Lesson Learned: 2023 Not Like 1936. So Far.

Chinese balloons crammed with electronics all over. The US shoots down four in ten days. What’s going on?

US Department of Defense confirmed that on two occasions F-22 jets took off from Anchorage, Alaska and objects were shot down, one with a Sidewinder AIM 9X missile.

Philosopher Nigel Warburton#FreeUkraine@philosophybites asked: What’s going on?

What’s going on is that tyrannies keep pushing, to see how far they can go. A tyranny makes war to its people, inside, and justifies that by claiming it is saving the people from a war, outside… which it self-engineered. As tyrannies get away with some aggressive actions, going further than any before, they feel encouraged, and encourage each other. Thus ever more excited, tyrannies repeat the process. This is what happened in the 1930s, after the invasion of Manchuria by a rogue Japanese army: Mussolonini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and their ilk felt encouraged. It was truly the start of World War Two… because the military reaction, the declaration of war of Britain and France, waited until 1939, when the alliances of the tyrants Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Franco had been made official… And because, as late as 1940 and even 1941, the USA was de facto allied with the Axis powers (for example by fuelling the Japanese army invading China). 

 

What’s going on now is that what’s going on is not like what happened in 1936: instead of letting tyrannies fly from success to success, insolence to insolence, testing new weapons, and tactics, expanding territories, democracies have learned something from the 1930s and thus, woken up this time, and are fighting back, in a timely manner.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/world-wars-are-culminations-of-brutish-processes-wwii-started-when-a-rogue-japanese-armyinvaded-manchuria-in-1931/

F22 high altitude interceptor, balloon killer.

Scott Kelly, US Senator ex International Space Station Commander, wrote February 10 to @elonmusk:

“Ukraine desperately needs your continued support. Please restore the full functionality of your Starlink satellites. Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost. You can help. Thank you.”
Elon Musk replied, with some condescendence: @StationCDRKelly: “You’re smart enough not to swallow media & other propaganda bs. Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed.

But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.“

This is a problem with endowing single individuals with so much power. SpaceX is a sort of second foundation of NASA… As I pointed out long ago, it would not exist without the largesse of the US government. SpaceX was actually saved by US government contracts when it was so close to bankruptcy, around 2009, in spite of injection of funds from Tesla, that Musk had only a few hundred thousand of dollars left, and he had to meet payroll, let alone pay for equipment! Landing rockets was researched and done by NASA, starting in the mid-sixties.  

Musk: elite entrepreneur and engineer. He also has apparently diversified to historian of war, and knows what escalates conflict. How does one escalates when one has been attacked by a bear? Should one defend oneself just so, but not too much? However bear only fears personal injury. Passive defense that doesn’t look as if it were going to hurt doesn’t work.

Zelinskyi has compared in 2023 Putin to a dragon who muster devour. But Putin’s behavior is more reminscent of that of an aggressive bear. Musk has probably never fought a bear. Yours truly actually has had several confrontations with bears, caused by wandering unarmed many times where bears are found in abundance. I had to threaten very aggressive bears both brown and black. Hitting a proximal surface with stones was often enough of a deterrent. But I had to hit a charging bear (who had just attacked a dozen high Sierra campers, and was now interested by the food I was carrying) with a (very large) stone, once… Bears fear stones, because they have been hurt by them and they have respect for those who can muster stones… In any case, that bear fled for dear life. But that bear attacked people again, wounded a grandmother, and three weeks later, rangers executed it.

Putin will not stop. Like a serial killer, one who has killed now more than 200,000 people, for all to see, his only hope to survive, or to justify himself, is to keep on going, as Hitler once did. So he has to be stopped. World War Two would have been aborted if, even as late as 1940, the USA had stood with France and Britain. 

So this time is different. But this time the stakes are also higher…

So it is good that the US is not playing games, this time.

As in the 1930s, though, tyrannies have their agents. In the 1930s, many intellectuals were following either Hitler or his ally Stalin. This had disastrous consequences on the war readiness of France (new planes were not equipped with guns, from fear that workers, aligned with Stalin, thus Hitler, would seize them and make a revolution… As a consequence Nazi Germany was able to acquire air superiority over France where it needed it!) 

Putin knows all of this, and that makes him hope that he will be able to change public opinion. After all, he has just three democracies’ public opinion to work on….

Patrice Ayme  

Putin A Tool? Double Machiavellianism Festering In Russia

Putin is a virus, and its vaccine is called Ukraine. To get rid of Putin, and foster democracy, one had to encourage him to attack Ukraine. What better to fight a tyrant than full war with a powerful democracy? Nothing else would do, the tyrant was too well installed, with towering popularity. So his internal enemies had to convince Putin that invading Ukraine would be a walk in the park, shooting off Nazis. 

How that popularity was won is itself a measure of how evil Russia became. In 2014, Putin wanted to invade Crimea. His two most powerful collaborators, Shoigu, minister of defense and a personal friend, a native of poor and isolated Tuva, in the mountains of Siberia, and Gerasimov, the commander in chief of the Russian army, apostle of hybrid warfare  

Who had an interest in getting rid of Putin? Putin’s kleptocracy has stolen Russia, to invest the stolen wealth in the West, overpaying while purchasing Western oligarchs’ properties, making all oligarchs happier. What was stolen by Russian oligarchs made Western oligarchs even wealthier..So Western oligarchs loved Putin and its wealth-transferring-to-the West oligarchy. Now, of course, the Western oligarchs are frustrated as Putin’s unraveling is threatening to dismantle the entire exploitation contraption.

Distinct lack of enthusiasm in some French and German circles of power has everything to do with the fact Franco-Germania organized much of its economy around Putin. It was not just getting gas from Putin; the French Total oil giant provided the Putin Reich with vast and ultra expensive installations similar to those provided to Qatar, to put on méthanier boats liquefied Siberian gas heading to Asia. These boats are some of the largest in the world, and pack several times the explosive power of Hiroshima.  

European ecologists and the likes of Merkel, were financed, or controlled, from the Kremlin. At least so say retired heads of French secret services. So the ecologists were anti-nuclear, and even anti-Western European gas (France has one century of gas reserves; so the ecologists, pushed by the Kremlin, had France pass a law outlawing the extraction of gas… in France. If the gas was provided by the Kremlin tyrant, that was fine).

So the only remaining hypothesis is that elements inside the FSB misled Putin about Ukraine, in the hope of having Putin destroy his regime there. Instead, it’s Russia which may end up destroyed. 

This is not the sole mechanism at work there. In the 1990s, Western advisers (Harvard, etc.) persuaded Yeltsin that Russia needed to be led to prosperity by an oligarchy. As the oligarchy was bound to steal Russia and make it stupid, the very origin of the Putin regime may not lay just in Alexander Nevsky’s sick ideology of ruling inside with brutality by allying oneself with evil (the Mongol invaders). 

The war may look insane, and it is. But it developed because of deep manipulations from very dark minds… who may have hoped that this sort of madness would develop as the intricate mess it has become… precisely because it could be exploited. The FSB may have incited Putin to commit a terrible mistake, so that he could be brought down. And the West certainly long collaborated with Putin, inciting him subtly to become ever worse. 

Now the ongoing existence of the largest land empire, by far, is being called into question, and democracies themselves can’t let Putin win. Anything at all. 

If Putin is a tool, does that mean that there are even more evil forces out there? Indeed! The cause of an evil is, in a sense always a greater evil. And causes work best when unexplained, undetected, and unexpected. This is why it is important to understand Machiavellianism, the art of making people do something while believing that there are doing the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

P/S 1: The first part of the essay above was censored by the Wall Street Journal, which delayed its publication by several days (the italic part was allowed in another comment; in the italic I carefully avoided the notion of Western oligarchy, which may be a banning offense according to the obsequious lemmings). So the WSJ’s readers were made blissfully unaware that:

1. Putin could have been manipulated into invading Ukraine
2. That the plutocratic universities (Harvard, etc.) and other influencers (US and European politicians) were instrumental and perhaps primordial in setting up the Russian mess which later brought up Putin. The same sort of enabling-disabling, bait and switch was used prior and during WWI and WWII. The US power circles are very good at it, their institutions, traditions and mentalities having trained with American natives for centuries. For example, claim that “black lives matter” while making sure that, under the pretext of freedom, blacks live in terrible conditions (bad education, bad housing, bad health care, bad food, sugar billionaires being subsidized, etc…) All this the very dark deep state organizes with mental terror….Don’t say this, don’t think that, etc. And that is enforced by the media, an example being the preceding comment which the WSJ banned. That was after a very interesting article on:

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers

Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war

MOSCOW—Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.

It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.

The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.

The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. 

Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news…

And now for one of Putin’s war planes going down in flames: a SU 25…

PS 2: Tyrant Vladimir Putin also indirectly attacked Russian oligarchs on December 22, 2022, along lines similar to those I drew above (and in many of my essays prior). Putin stated that Russians who drain Russia’s money from abroad and do not have a connection with Russia “represent a danger” to Russia.Putin claimed that while the majority of Russian businessmen are patriots, there are some who are not. Putin had nationalized many non-compliant oligarchs from a similat logic 20 years ago.

IF YOU WANT PEACE, PREPARE FOR NUCLEAR WAR

SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM NUCLEI

Any concession to tyrant Putin will make his bellicose drive worse. Appeasement will only tell him that he has got to be right, he is winning, and he is on the right path. We have seen that movie with Hitler. The drama with the Sudetenland in 1938 has much in common with the drama in the Donbas, including a dictator screaming that minorities were in mortal danger, and sham referenda: Hitler had been elected in part on the promise of protecting what he claimed were abused German minorities. 

Thus Pangermanism wanted to annex the Sudeten to Germany. However, Hitler was not so ridiculous as to pretend that the Sudeten inhabitants were victims of a genocide at the hands of the Czechs. He proposed an annexation referendum, overseen by the German army, though. The Czeks refused, France mobilized, so Hitler proposed a peace conference, at Munich, during which a piece of Czechoslovakia was given to Germany.

Putin’s discourse about a (completely imaginary) “genocide”in the Donbas is worse than Hitler’s raging statements about the Sudeten. A first attempt to propose a referendum of the Sudeten about annexation overseen by the German army was blocked by a war threat from France [1].   Hitler was given land at Munich in 1938… To appease him. 

That appeasement was not just a weakness, it gained time, the way France and the UK looked at it at the time (they were wrong). France and the UK did not have the USA with them, and Britain had basically no army (same as in 1914). The US was neither diplomatically, nor economically, nor politically or militarily with its parents, France and Britain. Roosevelt had named pro-fascist ambassadors to the UK and Germany, and hordes of US plutocrats were making the fascists regimes prosperous, well invested and fueled [2]. 

For many years, the New York Times, and other US media, did their best to ignore Hitler’s exactions, even while the German dictator was notoriously killing millions of minorities, and occupied democracies.

While Hitler was momentarily appeased, Britain was frantically equipping itself with a huge state of the art air force. France and the UK felt that time worked in their favor, militarily, because of their great empires.

Hitler invaded Austria in March, a day before a planned referendum on annexation by Germany (similar to Putin and his sham referenda).  After weakening Czechoslovakia militarily, grabbing its defense lines, Hitler invaded the rest. When getting ready to invade Poland, Hitler allied himself with the Kremlin (to add to his alliances with Italy, Japan and Spain). This time, France and the UK declared war.

The NYT, and pseudo-progressives paid by Putin, are at it again with the Kremlin nuclear tyrant: “If [giving part of Ukraine to Putin] happens, a territorial settlement will be reached and the global rules-based international order will be re-established”… bleats hopefully Mr. Brooks (who censored my comment contradicting his wish to give much of Ukraine to Putin) 

Appeasing a dictator who, because of his dreams of glory, threatened to extinguish humanity, is criminal nonsense. Putin is obsessed with taking Ukraine. Any negotiated settlement will just give him time to re-arm and return with greater force and greater threats. Feed Putin, like a bear, or a tiger, he will come back. The only way to end the threat is to eliminate Putin. If not eliminated, he will come back. 

***

Hitler had to keep on attacking, lest the German army and Volk turned against him: too many things, including democracy and the economy, had turned sour in Germany (same with Russia today). The exact parallel is true in Russia today: war powers protect a dictator. Given any piece of Ukraine, Putin will come for more, including the Baltic and Poland

The New York Times did its best to ignore Hitler’s exactions, even while the German dictator was notoriously killing millions of minorities, and occupied democracies.

The NYT is at it again with the nuclear tyrant; the NYT, and many other media, propose appeasement with Putin: “If [giving part of Ukraine to Putin] happens, a territorial settlement will be reached and the global rules-based international order will be re-established.” This is criminal nonsense. It’s akin to appeasing a rapist who threatened to kill the victim and onlookers, by proposing to him to rape the victim just a bit, to reestablish order. Putin is obsessed with taking Ukraine. Any negotiated settlement will just give him time to re-arm and return with greater force and greater threats. He will come back. The only way to end the threat is to eliminate Putin. If not eliminated, he will come back. 

***

We have an extremely similar situation now with what happened with Hilter and his fascist allies in 1937-1940. However, many have learned this history, and thus opted to act differently. This is why 27 European countries, including traditional neutrals such as Sweden and Switzerland are sending weapons to Ukraine. (Sweden and Switzerland helped Nazism for many years, often crucially), France is not taking orders from Biden, and yet, has switched to war production of many of its most sophisticated weapons, after sending 25% of its mobile high precision CAESAR guns to Ukraine.

The easiest way out of Nazism occurred in 1937 when the German High Command, led by General Beck, prepared a coup against Hitler. Stupidly, they searched for help in the Uk and US. The German army asked the US and UK to stand officially against Hitler (thus supporting France, Hitler’s dedicated enemy). The German army leaders would then make a coup, arguing to the German Volk that Hitler was an existential threat to Germany. 

 The best course for peace is then, as horrible as it may sound, to prepare for nuclear war. There is simply no alternative. Any concession to Putin is a concession to a group of criminals who threatened this week to “use strategic nuclear weapons against the West for their occupation of Ukraine“.

If the Russian army realizes Russia faces annihilation, it will make a coup.

If the West is ready to fight a nuclear exchange, the Russian army will find itself in the situation that German generals naively looked for in 1937: having a good excuse for a coup. So the West has to get ready, and has to scramble into world war mass production, especially of anti-missile systems [3] (which do exist; but recently the US had just one, around Washington, while France had eleven, and sent one to Romania to protect a major Franco-American base there…) 

Some will object that nuclear war is unthinkable, that I am thinking the unthinkable. But so did Putin, and for more than a decade. The strategy of going nuclear in a conventional conflict is called by Putin’s valets: “escalate to de-escalate“. There is little doubt that nuclear weapons should be unlawful. Only a few should be left, under UN supervision, in case a comet comes our way, or some rogue criminal organization develops weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, etc.), and needs to be taken out. An example of such a gang of criminals is the Putin gang. The UN has established that war crimes were committed, including rape, torture and execution of children as young as 4. Putin’s lovers, of which there are many throughout the West, have also to answer these crimes, which they approve of, by denying they happened, similarly to the most fanatical Nazis in 1945.

Their reasons are vile: we know Putin spent at least half a billion on infliuencers, worldwide. Those influencers using Kremlin propaganda should be jailed and prosecuted (in this order: this is the greatest war, we have to switch to military law and traitors to civilizations should be soped, that is, arrested.)

So we have a criminal gang, armed to the teeth with the world’s biggest arsenal of nukes. But nukes cost a lot of money to keep functioning as anticipated, and we have to rely upon the hope that there a re semi-decent individuals in the Russian military whose sadomasochism is not so high that they will try to destroy civilization. Meanwhile, scrambling for anti-missile systems, potential evacuation of cities, and reactivation of old Western nukes should be the order of the day.

As the old French saying has it:

“A la guerre, comme à la guerre”…

In war, as in war. 

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] The Czechs announced on 28 September 1938 that they rejected Hitler’s proposal of an annexation referendum (the  Godesberg Memorandum). France ordered the mobilization of 600,000 men. The Royal Navy was also mobilized the same day.

Hitler feared a war against Czechoslovakia, Britain and France. He agreed to Chamberlain’s proposal for a further meeting the next day, now at Munich, between four heads of government, Chamberlain for Britain, Hitler for Germany, Prime Minister Daladier for France and Mussolini for Italy, with no Czech (!!!) or Soviet participation. On 1 October, a pact was signed which provided for possession of the Sudeten Province to be transferred to Germany, with Britain and France guaranteeing the new borders of Czechoslovakia. On 1 October, German troops marched into the Sudetenland, which was immediately incorporated into Germany. Some 115,000 Sudeten Czechs and 30,000 Sudeten Germans, fled to what was left of Czechoslovakia. By 1 March 1939, the number of refugees,  including Social Democrats, Communists and Jews, was reported by the Institute for Refugee Assistance to stand at 150,000

***

[2]… to replace his friend the historian Dodd who thought war against Hitler was necessary. Throughout the war, US president FDR looked more interested in weakening France and Britain, and instrumentalized various fascists, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin to do so. Warning: this is nearly 100% in contradiction with the official version of history… But that version is wrong, and that’s demonstrated in many of my essays, detail after detail… 

***

[3] Western anti-missile systems do exist; but recently the US had just one (built in cooperation with Norway), around Washington DC, while France had eleven, and sent one to Romania to protect a major Franco-American base there…

 

France pursued a series of nuclear tests from 1966 through 1996 at Mururoa Atoll, French Polynesia. This photograph is from the 914-kiloton Licorne (Unicorn) test, July 3, 1970. Fangataufa is permanently uninhabited. It is classified as a Common Military Zone. The zone includes the lagoon areas enclosed by the atoll and by baselines linking the closest points emerging from the reef on both sides of the channel. Entry is prohibited without authorization. A standard strategic missile on a French SSBM submarine carries a higher destructive power than the bomb above (as it can spread 20% more power over a much larger area with ten warheads. The same SSBM can carry 16 such missiles. The US SSBM can carry even more missiles. Together, France, Uk, and US have 22 such submarines…

Anything Less Than Hating Putin Is Treason Against Civilization

Abstract: Hate, by itself is strong enough a motivation, in some human beings, to dominate any other consideration, or emotion. The roots of this psychobiology are millions years old This is why Hitler risked having a world war he couldn’t win: the world war enabled Hitler to feed his hatred. Putin is a similar individual, similarly motivated by hatred. His real aim, proximally, is not to win in the “Western” military sense, but to feed his hatred, and that means his hatred for the Ukrainian People, or all other “gnats” found inside Russia. Putin’s hate wants to eradicate the Ukrainian People. That some “Western” leaders do not understand this, although it’s happening in front of their eyes, is not just a civilizational problem, it’s a strategic problem.

***

During WW2, Churchill joked that he hated “nobody but Hitler… but that’s professional.” Well in retrospect the killing of 5% of humanity by Hitler (100 millions), directly, or through inciting allies, was well worth hating. Hate can be noble. At the last count, 17 millions civilians died in extermination camps, directly at the hands of the Nazis (including 6 million “Jews”). Many millions of other civilians died from other causes, and so did more than twenty million soldiers. Meanwhile in China, the other “master race” Hirohito’s devoted goons, killed another 40 million civilians or so. 

As Ukraine democratically elected president Zelinskyy said, “there are no words“… He had just been told by various “Western” authorities that sanctions would be increased if Putin used weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine… So basically the Ukrainian president was told to pray that Putin will use WMDs, and then Europeans would scratch a bit more sanctions in the direction of Putin (but no tanks, said a scared, uncivilized Macron, peeing in his pants, that would be going too far). As if the crimes against Humanity committed by Putin were not obvious enough, and as if Ukrainian cities had not been erased already…. Putin’s objective, long proclaimed, is to eradicate Ukraine… His apparently bungled military campaign achieves just that. Enlisting in the process the clueless “Western””leaders”, led by the nose by a crafty mass murdering monster.

Treason Against Civilization

So why did Hitler kill so many, including more than ten million ethnic Germans? Hate… Hate of Germans! Hate of self! Not just hate of Jews, Slavs, French, Russians, etc… Same with Putin!

When considering Hitler, and the holocaust he brought, pseudo-thinkers pontificate that one thing led to another, and there is somemerit to the idea. However, the Nazis themselves used that argument, somethig which should arose suspicion… The Nazis accused the French Republic to have caused World War Two, and thus the Holocaust, by intervening when Poland got attacked by Hitler…

This argument is superficially true, but neglects the fact that the Nazis had started mass executions in the name of humanity (the most ethnic way Nazis defined humanity!) before 1939. Also, the program of mass extermination of the Poles was formally (and secretly, of course) launched September 1, 1939, 56 hours or so before the French declaration of war (which took the top Nazi leadership by surprise, as it meant that France was simultaneously, by her own choice, at war with Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR, Spain, etc…).

But let’s get deeper in human, all too human, psychology, and discard Nazi logic. What were Hitler’s motivations? Yes Hitler exposed official motivations for threatening a world war: Germany needed to liberate, save and be reunified with oppressed German minorities (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Dantzig, Prussia, etc.). Nuclear tyrant Putin uses the exact same ethnic argument: he needs to be reunified and to save Russian and Slavic minorities all over… All the way to Kosovo! Even the Poles have to be saved from being converted to Catholicism!

However, doing so by force risked war: the main achievement of the Versailles Treaty had been the liberation from the subjugation of German speaking overlords of many nations of Eastern Europe. France was behind it. France’s preoccupation with Eastern Europe came all the way from Charlemagne. Roman emperor Augustus had said in his testament to never try it again. Trajan begged to differ, conquering Dacia, now called Romania (but the emperor suffered an early natural death). The conquest of Eastern Europe by Charlemagne had been a security, economic, and even financial achievement which had eluded the Roman state… and made it so that Europe has been unconquered ever since. 

Starting towards the end of Charlemagne’s rule, and as a consequence of it, directly and not,  the Viking invaded all over. In particular, the Varingians, coming out of southern and easter Sweden, created a state east of the “March” states of the Carolingian empire: Kyivan Rus. The Normans also established themselves all over Western Europe’s sea front, from Normandy to Sicily. France then allied herself with Ukraine (Eleventh Century), the highly educated, polyglot Kyivan princess became queen and ruled over what she viewed as the French savages.

All of this to say that Hitler, by fostering ethnic supremacy over Eastern Europe, was going against some of the deepest principles of European construction… Hitler the hater risked his puny military against the mighty French army. Thus Hitler took the challenge seriously and trained his army in Spain, crushing the local democracy. However the odds were against Germany in such a huge way that his own generals (some of them authentic Nazis!) plotted to “remove” (talking like Biden) in 1937… Indeed France was not alone, but fully united with her ex-vassal and creation, the United Kingdom… And then there was the looming question of that other French creation, the USA… An obvious potential rescuer of its own parents, France and Britain… 

Hitler’s generals may have been Nazi, but they didn’t feel suicidal, nor were they particularly interested in destroying Germany. That’s why they plotted in 1937 to get rid of the Nazis.

By not been conquered by the unifying Roman state, the German people were left to the tender mercies of tribalism,and obscurantism, making them more susceptible to the leadership of Luther and Hitler. Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler are inseparably linked with their extreme anti-Judaism, racism, and strident nationalism. It is impossible to assume that Luther did not have an enormous influence on Hitler, directly or not. Anti-Judaism was cultivated during the creation of Germany under Bismarck: unification through common hate.

But once again, the question remains: why the madness of engaging in a war Germany was most probably going to lose? First, because it was already tried in 1914. The  world war planned in 1912 by the Prussian high command, was launched in 1914, after a sort of US encouragement (riding the Sarajevo incident and its consequences as a pretext and coverup). For Germany to win that world war, the Prussian High Command decided to follow a strict schedule: first defeat France, then defeat Russia, and finally Britain. That rested on the military mobilizations: France had a large and ferocious army, readily mobilized. Russia had a gigantic army, but obsolete and extremely slow to mobilize (a month, not days). “Britain had no army” (as Lord Kichener, UK defense secretary, put it): it would take many months for the UK to draft an army.

So the German world war plan of 1914 was foolhardy. Hitler’s plan was even more foolhardy: it assumed that France and Britain would calmly wait until 1945, when Hitler was ready to wage a world war… Because in 1914, France and Britain were clearly not getting ready for war, by being extremely unwilling to wage war, calculating then that Germany would not miscalculate. Instead, Germany calculated carefully that the impreparation of Britain, France and Russia made a surprise world war win possible.   

Hitler, self-persuading that democracies were cowardly, unwilling and degenerate, thought that, like the German generals of 1914, it would be in his power to choose the day world war will start. Instead, France and Britain declared war to him on September 3, 1939, six years before the Nazis planned to be ready to fight them.

Putin made a roughly similar calculation, after the debacle of Afghanistan, the insistence of Biden and his partisans that Trump was too rough, and the pushing back of weapons deliveries to Ukraine in 2021, to not irritate the ruler of the Kremlin.

So Hitler took the risk. However, a cursory look at the numbers would have shown him that the military might of France and Britain left no chance whatsoever to Germany (the defeat of France in may-June 1940 was caused by the confluence of several extraordinary events, including, but not limited to betrayals of various sorts). 

Moreover, France and Britain were backed up by gigantic empires powerful economically and militarily (Senegalese troops in 1918 were extremely feared and hated by the Germans)… Let alone their rambunctious child on the other side of the Atlantic.

But Hitler hated. Yes, he hated the Jews. But he also hated the Slavs, the French, the Germans, and himself. After Pearl Harbor, in a fit of hatred supreme, Hitler declared war on the world economic superpower, the USA (right, he had something to be angry about: the US military industrial complex had been feeding the UK and the USSR).  

Salvador Dali said Hitler launched world war two, just to lose it. This is not exactly what happened, but close. Hitler didn’t mind to go down in defeat as much as being able to express his hatred

For years, Hitler, like Putin, was driven by hate. The origins of these two buffoons is somewhat similar: somewhat difficult events in their childhoods and early adulthoods. Hitler was destitute, rejected, WW1 saved him, but also the French nearly killed him. Putin was put back in a more modest place by the KGB twice at least, and presided over the debacle of the fall of the Iron Curtain in his KGB office… Burning papers frantically… Putin was very clear that the fall of the USSR was worse than any Holocaust or World War… Putin’s hate is as clear as Hitler’s anger. Hate is, of course, worse than anger…

Underestimating hate is the shortcoming of traditional humanism. The silly ones come around and ask: what is hate good for? Well, hate fosters the continuation of the species, by periodically culling it, so that the ecology the human species needs can survive. That makes hate a crucial safety mechanism of humanity.

But of course now we can turn around hate, by diminishing the ecological load with more advanced techs, for example by augmenting considerably the area at our disposal, with the colonization of Mars, the Moon, Vesta, etc…

Hate has become obsolete… But Russia is owned by a hater, and haters such as him and Xi prevent the advancement of tech… except of course, when democracies make new weapons to defeat them… By preventing the advancement of tech, hateful tyrants create the very ecology which makes them prosper…

Patrice Ayme  

The FASCIST, PLUTOCRATIC KAISER TRAP: Why Germany Attacked The World In 1914. And Why The Madness In The Kremlin, Also Entrapped By Its Own Evil And Degeneracy.

Germany was wealthy, ever more wealthy, the world’s most literate country in 1914, one of the four most advanced technological-scientific countries in the world, and Germany was ascending in all ways which its leadership considered important.

Germany had the world’s most powerful army in 1914, and a colonial empire spread around the world. So why did Germany deliberately decide to launch a risky world war in 1914? It was a war so risky that timing was everything to give it a chance of success: first the most dangerous adversary, France, had to be destroyed, before Russia could seriously intervene, and then, be in turn destroyed. Finally Britain, and her gigantic empire, and indomitable Royal Navy, somehow, would be beaten into submission, thanks to a large serving of wishfull thinking, which somehow included avoiding the stranglehold of a naval blockade of necessary war materials [1]. (Just as Persia with Sparta, a helpful plutocratic America stood ready to help.)

A national mass psychological mechanism, psychotic fascism, explains what happened to Germany in 1914: the KAISER TRAP, or, to name it by another of its aspects, the FASCIST, PLUTOCRATIC TRAP. A vicious, militaristic dictatorial oligarchy entraps itself in a situation where only an apocalyptic war can reveal to itself and the world that it should keep on ruling. Proof of goodness through natural selection, the right of survivorship. Otherwise said dictatorship would be condemned to disappear down into the trap of history.

The fascist Kaiser trap was in plain view by the 1880s, even from the German point of view: Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher, philologist and historian, wrote hundreds of pages hyper critical of the new and developing German character, brutal, insensitive, anti-Semitic, explicitly saying it would cause the greatest wars in the following century, and that this new German nationalism was the worst version of humanity imaginable.

Historians with various agendas upon which their livelihoods depend, have minimized the confluence of factors affecting the German plutocracy. Typically, the plutocratic establishment of “experts” these esteemed historians belong to, are keen to present the established order that they are supposed to serve as something which is not what it is, namely a plutocracy. As it would look bad to admit that a plutocracy deliberately started World War One, in a last dish attempt to stay in power longer, they just deny, or underestimate, it at every turn. 

But the logic is clear: we actually have contemporaneous statements of the main actors concerned, who were in command of the Prussian-German military, or even of the German Chancellor (who also wanted war in 1914). Those statements of German leaders are crystal clear: Russia and France are getting stronger all the time, their potential powers are much greater than the Kaiserreich. Thus, as time goes by, Germany will get relatively weaker, militarily speaking. Thus the time to act is now.

While being very explicit on the factors which brought them there, on December 8, 1912, the leaders of Germany, led by the Kaiser, decided to launch a world war within 18 months. The head of the German army Von Molkte the Younger, wanted to start the war in May 1914…. (when, happily enough, US presidential confidante and adviser Colonel House came around for the first time, proposing a “racial alliance”, against France, enabling the Germans to hope for US help…. parricidal against the democracies, but under the cover of morally elevated “neutrality”). 

The fascist Kaiser Trap explains how and why many dictatorial countries, especially when they are successful militarily, march to war. That very success, the march to war of such a military dictatorship, gathering ever more military power, at the detriment of the rest, makes the military tyranny vulnerable in all other ways [2].  And increasingly so, until the dictatorship’s military core, ruined by their degeneracy outside of the dictatorship outside of the military domain, in aprt from a lack of openness, thus intelligence, is finally gnawed at by the general fascist and corrupt gangrene eating society alive.

An example of this is occured with the Soviet Union after it dissolved in 1991: the entire socioeconomy, including the military capability of Russia collapsed.

An oligarchy controlling the media and a powerful army, establishes a social, mental and economic order centered on military performance. The future is grim for the fascist society, if more democratic neighbors are advancing in all other ways: more open societies, more open minds, more potential social and economic developments, thus greater intelligence, and ultimately the basis for much more powerful empires. This is the essence of the KAISER TRAP.

There is evidence that the generals accomplices with the Kaiser in plotting for war, really thought, as they saw their own old age arrive, that it was the last chance to use the instrument of war they had forged during their entire lives (clearly Putin, in a similar fashion, aware that the youth cares less about his humongous Slavic empire as he does, is also afraid that what he worked for his entire life will not be bequeathed as the magnificent art it is. So he has to act now.)  

The temptation is then for the tyranny to use its military, as it is still dominant, to physically destroy the more open minded neighbors… before they get too strong.

***

An explanation for war called the “Thucydides Trap” has become fashionable, according to which a dominant power challenged by an ascending one gets frightened by its challenger and thus goes to war. It is simplistic, fails to explain fully the war it purports to explain [3]… 

Moreover, the Thucydides Trap clearly doesn’t apply to Germany 1914. Germany attacked, just as Sparta attacked… But Sparta was relatively weakening, and allegedly afraid (said Athenian general Thucydides, perhaps self-serving…) Whereas, in 1914, Germany was ascending and all too unafraid [3]. Sparta was attacking Athens, a power much greater than itself, whereas Germany was attacking France, which was half its size, demographically… And Germany viewed itself as superior to France in all ways which mattered. Thus the need for another logic to describe the psychological march to war in 1914. Understanding it is urgent as a new Kaiser prepares for war, and doesn’t seem to see any other future, otherwise. 

Why do military dictatorship feel the urge to go to war? Because of this Fascist Trap: it applies to the Russian oligarchy around Putin, a “guy with nukes and no friends” (said US president Joe Biden, Feb. 2022). That fascist trap, applies, in 2022, to a kaiser, or czar. and could bring a war potentially catastrophic not just to Europe, but the world. Putin has under its command more than 6,000 nuclear weapons, roughly 20 times what is needed to utterly destroy the USA and launch a devastating nuclear winter. 

As Putin said, speaking of Ukraine: “Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty,“. In the Kaiser Trap, the dictator seeing no other way avoiding a deliberate weakening and self-denial, opts to do what he did his entire life:  justifying the horrible person he is by abusing and destroying others some more, and winning with it… as happemed before.

***

Patrice Ayme

*** 

[1] An old lie is that all nations of Europe marched blindly to war in 1914, like drunk blind men falling into a ditch in the dark. This weaponized myth accuses all European nations, thus Europe in general, to have caused the war.

Writing his memoirs in the 1930s, PM David Lloyd George described the outbreak of war in 1914 as a tragic accident. No power had wanted conflict, wrote the man who had been UK Prime Minister from 1916 to 1918, but governments had ended up “backing … over the precipice” into war. This apparently expert view contradicted the so-called “war guilt clause” of the 1919 treaty of Versailles, signed by Germany and the Allies, which stated that “the aggression of Germany and her allies” was responsible for the war.

In truth, fascist Germany, which was barely 40 years old, carefully planned a world war, over a period of years, and was looking for a pretext to launch an attack. All the other powers, even Austria-Hungary, were taken by surprise. The US party of “neutrality” (basically the party claiming France = Germany in 1914, or 1939…) was actually pro-fascist probably for racist reasons; and example is found in essays defending US president FDR’s discrete love for Nazi Germany).

[2] Nietzsche, Einstein, and other gifted youth had to flee Germany when it turned in to a hyper militarized, war-ready society.

[3] The “Thucydides Trap” concept was invented to describe the evolution of the conflict with China. It doesn’t apply there either. In the case of the Peloponesian war, there were two causes: the Thucydides Trap, and the Fascist Trap, boosted by the Deus Ex Machina Trap of Persia helping Sparta to break Athens…

Look and Learn: the Kaiser, on the left, with Kronprinz to his immediate left and his five other sons. The Kaiser, in January 1913, three weeks after having decided to launch an exquisitely timed world war in 1914. Part of the plan was to use German newspapers to. prepare the German Volk for a wolrd war… similar to what Putin has been doing in Russia.

A Bad Assassination By Plutocrats, For Plutocrats: Che Guevara

I have been highly critical of the excesses of Athens in defending herself during the Peloponnesian War (Such as the infamous holocaust of Mylo, with its grotesque justification). And I exceriorate tyrants such as Constantine, Napoleon, Louis XIV, Kaiser WII, Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, etc. for their human rights destruction. So it may seem strange my war against Islamism goes as far as approving the execution of a few Islam Fundamentalist terrorists (while being mild with Saudi’s MBS… although he is embarked on mass lethal war in Yemen, and a questionable relationship with assassinating an editorialist of the Washington Post…).

Well, I am far from approving all the activities of the US armed forces and secret services. I am not just talking about the Banana wars of the 1920s, 30s, in service of plutocrats, which the head of the US Marine Corps, Major General Butler then correctly decried. The assassination of Che Guevara (see below) is more of the same. See:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/military-industrial-complex-a-necessary-danger-to-civilization/

But also of more obscure actions, such as lawyer Donovan, soon to found the OSS, going to Yugoslavia in July 1941 to foment trouble against the Nazis… something that resulted in the death of more than a million Yugoslavs… ultimately just to extend the US world empire, on the cheap.) The list of various exaction campaigns perpetrated by the US government against other nations is in the hundreds… However, fighting Islamism (instead of using it as was long done, starting in the 1930s) is a good thing… And the USA has finally joined France on the correct side of the struggle against a superstition justifying sexism, stupidification, terror and dictatorship

***

Eliminating Soleimani was a question of world public security:

Major General Soleimani of Iran, an authentic war hero, and an imminent (mass) killer was a master Islamist general. Soleimani was excellent at using both Suni and Shiite, even arming them against each other, his Quds force pulling the strings. The end result was a projection of Iranian Islamist power westward, greatest, arguably, since the Eight Century.

One lesson of history is that Islamist military adventures have to be taken seriously. The diminutive Arab Islamist power quickly destroyed several large empires, including Zoroastrian Sassanid Persia, and half of Rome, in a few years, in perhaps the greatest military feat of history.

Soleimani promoted Islam, an ideology most successful, precisely because it is most friendly to dictators.

***

Che Dead

… Whereas Che Guevara promoted, however violently and idiotically, the struggle against inequality… a much better cause: 

However, those of Marxist inspiration tend to use dictatorial means, as promoted by Marx (following in a sense, Julius Caesar…)

Che’s hysterical ideology advocated exporting “revolution” to any country whose leader is supported by the empire (the United States) while falling out of favor with its peasants. Guevara talks about how constant guerrilla warfare taking place in non-urban areas can overcome (plutocratic) leadership. That was, and is, eminently stupid, and not supported by the facts, poor peasantry being militarily important, potentially, only in very few countries… and thus, that’s not what happened where revolutions worked!

***  

I always was against the execution of Che Guevara. It was an extra-judicial assassination, the way it happened, with nothing to justify it. The Che failed in Bolivia, because there had been a redistribution of land to poor peasants in 1950s. Thus the Che found himself alone, with little to no support, hunted by the CIA and its trained helpers. Bolivia was still replete with racism and massive inequality (I have lived there, long ago)… But that Bolivian racism and inequality could be endured… whereas the mix of dictatorship, Mafia, United Fruits and US exploitation in the 1950s Cuba was not tolerable; so Castro and Che succeeded in Cuba, not Bolivia, for the same reason that revolution could succeed in Russia, not the USA.

The ongoing threat posed by Che Guevara to Bolivia was nonexistent (nearly 2,000 soldiers trapped his little band of 17 famished guerillas; a goat shepherd Bolivian woman had apparently revealed their whereabouts…). One could safely have detained him, indefinitively, there was no human reason to assassinate him (officially CIA was against it). It was a crime, and that is why the Che was assassinated, precisely because it was a crime. US plutocrats involved in latin America and their CIA helpers were all for a reign of terror.

The CIA denied having killed Che. But, a few years after the crime, as it turned out, I talked with the Bolivian Justice minister. He told me: “There was nothing we could do. Our hands were completely tied. And it’s true to this day. We do exactly what the US tell us to do.” I didn’t realize at the time how exceptional that exchange was. I was direct eyewitness to history (and the lying snakes).

***

In this 1967 photo provided by Felix Rodriguez, CIA agent and US soldier Rodriguez, left, is shown with (still alive!) Che Guevara, center, before Guevara was executed in Bolivia. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Felix Rodriguez)

According to Rodriguez, this was all very personal, as his family had suffered in Cuba from Che and his ilk……

Another eyewitness of the general scene, shortly after Che’s execution, thinks Rodriguez killed Che. There are official orders, and then there are real orders.

Newsweek, 10/9/2017: 

“A White House memorandum signed by Walt Whitman Rostow, national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, also attributed the order to kill Guevara to Bolivian military leader General Alfredo Ovando Candía. “I regard this as stupid,” Rostow wrote about the execution order, adding, “but it is understandable from a Bolivian standpoint.”

Two American human and civil rights lawyers however didn’t believe the CIA role could be so easily dismissed. In their book Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder, Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith reviewed previously unpublished documents from CIA, White House, State and Defense Departments and argued the CIA wanted and expected Guevara to be killed, if captured.

“The line of the government was that: ‘The Bolivians did it as we couldn’t do anything about it.’ That isn’t true. This whole operation was organized out of the White House by Walt Whitman Rostow and the CIA,” Smith told Democracy Now in 2012.

“The U.S. wanted Che dead because that was the way to end revolutionary fervour in Latin America and around the world,” Ratner added.”

The US wanted Che dead, because the US government at the time, did exactly what US plutocrats making a lot of money in Latin America told it to do. Now they make less money, and, say, China, has become much more profitable (until the apparition of the demoniac Trump, that is…)

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was born to a well-off family in Argentina in 1928. While studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, he took time off to travel around South America on a motorcycle; he witnessed the poverty and oppression of the lower classes. He received his medical degree in 1953 and continued his travels around Latin America, becoming involved with left-wing organizations, making a big noise that he couldn’t g. In the mid 1950s, Guevara met up with Fidel Castro and his group of exiled revolutionaries in Mexico. Guevara played a key role in Castro’s seizure of power from Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Che served as Castro’s right-hand man and minister of industry. Guevara strongly opposed U.S. domination in Latin America and advocated peasant-based revolutions to combat social injustice in Third World countries. Castro later described him as “an artist of revolutionary warfare.”

Guevara resigned—some say he was dismissed—from his Cuban government post in April 1965, possibly over differences with Castro about the nation’s economic and foreign policies: Cuba abandoned Guevara’s plans for economic diversification and rapid industrialization, and instead became a part of the Soviet empire. Guevara then disappeared from Cuba, traveled to Africa, feeding the war in Angola, and eventually resurfaced in Bolivia, where he was killed (after failing to do his homework, as I said above).

***

October 9th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. 

Only one person witnessed Che’s death: the executioner himself, Bolivian Army Sergeant Mario Terán.  “Know that you are killing a man,” Che told him. “Now shoot here, dammit.”  The latter order refers to Che’s exhorting his reluctant killer to aim the rifle at the chest.  The president of Bolivia, René Barrientos, had already announced Che’s death in the previous day’s battle.  The mortal wounds had to appear related to a battle, not an execution. It seems that many of those who took part in Che’s death were latter tracked by Cuban agents. What is certain is that were killed.

Terán was forgiven by Cuba and given free cataract surgery.

***

Some Cuban exiles still hate Che, accusing him of extrajudicial executions. I am skeptical of these accusations, considering what we know of his later adventures, more characterized by naivety than anything else.

Si Vis Pacem, Para Scientiam: Science For War, War For Science

Si Vis Pacem, Para Scientiam? If you want peace, prepare for science? The original Latin proverb is: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. If you want peace, prepare war. Cute, but not enough. My proverb is more to the point.

At first the original Roman proverb, want peace, prepare war, sounds pretty deep, in the philosophy of military science, and so did I feel, for decades…

However, in the end the Romans were defeated. They didn’t get defeated once, or a few times, and then ultimately won the wars… As the Franks/French did so many times. No, the Romans, starting under Marcus Aurelius, started to lose… and lose, and lose, didn’t not recover very well, and finally, two centuries later, by 406 CE, four years before the fall of Rome to the Goths, the empire was riddled with armed German nations [1].  

So the proverb was nearly right, thus still wrong, a near-miss, the equivalent of the big splash the Bismarck succeeded to land next to one of the two British battleships assaulting it, drenching the command deck of its enemy… but failing to score. The British did score, though, and, within minutes, the Bismarck had lost the ability to aim its fire, becoming just a big fat target for the Brits.

By 406 CE, the Roman empire was also a big fat target for the Barbarians. To try to defeat the Goths later, the Romans had to muster an army mostly made of Huns at Toulouse. The Goths still won and killed the Roman general. That defeat of  Litorius was in 439 CE. In 451 CE, after being chased and harassed by a Frankish army, a coalition of Franks, Goths and Romans (under the plausibly double dealing generalissimo Aetius) defeated the Huns spectacularly.

Clearly the Romans were fighting a lot, prepared or not, and prepared to this mess, they were not. Something deeper had gone very wrong. Actually Aetius was assassinated later in palace intrigue.   

Because they only prepared for war, the Romans lost to the other guys, because the other guys had also prepared for war; the Parthians, then the Sassanids, and finally, worse of all, the Arabs. The Romans should have prepared for (more) science.

Greek fire was a sort of napalm spewed from metallic machines which could spew enormous fire at great range, from 15 meters to up to 450 meters when loaded on catapults. In the first battle which saved Constantinople, more than 2,000 Arab ships were destroyed, and only seven (7) survived! There was a repeat of that latter. Then the Arabs launched the plan of taking Constantinople from behind (as the Turks would o, seven centuries later!). So the Arabs conquered North Africa, Spain… Only to see three successive invasions of Francia crushed to smithereens, causing the fall of Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus… Greek fire was used to destroy the Arab fleet in the Gulf of Saint Tropez in the Tenth Century, while a Frankish army was pressing inland on the Muslim redoubt at la Garde Freinet. The Arabs never figured out how it worked… And we still don’t know, actually, so well guarded was the secret. In comparison, how to make nuclear bombs is no secret…

Greek Fire had saved the Oriental empire. It was then superseded by black powder. French engineers (more exactly the Bureau brothers) were able to make field guns, guns which could be wheeled into a moving battlefield, with which twenty years after roasting Joan of Arc, the “100” Year War was won…

To make sure one will win, one doesn’t just need overwhelming force [2]. One needs overwhelming smarts. Heraclius, the Roman emperor who defeated the Sassanids, was one of humanity’s greatest generals, achieving an incredible Blitzkrieg. However, Heraclius had fallen ill and was unable to personally lead his armies to resist the Arab conquests of Syria and Roman Paelestina in 634 (he was sick in Alexandria). An incredibly stupid tactical engagement of the vastly superior Roman army, in a place that put it at a heavy disadvantage, using impatient, foolhardy tactics, led to its defeat by the much smaller (40,000) Arab army. The Arabs then did something no one expected: they killed all males in age of bearing arms. (So here we are!)

But the really deep question is: why had it become a fair fight between Romans and Barbarians? How come Barbarians had achieved military technological equality? In short: because Rome had become a stupid dictatorship. Excuse the pleonasm: all dictatorships are stupid, my dear Marx! 

What keeps the peace nowadays? Some erroneously believe that’s because we are all so civilized. They look at the plutocrats who feed them to say such inanities, and they love themselves for being so smart.  A casual look at leading politicians show that this is not the case: civilization is not improving, just Machiavellianism (as happened in Late Rome). 

Peace is kept, because the three leading military powers of the West have no interest to wage war; they already have what they want, profit from the status quo… And the leading Western military powers have had, recently, huge military technological superiority (now quickly fading, though…) 

***

“Fourth Spy Unearthed in U.S. Atomic Bomb Project
His Soviet code name was Godsend, and he came to Los Alamos from a family of secret agents.”

The New York Times just ran an article exposing still one more spy at the heart of the Manhattan project, the nuclear bomb. A spy no one knew existed before, a physicist who was spying with the apparent help of his brothers. When the spies fled to the USSR in the early fifties, the FBI kept it secret (to keep the existence of its own informants secret). 

In any case, the Manhattan project leaked a lot; there were a lot of “Communists” at the time among intellectuals (“Communist” meant, in practice, at the time, infeodated to the fascist Stalin…) Carried over, the ebullient PM Churchill wanted to imprison indefinitively the top French atomic scientists… because they knew so much [3] 

The Manhattan project’s ancestor was launched in France in January 1938, thanks to the discovery by Nobel Irene Curie of the nuclear chain reaction with U235. [6]

Differently from the French, German scientists didn’t know a bomb was possible. French scientists and their plans fled to Britain, part of the materials was sheltered underground with the Crown Jewels, then the entire project transferred to Canada and the US. 

Secrecy in military matters is crucial: had the Nazis known in 1938 what the French knew, they would have developed a nuclear bomb. A better way to slow down neutrons was found (boron); then Plutonium created in reactors, the implosion pit invented with neutron triggers, etc. Lots of crucial details.

Too much Western (military) tech flows to the regime of dictator Xi, through armies of dual use spies, and Chinese investment in universities related startups.

Military superiority of (representative pseudo-) democracy, is a war the West can’t lose against blatant dictatorships. Rome, initially equipped with Gallic (!) weaponry, lost military superiority to Parthians, Sassanids, Goths. Yet, 

Constantinople was saved by Gregian fire (700 CE). Ever since Franks and their successors kept military technological superiority; that’s how the West (“democracy”) won!

Science for war, war for science. It has been going for millions of years. Progress doesn’t come cheap. It first have to fight those who want none. For a whole bunch of reasons. From the prosaic, to the most petty [4]. Those in power find progress hard, because, by definition, it means a move forward (forward (pro)-walk (gradi)), Any move is a threat to the establishment [5].

Science, and the scientific method, are as old as the genus Homo (and certainly older). How many today could go naked in the bush, and survive? Not many, because they don’t know much, starting with making and feeding fire… War rewards smarts, and reciprocally. Is it mean, is it hopeless? No, it just is. Science is about what is, and war about creating more of what is [7].

Progress is not innocuous: it’s a war, war against the unknown, war against the certainties of the past, and an understanding moving forward. In any case, it messes minds up, and many don’t like that… Especially when someone else starts the mess [8]. Well, they will still be pushed out of the way…

Ultimately, the giant walls of Constantinople fell to the giant guns of the Muslim invader. And a civilization fell. Did the famed (and imaginary) “Muslim science” (Islamophiles love to promote) succeed that feat? No. The engineers who made those guns were Hungarians. The assault troops who stormed Constantinople were “Janaissaries” Islamized slaves who had been captured as the Christian boys they were… and then brainwashed, imprinted, indoctrinated, and made offers they couldn’t refuse (everything they want, or impalement).

Dictatorships don’t play nice. Later printing was enough to earn the death penalty in Turkey, and that lasted centuries (in France too, but only if unauthorized, and it didn’t last; thanks Francois I for that). Right now the West’s technology is leaking to Xi, a dictator (he says it himself…) OK, maybe he is a “friend” of Trump, but that is still no excuse, let alone a guarantee, and the West should meditate the preceding…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Ironically, in the Seventh Century, after a horrendous war, the Romans, launching themselves south from Armenia, destroyed the Sassanids. However, this is just after this that the crafty Muhammad attacked… an exhausted Roman army, and a devastated Sassanid army and schizoid, civil war government. So, weirdly, Roman triumph was quickly followed by the destruction and occupation of ⅔ of the empire… 

***

[2] Overwhelming force failed during the Battle of France of 1940: all together, it looked as if France and Britain couldn’t be defeated. And actually the French Foreign Legion had put to flight, after two combined air-sea landings, elite Nazi divisions to flight in Norway. At the famous Midway battle. A small US fleet sank a more than twice bigger, in aircraft carriers alone Japanese fleet (and the Japs had a whole battleship fleet on top of that).

***

[3] Irene Curie and company were indeed dedicated Communists… until at the world intellectual Communist Congress in 1953 the Soviet delegate called Sartre a “dactylographic hyena”… The French delegation, headed by Irene, stormed out…

***

[4] A friend of mine a research Quantum Computing pure mathematician with chair and all the bells and whistles, medals and paid CO2 travelling, sent me a cartoon of Scott Aaronson, a revered figure of Quantum Computing software. The idea, apparently was to make fun of the ideas I proposed on Quantum and Brain. I am used to being made fun in that domain (50 years and counting)… And I sort of count Penrose among my students, so I am used to scoff.

However, why are paid intellectuals so motivated to be offensive to others, even at the price of being idiotic? It’s the old monkey coming out. They are looking for prestige, and want to pull rank. It’s not enough that they are paid to think. It’s even actually, a secret flaw: in spite of all the honors, isn’t it what prostitute do? Money for posing?

Oh, and the cartoon shows Aaronson either doesn’t know Quantum Physics at undergraduate level, or doesn’t hesitate to mislead the public about it… Just to claim he has the awe and mystery, with his Quantum computing algorithm, and others have not. Hopefully more on this later… Got me to think about the axioms of Quantum Physics…

***

[5] This is why the establishment hates Trump so much; because he moves things, and ask why is it the son of Biden gets diamonds from a Chinese plutocrat? And the like. Amusingly, when Macron started to tax tech giants at 3% revenue (as yours truly had begged for for more than a decade…), Trump went all enraged… But apparently Macron was able to talk him out of reprisals against France… Trump, a pure product of the financial establishment and its entanglement with subsidized construction, has been so vilified over the years, that he turned into an enemy of the establishment, where it hurts. The opposite can happen, the most famous case being Perikles… who ended up passing anti-immigrant laws who hurt Athens and himself, and were completely contradictory to the start of his political career… Also, he destroyed Athens in the guise of saving it… Powerful men turn into rogue rockets at the drop of a pin. That’s why we should organize the world to do without them…

***

[6] Maybe because I pointed out the origin of the Manhattan project in France, the New York Times censored my comment in the article linked above. But that was so true the nuclear business with Norway was probably a factor in Hitler’s invasion. In any case, when Norway fell to the Nazis, so full of spies Norway was, that the flight carrying, supposedly, heavy water to France was intercepted by the Luftwaffe. However, French agents had secretly transferred the heavy water into another plane on the airfield, and the heavy water escaped the Nazis…  Long live the new York Times and its Uber Alles view of history!

***

[7] Civilization, as it is, was created by war (in particular, the USA, in its extravagant beauty). The PC establishment doesn’t want to be reminded of that, because it’s sponsored by the plutocratic establishment, which itself, would prefer to see everybody asleep, far from any rebellious passion…

***

[8] I have seen individuals who make a show to project equanimity, gravitas get all enraged… when I proposed to change something to the US Constitution… It’s funny how something so small spiritually can engage minds: Homo takes thinking seriously, even fatally… That’s actually a strength of the species as it provides an environment in which mental progress can thrive…

 

 

 

 

WANT HUMAN? FREE TRUTH! Instead, San Francisco Promotes Lying, While Hating History, Reality

GAFA AGE SAN FRANCISCO IS READY TO SPEND HUGELY TO DESTROY US HISTORY!  

Teaching US Children the USA Was Wonderful In The Past, Knew Neither Slavery, Nor Genocide, and big bad imperialistic white men: Curiously, and infuriatingly, this has become a (pseudo) progressive agenda. Or when false and fake progressives reveal their true nature.

***

The San Francisco school board unanimously decided to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to DESTROY it. Destruction of historical art is paramount for San Francisco leaders, so as to deny, and definitively erase, the reality of what happened in the USA: slavery and genocide. According to the SF School Board, US high school students should never be exposed to such notions.

In other words, San Francisco wants to succeed where the Nazis failed: claim there was never any holocaust, no slavery. Especially not in the US. Nothing to see, nothing to learn, for ever and ever, during the great San Francisco 1,000 Year Uber Reich. 

***

The Terror Of Politically Correct Self-Contradicting Imbeciles:

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told the New York Times that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

So, according to this foolish reasoning, the way to “repair” what happened in Auschwitz and several thousands other Nazi extermination camps, is to erase all memory, and any traces of it. Washington and Hitler would become great men of history, who never engaged in racism, slavery and holocausts.

Those pseudo-”progressive” people as on this school board, are truly so stupid that they are becoming insane. 

Why insane? Because they want progress, but then they claim the past was perfect. So why to progress? From a perfect past? And since when can we progress from lies alone?

In a typical posture of his, Washington, as depicted in the mural San Francisco would pay any price to destroy, orders to proceed with “Manifest Destiny”, genocide, slavery, all the blood and injustice which made the US as it is. No good US citizen should ever know that real factual truth about the Founding Fathers, say the Snow Flakes. And that the USA was established through the most successful genocidal holocaust in the history of humanity. At least this is what the school board of San Francisco believe. Hitler would have gone to their feet and embrace them.

New York Times: 

“These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.

And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal. John M. Strain, an English teacher, told The Times’s Carol Pogash that his students “feel bad about offending people but they almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”

Which makes one wonder who these bureaucrats actually seek to protect. Is it the students? Or could it also be their reputations, given that those in favor of preserving the murals are being smeared as racists?”

The work was made by a famous Communist artists, and it is 80 years old (that’s antique by California standards). The short of it is that the San Francisco Bay Area, long at the forefront of thinking, is now wrecked by the mentality of avid greedsters, who know only one thing that is greater than greed, and this is to cover-up what they are really doing. They want to erase any suspicion that they are what they truly are. So they scream they are anti-racist, or, as Google used to, order us “not to be evil”. This all started with Reaganism [1]

In this mural, African origin slaves can be observed. Female black ladies slaves are working the cotton fields in the background. So it was. The WPA paid for the work and the artist had been taught by the great Mexican master of social consciousness rising throughs murals, Diego Rivera. The WPA was the Work Progress Administration, crucial part of the New Deal, full of socialists, leftists and outright communists.

The Murals of Washington High were detested by the McCarthyists, but there was never any talk of destroying them. That was inconceivable. One didn’t destroy art, even in Nixon-McCarthy witch hunt USA.

New York Times: “By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

Victor Arnautoff, the Russian immigrant who made the paintings in question, was perhaps the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the Depression. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he had the opportunity to make some enduring public artworks. Among them is “City Life” in Coit Tower, in which the artist painted himself standing in front of a newspaper rack conspicuously missing the mainstream San Francisco Chronicle and packed with publications like The Daily Worker.

Arnautoff, who had assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico, was a committed Communist. “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me,” he said in 1935. “The artist is a critic of society.”

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

***

Fighting the Red Coats, Burning Tea And Currency… More Washington High Murals

Washington was heir of a prominent military English American family. He owned hundreds of slaves. Urged by his friend and savior Lafayette to free them, Washington used weasel words, in correspondence with him, for years, to shirk his responsibility. New York Times:

“In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth about American history.”

Before any mental creation comes truth. Truth is established from real facts, not fake news, and big lies. Yesterday’s facts rule today’s horrors. If one wants to eradicate the latter, one has to understand the former.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/wrong-history-wrong-philosophy-nazi-lies-still-ruling-in-2015/

It is a fact that the North American English colony was founded, and prospered, thanks to genocide and slavery. Slavery was initially that of the whites (indentured servants), but, after a few years slavery became that of  Native Americans, and then imported Africans. Slavery permitted industrial culture of tobacco which made the English Colony highly profitable. Genocide was encouraged by New England cities which paid for Native scalps. Land was gained, one scalp at a time.    

Those brutal, homicidal social structures were transmitted to the USA, which pursued slavery and genocide on an even greater scale. That’s somewhat known… But other facts have been forgotten: the argument has been made that the true motivation of the American War of Independence was not the scandal of taxation without representation, but the fact that British authorities prevented European colonists to invade Native American lands (such as the Ohio Valley where Colonel Washington had important investments). Surely partisans of the established order will not entertain such a possibility.   

Are the facts of English American colonization, and of the USA for much of its history terrible? Yes. But the only thing more terrible than terrible history is to deliberately deny it ever happened. Happened. Indeed, the USA was born in extreme violence and that explains why, to this day, for example in health care or guns, or extreme inequality, extreme violence is felt to be the normal order of things.

In Nazi Germany, the Holocaust of the Jews was rendered possible only because the (Nazi) authorities succeeded to hide the truth enough from most of the German population that plausible denial could be brandished. The will to hide the truth is as inhuman as it gets: indeed, it defeats the essence of human beings, who are truth machines (Eat enough mice, and truth will come out). 

Truth can be, often is, inhuman, it’s most human to uncover it… And then one needs to explain it, prior to re-engineer the reality that truth was depicting into something more humane. There is nothing more important to teach to children… through countless examples. 

Instead, nowadays, a mood has arisen that truth should be hidden, guided by the will to total comfort all the time: hedonism gone mad, not just lazy. This deplorable mentality is what is needed to keep on going with the mass extinction of the biosphere, doing nothing about it.

That mood festers particularly in the San Francisco Bay, a land of contradiction. How come so many contradictions? Think of it: to commit a crime, it’s generally easier, or even necessary, to hide it, so one needs a cover-up. The cover-up is best, when it completely hides reality. So crimes and cover-ups denying them tend to cohabit. And the more, and deeper the crimes, the more outrageous and extensive the cover-ups. 

A lot of the business model in high tech applications has consisted in running ahead of the law, with the complicity of bought off politicians (such as found in the Obama administration [2]).

***

It All Happened Before: Rome Also Collapsed in an hypocrisy called Christianism so immense, and so insane, that all of desired reality came to be known as the “Apocalypse”: 

Covering up reality with its opposite fosters insanity, because the appearances are the opposite of reality, and then people have to engage in ideologies enabling this schizophrenia. See Brexit [3]. This is exactly why Roman Catholic Orthodoxy (Christianism) became the state religion of the collapsing Roman empire, where the truth was that a tiny .1% minority, the plutocracy, in combination with the military dictatorship, was exploiting nearly all the GDP, while the rest of the population was living in ever more horrendous conditions… 

To deny that reality, Christianism said it was all for the best, as the collapse of civilization would bring the apocalypse, and then the Messiah would return. And only then (the same schema holds in Islam).

Real progressives assess reality better than those stuck in the past. To fail to discern between the depiction of a thing and the endorsement of a thing one learns to do when one is a small child. To look at the painting above and to conclude that it “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” is apparently an example of how folly brings infamy. But the motivation below this may be even worse. There may be a method to the folly: greed once again…

The San Francisco Bay Area is increasingly dominated by the ideology of pleasing the wealthiest men in the world. The first thing those plutocrats want, is that we take leave from reality and our common senses. That plutocratically fostered insanity starts with saying art is not art, and history didn’t happen, because it shouldn’t have happened.

The rest of the world is forewarned: the world’s center of high tech is becoming mad… Yes, remember the fish rots by the head (same happened to France, not so much in 1940, rather than after the Second World War, during so-called “decolonization and “French Theory”, as I have explained extensively). 

The assault against reality was planned by the powers that be, and instigated by their sycophants masquerading as “antifa” or “progressives”, or “liberals”, “snow flakes”, etc. Verily, they are just obnoxious pigeons obsessed by crumbs, ready to feel and think anything to get some more… of whatever they believe they desperately need. 

Want human? Free truth!

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] In the 1980s, top Democrats came to collaborate with Reagan (except for Trump, who fought Reagan to death). It was all a huge and gigantic lie. David Stockman, Reagan budget director, explained that “trickle down”, Reagan economic program passed by O’Neil and other Democrats, the policy of advantaging the wealthiest was all hidden below a big lie: 

“It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.

— David Stockman, The Atlantic…

Thereafter, all the way to the end of Obama’s second term, Reagan was the big lie which kept on giving… to the plutocrats, and an increasing unequal society.  It’s no coincidence that Trump, who opposed Reagan, came up and screamed to all they didn’t know what reality was. Notice I am not embracing Trump here. Simply pointing out that Alternative facts and Alternative Reality, didn’t wait Ms. Conway to rule contemporary politics.

And here is the crux: As that big lie, that the Reagan policies would help the Commons, whereas in truth, they were designed to foster plutocracy, worked basically four decades, all of society, even the rabid low lives opposed to it, learned to lie…

***

[2] Some have accused me to have Obama Derangement Syndrome (I invented the TDS diagnostic, so that was amusing). However, I observed with glee, that, in the last few weeks, a bipartisan and Democratic Congress-Trump White House effort has been launched against the top tech monopolies that Obama took his orders from, and which are now the world’s most powerful companies… and most stealing companies…

***

[3] Brexit claims to want to Make England Great Again, but all the MEGA it will bring will be British implosion (and that’s bad for the UNSC!) So it self-contradicts: the way to keep the UK strong is to make it the spine of Western Europe, with nuclear armed France….

 

Abolition of Nuclear Weapons’ Nobel Not So Noble

ICAN got the 2017 Peace Nobel for advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons. Fine. However, not that simple. The world faces a “nuclear crisis” from a “bruised ego”, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) warned in an apparent reference to what is often reductively described as “US-North Korea tensions” (because the entire planet should be concerned by North Korean histrionic ideology).

The nine nuclear weapons states objected. In particular, France, the US and the UK didn’t send their ambassadors to the prize ceremony, something which never happened before.

The case those so-called democracies make is that nuclear weapons enable dissuasion, and thus make war between great, and greatly reasonable, powers unimaginable. That’s an important point: I don’t know of a span of 62 years in the last 3,000 years without war between great powers somewhere. All the wars since 1945 have been anecdotes (although some civil wars killed up to 33% of the population, as in Cambodia).

So France, the USA and the UK are right: paradoxically, nuclear weapons save lives.

A campaign led by ICAN was launched to abolish nuclear weapons. ICAN, a coalition of hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the Geneva-based group helped pave the way for the introduction of a UN treaty banning the weapons, which was signed this year.

While 122 countries backed the treaty in July, the talks were notably boycotted by the world’s nine known nuclear powers and the only Nato member to discuss it, the Netherlands, voted against. Australia has maintained a longstanding opposition to a nuclear weapons ban treaty. Russia, France, UK, USA opposed the treaty, China abstained.

The most Christian city of Nagasaki was spared not: the bomb was dropped over the cathedral. Two-thirds of the Christians in the region died. However, those 10,000 innocents didn’t die in vain: within 20 hours, Japan decide to surrender.

Only three countries, the fanatics in the Vatican, the so-called Holy See, Guyana (population less than 800,000) and Thailand (a military dictatorship) have so far ratified the treaty, which requires 50 ratifications to come into force (according to UN law).

I am also, of course for the abolition of nuclear weapons. However, first of all, even in the best of possible worlds, nuclear explosives should be at the ready, be it only to bust an interstellar asteroid, a hyperbolic comet, or god knows what else (this utterance does not mean I agree to the existence of god for the purpose of this essay).

The United Nations should have nuclear weapons at its disposal, in the present state of international politics, where nations would engage in significant wars at a distance (consider Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah, etc.). And who has nukes officially at the UN? The five permanent members, countries, which, historically, contributed more to civilization than to its opposite.

 

When the prize was attributed, a survivor of Hiroshima, Setsuko Thurlow, an 85-year-old survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and now a Canadian and ICAN campaigner talked. Ms Thurlow was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building at the time. She said that most of her classmates, who were in the same room, were burned alive. “Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by,” she said, as she received the prize. “Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen…This is unacceptable human suffering. No human being should ever experience what we experienced.”

I have myself nearly cried, reading the description of the suffering of little children at Hiroshima. However, probably more than twenty million children died in World War Two, a conflict that killed probably more than 100 million people (5% of humanity then). The Japanese, in particular, should be contrite: the Japanese political system, culture and general Zeitgeist was directly causative of World War Two. To this day, WWII war criminals are honored officially in Japan.

Japan killed at least in a rapport of twenty to one: for one Japanese killed, twenty non-Japanese were killed by the Japanese. Call that high efficiency. Most Japanese killed were Japanese soldiers who died from bad treatment in their own army! They died of disease, and, or, malnutrition. Officially, 3.1 million Japanese citizens died in World War Two, says the Japanese government (others say only 2.5 million).  Number of Japanese civilians killed? 550,000 to 800,000, including the victims of strategic bombing (Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.)

The full Japanese cabinet met on 14:30 on August 9, hours after the Nagasaki bombing. The cabinet spent the day debating surrender. War minister Anami told the cabinet that, under torture, a captured American Mustang fighter pilot had told his interrogators that the United States possessed 100 atom bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be bombed “in the next few days”. The pilot, Marcus McDilda, was lying. McDilda, who had been shot down off the coast of Japan two days after the Hiroshima bombing, told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear to end the torture. The lie caused him to be classified as a VIP prisoner, probably saving him from beheading. In truth, the United States would not have had the third bomb ready for use until August 19, with a fourth in September 1945 and then approximately three a month thereafter. The third bomb would have probably been used against Sapporo, to demonstrate America’s ability to deliver the weapon all over Japan.

Following a second meeting, Prime Minister Suzuki and foreign minister Tōgō met the Emperor, and proposed an impromptu conference which started just before midnight on the night of August 9–10. Japan’s inability to defend itself was pondered. No consensus emerged. At around 02:00 (August 10), Suzuki finally addressed Emperor Hirohito, asking him to decide. The Emperor stated:

“I have given serious thought to the situation prevailing at home and abroad and have concluded that continuing the war can only mean destruction for the nation and prolongation of bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer. …

I was told by those advocating a continuation of hostilities that by June new divisions would be in place in fortified positions [at Kujūkuri Beach, east of Tokyo] ready for the invader when he sought to land. It is now August and the fortifications still have not been completed. …

There are those who say the key to national survival lies in a decisive battle in the homeland. The experiences of the past, however, show that there has always been a discrepancy between plans and performance. I do not believe that the discrepancy in the case of Kujūkuri can be rectified. Since this is also the shape of things, how can we repel the invaders? [Hirohito then made some specific reference to the increased destructiveness of the atomic bomb.]

“It goes without saying that it is unbearable for me to see the brave and loyal fighting men of Japan disarmed. It is equally unbearable that others who have rendered me devoted service should now be punished as instigators of the war. Nevertheless, the time has come to bear the unbearable. …

I swallow my tears and give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation on the basis outlined by the Foreign Minister.”

Japanese society, and Hirohito himself was culprit of World War Two. Hiroshima and Nagasaki cured it: within four days of the sun of satan rising over Hiroshima, Japan had decided to capitulate, and nuclear explosions were the main reason.

ICAN should learn history.

Beatrice Fihn, leader of ICAN referred to increasing tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile development. “Nuclear weapons do not prevent conflicts. They caused this conflict”.

She is dissembling and lying: enveloping a lie into a truth, to help swallow it.  

The problem of war is vast. It’s related to our increasing powers. Nuclear weapons are just an aspect. To prevent war, one needs truth. When ICAN lies, it helps war. Truthiness helps war. At all sorts of scale.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

 

Frankfurt School of Philosophy As Nazism Unexamined

Unexamined until now, that is…

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A HEART, YOU DON’T HAVE REASON:

Was The Frankfurt School of Philosophy Disguised Nazism?

By 1946, it dawned even on the most obdurate, that German philosophy, viewed as a mass movement, had been a disaster. Its reasons turned out to follies of the greatest infamy, with an appearance of polished intellectual superiority, which foiled the superficially minded, as long as they had a cold heart. This very infamy made those infamous “German” reasons a strong social bond, binding the German masses together, to commit mass murder, and wars of massive aggression,  twice in a generation, under the enlightenment, the sun, of Satan.

Thus, unsurprisingly, some German mini philosophers reached the same conclusion in their Fort of the Franks (Frankfurt). They “wanted to break free from the past“(Adorno). Assuredly. Their past. By denying it. (My point of view on the Frankfurt School of Philosophy will be viewed as an outrage, a counter-sense, by the traditionalists. The present essay is a reply to “How the Frankfurt school diagnosed the ills of Western Civilisation” in Aeon, May 31, 2017. In essence, I believe the Frankfurt School did not have the courage to look at the main discourse of German history. They accused the imperialism of sliding doors (!) and Hollywood movies. I accuse Luther, traditional racism, intellectual fascism, and the plutocratic effect, in other words, Germany.

The German Enlightenment was dominated paradigmatically, pragmatically, and politically, and militarily,  by one state, Prussia, which was hyper militaristic, brutally expansionist, and successful at it, outrageously racist, and a dictatorship.

Berlin In Ruins, 1945: German Philosophy’s Crown of Creation!

The top philosopher of Prussia,  Kant, didn’t just believe in slavery or the tradition of enslavement, he wrote publicly to the highest authorities to encourage them to stand firm, while enabling slavery. Kant also believed that the highest morality was to obey the authorities unquestionably, a theory Nazis were enthusiast to enact while exterminating the sort of people Prussia, and then all of Germany, as early as 1815, discriminated against grotesquely, and criminally.

Herder, another piece of German Enlightenment, sang the praises of tribalism, to a point so extreme, he rejected French style Enlightenment, wholesale (although French style Enlightenment was just a modernized version, as far as eradicating exaggerated tribalism, of the one inaugurated by imperial Rome).

With (German) “Enlightenment” like that, who would not want to reject it? The Nazis?

***

The “European” Wars of the Twentieth Century were not European wars. They were German wars. That’s a dirty little secret which does not want to be faced, especially in the USA, for obvious reasons (twice the USA stood by, watching, for years, its parents, France and Britain, suffer the brunt of mass murdering German infamy). Germany deliberately ambushed humanity in August 1914, and again by electing an exterminationist racist fascist dictatorship, and obeying it enthusiastically. OK, it was a particular type of Enlightenment, under the Sun of Satan. But it was very German, in the sense “German” had taken after the rise of the satanic Luther (who wrote about torturing the Jews for pleasure) and the monstrous Prussian State. The mass murdering aggressiveness of Bismarck, the Kaiser and Hitler, were no accident, but the fruit of generations, even centuries of very specifically German evolution of the worst type.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/luther-hitler-unelected/

***

To believe that Europe became crazy in 1853-1945 is to confuse “Europeans” (sane and victimized) and Germans (culprit and insane). Nietzsche pointed it out before me, and well before German folly reached the highest heights. So it’s to confuse victims and perpetrators. Nothing to build a deep philosophy on.

To believe that “reason” caused the German atrocity of the period 1853-1945 is inaccurate: what was viewed then as patriotic German reasons caused the German atrocities. It had nothing to do with the Enlightenment in the style of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Sade Lamarck, or even Rousseau.

Aeon claims that: “Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism. Why? The Frankfurt School theorists argued that universal rationality had been raised to the status of an idol. At the heart of this was what they called ‘instrumental reason’, the mechanism by which everything in human affairs was ground up.

When reason enabled human beings to interpret the natural world around them in ways that ceased to frighten them, it was a liberating faculty of the mind. However, in the Frankfurt account, its fatal flaw was that it depended on domination, on subjecting the external world to the processes of abstract thought.”

To say that the cause dominates the effect is silly. To brandish “abstract thought” as a flaw is also silly. “Abstract” and “thought” have to be defined. If “abstract” means a model the brain created, then most thoughts, defined as neurological activity, are abstract.

In the visual system, modern neurology has revealed more than 90% of the circuitry as re-entrant. Thus abstract, calling on what the brain views as memories of what was experienced. This is assuredly typical.

“The rationalising faculty had thereby become, according to the Frankfurt philosophers, a tyrannical process, through which all human experience of the world would be subjected to infinitely repeatable rational explanation; a process in which reason had turned from being liberating to being the instrumental means of categorising and classifying an infinitely various reality.”

One would expect that Germans brought, educated, and mentally created under dictatorship, would be incapable to perceive what tyranny is, and how one gets there. This is exactly what happened under the Frankfurt School.

Far from being “rationalizing”, reason, in German culture prior to the last few years at best, was extremely irrational. German reason was irrational reason, because it tended to miss all the reason of the heart. Attacking the world in 1914 was a deliberate insanity: the German High Command thought that Russia would be slow to mobilize, and that Great Britain would come to full force no sooner than a year after France, and most of continental Europe had been defeated and occupied.

Moreover the High Command and the Kaiser decided to believe the soporific insanity of a world racial government which President Wilson had offered to share with them. (While not thinking for an instant that the US president and his colonel House may have had an “America First” agenda!)

And, somehow the very “rational” Germans naively believed that the Americans would help circumventing the British and French naval blockade (which they did, for a while, as long as it made them richer).

That set of reasons for launching all of Europe, in the atrocious infamy of World War One was not reason, it was a mad logic. And it was even more insane for average “rational” Germans to goose step behind those six men who had decided to destroy Europe… Just to save their version of German plutocracy.

From there on, it got even worse: because thousands of German war criminals had not been hanged after World War One, they felt free to do it again: surely, it would work better, on an even larger scale. Literally. A war criminal such as Ludendorff, de facto commander of the German army in 1918, never got prosecuted for his mass murdering in Belgium (in particular, Liege). So Ludendorff was probably the most important founder of the Nazi Party, and certainly the most prestigious.

Well, there was a reason: the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy had been very supportive of its German colleague in the Paris negotiations of 1919. Surely, it would happen again? (It did, but not to the same extent!)

Many are the reasons, that’s why we need a heart.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: Instrumentalized rationality consists in adopting specific axioms to get a logic to the ends one wants to achieve… and scrupulously restricting oneself to them. (As it is, that’s not saying much: Euclid did just that, more or less, with plane geometry!)
What the Frankfurt School wanted to express was “Instrumentalized” Reason, not “Instrumental Reason“. Now generally reason is instrumentalized, that’s why we brandish it. So, per se, it’s not saying much. A better notion maybe “Intellectual Fascism“, a type of thinking where an all too-small axiomatic set is used to animate’s one’s logic, while ignoring obviously related and more impactful axioms.

In particular, axiomatic sets ignoring the questions, and solutions of the heart, like basic human love, are symptomatic of Intellectual Fascism. That was, overall the Achilles heel of most German philosophy. Cogent, but blind to more significant alternative logics.
When the Frankfurt School speak of “Instrumental Rationality” in a derogatory way, it really speaks of “Intellectual Fascism” the ends of which are deplorable…