan, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany slowly ramped up ever more outrageous behaviors and invasions. But for France, democracies kept looking elsewhere, and making deals with the fascist powers (although perpetrators were expelled from the League Of Nations,predecessor of the UN, and starting in 1938, France and Britain tried to get Hitler to stop). Some nations, in both WWi and WWII became wealthy from breaking the blockade and helping the fascists. Not just the USA… Not just the Netherlands, or Sweden… Not just Switzerland…  

In World War One, the German Kaisereich was able to wage war because “neutral” countries (including the US, Netherlands, etc.) provided it with indispensable goods which skirted the Franco-British blockade. France and Britain protested to Washington in vain. And of course France and Britain took no serious hostile actions against the US. After the US joined France and Britain, the production of German high explosives collapsed to one tenth of the French production… in 1918.

“Neutral” countries are objective allies of fascist invaders if they make their invasion possible. Under this definiton, the USA helped imperial fascist Japan conquer China, for a decade, as US business provided the oil. A reason France lost in May 1940 was from sending the French mobile reserve to the Netherlands, which had been neutral until Hitler attacked it… just with the purpose of attracting the French, the most ridiculous, obvious trap… But it worked.

The democracies shouldn’t be afraid to force regimes which help the Kremlin to take sides. Typically the only power those regimes have is skirting around sanctions. So sanction them.  

Sanction them in turn, in all ways.    

After Athens was half destroyed by Sparta, and had to surrender, it went through an eclipse. Its spirit was not destroyed though, and Thebes in turn defeated Sparta, yanking away the city state it had enslaved. Then fascist Macedonia destroyed Thebes and Athens had not recovered enough to resist the successors of Alexander… When Romans came around, they used to make fun of Athens’ pretense at reliving her past. In any case, here we are 24 centuries later, and direct democracy, Athenian style, is still out of reach. As Putin gets small children killed (instead of enslaving them as the worst Greeks would have done), one must fear the next democratic eclipse to be worse…  

Democracy is protected by power, and that comes greatly from superior tech. So one has to protect that superiority… And that must require to regain financial supremacy and control: right now autocratic regimes can hide their finances, and even mingle them, not just with the enormous wealth of individual “family offices” but also with the wealth of Putin’s Russia… Offering a back channel way to acquire Western tech (Turkey is a potential case in point…)

The weaker democracy is defended now, the harder it will be to save it in the long term. The fate of humanity is in balance, as only democracy can provide humanity with enough intelligence, decency, authenticity.

An entangled world it is, but evil, mixed with the rest, is explosive.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] One Wagner fighter, Azamat Yaldarov, admitted that Prigozhin ordered his unit to kill children while taking control of Soledar, and that he buried 18 children that he killed in Krasnodar Krai and Saratov and Kirov oblasts.[13] Yaldarov emphasized that Prigozhin gave the order for Wagner fighters to ”eliminate” everyone in Soledar, and that Yaldarov was specifically ordered to kill children. Another Wagner fighter and commander of a reconnaissance unit, Aleksey Savich, told the interviewer that he fired on his own men for disobedience and that he personally witnessed the executions of 80 Wagner fighters for refusing to follow orders. Savich claimed that Wagner’s command gave the order to kill all civilians in Bakhmut aged 15 and older, and that his unit killed 23 civilians, 10 of whom were unarmed teenagers.

Savich recounted other instances from operations in Bakhmut and Soledar in which he murdered children as young as five years old and other civilians.

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[2] No precise allegations of Melian help to Sparta exist (the Navy argument below may have been well known at the time). Some allege Melian “open hostility” to Athens, and archeology indicates 12  kilograms of Melian silver may have ended in Sparta. 

As the war dragged on, the Athenians felt that their previous leniency made them look weak, encouraging revolts. The rising brutality of the Athenians responded to Spartan brutality, which had been extreme from the beginning. After the massacre committed by the Spartans at Plataea in 429 BC, the Athenians habitually massacred their own prisoners.

Moreover, Greek warships, the triremes, needed to be beached every night, in practice, as it was impossible to sleep on them, they carried no provisions, and they got water logged (thus slower). So Melian “neutrality”, considering the western Aegan position of Melos, was a serious hindrance to the Delian League… That explains why Athens felt so hostile. 

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[3] The good versus bad debate hinges on looking exactly at what is going on, at some point in space and time. For example the Franco-English wars are full of the dance between good and evil, or even good versus good, one way, then the other…. Wars against Louis XIV of France were mostly caused by Louis’ persecution of the Protestants. He had definitely turned into a bad guy with a bad cause.. And the French who don’t see this yet, embrace the bad side, just as US citizens who embrace the Confederacy… Actually worse, as the Confederates battled to preserve what they knew, whereas Louis created his own horror….

This map explains much of the present cultural geopolitics. At full extent, the Mongol empire was even larger than this: Mongol scouting parties reached the Adriatic, and there were major battles in Poland. The Mongols turned around, because they were afraid of the Franks and what happened to their ancestors the Huns (according to the Secret History of the Mongols relating the acrimonious debate among the top lieutenants of Ghenghis Khan, Subutai, Batu, etc.).

It is not that the Mongols were bad in all ways, far from it. But the Mongols’ military junta, with its top generals, like Subutai and princes, or Khan, like Ogedei and Batu, definitely broke (relatively) democratic Kyivan Rus… And annihilated Kyiv, before making the Kremlin strongman, Alexander Nevsky… Prince of Kyiv!

Fire Generals Sympathetic To Fascism

The defeat of France by the Nazis in May-June 1940 could likely have been avoided by just one factor: firing the Commander In Chief, Gamelin, on the job since 1931. Several French Prime Ministers intended to do it several times, but it didn’t happen, although the reasons the PMs had to fire Gamelin were prescient. Most prominent of all reasons, Gamelin was not exhibiting enough enthusiasm in fighting fascism. Gamelin made many decisions which were ridiculous, foolhardy, catastrophic, and completely outside of millennia of military science… And Gamelin made strategic mistakes on or before 1936. In 1939-40 his errors became astronomically baffling (for example sending the French reserve as far from France as possible!) Gamelin was fired within 5 days of the all out invasion, but by then Gamelin had ordered irreparable errors.

Studying Gamelin’s horrendous ways (Gamelin used landlines or messengers, not wireless radio as the Nazis did), one comes out with the impression that Gamelin wanted the Nazis to win… And that is confirmed, when he admits in his memoirs, written after WWII, that he, Gamelin, was more worried by the Jewish Socialist French Prime Minister Blum in 1936, than by the Nazi tyrant who had invaded Spain and the Rhineland the same year!

The top US general advocates to force Ukraine to negotiate with Putin. This is more than deplorable. It is a betrayal of democracy. It’s a cause for dismissal.

Right the democracies are running out of ammunition, and the Pentagon is fetching basic artillery shells all the way to Korea. But that’s because the democracies are in denial that they are in a situation similar to 1936. Had the democracies counterattacked the fascist regimes in 1936, or stopped collaborating with them (by sending fuel to Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, among other things)… World War Two in its full rage and attending genocides, would have never happened. In 1936, the British and US ground forces were tiny, completely unable to fight a world war, so UK and US decided that there was no world war, and that there would be no world war, as long as they averted their eyes from genocide (having deported 40,000 Ukrainian choldren from Kherson Oblast alone, the Kremlin regime is clearly genocidal…).

The Ukrainians are well equipped, because they are defending themselves and 50 democracies provide them with weapons, and even more with other non-lethal assistance. Now, clearly the democracies had decided peace would last 1,000 years. Instead a tyrant has threatened them to be visited “with destruction as they had never seen in their history” (to use Putin’s exact expression).

So the democracies are not armed either in quality and quantity to fight the world war they find themselves engaged in.

Some will pretend that this is not a world war. Such a denial is typical. Indeed, in the 1930s, there was clearly a world war situation in 1936, by the time when Hitler helped invade Spain and occupied the Rhineland, while Italy attacked Ethiopia, and Japan pushed deeper into China. However, it took another five years for the USA to get ready to fight a world war. France and Britain, who had declared war to Hitler were themselves slack in getting enough weapons at the ready (in particular France didn’t arm hundreds of brand new fighter planes… and Britain had a tiny army) 

Ukrainians can, and will fight through the winter. Winter is a friend of armored units maneuvering on hard ground. 

Russia is a corrupt tyranny, its soldiers are ill equipped, ill trained, ill motivated and will suffer through winter. They must surrender: Putin has resurrected “blocking sections” shooting fugitives.  

That the top US general advocate negotiating with the tyrant, the first tyrant who ever threatened to annihilate humanity, is not tolerable. Fighting Putin is like fighting a rattlesnake inside one’s bed: you can’t stop and go cuddly all of a sudden, just because you are ahead at some point. Any pause in the fighting will benefit Putin, as it will give him replenishment, and the opportunity to look so terrible that his enemies have to cease-fire.

Ceasefire was what the French Republic did with the Nazis on June 23 1940. US betrayal of France was an important reason for it (US “guarantees” given by FDR were not respected. Instead FDR sent his right hand man 5 star admiral Leahy, recognizing the collaborationist Vichy junta explicitly). 

All those advocating for a cease-fire with Putin advocate for a situation similar to that with Hitler when France agreed to a cease-fire in June 1940.

Ukraine can and should fight through winter. It fights for all of us. 

 France actually had the means to keep on fighting in July 1940, by retreating to Corsica, and North Africa.  Hitler could never have got there (the French Navy and Air Force were too strong, even without counting the British air force and navy). Why this did not happen has everything to do with the USA’s cat and mouse game with Europe: the USA had given guarantees to France in helping to fight Nazism, and then defaulted spectacularly on those guarantees in 1939-40. Understandably, many French leaders did not feel like doing most of the fighting and dying as in 1914-18, just to see the US grab most of the fruits of victory!

… And the question is: are we facing something similar today? Trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Yes, production and quality of weapons has to dramatically increase in the democracies, should they want Earth not to turn into a hellscape. So what? Nothing new there. Democracy is expensive.

Patrice Ayme

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Notes:

Context of the WWII cartoon below which is making scathing fun of US pro-Nazi policies of 1939-40: when the commanding US general finally arrived in France in 1917, after three years of the French Republic being attacked and invaded by the fascist imperial German plutocracy of the Kaiser, he said: “La Fayette we are here!”. Both in 1914-1917 and in 1939-42, US powerful US plutocrats were entangled with the fascit regimes in Germany… to the point of insuring the survival of these fascist regimes. For example in WWI, after the US finally participated in the blockade of fascist Germany, German shell production collapsed and became a tenth of French production…

Auschwitz and similar events can be traced directly to the US’s astounding betrayal of democracy in 1939-40. Not only that but there were explicit guarantees to France, and also France (in two ways) and Britain are the parents of the USA… Not just allies. That Hitler basically planned to kill all Jews, like Putin basically plans to kill all Ukrainians (what Putin and Lavrov call fighting to the last Ukrainian… accusing others of the idea, but actually promoting the notion by evoking it…) 

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ON Military Momentum During A Rout: When an army is routed, it is important to keep pushing it… That’s called a rout. World War Two showed several examples of this. Reciprocally, the Nazis, after a calamitous defeat in July-August 1944, pushed by the disembarkment in Normandy and Provence, were able to stabilize the front because of the one-bridge-too-far UK-US offensive in Belgium/Netherlands which turned into a costly semi-defeat for the democracies. The Germans actually called this miraculous stabilization the “Miracle on the Western Front“. If the bridge-too-far offensive had not been unlucky, with the presence of undetected SS armor, the Nazi Reich would have promptly collapsed in a matter of weeks, as intended.

Right now the Ukrainian are routing the Russians. That Mark Milley, the US C In C uses the occasion of a rout of Putin’s forces by the Ukrainian democracy to urge for “negotiations”, a cease-fire, that is, surrender is cause enough for dismissal. The ex C in C in France is advocating a similar surrender. One should not underestimate the “Hybrid Warfare” promoted by Gerasimov, the present Russian C In C. That includes betrayal by supposed adversaries which are actually secret allies. An excellent example is what happened with the French Communists in 1939-41, when their master in the Kremlin was allied officially with Hitler. This had dramatically adverse consequences for the military preparedness of France (planes were unarmed, less the Communists grabbed the guns…) 

US Military Dominance Brought 77 Years Of Peace. Now What? Welcome India! And Let The European Military-Industrial Complex Blossom!

The absence of new large scale war in the last 77 years was caused by US led military and diplomatic dominance of France-UK-USA (which control 2/3 of the United Nation Security Council Permanent Membership, and founded the UN, and its predecessor). The US, in particular, was the deus ex-machina of Pax Americana, having previously discreetly turned even Stalin’s USSR and China into client states (Putin and Xi were created by the established order). 

Not the sort of historical interpretation of reality that the establishment wants you to have.

The USA crucially and massively helped Stalin militarily in 1941, shortly after having refused to help the French Republic a year earlier in fighting Hitler (in spite of “guarantees” given by Roosevelt to France). According to expert Wehrmacht and Soviet generals, this US military help to Stalin saved the USSR from the Nazi onslaught. Moreover, Harriman had redeveloped Baku oil fields, offshore, insuring his colleague Stalin would have plenty of energy…

Why this apparently nonsensical behavior to those who believe the Shoah, or the Gulag, were very significant events? Because there is a deeper sense hidden below.

For the US Deep State, the French Republic was a world rival, co-leader with Britain of immense European empires. Demolish them, and the world would be an American oyster.  Stalin was just a Georgian, South Ossetian ex-bank robber, just a soldier of the US new order. So Stalin was given half of Europe at Yalta, by the US administration overruling an aghast Churchill, knowing full well that Stalin or his successors would ruin Europe and lose it and the Russian realm. As intended. 

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Then the US led the effort to develop China, followed enthusiastically by the naive Europeans, who didn’t understand that they were de-industrializing themselves… Under the pretext of “free markets”… the latter being not applied by US law to any US state business… that includes the giant US military-industrial complex… Indeed, the US was spared degenerating de-industrialization with gigantic military budgets: if you have got to have the best rockets, planes and ships, you will achieve some technical dominance where it matters most: at the edge of destruction. China, after suffering a rough millennium of successive invasions, has understood this.

***

However, the US has been too successful in its dominance. Europe has adaopted a possum strategy: behave like a stinky corpse addicted to Putin gas. The US, led by Trump, has gone MAGA… But actually never stopped being MAGA: the cynical investment in SpaceX, a sort of private NASA, was a case in point. Under Elon Musk’s exalted leadership, SpceX went right ahead, and Obama financed him. Meanwhile, Europe degenerated. Germany taught China how to make cars, France taught China how to make trains, nuclear plants, and even planes. While the US kept up with a select immigration, Europe was more into illegal destitutes, and the European school system degenerated into teaching why it was so good to be destitute, invaded and PC. 

Thus the dominance of the West has eroded, due to the relative weakening of Europe… And the rise of many powers, worldwide, irrigated by the tax mitigating, “green” promoted investment of Europe anywhere but home.

Thus one should anticipate the return of large scale war… Except of course if the Kremlin’s attempt to boldly confront democracy and decency fails. Even then, European-American dominance will have to be strongly reasserted militarily. That means much more defense spending, with a balance between the US and Europe… 

Spending more on defense inside Europe with European companies is something many Europeans do not agree with, prefering instead to become obsequious clients of the US, a behavior that is so short-sighted, that even Donald Trump correctly insisted it should be discontinued… Trump may have missed the US Deep State’s sneaky strategy of making Europeans dependent on US Defense, hence US top notch technology. Trump tried to save Europe, so some in Europe insulted him. 

***

Modi, India’s PM, said in public to Putin that he had told Vlad that this is not the age of war. However, unfortunately, as resources relatively shrink, even before sea level starts to rise in earnest, this is going to be the age of war… Except if a strong military coalition led by the less corrupt democracies can reassert itself. This is one of the reasons why a democracy like India should be vigorously encouraged to join the West in all ways. So give India the treatment which has been extended to China for decades: massive development through manufacturing.

What can be extended to India, because it’s a democracy, should be extended to Europe. Germany and other European powers have greedily bought US military systems, in the hope that US weapons make the US stakeholder in their realms. This policy would clearly backfire, if Trump returned as president. It is obviously backfiring under Biden too, but because Biden is more polite, Europeans did not notice that they are digging their own economic grave. The Germans, full of traditional Teutonic resentment, have said they will not finance French companies: they much prefer to finance US companies, even when the French firms’ products are superior to the US one. An example is the Aster/SAM T/Mamba air defense, a French interception rocket capable of 60 (sixty) gs (60 times the acceleration of gravity) maneuvering. Germany prefers US or US-Israel rockets… Which are less performing for realistic situations as encountered in Ukraine…

Why does Germany do this? Because Germany, under Prussian influence, has learned Machiavellian power politics as a morality play. It’s known under various names, such as “Realpolitik”… Which is ironic, as Germany was the most unrealistic state in the world for generations. The resulting catastrophic bouts with fascism in the Twentieth Century have not cured the German mentality completely: as it used to look up to the Kaiser, Hitler, Putin, now it wants to look up to, and take order from, and be dependent of… Trump? Is that the smart thing to do?

Germany is prostituting itself, going from Putin’s hydrocarbons to now the weapons and gas of the US of Biden (the mental contortions would be more amusing if Trump were in power). Prostitutes deoend upon pimps, and that’s not a job for the future… A future full of war, be it only against the rising ocean…

***

No weapons, and the will to use them, no democracy. The rise of democracy was directly caused by the domination of the hoplites (heavy infantry) over aristocratic cavalry. Modern equivalent is control by We The People of dual use technologies, including debating power.

Patrice Ayme

The Taj Mahal is exemplary of the cultural wealth of India. It can be viewed as a Muslim monument. Commissioned in1631 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) to house the tomb of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal; it also houses the tomb of Shah Jahan himself. The tomb is the centrepiece of a 17-hectare (42-acre) complex, which includes a mosque and a guest house, and is set in formal gardens bounded on three sides by a crenellated wall.

The Mughal Empire ruled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries.For some two hundred years, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus river basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of present-day Assam and Bangladesh in the east, and the uplands of the Deccan Plateau in South India (Kerala to the extreme south stayed independent). It was founded in 1526 by the Uzbek Babur.

If You Want Peace, Prepare For The Worst

Some advocate negotiating with Putin. They are hopeful: it’s not Putin who put the babies to death. Maybe NATO, whatever NATO is. That Finland wants to join NATO demonstrates it.

How does one negotiate best, with the devil? Long fork? Faustian bargain?

Very, simply, to negotiate with Satan, for the best, one should expect the worst from one’s interlocutor, and believe only the worst. 

Putin will make war until NATO and Ukraine get tired. Or so he seems to hope. This is probably not going to happen: too many in NATO and Ukraine have realized the evil of Putin’s tyranny. Too many remember Hitler and know they are next… because Putin explained his ruscist vision of history. So then what if NATO and Ukraine, which have more than a billion citizens, all living in democracy, that means, thinking in parallel and most of the most creative thinkers of the planet do not get tired? Putin’s Russia at some point, ravaged by war and sanctions, will stop being a Great Power, for all to see, having lost treasure, manpower, clout, its army and economy… while exhibiting its lack of smarts, and experiencing consequences thereof. Putin will then just feel powerful because of his nukes. 

We have to get ready for that day… and it will come all too soon.

Ever since Ivan I “moneybags”, the Kremlin empire has stabilized itself with foreign wars which enabled it to call all opponents traitors to the fatherland, thus kill or exile them. This mentality of expanding abuse was inherited from the Mongols who had invaded and destroyed Kievan Rus. Inner peace by terror through subjugating outer war created the world’s largest durable empire… and an entire civilization entangling war with a church. 

This mentality of expanding abuse contradicted the earlier quasi democratic traditions of Russian Kyiv. War regimes invite dictatorship, which became the Russian form of governance… or even civilization. In many ways Lenin was similar, yet more authoritarian than all the Czars before him (and he massacred more Russians). Many revolutionaries, for example Rosa Luxembourg, saw this and opposed it. 

Ukraine was subjugated by the Kremlin with various tricks and invasions in the last three centuries. Between Stalin and Hitler, Ukraine suffered up to 14 million citizens killed in as many years.

This war is between the democratic principle and and the principle that terrorizing nuclear dictatorships, monarchies with unbound power, the fascist principle, now with quasi divine power, should guide humanity. This is the moment when civilization has to save itself… by destroying the fascist principle. So this is an existential situation. Either we bring enough artillery, or we don’t. 

Some will object that Putin is so deranged, he will use nukes to avoid losing. The potentiality of that abomination gives us even more reason to vanquish him. This is a world war, and like WW2, it is starting slowly. Hitler was easier to oppose early on, before he unleashed his terror society. Same situation with Putin. 

The Kremlin has more than 2,000 “small” nukes (Hiroshima, Nagasaki).  The US has a few hundreds, and France discontinued its “Pluton” tactical nuke system. The smallest French strike now is 300 Kt, from supersonic bombers (twenty times Hiroshima)… that’s “strategic”.

***

As Putin has plenty of small nukes and NATO mostly only has big nukes, Putin apparently believes he can exploit the baby nuke gap as part of his unscrupulous doctrine of “Escalating to De-escalate.” “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon,’” Secretary of Defense, ex-top general Mattis told Congress in February 2018. “Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.” The commander of the US nuclear forces acknowledged in 2021 that no one knows if using low-yield or tactical nuclear weapons will trigger a full-scale nuclear war. Yet, as I said, this is irrelevant: the Putinists and rucists believe that using nukes… de-escalate!

Thus we need to persuade the rucists that such is not the case: using nukes will escalate… otherwise we will end, in the best possible case, as their slaves and toys.

To prepare for a nuclear war, which will come if a coup doesn’t come first, plans for evacuation of cities and massive prompt construction of anti-missile systems is a must. Also there will be no other choice than threatening to provide Ukraine with similar nuclear devices  

***

A coup would be better… Generals and colonels who may have engaged in war crimes should be told, laws should be passed, that they can’t be prosecuted if they neutralize the crazed idiot who gives them insane criminal orders now… in a war we have to persuade all influential Russian, terroristic nuclear tyranny can’t win.

In any case, the more than 40 military allies of Ukraine, it’s a world war, remember… have to get ready for the worst, and this is why Finland has decided to apply to NATO, and entered, with Sweden in a military alliance led by the UK, involving many of the countries which were immorally and idiotically neutral in WW2 (Netherlands, Danemark, etc…)

Getting ready for the worst means scrambling the construction of new weapons… But those to fight nuclear war should get priority (in particular ABM systems). This is what getting ready for the worst means.

***

Please do not believe I love war, just because I don’t want to please Putin: I had known, and written, that Putin was capable of this, for more than twenty years. Why was I so sure of Putin’s depravity? Fundamentally because he is a hater, smart at being an idiot, with a completely biased ethno view of history. And this was clear in how he got elected to start with, becoming popular thanks to engineering a genocide in Chechnya. This was already as dirty as it gets, and the Russian population falling for it, made it worse. Having risen through a genocidal plot makes Putin an illegitimate president from the start, another argument that putschists could exploit.

Biden, Senator Graham, and others, maybe following what was recommended here first, were right to call for Putin’s removal. That would be best.

Putin Delendus Est!    

Patrice Ayme    

The 280 mm gun in front fired a shell with a Hiroshima size bomb (15Kt) exploding 10 kilometers away after 11 seconds:

Cathedral of the Russian army, 100 meters tall, erected under Putin.

US Middle East Strategy Makes Sense, Was Not Born Yesterday… Although It Looks Upside Down

US FOSSIL FUEL POLICY HAS SWITCHED TO PARTIAL SUPPRESSION… NOT JUST EXPLOITATION.

The strategic interest of the USA is this: that no nuclear armed power emerges outside of the UN Permanent Security Council members (plus Israel, an ally, and the lethal Indo-Pakistani nuclear embrace). Out of the five members, two are parents (not just Allies) of the USA: France and Britain… So they sort of triple US influence. China and Russia, overlording giant empires, have no reason to go to war. 

A second strategic aim of the USA is that no oil and gas comes out of the Middle East, except from powers aligned to and controlled by US-France-Britain… Namely Arabia and Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE. Oil procurement has long been central to US strategy:

GREAT BITTER LAKE CONSPIRACY

A third aim is to keep the price of oil and gas just so, neither too low, nor too high, to keep the US fracking industry mighty.

September 1980, Abadan, Iran — An Iraqi soldier watches as the Iranian Abadan refinery, located near the Iraqi border, burns. The Abadan oil refinery was under constant fire from the Iraqi air force during the Iran-Iraq conflict. (Henri Bureau/Sygma/Corbis). US-France-UK did more than encourage Iraq to attack Iran: they collaborated militarily. Superficially it looks like a crusade against the Islamist State of Iran. But there may have been a more sinister aims, later decades would reveal. What is not exposed at first, may be revealed in the fullness of times. As it turns out the West, especially the US, outwitted Iraq. But not just that: the USA outwitted… France (rising the price of oil was fine for the UK, an oil exporter…)

Keeping Iraq (with its giant oil reserves) and Iran down and out achieves this.

The Iran-Iraq war was most helpful to help keep both oil producers out of production, thus strangling countries such as France, while keeping the US and its oilmen happy.  France, highly dependent upon Middle East oil, seems to have understood by 2003 (the UK had its own oil, and Germany no qualms using its dirty coal)… But by then, it was too little, too late.

Now SECULAR Iraq was unfortunately destroyed as an independent power by the USA over the 1990-2003 war (Bush I, Clinton, Bush II). That was definitively to make massive fracking in the USA profitable (and that was implemented by Obama)… Something that propped up the USA as a hyperpower, while bringing the financial plutocracy even higher than “TARP” and QE already had done (all of this under pawn Obama). Partisan of progress can only feel sorry at what happen to Saddam’s Iraq (and Saddam himself said he was baffled, an uncomprehending pawn, to the end…) .

The case of Iran is different from Iraq. Iran is an Islamist State. Progressives can only view it as an enemy. US frackers also view it as an enemy, or rival. The less Iran is powerful, the better it is, for civilization and humanity.

In either case, US strategy, however selfish, makes sense.

Some may object; isn’t in the interest of the US to extract oil from the Middle East? Yes… But not so much that prices will collapse, and, with it, the entire fracking industry… and a part of the banking industry. 

The USA, with Britain, developed Middle East oil, and it was owned by multinationals. However, in recent times, national oil companies have taken over. So the global plutocrats, in the precise realm of fossil fuels, have lost control… when they are not national government actors…

Thus the interest to suppress oil production out of potentially mighty nations… As exploiting it is not possible… 

In any case, the Trump administration’s ministrations with Iraq and Iran may appear new, but they are more of the same… Upside down.

There is plenty enough fossil fuel supply, just now, to make fracking (barely) profitable, and Russia squeezed, just so. (Russia, is the world’s second fossil fuel producer, and is highly dependent upon the cash they provide, differently from the world’s first producer, the US, with its enormous economy…)

Expect more of the same, on a much grander scale, in the distant future. Some day, the US will scream that the planet is dying and one has to go cold turkey on fossil fuels… As by then, the USA will have full replacements, thanks to solar, hydrogen… and thermonuclear. That will make for interesting new adventures…

Patrice Ayme    

 

Syria’s Assad Struck Because Pacifist Fundamentalism Leads To Horror

Good people will want to, have always wanted to, strike down Syria’s Assad and North Korea’s Kim. Pacifist fundamentalism is worse than an hypocrisy. It brings not just death, but the apocalypse (consider Nazism).

In August 2013, French pilots were in their seats in their fully armed planes, ready to strike Assad, when Obama lost his nerve, or got a call from one of his masters, decided to be worse than a hypocrite. Obama decided it was OK, after all, to use neurotoxic weapons such as Sarin to kill thousands, including children. Neurotoxic weapons against cities can only kill innocent people, such as children.

A Few Of The Hundreds Of Children Assassinated By Nerve Gas In 2013 By War Criminal and Criminal Against Humanity Assad. In Just One Single Attack In Damas (and there hundreds of such attacks). Unsure About Playing Knight In Shining Armor, Or Maybe Paid to Do So, Obama Lost His Nerve At The Last Minute. He Claimed To Stay Cool, Watching This, When He Had the Means to Punish It, and Thus Became A Smirking Accomplice of It. In A Way, It’s Worse Than What Happened In The Nazi Extermination Camps, Because We Had No Picture Of Exterminated Children!

By way of comparison with Assad and Obama, Adolf Hitler, not a humanitarian of renown, decided, in 1945 NOT to use neurotoxic weapons against his ferocious enemies, who were determined, and had declared officially, that they would not stop until they had annihilated Nazi Germany. Nazi stocks of gases such as Sarin were enough to kill dozens of millions, and the Nazi had the means to bring those gases over the targets (Western armies, London, Paris, etc.). In spite of the fact using the neurotoxins could have been imagined by the most crazed Nazis as a way to bring the war to a standstill, the Nazis did not consider using them.

The top Nazis knew all too well that the British, if no one else, would reply in kind. This sort of tit for tat had happened in 1940. The Nazis devastated Coventry. The Brits replied in kind, on a much greater scale. Rightly so.

This is why Hitler did not go fully neurotoxic in 1945.

Trump fired 59 cruise missiles at the Shariat Assad air base in Syria which fired the neurotoxins.

Good.

Barack Obama and the plutocrats in London (who are friends of Bachar El Assad) let humanity down in 2013. Civilization needs to be defended.

It’s telling that Trump, so vomited upon by the pseudo-progressives, is the one defending civilization, whereas their puppet president, who was the object of a cult by the plutocrats that be, did nothing which could upset the enemies of civilization, his, de facto, friends.  Trump’s action is an excellent message for all those who believe they can scare civilization into submission. An excellent way to set up the right context with President Xi of the People Republic of China, visiting the US president at Mar a Lago this weekend, reminding him that civilization without a great wall cannot be defended. But now civilization is one, and the great wall has to be in the minds.

There are great walls which cannot be crossed, because they ought not to be crossed, and the usage of weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations is one of them.

Patrice Ayme’

Elevate The Games Of Thrones

Many people told me to watch “Game of Thrones”, that it was like my essays, full of gore and what not. Not to say: why not. A lot of why not. Why not, indeed? “Popular” “cultural” references to “Game of Thrones” are climbing up, I have to stay with the times, to engage in cultural combat.

So I watched Game of Thrones Season 1 and 2. It is indeed entertaining. Some elements of the Feudal moral code are well reproduced. The fact that explicit references to all too well-known world history (such as Christianism and Islamism) do not occur, is much appreciated.

On the other hand, so far, I see no references to religiously motivated human sacrifices, which were ubiquitous in all cults before the rise of writing (and even after, as in the Euro-Mediterranean case of Carthage and the Celts… and a tiny sprinkling of ancient Romans and Greeks).

“Games of Thrones” shows characters who seem to be significantly more complex than is usual in fiction. I read few novels, because I find usual fictional characters very low dimensional, and base, dealing with all too ordinary circumstances.(Although there are exceptions, most notably in sci-fi, of all places.) Reality always beat fiction to a fine pulp, and then burn it to a crisp:

Game of Thrones, The Old Fashion Way: Killing 300,000, to Save Millions. Hiroshima Uranium Bomb Left, Nagasaki, Plutonium Implosion Bomb, Right.

Real history, on the other hand, is full of extremely complex characters, with very complex fates. Athenian history alone provides with many major characters with incredibly rich personalities, who moreover, had a tremendous impact on civilization through their actions: Draco, Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, Alcibiades, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle. The lives of these people were those of superheroes, their fates complex and contradictory. As soon as one digs a bit, one finds other influences (say of major philosophers, some female, on Pericles and Socrates).

“Games of Thrones” is an effort in that direction. Some of the bad guys doing very bad things are actually deep and subtle in their analysis of the world.

The real world is worse than “Games Of Thrones”. Brutus is an example. I confess I did not read Shakespeare about Brutus. Why would I? What did a playwright such as Shakespeare know? Five centuries ago? Not much, and certainly not much beyond what the government of Queen Elizabeth wanted to hear. Because, if that government heard something it did not like, horrible punishments were ready on a whim.

So, to know Brutus, I did not go along the route many of those who claim to be literate have followed. After all, Shakespeare was a mental puppet of Elizabeth government, thus, those who learn the world through Shakespeare, become parrots of the puppet whose string were pulled by more or less virgin tyrant. Learning such teaching by rote is assuredly far removed from mastery of reality.

Not that Elizabeth was a tyrant, for tyranny’s sake, only. Among other contrarieties, she was in a world war with Philippe II, the fascist Catholic emperor of Spain. Spain had conquered the entire world. There was only one problem left: the French army, which, not only defended France, but also the Netherlands.

Subjugating England was going to help. After trying marriage, the Spanish Catholic fundamentalist tyrants tried brute force. England did not have much of an army, especially when comparing to the famous “Spanish Squares”, and did not have much of a fleet. But Sir Francis Drake and his colleagues were skilled, and lucky: they repelled the Gran Armada.

So Elizabeth could not be mild. And Shakespeare respected the lines she drew. (Just as Game of Thrones does!) It is under Queen Elizabeth that the “West Country Men” came to dominate the system of mind that brought British supremacy, and Bush to invade Iraq, to grab the oil (since the Geneva Convention was “quaint”!)

The real history of (Marcus Junius) Brutus was fascinating enough. He was long suspected to be Caesar’s son. But there is worse, and much more telling: Brutus was corrupt. At some point he was governor in Anatolia (present day Turkey), and he filled up his coffers industrially, to the point that he had to be recalled. He also got the trust of Senate in Cyprus, and then abused it by lending money to it at the extortionate rate of 48 percent and by using force to exact its payments.

Thus, Brutus could hardly pose as the moral hero he is often depicted to be. Like his co-conspirator Cassius, greed was probably his main motivation in assassinating Caesar (followed by the moral code of plutocracy, which is that the plutocrats deserve the world, and We The People, the Populares Caesar headed, nothing. Or, let’s say, the fact he did, condemn him in the eyes of history. And, indeed, when the Populus Romanus learned that the leader of the Populares, Caesar, had been treacherously assassinated in the Senate, the entire city of Rome was gloomy.

Caesar was the last, and best hope of the Republic. Some will say: but was not he himself corrupt, and the Senate wanted to charge him with war crimes in Gaul, for waging an extravagant war there, even against historical allies of Rome?

Yes. However, corruption is not as much the problem as what one does with it. The Clintons wanted to be nice to the most aggressive “money changers”, so they could fill their own coffers. Caesar wanted to conquer more than Alexander. As it turned out, that was exactly what the Roman Republic needed at the time.

To launch a huge war to the East, in the Orient, and present day Russia, Caesar needed peace at home, so he needed the sort of reforms the Gracchi had tried to make.

Caesar, though, was naive: he did not anticipate the depth of corruption in the likes of Brutus, who were ready for anything, to keep being able to splurge at the through. This is probably why, after blocking several strikes, Caesar gave up the fight, when he saw Brutus armed with a dagger. Caesar was shattered psychologically, by the extent of the mental corruption in plain evidence.

Thus it is why, when we contemplate corruption, in say the European Union, led by the likes of Jean-Claude Juncker, we have to show no mercy: corruption starts with money, and often ends with murder. The early Obama’s administration “signature strikes” are an example of murder which the (secret) decision of Jimmy Carter, on July 3, 1979, led to. Leading astray can take a while (Obama had the head of the Taliban executed in a drone strike over the weekend: this was not a “signature strike”, but a precise strike against a determined enemy of civilization, perfectly appropriate.

Another perfectly appropriate strike was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: in tandem with the nuclear strike against Nagasaki, it finished the Second World War in less than a week. Yes tens of thousands of innocent people and children died (plus 35 US prisoners, some butchered in reprisal). However, that was the price of peace. Not dropping the bombs would have extended the war for months, with many millions of all ethnicities killed all over Japan, Korea, China. It also told the Soviets slaves to Stalin that an attack in Europe would bring the annihilation of Russian cities.

The Japanese found themselves in a monstrous war that their own emperor, following the game of throne there, had engaged in. Today, US president Obama goes to Hiroshima. Let all those who feel otherwise, be reminded that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima is entangled with the vicious war Japanese plutocracy engaged in, during the 1930s. That war itself was an enormous crime, which assassinated more than 30 million people outside of Japan (latest numbers). Few Japanese, relatively speaking, died: around two million soldiers, mostly through disease, and less than one million Japanese civilians (including the spectacular fire bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo).

The nuclear bomb program was launched by the French in January 1938. And the goal was to nuclear bomb Nazi Germany. After a lot of James Bond like action, for real, from France to Norway, the bomb was not ready soon enough to smash Nazi impudence and violence against civilization. However, The Bomb snuffed the top Japanese military arrogance. The top Japanese General had written poems expressing his desire to see one hundred million Japanese lives cut like flowers in bloom. It did not happen because fissioning the atom went straight through Bushido, the art of the Samurai. The emperor on his throne finally had an excuse to brandish the futility of it all (once he was told he could keep… his throne). The top General tried a coup, which failed, and then seppuku, which worked.

Two moral atrocities, the nuclear bombings of Japan, were morally optimal., in the greater scheme of systems of minds. Polls actually support this view, worldwide, and even in Japan, atomic survivor want no apology. Those who should apologize are those who engineered the attack of Japan onto the world (in French Indochina alone, the Japanese military attack killed two millions). And those who support ideas and moods conducive to this sort of aggression. They are the ones who got all these children killed.

We need to change the nature of the game of thrones. Instead of having particular humans sitting on a throne, with considerable powers, after spending a huge amount of energy to get there, we need to learn to sit ideas on a throne, fight for those, and spend considerable energy debating them.

If you want peace, make ideas fight each other, until the best win, until the best win, in the fair fight which makes understanding grow.

Patrice Ayme’

Luxembourg, Den Of Thieves

Send The Tanks?

Luxembourg is a nothing country. Yet, according to the World Bank and the IMF, the GDP per capita in Luxembourg was $117,000. That makes it the richest country in the world (omitting tiny tax havens such as Monaco). And more than half of it is stolen money. Nasty nothings like Luxembourg are, increasingly and subterraneously enraging We The People, all over.

Idiots say that Trump’s popularity is growing because of the color of Obama’s skin. In truth, the rage is growing because of the likes of Luxembourg. We The People has not understood this, because the Main Stream Media, owned and inspired by plutocrats, has made sure that We The People would not understand that. However, We The People is starting to guess what is going on, and it is my pleasure to help in this understanding. Here is an enraging picture:

Rogue Governmental Tax Thieves Are Stealing The Pillars Of Civilization, To Feed Plutocracy.

For 20 years, J-C Juncker led Luxembourg. Juncker made a business to betray the very foundation of Europe. The very foundation of Europe is the principle of SOLIDARITY. Then Juncker was selected to head the European Commission. The wolf was put in charge of the sheep (as Eva Joly, a Franco-Norwegian European MP who was presidential candidate and magistrate puts it). Unsurprisingly, Juncker himself is used as an argument against Brexit. Juncker is junk, the name of one of the greatest fraud ever.

People such as Juncker are toxic, even lethal: Juncker just re-authorized deadly chemicals such as BPA, an endocrinian perturbator who turns boys into girls, and vice versa, while giving them cancer. Lethal, and in more way than one.

[Computation by Gabriel Zucman in “Taxing Across Borders…”.]

In World War Two, Luxembourg just let itself be invaded, not even with a token 6 hours resistance like Denmark. Whereas France and Britain declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939. Some will, naively, say that they don’t know why I talk about a major tragedy of history. But the reason I do is that we are going through a major tragedy of history now. The weakening of the tax base of the leading countries of the West has, in particular reduced their might and awe. As a result we enjoy the likes of the Islamist State, Assad… And many other tyrants whose activities are rendered possible, precisely because the leading countries have been weakened… and contaminated by the corruption of the likes of Luxembourg.

Now we are facing Brexit, a plot by financial pirates, brokers and professional tax evaders to have “The City”, an official plutocracy in London, to lead the gullible to tragedy.

We are facing Brexit in great part because of the plutocratic organization of Europe. And that plutocratic organization is gaining ever more power.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the very human (in appearance) and extremely plite and nice ex-Prime Minister of Luxembourg who heads the European Commission. He is the one who organized the

Paradoxically, the “Lux Leaks” scandal made advertizing for the mass, governmental tax thievery organized by… Luxembourg: business has never been better.

In “Lux Leaks” journalists from 40 international media outlets on Wednesday used leaked documents exposing tax avoidance by major international companies — like Ikea, FedEx, PepsiCo, and Amazon — in Luxembourg through secret deals between that rogue state and more than 300 multinational corporations.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) examined over 28,000 pages of deals with hundreds of multinational corporations. Those allowed the companies to jointly

cut trillions from their tax payments worldwide.

Most of the documents were Advance Tax Agreements, or so-called “comfort letters,” which are rulings determining how businesses will be taxed by the rogue regime’s tax authorities.

Technically, Luxembourg is not an official tax haven, since it… does have taxes. (Places such as British tax havens do not have individual or corporate taxes outright.)

Luxembourg’s government] has developed a system of tax rulings, which are secret agreements between tax authorities and the companies.

Luxembourg has denied the leading countries which defend civilization part of their taxable base. Thus Luxembourg is an active enemy of democracy. Luxembourg is also a paradigm of tax piracy. It is followed by other scavengers such as Great Britain and the Netherlands (who also practice the tax haven trick, industrially). In 1914, and thereafter, the Netherlands collaborated with fascist Prussian-German empire.

A young Frenchman who came across documents of Pricewaterhouse Cooper showing the tax stealing of Luxembourg. He communicated them to a journalist who then contacted the afore-mentioned IJC. Both whistleblowers are on trial in Luxembourg, and they are threatened by ten years in jail. Meanwhile the bosses of the companies who stole billions of taxes are free to operate in, say, France.

This is the world upside down, and inversion of all values. Seeing tapes of J-C Juncker, tapping in the backs of presidents such as France’s Hollande, or Orban, the leader of Hungary, saying, with a big smile:”Hello, dictator!”, kissing other leaders on top of the head, etc. even a movie such as “The Godfather” feels quaint. And, indeed, although inspired by the Mafia, the GDP  used now with Rogue Government organized Dark Liquidity, Dark money, Tax havens, etc are orders of magnitude greater.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, Obama urged at Howard University, an apartheid university for “blacks” to engage into a “more disciplined form of activism”. I guess they should do like him, and collaborate with the powers that be, those who animate the Junckers of this world. Instead of being undisciplined?

Patrice Ayme’