WAR WRITES HISTORY!
Civilization must be protected from tyrannic invaders, but must also pursue the Mission Civilisatrice. Spain, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, the USA and Italy are consequences of France’s wars… For the better, all. Also Poland and all the Eastern European countries (Versailles, 1919). Civilization was born out of war, slavery, out of surrender. So it is nice that France and the UK, which don’t lose significant wars long term, are on the side of Ukraine! Reminder: France outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century… Just when Islam expanded it.
As the Red Cross puts it: The battle of Solferino (24 June 1859), between France and Austria-Hungary was the decisive clash of the war of Italian unification; the suffering of the wounded left without care was the inspiration for the founding of the Red Cross.
The battle of Solferino (24 June 1859) was the decisive episode in the struggle for Italian unification. The French, allied to the Sardinians, with Emperor Napoleon III at their head, faced the Austrian troops. The first exchange of gunfire took place shortly after three in the morning; by six o’clock the battle was in full swing; bright sunshine bore down on some 300,000 men who were slaughtering each other. In the afternoon, the Austrians abandoned their positions one by one; when night fell, the battlefield was strewn with more than 6,000 dead and 40,000 wounded.
The medical services of the French and Sardinian armies were overwhelmed: the French army had fewer doctors than veterinarians, transportation was non-existent and cases of bandages had been left behind. Those wounded who were able to do so headed for the nearest village — Castiglione — in search of a little food and water; 9,000 reached it, pouring into houses and barns, squares and narrow streets. In the church of Castiglione, the Chiesa Maggiore , Henry Dunant, helped by local women, cared for the wounded and dying for three days and three nights.
[Actually the so-called “Sardinians” were Piedmont and Savoie troops, in other words French or quasi-French… Savoie latter voted to join France and Piedmont ruled unified Italy… Until the Republic was established in the aftermath of WW2, when Italy turned around to bite its creator….]
French infantry advances, at Castiglione, next to Solferino. This was the third time in a century and a half that a French army fought a decisive victory in that exact city and locale. The second Battle of Castiglione had happened during the Revolutionary war. During the War of the Spanish Succession, the French under the duc de Vendôme occupied the town. In 1706, in the first Battle of Castiglione a French army under Jacques Eléonor Rouxel de Grancey defeated here a Hessian army led by Frederick I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.
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US Americans are told by their wealthy masters and subjugated school systems to despise France: it’s safer that way (for the masters…) One helpful legend, to foster the contempt for most things Gallic is that the French can’t win wars and have to be helped by the big strong USA. That’s a big lie: the opposite instead is rather true. De facto the USA government and certainly its mastering plutocracy, were allied with the fascist powers in 1914-1917 and 1933-1941… So to accuse the French of bad war management enables US propagandists to obfuscate the fact that there was the Holocaust, because the US powers that be helped fascists in Germany, all too long and all too much… Instead of helping France
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France conquered England in 1066 CE. The resulting regime was French for centuries… And it got ever more democratic because of Franco-French-Normand struggles in the English-Western France arena. For example the structures and prerogatives of the Toulouse Parliament, directly inherited from the Roman Republic, were imported to London.
After the collapse of the Roman state, the French established their own…Roman state, and the Franks did many things Rome could have done but failed to do. That was a refoundation of the Greco-Roman civilization, but with the Celto-Germans at the core, and with severe defects removed (such as slavery); in chronological order:
1) thoroughly defeat the Goths (507 CE, Vouille’)
2) outlaw Christian fanaticism, by nominating their own bishops, forbid the obscurantism that the Popes tried to impose by forbidding secular teaching (starting 6th Century).
3) subdue the Saxons and conquer all of Germany (500 CE-800CE) and defeat and replace the Lombards in Italy (8th C)
4) conquer Eastern Europe (where silver was, so coinage could be made again)
5) outlaws slavery (Bathilde, 656 CE)
6) … thus starting a tech bloom that was so strong metallurgy rose again to the peak of Rome…
7) defeat the Muslim invaders (8th, 10th and 11th Century, then the Crusades…)
8) make school mandatory (8th Century; OK, for boys…)
9) officially “renovate” the Roman empire, as they put it (OK, that was more marketing; proclaimed 800 CE; in actuality since the 5th Century)
10) relaunch the intellectual-mental-civilizational-technological progress crucial for civilization, because civilization, like a bicycle only works when it advances, the reason being that civilization at a particular tech level, is always unsustainable, long term.
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Some will smirk that this was all long ago. But France is always at war. It’s a spirit. Since France is at the core of Western civilization, a question naturally arises: is civilization possible without war?
And the answer is no, as long as civilization is not all over.
There was a two centuries war, launched by Spain (itself an ingrate re-created by France under Charlemagne by liberating northern Spain form the Muslim invaders)… Spain succceeded to expand in south Italy, and a century later, tried to conquer England. Two centuries of war between France and Spain, between Naples and Amsterdam. Ultimately France won, and on the way in sub-war of 80 years, the Netherlands was created… Another country which owes its existence to France…
Americans love to say bad things about France, their main parent, and creator, because it changes the conversation from the betrayal of France by the US Deep State in 1914-1917 and 1933-1941…. and thus the exact nature of the US Deep State (mostly a plutocracy). There was no excuse for this betrayal, and it corresponds to the US getting under the subjection of plutocrats who themselves increased their wealth and power along the same lines as Roman plutocrats after the 2nd Punic war…
So US plutocrats, hindered by law to maximally exploit the US population, went overseas, where there was no US law… To help dictators be all they could be. Literrally all WW2 dictators were on US plutocratic payroll… Until they got baited and switched (except for Stalin, Franco and Mao…)
France, following her Republican/Roman tradition found herself at war with all those dictators (except Franco, because the US forbid it, and Mao, because Mao’s collaborators, Chou En Lai and Deng Tsiao Ping, among others, had been formed in France….
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Why France is like that is because France is at the crossroads, same as Middle Earth… But from there a tradition of mentalism and fighting for it arose. The Middle Earth used to be like that before hydraulic dictaorships and then Islam… By contrast Christianism, the parent of Islam, was defeated in France… By the Franks… Or at least Christianism Catholic style, as invented by Roman emperor Theodosius I…
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In spite of severe US betrayals motivated by US selfishness… among others 1914-1917 and 1933-1941, plus Yalta in 1945… and a decolonization which conveniently ensured americanization… France and the US never had a war (there was a US-UK war). This means that one can have long term peace between democracies… And only between democracies as both France and the US had war with nearly anybody else…
The thesis above that there is no civilization without war is valid inasmuch as there is a conflict between democracy and its opponents, or a more advanced civilization and its opponents. A case of the latter was the Roman state against its opponents. Rome lost whatever was left of its republic and more advanced socio-economics because the leadership was so fearful of We The People that it insisted on a very small professional army. A popular army would have been one hundred times the size. But We The People was the enemy. That was very clear during the Nika Riots of Constantinople in the Sixth Century. The emperor, no less than the extremely determined Justinian, was going to resign, but his wife, an ex-prostitute, stiffened his spine, and the army was sent on 18th January 532 CE, with the generals Belisarius and Mundus in command, and killed all the revolutionaries (dozens of thousands of them).
So the Roman plutocratic elite was determined to fight for itself, but not for civilization.
In other words, for world peace, world democracy all over (this is the generating idea of the European Union…). And now for a bit of creative 21th century Latin…
In the USA, the Versailles Treaty is always accused to have caused Nazism… An absurdity: mass murdering racial hate was already fully obvious in WW1. Senegalese troops had adapted to German ways, and didn’t make prisoners either (Interestingly the racism of German soldiers against blacks didn’t exist in Tanganika, in the south-east of Africa, where German officers loved and were loved by their black troops…. showing German racism was top down…).
But what the Versailles Treaty did was to ensure the independence of Poland again (as under Napoleon), and Eastern European nations… France was very much behind the independence of “Slavic” nations, and the racist Keynes hated the whole thing (See his trashy book “Economic Consequences of the Peace… A book which bemoans that the economy will collapse because absent the beautiful racial leadership of the German race, the Poles in particular and Slavs in general will prove incapable of managing, working, etc.
Another one ensemble of erroneous thoughts which needs to be fought against…
Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.
Si Vis Cultu, Pugna!
Patrice Ayme