How And Why Civilizational Tech Drive Was Launched By Francia

Educated people are supposed to not know at all, whatsoever, how European civilization got launched after the Greco-Roman collapse. They never heard of the Franks, nor should they, because too much LEF, Liberty Equality Fraternity upsets their masters of the Global Deep Plutocracy. So the US Politically Correct have been trained to sneer when hearing of France, and how European civilization arose after Rome collapsed is not supposed to be interesting, or even a mystery. It just happened and the Anglo-Saxons did it: Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin. Then came Washington and Lincoln. However this picture is fake, false, and starting to crack. Even the San Francisco school board is starting to understand what I am talking about. So let me help some more by adding elements of crude reality…

The mood of technological revolution we presently enjoy in this civilization, even and especially in China was France based. More exactly, Francia based. Of course, this also depends what definition of France one uses: the general one valid from 500 CE to 1200 CE, not some fictionalized American primary school.

As I already wrote above, most Americans are thoroughly conditioned to be unaware that the Francia of the Franks created and united Europe long enough for this assertion to be true. To understand this better one has to look into Critical Race Theory and apply it to plutocratic domination.

Clovis takes a bath in the middle of winter… Thus imposing his common sense view of Catholicism on the Roman empire…

Americans, hopefully, are aware of a couple of centuries of US history, or four of them counting from 1619 CE, when racial based slavery was instituted in English America. Frankish control of Europe lasted several times as long, long enough to invent the basis of today’s civilization. The roots of American civilization are in Francia, and that of course infuriates the Global Deep Plutocracy.

Modern France, much of the core of the Francia of the Franks contributed enormously to modern science and technology. However that does not mean this is still going on. Amusingly, both mRNA and the first applications thereof (a vaccine, 30 years ago, which caused allergy problems) were French discoveries (Nobel for mRNA to Lwof, Monod and Jacob). However present France, dominated by MBAs, ENAs and lawyers spent way too little in research and does not have a French-made vaccine. However, that is a state policy, and French research stays alive: a French start-up, financed by Great Britain, got a huge order from Boris Johnson’s government (NOT from the present day French government, which is led by a young M&A banker, and revolving door artist).

Ah, but how, in this perspective, did the pro-technology, pro-knowledge start in Francia? From first beating back the insanity of Christianism with common sense. Told that Christ had been condemned to crucifixion Frankish king and Roman imperator and consul Clovis quipped:”It would not have happened if me and my Franks had been there!”

Second the Franks beat back the ignorance of children by encouraging religious establishments to teach all children secularly.

Third, Queen Bathilde of the Franks outlawed trading as slaves citizens of the empire. The only way out was to innovate cognitively, socially and technologically. A practical consequence was that Europe exploded in hundreds of sovereignties (although the Roman emperor or the French king were supposedly the ultimate authorities).
The dispersion and localization of authority brought some sort of de facto democracy by local responsibilization.

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To make sure of infuriating some more the ignorant, I answered the following stupid question: Which country generally has better technology between France and Germany? It is a silly question because Francia created Germania: a notion so correct, it infuriated the Nazis. The Franks even created the written German language (under Charlemagne). As if to foster some more this correct observation, Germany proper, as a country, or more exactly empire (“Reich”), was created in 1871 CE, in Versailles…

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Most engineering was invented in France, or by the French, including the steam engine (Papin, 17C, although he was then working in Germany!), chemistry (Lavoisier, 18C), hot air balloons, first automobiles (18C), plane (Ader, 19 C), the first helicopter, and transistor (1948, although the Nobel was given to Americans who didn’t invent the transistor, there were already patents, and some of the inventors working for the French company which mass-produced transistors in 1949 were Germans).

Hey, even Analytic Geometry (Descartes) or Calculus (Fermat)! And Buridan discovered “Newton’s” Second Law… Three centuries before Isaac was born. Did I mention evolution? The theory was established by research professors Lamarck and his enemy Cuvier… Before the amateur Darwin was even born (Darwin had to go to the university of Edinburgh with Lyell to learn Lamarck’s’ evolution…)

To augment the sneering from the pleasantly enraged ignorant, I will point out to the great Frankish bioengineering creations of the First Millennium: among them, huge horses… more efficient than oxen for ploughing.

Speaking of ploughing, the Franks’ demographic expansion rested on their enormous heavy ploughs made of dense steel which were able to overturn the rich dense soils of the Northern European plains. That was the best steel in the world, and soon hydraulic hammers were necessary to forge it. Cathedrals then arose with their walls of light made of metal and glass. It was known as “Frank” style, until a 16C italian who detested the French called it “Gothic” (because the Franks had destroyed the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths… And wiped them out of history). The Franks also developed new cultivars of beans in the Tenth Century, which came to be known as “full of beans”. Beans are nutritious and full of proteins… The mood of invention arose from the abolition of slavery and the practical existence of local democracy.

Recent Nobel attributions in physics consecrated French breakthroughs which found immediate applications in ubiquitous electronics. Tellingly, Giant Magnetic Resistance was discovered in 1988 independently by the groups of Albert Fert of the University of Paris-Sud, France, and Peter Grünberg of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. The practical significance of this experimental discovery was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Fert and Grünberg in 2007. GMR was used in hard disk drive, until it was replaced by TMR, Tunnel Magnetic Resistance, an effect was originally discovered in 1975 by Michel Jullière (University of Rennes, France) in Fe/Ge–O/Co-junctions at 4.2 K.

But yes, it is the US Big Tech led by college dropouts, which makes all the money and the glory they redirect at themselves, to augment further their monopoly and propaganda powers…

Now there is pretty much a fusion between French and German, or more generally, European, engineering, through the likes of MBDA (a missile company with state of the art missiles), or Airbus. The French though have a military-industrial complex with for their nuclear forces which is unique in Europe, and the only one in the West, with that of the USA, of course. (Britain has a nuclear deterrent reduced to strategic submarines equipped with US Trident missiles; the French make their own missiles and submarines, acknowledged to be the best in the world, and they have their own air based nuclear arm).

The intellectual tradition of France was born in the Sixth Century, when the Frankish empire told the Pope that Frankish bishops would organize secular education, in spite of Pope Gregory the Great’s lethal threats against his own bishops. In the following centuries, it only grew. By the 8C, all religious establishment had to teach secularly all children, by law. In Paris the Cathedral School grew into the world’s first university (it became physically independent in the 12C when the present cathedral replaced the old one).

The intellectual dominance of Paris was acknowledged by 1000 CE. It was called, at the time, “translatio studii”, the translation of studies from Athens to Paris. In quick order, the Franks/Normans reconquered Sicily and Southern Italy from the Muslims, and England from the Anglo-Saxon-Viking quarrelous mix which was messily ruling there (1066 CE)… In 1204 CE, a rogue French army took Constantinople, in an unfortunate victory of French secularism over Orthodox fanaticism.

Six centuries later, the USA was born from all this…

France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain, and the USA are distinctions without fundamental differences. The root is all the same: a large German confederation, that of the Franks of the Salt was created, helped by Rome’s better angels, and relaunched civilization on more common sense, hence more democratic, and more technological foundations.

And here we are. And so is China.

What happened? Well, after 13 centuries of various invasions by foreign powers, something that had a seriously debilitating effect on Chinese power and civilization, the Chinese did some thinking in… Paris (where most of the founders of Communist China ended up, except for Mao). How come China was invaded in the 19C by French and British armies, and not the other way around? How come China was invaded so much and controlled by foreigners for 13 centuries? And Europe was not?

Technological-scientific superiority was the answer. Europe founded by the Franks always had the better steel, better horses, mechanical advantage. In the 15C the Bureau brothers, who were engineers, invented the battlefield gun, which was designed to send the English back to England, as it did… But also protected Europe. The Chinese, under Xi, are overlooking one element, though: democracy, which underlays inventivity…

Patrice Ayme

Rome Fell While Rising, Rome Won By Losing

How Rome fell is not easy to conceive: as aspects of Rome were falling, aspects of Rome were rising. Ah, and what is “Rome”? A civilization, that is, the embodiment of systems of thoughts and mentalities, moods. Some of these moods went down in flames, and had to do so, while, and because, others blossomed.

For example, way back, Romans made human sacrifices (as did everybody else, it seems). After severe military losses against Celts, Rome sacrificed a couple of prisoners. After doing away with the raiding Celts, Rome was ashamed of those sacrifices and never did one again (some will sneer that executions of war prisoners for centuries to come were little else…) So that was a mood which crashed and burned.

More cogently, in the ancient Republic, the Pater Familias, father of the family, had right of life and death on the entire family. That right was removed later. Another mentality that went down the trashcan of history.

Other progressive legislations ascended, even in the thick of imperial fiat. Caracalla for example made Roman citizenship universal (the Franks would duplicate that idea later: by 600 CE, all denizens of the Frankish empire were “Franks”… although a century earlier the Franks were a small minority of Gallia). Cynics have pointed out that enabled the Roman government to tax everybody…

Lead Emissions are proportional to overall metal production, for technical reasons. The Frankish renaissance of metallurgy is blatant on this graph. It happened because the Franks conquered Eastern Europe, and one can see that was even before Charlemagne’s birth. Data from Greenland ice cores.

The forceful, ordered from the top, rise of Christianism brought the rule of softer notions, for example that the most cruel games of the circus were overindulged in. While that was good, the Christian drive against animal passions of the worst type was accompanied by a drive against some of the most necessary animal or specifically human passions. For example, criticism against authority, thus against the emperor as god, or god himself, became a capital crime. But there is no more fundamentally human passion than harsh thinking.

Christian theofascism brought, in no small measure, however indirectly, the fall of the Occidental Part (Pars Occidentalis). Indeed Theodosius, using the Goths, defeated the secular army of Occident, made mostly of Romanized Franks fighting under the banner of Hercules (symbolizing the most altruistic hard work for the community), in 394 CE. That left Occident without defense, but for a curtain of Slatic Franks which was pierced at the 406 CE Winter Solstice, when the Rhine could be galloped across…

This said, there were nice, progressive aspects to Christianism: although, overall, a catastrophe in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, some elements of civilizations invented them, very few of them, were worth keeping.

Those progressive elements were brandished by the Franks shortly thereafter. See, for example, Martin of Tours, a Roman officer who as he was approaching the gates of the city of Amiens, met a scantily clad beggar. He cut his military cloak in half to share with the man (around 350 CE).  

The Franks, under Consul Imperator King Clovis, invented Christianism with a human face. And the first application of that newly found humanity was to annihilate the Goths (Vouillé  507 CE). Being more human doesn’t just make you a better beast, it makes you win wars.

Another mood the Franks resurrected, after 5 centuries of Octavian-Augustus launched intellectual fascism, was the pleasure of debate and iconoclasm. Clovis, a fierce fighter, who killed the king of the Goths with his own hands, was excellent at that.

The basic undoing of the Roman Republic was its capture by a class of super wealthy idiots. They comprised the Senatorial class. Sounds familiar?There were up to 600 Senators; numbers varied; Octavian-Augustus, the first “emperor”, who called himself “First”, Princeps, executed 100 Senators… Not counting the many killed in battle during the Civil War, just prior.

Having the entire society guided and owned by a few hundred families was antithetical to the Republic: the Plebs had gone on strike against that, centuries prior. But this time, the reaction of the Plebs was too little too late.

The wealthy idiots owners of everything important censored any deep thinking that contradicted them. We see this nowadays.

But the hyper wealthy couldn’t censor the gathering ecological and military crises. Roman society depended crucially upon metals, to make tools and weapons. As the Islamists swept all in the way (they had just eradicated Persia), emperors desperately needed metals to make the equivalent of big guns then, the Gregian Fire. So the emperor came from Constantinople, and striped the metallic roofs of Rome. The gathered metal never reached Constantinople, as the Islamists seized it:

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Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, book 5, chapters 11-13 (PL95, cols 602 and 604):

1.  But the emperor Constans, when he found that he could accomplish nothing against the Langobards, directed all the threats of his cruelty against his own followers, that is, the Romans. He left Naples and proceeded to Rome.  At the sixth mile-stone from the city, pope Vitalian came to meet him with his priests and the Roman people. And when the emperor had come to the threshold of St. Peter he offered there a pallium woven with gold; and remaining at Rome twelve days he pulled down everything that in ancient times had been made of metal for the ornament of the city, to such an extent that he even stripped off the roof of the church of the blessed Mary which at one time was called the Pantheon, and had been founded in honor of all the gods and was now by the consent of the former rulers the place of all the martyrs; and he took away from there the bronze tiles and sent them with all the other ornaments to Constantinople. Then the emperor returned to Naples, and proceeded by the land route to the city of Regium (Reggio) ; and having entered Sicily during the seventh indiction he dwelt in Syracuse and put such afflictions upon the people—the inhabitants and land owners of Calabria, Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia – as were never heard of before, so that even wives were separated from their husbands and children from their parents. The people of these regions also endured many other and unheard of things so that the hope of life did not remain to any one. For even the sacred vessels and the treasures of the holy churches of God were carried away by the imperial command and by the avarice of the Greeks. And the emperor remained in Sicily from the seventh to the twelfth indiction, but at last he suffered the punishment of such great iniquities and while he was in the bath he was put to death by his own servants.

XII.  When the emperor Constantine was killed at Syracuse, Mecetius (Mezezius) seized the sovereignty in Sicily, but without the consent of the army of the East.  The soldiers of Italy, others throughout Istria, others through the territories of Campania and others from the regions of Africa and Sardinia came to Syracuse against him and deprived him of life. And many of his judges were brought to Constantinople beheaded and with them in like manner the head of the false emperor was also carried off.

XIII. The nation of the Saracens that had already spread through Alexandria and Egypt, hearing these things, came suddenly with many ships, invaded Sicily, entered Syracuse and made a great slaughter of the people – a few only escaping with difficulty who had fled to the strongest fortresses and the mountain ranges – and they carried off also great booty and all that art work in brass and different materials which the emperor Constantine had taken away from Rome; and thus they returned to Alexandria.

The problem we have now are all too similar. Not yet military disasters, but ecological disasters are already upon us, and they have everything to do with the ravenous class which owns and direct today’s modes of thinking. And feeling.

After its near-death experience in the Fifth Century, Rome rose again, but on better principles. Rome won, by losing its most evil ways. Too bad much of the population died in parts of Occident (in the Orient and Spain this would happen from Islamist conquest). One may have to thank the do-goodism of Christianism which led to the outlawing of slavery by Saint Queen Bathilde.

However, we don’t have the luxury now of waiting centuries for better moods to gather momentum. We may run out of oxygen well before that.

Patrice Ayme

FRANKS SURPASSED ROME Ice Cores Show (Fall of Rome XII)

Greenland Says: WHEN EUROPE WAS NAMED, EUROPE WAS SUPERIOR TO ANY STATE BEFORE EUROPE, INCLUDING ROME AND CHINA, IN IMPORTANT WAYS:

By the early Eighth Century, Europe, as the Franks named their empire, had risen above any civilization which came before, in some crucial dimensions (eat this, and choke, anti-European propagandists!) This is the darkest secret of the so-called “Dark Ages”. It flies into the astounding propaganda we have been exposed to regarding “Western” civilization. It was for philosophical reasons (many philosophical traditions, from Egypt, even Sumer, to Germany were entangled, and the Franks reorganized, and morphed them very heavily, it was not just a question of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, as the unimaginative parrots have it!)

Make no mistake: the established elite and its corrupt universities hate the full, deepest, correct history of Europe, because they hate reason.The only reasonable wise policy is to hate them in turn, just as president Franklin Roosevelt hated bankers (FDR said, adding that he “welcomed their hatred”).

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Rise of Metallurgy, Rise of Civilization:

For 8,000 years, civilization has been propelled by ever better metallurgy. When the Conquistadors invaded Mesoamerica, they discovered that some of the nations had copper technology. Cortez’s crafty capitans taught the Natives to mass produce dozens of thousands of copper tipped bolts to use in Spanish crossbows against the Aztecs. Metallurgy enables superior war, but also superior agriculture: when their heavy iron plows were able to turn around the fat fields of Northern Europe, the well fed Franks grew and multiplied, and the center of civilization went north, where the water was..

Superior? How superior were the Greco-Romans? How superior were the Franks? A graph says it well. Ancient layers of ice in Greenland hold lead that originated at mines and foundries in ancient Greco-Roman and Frankish Europe. Fluctuations in the amount of ancient lead pollution that reached Greenland trace the economic impact of wars, plagues, and imperial expansion in Europe.

The legend below the graph is an interesting example of the INSANE ANTI-FRENCH BIAS found in Anglo-Saxon literature, and thinking, in all domains (even physics, see note). Indeed look at the stupid timeline below: instead of mentioning the Franks (who had an enormous empire), “Visigoths” and “Moors” are mentioned. The Visigoths had been confined to Spain by the Franks. The Franks had sprawled over most of the rest of Europe: MASSIVE FRANKISH SILVER PRODUCTION CAME FROM EASTERN EUROPEAN MINES, CONQUERED BY THE FRANKS! That’s what the graph should be all about, instead it focuses on Muslim raiders, the ISLAMIST STATE (“Moors”) and Visigoths (who controlled Spain very superficially as their prompt collapse when the “Moors” invaded, showed.
Details of the graph are analyzed in detail below.

What about China not showing up in Greenland lead? Well China had a dearth of metals problem. All this wood construction in the East happened for some reason. The massive Greco-Roman and Frankish architecture was in stone, but it often was anchored by metals. When the Amiens cathedral threatened to collapse like a rotting pumpkin, the Franks aka French, surrounded it by a giganormous iron belt: hydraulic hammers helped (many other cathedrals got the same treatment).  

The peak of silver mining by the Franks is so strong that it is also towering in ice cores extracted at Nevado Illimani in Bolivia, just east of La Paz, in the southern hemisphere…

Civilization has been much about metal in the last 8,000 years. Earliest work on lead and copper has been found in Mesopotamia and the Balkans. By 3,500 BCE bronze (a harder alloy of copper with 11% tin) had been discovered in the same area, and metals had spread to Portugal and Britain. Metals were also introduced into China by Europoid people. Metals provided with the most important superiority of all: military. 5,000 years ago, Egyptians gave the highest worth to “daggers from heavens” made of meteoric iron. In the last three millennia, it’s pretty much those with the best metals who won wars, and metals drove history (the Etruscans invaded Italy where they did to acquire control of iron mines; the Celts had the best steel metallurgy, and equipped the Roman army, from sword, the gladius hispaniensis, to “Gallic” helmets).

The classical world economy ran on lead. The Romans made extensive use of lead for water pipes (limestone deposits inside the pipes would quickly isolate toxic lead from the water). Lead was used all over “plumbing” (which means “leading”), weights, soldering clamps between ashlar blocks or columns in architectural construction, sheathing and ballasting the hulls of some ships, etc.

A problem China had was the dearth of precious metals. Not so in Europe. The Greco-Roman economy ran on silver: Roman currency was minted in silver coins, the denarii. When smelting silver, adding lead to the crushed ore helps concentrate the silver. High-temperature smelting at around 1,200 degrees Centigrades, along with the process of separating lead from silver after the fact, released a lot of lead into the air over Southern Europe during Roman times.

China had a precious metal problem. Under the Tang (7-9C) it was solved, sorta, by using paper currency (that collapsed after being abused by the Yuan in the 13C; Bolivian silver solved the problem later)

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Icy Record:

Thus lead pollution provides a proxy for the GDP of the Roman economy. Now historians have an increasingly detailed record of changes in lead pollution levels from year to year, in the ice sheets of Northern Greenland. (The Northern Greenland Ice Core Project produced a 423-meter-long ice core.).

The core records nearly 2,000 years of annual ice buildup, from 1100 BCE to 800 CE. Each layer records slightly less than a year’s worth of accumulated ice, which traps other material, like lead from mines and foundries in Europe. Joseph McConnell of the publicly supported Desert Institute of Nevada and his colleagues have dated the layers with an uncertainty of just one or two years, enabling to see how historical events impacted lead pollution.

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Warning: The Chinese Learn From European Superiority:

Before I get to the Frankish superiority graph, let me relate a recent observation: I was in the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California, with the Google campus and headquarters all around. A group of Chinese scholars was there, with a particularly senior professor, with a cortege of full professor and student. The Chinese crowd stopped in front of the Antikythera mechanism, a Greek computer, 23 centuries old (mechanical computers reappeared with Blaise Pascal in 1642, then Leibniz 1673, and Bouchon (1725), Falçon (1728), Jacquard (1745).  

The senior professor turned towards all his entourage, and gave it a stern lecture on how much more the Greeks were than anybody else (including the Chinese). His audience, professors and students, listened religiously in rapt silence.

That’s the right attitude to improve civilization, now firmly embraced by China (and, hopefully, life-president Xi will concentrate on that, and let the West handle the rest…). Why Greece collapsed next is a philosophical problem: Aristotle (and Socrates, and Plato, and Isocrates, and especially a gigantic war Athens lost, etc.) destroyed democracy.

It’s a warning, because China may think the sky is the limit, and it’s not. It’s a warning because other nations have to remind China, and themselves that the sky is not the limit. Athens thought that even the sky was no limit (see Aristophanes’ “The Birds“). And the rest is history, not a pleasant one: Direct Democracy delayed 24 centuries and counting…

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Greenland Lead Pollution Details, And How They Connect With Previously Known History:

Yes, Europe was more advanced, at least in metal production, around 750 CE, just after breaking the back of the Islamist empire of the Umayyads (the “Moors”!), is rich in important lessons.

The traces of lead in ancient layers of Arctic ice got there because, somewhere in Greater Europe, foundry were busy smelting ore. When other layers got free of metal pollution it was because those miners and foundry workers were suddenly dismissed, fleeing, fighting… or dead.

The ice cores correlate with wars throughout Greco-Roman and Frankish history. When conflict came to a mining region, as it did during the three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, it disrupted life and work in the region. It shows up as a year or two of cleaner ice in Greenland, since the Mediterranean was producing less lead pollution.

At the outbreak of the first Punic War in 264 BCE, for instance, the amount of lead in the Greenland ice layers dropped abruptly: mining and smelting became secondary, war primary. But production ramped up again closer to the final years of the war: Carthage minted more silver coins to pay its huge mercenary forces (Roman forces didn’t need to be paid that much: they were drafted farmer-citizens).

Wartime drops in production were followed by a recovery at the end of the conflict, as people returned to work and started pumping lead into the atmosphere again. After the end of the Second Punic War in 206 BCE, Rome got control of Carthage’s mines in Spain: thus a sharp increase in the amount of lead pollution in the ice core from Greenland.

During the Crisis of the Roman Republic, a period of wars and threats thereof, from the late second to mid first century BCE, lead emissions from Europe stayed relatively low, while the economy was seriously disrupted. But as things stabilized, especially as Rome, led by “Augustus” conquered key mining areas in Northern Spain around 16 BCE, Europe began emitting steadily high amounts of lead that stained the distant ice.

Under Augustus and the early Julio-Claudian emperors, until 64 CE, silver denarii were made from effectively 100-percent silver bullion; and were made of new metal (not recycled). In 64 CE, Nero cut silver to 80 percent in the denarii. Moreover, Roman mints started recycling old coins to make new ones. We now know that technology was floundering, and the mines were decreasing output(“world is getting old”, the Romans would soon observe).

In 103-107 CE, under the enterprising Spanish general, now emperor, Trajan, the empire conquered Dacia, a vast territory in Eastern Europe, where silver mines were located. Trajan, as Julius Caesar before him, fully understood that the empire had to expand, or die. The empire briefly returned to producing coins from new metal again, and that coincides with a spike in lead pollution in Greenland’s ice.

In 165 CE a devastating pandemic struck the Empire (Marcus Aurelius would die from it 15 years later). We don’t know if it was smallpox or measles. The Romans called it the Antonine Plague. Several waves of outbreaks killed as many as five million people, before it finally burned itself out in 193 CE. The general anti-reason, anti-technological drift of the empire finally opened, under Marcus Aurelius, the door wide to multiple invasions by Germans and Sassanids. Disastrous policies by Commodus furthered the problem (he abandoned lands conquered by his father).  A Roman emperor and his son were actually killed in combat shortly thereafter, in 236 CE… a situation which had not happened for 350 years, since the Cimbrian-Teutones war (when Consuls were killed in combat, and, or their armies annihilated).

However this time there was no further conquest (although there were reconquests under Constantine). Metal production entered an irreversible decline.

When the war against the Islamist State became total  in 663 CE, Roman emperor Constans II visited the city of Rome for 12 days.  Constans infuriated the entire population by stripping everything of value to fund war against the Muslims. The roofs of Rome were covered in extremely valuable metal, which could be sold, or used to make weapons with (even the bronze roof of the Pantheon was stripped).

All in vain: a jealous God, Allahu Akbar! Struck and the fleet carrying most of the metal sank on its way back to Constantinople).

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Why Did The Lead Production Collapse Again After 800 CE? Total War! Vikings! Avars! Muslims!

In 800 CE, the Pope surprised Charlemagne by proclaiming him THE ROMAN emperor (a sacrosanct notion inherited from Roman Tribunes of the People), one and only. Constantinople, then under a regency, reluctantly agreed. Charlemagne reacted as if all this was an unwelcome distraction. There was a good reason for this, after 30 years of continual, total war against the Saxons, trying to finish what emperor Augustus had advised his successors not to finish. The Franks, correctly esteemed that ALL of Germany had to be conquered, anything else was not military viable. However, to their dismay, the Franks were finding out that there was a “Danish” problem.

Since 793 CE, when the Northmen attacked the Northumbrian coast, the British philosopher Alkuin, his PM, and tutor to his children, had tried to incite Charlemagne to do something about the Vikings. The Viking problem was related to the Saxon problem: Charlemagne had submitted the latter, and “Christianized” them (in the Frankish meaning of Christianism, which the Popes hated until Charlemagne freed them from the Lombards, and then gave them territory). In 799 CE a dismayed Charlemagne had learned the first Viking raid at Noirmoutiers. This was part of a full blown war between Denmark and Francia (all Vikings were then called “Danes”), a continuation of the war against the Saxons (just won by then, after 850 years, starting with Julius Caesar!)

The Ninth Century became a century of total war, throughout the “RENOVATED ROMAN EMPIRE” (Renovation Imperium Romanorum) a combination of internal civil war between Franks, and invasions of the barbarians attracted by the riches of the empire. In 846 CE, the Muslims sieged Rome, burned the Vatican, before being thrown out by a Frankish rescue army.

The lead economy collapsed.

There is such a thing as a war economy, it doesn’t need money, when sufficiently violent. The war within the Roman/Carolingian empire, in the 9th and 10th century were terrible. The devastation, immense. In some battles (Fontenoy) up to 50,000 were killed in a few hours, a carnage not even viewed in modern times. Chronic Muslim raids haunted, all the way to Switzerland! Throwing the Muslims out of Provence required a combined operation of the Frankish army and the fire spitting Roman Navy from Constantinople.

In a war economy, you don’t need money, just weapons, and then you can bark out orders to civilians. Death, if they don’t obey swiftly. (This is the sort of “collaboration” the Nazis extracted from the countries they had invaded…)

The dust would settle in the Tenth Century: Francia subjugated the Northmen, Scandinavia embraced “Christianism”. However, infuriated by the incompetence of the “Roman” empire, which had failed, for decades to subjugate the Northmen, although Frankish military power was great enough to do so, Francia elected her own king/emperor, and refused to participate in the election of the “Roman” emperor (that had also to do with the rise of the francized Saxons). Now equipped with her own king/emperor, West Francia exploded in 60 states (just as many as Caesar had found, a millennium earlier). By 950 CE, the Saxons had turned into perfect Franks and their “Roman” emperor Otto I, finally destroyed the Steppe men, the Avars. Soon the Normans and the Angevins would reconquer the Mediterranean islands from the Muslims, and Southern Italy.

By the Eleventh Century, the lead economy of Europe had recovered, and a full Renaissance had started again, this time to stay (the famous Renaissance of the 16C and the Enlightenment of the 18C were just further episodes of what was started in the 11C.. Although the resistance of the Catholic fanatics grew proportionally to progress of civilization! Meaning lots of wars, torture, inquisition, etc.)

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Not All Pollution Is Unsustainably Bad, Civilization Itself Is A Pollution!

The demonstration of European superiority is not just in the “soft power” of the queen of the Franks outlawing slavery in the enormous empire, or in forcing religious establishments to provide universal free secular education. The proof of the astounding activity of the Franks as shown by the Greenland ice cores

And it was all blown away by war. At least, for two centuries.

The ice cores show that the Franks were much smarter than the Romans: when a worse ecological crisis started in the late Twelfth Century (from an overly large population, and the first cooling of the Little Ice Age), political leaders took the right decisions.

One reason why history doesn’t always repeat itself is that sometimes, one has learned from it.

Patrice Ayme

WHY & HOW CIVILIZATION COLLAPSE (Part 1): Alexander, Greeks, Romans, Franks, Vikings, Macron, Mali

WHY DO CIVILIZATIONS “COLLAPSE”?

(I wrote “collapse”, not collapse, because the two most important civilizations, the Greco-Roman-Indo-European and the Chinese did NOT fully collapse, ever, although they partly collapsed spectacularly: the Indus (“Harappan”) civilization’s collapse through aridification being one example!)

Many have tried to say something on this subject, but their knowledge of Deep History was superficial, and Political Correctness prevented them to think in full. They didn’t do as good a job as the British historian Edward Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, published 241 years ago, by an extremely long shot. Gibbon understood the importance of system of thoughts. To understand history, one had to understand the importance of system of moods. Submissive mentalities such as Confucianism and Islamism dug their own graves. All too many success authors recently, did the same, by not understanding by not admitting that mindsets and metaphysics rule civilizations.

Why have Western Civilization and China not collapsed? Well, China was both very incompetent and very lucky. Intellectually incompetent, in no small part, because it was intellectually isolated (not anymore!) Lucky, because savages from north of the Great Wall ruled China for most of last millenium, and still, Chinese civilization didn’t collapse, , thanks to it high degree of intellect, also known as civilization… Although it was a close call (some of Genghis Khan’s generals proposed to annihilate China).

Western Civilization, although messier, and more aggressive, and because it was messier, and more aggressive, was smarter than China, and stayed univaded for more than a millennium, that’s the NON Politically Correct revelation which nobody wants to draw: non-collapse is all about intelligence… And intelligence arises from non PC circumstances and behaviors.

Europe got smarter in great part because, Europe, the labyrinthine extremity of Eurasia, is less isolated than China: Europe is smack dab in the Middle Earth. Thus Europe had the opportunity to learn much more history than China, isolated by a whole array of giant mountain ranges and deserts. Those societies which learned history better did better. For example, Europe learned in various ways why its ancestors, the Sumerian cities, Egypt, Babylon, Tyr, flooded, dried up, became unrecognizable after invasions, degenerated into quasi-oblivion, were completely annihilated (Hittites, Phrygia, Assyria, Tyr, Carthage), or became irrelevant (Eastern Roman empire, and all parts of the Roman empire conquered by the Islamists and not wrestled back).

This continual learning was applied live, as events unfolded, by the master leaders. Alexander had a deep appreciation of the higher principles which made a highest civilization tick: he was tolerant and forgiving, qualities that Julius Caesar, who had studied Alexander’s life extensively, copied to excess! Julian would also sin in the same exact superior way. Clovis didn’t study the Greeks to the extent Caesar and Julian had,  yet he expressed his determination to use force to rewrite the fundamentals of Christianism, upside down (keep the good, throw away the bad!) Charlemagne took himself for a reincarnation of King David, and operated accordingly. Hence the Romans, when they took control of Hellas were careful not to annihilate their cultural ancestors and superiors, the Greeks. Instead, they just put their foot on them, and the Greeks despised them back (until they regained control, 800 years later).

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There Is Just One Master REASON FOR THE COLLAPSE OF THE ROMAN STATE: OLIGARCHY!

And the dementia it both incarnates, and brings forth. More than two hundred (200) reasons have been evoked to explain the collapse of the Roman State. I have basically just one, but it’s a master reason which, modulo long, devious logical chains and happenstance, implies and causes the other 200 reasons. That master reason’s main effect was to make the Roman State, and the Roman society, completely senile (the details are fascinating: Octavian, aka “Caesar” and aka “Augustus” allied himself to the rebellious army, and then the Plebs to impose his tyranny ever more… in the situation of another revolution gone amok).

And we are repeating it now, the Roman drift towards tyrannical idiocy, by letting just a few do all the thinking, supposing they can think (and not just follow a public opinion which has itself been informed by plutocratic media), and having just a few do all the ordering around.

The senile, superstitious Roman empire, and its well-meaning, yet evil leaders, and founding church fathers, was wiped out, or more exactly shredded, and replaced by the frankly philosophically brutal Franks. However, as we will see, similarly to the Yuans, or the Romans of the morbid Republic, or the Romans of the late empire, by the Ninth Century, the Franks lost track of whom the Barbarians to be fought were. They forgot that smashing Barbarians was number one top priority.

Just like now.

And the reason for forgetting the evil of Barbarians is that we are led by an oligarchy who know all too well it’s evil (Bill Clinton surprised me by admitting that said oligarchy was nothing if it didn’t do good, at the Kohl funeral in the European Parliament; I guess he was burying himself alive? I noticed the absence of Obama, by the way…) Oligarchies are always anxious to entertain Barbarians even more abominable than it is. So that they shine, and are excused, relatively speaking.

We are indeed going through a similar process right now.  I watched ex-Kanzler Helmut Kohl funeral ceremony at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Kohl unified Germany, held hands with the French president and consented to the French idea of the common currency (“Euro”). A great European, who had learned his fundamental lesson among the ruins of the 1000 Year Fascist-Racist Nationalist-Socialist Reich, to which the French Republic had declared war, six years prior.

Superficially it was a great Franco-German European get-together. What I saw was an assembly of potentates, some notoriously corrupt, kissy kissy with each other. Kanzlerin Merkel and French President Macron talked well. However: Words are empty at best, full of poison, at worst, when thought by only a few, they feed too much power in too few hands.

Some will object. They will say the obvious, thinking they are very smart when charging windmills. They will smirk, not knowing their prove the point they want to deride.

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“REPRESENTATIVE” DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEMOCRACY:

One guy in Strasbourg was Russian Prime Minister Medvedev. He is apparently nearly as wealthy as Bill Clinton. Not bad for a guy who was only always in government jobs. Even when they are not wealthy in properties, those oligarchs who have all the power, are wealthy in outrageous power, and we don’t have the means to talk back (several major media in the USA and the UK ban me, for example, as they are seemingly terrified that their readers would read me in a comment… And then realize I am more free, better informed, and all together more interesting).

Representative “democracy” is all about a few elected individuals taking all the decisions. Right. That’s exactly how and why Rome went down. Accepting the Earthly rule of just a few individuals is accepting the rule of a few minds, unexamined. It is accepting the rule of idiocy. The pure Republic was rather a direct democracy; the impure Republic which Augustus set-up was rather a fascist dictatorship. The pure Republic established the empire, and dreamed to extend over the whole planet! It could, and would, have done it, had it found a way to preserve direct democracy, globally. That was, on paper, easy: to conquer the world, Rome just had to globalize the anti-plutocracy mindset! That would have required to refurbish the absolute legal limit on wealth, and also to end slavery (the Franks would do the latter; absolute limit on wealth was less crucial with the Franks because of fair inheritance laws).

Rome all the way to India, China, reaching the Pacific? It didn’t happen because Roman direct democracy collapsed in a plutocratic crisis.

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Notice that, most the Western Mediterranean, is divided between the Carthaginian empire and the Marseilles empire. Rome is still tiny. The logical thing to do was for Alexander to conquer all of Arabia (the south had agriculture). He intended to do just that, before taking care of Rome and Carthage (not Marseilles, or Magna Grecia in south Italy, both of which were Greek). However Alexander died at 32, while preparing the mixed sea-land invasion of Arabia. Also notice the hole in the middle, uncolored in purple: this represents Athens and her allies, which Alexander did not force to submit. The fiend Antipater, older than Alexander by half a century did, though, after he probably had the Alexander poisoned! The real Game of Throne is so complex, we don’t know yet where it started, nor how it will end…

ALEXANDER, HALF CIVILIZED, HALF GENIUS, CUT SHORT:

Conquering the was tried by Alexander the Great first, but his Greek and Macedonian army longed for home, and found that India was much more powerful militarily than expected. Indians could, and were defeated, but clearly the resources were too stretched out. On his way back, Alexander, infuriated with his men, led the army through the terrible, absolute deserts of Southern Iran, suffering enormous losses. Back in Babylon, Alexander apparently decided to get more organized, conquering first all of Arabia. Then he would turn to the west, and take care of Carthage and Rome.

Then Alexander listened to his mom, the redoubtable Olympia, a royal from a kingdom west of Macedonia, whom his father Philippe had divorced to marry a youngster with whom he had an infant son. Alexander didn’t have to kill his father himself, the chief of the security detail did , and before you know it, Alexander was heading east at the head of the army his father had prepared to deal with Persia’s Achaemenid plutocracy. Greek valor, Macedonian horse, and Alexander’s military genius did the rest. In a matter of years, Alexander had created a hybrid empire with the locals. The elites would talk Greek for centuries, from Central Asia to India.

Olympia wrote to Alexander that Antipater, the most important general of Philippe, was plotting against him. Alexander ordered Antipater to come to Babylon, from Greece. Antipater refused. Next thing, Alexander is dying mysteriously. His closest helper was Antipater’s youngest son. Many (including myself) feel that it is likely that Alexander was poisoned under Antipater’s orders.

Antipater then went to destroy Athens’ direct democracy (everybody debate and vote on all important decisions), replacing it by a plutocracy (only those who are rich enough vote, and it’s to approve what the bosses have determined is to be done).

Notice that Alexander had left Athenian direct democracy alone (and Athens had not rebelled against Alexander, but did, against Antipater).

This is the problem with monarchy, or oligarchy: only a few take the decisions. If those few are excellent and not in error, it works great. But a few minds can’t get it right all the time, however smart.

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HOW THE RENOVATED ROMAN EMPIRE DISINTEGRATED:

An example of this ineptitude of monarchy, or oligarchy, with only a few minds thinking, is provided by Charlemagne. Charlemagne had pretty much a no-fault reign (however his gift of a large estate to the Pope would give the fascist theocrats a power base, for many centuries to come, enabling them to devastate much of Europe with their ludicrous superstition).

However, when advanced in years, Charlemagne saw the first Viking raids. He didn’t know what to do. Neither did his successors, his son and grandsons. Worse: his grandsons fought each other for control (of pieces) of the empire. That was ridiculous, all the more as Charlemagne had a potential Navy, and certainly expertise, from the Venetian Republic, a subsidiary, “march” state.

The Franks should have known what to do with the Viking raiders: after all, the Franks themselves started their career, so to speak, raiding up rivers in Hispania and Gallia, more than five centuries before the Viking imitated them!

What Charlemagne would have done, had he been a young man, and had he thought correctly, was to set-up a Navy, and go to colonize the Scandinavians. Instead, the Vikings made hundreds of major raids, ravaging about a third of “Renovated Roman Empire” before they were finally subdued, through a combination of force and civilizational persuasion.

Notice that the Franco-Romans, when they went on to (re)conquer Britannia, two centuries later, put an end to the Viking kingdoms there. William the Conqueror made his military force irresistible, by advancing democracy in England (the Franks outlawed slavery, and established a sort of monarchy-of-the-people).

By the Eleventh Century, the Franks knew all too well that wild Vikings had to be subdued. But, in 800 CE, they didn’t take the Viking seriously. And then the Viking started first by mostly raiding rich churches, that didn’t bother the half-Pagan Franks too much: the Franks liked to use the Roman Catholic churches as libraries and secular schools, but they weren’t feeling the pain of churches’ treasures being carted away… By 888 CE, when the emperor was deposed for paying the Barbarians, that mood had changed!

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NINTH CENTURY & GREEK LESSONS ARE MOST INSTRUCTIVE TODAY:

Some will scoff: why should they care about all these Greeks, Romans, Franks, Viking and Renovated Romans?

Because we are encountering the same sort of situation today.

The Renovated Roman Empire (“Carolingians as conventional historians have it) had to search, attack and destroy Scandinavian power, the “Fair” (Norway) and “Dark” (Denmark) Vikings. The Vikings had the same ideology: basically they saw easy pickings among the “Renovated Romans”, the world’s richest empire. Similarly the refugees nowadays see easy pickings in Europe. Just show up, get welfare.

A refugee from the wastes out there, if she can sneak into France, say on a tourist visa, can  have a child, for free: the French state will pay for everything. Whereas a French citizen from overseas (there are more than three millions) will go to France, have a child, and pay full fare.

Fine, some will say. But then there is this massive refugee crisis, millions of refugees, thousands dying a month, vaguely reminiscent of when all the Vikings, Muslims, Magyar, Avars, wanted to grab a piece of Europe for free. They were able to stay in peace after they changed their ideology.

However, the Ninth Century was an apocalypse for the Renovated Roman citizens living in West Francia (pretty much today’s France, Benelux, and Western Germany. It got so bad, that the citizens lost all respect for the authorities.

The last overall Renovated Roman emperor,  Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fat, was reproached his inaction against the Viking: asked by We The People, to free Europe’s capital, Paris, from the Viking. Paris had been the de facto capital of Francia since the army there elected Julian The Apostate Augustus, in the Fourth Century.

Charles, great grandson of Charles I (Carlus Magnus, Charlemagne) chose to buy off the Vikings, instead of massacring them into submission (the proper course of action). As a result, the Vikings were right back. Again and again.

Charles III actually paid  the Vikings to attack Burgundy (then in revolt). He subsequently failed to deal with revolts in Swabia, Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, and Bavaria. The nobles of the Empire deposed Charles the Fat  in 887, and he died two months later in 888. He was the last single head of the united Renovated Roman Empire (decomposing West Francia went her own way).

An anti-Viking superhero, who fought in the frontlines, close and personal, Odo, Count of Paris, nominally succeeded the deposed Charles III as king of West Francia (Neustria, Austrasia, etc.). I say nominally, because, locally, people have had enough of global governance. Imagine Brexit to the power six (2^6 = 64…)

Ultimately, as I said, a combination of military force and force of civilization, would make the Vikings submit (they got to stay in the places they had so well depopulated).

However the population of West Francia had lost all respect for the capacity of imperial authorities to protect them. Local power was seen the best protector of We The People. West Francia (the western two-thirds of present day France, and the Benelux) exploded into 60 different states (the same number of states which Julius Caesar had found there, a millennium earlier!).

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IT LOOKS AS IF MACRON LEARNED DEEP LESSONS FROM  EUROPEAN HISTORY:

Emmanuel Macron, the latest elected French king, is going around, speaking eloquently of a “Europe which protects”. Ah, yes. High time. It’s not 888 CE anymore?

Macron has learned the right lesson from the debacle of the Ninth Century: the “Renovated Roman Empire”, after 800 CE, made a terrible job at protecting its citizenry. Armies were more used to see who was top dog among the Franks than to fight the invaders (one of these battles among siblings, Fontenoy, killed more than 50,000 of the best Frankish warriors, in a few hours in 841 CE).

So what to do now? The Barbarians are at the gates, and breaching through. Europe paid the Muslim potentate, the Sultan Erdogan, billions, to keep the Barbarians away and out. The Roman empire used exactly the same method for decades, before it failed spectacularly. It had only made the Barbarians more barbaric and more demanding, and more powerful.

The way to handle the Barbarians is to go out, and destroy whatever makes them so barbaric. When Rome had its terminal refugee crisis, from too many Goths at the gates, Christianized Rome was welcoming, and thus found itself at war on its own territory. Instead, Rome should have projected force outside, and help the Germans, and Scythians, outside, against the Huns.

Right after his election, king Macron went to Mali, a country twice the size of France, where France wages war against the Barbarians. And now the king has gone there again. Good. This is the way to do it. Project force. China was doing best when projecting force outside, it’s not just a European thing. As China found out, not projecting force can result in having can result in a situation where the whim of one man could have annihilated the entire Chinese population, the entire Chinese civilization, language, everything Chinese.

However Genghis Khan was intelligent enough to have a high opinion of civilization. He brushed off the proposal of his generals to exterminate China, turn it into a steppe.

Wage war outside, exterminate the Barbarians. Let the ignorant call that “colonialism”. History knows better, they don’t.

Patrice Ayme’

Why The Anglo-Saxon Rage Against France

CROSSROADS OF THOUGHT, OR WHY THE FRENCH ARE SO SMART:

Another day, another explosion of a luggage full of high explosive in a public space, courtesy of Islamist terrorist, Oussama Z., a primitive Moroccan screaming “God is great” in Arabic. He tried to terrorize Brussels’ train station, but law enforcement spotted him before he could organize properly his devilish terror weapons. The fanatical barbarian was promptly shot and killed by officers. The Islamists have good reason to be enraged against France, and anything French-like, such as Belgium, ever since they attacked France in 715 CE… And got whipped. Before they invaded again, in 721 CE, to be whipped again. And again, in 732 CE. Some are gluttons for punishment. Islamist feel that the more punished they get, the closer to God. Which is great, probably because He is a homosexual in denial, who detest women. Different people, different nations, different mentalities.

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France Alleged To Be “Liberticide”, Latest example of Anti-French rage and Hypocrisy:

Recently various major Anglo-Saxon media, including the crooked New York Times, preventively trashed new proposed anti-terrorist French laws as dictatorial. This is more than hypocritical. Those proposed French laws are nothing of the sort. Whereas US practice is beyond dictatorial, they are more police-state like (8 millions are under “Judicial Supervision” in the US!) 

For example a proposed French law says that the police could ask drivers of vehicles to have those inspected when they want to enter a security perimeter around major events (such as the “Tour de France”). This is a measure against car bombs. However, if the driver refuses an inspection of his or her car, to see if it carries a huge bomb, the driver can leave, no question asked. Try that in the US: you will be shot at, and everybody knows it (so nobody tries!) Everybody in the US knows that when the police gives an order, either you obey, or you get shot.

How “liberticide” is that? According to the crooked New York Times, enormously so (New York Times is crooked because it has banned me during the 2003 Iraq war, and for the last 6 years, although it denies it does, a further lie!)

By the way I have driven cars in the USA which way inspected for car bombs. Turning around was not an option, as I was dealing with the ladies and gentlemen of the US Secret Service, and that was nine years ago already. Major US media didn’t write editorials about it. I also found this to be no problem at all (because my car was not equipped with a car bomb!) I didn’t feel my right to carry a car bomb was trampled underfoot.

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Conflicts between nations and versions of civilization arise from different mentalities:

These different mentalities do not just arise haphazardly. They often originate for a number of incontrovertible reasons. For example Fernand Braudel found that the desiccation of the Middle East brought increasingly dictatorial regimes, necessary to organize the enormous, increasingly complex hydraulic systems necessary for the survival of civilization. Thus the Pharaoh became “shepherd of his flock” (as official Egyptian propaganda put it, copied by the Bible a millennium later). Not surprisingly, Egypt, long at the forefront of civilization faded away as an engine of mental creation.

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Why The French Are Like The Franks Who Became Like The Gauls:

It’s a curious thing that the same mentality inhabits France now as it did even before the Romans showed up. The population changed significantly in the meantime from massacres, immigration, emigration, etc. Centuries before the Roman empire, though, the 60 states of France each had their own treasury (and currency). And, in many technologies they were best in the world. Much of the Roman military equipment was purchased in Celtic Spain and Gaul (light metal helmets, swords). Five centuries later, the 37 arsenal of the Roman empire made their own weapons, right. But that was five centuries later, and by then Gallia was arguably the strongest piece of the Roman empire, and with a mind of its own (there was even a “Gallic empire” within the Roman empire, for a while).

France: trade routes from Med to Atlantic, and from Med to North Sea, and from Med to Germany! Melting Pot Max!

So why the same? Precisely because France was the original melting pot, the three main trade routes between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe being there. A crossroad of trade and especially mental trade. The Gauls actually used Hermes, also known as Mercury, as their main imported deity. That was the god of commerce, and communications

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Why The Clashing Mentalities Between France and the Anglo-Saxons?

England has been in conflict with France since, paradoxically enough, the highly successful invasion and colonization of England by a French army led by the Duke of Normandy. As the latter and his barons took control on the other side of the channel, the new king of England, namely aforesaid Duke, became a vassal of the king of France. The king of Francia was not any king out there. After the de facto secession of the Western Franks from the rest of the “Renovated” Roman empire, the king of France was officially “Roman emperor in his own kingdom”.

This status of vassal went on for centuries. The situation became worse when the “Louve de France”, the She-Wolf of france, daughter of Philippe IV Le Bel of France, became absolute monarch of England. She was succeeded by her son Edward III, grandson of Le Bel, legitimate king of England and France. At that point, the leadership of England could claim that Paris was vassal to London, and the 475 years war (so-called “100 years war”) was on.

Another problem is that the Duke of Normandy had to persuade the English that it was in their best interest to be ruled by him. First, of course, the french outlawed slavery in England, something that the 20% of the population who were slaves, loved. But William had to make We the People stakeholders in their nation: England had been crisscrossed by civil wars and invasions, with all sorts of Angles, and Saxons, and (“Fair”) Viking from Norway, and Dark Vikings from Denmark, for 5 centuries… Thus William of Normandy installed a sort of more direct democracy which was frowned on by the more traditional Franco-Roman plutocracy on the other side of the Channel. That “English” trick was increased in following centuries, for example when other (French) aristocrats tried to be elected king by the (English) Parliament, and hoped to do that, by first increasing the powers of said Parliament.

In any case, as France was much more powerful than England then, with several times the population and riches, and a closer connection to Roman inheritance, the leadership in England could survive only through more devious and militarily efficient means than those used by the French from France.

In the end, England became basically a more efficient version of France, and that included a mentality that the French could see as more pragmatic, less principled, more perfidious and hypocritical.

As French supremacy lasted until 1815, the English had to try much harder until then, with a more underhanded mentality. In 1815, the English monarch renounced his claim to the throne of France (a claim started by Isabelle and her son Edward III, and later reconfirmed in an accord to end the “100 Year War” which Joan of Arc and her operators would violate, relaunching the war for another 375 years).

After that, France was clearly the junior partner in the way of world empire… But not as a land power, where the French military stayed the most powerful in the West, most of the time, until May 1940.

The German empire was the world’s most powerful military in the period 1871-1914. However, in September 1914, it was nearly annihilated by a French counterattack at the First Battle of the Marne, shattering the conspiracy to take control of the world. The reason for french military might can be tracked all the way back to the Third Century, when the Confederation of the Salian Franks was created, and Franks went up Roman rivers in what would become the Viking style, five centuries later. The alliance between Romans and Franks arose from these earlier conflicts, when the Romans, and in particular Caesar Constantine, realized that Frankish military might was best co-opted, rather than fought.

The ascent of the Franks was defined by them militarily defeating all and any enemies who tried to encroach on present day France. The list is nearly never ending, and includes the Huns, the Goths, and the Berber and Arab armies of the three invasions of Francia by the Umayyad Caliphate (715-748 CE), which brought its demise in 750 CE (as the bones of its armies laid in France). The switch from “Franks” to “French” happened in the Twelfth Century, and the first unelected French king was Jean I, an infant who ruled 5 days, before being probably poisoned (by Countess Mahaut of Artois; now a region of pseudo-independent Belgium).

Thus the French are frank and aggressive. On this civilization grew and multiplied. Frank, to know and transmit the truth, which is the core strength of war. Aggressive, to impose the truth. Why so much war? Because France is at core of Europe, where the easiest main three trade routes pass (going across the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Balkan Mountains or the Caucasus, all East-West ranges, mostly, is best done through… France!)

More details of European topography, showing better that the easiest trade routes indeed go through France… South of Massif Central (the volcanic range in the middle of France), going west, and up the Rhones valley.

The French state is the direct descendant of the Roman state. There is actually no discontinuity whatsoever, militarily, legal or otherwise. The first well-known elected French king, Clovis, was also Roman Consul and Imperator of the Roman army. Clovis succeeded to do what the Roman state couldn’t succeed to do in the preceding 150 years: Clovis crushed and evacuated the Visigoths (Battle of Vouillé, in 507 CE). Thus Francia and Constantinople, all the way to the Tenth and Eleventh Century, viewed themselves as part of the same Romanitas (resulting in common military campaigns, as when the Eastern Roman fleet operated on the French Riviera in the Tenth Century, in cooperation with Frankish armies in the interior, to extricate the Muslims who had been terrorizing Western Europe, in still another invasion; the First Crusade, 150 years later was the reciprocal courtesy…)

The philosophical method William the Conqueror used is exactly the same which Clovis used. And that’s not happenstance. Notice that, in both cases, those methods were quite opposite to the cool massacres, and thorough holocausts enacted by Julius Caesar when he conquered Gallia (Gaul).

However, the gigantic French empire was the object of US greed by 1914, and the envoy of hyper racist US President Wilson (a democrat, ex-president of Princeton University, a famous plutocratic university) conspired, encouraged, abetted and talked the German Kaiser into launching a world war, which he couldn’t win, with the result that, in 1945, the US was in perfect position to grab both the British and French empires, in the guise of decolonization.

This crowned the “American Century”, this worldwide empire, in the glory of which we are all presently basking.

So why the “Anglo-Saxon” anti-French rage?

This anti-French rage is a preventive measure, lest all the preceding be found out.

And should we be Zen-like, satisfied with this cognitive cover-up, organized in great part by the glorious US plutocratic universities? No. Why? Because we are getting through what promises to be maybe the greatest extinction of the biosphere ever since Snowball Earth. The simple US greed mentality is completely insufficient to deal with this crisis. Americans emit 16 tons of CO2 per capita, per year, in no small reason because they are such glorious, sensitive people, having attended their glorious super smart universities of greed, and they need to drive big truck as soon as they are 16 years old. By comparison, the French emit 6 (six) tons of CO2 per capita, per year. Because they are such losers. But, precisely, we need to learn to lose gracefully the battle of mental comfort and venal stupidity, to win the next war.  The ultimate war. The war of biosphere survival. A war against all of yesteryear’s mentalities.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Banality of Rogues

The famous Prussian Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, an anti-Nazi who slept assiduously with the Nazi Heidegger, her thesis advisor, married to someone else, wrote about the “banality of evil”, a concept that became famous… Although Arendt’s “discovery” would have made the Catholic Inquisition shrug and smirk, five centuries prior (the Inquisition would have said:’This is exactly what we have been talking about, evil everywhere!’)

Today I will speak of the banality of rogues. You see rogues tie in with the (re-)Foundation Principle. No rogues, no civilization. (There goes one of the main critiques against Donald Trump! Yes, I just saw the movie “Rogue One”…)

We have a real, huge example in history, the very base of our present civilization: the Franks were both rogues, and “renovators”, as they themselves described themselves, of the Roman empire. No less. But actually the Franks did much more, founding Western civilization in full, by outlawing slavery, making secular education mandatory, and running an imperial, military society which, somehow, saved and overcame antiquity, while preserving an open society (the whole picture got in trouble with the First Crusade: see, it’s the fault of Islam, once again, ha-ha-ha).

I was reading in a history publication, how the Roman empire went down, and they mentioned all sorts of barbarians: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Vandals, Alans, Huns… They forgot to mention the most important ones, the ones vested with Roman power, more than any others, the Franks… It was as if they talked about breathing, but forgot to mention air.

Ignoring the re-foundation of Rome by the Franks is ignoring, not just history, but the re-foundation of civilization, no less. Indeed the Franks removed the most glaring defects of Rome.  (That “renovated” empire officially went on until Napoleon, emperor of the rogue imperial part of said Roman empire called Francia, then France, shut it down in 1804.)  

Habitable Exoplanet With Ring In the Movie Rogue One: In Our World, Our Mental World, There Are Now Exoplanets Everywhere. In 1600 CE, Giordano Bruno got burned, just for suggesting that.

[Earth may have had a ring at some point in the past (some scientist have speculated, looking at some otherwise weird data). Thousands of exoplanets have been found since the first one, 51 Pegasi b, at the University of Geneva eleven years ago. An exoplanet was found, in 2016, around the closest star, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf; the planet is in the habitable zone. Details are unknown, as the planet does not seem to come between us and its star; good spending in astronomy would allow to look at it directly, using existing technology.But our corrupt leaders have prefered to give money to our plutocratic masters, and, thus, crumbs to themselves, rather than making science all it can be. Science is the one job for all, and necessary for survival, moreover.] 

How did Rome die? Basically from sclerotic thinking, mental paralysis, senility: the establishment by Augustus of his damned “Principate”, with a permanent “First Man” (Princeps) at the helm, was the fundamental cause of mental decay. We The People got completely disinterested from the most interesting question, and the few families at the helm were too idiotic to have any new ideas.

Once mental decay is at the helm, and pervades the base, nothing can save a society: when problems occur, they can’t be solved. This is what happened to Rome. Confronted with worse problems in the Fourteenth Century France sailed right through, as nothing had happened, because Fourteenth Century France was an intellectual power machine, greatest in civilization so far, ever.

Buridan, who was worth ten Newtons, at least, having overturned Aristotelian physics, discovered ⅔ of “Newton’s” laws, and justified, as a result, the heliocentric system, was not just chief of the university of Paris, but counselor to four French kings. That was typical of the situation in France, England, Germany and Italy at the time. Buridan’s network of students and collaborators extended throughout Europe. Meanwhile Florence’s bankers funded that Italian Republic’s mighty army with national bonds…

So the fierce, swift and abominable Black Plague killed half of Europe, and no aristocrats… So what? Rome, affected by smaller plagues, tottered on the brink of extinction…

Yes, one can point to the sorry state of the Demoncratic Party, with its entrenched interests, drinking the elixir served by self-serving plutocrats (such as those who set-up Obamacare without cost control. And no, don’t point at Trump; he and his Kellyanne Conway, among others, are a breath of fresh air, after decades of increasingly metastatic plutocracy. We will see what they do.

Sometimes heavy destruction is the only way to construction. It is alway the case, when the construction is huge. (And this is true for brains too, explaining why philosophers have it hard, when they interact with the commons… and reciprocally!)

Oh yes, it can hurt: this is the implicit theme in the last Star War saga (“Rogue One”). The rebellion has done evil things we are informed, and we see it trying its very best, to do some more (the father of the heroine is assassinated by the rebellion, although he works against the empire; the movie is notable also for the fact the main hero and character is a human female in her full glory, second to males in no way whatsoever!)

It is a complicated world. It will get ever more complicated. Mastering its complexity is the most crucial part in fighting evil. To master complexity, one has to understand it first. Thus, standing in the way of understanding is the greatest, deepest meta-evil.

Only rogues dare to understand, and act upon, what others refuse to understand, or even see. Rogues are necessary to progress, forward, and civilization is riding a bicycle: no forward motion means collapse. Because a ruined ecology is always biting at the heels of civilization.

Civilization may not like rogues, but it needs them, to be born again, with a better intelligent design, necessary for survival.

Being a rogue is not just a neurohormonal state. It is a mental architecture. Studies just published showed that first mothers get their brains permanently modified (details another time). Similarly a rogue brain is different from the brain of a servant of the establishment like Obama. It is permanently different. Giordano Bruno, or Galileo, or Descartes, or Montaigne or Abelard, were permanently different.

The superiority of the “West” (“Pars Occidentalis” as the Romans said) is due to its being just enough of a host medium to rogues. The fate of rogues was not as good in Islam, by orders of magnitude; after he got in so much trouble for fighting the Church, Abelard, in the Twelfth Century, toyed with the idea of going to live among the Islamists (so he wrote). Wisely, he did not do it: he would have been killed there (instead, in the West, his ideas won, over the centuries…)

Happy New Year To All (even the abysmal Obama, basking in Oahu, and his cohort of the corrupt!)

Rogues watch ants with sympathy…

Patrice Ayme’

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy

In the Real World, Foundations Saved Civilization Before:

The combination of imperial collapse followed by re-birth from Foundations within happened several times already, for real.

Civilizations collapsing into Dark Ages from the actions of dozens of millions of people occurred more than once. And then very small groups arose, often within the collapsing empire, and imposed new ways of thinking which enabled civilization to restart. One such case was the Mongol takeover of China, and the subsequent collapse of the Yuan dynasty replaced, within a century, by the Ming dynasty (appropriately founded by a Buddhist monk).

Yet the most striking examples of collapses are in the West, and the most spectacular ones come with two foundations.

The first collapse was that of the seven superpowers which made the Bronze Age civilization. They were attacked by nations which made “a conspiracy in their islands” (said Pharaoh Ramses III in 1175 BCE). Besides the calamitous invasions by these “Peoples of the Sea”, a number of disasters striking simultaneously (calamitous climate change, including super drought, quake swarm, etc.) brought the entire trading system down, upon which some civilizations depended for survival, and then generalized destruction followed. The Foundation consisted in a number of Greek city states, mostly on the Ionian coast. The Second Foundation was Athens.

However soon enough, an unserious Greece was taken over by the fascist Macedonian empire, and its successor regimes, the Hellenistic kingdoms.

The Second Foundation was the Roman Republic itself. Rome had been created where the shock waves from Magna Grecia, Italian Greece, and the Etruscans collided. That positive interference brought herdsmen to civilization. The Etruscans were themselves one of these roaming “Peoples of the Sea”, and they had settled in Syria for a while, before grabbing the part of Italy with the richest iron deposits: Foundations everywhere.

Rome freed Greece, and then turned into an evil empire itself. Rome degenerated ever more into all sorts of fascisms… and progressively collapsed ever more, as one major system after another became dysfunctional.

Then emperor Constantine re-founded Rome by imposing the Catholic Church, which had grown semi-secretly for two centuries, as a favored institution within the empire.

At the same time, other Roman generals cum lawyers equipped the savage Germans constituting the Frankish Confederation with a Latin written law, the Lex Salica. The Franks were opposed to Christianism. In a further twist, Constantine and his successors used the Franks as shock troops of the empire (Once the Franks staged a full civil war to give back control of the empire to secularists).

Meanwhile the First Foundation, Catholicism, collapsed Rome, and then it gave control to the Second Foundation, that of the Franks, which had opposed them. In a complete turn-around, the Franks then adopted Catholicism, modifying it extensively to eliminate all its bad aspects (no more apocalypse around the corner, total tolerance for fellow religions, mandating secular education, etc.), while keeping the good ones (charity, altruism, Christian Republic mentality, etc.). Within 150 years, the Franks would outlaw slavery in Europe (there had been no slavery in Germany, so this is more the German than Christian influence: all bishops were very rich and they had dozens, or hundreds, of slaves).

Small foundations can, and will always, save civilizations. For two main reasons: 1) their small size enable them to think democratically, thus better. 2) the excellency their struggle for survival forces on small foundations, require them to think straight and true (otherwise they won’t survive).

It is likely that some of the real events I just related inspired Asimov: he was a very knowledgeable person (and the Foundational aspects of Rome and Athens were well-known, as was the social failure to oppose Macedonia in a timely manner, in spite of the strident warnings of the philosopher Demosthenes).

When I read the Foundation Trilogy, long ago, I found, even then, some of its aspects very dated. But in a way, that is the entire point.

Psychohistory was not invented yesterday, we have crucially depended upon it, for millennia.
Patrice Ayme’

Skulls in the Stars

I’ve recently been trying to become more acquainted with science fiction as a genre, as most of my life I’ve been focused primarily on horror fiction.  A natural and obvious place to place some emphasis is on classic works from the golden age of science fiction, and a natural and obvious place to start there is with the work of Isaac Asimov.  A few weeks ago, I read Asimov’s Foundation (1951), and blogged my thoughts about it.

Asimov has written seven books set in the Foundation setting; I figured that I would be content reading the first one, to get a feel for it, and then move on to other authors and other series…

… and, as of today, I’ve started reading the fifth of the Foundation novels.

As the first three books, Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953), form the original trilogy, and I thought it…

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Cracking Down On Literal Islam

Europe is finally waking up to the danger of Literal Islam. “Literal Islam” means reading the fundamental texts of Islam as what they are supposed to be, according to Literal Islam itself: as the word of God. For me, Literal Islam, Salafism and Wahhabism are roughly synonymous.

Says The Economist:”In the very loosest of senses, all Muslims are Salafi. The word literally describes those who emulate and revere both the prophet Muhammad and the earliest generations of Muslims, the first three generations in particular. There is no Muslim who does not do that.”

So what did these three generations of Muslims do? They conquered, by the Sword, the greatest empire which the world had ever been. In a century. If You Think The Sword Is True, Islam Is True. If you think there are higher values than The Sword, Islam of the first three generations, is just an invasion by the most bellicose fanatics The world had ever seen. Have a look at this map, showing the brutality, the violence of the most significant Islamist attacks and invasions between 622 CE and 750 CE:

The Franks Fought Back Four Invasions in 715 CE, 721 CE, 732 CE & 737 CE To Pure Arab Islamist Caliphate Collapse in 750 CE.

Tremendous civilizations were wiped out by the Islamist invasions, such as those of Mesopotamia and Iran, and the Mother of all Indo-European religions, Zoroastrianism. Not content with wiping out millennia of common civilizations, Islam tried to wipe out millions of years of human evolution itself, by making women half, or less, of men. (Whereas the human species has low sexual dimorphism.)

Thus, celebrating the Fundamentals of Islam is celebrating the fundamentals of a dramatic, extremely brutal invasion. The Economist however, pretends moronically that: “…there are Salafi mosques whose preachers are theologically conservative but are far from terrorists…”

You mean they are not making bombs? Sorry, The Economist: that makes no sense. The lethal violence in Literal Islam is overwhelmingly present in the texts, maximally nasty, boringly repetitive, and extremely scary. Yes, scary, like in phobia. As in Islamophobia. Can one not be a terrorist, when one teaches that terror is what God wants, and orders?

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

There is nothing subtle about Islamic violence as found in the Fundamental texts of Islam: vast categories of (most) people are supposed to be killed (either by God, or the Believers, or both). Apostates, Non-Believers, Gays etc. Those who kill in the name of God will go directly to paradise: they will not be submitted to the last Judgment: hence the great success of the Islamic invasions. The Islamist warriors were persuaded that death would bring them eternal happiness, life, and being on the right of God.

The Last Judgment will happen only after the last Jew has been killed.  (Hadith 41;685: …”Allah’s Messenger… : The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will FIGHT against the Jews and the Muslims would KILL them…”. That Hadith is repeated a lot, and is part of the Hamas Charter.)

Some will say: no problem we will keep an eye on those who read Fundamental Islamic texts literally, make a terror watch. Propped by Saudi and other Medieval types, oil money, those people are already millions. Is surveillance to become the most important industry? Or is it easier to strictly outlaw all Literal Islam?

A few days ago, more than half a dozen Salafists were arrested in France. They were all unknown of security services (which track more than 10,000 Islamists already!). The Islamists had planned murderous attacks throughout France. One of them taught in a public school. Nobody suspected him (they hide among ourselves, like the crocs below the murky waters, ready to strike, causing ambient paranoia, as intended).

When is someone who does not follow Islam literally not a Muslim anymore? That is a simple question pregnant with a dreadful answer: those who do not believe in Islam anymore, apostates, are to be put to death.

At this point, Politically Correct demoncrats generally lash out, from their tiny knowledge base learned by rote, that Christianism is just as bad as Islamism, so we are racist to implicitly claim a difference, etc., etc.  (Never mind that most of those who lash out at Islam don’t believe in Christianism either.) Well not quite. There is not a symmetry between Islamism and Christianism. Christianism was worse, in the sense it came first, and got the ball rolling, by terrorizing first. But then Islam copied it, but it was worse, because Islam is the state, whereas the relationship between state and Christianism was much looser (except in the periods from 386 CE to ~450 CE and again, for two long periods in the late Middle Ages/Renaissance; in both cases, state terror got enacted under the guise of the Faith.

Yes, Roman officials launched condemnations to death for heresy. In 380 CE, the Edict of Thessalonica of Roman emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire. By this edict the state’s authority and the Church officially overlapped. Thus the state enforced religious terror, whenever convenient. Thus church leaders executed (some) heretics. Within six years of the official criminalization of heresy by the Roman Emperor, the first Christian heretic to be executed, Priscillian, was condemned in 386 CE by Roman secular officials for sorcery. He was put to death with four or five followers. The edict of emperor Theodosius II (435 CE) provided severe punishments for spreading Nestorianism (a Christianism found all the way to Mongolia). Possessing writings of Arius brought the death penalty (Arius influenced the Coptic church, hence Islam).

So the Christians, more exactly the Roman Catholics, were anti-civilizational savages. Guess what? The empire of savage fanatics soon collapsed. It was replaced by the fresh Confederation of the Franks, which reinvented Christianism from scratch, complete with plenty of newly created saints. The Franks viewed Christianism, or, more exactly, Catholicism, as a help, a secular help, to rule over dozens of millions of Roman subjects throughout much of what is presently the Eurozone (Netherlands, Germany, Eastern Europe, Italy, Gaul). But all religions were allowed, including Paganism, Judaism, islam, etc.

Things changed just at the time the Frankish emperor in Paris decided he was king of France, and it was high time to submit the giant County of Toulouse. “Philippe Auguste” allied himself to the Pope, killed a million Cathars, grabbed their lands. Thereupon, Christian terror was back, as it was so profitable. The Enlightenment would put an end to that Christian terror.

Islamist terror had been profitable all along. Still is.

A further problem is that Literal Islam is not just an incitement to ultimate violence. It is also an incitement to unreason, and violating the most basic standards of what makes humanity, humanity.

Amusingly, The Economist, propelled by the anxiety of sounding indiscriminate, contradicts itself: “It’s important to understand that of the various forms of Salafism described, there is one, the unreconstructed kind, which can (though does not always) morph into terrorism.” Well, real Salafism is “unreconstructed”. By definition.

We need clarity. Go read all the basic texts of Islam, then report. Stop parsing red herrings, please go to the meat of the matter. Religious terror was extirpated from Europe during the Enlightenment, it is high time to bring some light to all this darkness. So, instead of leaving Islam as a darkness which cannot, and should not, be explored, please visit it.

It’s instructive. The basic texts reveal that Muhammad actually ordered women’s faces NOT to be covered. So why the contemporary insistence, now, that they should be? Because it’s a way for Islamist dictators (like the various kings, emirs, ayatollahs and what not) to terrorize the Republics.

Or, at least, to put them on the defensive:’Oh, you see you don’t respect freedom of religion!’

The French Republic installed a law outlawing face covering. Islamists howled to the Moon, naturally, that’s all old tradition of Mecca, older than Islam, but the French Constitutional Court upheld the law as it was explicitly made for security reasons.

I would advise Donald Trump to have such a law passed ASAP in the USA. Every time a woman goes fully veiled in the streets she attacks civilization, human ethology, the Republic, public order, and helps convert the Enlightened West into the incomparable messes that all countries ruled by, and with Islam have become (yes, from Morocco, where Islamists are in power, to Indonesia, where the governor of Djakarta is prosecuted for “blasphemy”, because the Islamist god is that weak little simple-minded creature that needs very much to be protected, by killing lots of insulting people, lest that fragile entity wilts away…)

Just do like France, Donald: after all, it is a question of security (veiled women were used massively in the Franco-Algerian civil war, to carry explosives, allowing a tiny minority to seize power and keep it to this day, while leading Algeria through another civil war which killed at least 200,000). Outlawing Islamist veils will help to change the mood: no more blatant tolerance for the nefarious ways of the enemies of reason.

It will be interesting to hear the devilish ones preaching that Islam is perfect for the countries they, themselves exploit. And it also means the rather drastic observation: Whenever, pretty soon, burning hydrocarbons is made unlawful, Islam will disappear. Because the main reason for its modern existence will be gone. As simple as that.

Patrice Ayme’

CONQUEST Of England, 950 Years Ago: End of Slavery, Birth of Modern Democracy

The BATTLE OF HASTINGS, WON By The FRANKS 950 YEARS AGO: Outlawing Slavery, Jump Starting Democracy

How did British democracy arise? With the exact opposite maneuver from Brexit. What is the opposite of Brit-exit? Frank-in. And when William the Conqueror, came in, conquered-in, he did not just bring, but enforced a more advanced civilization, and much more, a process to self-feed democracy.

The ascent of Britain, blossoming into the edge of world civilization is a long story which started well before Caesar’s two landings in England. The mighty, yet disorganized Celtic civilization had been divided into a diversity of a bewildering obfuscation (fostered by the Druids) of countless small units: Gaul had 60 nations, with 60 central banks, senates and three languages. Roman organization put an end to that non-sense, and Gaul came out much stronger, wealthier and more intelligent (the Druids cultivated stupidity, by outlawing written expression, except among themselves).

The collapse of the Roman state brought an even greater mess to Britain, while the continent got reorganized under the Franks’ Lex Salica (see chapter inside the essay on Outlawing Muslim Brotherhood). The reconquest of England by the Franks under the command of a Roman duke of Normandy added a whole new layer of complexity in the subtilty of government. It is William’s Conquest, a conquest by a plurality, and the most advanced principles, which instigated the rise of the world’s most advanced democracy, protected, as it was thereafter, by the insular nature of Britain (whereas the rest of the Roman empire, on the other side of the Channel, fell in ever worse divisions sheared from ever mightier armies).

After its conquest under Claudius, a Roman emperor born in Lyon (Lugdunum), Britannia was unified and pacified for more than four centuries. However budget cuts by the theologically minded plutocrats who ruled Rome around 400 CE, led to the withdrawal of the legions (which constituted the core of the crack field armies of the empire). Local Roman militia was unable to repel waves of invasion of determined Angles and Saxons in the next two centuries. Finally British forces retreated towards Wales or took refuge in what came to be known as Brittany (formerly Armorica, the large western peninsula of France advancing in the Atlantic). Then the Viking came, overrunning much of England, and all of Ireland.

By the Eleventh Century, the king ruling England, Edward the Confessor, had no direct descendant. (His earlier life had been astoundingly full of battles and unlikely events; suffices to say he was the seventh son of his father, from his second wife, Emma of Normandy who ended up marrying a Viking invader, Cnut, who conveniently executed some of Edward’s half brothers. Edward spent many years in exile in Normandy (and acted accordingly: Edward could see that Frankish civilization was superior). 

William The Conqueror Territories In Red, That Of Some Of His Other Frankish Allies, in Blue (Poitou, Anjou, Flanders) or Green (Bretagne)

The Reconquista Of Britannia By A Dux Of The Roman Empire:

The reconquest of Britannia by a Roman Dux was no accident: five centuries after being overrun by the Angles and Saxons, the British Isles were more of a wasteland than ever, as waves of Viking sloshed all over. It was high time for re-establishing civilization. Only force can re-establish civilization (a theme of mine). William would apply overwhelming force, in the service of the most advanced civilization anywhere. And it worked splendidly: the progress he launched became self-feeding, and promoted peace. Indeed, after William’s conquest, except for a victorious Dutch invasion in 1688 CE (with the objective of defeating France’s dictator, Louis XIV), England would never be conquered again. 

The closest relative of king Edward the Confessor was the Norman Dux (“Dux”, Duc, Duke, was a Roman military title of the Late Empire: a Dux was the superior military officer of a large province, only subject to command from the Emperor himself). More exactly, Edward was the grandson of the maternal uncle of William the Conqueror. The accession of William to the ducal throne had been difficult because his father had died in Nicea (Anatolia), when William was seven years old. William’s mother was his father’s mistress, an independent business woman who then married somebody else. However, Dukes of Normandy were often “illegitimate”, and there is no doubt that his father intended William to be Duke (he made his vassals take an oath of obedience to his son, before leaving for the crusade, over his family’s objections).

By the age of 23, the battle tested William was the uncontested Duke of Normandy, and Edward was back, overlording an English realm streaked by Viking raids. Thus, in 1051 CE, Edward selected William as heir (no doubt feeling that Britain needed to be reintegrated in the Roman ensemble, for its own good as it indeed turned out). In 1064 CE, a top officer of Edward, Harold, showed up in Normandy, helped William wage war in Brittany, and told him that he, Harold, would support his claim to the throne (at least that is what Normand discrediting propaganda claimed at the time).

On January 5, 1066, Edward died and Harold, treacherously, took power as king of England. Many other claimants and grandees were not happy, and a complicated war started, with four parties involved.

However William was an official Duke of the Roman empire, had been named future king 15 years prior, and thus William was the only one with real legitimacy, and enormous clout (but making William king meant that Britain was reintegrating the Roman empire! And thus who thrived from the mess were going to suffer). Indeed, consent of Pope Alexander II for the invasion was obtained, and a Papal banner was flown by William. The Roman emperor also gave consent. On top of this, William was an extremely experienced military leader, used to command in the Roman imperator tradition (namely ready to execute miscreants as needed). William had been at war since age 8. And he was now 38 years old.

An enormous fleet was built, 3,000 ships it has been said. It sailed from the Somme river, once intelligence informed William that Harold’s army had been removed from the Channel and was battling in the north.

William led an army greatly composed of contingents under the direct command of many French barons who were not his vassals. In particular William’s forces comprised Breton, Anjou, Poitou armies (which made the left wing at the Hastings battle, commanded by Alan the Red, a relative of the Comte de Bretagne) and a French, Picardy, Flanders army (which made the right wing at Hastings, and was commanded by the Count of Boulogne, who was severely wounded in the pursuit of the Anglo-Saxon forces).

***

That two-third of William’s army was made of Frankish allies not his vassals was of great consequence: his non-vassal allies would shortly enforce upon the king the MAGNA CARTA LIBERTATUM, the Great Charter of Liberty.

During the battle, William’s left wing, the Breton army at some point cracked and fled, and was pursued by Harold’s forces, led by two of his brothers. That stretching of the enemy in the open enabled William’s cavalry to surprise and destroy them. The Normans feigned retreat twice more, to expose Harold’s army to cavalry (Harold had no cavalry, and no archers, William had both). William engineered attacks after attacks, changing strategy repeatedly, and had several horses killed under him. In the end, Harold was killed, some say by William himself (that Harold was killed by an arrow is apparently a later legend which arose when the Bayeux tapestry was misinterpreted).

The war was not finished.  English clergy and aristocrat nominated Edgar the Ætheling as king to replace Howard (whose body William had ordered thrown in the sea). To win the war, William instigated reforms right away.

William changed England in many ways. For example he was partly financed by Jewish financiers and brought rich Jews from Rouen to foster lending in England (an activity forbidden to Christians with Christians, but allowed from Jews to Christians). Thus William introduced Judaism to England (so Jews were not always victimized by it did not exist prior to that there).

William had made church reforms in Normandy. He extended them to England, and replaced English clergy by Normand clergy. William also enforced all the laws passed by Edward the Confessor (the preceding English king, who had spent most of his formative years in Normandy, thanks to William’s family, and much of his life, and had made his relative William his heir). Some laws protected especially the “Frenchmen who had come with William to England”, as one would expect after a conquest. But William went much further.

***

William The Conqueror’s Laws Created A New Polity And New Civilization:

William introduced ten major new laws. The first made Christianism the official religion (exit the pagan gods).

William’s second law made all Englishmen take a direct, personal oath of loyalty to the king, as if they were soldiers in the Roman army. Those who did not take the oath would not be considered to be freemen. The oath had to be witnessed by many. That was a very significant advance: prior to this, citizens did not have to take an oath of loyalty (only the Roman soldiers had to, except for a few years under Roman emperors Diocletian and Galerius around 308 CE).

All problems have to be solved in court, ordered William. Non-attendees were heavily fined, up to the amount of the charge against them.

The final two laws passed by William were stunning:

“No man is allowed to sell another man. Anyone breaking this law will pay a fine to the king.” This law outlawed slavery in England. 20% of the population had been enslaved under Harold. William, as a Roman Dux, had to implement the Lex Salica’s most prominent feature, the one that distinguished it more saillantly from Justinian’s refurbishing of Roman Law, was the interdiction of slavery. It is also on that law that the prosperity of the “Renovated Roman Empire” rested. Britain had been reunited with the empire (although, it was implicitly intimated that it never left).

“No one shall be executed for crimes they have committed; but if they are guilty of a crime, they will be blinded and castrated. This law is not to be challenged.” Outlawing the death penalty was very much a world first. (Although the EU has outlawed the death penalty, the USA still uses it, 950 years later.)

***

Outlawing Slavery Was Not Just Frankish Law, But An Essential Part of William’s Power Grab

As a Dux of the Roman empire, William had to implement (Franco-)Roman law. Slavery had been made unlawful by the (English-born) Queen Bathilde of the Franks in 650 CE. Later the Franks conquered most of Western Europe, including the British isles and the part of Iberian and Italian peninsulas still held by the Muslims. The outlawing of slavery by the Franks was extended to these liberated territories where Roman rule was re-imposed.

In turn, the outlawing of slavery no doubt facilitated this Roman reconquest. For example, the 20% of Englishmen who found themselves to be “freemen” as long as they took a loyalty oath to William were no doubt enthusiastic supporters of William.

***

Frenchmen, and French

In the following centuries, many powerful French characters and adventurers in England, would try to preserve their power, or try to seize power, and would push for various democratic reforms limiting the power of the king. Out of that came the Magna Carta Libertatum (the descendants of the allies of William wanted to keep the powers William had conferred to them, that of allies, not vassals), the power of Parliament (Lancastre hoped to be elected king through Parliament, so he boosted its power; Lancastre was killed on the battlefield, but his reforms stayed). And so on.

Ever since William’s conquest, France and England have been entangled (although intellectual life on both sides of the Channel had been entangled for two millennia already: Druids would study in Wales, Saint Patrick was educated in Cannes, Anti-slavery queen of the Franks Bathide was from Kent, Alcuin, Charlemagne’s main PM and philosopher was English).

The reason for thinking otherwise, that England and France have serious differences (instead of being family), was the dictatorial drift under the fanatical Jihadist tyrant Louis XIV, while England went the other way, towards more democracy. Democracy brings power, dictatorship, weakness. The result was that France became weaker and England blossomed into a superpower. In the (world) wars of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Year War, and the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars, a haggard France was defeated and more subtly plutocratic England became a world empire.  

It is the mess of more distributed power which rendered England ever more democratic. Whereas in France, the emperor-in-his-own-kingdom (that was the official expression!) Philippe-Auguste (literally: the lover of horses who augments!) colluded with the Pope to destroy the (quasi-republican) giant County of Toulouse (which was ruled under a Count, but mostly by Parliament).

However, moods perdure. Lancastre, one of those who exploited Toulouse got there the idea of using Parliament as a weapon against the king, and implemented the idea in England.

Intelligence is greater, the greater the ability to detect, distinguish, identify & imagine (knowledge, distinctions, equations & allusions).

Contemplating history shows that reason is not linear, but a web. And guess what? Quantum Theory says the same, and it has a name, entanglement. This is an entangled world, and to reveal it, one has to reveal its implicit order. It arises from occurrences. By building one’s neurology while missing the most important occurrences in the world pertaining to it, one risks becoming stupid. 

Patrice Ayme’.   

 

France Taking Command After Breakshit

How The Empire Fell:

The Goths, refugees from the Huns, were attacked once on a sweltering 9 August 378 CE by decision of Roman emperor Valens. The Oriental Roman field army was hot, tired, thirsty, after a forced march in the morning. Some of the Roman commanders were arrogant. Rested, the Roman field army would have been invincible. Moreover, the Occidental Roman field army, itself also invincible, if rested, was marching in. But senior emperor Valens was in charge of the Oriental army and his nephew Gratian in charge of the Occidental army, full of Franks.

The Frank Richomeres, head of Gratian imperial guard, sent ahead, told Valens to wait for the second field army (Richomeres would later become Consul, and head of all the Oriental Part of the empire, militarily; as a Frank, and non-Christian, he was refused the purple of an Augustus, yet he had imperium). But Valens wanted a victory of his own (Gratian and other commanders had theirs in preceding months). Valens decided to attack (his mind perhaps afflicted not just by the heat, but also the desire to self-annihilation of old fashion Christianism). His decision was all about hubris. A few hours later, the Oriental Roman field army was mostly annihilated, and Valens was dead. 

The Roman state would never recover from this disaster. Twenty-two (22) years later, the Franks were put in charge of the Roman defense of Gallia and Germania (400 CE). Twenty-eight (28) years later, the legions would be withdrawn from Britain, to save money, and hordes of savage Germans would break through the Roman empire, all the way to Africa. The Goths would take Rome, 32 years after the defeat of Hadrianopolis (410 CE). Now Hadrianopolis is a city in Turkey. And Turkey is full of exploding Muslims (mass attack of ISIL/Daesh on Constantinople’s airport, today).

The Franks would exterminate the Goths, 129 years later, and impose the Imperium Francorum over Gallia, Germania, and, soon enough, other regions (Italy, Spain)…  

European Parliament: French President & Girlfriend Telling British Europhobes To Get Great Britain Out Of The European Union. October 2015

Contempt For France and the Latins:

I was talking Brexit with an American friend with very long blond hair. I told her that, initially the language of the European Community was French rather than English, and that now things would change a bit. She was amused to no end: don’t worry, French is never coming back. Ever. Again. Never.

Her arrogance made me think. Was it Hadrianopolis all over again? I mean, really, why would “Anglo-Saxons” and what I call the “West Country Men” mentality, be in natural control of the world? Because they are naturally born killers?

West Country Men mentality, essence of lurid Anglo-Saxonia: Greed is the thinking reed which makes humanity wisely bend, as required by reality. Voltaire thought it was very philosophical to let such a mentality in charge of the World. Well, I don’t.

It’s true, in part, but just in part, that greed as the reed can be useful. Yet, there are many other, even more crucial, dimensions to the human existence.

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France Is Different:

In the US, and much English imagination, the “Latins” are viewed as bit players. At most good lovers. Yet, in Europe, Spain, Italy, France and their satellites have 200 million people.

The situation of France is peculiar, because this is where the core of the mother civilization was, and rose. France is mother to Britain and the US, secularism, nationalization, mandatory education, and the anti-slavery movement, among others. All that was achieved way back in the past, and cannot be changed, even by Allah. (To finance war against the fanatics of Allah, in the early 700’s, the Franks confiscated all valuable Christian church property, and paid the army with it.) 

The English love to talk about the Magna Carta, forgetting that the rebellious barons were French. And when the French Revolution started, the “National Assembly” decided it was a “Constituent Assembly”. Where did that come from? Well what became known as the “National Assembly”, with 578 representatives, had been elected in 1788 CE (a year before the official start of the French Revolution).

The English say: ‘we have this, too, Parliament…” Actually the powers of Parliament were set-up by a Frenchman who wanted to be elected king, way back. The English have Parliament, but it’s not really a National Assembly, as it is entangled with the non-elected “Chamber of Lords”. In 1789 France, the “National Assembly” made a coalition with (most of the) the Catholic church, and ejected the “Chamber of Lords”, never to be seen again.

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The Mood Of European Unification Has Celto-German, Roman Republican and Frankish Roots:

Who were the Franks? The European Union! Indeed, the Franks were NOT a tribe. They were a “federation”. A number of people who had taken an oath. From foederare (league together) and foedus (covenant, league).

The Salic Law of the Franks was initially written in Latin by Roman lawyers. So not only the Franks were not a tribe, or nation, but they embraced the notion of being endowed by superior ideas, even if they came from others.  

When one talks about deep Europe, some go back to Charlemagne. I just showed one has to go five centuries earlier. But one should of course go even earlier. The Celts had a very advanced civilization, ocean trading and more advanced than anywhere else in the world in several technologies. They were hindered by a religion which the Romans destroyed and outlawed (as should be done to some contemporary religions!). Otherwise, the Celto-Germans were pretty much open: they had a secondary cult of Greco-Roman deity, particularly Mercury, the god of trade. Compare with present day Saudi Arabia, which will cut your head off, if you disagree with what they call Allah…

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Withdrawing England’s Privileges:

The French agreed to Great Britain entry in the European Community, 45 years ago. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake. But who could guess that Britain would be such a bad player? Refusing the free circulation of citizens of the Schengen Treaty, blackmailing for a rebate, organizing tax havens, grabbing most Euro trading, refusing the Euro, while staying inside the European Monetary System to sabotage it, fostering global plutocracy while spreading outrageous lies about the European Union’s alleged lack of democracy?

Britain was needed, because of its heft, and its military power. But the latter, and its connection with morality, has faded in recent years, witness the Assad debacle: the UK Parliament refused to attack plutocrat Assad, because the UK does not attack plutocrats. Great Britain loves plutocrats and especially their money, no questions asked. Due to budget cuts, and ethical cuts, Britain is much less than what it used to be militarily.

The French Republic then is the only significant military power in Europe, and can make Germany pay for it, by running deficits (that’s the implicit accord, obviously).

Europe is just a trading place, say Europhobes. However, it is more. It is a place of solidarity. Solidarity is a better way for interacting harmoniously than hatred and alienation. So, in a spirit of solidarity, and to bring up its abysmal economy, London was enabled to get away with much, enriching itself, impoverishing the others.

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After Ejecting UK PM Cameron,

the City of London should no longer be able to clear euro-denominated trades, the French president said on Tuesday, June 29.

François Hollande said at the end of a summit in Brussels where EU elected leaders started trying to consider the wreckage of David Cameron’s referendum catastrophe, that it would be unacceptable for the trading of Euro derivatives and Euro equities to take place in the UK.

“The City, which thanks to the EU, was able to handle clearing operations for the Eurozone, will not be able to do them.  It can serve as an example for those who seek the end of Europe . . . It can serve as a lesson.”

High time. Amen. Let’s do it. Move London over to Paris and Frankfurt.

Patrice Ayme’