Brexit: Keep Britain In, Under Lock and Key! Caesar’s and Charlemagne’s Dream, Not Waterloo’s Revenge!

The Roman empire succeeded a gigantic unification of Western Europe and North Africa. It was peaceful, and wealthiest, for centuries, before a sudden collapse from an invasion by Vandals (literally!) in 406 CE (after more than two centuries of military pressure from various German tribes). Now, nearly two millennia later, Britannia and Algeria are acting up. Britannia is out of sorts, after decades of anti-European hate mongering by wealthy manipulators. Whereas Algeria is acting up, for the best reasons, out of righteousness, after 57 years of FNL dictatorship engineered by a French general (however strange that may sound, that’s what happened, what I have been saying for decades; a paradox many young Algerians are daring to express at last!)

It’s another paradox that Brexit aims at unifying the continent, excluding Britain, exactly the opposite of British policy under… Napoleon. Was Waterloo, Trafalgar, for nought!… However now Brexit is turning into Brexinfinity, a malady of infinite uncertainty…

A little reminder, from a Remainer: England and Algeria were in the Roman empire for centuries. The empire was the wealthiest, most prosperous part of the world. That prosperity lasted until military decay, and then collapse, first at the hands of the Goths (mostly). In the century after the 406 CE collapse, the Franks started a long conquest of Germania Magna… Following Julius Caesar’s final message: the Republic could be made safe only under final borders. Now, in a way, the UN is the borders… As civilization in its best version so far, conquered the planet…

I am a mortal enemy of Brexit. I think the European Union as it is organized, is a disaster, but it’s less of a disaster than no Union at all. Of course, Britain should be part of the Union. However all too many British are Pluto pawns driven to madness by the deep emotional misinformation in which they bathe.

Indeed, there are lots of the problems of the present European Union, including pig-headed expansion, were caused by British bullying. The EU immigration so decried by the Brexiteers was therefore a British Pluto trick… second only to non-EU immigration to Britain… thus demonstrating in an even deeper way that massive immigration to Britain was organized by the same manipulators who are behind Brexit.

I have argued that ejecting Britain out of the EU could have unforeseen consequences, that alienation is a very bad thing, etc.

The classical case of this, I insisted, was the estrangement of Western Francia from the rest of the Roman empire in the Tenth Century (that Roman empire is often erroneously labeled by unfaithful historian “Carolingian” empire). That brought one millennium of war (all the way to Hitler). Now the Western Franks had a very good reason to split: the Roman empire had not defended them against the Vikings by eradicating the latter. Instead Western Franks had to defend themselves by their own means. So Frexit had an excellent reason.

So happy together. British press always refer to the Union as a “block”, or “club”. That’s how propaganda works, by disparaging those one wants to hate: would you like your union to be called a “bloc”? Macron and Merkel and their common republican home. Neither the Kaiser, nor Hitler would have been happy to see this, they would have been revolted, apoplectic, enraged, uncomprehending. But the Kaiser was the grandson of British queen Victoria. Republic s such as present day Germany and France, don’t need “Royal assent” (as British politicos do) Brexit, or Exit Britannia from its royal mind…

The case of Brexit is completely different from the Frexit of the Tenth Century: half of the British electorate has been rendered stupid, delusional and angry from plutocratic propaganda, and enormous lies. They have to snap out of it, they need psychiatric treatment.

However, the EU is in a maelstrom. The planet is dying, etc. Can we afford a few more years taking care of delusional Brits, at the exclusion of the needed further federalization of the European Union?

No.   

Did I change my mind?

Well, the head of (misleading called) European Research Group Jacob Rees-Mogg, changed my mind. I listened to him for a long time. The gentleman looks very calm and collected, full of certainty for his delirious absurdities, the sort of certainty many promoters of Nazism exhibited, with somewhat similar absurdities.     

Brexiters are determined to keep on sabotaging Europe, so that Europe can become a better poodle for global plutocracy and USA. Should wisdom then activate Waterloo’s revenge, and kick them out all together, or just keep them out of European Parliament?

Verified account @Jacob_Rees_Mogg: “If a long extension leaves us stuck in the EU we should be as difficult as possible. We could veto any increase in the budget, obstruct the putative EU army and block Mr Macron’s integrationist schemes.” Prominent Brexiteer MP Mark Francois, said that if the U.K. remained in the “bloc“, “then in return we will become a Trojan Horse within the EU.” In return, or will return to? Honesty requires to admitting the second formulation.

What to do? Throwing the UK out may be reasonable, at first sight, considering such a mindset from prominent UK politicos.

E U solidarity with the Republic of Ireland has been total. The EC chief negotiator, Michel Barnier confirmed that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the EU would make solving the Irish Border issue a prerequisite for any re-starting of trade talks with the UK. That’s the so-called “backstop”: the EU will enforce it. As things stand, the UK is due to leave the EU on Friday, April 12th, midnight, Franco-German time. As decided by the last EU summit. The rhetoric is escalating, as the EU is threatening to use some sort of force.

Tough? Yes. But we can’t Brexinfinity forever… So what should Macron do? Without Britain to sabotage in the name of global plutocracy, France has only to deal with Germany. And much can, and should be done.

Meanwhile, a number of EU states want the British government signed up to conditions that would bring “sincere cooperation” from the UK during its extended membership, including restraining from involvement in budget discussions or agreeing to go without a European commissioner (each full member gets one).

It is crucial that an extension of Article 50 and Brexit limbo, would not allow British politicians, and in particular, a Brexiteer prime minister, to damage EU interests. (I proposed that the UK would not sit on the European Parliament.)

If independence from British meddling, while the UK keeps on saying it wants out, but is still in, can’t be insured, Britain should be kicked out.

***

Trump Accuses Airbus To Have Sabotaged the 737 MAX with negative vibes, punishment coming:

Meanwhile, indeed, the most imperial Trump is acting up. As I exposed, Boeing’s 737 MAX is misshapen and shouldn’t be allowed to fly (if they correct the software which makes the plane plunge towards the ground, it will tend to stall…). That’s an immense disaster: more than 5,000 of the type were ordered, worth up to $130 million each.  So what does Trump do to come to the rescue? Accuse and punish Airbus with 11 billion dollars of sanctions on things like… cheese. That’s imperial logics at its best. Already French cheese sold in the US is mangled by the authorities in such a way, that’s it turns disgusting pretty quickly. But that’s not enough, Boeing designed a plane in the 1960s, tries to sell it in 2020s, doesn’t work, it’s the fault of Airbus!

***

Not to take those things lightly, the tit and the tat, the French Republic’s Parliament passed a GAFA law:

The law now goes to the French Senate (which is controlled by the opposition).

I have advocated to pass such a law for a decade. Tax according to revenues, not profits. The French GAFA law taxes 3% of revenues in companies with worldwide revenues above 750 million Euros. The rest of Europe, apparently paralyzed by terror, watches the French with the fascination of prey species seeing forces they can’t comprehend counterattack American predators.

US pawns and minnows, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Denmark blocked a draft EU-wide GAFA tax proposal over the weekend. In the last World War, when Hitler killed himself as the coward he had become, Ireland sent condolences to his successor, war criminal Doenitz. Ireland had refused to help the Allies in WWII, to the point that it preferred being at Hitler’s (implicit) side rather than accept Churchill offer of Irish reunification! So now Ireland is Apple’s tax evasion agent, worldwide. Always going for the strongest, baddest empire around.

Whereas Ireland was passively pro-Hitler. Sweden was so pro-actively pro-Hitler that, had Sweden not been around, Hitler’s war effort would have been stunted from the start: Sweden provided Hitler with raw materials and weapons necessary to the Nazi war machine. Had not France fallen suddenly after 10 May 1940, the French Foreign Legion would have cut Sweden in two, as it was poised to do (that’s why the Legion was not in France during the battle of France). Finland was outright allied with Hitler (and stayed at war technically with Britain until 1948). And Denmark? Denmark fought six hours in World War Two, before surrendering… (Whereas the French ceasefire of 26 June 1940 turned into the Bir Hakeim battle 23 months later, where the Italian and the Afrika Korps suffered a strategic defeat they didn’t recover from…

See the note on Bir Hakeim at the end of: New Thinking Always A Combat.

In other words, small countries such as Sweden, ireland, Denmark, Finland refuse a EU wide GAFA tax, because they are US agents… And why that? Because they fear the USA more than they fear France, and they fear the European Union, not at all. Britain, of course, aspire to the same level of prostitution, forgetting reality in the process…

Confronted to the French GAFA tax, the American imperialists howled to high heavens, but skeptics pointed out that the French GAFA tax is probably not even a third of what should be the fair amount. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned last week that the tax would hurt both the American firms and the French citizens who use the platforms. Fortunately, the French are sadomasochists, so it should be alright.

The USA is an empire, China is an empire, Russia is an empire, Brazil is an empire, Indonesia, Japan, are clearly empire, India is an empire… And Pakistan (population 200 million) put a fatwa on yours truly.  

What is Europe in all of this? Throwing Britain out, as amply deserved, would make Europe into an empire, something that gives out orders (imperium, even lethal ones). But, at this point, it would not be the smartest thing. Better to let England fully experience the folly of taking one’s orders, hearts, facts and souls from global plutocratic media.

Meanwhile, those who don’t like a European empire as either Putin gas dependent (Germany), aspiring prostitutes (UK), and, in general, lovers of all empires, but for one leading European destinies optimally. This tendency in Europe is fundamentally a laziness, a lethargy, an infantilism. It was vastly behind the so-called decolonization movement… which was, all too often, a plutocratization movement. The best example there is Algeria, which, at last, is understanding that De Gaulle was the head of the FNL…  Hey, I must admit, a slightly harder notion to understand than the fact that PM May is a Remainer, a Remainer of the Machiavellian type, vastly underestimated by the enraged Brexiters she outmaneuvers at every turn and twist…

So let the European Union give a gigantic Article 50 extension to a defanged UK: the rights of the UK as a full EU member will be restored after its third EU referendum, the one when the UK will decide to Remain, in a year or so… Meanwhile there is a lot of empire to build…

Patrice Ayme

 

8 May 1945 Versus 8 May 2015

That was the second day when the Nazis surrendered. The true capitulation, without conditions, had been made May 7, in Reims, France. (The Soviets insisted to conduct another ceremony in Berlin, the next day… and they celebrate it the 9^th…)

As the French Republic had declared the Second World War, the surrender in Reims was appropriate. At the time when France declared war to Nazism, the USSR was allied to Hitler (and it as also, de facto allied to the USA, as the president and congress of the USA took sanctions against France and its belated ally, Great Britain… on the ground that those two parents, direct genitors of the USA were “belligerents“).

The rendition of Nazism was celebrated with extreme seriousness, and the same spirit, in France and Germany, on May 8, 2015.

France, Joined By USA Sec. Of State John Jerry, Celebrate V Day, May 8, 2015

[Republican Guards Horsemen.]

May 8, 1945, is also the same exact day the Franco-Algerian war started, with a wound that was pretty much fatal. Both facts are related. French civilization (and lack thereof) was central to both facts. While racial fascism was smashed in Germany, for all to see, it exploded on French soil (in an atrocious contradiction).

Let’s recapitulate.

1) The leaders of the French Republic knew, as early as 1919, that there would be another war with Germany. That was mostly caused by the hyper-nationalism, racism and fascism mindset which reigned in Germany. Also Germany had been immensely successful industrially, technologically, economically, leaving both Britain and France behind.

That very successes of German fascism (under Bismarck and then the Kaiser Wilhelm II) seemed to prove that fascism was a system superior to the degenerating democracies of Britain and France.

2) France, all along, prepared for the third round with German racist fascism. However, Great Britain and the USA had opted for the opposite approach. It is of course insufferable for contemporary citizens of the UK and the USA to read that their countries aided and abetted the Nazis (some come to scream about that periodically on this site).

However there is a deep lesson there, a warning for tomorrow: British and American plutocrats drove the collaboration of the UK and the USA with the racist and fascist mindset. So doing, they set-up the conditions for the violent death of more than 70 million people, among other inconveniences. Indeed, if the USA and the UK had made a block with the French Republic, in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the fascists in Italy, Japan and Germany would not have had the possibility to dream that they had a chance in the land grabs they envisioned.

Actually the plutocrats which helped the fascists so much were nearly as culprit as the crazy, murderous tribal nuts they encouraged.

Lessons? Plutocracy can manipulate not just the minds, but history itself.

When democracy stand divided, tanks can roll all over it. Something to remember with Putin. Those who cannot stand firmly for democracy, encourage fascism.

3) War can turn badly, unexpectedly. The Nazis use insane, desperate, strategies which turned around the mightier French army and its slow poke little British bulldog. This military disaster of May 1940 is nearly impossible to reproduce in war games.

Lesson? Don’t underestimate the ability of fate, incredible stupidity, really very bad luck, to surprise even those who felt the best prepared.

This is valid now more than ever. A few nuclear bombs could bring losses comparable to all of World War Two, within hours. North Korea is arming itself to the hilt, and threatened to use its nuclear devices, even against the USA. This should not be taken lightly.

The Franco-Algerian Massacre in Setif:

As in places all over France, there was a massive demonstration of joy in Setif, Algeria. A young demonstrator carried an Algerian flag. He was killed by a gendarme. A first wave of retaliation led to the death of a few dozen colons (or more). The later, in further retaliation, supported by the French army, tanks, even planes, killed in turn tens of thousands of Algerians.

Philosophically, this was a tribal reaction not substantially different from Nazism and the like.

This event is not commemorated enough (neither the French state, nor the FNL, which became the Algerian state, but got started in a different mindset in 1954 are anxious to remember it).

It exhibits a lot of warnings about human nature. It needs to be analyzed more. How could the French forget 15 centuries of tribal tolerance? Because they just finally defeated the Nazis, they could act like them? Inhibitions were lifted for a day? Well, whereas France and Germany are now (re)united, and now share a common fraternity, much work remains to be done in the case of France and Algeria.

A work of truth. Thorough truth.

And that’s not just about Europe and Africa, and the USA. Establishing, and imposing the methods to elucidate, uncover, and make everybody admire truth, is the general first order strategy to deal with the world’s ills.

Patrice Ayme’

Torture Denies Brotherhood, Reason: Plutocrats Love It

Rejecting Torture Is Torture To Those Who Refuse Civilization. Let’s Torture Them That Way:

The government of the USA, fully duplicitous:

The Bush administration decided that Middle-Ages tortures (such as immersing a face under water) were not torture, when ordered by the government of the USA. This official policy of the USA got a further twist under Obama. Obama pontificated that “Torture is contrary to what we are”.

Thus the Obama administration did not prosecute torture advocates and torture administrators: surely we cannot be prosecuted for the opposite of what we are. Leon Panetta, CIA head and Defense Secretary wrote in “Worthy Fights” that, summoned to the White House by Obama’s chief of staff (now the mayor of Chicago), Rahm Emanuel “got ugly”. Says Panetta: ‘The president wants to know who the f**k authorized this to the committees,’ Rahm said, slamming his hand down on the table. “I have a president with his hair on fire and I want to know what the f**k you did to f**k this up so bad.”

Obama Facing Torture, Dec. 10, 2014

It’s “contrary to what we are”, said Big Brother. So it cannot possibly be. And that sure infuriates Him.

Hitler used to tell the highest Nazi Party officials, that exterminating the Jews was out of the question. When asked about that much-emphasized position of the “Guide” at the Wannsee Conference, SS General Reinhart Heydrich bluntly said that it was what Hitler would keep on saying, if asked: thus the necessity of the Wannsee conference to make explicit to the highest officials what the real policy of the Reich was.

So what’s the real policy of the USA?

Now that the Democratic Party is in the last few days of its control of the Senate of the USA, Senator Diane Feinstein released a heavily “redacted” (= censored) report of CIA torture (over objections from the apparently pro-torture Obama administration). Feinstein is apparently keen to leave a trace beyond her own personal greed for money. She is suddenly interested by truth.

An aside: another Senator, Mark Udall, a Democrat from Colorado, who is in office for another few weeks (he lost re-election), said on Thursday that: “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate intelligence committee computers. This grave misconduct is not only illegal but it violates the US constitution’s requirement of separation of powers.”

Funny all these pseudo-progressives trying to wash their souls in their last few days of power…

***

Why not to engage in torture? The answer was found by the Roman Republic:

The Republic outlawed the torture of citizens. Why? Well, first, because it was not needed. In a coherent, cohesive society of peers, peers don’t torture peers, because peers never engage in some conspiracy so dastardly that only unbearable suffering is the only thing that will get them to confess.

So engaging in torture meant precisely that hatred, not fraternity, ruled.

France, the ex-Francia Occidentalis, had developed, by 1300 CE, the modern police state. (Proof? All Templars were arrested at the same time on the same day, all over; also the Pope was arrested in Rome by French Special forces headed by a lawyer, and died in custody.) By then torture was very scientific, and delivered results.

However, by 1600 CE, police methods were so advanced that torture was found to be counterproductive. The subtlety of having an informant networks was found much more efficient. During the famous “Affaires des Poisons”, a gigantic, mind boggling conspiracy of poisoners, greedy wives, sorcerers, plotting socialites, plutocrats, mistresses, duchesses, and the like, careful police work was more effective than torture to obtain (too much, said the King) information.

(That does not mean that burning alive some miscreants who had killed up to 2,000 children did not have a salutary effect on the public! Torture for punishment, and torture for intelligence are two different things… Observed a winged devil who passed by…)

So one can say that employing torture is a testimony to a non-cohesive social situation. Apparently, during the Battle of Algiers, French paratroops, confronted to amateur, but deadly bomb makers, were able to extract, through torture, crucial confessions under extreme time pressure, as bombs were literally ticking.

However what torture gains in military efficiency, is more than lost in the propaganda battle. To this day, the cogent reasons for paratroops to use torture in that very peculiar situation, are drowned by the jeers of those who wanted the Algerian society deconstructed.

Torture Is Contrary To The Brotherhood Of Reason Known As Direct Democracy, Our Ideal:

When the civilized West is confronted to barbaric fanatics, Muslim or not, it’s of its essence to not exchange nature: the West has to stay civilized. The West does not have to stay civilized at all and any cost, but close to it.

The aim of the war of civilization against barbarity is to establish a brotherhood of reason.

So we have to enforce both brotherhood, and reason.

It goes without saying that plutocrats like neither. That’s why they love torture: it contradicts both brotherhood, and reason. Instead it extolls the rule of cruelty, brute force, and extermination, it brandishes torture as an achievement, and gives it another name. (Just as Christianism did.)

Hence it was not a coincidence that torture became the official policy of the USA under Bush’s plutocratic government. Because it was not just the CIA. The CIA acted under order from the Bush government, and several torture lawyers such as Mr. Yoo (who made the mistake of inviting me to his home).

Now Obama is trying to hide all this, by saying that “true patriots” got panicked after 9/11. Says he:” “We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened.”

We? Maybe you understand why it happened, but you are trying to say the CIA and others did it all, whereas they obeyed orders by plutocrats from above. And their obsequious servants down below, from the gutter.

Mr. John Yoo, the lawyer, is a Berkeley Law Professor of pure Asian genetics, and who saw an occasion to make a name for himself in plutocratic circles with deviant legal reasoning in his famous “TORTURE MEMO”. Yoo was Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States.

It was signed in August 2002 by Assistant Attorney General Bybee, now an all-powerful Federal Judge, also a denizen of Berkeley. The memo advised the CIA, the DOD, and Bush and his goons that torture was legal. (So probably is slavery if you call it something else!)

So Obama, once again, is covering-up for the forces of evil. And the message is: if you, little mongrels, get out of line, and rebel against the powers that be, remember torture is contrary to what we are, and we get away with it.

You can escape the judgment of today’s pundits. But not that of history.

Patrice Ayme’

Mandela, Algeria, Zizek, Truth

ALGERIA’S DISASTER, SOUTH AFRICA’S SURVIVAL:

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

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

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

War Slashes Souls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

SILLY ZIZEK:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

***

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

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

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

Truth Is Hell: Iraq, etc.

TRUTH DIGGING CONSISTS IN UNMASKING EVILS:

Abstract: I celebrate the Iraq invasion my way, pointing out some of the devils, or evils traditionally ignored. The lack of learning after the disastrous Iraqi crusade is directly due to the persistence, in the USA, of the power structure that brought the war. The war itself was a giant red herring to hide much worse, the collusion between Washington and some of its worst creatures.

A red herring that between 2003 and 2007, killed more than a million Iraqi. A red herring that caused morality in the USA to collapse, and stay collapsed, every day that the war criminals are not prosecuted (interestingly many major French politicians are on trial in France for unlawful activities in Iraq… for much lesser alleged crimes than the ones Bush and company would be charged with).

Often devils (O’Connor, Saint Louis, Joan of Arc) are still viewed honorably.

With Saint Louis, the Dark Side overwhelmed any other side. Contrarily to his reputation. [In the Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 76 meters high, that he had built in 33 months.]

This failure to perceive devils for what they are is a consequence of the same cognitive-moral failure that brought us Bush, and his adulation by the sheeple. A lack of attention to the details, where devils lurk. Ever since there were evil beasts, and they wore camouflage, precisely because they were evil.

Democracy only survives if a truth machine, elucidating all hidden devils. If the devil is in the details, only the devil knows the truth. Truth should strive to go where evil lurks.

***

WITHOUT CORRECT DETAILS, HISTORY IS JUST THE HOUSE OF DEVILS:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Said Edmund Burke, who added: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Sounds good. Yet in Burke’s mind, his version of history called to invade France, destroy the Constitutional government there, and  replace it by the Ancient Regime of time honored plutocrats and theocrats. Never mind that king Louis XVI himself had spent all his long reign trying to make plutocrats pay. The alternative was default. So Louis called for a revolution.

Burke yearned for the likes of Saint Louis. Somebody who kills in good faith.

Saint Outside, Devil Inside.

Saint Louis was a co-patron of the Order of Saint Francis. By modern standards, he would have been caged immediately (see below). Nice to see the present pope being unaware of these intricacies. So he was with the Argentinean dictator Videla who he used to feed.

Never mind that Louis XVI himself, as king, had initiated, condoned, and literally signed on the French Revolution. Burke’s murderous policy was implemented, bringing the death of millions, in France alone. And many times that, over all of Europe. Armies roamed from Lisbon to Moscow.

In the end, Human Rights won, which revolted Burke so much, that he thought moral to risk killing much of Europe for it (as France was three times england, and as the government there was constitutional, to call for an invasion was to call for devastation throughtout Europe, as, indeed, happened).

Unfortunately for Burke and his followers, Human Rights are now the core of the charter of the United Nations. That god who Burke had the presumption to help, is in full retreat, except in the most desolate places (that will include the vacuity of many an American youth’s mind).

Burke was a hero to crypto-fascists such as Hayek and Friedman, who provided the “intellectual” justification for atrocious dictatorships from Chili to Argentina, all the way up to Mexico, just as Heidegger provided it for Nazism. Hayek, Friedman and their ilk, actually provided the ideology  for the new plutocratic order we are enjoying nowadays, all the way to Moscow, Cyprus and Dubai. (More on these forsaken pirates havens in another essay soon.)

So Burke lives to this day, in very many places, including the red hot anti-French hate among a significant part of the Wall Street journal readership (I’m a subscriber, so in a good position to judge.)

In a similar vein, the famous elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, started his mesmerizing work, “Mein Kampf” with pages of (anti-French pseudo-) history. Same idea as Burke: hit on human rights hard, right away. Only then did the fascist Guide switch to the ethological description of Jews in Vienna.

By April 1945, and 70 million dead later, the Guide conceded he had been misguided all along about the Germans and the Slavs.

So it’s not just enough to remember history, it’s important to know history, that is the facts as they really happened. History is about the details, and the devils therein, all of them. Leave none unturned.

***

PLUTOCRACIES USE THOSE POOR DEVILS, MERCENARIES:

In “Marches Of Folly“, an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman asks: “Did we learn anything from Iraq?”.

“Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.”

Let me comment  here right away on Krugman’s “somehow”. “Somehow” is the crux. A quick historical reminder helps to understand the madness that gripped the USA.

A similar situation happened after the Second Punic War. Carthage’s own mercenaries revolted, and attacked Carthage. Carthage defeated them with great difficulty.

Why did Carthage employ armies of mercenaries? Because it was a plutocracy. At that time, the Roman republic was a rather direct democracy. So Rome could bring up armies of citizens, who were fighting for themselves. Self motivation made Roman soldiers much more determined than any of their paid adversaries.

The lesson of that disaster was that Carthage had to become much more democratic. Ironically, considerably enriched by conquests all over, plutocracy simultaneously took Rome over (and that was going to lead to the crash of Greco-Roman civilization).

How does this relate to the “somehow”? Very simple.

Carter, the very Christian president, had launched war, secretly, against Afghanistan. Although he had entire armies of goons at his disposal, the Geneva Fourth Convention violator in Washington needed more, to attack an entire country. Using a mercenary army raised by the Saudi plutocrats was the solution implemented in 1979.

Al Qaeda was initially an organization created by the CIA and the Saudi Intelligence Agency: they literally went to fetch the young Osama Bin laden in Turkey. As he was very pious, the bellicose side of the Qur’an could be manipulated to guide him, by making him believe he was as good as anyone to interpret the sacred texts. Then the godless goons taught Al Qaeda how to conduct asymmetric warfare against the Afghan republic (attack schools, not the military).

The entire political, plutocratic and propaganda class of the USA was immersed in all this. And it worked well for 15 years, until, well, just as with Carthage, the mercenaries understood they were being played, and underpaid. Then they turned against the hands that had taught them. The result: an asymmetric war between the gigantic army manipulated by Washington and the mercenary force. And then 9/11.

By then the Washington establishment had to admit everything, namely that, since 1945, it had instrumentalized Salafist Islam, in Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, etc. Or then it had to deny everything, and be more in power than ever. It just had to tell a good story, and stick to it. The story was that on 9/11, the sky was very blue, and then planes came out of nowhere…

Just charging bin Laden presented the inconvenience that some were bound to dig, and ask how bin laden appeared on the scene. It was best to go charge an enormous red herring first, with the largest imaginable lies possible ( a technique used and explained by no less than the German Chancellor above). The very size of the lies would have distracting properties, all by their absurdity.  So Powell went to the UN with kindergarten drawings.

How does one disguise all this mess? Under which carpet does one hide it? Well, war against Saddam Hussein. (It also had the advantage of destabilizing the Middle East, and that is to Israel’s colonizing advantage.)

***

PLUTO PROFITS FROM WAR, ANY WAR:

Here is Krugman again: “Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.”

Counter-intuitively, many of the war party of the USA love a bigger and more influential Teheran:  with a bit of luck, Teheran will do like Saddam, feel overconfident, and offer a casus belli. Then full war against Iran could be joined. However, of course, not all wars can be won. Overall, although it may not look like it to the clueless, the war against Iraq was a defeat for the USA.

The USA has a lot of false friends in the Middle East. The SIA is feeding Al Nusra, a Syrian Salafist army in Syria, and something will have to be done about that, and soon.

Krugman again: “So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.”

Why would they look as if they learned something? That would mean they went, somehow, through something untoward, that something adverse happened, to THEM. It certainly did not happen to them; they are richer, and more domineering than ever. Fortunes were made. Not far from New York, a war profiteer built for himself a sort of Versailles. Don’t expect to see this sort of data points, or giant architecture, appear in USA Main Stream Media (it was on French TV).

***

ATROCIOUS WAR CRIMINALITY IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN:

The USA invaded Iraq. Now it has completely lost that war. 4,500 USA soldiers died, and more than that in allied soldiers and mercenaries. Dozens of thousands of other soldiers were gravely wounded and millions got psychologically damaged by suffering, or inflicting extreme violence.

After the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a naive decision parroted by many other Americans around the country: he enlisted in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who killed nearly 3,000 men, women and children. Little did he know that those enemies were in Washington, where the war had been fully engaged July 3, 1979. Little did he know that these enemies were just American mercenary forces. As a good vacuous American youth, he was unaware that his own government had already caused the death of three millions, not three thousands, in Afghanistan.

Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan — where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated — but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by resistance fighters. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again. For the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks, and now intent to die by withdrawing treatment. Neofascists should not worry: Young will not count as an Iraq war casualty.

From Young’s letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Young goes on to attack the “cowardice” of Bush and Cheney for avoiding military service themselves, and to encourage them to “stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”

(Read Young’s entire letter here.)

Not to worry: plutocracy is also a mood, where all values are inverted. Greed is viewed in more regards than altruism. As far as Bush and Cheney are concerned, Tomas Young is just a loser, with not enough brains to make the correct investment.

It goes without saying that international law ought to be brought to bear on all war criminals. Justice is not just about trying Serbs and Africans. Plutocrats should qualify too.

One of the USA’s main axes of exploitation, since 1945, has been to instrumentalize Salafist Islam. That was initially used against Britain, France, and even Israel (times change…) The difference between now and 60 years ago, is that many of the Salafists have realized they have been played (and first of all the Iranians; OK, technically the term “Salafist”, the “old ones” does not usually qualify Shiites, but I am generalizing, for semantic convenience!)

The hostility of the USA against the French republic during the Franco-Algerian civil war made a bad situation irreversibly worse:

***

ONGOING FRANCO-ALGERIA DRAMA:

51 years ago, on March 19, 1962, the Evian Accords finalized the transfer of power from the French Republic to the (“Algerian”) FNL (Front National de Liberation). Officially, this was a good thing, a step forward, the flow of history. In truth, it was basically a transfer of power from one terrorist organization, to another.

That was a disaster for the populations concerned. About 15% of the people living in Algeria fled, living everything behind, and many committed suicide. Algeria has known dictatorship ever since, first from the FNL, then from the military. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the following decades, at the hands of terrorists (from official Algerian numbers).

There is no doubt that the French state behaved extremely badly in Algeria, starting in 1945. Before that, it was just behaving badly. There is also no doubt that the FNL was an extremely nasty terrorist organization.

So there is nothing good to celebrate there. And the mayor of Perpignan, a major French city had the courage to recognize this simple fact today, that a very bad thing happened on March 19, 1962. The mayor ordered to bring down the French flags, and circled them with black.

Truth always start with an emotional admission. Even in mathematics, or science.

The politically correct emotion about the Evian Accords has been, for 51 years, that they were good, and necessary, however grim it was to sign them. They went with history. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The French republic’s abuses in Algeria were not wiped out clean by another 51 years of abuse, starting with abusing truth.  

Confronted to that sort of past, in Algeria or Iraq, where reality is viewed as unbearable, there is only one principle worth having first. Namely that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, can prevent nasty outcomes. Especially those lies festering to this day.

Because, of course, the basic reasons for the Franco-Algerian civil war, are festering to this day, just on a grander scale. And now, the USA, instead of pulling nasty (Salafist) strings from the shadows (against France, BTW), is now on the frontlines (with France, happily).

The main reason why Germany is, finally, doing so well nowadays, is that a lot of the truth finally came out about some very bad ways German minds used to consider politically correct to operate under, while knowing no others.

***

WITH SAINTS LIKE THAT, WHO NEEDS DEVILS?

Not that only Germany has to be freed from simplistic, hence devil laden history. It’s not just that the American Founding fathers were slave masters. By contemporary standards, Saint Louis was a vicious criminal, and, at best, would have been interned as an insane maniac (he had declared, in writing, that nothing could be more pleasing to him than planting a knife into a non believer’s gut, and then playing around with the blade, once so inserted; why the Catholic church considers such a creep a saint rests on the fact that Catholics are not familiar with the lives of their most famous saints… and of course, that the church hierarchy is deeply evil).

Speaking of saints, the most revered Joan of Arc was a peace breaker. Paris and London had come to terms, and decided to reunify the kingdom (Treaty of Troyes). The king of England reigned over France. Unfortunately, he died within 2 months. His infant son was supposed to reign upon his majority. Wise people in England and France knew that this was an excellent arrangement, because, France being much bigger than England in all ways, there was no risk she would be gobbled up by England (contrarily to misrepresentations ever since). End of the 100 years war.

But then Jeanne, or rather the forces behind her (Yolande of Aragon) , from the south (Armagnac, Bourguignons, etc.) stepped in.

Jeanne restarted the Franco-French(-English) civil war. This time London and Paris were on the same side. Jeanne had quite a difficult time seizing Paris. Why such a divisive theocratic war monger is admired to this day is no mystery. Once Bush was selected, I mean when Charles VII had been unconstitutionally made king, there was no turning back. Jeanne d’Arc had to be made into a saint, or at least the judgments against her thrown out.

So will say it was better that England and France kept fighting each other for another 4 centuries: war is a force that gives us meaning. Perhaps. However, it’s neither wise, nor glorious not to teach in detail the reality of what happened. What happened is that Joan of Arc is another Christian “saint” who killed millions, and whose message, bloody sword in hand, voices from god in her head telling her war was all we needed, for no rational reason, is really not something one anyone wise would want to promote.

History is sometimes made by rats. As the famous sayingobservation has it, a rat gnawing through a dike can drown a nation. Now to this list of most creative creatures, we can add Sandra O’Connor, a so called “Justice”. Not only she has no notion of history, or justification, but that most fundamental human instinct, regret, central to learning anything important, has been extinguished in her. Her excuse? She is a “Westerner”. (Is that supposed to mean she has a gun instead of a head?)

Speaking of handing the presidency to plutocrat Bush, the vacuous Sandra reverted to a three year old persona. Said she: “There’s no point in my, at this point, saying I regret some decision I made. I’m not going to do that.”

Another bratty behaviour she may want to consider is to stop breathing and turning all blue until wiser people take pity. The Sandra girl by ordering to NOT recount Florida, gave the presidency to plutocrat Bush. The one who won the popular vote by two million, and also won Florida, Al Gore, was given a Nobel Prize instead of the presidency of the USA, to calm his nerves!

The point, O’Connor baby, is that, by saying that you regret your unconstitutional demolition of democracy, you would turn your back to Pluto, and join humanity. At least, symbolically speaking. That’s better than nothing. And better than staying forever, in the judgment of history, not just somebody who should never have existed, a one person democracy destroyer, but someone who persists into not even regretting her badness, contrarily to, say, Darth Vader.

It’s astounding one has to spell such an elementary truth to a big time Supreme Court “Justice”. Why are people such as these next to god? (Answer: because their very mediocrity insures that they will do the bidding of the plutocratic order.)

As the Romans knew, but O’Connor, and most of the truly bad soldiers of evil, do not want to admit: Errare Humanum Est, Perseverare Diabolicum! (Error Is Human, Persevering Diabolical!)

Going for the truth, and yanking it out of the entanglements where it lurks is always hellish in character. After all, woe onto those through whom scandal arrives.

Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Hell, it’s the others.” (L’enfer, c’est les autres): that was a neologism, an unusual way of using “autres”. It is mistranslated as “Hell is other people”, a different idea.

More generally, hell comes with the full reality that requires us to understand we would become obsolete, lest we change our minds. It may be painful to visit hell, but that’s where the hardest truths are lurking. Being ultimately good means turning hell into heavens.

***

Patrice Ayme