Posts Tagged ‘Bible’

Shakespeare Versus Sade

January 7, 2016

Why were the English, or even the Spanish and the Portuguese so much more successful in establishing a world empire than the French? On the face of obvious facts, it’s curious that France did not do better. Nowadays Latin America speaks Spanish or Portuguese, entire continents are English-speaking. Only some of the wastes of Africa speak French. How come? Why did France not grab a continent for herself? Was France… too civilized? Is too much civilization an infection?

France was the most powerful, most populous, most innovative, most central, not to say most belligerent, of the European countries, for at least 13 centuries… Besides being the creator of Europe since 360 CE (election of Julian). France led a healthy reaction against Christian terrorism, and became the center of military and imperial power which made Western Europe one (rather united, “Christian”) civilization.

Too Much Civilization Goes To The Wolves

Too Much Civilization Goes To The Wolves

And, precisely, more civilization and more centralization may have been the problems, which made France come short. If one is too civilized, one may respect the Natives so much, that one may forget to take their place. This is clearly what happened to the French in Canada. The French civilized and settled the Hurons. Then the Iroquois Confederacy came down from the mountains, and exterminated the pacified Hurons. And so on. Turkeys cannot built a civilization under the watchful eyes of lions.

If one is more centralized, while civilized, one will be unable to exploit the Natives as required for a successful settlement, in a timely manner.

True, Louis XIV, the famous Sun-Tyrant, made “legalized” slavery in the French West Indies, with the “Code Noir”. However, there was no slavery in French Canada and Louisiana, while slavery was lawful in English colonies, starting with Massachusetts…to immense economic success: some English American states were mostly people by African slaves cultivating tobacco, under the white whip, terrorized by their white masters. Tobacco had made English America profitable.

So what the difference in the imperial patterns of various European powers? Moods. Basically, the French had too little too late, of the … Dark Side. I mean real Dark: the king of Portugal harassed the Pope to obtain a Papal authorization to enslave Africans (Frankish law forbid to enslave Europeans explicitly, and Charlemagne had created the Papal state). Their Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand harassed Borgia, a fellow Spaniard and Pope to authorize the Inquisition (then used to exterminate Judaism and Islam in the Iberian peninsula). Portugal and Spain were then ready to lash out. A planned crusade to exterminate Islam, was redirected more profitably towards the conquest of the Americas.

How come the greater friendliness of the English government to the Dark Side? Not coincidentally,  the rise of Shakespeare and of the West Country Men was simultaneous in England. And they were entangled: the (ex-Scottish) King James I, one of the West Country Men (basically) supported Shakespeare. (As Dominique Deux said) the success of Shakespeare comes from his parade of monsters.

Shakespeare, just as Allah in the Qur’an (following Yahweh in the Bible), made monstrosity honorable. Thus monstrosity became a strategy at the ready, something normal to do.

One may object that it’s not clear why monstrosity worked so well for the English and not so well for the Muslims.

Well, as a metaphysics of war, Islam was superb: the initial Muslim empire went from France, through Spain, North Africa, all the way to Central Asia and India, within 89 years of its launch in 732 CE. On the way it defeated the two most powerful empires outside of China, annihilating one, eating more than half of the other.

The feat was renewed later: in the Eleventh Century, the Turks, a decade or two after converting to Islam, defeated three large empires in West Central Asia, including a mauling of the Roman empire (which called the Franks to the rescue, launching the crusades).

So Islam’s monstrous side is excellent to motivate primitives for war.

This is proven as we speak: yesterday and today, January 7 2016, two Jihadist attacks in France (some terrorists tried a car attack against soldiers, no doubt inspired by happenings in Israel, and another attacked policemen with a meat cleaver, screaming “Allah Akbar”, and carrying a fake explosive belt, he was shot to death).

However, fanaticism does not rise to the motivation and power of free, knowledgeable men, as Islam’s crushing defeats at the hands of the Franks (starting in 721-732-748 CE), would prove in the next 13 centuries). Or the reconquest of Ramadi from the Islamist State by the Iraqi army and Sunni tribes.

So how come the English were so successful: it’s simple: in the case of the English, monstrosity was an adjuvant. I was listening to the Queen’s 2016 message the other day. She charmingly, succeeded to quietly claim that her family invented Christmas (a 4,000 year old tradition). She was completely unfazed by the monstrosity of her claims. (One could easily imagine her claiming Macbeth invented Christmas, just as unfazed.)

Monstrosity worked well as an adjuvant to other, more democratic structures in society, such as Common Law, Parliament, the Monarchy, with the oath to it that all males had to take at 14 of faithfulness to the King. In the case of the Qur’an, the Qur’an was all there was. Interpreted literally, the Qur’an is unbalanced monstrosity 100% of the time (with the major inconvenience that everybody can be suspected of apostasy, something punished by death).

Admiring Macbeth’s statement that life… is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, is a perfect slogan to go kill Irishmen (as the West Country Men did). And then American Natives (as the colonies founded by the West Country Men in America soon did).

Make no mistake: the Bible is full of genocides. Just as the Qur’an, which it inspired, it enables major monsters, bent on holocaust, to claim they are doing God’s will. Shakespeare is a secular version of the same mood with which to handle the world.

In the USA, many a school children spent an entire year studying Shakespeare shaking his spears all over human society (Shakespeare himself made jokes about the spear in his name, wanting it as his coat of arms).

Some could sneer that Sade wrote worse things. True. And actually I do think that writing terrible things is not just good, and instructive, but fights boredom, and feeds the mind. However, the obsessive exposition of Anglo-Saxon children to Shakespeare (or the Queen and her grotesque lies), while presenting that author as the epitome of classical humanism is deeply wrong.

Sade did not claim to extol classical humanism as he described horrors with relish. He was actually highly critical. Differently from Shakespeare the bard, about whom we know little, we know very well that Sade played a major role in the 1789 Revolution (including instigating the attack against the Bastille). Not just that, but he personally saved thousands (and got nearly executed for his troubles, escaping at the last moment thanks to the coup against Robespierre).

Sade’s main theme is that man is (potentially) immensely cruel, and politicians even more so, as they need cruelty, just to relax.

Power is cruelty, and absolute power is absolute cruelty.

A society where spears are shaken all the time, does not just shoots itself in the foot, or the head, very much. It also shoots everything that is in the way, all too readily. Shakespeare is viewed by the Anglo-Saxons as classical, while some of what is viewed as his most classical parts is just as bad, if not worse, than the worse in Sade (who, at least, was conscious of cruelty, while extolling it). The same objection can be made, and should be made, against the devout followers of the Bible, the Qur’an, and other various books of horrors. They say it’s classical, and should be respected.

No. Those books are classical, they should be known, but then they should be debated, fiercely, and dragged in the mud, as needed. Identify, condemn, and cut off the gangrene, the gangrene of the mind, as needed.

The West Country Men, powerful plutocrats as they were, sent soldiers and “endured servants” (white slaves) to America to make a profit. The French founded Canada for the “Mission Civilisatrice” (mostly). The West Country Men, operating in connivence with Justice, sent derelicts and miscreants to America. The French government carefully selected a moral elite to go to America, help the Natives.

However, in the real world, the sheep, however clever and cultivated, does not vanquish the lion. The former eats grass, the latter, sheep. It’s as simple as that. One lesson? Instead of just criminally prosecuting Africans, the International Court of Justice in La Hague should think about engaging a procedure against ex-president G. W. Bush, for instigating so many war crimes in iraq. Then, logically, the ICJ should move against the Saudis and all those businessmen doing business with them.

Indeed. Think about it. Culture without claws and fangs, and the will to use them, is only a betrayal of civilization.

In the Sixteenth Century, the Conquistadores enslaved the Indians, made them dig for oil, grow food for them. After they exterminated the Indians this way, they brought African slaves. When, finally the Frenchman Charles Quint, Spanish king and Roman emperor was forcefully appraised of the extent of the Holocaust by men of conscience (Bartolome Las Casas, etc.), the emperor autocratically ordered a halt to the Conquista (after a supreme tribunal got hung up). Otherwise all the Americas would be speaking Spanish.

Then Charles V retired. His son, Philip II, was less French. When Philip learned of French (Protestant) colonies along the “Carolina” coast, he sent an armada to exterminate them to the last French baby. A French relief fleet was dispersed by a hurricane (showing that god, were it to exist, is not friend of goodness). The French babies got killed, down to the last one (although some may have been rescued by Indians).

Not defending goodness with fang and claw surrenders it to the wolves. The good human is not an inert human. Goodness cannot just be lauded, it needs to be defended. Being inert, is inhuman.

Patrice Ayme’

Why Are Americans So Primitive?

July 1, 2014

Paul Handover, from Learning From Dogs, a commentator of this site asks: “Your essay, Patrice, clearly depicts your views towards Western religions but here’s a question: why do so many Americans embrace Christianity in what one might describe as almost a fundamentalist manner? For such a forward-looking nation in so many ways, this aspect has puzzled me for some time.”

Both aspects are related, the religious primitivism, and the charge forward. Metaphysics, like other things meta, is primarily to address down to Earth questions. Literally:

God Given! Let the USA Bless God. Alleluia.

God Given! Let the USA Bless God. Alleluia.

[Don’t You Ask How We Got All This.]

The USA is like a horse with blinds: it is forced by its masters to pull a heavy load, and devices around its head do not allow it to look sideways. Not looking around and questioning is fundamental. Sitting in a café’, and chewing the world for hours, is best done somewhere in Europe. Americans do not like to discuss the big issues as much: they are too close to “conspiracy theories”.

An all-encompassing philosophical attitude looks around too much, away from the task at hand. It would ask too many questions about the reigning plutocracy. The plutocrats do their best this not to happen. The USA functions like an empire driven by masters, and common people think accordingly.

The coming back of the Christian God in the USA, since the 1940s, corresponded to an enormous influx of cheap labor from (then) primitive areas of the world (say Mexico). The Latinos provided with cheap labor, but they have a strong family structure. Primitive Christianism is a proven recipe to keep them down (just ask the Conquistadores).

In 1954, “IN GOD WE TRUST” was made the motto of the USA, and enforced in public schools in many states (not Hawai’i).  So now we have a president who asks God to bless the USA, as if he were the Pope, urbi et orbi.

I have written numerous essays on the connection between the Bible, where God Himself conducts holocausts, and the barbarity of the first three centuries of occupation of North American by English speaking Europeans. Whereas in Spain, Charles Quint, as early as 1550 CE, ordered to stop holocausts in the Americas, such an order to stop the massacre, was never given in the territory that was going to become the USA.

The result can be contemplated in the Brazil football world cup: whereas the Central American football teams (Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras) are genetically mixed with Indian genetic stock, there is not one speck of Indian facial trait in Team USA.

A successful holocaust is not conducive to introspection. Especially when one enjoys its fruits every day.

But let’s look at it from a different angle. Obama named a commission to look into the disappearance of the bees. Well, there is no need to do this: the factors are well known, including nicotinoid insecticides.

So the leadership of the USA is playing stupid, to gain time for those who make and use such nicotinoids: playing dumb has its uses to gain time. After slavery was officially outlawed at the end of the Secession War, in December 1865, racism kept on going strong in the USA. Obsessing about the Christian God, allowed not to notice that: how could people obsessed by becoming good, be bad?

After all, the Bible is racist enough to endorse any tribal excess: it’s all about the Chosen People (whom Hitler chose for a perversely inverted special treatment).  The myths of the Bible, such as the “city on a hill”, and, of course, the chosen people, in this case, the Pale Faces, was to rule what was obviously the Promised Land.

Naivety can be brutally effective. And it’s not always wrong.

Minds in the USA are concentrated on achieving practical tasks. Instead of remaking the world in their head, the world is God-given.

So citizens of the USA work, and work, and never, ever, contest the established order seriously.

That’s why you will never see Paul Krugman contest deeply the banking system. Quite the opposite: he wants central banks to send it ever more money.

Paul is practical: he camps on popular positions. That makes him the most popular blogger for progressives on BOTH sides of the Atlantic (so Americanization is progressing, even among self-proclaimed progressives!)

Popular now, sure, but a future dwarf, not to say flea, in the history of thought.

All and any Americans are deeply uncomfortable when one makes deep critiques against “their” system. I had a rich, highly successful architect with plenty of skyscraper under construction, become red in the face, when he accused me of wanting to change the Constitution of the USA, and that never, ever, any reasonable American would take me seriously. Never mind that dozens of European countries change their Constitutions continually. In the USA, it’s the proverbial “third rail”, where all the electricity goes through. He never invited me again, an experience I had too many times to bother counting them.

Challenging the system, in a country such as France, for at least three centuries (after Louis XIV croaked), has been seen as the most interesting exercise (except for when the humor-less Robespierre and Napoleon ruled). In the USA, it’s viewed as a personal threat (by all too many).

Americans come from all over the world. Only very strict simplifying principles keep their minds compatible with each other. At least, so all too many of them feel.

Yesterday I was swimming in a lake in California. It has a small official “Swim Area”, watched over by no less than four official would-be rescuers armed with loud speakers. Going outside is “Against The Law”, although deprived of danger.  Other arcane laws apply: a five year old child, going out of such and such a particular limit, within the “Swim Area”, exposes the accompanying parent(s) to a $300 fine.

Being “Against the Law” is even more important than God, in the USA. Some laws seem set-up, just to test whether one will respect the “Against The Law” Principle. Those who do not respect that Principle are “outlaws”, and definitively not felt to be socially acceptable.

As this happened in Berkeley, a supposedly rebellious, flower power town, if there ever was one in the USA, some swimmers braved the interdiction, and were soon yelled at through the loudspeakers by adolescents a third their age, threatening them with the long arm of the law.

(Unsurprisingly, old foggies from the 1960s tend to be more rebellious than the youth whose parents were raised by Reagan; so, all too often, the enforcers are young, the old disobedient.)

As in all good American movies, the cavalry was called to the rescue against the terrorists. Black uniformed police officers swarmed the edges of the lake. A police helicopter flew low overhead, barking out orders. Never mind the budget crisis. Never mind this is a narrow 300 meters deep valley adorned with giant eucalyptuses and towering redwoods.

What is important, is to demonstrate how important law and order is in the USA. “Shock and Awe” will be applied. If the helicopter crashes, the rogue swimmers will be no doubt charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Order starts with God. The God that gave the “Promised Land” to the “Chosen People” is best. He has proven his worth by killing millions, emptying continents, and torturing David’s son to death, because his father had not respected the law of God. The law of God is now applied to European banks and Argentina, bankrupting them all, empowering and enriching Americans some more, proving how this metaphysics of brutal  primitivism is all worthwhile.

Let Obama conclude: “God bless the United States of America!” OK, children! Now that we are done with philosophy, back to work!

Patrice Aymé

From Gods To Dogs

April 3, 2012

WHY DELIBERATE SILLINESS IN FASCIST RELIGIONS.

The best way to rule is over a population that believes (the) god(s) put you in charge. You and the tradition you incarnate.

A supplementary safety mechanism is to make the population stupid from (the) god(s) and terrified by (the) god(s). Hence all the terrifying silliness in the Bible and the Qur’an. Such a terrifying silliness is not an innocent sideshow, it is central to enabling the submission of the rabble.

Suppose an Imam, Priest, Monk, Pastor, Witch, Mullah, Lama, Medicine Man, Prophet, Sorcerer, Shepherd, Witch Doctor, Druid, in other words, an illuminated Holly Man, comes and says:”You cannot eat such and such a food!” I will reply with a question:”Will that food give me cancer, Alzheimer, a stroke, heart attack, inflammation, allergy, a neurological syndrome?”

Let’s suppose the Holly Man answer:”No, not at all, it’s just the command of (the) god(s).”

Then, I will have to eat that food. Why? Because my religion, freedom defended from infamy, orders me to.

My religion, that of the Franks, the free, is not only not to take orders which do not make sense. That is what the free does. My (secular) religion goes much further: this religion asks to systematically violate, what is ordered, if it makes no sense, but for humiliating the mind. In my religion, the mind rules, not an ancient book.

Is there a higher principle at work? Yes. Is there an idea behind it?  Yes. It’s an idea made to negate the very reason why an Imam, Priest, Monk, Pastor, Witch, Mullah, Lama, Medicine Man, Prophet, Sorcerer, Shepherd, Witch Doctor, Druid is paid to give senseless orders.

Terror religions give senseless orders, precisely because they are senseless. They teach to respect what makes no sense, precisely because, otherwise, they would make no sense. (Notice the proximity to the central paradox in logic, incompleteness; this is not a coincidence.)

An attack dog is trained to perfection when it obeys absolutely any order given to it, even if apparently senseless, even if the cost is the dog’s own life. Obey, don’t question, oh dog!

Nietzsche famously said that Christianity was a slave religion. But slaves often questioned, at least in Rome, that exemplary slave society, the sense of their masters. Some taught their masters Greek. Even president Jefferson argued with his slaves.

The Bible instead goes on a mission from God that often makes no sense. We know, from paleontological studies, that men have eaten shrimps, crabs, mussels, urchins or algae, for at least 100,000 years. Some flourishing caves were by the sea. and are full of remnants of fruits of the sea repasts.

The Bible, rarely missing a stupidity that allows to make its desert people even more stupid, on the cheap, orders people not to eat shrimps, crabs, mussels, urchins or algae. Leviticus11:10-12 says:

10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
11 They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
12 Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.”

(By cheap stupidity for desert people, I mean that some of these interdictions are just there to enforce stupidity: forbidding to eat pigs or algae in the desert is just like forbidding skiing on the moon, it’s cheap, it means nothing; this cheapness also explains why Arabic style Islam has found hard to extend far out of the desert. And why countries such as Senegal uses instead Sufi Islam.)

In Leviticus 20, the death penalty is prescribed for all sorts of reasons: insulting one’s parents, adultery, “men lying with a men as they would with women“.

The logic is itself moronic: lying with women is precisely what male homosexuals are precisely not doing! So they cannot be doing with men what they don’t do with women! Stupidity is taught, as an end in itself.

Having relations with a woman and her daughter deserves death by fire. Burned alive is also the explicit condemnation for the daughter of a priest who has prostituted herself (Leviticus 21:9).

So what we see is that the Abrahamist religion treats people worse than dogs. Dogs are not burned alive when they have illicit sex with the daughter of so and so.

The whole idea seems to want to make people cower, worse than dog, in the fear of dog, I  mean god (it’s getting confusing, with a god behaving like a rabid dog!) Of course the man of the cloth is protected, and protects, the man of the sword, implementing the Holly Man’s orders, however stupid and secularly criminal. What the Bible teaches is blind adoration of senseless orders from above.

This blind adoration of senseless orders from above backfired against the Jews, many times, more recently with Hitler. When Hitler came, barking out orders, the “Jewish Councils” applied the Bible, and obeyed scrupulously the senseless orders, just like they saw it done in the Bible. This is the source of what Hannah Arendt observed, and condemned, the criminal peacefulness of the “Jewish Councils”. (I am targetting here the councils that collaborated with Hitler years before France and Britain declared war, whereas Arendt focused on the war time Judenraten.)

There is no doubt that, if the “Jewish Councils” had fought the Nazi dictator with ferocity, just as the Syrian opposition is fighting the dictator Assad with ferocity, France would not have had to wait until 1939 for a military treaty with Poland and Great Britain.

It’s true that violence begets violence, thus, when war is the only solution for the religion of man, starting mayhem as needed is the first religious act that allows humanity to rise to the occasion of re-establishing a better world. The Dark Side is not always an enemy of the better (as anyone seriously parenting a two year old will testify).

A treaty was not enough. Poland had an obsolete army, and Britain a tiny army of less than 200,000 men, barely bigger than the U.S. army (by contrast France had 117 divisions and Germany 152, in May 1940). Moreover there was no such treaty with the USA, and, even more crucially with Belgium, and the Netherlands; it’s the treacherous neutrality of the Netherlands, combined with Hitler’s cruelty and the stupid goodwill of the French High Command that directly and proximally caused the fall of France in June 1940… And thus, not just France’s glorious shame, but 50 million dead.

If the Jews and others had launched a terror war against the Nazis, it may have been impossible for the treacherously neutrals to claim all was fine with Hitler.

The general drift above extends to secular religions. Apparently silly notions occupy minds, and bring them back to the central theme.

That is why disciplines in armies can become thoroughly ridiculous. Apparently silly orders are given, such as cleaning a courtyard with a toothbrush. They are ridiculous by design. At that point the soldier is made in a spinal cord in charge of executing orders. It is often said that discipline is the strength of armies, and that is true, but it goes beyond that. Fascism is the strength of armies, as it makes one huge monster out of many men.

“Thou shall not kill” is only the Sixth Commandment in the Bible. (The Seventh forbids stealing, the next adultery, the Ninth forbids bearing false witness, the Tenth forbids ‘coveting’ house, other men’s wife, servant, ox, ass, and other stuff, in this order.)

One would assume the first five commandments are more important. They deal with silliness, mostly. So silliness is most important. Contemplate the Second Commandment (full version)

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth:

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

This why so many Abrahamists, as hard core Sunnis or Hutterites, refuse to take pictures, or represent the world, in contradiction not just to what people had been doing for 50,000 years, but also to what people had to do, for millions of years, as making the likeness of anything is the essence of technology. That is why some of the fanatics reject technology (and get periodically nearly annihilated, as the Hutterites were.)

These orders are stupid, and self contradictory: the fanatics overlooking the fact that a piece of technology, a book, made “in the likeness of [something] that is in heaven”, namely the word of god, is ordering them around!

Another stupidity in the Second Commandment was designed to hit the emotional center, as deeply as possible: God boasts that He is jealous”.  How would any priest of God thereafter find it easy to claim to have the high moral ground by following the orders of somebody jealous”? And why would God admit that he is a very bad creature, who boasts of punishing great grand children, and great great grand children? It is one thing to be a God of Terror, it’s another to boast of being an outright monster.

Two interests therein:

a) first, abject terror, and so the justification of abject terror inflicted upon others, that is why the fanatical Muslim Mohammed Mehra in France had no problem wounding, and then killing a seven year old girl: it is in the Bible.

b) inflicting a moral rape. See, we will claim that’s morality. Never mind that our God, up in the sky, is worse than Hitler. Never mind is the point entirely, as I will insist upon shortly.

Worse than Hitler? Hitler never boasted that that he would kill innocent people (the Nazis had only 7,000 Gestapo officers, inside Deutschland, they ruled with the consent of the Volk). Quite the opposite: Hitler claimed to be a man of peace (that is why Gandhi could claim he loved him so much, besides the use of the Indian Swastika and of a caste system). Hitler would certainly not have ever claimed that he was “jealous“, and that he wanted to punish innocent children. But the Christian God did.

A terror religion does not just teach  people to behave like sheep. It teaches people to be sheep. And to enforce that, the best way is the defeat of the mind. Give to stupidity the aura of intelligence, and be done.

Against gods armed with stupidity, humanity contends in vain… Hence, to reassert itself, to progress out of submission from obsolete lords, humanity has to destroy those gods. Revolution revolves deep, when it strikes the god(s). And so it has been done, per omnia saecula saeculorum

***

Patrice Ayme

SEPARATE STATE AND SUPERSTITION.

January 19, 2009

OR THE REPUBLIC WILL KNOW AN OMINOUS FATE.

Why do most United States Presidents swear to “defend and protect the US Constitution”, while taking their oath over the Bible?

Because nobody in the USA can find a copy of the Constitution of the republic, on which to take said oath? Just asking.

Why did Theodore Roosevelt refuse to take his oath by using the Bible?

Because T. Roosevelt wanted to show that Church and State should be separated. Although he was a devout Christian and a Bible fanatic, Roosevelt remembered that the US Constitution is very clear on the principle of separation of State and religion.

That principle of separation was reinforced by a joint work of the first two US Presidents, Washington and Adams, in 1796-97 (the Treaty of Tripoli, elaborated by Washington’s administration, made into law by Adams). As presidents G. Washington and J. Adams put it: “…the government of the United States of America is NOT, IN ANY SENSE, founded on the Christian Religion… “.

The growth of superstition in the USA is directly related to the increasing decay of the USA. To get an inkling of this, readers can consult Paul Krugman’s excellent essay [New York Times, January 19, 2008] on how superstitious thinking prevents to solve the financial crisis [whereas a similar crisis was solved correctly twenty years ago]. Meanwhile more offerings are made to the plutocratic Gods of America.

The Bible is studied carefully all over the USA, but history, very little. Why should history be studied? To find out that the world was not created the way the Bible say? That would be too complicated, and unpatriotic beside: the nation is “under God” [an oath in public school], in whom it “trusts” [the motto of the USA and the currency since 1956]. So why to change? Is not God’s creation already perfect? Yes we can what? Is not God all in charge? Why to take any responsibility for anything? Is not God in charge? Why to learn anything really new? Why trying to form new thoughts? Is not every thing worth knowing in the Bible already? US citizens do not have to ask, they know.

The metaphysical connects to the psychological, and the psychological to the industrial. It is difficult to love progress, while loving the Bible, and ignoring history. In recent years, the rallying cry of those who supported Bush’s policies was against “progressives”.

Without progress, one will stay in the can. Yes, we can, because we are inside the can. The can, in the USA, is the Bible. The Bible is not just in all hotel rooms, it boxes in all too many American minds, and all too much. American thinking is canned, by the Bible [team sports watched on TV do the rest].  And if one is canned, one can’t get no satisfaction.

So, next time, let’s get some real progress, and please find a copy of the Constitution, to take an oath on. It should be less difficult.

SOPHIA: BIBLICAL THINKING, OR HOW TO SEIZE CONTINENTS.

May 14, 2008

AMERICANISM, NAZISM, GENOCIDES, BIBLE, SLAVERY, RACISM, BIG TIME LYING, AND HOW THEY ALL RELATE.
***

NAZISM WAS MORE OF AN ACCIDENT:

Roger Cohen of the New York Times points out that there is a US museum about the Nazi holocaust of the Jews, “a German crime”, but that there is no museum about slavery, an “American crime”. He finds the USA dangerously hypocritical: “Germans have confronted the monstrous in them… The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating. America’s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race … it’s time for the country to ask itself the hard post-jingoistic questions and allow the memorialization of even its darkest chapters. To demand truth commissions of other nations, while evading them at home, is self-defeating.”

(04/16/08; http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/16/opinion/edcohen.php).

 

Civilizations can change, and Germany has changed completely. If time travel were possible, and today’s Germans could go back to 1938, they would join the French republic to fight Nazism, in the blink of an eye, no questions asked. Actually many July 1944 German officers did (survivors were later honored by France)! When Colonel von Stauffenberg asked his superiors in the Coup-Against-Hitler hierarchy whether they should proceed, because the war was clearly lost anyway, and Germany was going to be severely punished; he was told to proceed, because the German Army had to show the world and posterity some things were worth rebelling against and dying for. Many of the highest officers, even several marshals of the Wehrmacht were involved in the coup (elite officers were to shoot Hitler in the face in Ukraine, during a breakfast they had contrived, in 1943, a year earlier, but because Himmler did not show up at the last moment, their commanding marshall told them not to).

Fascism in Germany, however abominable and of great consequence (all together, at least 100 million dead), was a slip in history, abhorrent to the deepest roots of German civilization, and pretty much contrived by a few generations of leaders who co-opted each other (unfortunately starting with the sometimes respectable Bismarck, political instigator of a fascist self amplifying machine he came to regret). The two main flaws of the German error were xenophobism and hubris. Sitting above the preceding two to make them possible, was blind and servile obedience to fascism, itself allowed by the death of the mind, which had been carefully instigated by tweaking the school system (obedience was adverse to the original German character, which had gone to large scale war by resistance to Pax Romana, archeology found).

The German flight from the truth of what really happened on August 1, 1914, caused a profound revisitation of the same horror in January 1933, in a more obstinate and self righteous version. It was the flight from truth that created Nazism (Hitler was the first to assert this in print, there are entire chapters on it in “Mein Kampf”). In the case of the USA, the flight from truth is clear and present, it prevents to analyze what went wrong, and thus what’s wrong now.
***

… AMERICA IS MORE OF A SYSTEM:

Murderous fascism in America is at the core of the American system of thought. It’s a fact, not an opinion. It’s also the fact US Americans like to talk the less about, lest they be viewed as un-American. It’s four centuries old, and it has force multiplied since, as it flew from success to success. Its most important metaprinciples were mostly accepted by dominant Americans for twenty generations, and it molded the country’s institutions. As we will explain, although they got increasingly diluted by universalism and the Enlightenment, the principles that allowed murderous fascism to thrive and hide, -anti-intellectualism and profits uber Alles- have not changed much in their preponderance, in spite of hefty immigration.

American fascism can be measured with funny details: with less than 5% of the planet’s population, the US holds more than 2.3 million prisoners, more than a quarter of the world captives (yes, more than China’s 1.6 million; like China, the US has also many ex convicts under surveillance, and without full civil rights).
***

GENOCIDE, THE BIBLE, AND RACISM WERE CRUCIAL TO THE AMERICAN THOUGHT SYSTEM FROM INCEPTION:

America is in flight from some of its own master generating ideas, for the deepest reasons intrinsic to its very nature. Genocides, the Bible, slavery, racism, formed an intricate network of mind characteristic of, and crucial to, a growing English speaking North America for four centuries. From those entangled evils blossomed out many a splendid attribute of America. No intrinsic monstrosity, no American splendor (no wonder many careful students of America, such as Tocqueville, ended baffled and ambivalent). Without understanding this, major malfunctions will occur looking forward, and not just for the US. There are lessons in this, to be carried all over the world.

The American thought system, progenitor of the success of the USA, originated well before the Enlightenment. It was the twisted expression of a de facto democracy (people-POWER). “We The People…” was made of rich white males: only real estate owners could vote. According to the modern moral standards of the Enlightenment, the American thought system was not pretty. Efficient, yes, pretty, no. The English speaking American colony, and its successor, the young USA, were out to conquer a continent. They were not out to enlighten the natives. If only the Enlightenment had reached the Amerindians, they would still be around (although Prof. J. Diamond insinuated otherwise). The USA does not look racially like Bolivia, not because of the Enlightenment, but in spite of it.

In that sense the American thought system is similar to fascist versions of Islam: in the very genesis of a thought system can lay the paralysis it gets afflicted with. The US mental paralysis is a world problem, because the USA was long one of the mental leaders for the world, but now it clings to memory loss and decerebrated childhood, feeding its various denials, such as being addicted to waste, enslaved to the Rich, terrorized by thinking, petrified by change. The USA is the last place in the world using systems of units dating from the Middle Ages. No wonder the USA still uses Biblical thinking . Only in the USA, and nowhere else. In more ways than one, the USA is stuck in full mental reverse (just as this Taliban it gave birth to). Why? Because the US thought system is on the verge of a breakdown. It becomes ridiculously destructive: after conquering Iraq, it did not have to destroy it!
***

BIBLICAL GUIDANCE FOR THE LONDON COMPANY: GOTT MIT UNS!

What is a civilization? A system of thought carried by the many minds of a people (typically living in one or more cities, hence the root “civilis”). The US system of thought originated in English colonial America (hence not in 1776, nor in 1789, but in 1606). The US system of thought had two main proximal inputs: England herself, of course, and the London Company. It was a symbiotic mix of heavens and hell, each serving the other. We passed the 400th anniversary of the hidden Constitution of the USA in total silence, but the democratic candidates for the US presidency were embroiled in theology, as befits savages of 1606 CE, not philosophers of 1789 CE.

The London Company was an English stock company established by royal charter on April 10, 1606, with the purpose of establishing profitable colonial settlements in North America. The London Company had right of life and death over the entire continent, and the mission to impose Christianity on the natives (1609). Things went on according to the master plan. The USA is the one country that originated in a conspiracy of a few men, and we have its foundational document, black on white.

The Puritans arrived later, in 1620, under the authority of the London Company (and of the military). Their master idea fit perfectly well the London 1609 Charter, they thrived. The Puritans had decided to impose the Bible on earth (and planned to go back in strength and invade Europe to impose their god!). As soon as established, they exterminated whoever was preventing the full expression of their purity. Puritans exterminated not just Indians, although Indians had just saved them, but also “rough fellows”, independent British settlers further north, who had committed the sin of being too friendly with native women (who could be massacred and enslaved at will, since they were unbelievers; cf. Christ below, or the literal Qur’an).

The fundamental principles of both London Co. and Puritans were pretty much according to a racist book full of Shoahs (holocausts), a book they were reading every time they wanted to look deep. That “Mein Kampf” of the invaders made holocausts, and the grabbing of lands, into a religion. It was easy to transpose the ideas of this book; the Puritans were the Elected People, their enemies happened to be occupying their promised land, and had to be destroyed, as Jesus confirmed, because they were enemies of their God. Thus murderous, genocidal racism was instated at the top of the mental agenda, and with God’s stamp of approval. The Bible insisted that, it was not good behavior which was its own reward, but that (material) rewards would be given by God, as they are to dogs (example of rewards: Israel, America). This sort of barbarousness would never have sailed through the republican Roman Senate, but, armed with the Bible, a book which extols events that happened more than a millennium before the Roman Senate agonized about destroying Carthage, the English settlers of America did what Western Civilization had not done before: genocide on a Biblical scale.
***

CHRIST AS HITLER’S MENTOR:

Murderous anti-Judaism was invented by the top Christians: Constantine, St. Hilarius, Constantius, St Augustine, St Louis, Luther, etc. (and absolutely not by Pagan Rome, which fought Jewish extremism fair and square, not with genocidal hatred). None of this was accidental: emperor Constantine, a vicious killer, selected Christ, because Christ made murderous fascism divine.

Six centuries before the Qur’an, Christ himself fed xenophobism, hatred for diversity, and intellectuality, by ordering to kill anybody non Christian: “But these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and kill them before me.” (Luke 19; 27). There are many such homicidal statements in Christ’s New Order, his “New Testament”. Sometimes Christ recommends drowning: “And whoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” (Mark 9; 42). Sometimes a “fiery furnace” or “unquenchable fire” will do [Matt. (13; 42, 25; 41) Luke (3; 17)]. Of course, Jesus destroys cities: “Whoever does not receive you [apostles], nor heed your words…it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.” (Matt 10; 14-15; Luke 10;12). Inspired, fanatical followers destroyed millions of people and books (thus Christianity caused the Dark Ages of the late Roman empire: 312 to 632 CE). 

 As Hitler summarizes it: “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. [Jesus]… once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.” [Hitler, 1922]. Christ’s murderous mania was also the official justification for the North American holocaust.
***

SLAVERY, EXTERMINATION AND RACISM ARE MORE AMERICAN THAN APPLE PIE:

To start with, modestly enough, because the Amerindians were watching their every move, the London Company reinvented slavery for Europeans. Jamestown was initially crewed by white slaves: convicts and indentured servants, to be punished and killed in atrocious circumstances at the smallest pretext (those who fled to the Indians were quartered alive).

By comparison the French government sent to its colonies only people who had been checked for their highest morality, and they were free to return any time! In the English colonies, slavery of the whites was, naturally enough, soon replaced by that of the natives, and, when the colonies could finally afford them, by (expensive) African slaves (bought with tobacco revenue, and that is why African slavery was mostly in the South).

The English colonists had versed into criminality, not just because of the Bible, and the London Co. Charter, but also because they were without adult supervision. England was distracted. She was shaken by civil and religious wars, and revolutions, fighting and being conquered by Holland. So, in far away America, the most basic standards of civilization could be trampled with alacrity. The European colonists in America turned feral. Perhaps finding that the burning of Indian towns (following Jesus!) left too many natives roaming the woods, municipalities were paying for Indian scalps.

One of New England’s most esteemed religious leaders, the Rev. S. Stoddard, as late as 1703, formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial assistance to purchase and train large packs of dogs “to hunt Indians as they do bears” (1703). [American Holocaust, Oxford (1992)), p. 241].

The passionate hatred between Indians and English settlers soon got encouraged by the passionate hatred between enslaved Africans and Whites (some southern states had more slaves than Whites, and only terror made them stable; burning blacks alive was cruel and usual punishment). American racism was an acquired staple of survival. It was married to slavery, creating the particularly monstrous progeny of racially determined slavery (even worse than in 1500 BCE India, three millennia earlier!).

None of this, of course was very European: racism was unknown in Europe ever since the Romans had Spanish (1C), African and Arab emperors (3C). Slavery had been unlawful in Western Europe since the Merovingians (660 CE).

In English America slavery and racism were means to an end: the conquest and possession of an entire continent by greedy Europeans maximizing profits. But it’s no accident that both the Spanish and the French, who both used ethics that were not flying as low, completely failed in North America. Although the temperate coast of North America had been known since the Vikings (who imported timber from it for many centuries), it could not be colonized for military reasons: the natives were too fierce, and they knew that the Europeans had come to steal the land (see Viking and Cartier reports). The English settlers used all the weapons at their disposal, and the war manual that suggested many of them, and the righteous spirit to go with it was the Bible. It’s still true today: Bush attacked Iraq because his “Higher Father” told him to. Long live the Bible and its God! An argument few Americans can resist.

So one should not scoff, and call the European settlers in America naive. That system of thought, which mixed Bible primitivism and European high tech, was immensely successful: English Americans became quickly the richest, best fed, and often best educated people on earth (they held that position for three centuries). They were free, and formed into a de facto republic before London and Paris figured out what was going on. Nine generations after inception, excited by French agents, the republic declared its independence (1776). Tocqueville, arriving another four generations after that, declared, not without scathing irony:

“The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in EXTERMINATING the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained BOTH these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the EYES of the world. It is impossible to DESTROY men with more respect to the laws of humanity” (from “Democracy in America”).
***

DEVASTATING IDEAS LEFT UNCHALLENGED KEEP ON FESTERING; HOW THE AMERICAN GENOCIDE INSPIRED EUROPEAN RACISTS AND EXTERMINATORS:

Racism is a natural instinct, a consequence of psychobiological tribalism, when all one sees is white men, and one identifies civilization with them, and civilization is in a worldwide fight (against superstitious religion, habits and elites of the past, etc…). Savagery got identified with anybody not white, such as black men. Although such an identification was certainly culturally correct (outside of Eurasia, cannibalism was endemic), it was genetically erroneous, sure. But the point is that racism, however erroneous, flourished in Europe, and the conquest of the “New World” was seen as its prophet. The Franks had fought savagely to protect and push European civilization inside Europe (succeeding where Rome failed). The Europeans in America showed that even more savagery brought even greater fruits (Euroamericans were the richest, healthiest, and freest earthlings). It seemed wise to extend such a violent European effort all over the world.

English America and its USA were a great inspiration for many (a particular Belgian king devastated Congo for Ivory, allegedly killing millions). The racist Prussian fascists, such as governor Goering (the father of that WWI war hero, Herman Goering), instituted in Namibia an accelerated program trying to do very fast, around 1900, what the Americans had done in centuries, away from prying eyes. The British themselves used against fellow Europeans (the Boers) US style concentration camps and pseudo accidental mass death (killing more than a third of all the Boer women and children).

America invented and justified, by its very success, slavery, extermination and racism. Those (Biblical) ideas fed back to Europe: many Europeans were impressed by their triumph in North America, and longed to duplicate it all over the planet. European 20C fascism was inspired by the NEW WORLD AND ITS NEW ORDER, the New World being the only place with dramatically successful fascism prior to the 20C, for all to see.

The Nazis, of course, were the most dedicated students of the genocide of the Amerindians. They decided to duplicate it in Europe, applying it to all their enemies (starting with the Poles, then the Jews, etc…) They put all these ideas on steroids, missing out completely on the plausible self denying moral subtlety of the Biblico-American ways (which made them sustainable). As Tocqueville indicated, the Americans had become expert at lying to themselves and keeping appearances civilized. Although of course, coming after 220 years of continual holocaust, Tocqueville missed most of it. (US American civilization took three centuries to exterminate the Indians, and, by trying to do the same to all of the advanced Europeans of Eastern Europe in three years, the Nazis were bound not to make friends, even among themselves.)

Another meta feeling that was comforted by the keeping of appearances, was that English America, come hell and high water, was always right: nothing succeeds like success. It was fundamental to assert this loud and clear, because loud crowing was part of the cover-up (another was to play dumb and inarticulate). This lack of doubt about America has become a US mental tradition. It explains why the role of the USA in helping fascist regimes (and, first of all Hitler’s) was never put front and center. Unsurprisingly, so has it been for the role of the USA in pushing Judeo-Christo-Muslim fanaticism (before S. Hussein put God on the Iraqi flag, the USA chose as motto “In God we trust” in 1954. This religious slogan unconstitutionally replaced the US Founders’ “E Pluribus Unum”; Congress made an “establishment of a religion”, and that is explicitly forbidden by the US Constitution. But nothing succeeds as well as enormity, Hitler insisted.
***

AMERICAN ANTI INTELLECTUALISM AS THE ULTIMATE COVER UP:

A characteristic of the American thought system is anti-intellectualism. Pushed around, Americans tend to evoke their “faith” in “god”, rarely supreme reasoning ability and sensibility. The Bible overlords it all, in some ways more than ever (some American Founding Fathers wrote very strong anti-Christian stuff, and got elected, whereas saying the same nowadays would be politically deadly). At the same time, in part to prevent the rule of absolute idiocy, which would be counterproductive to the overall mission, the USA has the best universities in the world (if “best” is carefully evaluated in the realms of the easily thought, and readily publishable; don’t expect the first genuinely American Abelard, Buridan, Voltaire, Gauss, Nietzsche or Einstein any time soon…).

Europeans remember the old Nazi proverb that “whenever I hear the word Kultur, I pull out my Browning” (Browning being an American brand of revolvers American capitalists smuggled to the Nazis in vast amounts). Culture was what ultimately stopped Nazism (the German army coup against Hitler of 1944 was launched as a matter of cultural principle by its upright instigators). France opposed Nazism at every turn, from January 1933 on, mostly for higher cultural reasons (just as the US plutocracy cooperated with Nazism against France, by common hatred against those who detested genocides, racism, slavery, and the Biblical god).

The American thought system, increasingly laden with contradictions, encouraged by its devotion to the Bible, has avoided to think. Thinking is intrinsically creative, and would turn to dust the old American mummy of obsolete habits, if it ever touched it. In any case, the verdict of the American elite, when asked why they went to Iraq, admit that it was by “lack of intelligence”. No kidding. They don’t even understand what they say.
***

THE TENACITY OF CIVILIZATION NEEDS TO DEAL WITH THE FINAL AMERICAN IDEA:

 In the 19C, most of the system of thought supporting slavery in America was destroyed. In the 20C, racism and extermination came into direct conflict with democracy, and democracy won, and the system of thought of racism ended fatally damaged. In no small reason because especially France (but also Britain and America) used colored troops in combat to munch through the white master race: many extremely fierce “French” divisions were mostly African; for thirty one years, Senegalese and Germans were not in the habit of making a single prisoner: the lethal hatred was mutual, a good ground for future respect.

 After a crafty hesitation of four centuries, full bore European civilization threatens to finally land in North America (if it had landed earlier, the USA would not be white). The opportunistic causes of the English American monstrosity have faded; the continent was conquered, the Amerindians exterminated, the beast should be digesting its prey, instead of getting all agitated. The Biblical political philosophy of holocausts, racism, slavery, and theft of the land, having fulfilled its role, should be safely disposed of, instead of trying to recycle it in Iraq or Afghanistan (with Halliburton in the role of the London Company). But old habits die hard. Although it worked well against the Neolithic ones, the Bible will not work where people have been numbed out by that other Biblical derivative, the Qur’an (made to be used in a similar fashion).

 Moreover there are more pressing issues. The greenhouse disaster is upon us, and some old American ideas, such as the unrestrained exploitation of everything, long successful in a continent voided of its native population, have to be detected, exposed and thrown out before they attempt to germinate all over the planet, in the fury of the overcrowded rats.
***

THE ORIGINAL FOUNDING IDEA OF ENGLISH AMERICA SURVIVES TO THIS DAY:

As we said above, the London Company itself was founded for profits, Biblical extermination was its tool, and the ultimate master idea of its foundation was that BIG PROFIT IS THE END THAT JUSTIFIES ALL AND ANY MEANS (an example of the application of this idea is in US health care, where death of American humans is OK, as long as the profits roll in! Death of profits would be major, death of humans a way to prevent that). Slavery, extermination, racism, Bible and war crimes, and systemic lying and dissembling were just instruments of that master idea, in total violation of 20 centuries of explicit Western civilization (religion, aka the Bible, allowed and instigated that violation, and that is why it became the sacred American text par excellence). The progenitor idea of all master ideas has survived so far, and reached a new level of achievement by sending the US Army to the Middle East to protect the oil, as the paramount mission of America. And by having the richest Americans taxed at the lowest rate (15%!).

So now what is left among US bad mental habits, that still set it aside from its parental European thought system? Is there a head to this nagging obsolescence? One idea is left above all, and it’s at the genesis of it all. It shows up in basic principle of the US health “care” system.

The overall American idea that BIG PROFIT IS THE END THAT JUSTIFIES ALL AND ANY MEANS has to see its prominence destroyed. It was appropriate to the invasion and destruction of the old North America. But now is a new World, all over the planet, and we don’t want it destroyed. Throughout old civilizations, capitalism always checked the excesses of plutocracy, ever since there were cattle herders, and there was a wealth tax (and yes, a “death” tax!). Contrary to legend, Adam Smith (a student of French economists) was perfectly aware of the limits of the free market (so was his economic grand father Voltaire!).
***

THE US REVERSAL OF CIVILIZATION AS JUST A VORTEX IN ITS FLOW:

The main drift of civilization over the last 3,000 years has been towards the universal. The Athenians at their best insisted on democracy and the “open” society. The Romans insisted on the law for all free men, no more racism, and universal citizenship. Unfortunately they devolved because of theocracy, that, while honoring the preceding insisted to destroy thought. Then came the Franks, who wiped out the theocracies, and also slavery, opening the way to high tech, and the universal civilization we have today. English colonial America became great because it did on a huge scale what the Romans accused Julius Caesar to have done on a smaller scale in Gaul: war crimes.

The whole idea that English colonial America succeeded with methods the Nazis failed to duplicate is deeply abhorrent to the US intellectual class. US intellectuals such as Jared Diamond insist that it was all about germs and steel. Although Diamond mentioned guns, his main drift is that the European environment that the Europeans carried with them did the dirty job (ergo, it has nothing to do with the Bible!). Well a detailed study of circumstances show this was not the case. True, germs did a lot (allowing e.g., the initial settlement of the Puritans; in the same place exactly, 20 years before, a French scientific expedition found too many people!). They did a lot initially. But they have nothing to do with US president Jackson “removal” policy (which used methods of deportation and extermination Stalin and Hitler duplicated later). And Jackson came on the tail end of 200 years of deliberate racism, slavery and thorough genocide. After the French got defeated in 1763, and expulsed from Canada, the Indians, having lost their support, revolted. (Pontiac rebellion”.) The commanding general of the entire British army, Jeffrey Amherst, ordered the distribution of smallpox infected items and “to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.” Amherst is the town named after him, in his honor. Honor to some, shame to others.
***

A NEW SURVIVAL SKILL. THE DECONSTRUCTION OF DANGEROUSLY OBSOLETE THOUGHT SYSTEMS:

The time for holocausting some obsolete thought systems, before they holocaust us, has definitively arrived. We may as well start with this new approach to thinking within the USA rather than with Afghanistan (or China!). After all, the US Americans want to pretend that they can think, that they are an elite of a crowd.

Candidate Obama has been trying to think in public, and the screams of the Beotians have been loud (the US plutocratic elite insists that thinking should be despised as “elite”, in a successful strategy to prevent the American people from thinking disobediently). A warning: anti-intellectual theocracy mangled the civilization of the so called “Golden Age of Islam”, and brought even Constantinople to her knees. Civilization was saved by the barbarian Franks, who smashed with their huge battle axes not just the theocracies (Catholic and Islamic), but much of what was wrong with Greco-Roman Antiquity.

It’s now time to clear the mental tables, not just for the sake of the USA, but because now, whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not, we are one world, one spaceship, and the air is getting foul, and the waters are rising, and the food stores are running low, and the third class passengers are rioting, and the oceans are getting empty of all, but poisons… It’s the road to hell, and no Bible can paper it over. Only hard core truth can come to the rescue, and appreciation for it is not found in many of the parts of American (lack of) thinking that made the USA such a success. Therein the conundrum for the pusillanimous, and the challenge for the wise: how to save America by changing what in its soul need to be jettisoned.
***

Conclusion: PASSION IS NEEDED FOR DECONSTRUCTING YESTERDAY’S ATROCIOUS MIND:

The American Biblical revisitation of an atrocious past was transposed in modern times to seize an entire continent. It was a civilizational devolution that directly preceded, encouraged and inspired such extravagances as Nazism. The least US American civilization could do now would be to acknowledge the enormous terror of its old ways with museums allowing children to learn how the full horrors of racism, slavery and genocides made the USA the success it is now, and that horror can be viewed as justice. It is not for begging forgiveness on ones’ knees. After all, contemporaries did not commit these crimes. But re-enacting such crimes nowadays would be a self destroying, even world destroying, error. The trains of thoughts and emotions that allowed these crimes are still in great part still around (cf. Iraq). We don’t want others to copy these now completely inappropriate ways (as the idiotic Hitler did). Passionately condemning these crimes will energize the vigilance against the cognitive, logical and emotional patterns that gave rise to them.
***

Patrice Ayme (& CR).

 

P/S: Marx famously called “religion the opium of the people”. Going further, we exposed the Bible as a holocaust manual, making it fundamental in the colonial English America and the USA, to bring the maximum riches slavery and extermination provided with. A third advantage of the Bible is that it makes people really stupid, and stupid people are easier to manipulate and make delusional. Now, the London Company, from inception, the English Colony of America, was a plutocratic creation, a stock company given divine powers and mission. Stupidity advantaged both plutocrats and “We The People”, those chosen few, and Promised-Land-providing mindlessness is the real justification for “American anti-intellectualism” (“how we got into Iraq by lack of intelligence”)… now the remaining symbol of worldwide stupidity and brutality.

 

THE BIBLICAL MIND, OR HOW TO SEIZE A CONTINENT.

April 19, 2008

AMERICANISM, NAZISM, GENOCIDES, BIBLE, SLAVERY, RACISM, BIG TIME LYING, AND HOW THEY ALL RELATE.
***

NAZISM WAS MORE OF AN ACCIDENT, AMERICA IS MORE OF A SYSTEM:

Roger Cohen finds the USA dangerously hypocritical: there is a US museum about the Nazi holocaust of the Jews, “a German crime”, but there is no museum about slavery, an American crime. He adds: “Germans have confronted the monstrous in them… The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating. America’s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race … it’s time for the country to ask itself the hard post-jingoistic questions and allow the memorialization of even its darkest chapters. To demand truth commissions of other nations, while evading them at home, is self-defeating.” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/16/opinion/edcohen.php).

Civilizations can change, and today’s Germans are lethal enemies of fascism. If time travel were possible, and they could go back to 1938, they would join the French republic to fight Nazism, in the blink of an eye. Fascism in Germany, however abominable and of great consequence (all together, at least 100 million dead), was a moment in history, abhorrent to the deepest roots of German civilization, and pretty much contrived by a few generations of leaders who co-opted each other (unfortunately starting with the often respectable Bismarck, political instigator of a monster he came to regret). The two main flaws of the German error were xenophobism and hubris. The main control mechanism, sitting above the preceding to make them possible, was blind and servile obedience to fascism, allowed by the death of the mind (obedience was deeply adverse to the original German character).

Not so with America. The American system of thought is four centuries old, and was accepted by all Americans for twenty generations (although in increasingly diluted form, its fundamental nature -anti-intellectualism and profits uber Alles- was not changed).

The American thought system is the progenitor of the success of the USA. It soon intrinsically became the twisted expression of a democracy (“We The People… made of rich white males). But, according to the modern moral standards of the Enlightenment, it was not pretty. Efficient, yes, pretty, no. Thus, America is in flight from many its own master generating ideas, for the deepest reasons intrinsic to its very nature. Genocides, the Bible, slavery, racism, formed an intricate network of mind characteristic of, and crucial to, a growing English speaking North America for many centuries. From those evils blossomed out many of the splendid attributes of America. No intrinsic monstrosity, no American splendor (no wonder many careful students of America, such as Tocqueville, ended baffled and ambivalent). Without understanding this, major malfunctions will occur looking forward, and not just for the US. There is a lesson in this, which can be carried all over the world.

The German flight from the truth of what really happened on August 1, 1914, caused a profound revisitation of the same horror in January 1933, in a more obstinate and self righteous version. It was the flight from truth that created Nazism (Hitler was the first to assert this in print). In the case of the USA, the flight from truth is clear and present, it prevents to analyze what went wrong, and thus what’s wrong now. In that sense it is similar to fascist versions of Islam: in the very genesis of a thought system can lay the paralysis it gets afflicted with. The US mental paralysis is a world problem, because the USA was long one of the mental leaders for the world, but now it clings to memory loss and decerebrated childhood, feeding its various denials, such as been addicted to waste, enslaved to the Rich, terrorized by thinking, petrified by change. In the USA, systems of units dating from the Middle Ages are still in use. Only there, and nowhere else. In more ways than one, the USA is stuck in full mental reverse (just as this Taliban it gave birth to). Why? Because the US thought system is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But breaking it is the best gift one can make to it.

What is a civilization? A system of thought carried by the many minds of a people (typically living in one or more cities, hence the root “civilis”). The US system of thought originated in English colonial America (hence not in 1776, nor in 1789, but in 1606). The US system of thought had two main proximal inputs: England herself, of course, and the London Company. It was a symbiotic mix of heavens and hell, each serving the other. We passed the 400th anniversary of the hidden Constitution of the USA in total silence, but the democratic candidates for the US presidency were embroiled in theology, as befits savages of 1606 CE, not philosophers of 1789 CE.
***

SLAVERY, EXTERMINATION AND RACISM ARE MORE AMERICAN THAN APPLE PIE:

The London Company was an English stock company established by royal charter on April 10, 1606, with the purpose of establishing profitable colonial settlements in North America. The London Company had right of life and death over the entire continent, and the mission to impose Christianity on the natives (Charter of 1609). Things went on according to the master plan. The USA is the country that originated in a conspiracy, and we have its foundational document, black on white.

The Puritans arrived later, in 1620, under the authority of the London Company (and of the military). Their master idea fit perfectly well the London 1609 Charter, they thrived. The Puritans had decided to impose the Bible, on earth (and planned to go back in strength and invade Europe to impose their god!). As soon as established, they exterminated whoever was preventing the full expression of their purity (they exterminated not just Indians, although Indians had just saved them, but also “rough fellows”, independent British settlers further north, who had committed the sin of being too friendly with native women (who could be massacred and enslaved at will, since they were unbelievers; notice the similarity with the hard core Qur’an).

The fundamental principles of both London Co. and Puritans were pretty much according to a racist book full of Shoahs (holocausts), a book they were reading every time they wanted to look deep. That “Mein Kampf” of the invaders made holocausts into a religion, and also the grabbing of lands, etc…. It was easy to transpose the ideas of this book; the Puritans were the Elected people, their enemies who happened to be occupying the promised land, were enemies of their God, and had to be destroyed. Thus murderous, genocidal racism was instated at the top of the mental agenda, and with their God’s stamp of approval. This sort of barbarousness would never have sailed through the Roman Senate, but, armed with the Bible (a book which extolls events that happened more than a millennium before the Roman Senate agonized about destroying Carthage), the English settlers could go where Western Civilization had not gone before: genocide on a Biblical scale.

To start with, modestly enough because the Indians were watching their every move, the London Company had reinvented slavery in a European setting. Jamestown was initially crewed by white slaves (convicts and indentured servants, to be punished and killed in atrocious circumstances at the smallest pretext). (By comparison the French government sent to its colonies only people who had been checked for their highest morality, and they could return any time!) In the English colonies, slavery of the whites was, naturally enough, soon replaced by that of the natives, and, when the colonies could finally afford them, by African slaves (buying them with tobacco revenue, and that is why expensive African slavery was mostly in the South).

The English colonies were without adult supervision (because England was in terrible civil war trouble; when the English king asked the French king to come help with his army, even the war friendly Louis XIV prudently declined). So the most basic standards of civilization could be trampled with alacrity. Perhaps finding that the burning of Indian towns left too many natives roaming the woods, Boston was paying for Indian scalps. The passionate hatred between Indians and English settlers soon got some company from the passionate hatred between enslaved Africans and Whites (some southern states had more slaves than Whites, and only terror made them stable). American racism was an acquired staple of survival. It was married to slavery, creating the particularly monstrous progeny of racially determined slavery (something not tried since 15C BCE India, three millennia earlier!).

None of this, of course was very European: racism was unknown in Europe ever since the Romans had Spanish (1C), African and Arab emperors (3C). Slavery had been unlawful in Western Europe since the Merovingians (7C).

In English America slavery and racism were means to an end: the conquest and possession of an entire continent by greedy Europeans maximizing profits. But it’s no accident that both the Spanish and the French, who both used ethics that were not flying as low, completely failed in North America. Although the temperate coast of North America had been known since the Vikings (who imported timber from it for many centuries), it could not be colonized for military reasons: the natives were too fierce, and they knew that the Europeans had come to steal the land (see Viking and Cartier reports). The English settlers used all the weapons at their disposal, and the war manual that suggested many of them, and the righteous spirit to go with it was the Bible. It’s still true today: Bush attacked Iraq because his “Higher Father” told him to. Long live the Bible and its God! An argument few Americans can resist.

So one should not scoff, and call the European settlers in America naive. That system of thought, which mixed Bible primitivism and European high tech was immensely successful: English Americans became quickly the richest, best fed, and often best educated people on earth (they held that position for three centuries). They were free, and formed into a de facto republic before London and Paris figured out what was going on. Nine generations after inception, excited by French agents, the republic declared its independence (1776). Tocqueville, arriving another four generations after that, declared, not without scathing irony:

“The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in EXTERMINATING the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained BOTH these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the EYES of the world. It is impossible to DESTROY men with more respect to the laws of humanity” (from “Democracy in America”).
***

DEVASTATING IDEAS LEFT UNCHALLENGED KEEP ON FESTERING; HOW THE AMERICAN GENOCIDE INSPIRED EUROPEAN RACISTS AND EXTERMINATIONISTS:

America invented and justified, by its very success, slavery, extermination and racism. Those (Biblical) ideas fed back to Europe: many Europeans were impressed by their triumph in North America, and longed to duplicate it all over the planet.

Civilization had to fight hard in Europe, to triumph over Europe’s own savagery, and it was natural to extend an even more violent effort overseas. Racism is a natural instinct, a consequence of psychobiological tribalism, when all one sees is white men, and one identifies civilization with them, and civilization is in a world wide fight (against superstitious religion, habits and elites of the past, etc…). Savagery got identified with anybody not white, such as black men. Although such an identification was certainly culturally correct (don’t scream or a 19C Maori will come back, and eat you on my behalf), it was genetically erroneous, sure. But the point is that racism, however erroneous, flourished in Europe, and the conquest of the “New World” was seen as its prophet.

English America and its USA were a great inspiration for many (such as a particular Belgian king who devastated Congo for Ivory, allegedly killing millions). The racist Prussian fascists, such as governor Goering (the father of that WWI war hero, Herman Goering), instituted in Namibia an accelerated program trying to do very fast, around 1900, what the Americans had done in centuries, away from prying eyes. The British themselves used against the (European) Boers methods of concentration camps, deportation and pseudo accidental death (of more than a third of all the Boer women and children) that they had learned from the US Americans.

The Nazis, of course, were the most dedicated students of the genocide of the Indians. They decided to duplicate it in Europe, applying it to all their enemies (starting with the Poles, then the Jews, etc…) They put all these ideas on steroids, missing out completely on the plausible self denying moral subtlety of the American ways (which made them sustainable). As Tocqueville indicated, the Americans had become expert at lying to themselves and keeping appearances civilized. Although of course he came to observe after 220 years of continual holocaust (missing most of it). (US American civilization took three centuries to exterminate the Indians, and, by trying to do the same to all of the advanced Europeans of Eastern Europe in three years, the Nazis were bound not to make friends, even among themselves.)

Another meta feeling that was comforted by the keeping of appearances, was that English America, come hell and high water, was always right: nothing succeeds like success. It was fundamental to assert this loud and clear, because this loud crowing was part of the cover-up (another was to play real dumb and inarticulate). This lack of doubt about America has become a central American mental tradition. It explains why the role of the USA in helping fascist regimes (and, first of all Hitler’s) was never put front and center. Unsurprisingly, so has it been for the role of the USA in pushing Judeo-Christo-Muslim fanaticism (before S. Hussein put God on the Iraqi flag, the USA chose as motto “In God we trust” in 1954. This religious slogan unconstitutionally replaced the US Founders’ “E Pluribus Unum”; it’s unconstitutional to bring a god in because, so doing, Congress made an “establishment of a religion”, and that is explicitly forbidden by the US Constitution. But nothing succeeds as well as enormity, as Hitler pointed out (in this apparent competition of enormities, Hitler earlier put “Gott mit Uns” all over his SS)).
***

ANTI INTELLECTUALISM AS THE ULTIMATE COVER UP:

A characteristic of the American thought system is its anti-intellectualism. Pushed around, Americans tend to evoke their “faith” in “god”, rarely their supreme intelligence and sensibility. The Bible overlords it all, in some ways more than ever (some American Founding Fathers wrote some very strong anti-Christian stuff, and got elected, whereas saying the same nowadays would be death to any politician). At the same time, of course, in part to prevent the rule of absolute idiocy, which would be counter-productive to the overall mission, the USA has the best universities in the world (if “best” is carefully evaluated in the realms of easier thoughts, and the readily publishable; don’t expect the first genuinely American Abelard, Buridan, Voltaire, Gauss, Nietzsche or Einstein any time soon…).

Europeans remember the old Nazi proverb that “whenever I hear the word Kultur, I pull out my Browning” (Browning being an American brand of revolvers American capitalists smuggled to the Nazis in vast amounts). Culture was what ultimately stopped Nazism (the German army coup against Hitler of 1944 was launched as a matter of cultural principle by its upright instigators). France opposed Nazism at every turn, from January 1933 on, mostly for higher cultural reasons (just as the USA cooperated with Nazism against France by common hatred against those who detested genocides, racism, slavery, and the Biblical god).

The American thought system, increasingly laden with contradictions, encouraged by its devotion to the Bible, has avoided to think. Thinking is intrinsically creative, and may turn to dust the old American mummy of obsolete habits, if it ever touched it. In any case, the verdict of the American elite, when asked why they got into Iraq, admit that it was by “lack of intelligence”. No kidding. OK, that’s what they say, but not exactly what they mean, but that’s just because they did not think about it yet.

It’s encouraging that candidate Obama has been trying to think aloud in public, but the screams of the Beotians have been loud (thinking is traditionally viewed as “elite”, the plutocratic elite insists, in its successful strategy to confuse the American people). It’s discouraging to remember that, in the fight between anti-intellectual theocracy and the so called “Golden Age of Islam”, the theocrats won, and destroyed civilization (as they very nearly did in the Roman empire between 300CE and 550 CE).
***

THE TENACITY OF CIVILIZATION NEEDS TO DEAL WITH THE FINAL AMERICAN IDEA:

After a crafty hesitation of four centuries, full bore European civilization threatens to finally land in North America (if it had landed earlier, the USA would have been more Indian than Mexico). The opportunistic causes of the English American monstrosity have faded; the continent was conquered, the beast should be digesting its prey, instead of getting all agitated. The Biblical political philosophy of holocausts, racism, slavery, and theft of the land, having fulfilled its role, should be safely disposed of, instead of trying to recycle it in Iraq or Afghanistan (with Halliburton playing the role of the London Company). But old habits die hard. Although they worked well against the Neolithic ones, Biblical methods will not work in the cradle of civilization, however numbed out it was rendered by that other war manual, the Qur’an (the Qur’an derives from the Bible, and was used in a similar fashion).

Moreover there are more pressing issues. The greenhouse disaster is upon us, and some old American ideas, such as the unrestrained exploitation of the land, long successful in a continent voided of its native population, have to be detected, exposed and thrown out before they attempt to germinate all over the planet, in the fury of the overcrowded rats.

In the 19C, most of the system of thought supporting slavery was destroyed. In the 20C, racism and extermination came into direct conflict with democracy, and democracy won, and the system of thought of racism ended fatally damaged (in no small reason because especially France (but also Britain and America) used colored troops in combat to munch through the white master race: many extremely fierce “French” divisions were mostly African; for thirty one years, Senegalese and Germans were not in the habit of making a single prisoner: the lethal hatred was mutual, a good ground for future respect).

So now what is left among US bad mental habits, that still set it aside from its parental European thought system? Is there a head to this nagging obsolescence? One idea is left above all, and it’s at the genesis of it all. It shows up in basic principle of the US health “care” system.

As we said above, the London Company itself was founded for profits, Biblical extermination was its tool, and the ultimate master idea of its foundation was that BIG PROFIT IS THE END THAT JUSTIFY ALL AND ANY MEANS (an example of the application of this idea is in US health care, where death of American humans is OK, as long as the profits roll in! Death of profits would be major, death of humans a way to prevent that). Slavery, extermination, racism, Bible and war crimes, and systemic lying and dissembling were just instruments of that master idea, in total violation of 20 centuries of explicit Western civilization (religion, aka the Bible, allowed and instigated that violation, and that is why it became the sacred American text par excellence). The progenitor idea of all master ideas has survived so far, and reached a new level of achievement by sending the US Army to the Middle East to protect the oil, as the paramount mission of America. And by having the richest Americans taxed at the lowest rate (15%!).

The overall American idea that BIG PROFIT IS THE END THAT JUSTIFY ALL AND ANY MEANS has to see its prominence destroyed. It was appropriate to the invasion and destruction of the old North America. But now is a new World, all over the planet, and we don’t want it destroyed. Throughout old civilizations, capitalism was always against the excesses of plutocracy, ever since there were cattle herders, and there was a wealth tax (and yes, a “death” tax!).
***

A NEW SURVIVAL SKILL. THE DECONSTRUCTION OF DANGEROUSLY OBSOLETE THOUGHT SYSTEMS:

The time for holocausting some obsolete thought systems, before they holocaust us, has definitively arrived. We may as well start with this new approach to thinking within the USA rather than with Afghanistan (or China!). After all, the US Americans want to pretend that they can think, that they are an elite of a crowd.

It’s time to clear the mental tables, not just for the sake of the USA, but because now, whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not, we are one world, one spaceship, and the air is getting foul, and the waters are rising, and the food stores are running low, and the third class passengers are rioting, and the oceans are getting empty of all, but poisons… It’s the road to hell, and no Bible can paper it over. Only hard core truth can come to the rescue, and appreciation for it is not found in many of the parts of American thinking that made the USA such a success. Therein the conundrum for the pusillanimous, and the challenge for the wise: how to save America while changing its soul.
***

Conclusion: PASSION IS NEEDED FOR DECONSTRUCTION.

Having being the author of a Biblical revisitation of an atrocious past transposed in modern times for seizing an entire continent, a form of civilizational devolution that directly preceded, encouraged and inspired such extravagances as Nazism, the least US American civilization could do now would be to acknowledge the enormous errors and terror of its old ways with many museums allowing people to recognize the full horrors of racism, slavery and genocides that made the USA what it is now. It is not a question of begging forgiveness on ones’ knees. After all, contemporaries did not commit these crimes. But the trains of thoughts and emotions that allowed these crimes are still in great part still around (as the mayhem in Iraq demonstrates for the whole planet to see). Becoming passionate about condemning these crimes will energize the vigilance against the cognitive, logical and emotional patterns that gave rise to them.
***

Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
http://www.patriceayme.com/index.html


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because all (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum

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Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.

ianmillerblog

Smile! You’re at the best WordPress.com site ever

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Political Reactionary

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Rise, Republic, Plutocracy, Degeneracy, Fall And Transmutation Of Rome

Power Exponentiation By A Few Destroyed Greco-Roman Civilization. Are We Next?

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GrrrGraphics on WordPress

www.grrrgraphics.com

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because all (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum

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