DON’T ASK WHOM REVOLUTION IS TOLLING FOR, IT TOLLS FOR THEE.
Civilization Without Revolution Is Only Perversion And Stagnation. We Revolve, Thus We Progress.
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Abstract; Civilization amplifies man. Plutocracy destroys man. There are many reasons for this, such as greed (l’appat du gain, in French).
However, the full truth is much more sinister than that. Ultimately, plutocracy destroys man by design, evil design, rather than by happenstance.
As usual, by plutocracy I do not mean just the rule of wealth, but also what eggs on this obsessive behavior, the RULE OF EVIL. Plutocracy: Pluto’s rule, Pluto in full, not just the Pluto who wants to grab all the treasures of the underground, but also the Pluto of everything else, the one who can make himself invisible, the one who is the other name of Hades.
So, by Pluto I mean Pluto as evolution created it: the ultimate way to keep Earth in balance with the genus Homo. Through the culling of the genus Homo. (But culling, just so, is so delicate to do, with weapons of Mass Destruction.)
Plutocracy in the usual sense, the rule of wealth, appeared as soon as huge quantities of capital could be created, and thus concentrated by the few. Indeed, capital tends to concentrate (a purely mathematical phenomenon).
As capital concentrates on the few, others are left with too little. Thus plutocracy renders most people impotent. But people are made to be potent. “Live potent or die”, this is how evolution had it. Thus plutocracy makes civilization morbid, ready to collapse at the first adversity, be it only because not only does it estrange Homo from himself, but, by making most members of society impotent, and thus incompetent, it makes for a society of worthless individuals, grains of sands in the machinery of meaning.
This is why revolutions are necessary. Verily the real sense of the concept of “revolution” is not destruction, and a jump into the unknown, for the unknown’s sake. In truth, it’s the exact opposite. Revolution is actually the act of going back, to re-turn [Latin: re-volvere]. Nietzsche would have been pleased. He was obsessed by the “Eternal Return of the Same”. I am saying that said return has to be engineered.
Return to what? What is so revolutionary about returning?
A real revolution returns to the fundamental nature of man. A real revolution re-empowers average individuals, by allowing them to return to their fundamental nature. A real revolution free people from those chains Rousseau was talking about. (That is how a real revolution can be distinguished from the fake ones: a real revolution brings back to the real nature of man; a fake one drags man further away from man; what I mean here is that Lenin, for example, organized a fake revolution; he brought more plutocracy, not less… And that was even his program!)
Thus, although revolution is necessary for progress, it is the most conservative thing. The enemies of revolution claim to be the most conservatives, but they are the exact opposite. Or then hyenas are the most conservative. After all, they want to keep the entire carcass to themselves.
Civilization has to protect itself from excessive plutocracy. It does this by undergoing periodic revolutions, cleansing excessive plutocracy, adapting the essence of man to the new reality that advancing technology, plutocracy, and changing circumstances have brought about.
Otherwise, if civilization does not undergo a significant revolution in a timely manner, it fails epically: see the Mayas drying up, at each others’ throats (650-900 CE). Or see Muslim Spain falling apart all by itself (in a flurry of petty lords fighting each other) , or look at the Baghdad Caliphate in 1258, annihilated after typical plutocratic madness had rendered it unable to perceive the roughest outline of reality (see below).
The West has been erroneously described as “Christian”. Nietzsche insisted that this was never true, and that aristocratic morality dominated along, whose values were deeply anti-Christian. Although Nietzsche sourced his reasoning in literature, the historical record is pretty clear, and the actors even more so. They have names, and I don’t hesitate to brandish them. Real history beats philology anytime.
In truth, the fundamental ideology of the West at its best, is the permanent revolution. The West has done well because of its propensity to revolution.
In its most significant outline, the history of the West is pretty much the history of revolutions. Revolutions have cleansed plutocratic pollution. They have prevented the Occident to turn into the hydraulic dictatorships of the Orient. Revolutions have allowed to adapt to technology, and push it further.
Contrarily to received wisdom, revolutions do not have to do with mobs. Revolutions are always led by intellectual elites. Then a People implements it. When a mob rises to seize the Bastille, it is the fracture at the end of an accident.
The history of China is replete with fascist paroxysms such as the short lived Qin dynasty. A revolution in more ways than one, many have said, and evidence shows, but in my set-up anything that augments fascism considerably, to the point of burning books and burying scholars, actually end up increasing plutocracy, and does not qualify as a genuine revolution (which has to do more with ideas; fake revolutions by plutocrats and fascists aspiring to become plutocrats are abundant; see Libya, and various other Arab speaking regimes).
The Ming can be viewed as a revolution against the Yuan (= Mongols), but there again, its anti-intellectual character makes it more a mental collapse and a coup than anything else.
In other words, between Confucius and the Twentieth Century, a lapse of 26 centuries, China has known 2 successful foreign invasions (not counting the ephemeral French, British, and Japanese occupations), but no revolution. The absence of genuine revolution was China’s major problem. China has been playing catch-up, by indulging in at least 4 major revolutions in a century, which brought in a cornucopia of Western ideas. And many have worked spectacularly well.
Same in India, for that matter. In spite of Buddha’s pretty meditations below those big trees, the caste system stayed in place until the British squeezed the life out of it. That was a non neglectable 33 centuries or so. And it was genetically based (modern gene studies have shown). So much for the great achievements of Indian philosophy, and the life impacting wisdom exuding therefrom. But now India, too, has become revolutionary (I will make Gandhi a honorary revolutionary, but not the main one, just for the occasion of this particular paragraph).
Similarly in the lands that Islam crushed, no genuine revolution was ever seen. Except in Turkey, where the intellectual leadership that characterizes a real revolution was provided by the “Young Turks”.
Right now, the intellectual leadership for revolution against fascist plutocracy is provided by the Internet.
The quasi simultaneous revolutions in Athens and Rome, 26 centuries ago, are exemplary. An earlier example was the revolution from the top in Egypt, when a Pharaoh decided to reduce vampiric theocracy by imposing just one god, a secularist, naturalistic god, to replace the many gods with their attending theocracies (circa 1350 BCE). This Egyptian revolution, like many other Egyptian revolutions, had consequences to this day (in particular, it clearly influenced, JCI, Judeo-Christo-Islamism, the religion of Abraham, the would-be child killer; the child killing itself is in the “MLK” tradition: Moloch, and had nothing to do with Egypt… Until the followers of Abraham, that is, partly, Moloch, conquered Egypt, 16 centuries ago).
An anti-plutocratic revolution is a matter of restoring the highest principles above the machinations of the few who are animated by that part of the ethology of man which is man-destroying.
There are other types of revolution, in science, philosophy or art. They are related to purely anti-plutocratic revolutions, because any established system of thought gets captured by an oligarchy (priesthoods, such as the priesthood Muhammad was trying to avoid when he set the basics of Islam, are examples). So for correct new thinking to be accepted, an oligarchy has to be seduced, or vanquished.
Thus Europe has been thinking well, because Europe has cultivated the spirit of revolution. This observation generalizes Nietzsche’s thesis that the spirit of the god Dionysus (the feasts of the senses, mental anarchy), animated the Greeks as importantly as that of Apollo (classical beauty, rigor).
Reciprocally, if the spirit of revolution falters, so will creative thinking. Be it only because creative thinking, when it is creative enough, is always a revolution.
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REVOLUTIONARY ANTIQUE EGYPT:
Egypt brought enormous contributions to civilization. It was at the very top, until rendered stupid by the religion of Abraham. Egyptian civilization was the last remnant of the Saharan civilization, which had to flee to the margins, as the Sahara became the world’s toughest and largest desert (short of Antarctica). The Egyptians adapted to the Nile. Their contributions go far beyond the monuments left today. The Egyptians were part of the work group (so to speak) which invented the alphabet, as they exchanged ideas on that with the Sumerian cities.
A lot of what came to be known as Greek mathematics originated in Egypt. Egypt had also a close, symbiotic relationship with Crete before the later got destroyed by the crazy volcano. Much later, at some point Athens attacked (for a while successfully) to free Egypt from its Persian occupiers.
Deciphering ancient texts has shown that life in ancient Egypt was amazingly modern in feeling, closer to the present day West than to the Salafist hell which have come to pass for normal in the region for the last millennium or so. People would have a picnic in the park with the children (watching the crocs and hippopotami). A lot of the famous legends of the bible can be found verbatim in Egyptian fables. The Egyptian fables are thousands of years older.
Women were fully liberated, as they used to be in prehistory. Egypt had many female pharaohs, as the eons passed by. And many queens of superlative influence, such as Nefertiti. That makes Islam, with its vision that woman ought to be, at best, worth half a man, particularly offensive, and grotesque, in a place which knew little sexism for millennia.
As the following demonstrates, real Pharaohs could be extremely enlightened. At the time of the following, the Pharaonic empire was gigantic: it extended all the way to Mesopotamia and Anatolia.
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A REVOLUTIONARY PAROXYSM OF CONSEQUENCE IN EGYPT, 33 CENTURIES AGO:
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV had succeeded his father Amenhotep III’s. Amenhotep III reigned 38 years (better than Mubarak!). Mono-Atenism, a revolution, was launched by the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV who changed his name to Akhenaten or “Living Spirit of Aten“. Akhenaten was exasperated by Egyptian theocracy, which was sucking the empire dry (he was the top theocrat, so in good position to know).
Amenhotep/Akhenaten’s chief wife was Nefertiti. His son was Tutankhamun (DNA confirmed). So we are among the elite. Akhenaten’s revolution was from the top.
The revolution imposed by Akhenaten was astounding: he basically imposed the belief that the nocturnal struggle of the sun, characteristic of the old Egyptian religion, did not happen. Instead the rise of the sun was viewed as mechanical, led by a mechanical god (who had three aspects). Akhenaten believed in a god one could not really pray to. (So what happen in the after-life? After a beloved daughter died in childbirth, the pharaoh recognized he did not have an answer… and he was sad; that was the Achilles’ heel of his religion… Achilles would come within a century).
Akhenaten preceded Judaism by 2 centuries. some have suggested he was the true Moses. Sigmund Freud, a sexually obsessed secular Jew, argued that Moses was an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt when Atenism fell in disfavor (as bad luck would have it, there was a plague). There is much to be said on Akhenaten. Akhenaten believed in nature, and the art of the period is characteristically, very realistic:
Plaster portrait study of pharaoh Akhenaten (or some pharaoh closely related to him). The heads of Nefertiti (= “Real Beauty has Come”) and Tutankhamen, are from the same period.
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MEN DIE, IDEAS LIVE ON:
From the preceding a conclusion arises with inevitable splendor. Revolutions are natural to Egypt. Recent Muslim autocratic stagnation is not.
If Ancient Egypt had been as dumb, in a sexist way, as the Qur’an wants it to be, it would not have been: dumbing women down, dumbs down all of society, because women teach infants and small children, when intelligence is taught the basics. That was always the downfall of sexist societies. They breed idiots.
That makes Islam, its associated, vicious, meek potentates, offensive and grotesque. It is amusing to see a religion coming out, and making fascism into a moral principle (see Qur’an, Sura 4, verse 59, a quote all would be revolutionaries and defenders of Islam ought to consider; it makes Hitlerism virtually identical to Islam, on that point, the point of what Islamist politics is all about; no wonder: Hitler knew Islam well, and sang its praises).
As I always say, but it is as good a place to remind it as any, plutocracy encourages theocracy. After all, plutocrats thrive better when they are viewed as divine, or as having a special relationship to god (the formula Roman emperors settled on).
The European Middle Ages is the archetypical example of plutocracy leading back to theocracy. In recent decades, plutocracy has been facilitating theocracy both in the USA and in Muslim countries, the former bringing the later, and it is backfiring in both places, as it always does. That this plutocracy is USA based is irrelevant to the mechanism itself; the initial rise of Salafist Islam during the Middle Ages was also plutocratically driven, but indigenous, and took much longer.
Rebellions, revolutions and wars in Europe cut down, again and again, the unhealthy rule of plutocracy and theocracy.
Past Egyptian revolutions’ ideas are still driving our civilization today. However, the first rate civilizational role of Egypt collapsed after the grabbing of power by the follower of Abraham. In light of this, anybody extolling instead the grandeur of Islam ought to go see the history doctor. Probably the psychiatry doctor too.
Akhenaten was the world’s richest man, when he launched his revolution, and had always known extraordinary privilege. He used his astounding position to rule for the better, and leave behind ideas that would help to rule for the better. That proves that the relationship between money and rule has to refined, as I advocate. Plutocracy is not just the rule of money. Akhenaten’s rule was no plutocracy, because he was not inspired by the worst in man, but by secularism, pragmatism, the observation of nature. It was the rule of revolution, actually aiming at decreasing theocracy and plutocracy.
(Marx himself was made possible because his friend Engels was rich, born of the rich; top thinking has always required a tap on the top means.)
However the evolution of ideas know strong relapses, and the stronger the ideas, the stronger the relapses. Under later Pharaohs, a lot of the ancient Egyptian religion was re-instated (although Akhenaten’s ideas were never completely forgotten).
By the time of Pharaoh Ramses II, Akhenaten came to be known simply as “the enemy“, and the method he had himself used, what the Romans came to know as “Damnae Memoria”, where all references and statues and representations of a previous ruler are erased, was used against him.
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EUROPE, OR CONTINUOUS REVOLUTIONS EVERYWHERE:
Sparta, Athens and Rome had drastic revolutions within a century of each other. The Athenian revolution was more drastic than the Roman one; Athens was a democracy, the People ruled, whereas Roma was a republic with a “mixed” constitution (Polybius dixit), part democracy, part aristocracy (with the two chambers systems of Sumer, 15 centuries earlier).
Revolutions is how Athens and Rome came to be. Those who admire Greco-Roman antiquity admire revolution. Athens had more than one revolution, as it relapsed in plutocracy. Those revolutions threw out kings or tyrants, in other words, plutocrats. The Athenian or Roman civilizations would not have happened without these revolutions. What would have happened instead is a mystery: a Marseilles-Etruscan alliance against Carthage?
It is significant that, in the usual Marxist view of history, these fundamental revolutions are ignored; however they redistributed wealth, expropriated, and reorganized the class structures. They are more reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s revolution than to anything mild. I guess evoking their amplitude and radicalism would have sabotaged Marx’s simplistic view of the ineluctable flow of history, from feudalism to communism.
Many other thinkers have ignored those revolutions too, including Nietzsche, who contented himself with pointing out that the Greeks were hysterically “Dionysian”, non rational in the conventional sense, and therein their superiority (until Socrates came around, all tangled up with his little three cents arguments). In truth the Greeks were fundamental revolutionaries.
Conservatives, Neoconservatives, and various fascists wax lyrical when they evoke Rome, but they tend to forget that it started as what would now be called a “Marxist”, or “Socialist” revolution. Although, in all fairness, the Italian fascists, and even the Nazis remembered. Those critters were explicitly anti-oligarchic, and anti-plutocratic, as they understood quite well that the Peoples they led by the nose confusedly understood some elements of the connection between plutocracy and civilizational regression.
So fancy night clubs were supposed to be closed, In Nazi Germany (wow). In truth, of course the Nazis were faking it, it was a camouflage: so it is when the death adder resemble dead leaves. The Nazis were the greediest, and so where their supporters, and they all conspire to steal the Jews and other Europeans, so greedy they were.
Even after it was occupied by the armed forces of plutocrats, Athens kept on revolting. First against fascist imperialist Macedonia. Finally, with Roman help, it was successful in getting rid of Macedonia. It had taken 180 years.
But the Roman allies stayed, like the Americans would have liked to do in France in 1945. And they stayed in an aura of terror, because they had wasted Corinth, on the ground that t was too socialist a city.
Still, Athens stayed alive, like ambers of a fire ready to devour its Roman masters. Emperor Justinian, nearly 6 centuries later, would finally close the Athenian academies, and outlaw any critical, secular, or philosophical teaching not under the state’s Christian close supervision. The punishment for miscreants was according to Saint Pau’s orders: by burning the culprit alive.
The Revolution of 1789 in France was severely criticized (including in the USA at the time), for being something iconoclast, something never seen before, bloodied, respecting nothing.
However, those holding such opinions show their ignorance of history. The revolution of 1789 was in the best tradition. It was the revolution Athens and Rome should have made: giving universal rights, including voting, to all.
Athens had given the vote. Rome had taken back the vote, but extended the rights. The revolution of the universal rights of man and the citizen of 1789 was in the best tradition started by Athens and Rome. BLOODY REVOLUTIONS: THAT IS HOW THE WEST WAS WON.
The two heroes represented below assassinated one of the two tyrant brothers of Athens (514 BCE). Members of their families could dine for free forever after.
Statue of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Naples. [Roman copy of the Athenian version by Kritios and Nesiotes.] The heroes are au naturel, because the raw spirit of real men needs no cloak. Only the Dark side needs to hide.
The conspiracy to do away with the tyrants was revealed a few minutes too early, so the other tyrant escaped and was able to torture the surviving hero to death. Later a Spartan army swooped in, and did away with him too. Violence does not just feed on violence, it can eat up entirely.
This by the way illustrates what I would call the NON VIOLENCE FALLACY. The illusion that violence can be vanquished, or is best vanquished by non violence. if that Spartan army had not shown up, the great Athenian civilization would not have been. [See below.]
There were even mini-revolutions under the fascist Roman empire. The Roman republic was forced by its Italian allies to grant them citizenship: Rome won that war, but lost the argument. It was a war for equality, something even more drastic than a simple revolution. Finally, under the Severian emperor Caracalla, Roman citizenship, and all its privileges, was given to all free men (3C).
Then, of course, Christianity itself, imposed from the top by Constantine as he was busy conquering the empire (helped by his Franks), was a revolution. Christianity, as interpreted by most Christians, was opposite of a lot of the Roman ethical system under the empire: instead of cruelty, it promoted love. Christianity was even opposed to the ethic of the republic; instead of the (republican) law, it promoted forgiveness (highways became deadly as the Christians refused to punish robbers). And so on. Rome was punished by its own instruments, as the application of Christianity soon proved itself more cruel than anything Rome had known, ever. Killing with kindness is still killing. And Christians were often more demented than kind in any sense.
That Christian ethical ethical revolution was not the end all, be all. It built up on the Greco-Roman republican ethics (with its notion of equality). It was more sexist than Romanitas (after all Rome had empresses, the Augustas: whereas the church never had a female leader). Christianity was also indifferent to the greatest flaw of the Greco-Romans, slavery.
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THE FRANKISH REVOLUTION:
The ethical driver of Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism and cruelty. However Christ was himself power mad and cruel, as demonstrated when he suggested to bring unbelievers to him so he could strike them with a sword, and kill them. One could argue that Christ was less power mad and cruel than say, emperors Constantine, or Constantius II, who killed most of their own families. But that is not saying much. As a good Roman imperial leader, Christ celebrated his ability to break families with his personality cult, as children would follow him rather than their parents, a boast Hitler would also make, word for word. Great minds of the Jewish hating kind think alike.
OK, Christ probably never existed, so I will forgive him. Nietzsche correctly argued that it was erroneous to describe European civilization as “Christian”. Nietzsche observed that the European aristocracy rarely behaved as if it were Christian, but, instead celebrated anti-Christian values.
Indeed those who view Europe as Christian are far from the truth. They are confusing the truth, and the crafty cover-up which was set up to hide it. Most read history naively. As Clovis pointed out, if he had been there with 10,000 of his Franks, Christ would have never been crucified. Naively, one could say that Clovis understood nothing to Christianity. But it would be as if saying that the wolf understands nothing to the sheep and its immaculate robe, because it eats it alive, and splashes blood everywhere. Who is naïve here?
What Clovis was saying is exactly what he said: if he had been there with “10,000 of his Franks”, there would have been no crucifixion circus, and thus no Christianity. 10,000 Franks: no Christianity.
The Franks did not respect Augustus’ advice to leave northern Germany alone. The Franks conquered Europe, brandishing the cross, because that instrument of terror was excellent with distant savages. But they did not conquer Europe with love. Quite the opposite. They conquered Europe with military hyperactivity: several of the most famous Frankish leaders, over a span of 3 centuries, were continually at war. The Franks made the Romans look like placid cows. The Franks invented methods of victory and domestication later copied by the Mongols, and the Americans.
The Franks made an anti-Christian revolution (they were above any suspicion, since they had just converted to Catholicism, they loudly proclaimed, caressing their francisca). Christianism had been against law, order, the military, thinking, books and education, to the point of suiciding society. The Franks swept all this, and established at the helm a sly mixture of German democracy and Roman fascism, under the banner of “Europe”.
In the following three centuries, one can argue that the Franks piled up at least three other revolutions: the outlawing of slavery (7C), the nationalization of the Church (8C), and forcing the church to teach secular knowledge to all the children (8C). And all of this was before Charlemagne. Charlemagne instituted a flurry of mini-revolutions. Such as linguistic revolutions: replacing Roman capital letters with Carolingian minuscules, which could be written in 3 strokes, and thus allowed to copy books much faster. They also created written German.
The invasion of England by the Franco-Normands also rode in as a revolution (and many revolutions rolled over England in the next 6 centuries). The Conqueror instituted a direct relationship with his subject, and preserved the local assemblies. His relationship with the lords of his French army would soon lead to the Magna Carta (as the French Barons saw themselves as partners in the conquest of England, rather than simple subjects).
Another aspect all too neglected, is that the Franks claimed (like the Romans) that they came from Troy. The Roman story may have percolated from the mysterious Etruscans (who indeed came from the area of Troy, sort of). The Etruscan plutocrats were the victims of the Roman revolution, but they had taught Romans to count their cows.
However the Franks were much more seriously anti-Greek, in the sense that their vision of society was definitively radical: they wanted no slaves, and women were to be equal enough to reign (Rome had several “Augustas”, reigning empresses, de facto, but one had to wait the Frankish queens to have female leaders with exactly the same “authority” as if they had been men… the reigning queens and empresses Europe would enjoy a millennium later come from that tradition… curiously it died in France where it had been born, as a reaction to the fearsome Isabelle de France, daughter of Philippe IV le Bel, queen of England).
This is the flow and ebb of revolutions; the Greeks and the Romans had been outrageous enslavers and sexist demons. Crete, the partner of Egypt, centuries before the Dorian conquest of Greece had not been sexist: it had female toreadors, exerting with very little clothing. However the Dorians came in as males armed with steel swords, killing the men, and enslaving the women.
Both Christianity and the Franks owe their success, ethical, and then material, to the fact that they reconciled civilization with the authentic inheritance of the genus Homo.
France, of course, stayed revolution central ever since (even organizing one in America, just for the heck of it, repaying England with some of its own medicine).
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TO UNDERSTAND MAN, GO OLD:
When one wants to understand man, one has to look back to prehistory always. This is the most worthy religion; re-ligare, re-tying to our true nature, and, thus the true nature of nature. Why?
Simply because man, and that means man’s ethology, evolved over at least the ten million years anticipating that sliver we call history. It’s not ten thousand years of Neolithic, not even one half of a thousandth of the duration, when the gens Homo has proudly carried its name,that changed the eons that preceded them.
OK, some population, from Norwegians to Kenyans, learned to digest milk as adults, in the last few millennia. But they did not change how they loved, feared, hated, and yearned for glory, mayhem, and the hunt. Why? Because man is out of nature, for and against nature. Manipulating nature into something more suitable is what Homo does, ever since she learned to cut rocks just so, make clothing, and use fire.
However, nature, in its full glory, has not changed much. OK, Homo has mangled the biosphere, and caused the worse extinction tsunami in 65 million years. But the rest of nature has stayed pretty impervious: lightning is still there, volcanoes erupt, and the tides don’t dance the samba, however strong we wish them to. And we are quickly running out of metals (a problem overlooked by past historians, as far as I can tell, but which was a major factor in the decline of Rome).
What is the implication? The deep nature of man, of Homo, was apt to solve the deepest problem: evolve a nature to master nature itself for the better (and the better had to be defined according to wishful thinking). So the deep nature of man, prehistoric man, is not just about who we truly are, but about what the true nature of the mental machinery for resolving nature is.
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NEOLITHIC & CIVILIZATION AMPLIFIED THE DARK SIDE:
If anything, Neolithic and civilization (the first cities appeared in Anatolia, 10,000 years ago) made a bad situation worse, or let’s say that civilization and neolithic made some already all too human characteristics, much more so. And not always for the good.
I am not saying that this is a possibility, but, rather, part high probability, part fact. Why? Because the neolithic and then even more so, civilization, increased human densities, hence human interactions enormously. Increasing density put humanity, and humanism, on steroid, so to speak. Man’s intelligence is culturally programmed, and if the intelligence of culture blossom, so does individual intelligence (it goes the other way too: submitted to a really stupid culture, such as Nazism, or superstition, individual intelligence can go in reverse).
Studies of earthly remains show that neolithic life was extremely murderous. And it was probably much more murderous than before. Indeed paleolithic human groups used to be small, widely separated, with low birth rates, during the millions of years of the paleolithic. Paleolithic man had more problems with the local lions. Although, of course, expeditions to steal someone’s else fire were probably the greatest achievement for hundreds of thousands of years as Homo Erectus appreciated fire, an engine of survival, but did not master enough thermodynamics yet (namely that heat is motion). Wars, and holocausts (of more than a dozen humanoid species) imparted the human mind with its very Dark Side.
Thus the Eden Rousseau longed for, not only never existed, but was deeper in prehistory, where our character comes from, and roasted Rousseau for dinner was a much rarer occasion indeed (in all senses of the term).
But still, agreed, things got worse, in more than one sense as the combinations evil thrive on multiplied with each other, when human densities went up.
Civilization meant the high density of cities, but it also meant the high intensity of thinking, and therein the possibility of imaginative solutions, those which allowed to survive, the sustainable ones, the mores, morality, and its enforcement, the law.
It is funny how many talk about “oligarchy”, the rule of the few, whereas few talk about “plutocracy”, which I define as the rule of hell. But, pray tell, how could only a few rule, without giving hell to the many?
Another countersense is to call regimes such as the Tunisian, the Egyptian “autocracies”, the rule of self, whatever that means. Since when has “self” ruled alone? The Tunisian and Egyptian regimes rested not just on the army (which switched sides), but the police (now claiming to have been a victim too), and, just as American rule in Iraq and Afghanistan, on secret armies of private goons expert at the darkest arts, such as killing people from afar (snipers’ position were revealed on Twitter, though…)
Maybe Stalin was the closest approximation of the rule of self, or then Roman emperor Domitian. But Stalin, after his buddy Hitler attacked the USSR, stayed secluded for days. When he met with the politburo, Stalin expected to be fired (aka executed). Even Stalin did not rule alone. Domitian, or Nero, ended up doing so, and they were disposed off in vast plots. And plots not from the People, but from fellow oligarchs, or more exactly, plutocrats (a similar scenario held with Caesar, except Caesar was far from alone, but he decided to go around as if he did not even need one companion or bodygard).
Look at vile regimes such as Mohammed VI’s in Morocco, or the Saudi: you have got many, thousands, grossly profiting from the regime. Same in Jordan, or Algeria. Ultimately people of the West profit also from cheap phosphates (Morocco) or cheap oil (the Arabs). in truth, the money is recycled, such as when the owners of Arabia buy zillions of dollars of weapons to their fellow senior partners in plutocracy based in the USA.
In Algeria, health care is free, thanks to the 60 billion dollars of oil revenue, a lot of which is redistributed.
Call, if you want, Mubarak’s Egypt an oligarchy, or a dictatorship, but both descriptions will come short, as neither brings to the mind the rule of the worst that the human character can display. But a regime which can kill more than 300 of its pacifically protesting citizens in 2 weeks (while hurting thousands more), for all to see, that’s a hellish regime. Of course, Libya will do worse, because it’s less civilized.
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RECOGNIZE EVIL, IF YOU WANT TO FIGHT IT:
Where does hell come from? Here is the Roman answer:
It’s all mixed up! Yes, the yin-yang symbol appeared at least seven hundred years earlier in the West than in China. Even two thousand years earlier, if one counts, as one should, its ubiquitous apparition in Celtic art (where the Romans probably got it from, since Gallia Transalpina is now known as Northern Italy).
Roman republican civilization was hard, tough, uncompromising. It’s the Romans who brandished:”Homo homini lupus.” (Man wolf for man). Under the Principate (“empire”), this revelation turned to plain cruelty.
The same idea, that toughness is central to effective civilization, is in the fascist symbol, representing justice, an idea adopted by Rome from Etruria. A bundle of rods together: E Pluribus Unum, Out Of Many, One, holding an axe. So justice without the threat of ultimate violence is not.
Roman fasces
Not only is hell all mixed up, it is a matter of location in the dynamics of the swirl. No violence, no justice. Justice associated to violence: the way of the West, the way of revolution.
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THE NON VIOLENCE FALLACY TRICK:
Since Gandhi became fashionable, it has been said that the best revolutions are non violent. How convenient for those with the guns.
It is true that non violent methods can be very useful. Mr. Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolent revolution, such as “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents with practical advice.
However, as I always tend to argue, Gandhi did more bad than good. So arguing pacifism, and non violence was good is a bit like arguing that vegetarianism was good because Hitler, a vegetarian, wanted to free Bohemia. OK, Gandhi esteemed Hitler, I know, and Hitler did free bohemia, his way.
Gandhi was fighting an enemy, the British, whose ridiculous tax on salt, and the like, was going to be discontinued, just as their rule. The Brits were the first to know that. Gandhi was fighting scurrying rabbits. Gandhi’s later life shows that he was aware of how wrong he had been. Not only did he want to repay the Muslims, in spite of death threats of enraged Hindus, but it seems that he wanted to die.
Non violence is pushed by those who want to fight only scurrying rabbits, and bleating sheep. It is a maneuver of the vicious ones, essential to their rule. even more so than building a fear barrier.
Greenpeace forced Japan to give up killing whales, in the present Japanese execution of whales season. But if Greenpeace had been only peaceful, it would have got nowhere. Instead it took huge risks with its science fiction motorized catamaran, and great violence was used.
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PLUTO PREFERS TO HAVE A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE:
While the oligarchies advise peace and moderation to protesters, they do not feel so constrained. In Egypt the 18 days rebellion of February 2011 killed at least 365 people. Within a few days of the start of protest, the obviously mentally impaired Khadafy had killed more than 200.
To counteract that governmental violence, violence of the People, that is force of the People, was, and had to be used. The demonstrators protected the Egyptian Museum on Tahir place, which (violent) thieves (probably regime goons) had raided. Thousands of Molotov cocktails were exchanged. If all “non violent” Egyptians had been thoroughly non violent, Mubarak’s son, Gamal, would have sat in the throne in September, after another fake election, as planned by the plutocracy.
In Tunisia, demonstrators tried to take over jails, in which political prisoners were held. They got killed, until the Tunisian army, charging with tanks, interposed itself, ordered the prison guards, police and goons to open the jails, and surrender.
When a real revolution is needed, real violence has already been used. Only more violence can push it away. In Tunisia, definitively, and in Egypt, half way, the revolutions have worked because the armies sided with the demonstrators. So it is FORCE which decided which way things would go. The pictures of Kasserine, with the red berets officers standing barking orders from the top of tanks, holding heavy caliber weapons tell more than volumes of wishy-washy pata philosophy by the meek and weak.
And indeed, where the army supports the regime, the regimes did not break. Algeria is the quintessential example (but there the army can justify its existence, as it fights vicious Muslim fundamentalist closely related to Al Qaeda). In Libya the murderous clown, Khadafy, at the head of what he calls his “massocracy” (rule of the masses), killed more than fifty, just in the first two days (Libya is supported by various European powers).
In Bahrain, the USA supported dictatorship felt that it could fight, considering that the world empire of the USA has a major military basis on the premises. So the army, paid by the plutocrats, came out in the night as demonstrators were sleeping. The army charged and shot, killing at least 5.
One could object that my little theory that non violence does not amount to much was disproved in South Africa. But South Africa was a special case, and not just because of Mandela’s extraordinary intellect. His enemies themselves were also pretty extraordinary, and they had lived through something similar themselves, as victims, a few generations earlier, during the Boer War. The Boer had been submitted to a holocaust, and none of the other locals had it so bad.
Both Mandela and Gandhi were British trained lawyers. Both are depicted as giants of non violence. However, that’s an illusion. Mandela’s approach was completely opposed to that of Gandhi. And so were his solutions. Mandela embraced bombs when it was important to show the whites they would not win a violent struggle. Seriously jailed, he embraced the minds of his enemies, learning Afrikaner, and subduing them mentally. Then he found a “Truth and Reconciliation” approach which was most appropriate to South Africa.
Some who read me carefully may feel that embracing Mandela’s “Truth and Reconciliation” while approving the French method of shooting legions of collaborators in 1944-45, seems a bit spastic.
However, different places, different reconciliations. In South Africa, the Peoples needed to be reconciled. In France, starting in 1944, the population had to be reconciled with the idea that the republic was strong. Also the USA, carried a bit by president Roosevelt’s dislike for France, had planned to occupy France, as if she were Nazi Germany, or Poland, and the USA were the USSR. The USA had to be warned to: a diminished France would play the game of collaborating with the new world order, but only so far. and, as in 1939, was ready for the greatest sacrifices.
Shooting up to 40,000 collaborators in 1944-46 was not just a sacrifice on the altar of the republic, it was a warning by the republic to all enemies: if we can do that to the French, we can do it to you too.
This American occupation did not happen because the French army, even with 6 million prisoners in Germany, was more than a million strong (not counting reserves). And it was a ferocious army. Some officers had fought 6 years. An IBM director (believe it or not), and the fact that North Africa was basically France at the time played an important role there (which explains why the USA then tried to separate France from North Africa, exciting the Muslims against the French republic).
In other words, just as the USA exploded atomic bombs over Japan, in part as a warning to Moscow, France executed a lot of Nazi collaborators, as a warning to those too tempted by the idea of crossing again the French republic. The fasces of the republic had to come down hard, as a strong teaching for Europe, the world, and the future. After the war, the USA collaborated with thousands of the most vicious Nazis. In France the collaborators of Nazism had to be very careful.
Some may feel that I talk, talk and talk, gushing with execrable facts and theories, and, as a French speaking commenter decried, that I never propose any solution. But not so.
If the armies dominate, as I say, then the West, should it want to change the regimes, can influence the armies. Those armies generally depend upon the West for their armaments, and, thus, training. (A dictatorship such as Myanmar receives military support from its main trading partner, and fellow soul in more ways than one, China. it is the exception that proves the rule. In the world plutocratic system, no dictatorship is an island.)
Exerting force on the military is what the USA has done in Egypt. The force to be exerted could be just the force of persuasion (say in Jordan, Libya, Morocco).
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ROME FAILED BECAUSE IT HAD JUST ONE REVOLUTION. THE FRANKS SUCCEEDED, BECAUSE THEY HAD MANY:
The history of the West is pretty much the history of revolution. Continual re-evolutions have allowed the West to keep on progressing. It is pretty telling that Rome had only one revolution (when it threw the Etruscan kings out). Then there were many centuries of an increasingly democratic republic, until the disastrous Second Punic War (starring Hannibal). Rome’s elite was decapitated, nouveaux rich took over. Plutocracy thrived, and fed the military industrial complex. The machine overheated, the world was conquered, with one war of choice after the other. Aggression against Greek republics committed.
Then those aristocrats, the Gracchi tried a revolution, but they and thousands of their supporters were killed by armies of private goons in the employ of the hyper wealthy. At that point the Roman republic was lost, and transmogrified into a senility gnawed at by gangrene (and indeed, by 200 CE, although the empire is still militarily overwhelming, science and literature have died).
The Gracchi had viewed the problem with total clarity: plutocracy. They described it with flame and fury. They legislated land redistribution. Thus, once again, Marx and company invented nothing there. The Roman republic died, because the revolution the Gracchi tried to implement, failed. It failed, because overwhelming force was used against it. And only because of that.
As the Greco-Roman civilization caught fire, disintegrated, and ravaged all, in its theocratic death throes, the Franks tried several coups, revolutions, and all out wars. The Franks named two of their candidates Augustus, and one of them was the famous Julian, Augustus of the unified empire, hated by the Christians, who call(ed) him the “Apostate” (he was mysteriously killed).
Clovis succeeded where Julian failed (unfortunately, by then, after 125 years of anti-civilizational terror most books and teachers had been destroyed). Whereas Julian and his brother, soles survivors of their family, had access to a tremendous library and teachers in the imperial castle at Macellum in Cappadocia, the libraries got burned under the order of Augustus Jovian, who succeeded Julian, and the teachers soon followed.
It is pretty telling that nobody ever disserts about Christian theocracy and its tremendous holocaust. Is that a form of racism? (Namely Christians can do no wrong, so the proclamation of the Dark Ages by 375 CE is something better ignored. What would have happened if the Nazis had won? Auschwitz and its 40 square kilometers, would never have happened? )
Revolutions can fail: the first half dozen anti-Christian revolutions attempted by the Franks failed. Julian counter-revolution also failed. It can be argued that he used too much “Truth and Reconciliation”. “Truth and Reconciliation” would not have worked against the Nazis. When American services used the Nazis after the war, the approach was “Lies and Concealment”. Clovis and company succeeded in part because they claimed that they were not what they were, so they were well accepted. Another trick was to progress progressively; when slavery was outlawed (around 660 CE), it was outlawed initially only in the sense that citizens of the empire were not allowed to own Christians.
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Conclusion: WE RE-EVOLVE, THUS WE DOMINATE: Rome did not re-evolve, so it declined and fell into a heap. Having learned from this mistake, European civilization is about permanent revolution. When plutocracy has become too domineering, it is time for some more re-evolution. The reason for this continual struggle is that technology evolves, thus opening new avenue of domination to plutocracy. For example Corinth invented the trireme. Soon, a public-private program devised under Themistocles, allowed Athens to build 200 triremes (cutting all its primary forest in the process), and to construct a sort of aquatic empire stretching all the way to the Black Sea. That was all for the good. However, the plutocrats of Macedonia, those predatory horse lovers, also learned to build triremes, and, differently from the Greeks, they were extreme imperialists. In the end, they defeated Athens in two sea battles, as the rich Athenian captains decided to go to the Dark Side.
This shows that, the faster technology evolves, the more opportunities open to the Dark Side. The present financial markets, with their metastatic evolution are a perfect example: new technology has literally allowed them to get away with murder. For example as the world organization they set up for commodities, or rather, necessities of life, have allowed them to starve to death thousands, if not millions.
Let’s not overlook the fact that both the Athenian and Roman republics were sparked by forceful ANTI-PLUTOCRATIC revolutions. The Franks themselves conducted quite a few of them. So what’s the ultimate religion of the civilization we have now? REVOLUTION. Forget Christ, his jealousy, and his sword, in the name of his self aggrandizement. When the Americans made their revolution, it was against the king, the plutocrat in chief. It would take more than a century for the USA to see a billionaire again.
We welcome our Egyptian comrades to the side of permanent revolution. Their road is long and narrow, and passes through their hearts. Many have died, and more will, as satanic regimes fight back. All over North Africa, the Middle East, and even the world, Western plutocrats have installed rotten plutocrats they deal with, in a collective exploitation of all the peoples, all over, all the time. Insane maniacs such as Khadafy are perfect examples. Cracks are appearing in these cozy arrangements. Make no mistakes: what you see in Egypt, you have it at home. It’s just a bit more crafty. You had plutocracy in Egypt, because you have it at home.
But the fact also remains that North Africa and the Middle East have been the object of the very Greco-Roman and Hydraulic Dictatorship influences which made them too friendly to sexism, enslavement, and submission to theocracy and its obscurantism. “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Qur’an is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.
They Muslim brothers, those submissive ones, learned that from Theodosius and Justinian, but they don’t know that. in a way, they are slaves to Constantine, Jovian, Valens, the two Theodosius, and Justinian. They need to be liberated from their Roman catholic lords.
Once I pointed out to a very educated Moroccan woman living in the USA that the Romans came to Morocco before the Arabs. She was so outraged that she told me that it was the end of this 15 year acquaintanceship, just there. Education is relative. But the big question, in the flow of history is: when is it enough? In 1258 CE, the largest army ever fielded by the Mongols, led by Hulagu Khan, attacked Baghdad. More than half the force was not Mongol. Aside from the usual Chinese siege technicians contingent, the army counted the Georgian army, Armenian cavalry, and the unavoidable Frankish contingent, from Antioch. All Muslim inhabitants of Baghdad were destroyed as if they were rats. Maybe a million died. The “House of Wisdom”, and countless libraries and treasures of the literature of antiquity were annihilated.
It was an immense catastrophe, and the end of the most enlightened Islamist civilization that ever was. I guess the Muslims of Baghdad ought to have been careful not to antagonize Armenia and Georgia (which were Christian centuries before Muhammad was born). Hulagu was particularly incensed by the Caliph’s haughty plutocratic behavior, and made a short discourse telling him why he should died for having preferred luxury to the welfare of the People.
Democracy permits men, and women, to live free as evolution made them. Greco-Roman theocratic plutocracy, as incarnated by countless Roman emperors, the true prophets of the Qur’an, was a perversion of civilization by the Dark Side. It is high time to revolt against 25 centuries of history of a pervasively perverse type.
And the West better not stay in the way. Being in the way, would not be against the nature of the West, it would be against its best self interest. $300 dollar a barrel oil will help the planet, and thus the West. But not just that. Roman leaders used to start their declaration with “Urbi et Orbi” (” to the City of Rome and to the World”). Republican Rome, when it became imperial, had it in its head that it would conquer the world (that was already an idea of Alexander, which had to be abandoned when his army went on strike in India). That dream terminated when a German coalition led by a traitor a la Bin Laden, Arminius, smashed the elite Roman army in Northern Germany.
We now have not only the occasion to spread republic and democracy, worldwide, but it is also a necessity, the alternative being rising seas and thermonuclear war. It will also be a good occasion to reflect on, and correct, the fact that, as the Athenians would point out, our present system, of “representative” democracy, is more oligarchic than democratic.
Ultimately history will judge today’s political leaders. It will judge whether they sided with civilization and revolution, or plutocracy and mayhem. It’s their choice, their judgment. But fear the consequences: history can move at lightening speed. So did it, already 25 centuries ago. Let alone today. Today’s scums don’t have palaces big enough to hide inside. And the planet is now a village: nowhere to run.
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Patrice Ayme
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P/S: Mubarak, his wife and sons, and all the plutocrats associated to them, and similarly in Tunisia, are plutocrats of a high criminal type. They should all regurgitate their ill gained possessions, and be punished. Switzerland waits from a word form an Egyptian prosecutor to freeze all their assets.
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