DOES NOT DO A CIVILIZATION GOOD
Main Ideas: The USA attacked Afghanistan. In July 1979. The USA recruited, financed, trained and armed the greatest Muslim Fundamentalist army of Jihadist warriors, that the world had ever seen. In particular intelligence services of the USA and their proxies recruited Osama Bin Laden. That was the high point of the terror strategy of the USA, which consisted in supporting terror leaders, throughout the world, if they were friendly. If they had oil, they did not even need to be friendly.
Most Americans, being told of those facts, would think you are crazy to talk that way. The president may want your “head examined”. The plutocracy of the USA has succeeded to hide from its ignorant populace the oily game it has been playing by using Muslim Fundamentalist warriors to get to Middle East, and Central Asian oil. Central Asian oil? That is why the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was attacked by Carter in 1979 (under advice from his pro-plutocratic advisers).
As if this were not bad enough, some of the fundamental tenets of Western civilization have been thrown to the wolves by the leaders of the USA, for all to see. Reintroducing “extraordinary question” (also known as “enhanced interrogation” or torture) was bad: torture was already unlawful against Roman citizens, 25 centuries ago.
But now Obama has suggested to wipe out 25 centuries of justice by proclaiming that it is done as it was done with Apaches. First use the Apaches, to hunt Apaches, then kill them, and cover it all up behind lies as thick as Middle Eastern oil.
In truth the Greco-Romans imposed justice as the supremacy of the law, above anything else, including expediency. The law is not just about killing Apaches… or Jews. There is such a thing as the law of the West, and it is above Americanism… just as it was above Nazism.
Adding to this, civilization has found more recently that justice’s highest goal is to establish the truth on criminal systems of thought. All of this should not be thrown to the fishes, just because one has a bigger boat.
Supporting terror leaders, and terrorist systems of thought, such as Islamist fascism (as American “intelligence” has done perfidiously), goes against the necessity of making terrorism unlawful. Terrorism has to be thrown out, because, if it is not, there will be nuclear war. That means a world where people eat people (there would be nothing else left to eat, as neoconservative torture supporters will be pleased to inform you).
So it is high time for the USA to rethink its approach to progress. Truth is sustainable, lies are not. Blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions for the whole planet to see, is not tolerable, especially in a major, would-be democratic regime. There are no ifs and buts.
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Abstract: President Obama basically, and unwisely, admitted that he ordered Bin Laden killed, and then added: “…the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”
Polls: 80% of U.S. citizens think that killing Bin Laden was the right decision. Those who think it was the wrong decision are 1%. (OK, the approval rate of the Iraq war was 83%, at the time, in 2003: same uncomprehending hatred, same wolves howling to the wind of madness.)
Obama is not expressing any opinion on mass murder on Afghan soil by American paid, armed and trained Jihadists. Mass murder on Afghan soil is an entirely different matter, let’s make a note of that.
Examining heads is what philosophers do, starting with their own. Correct thinking requires precision. Certainly Bin Laden got what he deserved. Anyone knows that. However, anyone who would not question whether the way Bin Laden got what he deserved is compatible with the continuation of civilization looking forward, should have his sense of civilization examined.
Confusing bullets and justice does not do a body politics good. It’s not just bad Karma, a terrible incitation, but also the justification of Osama, by Obama: I kill, therefore I just. Hyenas beat Descartes anytime, because they have bigger jaws.
Of course Obama is just a politician, the leader of the pack. If it’s a pack of culturally challenged wolves, he has to howl louder. A good politician has to be Machiavellian. Were I Obama, I may have assassinated Bin Laden too, putting to rest forever the assertion that I were a wet rag. Except, of course, that would have made me a war criminal, and that is a line I would not have crossed, not matter what. (Be it only because when Athens, a democracy, committed war crimes, it condemned itself to be hated by everybody, removed its greatest weapon, moral superiority, and that made Athens lose the war that destroyed half of its population, and would have extinguished it, but for Sparta.)
Obama has to do more than accompany the philosophy of the People, he has to lead it in the right direction, if he wants to be remembered as somebody who made a difference.
Philosophers make the philosophy of future people (and the best politicians consulted with philosophers, starting with Pericles). So contemporary people often act as the enemies of philosophers, because humans aspire to mental supremacy, and do not love to be told they are full of it.
In the week after Bin Laden’s elimination, the USA was traversed by another of these nationalistic frenzies we have observed in 2001, or 2003. I am well aware that Americans will hate what is written below. I am aware that nationalistic hatred knows no bounds. Here is a typical comment in the New York Times, made by “Justin”: “I consider myself a strong liberal but being upset about bin laden’s burial or not being taken alive is too bleeding hurt even for me.”
“Justin” has understood nothing, except that when the wolves howl, he better howl with them, to become their friend. I am also aware that the Dalai Lama has howled with the wolves. I expected nothing else from him.
Wisdom was not built on hatred as much as on a correct analysis of reality.
That American so called “strong liberals” are like little children from a courtyard, or jackals howling with the jackals, is the fundamental reason why they are increasingly manipulated into oblivion by the victorious plutocracy. Plutocracy, or the oblivion of civilization. Civilization is not so much about “bleeding hurt”, than about the toughest, most elaborate mind reason can build. It’s the opposite of bleeding and hurt.
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THE POWER, AND THE ETHICS, OF OUR CIVILIZATION RESTS ON TRUTH.
Any other description is a lie of the highest order, and most dangerous sort. Science establishes truth, so does justice. Bullets only make holes.
To survive and thrive, civilization will have to rest on ever more rigorous notions of truth. The ethics of Muslim Fundamentalists rest not on truth, but on superstitions found in old books: the Qur’an, and the Bible. Justice then meant whatever the guy at the top decided.
By throwing out, as if it never existed, 25 centuries of the advancement of the idea of justice, and choosing instead Biblical revenge, the government of the USA has allied itself with the enemies of the present civilization. Once again.
It is a curious thing that, while ostensibly fighting against bin Laden, after having fought in his company, in the end, the government of the USA agreed with Bin Laden on the most important subject. Ethics. Obama won Osama’s fight by killing him, the way he did. I kill, therefore I just.
It is an even stranger thing that, after being burned by Bush with the assault on Iraq, civilization and human rights by the Bush administration, the American people seems to have learned nothing, and becomes overwhelmed by joy as justice is subdued by bullets. “Does our children learn?” -As Bush would say, with his characteristic kindergarten grammar. (The fact that it is individuals with mangled culture who elaborate the devolution is rich in signification.)
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NO JUSTICE, NO CIVILIZATION. WAS IT JUST TO ATTACK AFGHANISTAN IN 1979?
Our formidable, worldwide civilization progressed in no small reason because of ever more sophisticated notions of justice. Precisely because justice is a form of truth. The American president has decided to throw them into the trash. It is an ominous victory of primitivism over wisdom, in a country with global pretentions.
Contrarily to the mythology their masters have stuffed gullible Americans with, the USA launched a war against Afghanistan, on July 3, 1979 (see document below). Of course, 9/11 killed 3,000 Americans and this is a much more important fact for Americans to be horrified by than the 3 million Afghans (at least) killed since 1979. If you tell Americans about the three million Afghans killed by a military action initiated by their government, they will look at you like goldfish. They will think you are beyond the pale, a type of crazy, who widely steps beyond appropriate mien.
This shows that, in the generally accepted estimate, an American life is worth more than a thousand times an Afghan’s life.
Bin Laden, then a son in one of the world’s richest families, was recruited by the “intelligence” oligarchy which helps to rule the USA. Bin Laden, from the second richest Saudi family, had the contacts among plutocrats to provide the secret war with needed funds. As an engineer and businessman, Bin Laden’s organizational skills came in handy. He became the head of a 20,000 men terror army, the point of the CIA war in Central Asia. Bin Laden, and other Jihadists, were taught to inflict terror on hard-to-defend objectives, such as primary schools for girls. Yes, it is abject. I am just describing hell and its demons. Only then did the government in Kabul called the Soviets for help.
American leaders, the powers that be, have no interest to see some of their unsavory top ex-operatives being brought to justice, and this sort of facts to come to the surface. This is the true meaning of the CIA archipelago around the world. Nor does the American public want to hear the truth in a courtroom, or anywhere else. Not anymore than Germans wanted to hear about Auschwitz, when Hitler was conquering the world.
Some truths are more than inconvenient, they could be lethal to the powerful, the reigning oligarchies, and the hopeful little servants crawling by their feet, full of all the psychopathic emotions which animate the creepy.
By ordering jihad against a secular republic, Carter signed, basically, the order of assaulting Afghan primary schools: this is what we are talking about here, the abject reality of the policy conducted by the American oligarchies just boiled down to that. Carter, the ethical crater, was of course given the Nobel peace prize: he had served the established order well. This puts in evidence why American presidents always sing the praises of Islam: they order the armies of Islam around. Ostensibly for Islamist purposes (they say to the Muslims), and freedom (they tell the rest of the world).
Before that, the war against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had been conducted even more secretly, through Pakistani intelligence (ISI). Thus the relation between the masters of Pakistan and the masters of the USA is that of partners in crime, a fact best hidden to everybody in sight, lest said masters find their rule more complicated. Nothing such as terrible secrets in common to unite (Reciprocally many Muslim fundamentalists are aware of some of the elements above, and, as they spread that revelation, that true message, mixed with the grandeur of simplistic ethics, they gain in credibility, because it all makes sense; in other words, the lying of Western leadership allows the religious fundamentalists to use against the West its most terrible weapon, the truth.)
Why did the USA attack Afghanistan in 1979? Really vicious governance piles up layers of lies as if they were sediments. Officially, the Carter administration defended its attack of Afghanistan as an attempt to catch the USSR in an “AFGHAN TRAP” (this defense of U.S. policy was made in France; it is pretty much censored in the USA; see document below).
This is another excellent lie, because it has an appearance of truth. As usual, confronted to a mysterious crime, it is wiser to search to whom it profits. Much of the superiority of the USA in the last 150 years comes from oil. So where is the oil? Afghanistan itself has no oil. The oligarchs alluded to the truth when they admitted that they wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
The real truth is that the American oiligarchy was trying to get to Central Asian oil and gas, and extend further American plutocracy’s dominion. It needed jihadists, bin Laden, to clear the area from the Russians. And it worked. So far, mostly: plutocracy: 100, everybody else, zero.
Bin Laden was assassinated, to prevent the public to contemplate deep perspectives, over the abysses upon which their masters rule. And the unraveling of elaborate tales. Americans find themselves in the position of the Germans of old, not too keen to ask too many questions to their guides, lest their mental and material comfort suffers…
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AMERICANS ARE UNAWARE OF 32 YEARS OF AMERICAN ASSAULT ON AFGHANISTAN:
Obama gave the context of the death of Osama: “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”
Really? Came to our shores? Started with slaughtering U.S. citizens? The American people did not choose this fight? Well, that is speciously true; it’s the plutocrats of the USA who attacked Afghanistan. And they kept it secret first. So, indeed, the “American People did not chose this fight”! Well done Mr. President! what’s next? The Nobel prize in logics?
Then the plutocrats next described their assault on Afghanistan as a fight for freedom. but mostly, Americans chose to ignore that, and revere Reagan’s regain instead. The first inkling that most know-nothings American had that something wrong was going on was the (counter-)attacks on the USA, on September 11, 2001. THAT was painful.
ON JULY 3, 1979, USA’S PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER SIGNED A DIRECTIVE FOR SECRET AID TO THE TERRORIST OPPONENTS OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN.
The (official) aim of USA was to drag the Soviet Union into the “AFGHAN TRAP” as US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski termed it. And that too, was also a lie. Lies, within lies, within lies… The USA attacked the democratic republic of Afghanistan, using Osama bin laden and his friends, for the usual reason, as I will explain. But let’s get the first version of the story from the snake’s mouth:
Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*
Question, Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. BUT THE REALITY, SECRETLY GUARDED UNTIL NOW, IS COMPLETELY OTHERWISE: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? THAT SECRET OPERATION WAS AN EXCELLENT IDEA. IT HAD THE EFFECT OF DRAWING THE RUSSIANS INTO THE AFGHAN TRAP AND YOU WANT ME TO REGRET IT? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic Fundamentalism [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? SOME STIRRED-UP MOSLEMS or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
[*] The version of the Nouvel Observateur sent to the United States did not include the Brzezinski interview. Perhaps the minders of America did not want to stir -up the natives. Clearly, Obama does not want American youth to know more than the fantasy that the American assault on Afghanistan started in 2001.
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CIVILIZED JUSTICE VERSUS JUSTICE OF THE APE:
In primitive, Biblical times, justice was about retribution in kind, an eye for an eye. It was all about revenge, and it led to an unending cycle of violence. The cycle of vengeance and violence became the bane of the Mid Terra area. That vicious circle is still found in a few of the most primitives parts of the planet, such parts of Albania, or parts of the Amazon. Now the USA has proclaimed, loud and clear, that it has joined the reservation.
The Romans had introduced a more advanced notion of justice. Roman justice was represented as blind, weighting the evidence from the facts alone, and not carried away by the fury of appearances. Roman justice incorporated the notion of forgiveness: suspects could not be judged, too long after the facts, as those could not be determined precisely. Facts ruled: no facts, no justice.
Rational, fact and law driven justice broke the cycle of vengeance which came to wreck much of the Mid-Terra world. Superior justice was no small contributor to the supremacy of Roman civilization, and to the ultimate triumph of many of its mental elements through the superstitious, irrational, anti-intellectual, Biblically induced Dark Ages.
Roman style justice survived the Dark Ages, in no small part because Roman lawyers and/or generals had written down, in Latin, a Salian law for the Franks, which complemented nicely secular Roman law. Even the fanatical Justinian, emperor of most of the Roman empire (but for Francia), refurbished all of Roman law, ordering to separate carefully secular law from Christian law (this refreshed law was instated in the “Occidental Part”).
However, as the centuries passed by, it was found out that justice could be endowed with an even higher purpose that had escaped the Romans. The failure of understanding, in a timely manner, that there was more to justice than punishing the guilty, allowed the collapse of the Roman republic, and its transmogrification into the fascist empire.
The highest purpose of justice is not anymore what it was under the Romans. Replacing vengeance with the arbitration of a third party, the law, same for all, was the highest purpose of the Greco-Roman style justice. The leading edge of civilization has done much better since.
After the cataclysm of Nazism, the most careful thinkers in Europe imposed a higher purpose for justice. Contrarily to what the Nazis asserted, it was not “victors’ justice“. Quite the opposite. THE HIGHEST PURPOSE OF EUROPEAN STYLE JUSTICE BECAME ESTABLISHING CAUSALITY. ESPECIALLY IN THE CASE OF CRIMES INVOLVING THE STATE. SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT WERE PUT ON TRIAL.
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INFAMY IS INDEFENSIBLE, PUTTING IT ON TRIAL INSTRUCTIVE ALWAYS:
Confronted to monsters who had killed sometimes millions of people, during WWII, the European leaders did not go ape. They kept their cool. they did not devolve civilization further. They did not behave like Nazis, but as their antagonists, that means they clang to the principles of western civilization.
European leaders, and democratic institutions, did not just put on trial suspect individuals. They also tried the systems of thought that animated them, by going deep in their motivations. Some of the criminals defended themselves with the best they had, and that was exactly what was the worst with them, their own criminal systems of thought. A careful selection of the worst thinking was made, and publicly tried, condemned, and executed.
The top Nazis themselves exhibited the paucity of Nazism when they tried to use it to defend themselves. Bin Laden using Salafism to defend himself would have put Salafism on trial. For all to see. Fundamentalist Islam would have suffered. That means: an ally American plutocracy has been able to surf on beautifully would have suffered, weakening the ride it provided plutocracy with. Also, of course, the symbiosis between CIA, ISI, and Jihadism, may have come to light. When crime is well organized, witnesses are the first to go, even if, especially if, partners in crime.
By defending themselves, Nazi criminals exposed their logic. In the end none of the miscreants of Western civilization had anything important to say in the defense of Nazism, fascism, and racism. Even the worst Nazis were emotionally shattered when the monstrosities they had allowed, incited, or ordered, were shown on the screen. In the end, most of them put themselves at the mercy of the court, admitting their best defense was to admit their own mental, cultural and moral retardation, and fundamental viciousness.
Goering himself, and many other Nazi leaders found themselves recognizing that the holocaust had been a horrible thing. Many claimed, implausibly, that they did not know. In other words, the top Nazis themselves could not defend Nazism in its hour of need.
Justice did not just execute criminals, it executed Nazism, and its executioners were its top practitioners. Justice made it so.
This way the world was rid of Nazism and racism, for good, and quite a while. (Things could have gone much further by exposing the forces behind Hitler and company, but those ruled in the USA, more than ever, after their collaborator’s ignomious fall; see the Dulles brothers, P. Bush, H. Ford, GM, IBM, etc…. It was a from of gravity assist: evil falling in the abyss, to gain even more energy. Hence the problem we are facing today!)
By assassinating bin Laden, the USA has proclaimed that, far from respecting the Roman conception of justice, it devolved back down to the Biblical notion of justice, not far removed from that of the apes. Forget all this European notion of advancing understanding through justice, and judging systems of thought. It’s a war, and an eye for eye. What war exactly? A war that, contrarily to what Obama insinuated, the USA itself started. The war for the control of Central Asia, and its enormous reserves of oil and gas. Who is next?
Far from being a secular, thus a modern country, most of the USA is caught in a time warp. It had it so good for so long that it cannot understand that the music has stopped, and it has run out of Apache territory to invade. With all the Muslim rebels, as with the Indians: progress means that, this time, the fishes will have Geronimo. Justice, the American way. Throw the means to get to the truth in the abyss.
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EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM:
Europe and Israel were careful to not throw their mass murderers to the fishes on the first day. First they made them sing. All those who were intercepted were tried (Himmler, once detected by the Brits took poison).
Great mass murderers and criminals against humanity are too good a counter-examples to civilization to go to waste. It is an insult to victims to dispose of criminals against mankind as if they were nothing important, just fish food. Move on, we have an electoral campaign!
Israel conducted a commando operation to arrest Eichmann in Argentina, in total and appropriate disregard of Argentine law (France conducted similar arrests in Bolivia and Sudan, removing respectively Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal). Eichmann killed millions of Jews. Eichmann had a long and elaborate trial (so did Barbie and The Jackal in France). He was condemned to death, and executed.
Eichmann’s defense during his trial was extremely edifying. He claimed not to hate Jews, far from it. His best friend was a Jew (he begged Himmler to save him). Eichmann suggested that Kant misled him. Kant was a Prussian philosopher of obedience, and respect of conformity, much admired by those who don’t want to think too much.
Thanks to Eichmann, those who have not been persuaded by Nietzsche’s fierce attacks against Kant, can now associate Kant to German fascism and mass murder. This is a very important point: Kant is still very admired. This is thought to be very scholarly an attitude. But Eichmann gave a vivid and livid illustration that Kant is loved by those who crave the power of the conformism fascism cannot do without.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote up a whole book, exposing her theory of the “Banality of Evil” (which was certainly an appropriate description for most Germans). In any case, a high level debate has been conducted ever since, to hunt down the elements in human psychology and philosophy which led to the criminal madness of Nazism, and how they seduced most Germans (and few others).
The Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion was monstrously courageous to send Israeli special forces kidnap Eichmann, and to conduct an open trial. During the war, he had negotiated with Eichmann. Eichmann proposed one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks. Ben Gurion refused. So, in a sense, Ben Gurion was a partner in crime with Eichmann. However, he was unafraid to stick by his position that (re)constructing Israel was the best way to save Jews. According to him, it was no good to send Jews to Britain.
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JUSTICE WAS NOT A GIFT TO NAZIS, BUT AS AN INDICTMENT OF NAZISM:
The U.S. president wants to ‘examine the heads of those who question’. Cheering assassinations is much better, and should not be questioned: the USA is turning into Godfather central.
Whereas the Europeans conducted all the trials of Nazis and their collaborators, and the trials of some of the world’s most famous terrorists in the open, the USA has refused to do so with Muslim terrorists. Why no open trials? Are Americans afraid that if a Muslim fundamentalist open his mouth, they will turn to stone? Or is it simply that the American People should not be reminded that Muslim terrorists were collaborators of the USA for many decades (at least 6)! The true meaning of the Guantanamo archipelago is that terrorists have not to make any declaration to the American People, only secretly to their secret masters in Washington.
People with unexamined heads feel that justice is a gift to the criminals. But justice, as it allows to discover what led to the criminal behavior, helps civilization understand sociopathy, and thus allows people to live better lives. It was important to determine what made Bin Laden tick. And it is even more important to know, if those who winded Bin Laden up sat in the White House (or would that then be the Black House?)
Once again, it is not my conspiracy, it’s not just inhabitating my mind: I did not raise a 300,000 jihadist army to bomb primary schools for girls. The powers that be in the USA did. Then they played gravely offended on 9/11.
Some of the oligarchs who decided to use “stirred up Muslims” to get to Central Asian oil, probably had not studied enough history: betrayal by a mercenary army is one of a great theme of history. It happened to Carthage. And to Rome many times, and, in the end, fatally (the battle of Adrianople, where the Oriental Roman army was destroyed, and the emperor killed).
But then, again, maybe some of them did: more on this later.
During the Nazi occupation, Europe was rife with massive state sponsored hate crime. Afterwards, some countries reinstituted the death penalty, after more than a century without.
Countries tried to understand what happened, what led so many people to crimes against humankind. In Norway, Quisling established a treacherous regime. Quisling knew Hitler even before the hostilities, and started his collaboration even though the Norwegian army and state was still fighting a few miles out of Oslo in April 1940 (the Norwegians caused considerable losses to the Nazis, even sending below the cold waters of Oslo fjord, the entire administration the Nazis planned to impose on Norway).
Quisling organized the deportation of Norwegians to Germany for assassination. Responsible of thousands of death, hated by the entire country, he was nevertheless given medical treatment, a good health, and the opportunity to mount a defense. He claimed he never suspected the holocaust (the usual line). He was executed five months after his arrest.
France confronted worse mass murderers than Osama bin Laden (they killed more, and more horribly). However France, as a state, showed real cool, jailing and judging all of the biggest fish appropriately. Famous collaborators, including writers, ex war heroes, highest police officials, and a Prime Minister, were executed in the end, along with many thousands of lesser Nazi loving criminals. No country (but for Stalin’s nightmarish fascist kingdom), executed as many collaborators.
Justice was done above the board, publicly. It is now possible to consult the argumentation the fascists made when they tried to save their precious skins. That exposed logic now allows jurists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers to understand much better what makes fascism tick. This body of knowledge is now an archeology of evil. Digging through it allow to understand how to prevent the repetition of such dreadful abuse.
Why do Americans not want to understand why 19 believers killed 3,000 Americans, in an act of faith? Are they afraid that faith would not look good? Or that the 19 had strong reasons to believe that the USA was what ailed them? And if so, why? What about 19 Pakistani engineers believing the same, with their fingers on 200 thermonuclear bombs, inside 200 rockets pointed to the United Stupid of Apathy? Is there nothing important to learn there? Or is it all fish food?
An example: SS Klaus Barbie, killed more people than bin Laden ever (Barbie tortured to death 5,000 people, one by one, over the years, and some were children). France captured Barbie in Bolivia, where he was a top CIA operative, in charge of drug and arm trafficking.
How strange: Barbie was in a role of self financing of American intelligence, somewhat similar to bin Laden’s task. Barbie used drugs and weapons trafficking, Bin Laden his plutocratic friends.
Barbie was condemned to life in jail by a French court. After a public trial, defended by the best defenders. Plenty of facts were exposed, such as the systematic use of the worst torture by Barbie and his crew. Nothing to hide. France, as a nation, has tried to discover what happened before and during World War Two, be it only to find out what went wrong. That requires open justice.
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JUSTICE DONE BY KILLING APACHES VERSUS JUSTICE RENDERED BY CIVILIZATION.
The USA named Bin Laden “Geronimo“. This is more than a Freudian slip. It is more than a mockery of a past genocide. It is a more than a civilizational slip. Geronimo, the last free Apache had been… betrayed by the USA. It is also a warning: Arabs who resist are Apaches, and shall be treated as such: employed as the Apaches were to further the goals of the USA, and then eliminated, when not of use anymore (many of the Apache trackers who helped the U.S. Army were treated as badly as those they had contributed to catch…)
One has to keep in mind that the hunt and extermination of Native Americans was deeply uncivilized, starting in the technical sense: it was conducted on the frontier, where there were no cities. So frontier justice is fundamentally uncivilized. Now Obama wants it to be the world’s justice, in regions where there have been cities, for 10,000 years.
A few weeks ago, in a joint, UN requested operation, French aircrafts demolished the fortified mansion of the ex-president of Cote d’Ivoire. Ggabo wanted to pursue his decade long tyranny. Losing an election forced upon him by the United Nations, did not make him relinquish power to his highly qualified opponent. After serious, lethal combat, over many days, with thousands dead, republican soldiers captured the ex-president, his (hated) spouse, and their 30 something son (bloodied). They are alive, awaiting the wheels of justice. This is a face of topmost African justice, 2011 style. It has much improved. What is the face of topmost American justice, 2011 style? It has much decayed. What used to happen in secret in remote locales is now flaunted in public. The USA now hunts Apaches in the middle of Pakistan.
In the first few days, the White House floated various interpretations of bin Laden’s death. In some the villain took a wife as human shield, in others he engaged in a firefight. As it turned out the wife was shot by the Americans, and bin Laden was unarmed, and received one chest wound, and a shot to the head.
Real justice from real civilization means that, when you have 79 super trained, super armed, and armored commandos, you do not assassinate unarmed suspects, one of them a 19 year old, even if their name is bin Laden.
You do not assassinate, in a democracy, especially if the name is Bin Laden. Why? Because you want, if you are a democratic leader, to go to the bottom of things. And, if you do, as a democratic government, you don’t crow about it. Things are completely different if you are the hired and paid hand of a plutocracy. The difference between the army, or police force of a democracy, and mafia goons then come to the fore. The democracy acts out of justice, the mafia out of imposed silence, retribution, and reinstatement of the status quo ante.
The president glorified the dubious notion of plutocratic justice of frontier towns, where the local sheriff was on the payroll of the local wealthy rancher… or oil man. That old notion of “justice” where the local inhabitants, present there for millennia were hunted like vermin, where entire ecological systems were destroyed, not just to get to gold, but to starve the natives, where treaties after treatises were signed to gain advantage and provide opportunities for the most vicious betrayals.
To flaunt all this, to serve it as a reminder to the entire planet that, as far the American government is concerned, we are all Apaches, and it was correct, politically correct, judicially correct to massacre the Apaches, and so it would be to all the savages who stand between the USA and its oil, Bin Laden was named Geronimo. What else? They are not that clever? But that is worst: because they have learned nothing. Sometimes deliberate evil, in the know, is better than self righteousness so acute that evil is confused with goodness.
In the CBS “60 Minutes” interview, Obama admitted that, not only he got bin Laden killed, but other people too. After apparently assassinating Bin Laden for all to see, the president of the USA, just to make sure that the sheep out there got it, looked straight at camera, and assassinated the idea of justice.
Obviously, the government of the USA has things to hide from the People in the name of which it governs. Not just that, but it ominously let it be known that it does, and that everybody should shut up about it. The oligarchs did not want their ex-agent bin Laden to explain how their mass murdering collaboration evolved into squabbling. The oligarchs did not want bin Laden to stand up, and plead not guilty. They would have hated to see bin Laden request that directors of the CIA be brought to the stand as (presumably hostile) witnesses.
The same method was used with Saddam Hussein: silence, the Western governments have nothing to do with your badness, you little pawn! Bush kept repeating like a deranged parrot that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people, forgetting that this was during a war against Iran more or less incited by the West, and where the West gave the means to Saddam, including the chemical capability. The will to dissimulation and dissemblance emanates from governments serving their friend the plutocrats (the oil men, the military industrial complex, the financiers) rather than their voters, the public.
***
THROWING JUSTICE TO THE WOLVES IS ANTI-AMERICAN:
If Africans can do justice, why can’t Americans? Obama insisted that “justice was done”, “bin Laden was brought to justice”. He should know: he taught constitutional justice at the University of Chicago. If anyone knows what American justice is about, it is Obama.
Perhaps Americans are stupid, and they believe the statement that “justice was done”. And, if they don’t, trust Obama to repeat it to them another 1,000 times. However, the rest of the planet is smart enough to know that if it is what the USA mean by justice, they don’t want it. By flaunting a Biblical notion of justice, Obama is feeding raw anti-Americanism, and also the very religious extremism, “stirred-up Muslims”, he claims to want to fight. That may seem contradictory, but it’s not. At least since 1953, a big part of the policy of the USA in the Middle East has been to stir-up Muslims, and get them to do the dirty work… Against democracy and progress.
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THE USA’S OILY & SLIPPERY GAME IN THE MIDDLE EAST:
An obvious observation is ominous for American democracy: the government of the USA does not want to reveal what transpired between itself and bin Laden. That is the one and only explanation for the elimination of Osama without examination. Alternatives such as Obama was so Oh Drama about Osama don’t stand scrutiny. As he said it himself, he did not lose sleep about him.
An example of disinformation is the Wikipedia article “CIA-Bin Laden controversy” where the best reputable sources are presented as “allegations“, while propaganda is presented as “scholarly“. With so many Harvard professors on Qaddafi’s payroll, “scholarly” has a double meaning. Openness is rejected, because it would turn the USA to stone. The USA conducts its secrecy in the open, like its collaborator, China. Call that whatever you want, but democracy is not its name.
At some points, if enough allegations about American plutocracy double dealing with Hitler, even Stalin, all sorts of Muslim Fundamentalists, and organizing giant transfer of monies from the poor to the rich in guise of saving the world’s economy, end up on the surface, all exposed, the American People may understand that it is in its best interest to figure out what is going on. Elements of the Obama administration have even ludicrously claimed that money was made, by taxpayers, out of the financial disaster. It is a lie, as anyone reading the Wall street Journal (as I do every day, me and Karl Marx!) knows (see the WSJ, May 9, cover story about AIG).
***
WHAT COULD HAVE BIN LADEN REVEALED?
Well, Americans have been told to not know the following, and they, and their hypnotizing, plutocratic owned media, are doing an excellent job at it:
1) The plutocracy of the USA has instrumentalized Islam. Islam has become a tool to achieve some of its aims, so it is appreciated. That is why the USA admits that it organized, financed and armed a 250,000 jihadists army in Afghanistan, now known as the Taliban (“Wilson’s war”).
The instrumentalization of Islam is why the American president talks as if he were the Caliph. Just listen to him carefully, he will tell you what the religion is. Daddy knows best. Let me explain explicitly: Obama has come on the TV, many times, and told us what was bad Islam. He told us, speaking of some particular Muslim Fundamentalists: this is not religion. Obama, just like Osama, knew better. Ayatollah in Chief bin Obama thus played the oldest game in Christo-Islamism: deciding who is a believer, and who is not. (The proper role of the leader of a secular democracy is to NOT make religious interpretations; THAT is the difference between a Caliph and the president of a republic; the leaders of fuller democracies are careful NOT to present themselves as if they were caliphs.)
Those who are out, the unbelievers, said Jesus Christ, the well known prophet of Islam, should be burned (read the evangel of John carefully, if in doubt). Who knows what is good Islam, and what is bad Islam, and sends armies to impose his fatwas? Well the Caliph, of course. No wonder so many Americans think Obama is a Muslim: he proffers Muslim opinions (“fatwas”), all the time: this one is a good Muslim, this one, I kill. Bin Laden used to do that too. Takes one to silence the other. How do you spell bad karma? But of course Americans are a primitive crowd: 61% believe bin Laden is in hell.
Yes, really in hell, not as a figure of speech; then some chant that this is not a crusade! It goes without saying that the fact Americans believe that bin Laden is in hell feeds the opposite point of view, in those that the USA or its agents oppress. Let’s be explicit here: by making bin Laden an absolute revulsion, the definition of evil, 61% Americans say that it good to absolutely hate. And who do they hate? The one that their own government dispatched to commit terror jihad against the innocent, in the hope it would weaken socialism and secularism.
By saying that Osama is ultimate evil, and Obama ultimate good, they are a letter away from contradicting themselves. And they will, because one letter is not much, when all you have is chanting. How embarrassing. In any case they teach the Muslim world with the example of the metaphysics of hatred, unbridled emotion.
OK, let the primitives to their own instruments, and let’s be serious. The policy of fitting Islam to the purpose of American oil men and American financiers started in 1945. (16.5 years before Obama’s birth: I am not claiming that Obama is an original thinker!)
2) That policy of instrumentalizing Islam worked splendidly: plenty of oil and gas was produced, and made American oilmen rich, while plenty of petrodollars were recycled through Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex. Prince Bandar reigned over Washington. Americans were instructed to respect Islam and those who mastered it. Oil procurement distracted the populace through oil addiction and waste (the Romans wanted bread, the Americans wanted oil, so they could out and play with mind consuming toys). Bin Laden and Al Qaeda became themselves distractions, and blames defectors.
Don’t ask what you could do against bin Laden, ask what your bin Laden has done for you. Well, bin laden has made Obama into Osama. Kill, and call that justice. That is where my Obama head examination irresistibly leads me to.
However, a number of the believers who were instrumentalized, such as the Shiites in Iran, realized later that they had been pawns of Uncle Sam, and they turned against the American chess masters with a vengeance. Turning against the USA with a vengeance started with Nasser, it went on with Iran, Iraq, then bin Laden. It’s starting to happen with Pakistan. Anti-Americanism has a rich future, because one cannot exploit and manipulate all the people, all the time. Not everybody has interest to be as gullible as the American people. As the manipulation mechanisms are revealed, the People will revolt. It has already started. But this is just a start, although some hope to stop it, Tiananmen Chinese style (Assad’s line in Syria).
When bin Laden and his fellow jihadists understood that they were played like violins in American hands, they rebelled. That rebellion was facilitated by the fact they were out of work, after the ignominious defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. (Many then tried to make an Islamist revolution in Algeria, but the Algerian military, in full cooperation with the redoubtable, pernicious and obdurate French republic, blocked them in a bloody civil war reminiscent of the Algerian war of independence. Exploding very high speed trains and trying to crash jumbo jets over Paris in 1996, did not help any.)
After 9/11 American propaganda was able to fall back on its feet, by increasing lying and dissemblance Brandishing Islam, and claiming that “the USA is not at war with Islam” is part of the dissemblance, for the good and simple reason that it is not the proximal outrage at hand; the real question was:”How come the CIA employed operatives who now attack the American People?” Another dissemblance is to say that Bin Laden was not a CIA employee. Neither was Klaus Barbie, of course.
American policy in the main oil region of the planet has piled lies upon lies, upon lies. In the apparent hope, so far realized, that the American People is too misinformed, or too dumb, to figure it out.
There are no bounds to the Machiavellism. For example, American “intelligence” has created Pakistan, and its nukes (the latter partly, and officially paid by Bush and his taxpayers!). At first sight, that does not look very smart. But, on a second, and much deeper look, a nuclear, crazed Pakistan is exactly what the oiligarchy and the military-industrial complex need. If the interest of warring in Afghanistan now escapes the American public, warring all over Pakistan offers rich opportunities. OK, not everybody will get rich, only those who pay millions to befriend the president, or only 50,000 dollars to be in the same room, admitted to the presence.
In the end the system laundered money from the American public, through oil producing countries, back to the richest manipulators of the USA, on Wall Street. A small example: the financial system of the USA found itself with 60 billion dollars controlled by Qaddafi (the Saudi sums are astronomically larger).
***
WE THROW YOU TO THE FISHES, SUCH IS THE MAFIA:
The mafia style assassination of bin Laden, and the propaganda accompanying it, with its imagery from the Mafia (“fishes”), and ethnocide (“Geronimo”), will live in history as one of the most famous cover-ups.
Movies such as “The Godfather” are nothing relative to what we just witnessed, the guy on the red carpet, looking the whole planet in the eye, coolly announcing that the notion of justice of Athens and Rome was not valid anymore. Too soft that law according to Greece and Rome. The USA has returned to the old fashion way, Babylonian justice. According to Obama, justice is now back to pure force, and those who thing otherwise “should have their head examined”… probably before being thrown to the fishes too.
Socrates, who could have escaped, as Aristotle did, preferred to die to confirm the supremacy of the law over the City and its citizens. Now an American comes to tell us inconsiderately that the last 25 centuries of civilization were for nought. “Justice is done” now with bullets. Those who “question” that, “should have their head examined”. The Guide’s hysterical populace is besides itself with joy, in a show reminiscent of the public face of Nazi Germany, complete with the joyful face of hate and bloodlust, music bands marching on TV sets.
Not only is the silencing of partners in crime by the powerful unworthy of a confident democracy, or republic, but it is a further step in its decomposition. The relationship between bin Laden and American intelligence and its proxies lasted a quarter of a century, and was perfectly illustrated by the sheltering of bin Laden right in the lair of the Pakistani military, for all to see, once again. Maybe that is why Bush was so unconcerned about catching bin Laden: who would want to catch oneself in public?
I am calling here onto the spirits of big time history. When democracy in the USA behaves worse, 21 centuries later, than an already deeply troubled Roman republic, Earth, we have a serious problem. Confronted with much more serious, dangerous, and mass murdering foes of the treacherous type (Jugurtha, Vercingetorix), the Roman republic arrested them. They were executed much later. There is little doubt that bin Laden could have been executed later. In theory, the ruler of the USA is the People.
The People should have had questions for bin Laden. Starting with: why did you meet many times with CIA operatives at the American hospital in Dubai in July 2001? What was exactly your relationship with the CIA? And the ISI? And Prince Turki (Saudi intelligence head)? Were you ordered to attack primary schools in Afghanistan? If not so, who did it? Etc.
I do believe in the superiority of civilization over the wastes of the wilds. That superiority rests on logics. Thus it can come and go, as logic does. Who profited from the immediate elimination of bin Laden? Well, those who did not want him to answer questions in a judicial process.
***
FIGHT OF THE DINOSAURS: ADVANTAGE AL QAEDA:
American plutocracy versus Jihadism, its ex-employee. Al Qaeda was able to steer further the USA towards civilizational irrelevance, by making it embrace Biblical justice. So Al Qaeda won in spirit. And spiritual elements are what lasts longer.
Al Qaeda had only 200 men in 2001. The USA launched a three trillion dollar war, ostensibly to fight it, killed hundreds of thousands of people, changed the nature of American society, and made the USA more like old Sparta, with an oligarchy ruling an increasingly destitute American population, as the society became more and more molded by war, for war.
The disproportion is astounding. 200 guys on one side, and the USA has still not won! The USA ruined its economy, its sociology, its law and its civilization, and the 200 guys are still out there, fighting back. Bin Laden was not the most important character of Al Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from the Muslim brotherhood, is much more important (and may have given bin Laden’s location to Obama, for all I know… There were good reasons for this crafty move…)
Not just this, but, the USA did so, while making Al Qaeda and its imitators stronger. Only fools will think that this was just out of clumsiness. A more subtle interpretation is that this was a computation of the American oligarchy to reign more, onto its own People.
Pro-plutocratic Romans used to chant:”One must destroy Carthage!” (“Cartago delenda est”.) Carthage had become democratic, and thus, being the enemy of Rome, Carthage became a way to paint democracy as the enemy of Rome. Something similar is going on now. The presence of Carthage had been used to justify the weakening of democracy, while increasing the militarization. Similarly, the presence of a jihadist army allows American plutocrats to do exactly the same.
Before howling that I see conspiracies everywhere, and my head should be examined again, think about it. Which country, in the world supported financially, trained and equipped an army of 300,000 jihadists? Only one: the country of the towers which fell by total surprise, among the bleating sheep.
“A fight that we did not start, but came to our shores”, as the thinker in sheep, I mean in chief among the sheep, blurted out repetitively, the way sheep are won to do.
“To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.” (U.S. President Reagan, March 21, 1983.)… we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones” (Charlie Wilson, head of U.S. Congress for Afghan jihad.)
In the end, American commandos fought just one guy to kill an unarmed bin Laden, and no American was wounded. Was it much ado about nothing? No. Bin Laden became a pretext to invade much of the oil producing part of the planet, that the USA did not control yet.
However, in the end it cost too much in lives and treasure. More than 6,000 American soldiers, and more than 1,000 other NATO troops have been killed in action, and dozens of thousands of soldiers have been gravely wounded. NATO populations, profoundly incognizant, are still supporting the wars, but their economies have already cracked… And we were told it was all because of greedy homeowners. (Now to be helped, by giving free money to the world’s richest people, the one who fill the campaign coffers of the politicians who serve them.)
The conflict did not come out as intended by American oligarchy. By making the fight with 200 guys into an enormous war, with the enormous ambition of controlling Iraqi oil, and Central Asian oil and gas, the USA bit more than it could chew. Al Qaeda, and a new anti-American galaxy, won militarily. The USA is defeated militarily, and is trying to extract itself from Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq is on the verge of a grand alliance with Iran and Syria. Pakistan is playing a complicated game, using both the jihadists and China against the U.S. taxpayers. The plutocracy of the USA keeps its cool; nothing like a big mess, to advance its cause.
Al Qaeda won philosophically: the USA embraced its primitive disregard for Western civilization. Not only Americans, like the Salafists, believe in hell, but they indicate that civilization is in the way, and ought to be jettisoned.
Some will say that is sad, and unfortunate. They miss the point: it was deliberate, and a joyful occasion for the plutocracy. And so was the pseudo-crash of 2008 (which was more akin to gravity assist, when a space probe falls into a passing planet’s gravitational field, in a near crash, and then comes out with much more energy.) A whole menagerie now reigns on American TV, celebrating “enhanced interrogation”. In the Middle Ages, that was called “extraordinary question”, colloquially: torture. It was discontinued in the Middle Ages, because more efficient ways were found to find things out, while making civilization progress.
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DEMOCRACY IS BEST FOR WAR, & SOMETIMES CANNOT AFFORD ANYTHING ELSE:
Salafism is a form of fascism. So is all too much (not all) of Christo-Islamism. Christianism was fascism, and so was Islamism. Christianism was domesticated long ago, when the Franks took control in 486 CE. (It escaped out of its cage, by using the Crusades, and it took centuries to completely re-domesticate it). But nobody came out, and domesticated Islam. Even the French, expert at the domestication of Christianism and Islamism in “Francia” herself, did not try to domesticate Islam in Algeria. That was to the advantage of the hyper wealthy (who feel that they profit from an ignorant population), but not to the advantage of advancing civilization (which all too many French did not want to advance in Algeria, as primitives are more easily exploited than the sophisticated).
Islamism is more alive than Christianism. People have been lapidated in Afghanistan in 2011, because of so called “infidelity”. Videos were taken (they have been shown in the West). The game of NATO and the USA in Afghanistan has been to leave islam in command, for the same reason as stupid French left islam alone in the Maghreb; it is easier to exploit the primitives. More exactly it allows to make deals with a few fascist leaders, such as Karzai.
Mubarak and the Saudis, or Qaddafi, did not charge fully for oil. If those regimes were democracies, oil would be more expensive, and Israel would find harder to pursue its exploitation of the Palestinians, and the oppression of the quarter of its citizenry which is not Jewish.
Islam, just as Christianism, has been mostly used as an excuse fascists have found to stay in power. Fascism is the Raison d’être of Christianism and Islamism. See the (rich) Egyptian military leadership making deals with the Islamists, as Mubarak used to, under the cover of officially not liking them. And see the deal between the Saud family (fascists) and the Wahhabists (theocrats).
The planet has shrunk, democracy cannot be weak with fascism. Weakness, or more exactly, in the case of the (plutocrats of the) USA and the UK, double dealing, was tried with German fascism. It worked well, but mostly for the (plutocrats of the) USA. Bin Laden was part of a similar system: as a good Saudi, he brought the goods to the USA, in this case, a jihadist army. So, basically the same double deal was done with Muslim Fundamentalists as was done with Hitler: get the best deal from the fascists, by collaborating with them.
Resting one’s fortune on a holocaust is not easy to duplicate, though. The (plutocrats of the) USA ought to be careful next time. Apparently next time is now. In no small part because the plutocratic system is increasingly hard to hide, from Wall Street to Qaddafi.
I have advocated that fascists who lose legitimacy and present a threat ought to be aggressively removed in a timely manner, as needed by democracy. Hitler ought to have been assassinated by the Germans, and the West ought to have assisted in that matter by treating Hitler with proper disrespect. This is done with Qaddafi right now, by stopping him militarily, attacking his reputation, property, and dragging him to justice in absentia, for crimes against humankind.
An obvious problem, though, is that the world plutocratic system is all tied together, as an organic whole. The ambassador of the USA related secretly the North Korean weapons transfers through China (WikiLeaks). The Chinese and the North Koreans know that Washington knows, and Washington lets it happen, becoming an accomplice. Why? As I said, it’s an integrated whole. As long as the public does not know, it flies. WikiLeaks worries Beijing and Washington, because it exposes how they rule, for the benefit of their oligarchs, and that rests on excluding the public from ruling.
One more example: Switzerland just found in its coffers 400 million dollars tied in to Ggabo, the arrested dictator of Ivory Coast. OK, that’s far from the 150 billions of the Qaddafi clan and the 80 billions of the Mubarak clan, or the 8 billions of the Ben Ali clan (Tunisian dictatorship). But that is only in Switzerland. The world’s greatest tax heavens is actually the… USA. And the Qaddafis had 60 billion there (according to Hillary Clinton).
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A BIN LADEN TRIAL WOULD HAVE BEEN ADVERSE TO THE RULING CLASS:
Pluto can make itself invisible, such is one of its qualities the Greeks discovered.
Obviously, the government of the USA has things to hide from the People in the name of which it governs. Not just that, but it ominously let it be known that it does, and that everybody should shut up about it. Heads examined otherwise. And don’t forget “enhanced interrogation”.
The oligarchs did not want their ex-agent bin Laden to explain how their mass murdering collaboration evolved into squabbling. The oligarchs did not want bin Laden to stand up, and plead not guilty. They would have hated to see bin Laden request that directors of the CIA be brought to the stand as (presumably hostile) witnesses.
The same method was used with Saddam Hussein: silence, the Western governments have nothing to do with your badness, you little pawn! This will to dissimulation and dissemblance all comes from said governments serving their friend the plutocrats rather than their voters, the public.
***
THE LEGEND OF BIN LADEN WILL LIVE ON:
The stories about bin Laden’s death keep on changing considerably. In the latest version:
…” the raid, though chaotic and bloody, was extremely one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy Seal members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden. Administration officials said that the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the beginning of the operation… After the Seal members shot and killed Mr. Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, the Americans were never fired upon again.”
An unarmed 53 year old man, armed only with his bare hands, cannot be subdued by dozens of super trained American commandos. The indomitable bin Laden, we are told, faced with immense numbers of armed, armored professional killers, not only does not surrender, but resist splendidly the elite American supermen. A crowd of the best American warriors are like nothing, faced by an invalid in pajamas. Just here, we now have more than enough for a formidable legend: see what a true jihadist is! Bin Laden may have been gravely sick for more than ten years, Americans are still like insects, relative to him. They cannot subdue him. In that crucial moment, the impotency of the USA reaches the visage of god, and god spit them back. So the Seals shot bin laden lethally. But so great is his spirit, so great is their fear of incompetent little men, they have to shot him lethally multiple times.
We are also told that bin Laden was shot at least twice: in the head, and in the chest. Wait a minute: if he had been shot in the head, why to shoot him in the chest? Thus it has got to be the other way around. And if he had been shot in the chest, why to shoot him in the head? Because one wanted to make sure he was really dead? So that he could not hold any interesting conversation? Then Obama tells us that bin Laden has been too disfigured to be shown. Really? Or is it because it looks like a mob execution? Bad karma that would be, and karma sees through all.
Then bin Laden was thrown to the fishes. When I advocate civilization, I do not mean that the fishes have it.
Then there were the grotesque rejoicing in the USA, reminiscent of the grotesque rejoicing on September 11, 2001. The Main Stream Media used marching bands, etc… But no element of media went beyond any analysis about anything preceding September 11, 2001. The conspiracy of starting history on September 11, 2011 has worked splendidly: all Americans seem really to believe it all started with the big boom booms that September day. That reminds me of the German (fascist) conspiracy of starting history in 1919, with the Versailles Treaty (as if nothing had happened before, and in particular, grave injustices had not been committed by the Germans against many peoples of Eastern Europe, such as disappearing entire nations) .
***
FURTHER DISSEMBLING, FURTHER PLOTTING:
Obama insisted for half an hour on CBS that they were no more than “50%”, or 55% sure that Bin Laden was there. It looks highly implausible that the USA would have risked a shoot-out, in the middle of a sovereign country, with the armed forces of that country, while killing the bodyguards of some rich plutocrat.
The very fact that Obama insisted, again and again on the notion that the CIA figured it out, all by itself, without any help from anybody else, is conducive to suspect that the opposite is true. So Bin Laden was sold, and probably by some accomplice(s) in the Pakistani governmental structure, and that Trojan Horse has to be protected.
It is clear that elements of the ISI sold Bin Laden. Actually major arrests of Al Qaeda leaders had been made in the same city 3 months earlier (of some Bali bombers). And they said enough to deduce bin Laden was in that house. So Obama was clumsily trying to protect his accomplices. He should work on his lying.
As I mentioned other members of Al Qaeda may even have had interest to dispatch Bin Laden. The democratic revolutions in the Arabo-Muslim world made Bin Laden irrelevant, He could not bring any funds anymore. Long gone the times when he would jet into London, in his private jet, as he did as recently as 1998. Best to make him a martyr, and re-orient Al Qaeda a bit.
Why do I mention this? Am I not an enemy of the fascist Pakistani system. Sure. But fascism is fought by exposing it, not by plotting within. The forces of light triumph by exposing the darkness, not by pulling the curtains.
***
Conclusion: AMERICANISM IS AN INFANTILISM:
When the dust settles, one fact stands firm: the USA thinks the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, are for the fishes. They don’t hold for Apaches, and, presumably, not for the rest of us either.
According to a senator who saw the pictures of Bin Laden after he was shot, an explosive bullet entered in his ear, and came out, by Osama’s left eye, spilling brains over his face. In other words, after having been shot a first time, bin Laden would have been shot from the back, in the head. Yes, when an army does that, it commits a war crime. And when the commander-in-chief calls it justice done, he also commits a war crime. (There are very precise laws on this. Obama said he would visit Europe after his presidency. It’s not so clear now: Bush had to cancell a visit to Geneva recently, lest he be arrested… For his apparent crimes against mankind.)
Erich Maria Remarque observed that: “Tolerance is the daughter of doubt.” By the same token, “Intolerance is the daughter of certainty.” True justice is not certain to start with. It explores, and observes. It questions. And nowadays it needs to go beyond culprit individuals, to culprit thoughts. Bin Laden did not start the war in Afghanistan. The USA did. And that much is certain.
What do children want? Everything. After all, they are trying to find where the bounds are. But infantilizing an entire population while giving it thermonuclear weapons cannot have a good outcome. That way the USA and Pakistan are similar.
Trying to justify not showing the gory pictures of a dead Bin Laden, which would have made clear to forensic experts that he had been assassinated, Obama said several times:”We do not spike the football, that is not who we are”. So how come you have that infantile picture in your mind? And did you not compare Bin Laden to a football, just now? How much more childish can one be?
Given a populace of lemons, plutocracy makes lemonade. The oligarchs were ready for a new approach to the Central Asian oil procurement plan. Since Pakistan was a problem, they suggested hopefully that their “allies” to the north of Afghanistan would come in handy to help. In other words, the Central Asian (oil & gas) issue, which, as I said, is the fundamental one, is already acquiring a new cover-up! The American army has to occupy Central Asia to save Afghanistan. Pakistan made us do it!
Can a civilization thrive on lies, fables, and children stories? Sometimes yes: the Nazis and their supporters got quite a bit of mileage, from claiming they were protecting the Jews, as they were removing them (and stealing all their property).
All humongously oppressive regimes rest on enormous lies, and those can last centuries. The most enormous example is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ is viewed as the definition of love. That was a lie: Jesus ordered to burn those who did not believe in him. That was, clearly, not very loving. But that lie was extremely convenient to various “Christian” fascist regimes, for 15 centuries, as the rebellious ones were not condemned just to have their heads examined, but were actually thrown in the fire.
To describe infantilism, one has to define what a lie is.
A lie is a misrepresentation of reality which could have been avoided, had the agent which proffered it taken full care in deploying full, imaginable logic, and checking thoroughly the subassemblies it is made of.
This apparently convoluted definition covers deliberate ignorance and other mental contraptions erected to manipulate one’s subconscious into a state of dissemblance. The archetype of the modern lie is that the Germans did not “know” about the Holocaust (or the Communists did not “know” about Stalin’s terror, horror, enslavement and mass murdering). Sure they did not “know” about it, in the sense that it was not front page news. But, had they been a bit observant and logical, they would have deduced that they were lied to.
The lamentable shows of exuberance throughout the media of the USA to celebrate bin Laden’s execution, were a form of lie. They assumed that ultimate happiness has been reached, because the military of the USA terminated, with the help of the CIA, the essential problem which affected the USA. In truth, it was nothing of the sort. Bin Laden was just one of the CIA’s most important past operatives. Bin Laden did not start the war, he was just a recruited agent.
This is immature. In the full sense of the term: are Americans little children? The CIA organized a little show for them, and they cheer. The Bin Laden rocket climbs up the sky, its great fireworks extinguish the USSR in the name of Reagan, before falling down to the ground, and being extinguished, by the CIA. Among thunderous applause. Apparently the president can get away with enormous hallucinations such as “we did not start this fight”, and nobody serious and respected rises, and call the hallucination for what it is.
No wonder that the Pakistani intelligence tried to preserve in bin Laden a living witness of what had really been going on, and who gave which orders, who got which ideas, and who had been manipulating whom. No wonder too, that this indispensable witness was fed to the fishes by the masters. As in old Mafia movies.
Oops: I guess i have fallen back already in my anti-American mode. All good, rational Americans learn as early as 2 years old, that there are good and bad people, and “no conspiracy theories”. A “conspiracy theory” is any explanation in which plutocracy does not come on top, ethically speaking.
Rachelle Maddow said that Bin Laden’s assassination was a “cathartic moment for all“. Maddow is as left as American left go. As far as I am concerned her lack of critical sense suggests that she should be called “meadow”, like something to be trampled on and munched by cows. The Greek word. kathartikos means “fit for cleansing, purgative”. Far from being cleansing, Bin Laden’s elimination has removed an easy path to the truth.
Thus, bin Laden was absolute evil, now it has been made into fish food, justice is done, and all conspiracy theories about the forces of good are also dead. The only conspiracies are those of the forces of evil. American Main Stream Media actually run shows “advising” parents about what to say about Bin Laden. The new sense of justice is introduced to toddlers: kill your enemy, that’s justice done.
There have been many systems of thought which have become oppressive, or even murderously insane. Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Nazism are examples. They all have this in common to be forms of political fascism.
Not that all fascism is bad all the time, even from a fascist political system. The best example of that was the invasion of fascist, mass murdering Cambodia by the Vietnamese army. Vietnam, a communist regime inspired by hard core French communism, battle hardened against the French and American military, intervened for humanitarian reasons. And it was true, and it was well done. Vietnam stopped the holocaust in Cambodia.
It is often said that democracies do not fight democracies. But Rome, a plutocratizing republic, attacked several democracies around 146 BCE. The massive wars around 146 BCE allowed Roman plutocracy to seize the world, starting with the Roman republic itself. No wonder that Roman plutocracy had interest to get them started. So maybe some of the American plutocrats believe that a world war would be the best thing which could happen to their class. In that sense, helping Pakistan with nuclear weapons makes a lot of sense.
Moreover, democracies can become extremely exploitative. Peoples can attack, and exploit peoples. An example is the slave system which fed the American colonies. Or the way Belgium, a democracy, let its head, the plutocratic king, ravage the Congo.
People, and their democratic government , can even exterminate other peoples. The best example is, of course, the USA itself, which exterminated (most of) the American natives. Don’t mention this too loud, if you want friends in the USA: evoking this is in the category which leads your friends to think your head should be examined.
So what is Americanism? A system where reality, sometimes uncomfortable, is denied through infantilism. The key there is high school, and college. The philosophy, and even the culture imposed on American youth is that of sports, and scoring over the rival team. As the banners screamed it: Obama 1, Osama, 0.
In infantilism, higher ethics is not the furthermost guidance, sports and Jesus’ call to burn miscreants, are good enough.
Some of my interlocutors have suggested that I was naive and that the democracy movements have been also instrumentalized in Libya by the Western oppressors. Just as I have long argued that Islam was instrumentalized. But I completely disagree: literal Islam is mentally primitive, democracy is not just advanced, but inimical to literal Islam (as it is inimical to literal Christianism).
The French instrumentalized Islam a bit, to help with African volunteers to fight German fascists in WWI and WWII. It was a complicated relationship: some Islamists were arrested and exiled, before being reinstated, celebrated, and honored by the republic.
However, overall, the French and British were careful with Islam. They kept at a distance. When the French nationalized religious establishments in 1905, Islam was ignored (big mistake).
On the other hand, the USA had no such qualms. Remember: from the American point of view, Middle easterners had oil, and were all Apaches. Instrumentalizing Islamism was the way to manipulate those who had oil, while pushing out the French and British, by financing, helping and organizing jihadists… Against the French, and the British, or their proxies. The method of American intelligence to use Muslim Fundamentalism against the progress of native socializing republics or democracies was used in Egypt, against the French, and most famously against PM Mossadegh in 1953, in Iran. And, actually, all over the place.
The rising of a giant American Mujahedeen army in Afghanistan was a particularly striking symbol of that. Financing Pakistani nukes, now built at an amazing pace, another. Don’t forget that American planners think they are only dealing with Apaches: they have no fear.
In Egypt, the old (secret) alliance between the plutocratic military and the Muslim Brotherhood, pushed (secretly) by Western plutocrats, is alive and well. It’s partly a question of American (Egypt, Saudis) spheres of influence: the Egyptian army has been trained, educated, domesticated by the Americans. . In Libya, the Europeans are trying to regain a foothold in their own backyard, and they push democracy, not Islam.
By throwing the idea of justice to the trash, the American government is trying to throw to the trash a piece of Greco-Roman civilization which survived even the Dark Ages. Last time a big, modern country full of arrogance and exceptionalism threw justice and civilization to the trash, it was called Nazi Germany.
What to do then? Well, tell the truth. And tell it to everybody. That is how justice starts.
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Patrice Ayme
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