Will to Knowledge

 

Physics is nature: what we observe. Metaphysics is what we suppose beyond what we observe for sure. All logical discourses come with a metadiscourse. It’s Logic 101.

In its generosity, the New York Times decided to make the preceding statement one of its “pick“. And, yes, it is really Logic 101 (I could teach a basic class in Logic at a prestigious college; the “universe” one has to attach to a logic is essential to Model Theory).

Although true, and purely “scientific” the preceding statement is charged with consequences, very practical consequences. Because it means there is really nothing very special about people “of faith”, with so called “believers”. We all have to have faith, and we have to be believers, just because we use… logic.

Sorry to rob “believers” of the monopoly of respect they feel ought to be directed at them. We are all in the same metaphysical boat.

Little ideas, shattering little ideas… Shattering:

Assad’s Damascus, September 9, 2013

French experts think it could take ten years to locate and dispose pacifically of Syrian chemical weapons. Why? It may be the world’s largest arsenal thereof. Special factories will have to be built to b urn them safely (something some warheads can do).

As Paul Krugman observes: “One of the things you have to get used to if you want to debate…is that people will make arguments that leave you floored with their sheer dumbness. The first time you pay attention, you find it hard to believe.”

(Nota bene: I generalized Paul’s thinking a bit by omitting the mutilating precision he adorned his discourse with…)

An example of abominably acute stupidity was the suggestion, by self glorifying people who clamor to be “anti-war”, that the rebels gazed themselves, and their children. That ought to floor anyone by the sheer dumbness. Or does that mean the anti-wars view as natural to gas oneself, and one’s own children? Or does that mean they have such a feeling of racism against anti-Assad rebels, that they feel anti-Assad rebels are that sub-human, that killing their own children is just a tactic for them?

Stupidity is common, genius exceptional. It has to do, in part, with economics. Brain economics. All and any trait of genius always starts with The One, hated and vilipended.

Most brains are organized on the cheap, by just duplicating what other minds proffer. To make one’s mind a center of creation is an expensive habit to have.

New idea accepted means brain reorganized, hence huge energy spent for deconstructing erroneous neural connections, and for building new ones. Thus, when a new idea shows up, commoners interpret it as a potential aggression, or, at the very least, a costly proposition.

That’s one of the reasons why breakthroughs in understanding are always met with hostility.

Without breakthroughs in understanding, all and any economical system, and then society, or even civilization, will collapse. Why? Because there is no steady state: for millions of years, all and any society has exhausted resources, while confronting the hostiles. As the opposition adapts and the world’s old exploitation schemes get old, old ideas lose grip. Or relevance.

Depressed economies tend to recover, for the simple reason that, if they did not, a civilization sized catastrophe would incur. One cannot crash a civilization every few years, so depressions tend to pass. When they don’t, we have what happened when the Roman Imperium crashed, or what happened in the 1300s, or the 1600s… In the West. Or what happened in the  600s in the Orient, or to the Mayas after around the same date, or what happened to China in the 1200s, or 1800s…

Another reason why is The One, The Genius, is hated and vilipended? Because the human animal feel the importance of ideas. It can be described as the Will to Knowledge. It’s an instinct that even Nietzsche recognized as distinct from the Will To Power he was obsessed by. Human beings are technological, otherwise even dogs would eat them. It started with sticks and stones, and improvement thereof. It went on with fire, which allowed to conquer temperate latitudes and vegetable foods. Technology means knowledge, wisdom.

Hence those who can produce the wisdom come to dominate society. Hence the importance of elders all over durable societies. Be it Native American society, China, or the Roman Senate (Senate, from senens, old.) In Sparta, to be elected to the governing council, the Gerousia, one had to be at least 60.

Thus, with humans, the Will to Power and the Will to Wisdom are mixed. They are entangled. The danger is that the former messes up the later. And that was one of Socrates’ main complaints, the one he directed against Sophists (he basically accused them to be prostitutes). This is also the reason of my contempt for for-money universities (Harvard, etc.). The same complaint extends to for-money scientific publications. On that later point, a movement towards ‘open publishing’ has progressed. Some now claim that about 50% of scientific publishing is “open”.

The Will to Knowledge is human. It’s even the essence of man. In the case of Hitler, or Assad, the majority of people did not, does not, want to know. That made them inhuman morally, but also in essence.

If one wants a human civilization, the only that can, and deserves, to survive, the Will to Knowledge has to be preserved as a power in its own right, beyond and above the Will to Power.

***

Patrice Ayme

Liquidate The Liquidator

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro a few days ago, Dictator Assad pretended that, “In the beginning, the solution should have been found through a dialogue from which political measures would have been born.”

That was a lie: he shot peaceful secular demonstrators demanding an end to his tyrannical hereditary plutocracy, when protests started in 2011 (no other Arabic speaking dictator did this so massively). Then Assad repeated for the Figaro his refrain that 90% of the rebels are Al Qaeda. “The only way to cope with them is to liquidate them,” he said. “Only then will we be able to discuss political measures.”

First kill, then negotiate. Assad feels like Bruce Willis in the “Fifth Element”.

Assad should know: he is a liquidation specialist. “If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon.” Assad told Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri in 2004, a few months before two metric tons of TNT (seven Tomahawk missile warheads!) blew Hariri and dozens of other people into small bits. Hariri had been Prime Minister a total of ten years, and was the most prominent Lebanese politician. He and French president Chirac were pushing Assad’s occupation army out of Lebanon.

Why aren’t you worried about the Islamist rebels? They seem cruel and demented.

They are cruel and demented. The Assads made them so.

The Assad dynasty is about the worst of the worst. Smiles hiding criminal fury. It single handedly caused the Syrian civil war. Instead of  “liquidating” his countless enemies, an easier alternative, to reach appeasement, is to liquidate him.

As the sedate NYT puts it: “His violent reaction to the uprising led what was once a proudly secular society into a largely sectarian conflict between the majority Sunni Muslims and his small minority of Alawites, an obscure branch of Shiite Islam.

“For him there is nothing to lose,” a Damascus-based analyst said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “He cannot compromise. He has to see this through. He cannot rebuild; he cannot reconcile. He is stuck. He can rule over a pile of rubble — that is the best he can do.”

The New York Times ran the following day a report on the execution of 7 soldiers…

I read it, and send the following comment (the NYT censored nearly all my comments on Syria, something that makes me suspect a lack of neutrality on their part):

I find unbalanced that more than 95% of the NYT “pick” comments are statements using an irrelevant brutality to justify not punishing a crime against humanity by a government.

Now for the naive ones out there who are inspired by the years of infamy of the USA in 1939, 1940, when the USA refused to fight Hitler: the Assad family created that mess, and most of it, deliberately.

Although I strongly condemn Islamism, and wished the laws of war would be respected, in the case of an insurrection, it’s difficult to keep prisoners alive. Guerillas don’t run prisons. Besides, that the executions of those seven soldiers related in the NYT were brutal, and apparently unjustifiable, does not mean they were unjustifiable (the rebels claim those soldiers had committed war crimes, and recorded them in phones). The whole story was related by one of the rebles, who disagreed violently with the execution. 

A rush to judgment is rarely a rush to intelligence. Thinking is harder than sinking.

Notice that when three USA divisions were engaged in the Second Battle of the Marne, in July 1918, they made nearly no prisoners. One of the reason? The American divisions, although victorious, suffered so many casualties, they were taken out of combat after a couple of days. American GIs, confronted to immense ferocity, rose to the occasion, and replied in kind.

Most probably, Syrian rebels are doing just the same, answering massacres by massacres, after decades of massacres.

End of my (probably unpublished) comment to the NYT. 

(The GIs were also inspired by the Senegalese division by their side, which made zero prisoners, as the Senegalese knew full well that the Germans killed them racially like vermin! This sort of racial extermination went on in 1940, under Rommel’s 7th Panzer; however, by 1944, Marshall Rommel had realized that being a war criminal was not a good idea, so he ordered the arrest of the SS das Reich officer responsible of Oradour sur Glane!)

You see nothing good about Assad?

I share his official distaste for the Muslim Brotherhood. He can be amusing. As when he protested that comparing the Islamist dictator Morsi to a donkey was “an insult to the animal“. When he got to power, observers hoped that he would break away from his father’s dictatorship.

Yet, he became worse, as the Hariri assassination shows. Assad came to depend upon the Islamists to justify his own, much older terror. Terror will never end, as long as he is around. If he is not put out of commission, millions will die, and that’s the least of the problems that will arise.

Sec. of State Kerry derided common Americans as “Armchair Isolationists”? Makes you happy?

Kerry mentioned the liner full of German Jews that was turned back from the Americas, and sent back to Hamburg, and they all died. That was polite. I don’t have to be as polite as Kerry.

The USA plutocracy and its pet government, plus their honored homologues in the UK, formed the Deus ex-Machina that enabled Hitler.

You are obsessive. Plutocracy this, plutocracy that. What does plutocracy have to do with it?

Plutocracy is the rule of the Dark Side. That’s exactly what it means. Instead of the reign of Ahura Mazda, it’s the rule of Angra Mainyu. Plutocracy in that sense is more general than Jesus’ condemnation of wealth, it covers all the bad aspects of Satan as found in the New Testament and the Qur’an. Plus more.

Assad is a plutocrat in the worst senses of the term. Sometimes it’s a parody: his spendthrift wife was an investment banker in London. She is much admired there, a sort of Lady Di of Syria, rail thin.

Assad is expert at the dark art of an extremely rich family that killed hundreds of thousands to stay on top of the heap. He released thousands of Salafists to drown his legitimate secular democratic opposition, now he is whining that they are winning. His only future is death.

Assad’s plutocratic connections is why he is so popular in Britain. It’s again the same story with Britain, a semi democratic plutocracy, as in the 1930s, with Hitler and Mussolini: the plutocratic temptation. The men (and occasional women) who invented and financed Hitler were all plutocrats (as my uncle, who was in the know, told me when I was six).

Without the help, financing and investment of Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco would not even have fuel to move their tanks.

Stalin and Hitler hated each other!

They came to hate each other. But first they were allies. Even earlier, before Hitler, Stalin had helped Germany re-arm in violation of the Versailles Treaty. German generals trained in the USSR! That’s why they thought they could invade it successfully.

Britain did just the same, starting in the 1920s. There were very nasty exchanges about stealth German re-armement betwen Churchill and the French Republic, as early as 1929 (so pre-Hitler!). Without plutocrats from the USA, Nazism would not have been, and Stalin could not have developed his oil fields (thanks to pillars of the Democratic Party of the USA!).

Stalinism and Nazism were global phenomena inside which Anglo-Saxon plutocracy played a crucial role.

Can you be a bit more specific?

There is room for a 10,000 pages treaty. Not strangely, that treaty does not exist. Harvard forgot to study the subject (that Nazi songs were modified Harvard songs is a hint why!)

Jew hater Henry Ford massively financed Hitler in the early 1920s already. That’s how Hitler was able to constitute a well equipped private 5,000 men army by 1923. JP Morgan’s man was Schacht, the biggest man of the Weimar Reich; Rockefeller financed Nazi eugenics, etc.

Until 1924, Hitler was essentially an American propelled phenomenon. Some of these billionaire plutocrats, such as the Warburgs, were even Jewish. French intelligence at the time tried to expose all this, but it backfired and caused more hostility against France by those in the know in USA business circles. While the masses did not understand that they were manipulated by extremely vicious characters who had hedged themselves so that, whichever way World War Two would turn, they would profit from it.

Why would Jews support Hitler?

Just ask the peaceniks who support Assad. The head torturer Nazi Marshall who conquered Norway for Hitler was a pure Jew (Hitler then made him a “honorary Aryan“). Nearly 200,000 German Jews served in the Wehrmacht.

As Nietzsche insisted, the Will to Power tends to rule minds.

Fritz Thyssen, a top plutocrat, author of “I paid Hitler”, explained all this in great details (including later, the American plutocratic connection, with the USA government doing exactly what the hyper wealthy supporters of defunct Nazism told it to do). Don’t be surprised that Thyssen’s book is out of print, and out of reach of commoners.

Why do you always mix up the 1930s with today’s world politics?

For two main reasons. 1) The descendants of the bad actors of the 1930s and the institutions that supported them are still pretty much in power, and they use still the same highly conspiratorial methods. A method is to create, or support, very bad actors, such as Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco (in that order), and then leverage the mayhem they cause.

For example a casual look at how Egypt used to live like in the 1930s show a huge progression of Salafism Islam since. That can be traced back to the fact Roosevelt and his minions, to arrange ARAMCO and company, made a pact with Ibn Saud that involved the Muslim Brotherhood. As Roosevelt had just given half of Europe to Stalin, at Yalta, that all made sense as a great work of Pluto.

Eight years later, the CIA used Khomeini and his Shiites to throw down the democratically elected Mosaddegh (later assassinated).

2) The fact that some bad actors got away with, and leveraged themselves thanks to, crimes against humanity in the 1930s was noticed by other bad actors, who did the same. That danger is much greater now.  The stakes are much higher.

Why are the BRICS so opposed to enforcing International Law?

Obviously because they intent to break it themselves. Several of them face huge rebellions in their own empires. About half of the PRC’s empire would be in outright rebellion, if not for heavy preemptive terror. India has lost control of a huge territory. Putin used huge brutality in the Caucasus, and is afraid to lose it all. Meanwhile he made the local Christian superstition into a state religion again.

What would you tell Hollande and Obama?

That they should hint to Putin and Xi that they have got it good, controlling giant territories not historically under Russian or Han control. Russian spans eleven time zones. That’s very good.

But Russia does not need to spread its military control in the part that used to be the core of the West, the Eastern Mediterranean. Same observation for Mr. Xi: he can keep on playing on the other side of the Himalayas.

Others, worldwide, ought to be told that it will be human rights, one way, or another. When the UN was formed, the obsession was to avoid war between nations. Now the obsession ought to change into avoiding the sort of decomposition one observed in the 1930s, a mix of fascism, plutocracy and destruction of human rights.

As the movie 2010 had it: “Europa is not yours, don’t attempt a landing there.” If Putin and Xi want a cold war, they will not win it any better than Brezhnev and Mao.

In general, the BRICS became what they are, because of capital flight towards them, from the West. Financial and intellectual capital. Embraer won’t be much, without Airbus’ help and the Western market.

If the BRICS threaten the core of the West, the West can fully reel back its plutocracy. To start with, the West controls at least two-third of the world’s GDP (Euramerica alone controls 55%of world GDP).  

Considering the state of the planet, if order does not come to reign, it will have to be imposed. Auschwitz was secret, so the immoral ones could claim they did not know.

Instead Assad is loud and blatant, making the immoral ones who hide behind peace into obvious co-criminals. Damascus is not a swamp in a deserted part of Poland (as Auschwitz was). Damascus is the oldest continuously occupied city in the world. The rebels Assad gased there, are secular people fighting for survival. Assassinating their children is a crime as great as any crime known to humanity.

When the Second Cuban division invaded Congo in May 1978, the French did not ask the UN for authorization. France dropped paratroops, the 2e Régiment étranger de parachutistes over Kolwezi, and that was it. Cuba and France are in good terms now, precisely because France just said no, when it was time to say no.

Why do you say the West may have jurisdiction over Syria?

It’s a long story, and I should write a specific essay about it. However, in light of the G20 meeting, let me give a quick synopsis of the argument:

Syria was never really a nation, until it became a Roman province and reached its apogee under Rome. It was illegally seized in 636 CE by the Islamist invaders, using horendous methods. Looking that far back in the past may sound ridiculous, but the unlawful demolition of Israel by the Romans after the Second Judean war (explicitly recognized as illegal by emperor Julian around 360 CE) is the legal basis for the existence of Israel, as far as I am concerned.

France is the successor state of Rome. The Imperium Francorum is actually the fifth state of Rome, after the Monarchy, the five centuries long Republic, the Principate (starting with Augustus), and the Dominate (starting with Diocletian, around 300 CE).

Europe was officially a “Renovated Roman Empire” by 800 CE. Thus the states Francia spawned, not just France, and Germany, but Italy, Spain, Britain, actually all of Europe and its entire diaspora, are all successor states of Rome. That can be seen by looking at the Capitol in Washington and the (Roman!) law, all over.

After the First Crusade, Roman power was back in the Middle East, including in much of the green part of Syria. Legally, I do not see why it could be seen as having ever left. Call it the long arm of secular law.

That the successors states of Rome have jurisdiction over Syria is easier to explain than the presence of the Chinese or the Russian states over giant expanses they never controlled before (although Chinese armies were in Central Asia in 750 CE, after the Franks had destroyed the Damascus Caliphate). Something Putin and Xi should be made aware of: they behave as if they can mess up the historical core of the West. So why should no the West mess up with their empires?

Before and during World War Two, imperial fascist Japan generals conducted more than 2,000 gas attacks inside China. This was ignored by the world for years. But, as it turned out, not safely ignored. The act, and ignoring it, was a sign of collapsing ethics, worldwide.

There is No Hope but Hope. And Human Rights prophecize it.

***

Patrice Ayme

Pandora’s World

Abstract: More reasons for attacking Assad beyond what I wrote two years ago, “Force Works, Syria Next?“, and more recently (“Syrian Red Line” and “Peace From War“).

Three original points in the dialogue below: 1) there is -nearly- a right of ingerence in the United Nations, that allows to override the Security Council. The French Republic used it many times. This is such a case again. An occasion to teach most of the world’s countries about human rights.

2) Dictator Assad has threatened Israel and the French Republic. So now the self defense clause of the UN Charter can be used against him. In the latter case, that activates NATO.

3) An exclusive argument shows that the West has jurisdiction over Syria (as it had over Yougoslavia). The transfer of power from Rome to Islamist invaders in 636 CE was illegal, unconstitutional, uncivilized, and has proven irresponsible. Time does not make wrong right.

Fascism Is Always Personal, Decapitation Best

***

The French President wants to overthrow Assad’s regime. Is not that going too far?

No, it’s perfect. Assad, a criminal against humanity, equipped with weapons of mass destruction, has threatened France, so, to insure French security, that regime needs to go. The United Nations’ charter allows self defense, so now that Assad has threatened the French Republic, the latter has to right to strike. French strikes ought to specifically target the mass murderous dictator.

Assad is roughly in the same position as Hitler got in. Hitler did not surrender. Neither will Assad. Hitler ought to have been destroyed. By the same token, Assad ought to be destroyed. It’s not just a question of striking the VX factories, killing the neurotoxin scientists, their installation, and the specialized military units.

You see no ethical problem in attacking the Syrian government?

There are risks in engaging in action, any action, even going to the movies.

To check how fool proof my logic was, I dressed in pink (mimicking thus the “Code Pink” anti-war activists), and searched potential contradictors. I found them resting their wisdom on ill-information (I am much more “left”, whatever that means, than they are). Slogans (USA atom bombed Japan!) do not a logic make. (Self) glorifying peaceful thinking does not bend psychopathy. Quite the opposite; psychopaths smell weakness, an easy kill.

Fanatical pacifists bleat about non violence, to keep wolves away. They don’t understand biology. Let them munch grass. Fiercer ones save the world. Always have, always will.

Of course, when attacking Assad, countless things could go wrong, and will. A French SCALP missile could stray off course and flatten a school (but they will come at night and their precision is one meter). Assad put people that he would rather see dead, such as some of his own Suni troops, in harm’s way.

In 1944-45, American strategic bombing over France, even Paris, killed many thousands of French people, and flattened entire cities (Brest, Saint Malo, Toulon, etc.). Some, including myself, consider that some of these bombings were motivated by weakening France. Yet, if you ask the French, they shrug, and use a well know expression:“C’est la guerre.” (“It’s war.”)

Assad turned peaceful protests against his plutocracy into a butchery: more than 100,000 dead, more than two million refugees (UNHCR numbers: one million more refugees in 6 months).

The Syrian dictator has violated International Law  by using lethal chemicals in a mass attack on a civilian population (inside his own capital city).

Doing so, the dictator also committed a crime against humanity by killing hundreds of children, knowing full well that the gas would sink in underground shelters where women and children had taken refuge. That does not make him legally different than the worst Nazis.

(Klaus Barbie, who had personally tortured to death around 5,000 people, was condemned to life detention by a French court for the murder of 34 children. Why? Because killing children as a hate crime is a crime against humanity. No prescription. That’s just one thing one can demonstrate Assad just planned to do, assassinating 462 children, at least.)

Chomsky has called an intervention in Syria a war crime.

Chomsky’s indignation against imperialism is so parody, it has no bite. The real problem is plutocracy, not imperialism. There are empires all over. I condemn Bush’s attack against Iraq in 2003 or Carter’s attack against Afghanistan in 1979. Posing as anti-establishment, while being part of it, as Chomsky is confusing.

Chomsky claims that the usage of neurotoxins by the Syrian government is not credible. He thus contradicts the evidence put forward by the French and American governments, and common sense. (The French government web sites have more than 100 shocking videos of gas poisoning in progress.)

I expect no less from someone whose scientific reputation rests on a silly theory of language (“innate grammar“; a theory that someone familiar with varied languages, can only smirk about).

This being said, Chomsky does a nice job as crazy, well meaning uncle in the attic.

Why can’t you embrace non violence?

Non violence contradicts the essence of man. Those who practice it religiously deny reality and invite moral disaster.

Gandhi embraced violent non violence that made him the self declared friend of Hitler, and caused the partition of India along superstitious lines, killing millions. So he was a disaster, although an icon to the fanatical non violent, and that makes sense.

By contrast, Mandela, also a lawyer, embraced violence when he saw no other effective way. By using bombs, Mandela earned the respect of his racist enemies, to the point he was able to change their minds.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is an extremely violent species. Quasi by definition. Be it only violence in the noble sense of using force. Homo SS has never been as violent as he is now, when he is threatening the entire planet, by his mere existence. Yet, non violence is not an option.

Because technology itself is violent. Yet, without it, most of humanity would die. Moreover, solutions to the dilemmas at hand, like the CO2 poisoning of the atmosphere, will involve great force, great imperium (say putting international flying, or even much trade, out of reach of the commoners).

The key to survival, of the humanity we have, is not to lie supine, but to call for ever more violence, or, if you prefer that semantics, force, while channeling it where it will do necessary good.

Politics is about making the lesser of two cruel choices always. Those who do not want to impose, or suggest, the application of cruelty, should stay out of politics.

Is not that too radical a position?

No. Take the CO2 poisoning of the planet. Obama proposed, in the same style as Obamacare, a host of regulations, all over. At best that would make for a police state, with a huge bureaucracy, a sort of Stalinism without executions. At worst, it will be costly and won’t work.

Instead the free market solution is just to change the playground ground rule, by imposing a carbon tax. Just as the free market solution for health care is Medicare For All.

You have lost me completely there. What’s the connection with Syria?

To do the right and moral thing in politics, one has to take often tough and cruel decisions. Just as Obama has long been reluctant to do. Until Libya, and now Syria. The boy is growing up.

A good politician has to take decisions that, at first will feel tough and cruel to some. Sure, it will be tough to kill Assad and his butlers. However, if one had killed Hitler and his butlers in a timely manner, more than 70 million people would not have died, and huge suffering would have been prevented.

Certainly, as a politician, it’s sometimes bad to be too good. Chamberlain thought he was good by refusing war as a solution in Munich and leaving Czechoslovakia to the wolf. That proved a disastrous decision, as the French republic and Czechoslovakia, per se, could have held off Hitler.

The planet is hurtling towards destruction at this point. The correct ideas to save the planet will feel tough and cruel to many, if not most. Because they will be so much out of what they are used to, their comfort zone. That should be explained to the naïve masses.

The Iranian president, says he is “a lawyer, not a colonel”. Is not that reassuring?

Rouhani is president. He gives orders to colonels. Or would, if the Grand Ayatollah did not pull the strings. He “strongly & completely condemns chemicals in Syria”.  Yet, if he does not want to do like USA president Roosevelt in the 1930s, who argued with Hitler, but then helped him as much as he could, Rouhani should help do away with a man who gases his own capital city.

The best way to avoid serious wars is to show to fanatics, and persuade them, that violation of International Law and crimes against humanity will be met with the Wrath Of God, right away. A language they understand.

Don’t you think that spurning the UN Security Council is ill-advised? Chomsky said that was a war crime.

Chomsky barks, history will forget him. The French Republic intervened many times, and got retrospective approval of the United Nations. The 1930s have taught the French that they should trust their instincts about human rights, and not pay too much attention to two tendencies:

1) International plutocracy’s influence (its moods, its plots, both adverse to democracy).

2) The global anti-Republic mood (one of the aspects of the anti-republican mood is the claim to cultural equivalence, aka “multiculturalism”, a mood that makes, for example Islamism equivalent to the secular democratic republic that is constitutional, and the most advanced stage of civilization, and has been, for 3,000 years).

Why Are You Pushing For Regime Change In Syria?

If one just “degraded” Assad’s capabilities, the danger is to undershoot.

1) One does not just wound a bear. Assad has engaged in terrorist acts in other countries (Lebanon). If he survives, he will feel empowered.

2) The likes of Kim have to be shown that, beyond the Red Line, there is no hope. A clear example has to be made. If we do not, Pandora’s world will open, and all evil contained therein will escape and spread over the Earth.

[Part Two Tomorrow.]

***

Patrice Ayme

Syrian Red Line

Obama said that Assad using gas in Syria would be a red line. Then he muttered that he could not tell which shade of pink it was. However French laboratories  determined and French foreign minister Fabius, an ex-PM, declared officially, that chemical weapons were used in Syria by Assad. Many times. The neurotoxic agent is Sarin.

Time to go to war. War is the force that defines civilization.

Civilization Defended: Ypres

Why to make nerve agent a casus belli? First, chemicals are unfair weapons: one cannot surrender to a gas cloud. Second, militarized chemicals also allow mass killings, cheaply, and readily (in the Nazi extermination camps, most of assassinations happened using deadly gas made by IG Farben, a chemical cartel created by Wall Street in the 1920s).

France hates chemical weapons.

In World War First on 22 April 1915, the German Army released 168 tons of chlorine, north of the Belgian town of Ypres. It formed a gray-green cloud that drifted across a division of French from Martinique and Algeria. Some tried to flee. They got asphyxiated while running. Within ten minutes, more than 5,000 French troops were gazed to death. Yes, in minutes, five thousands dead: analogies with Auschwitz are invited.

Ypres After Fascist Prussian Attack WWI

That massacre left a 7,000 meter gap in the Allied frontline. However, the German infantry, wary of the gas, failed to exploit the breach as much as the criminals who ordered them around wanted them to.

Other Canadian and French troops were rushed in. The Germans reapplied gas. In spite of various counter-measures against the gas, the Canadians suffered 1,800 dead from the chlorine by 24th April.

(Canadians? Were where the “Americans”? They were at peace, and would take another two years to threaten fascist Germany with words: the closest adviser of USA president Wilson had proposed an alliance with Germany in 1914! Thus we can see that World War One happened, in part, because the USA played Germany against France and Britain. Same old, same old…)

The allies called the German usage of gas a war crime. International treaties outlawed the usage of chemicals in shells. The Germans argued disingenuously that the gas had been released from “canisters” not “shells”. Fascists are disingenuous, or they are not.

Because the element of surprise was passed, never again during the war was a gas attack so successful. The Allied Democracies, especially the Brits (up-wind in Flanders!) had to retaliate in kind: only gas could stop  those who used it. All together 100,000 soldiers died from gas, right away, and one million were handicapped for life (most dying in the following years).

France, Britain and Canada screamed loudly that the Prussian General staff was a gang of criminals.

Yet after the war, under pressure from the glandularly deprived, and soon stroke struck USA president Wilson, obvious German war criminals of the First World war, starting with the Kaiser and the four generals and two admirals who had plotted the war, as early as December 1912, were not prosecuted.

That Colonel House, Wilson’s grey eminence, had proposed an American-British-German world domination deal to the Kaiser, on May 1, 1914, obviously inflected American policy thereafter. In particular from 1919, all the way to 1942… don’t be surprised if this sort of history is not taught in pro-plutocratic Harvard.

The non-prosecution of gross war criminality in World War I opened the way to Auschwitz. In the first few weeks of the German invasion, Belgian and French civilians were made hostage to military death threats, and then summarily executed in retaliation (for whatever).

Clearly, the generals who ordered the usage of gas on April 22, 1915, ought to have been judged, condemned and executed. And if there were 500 “Prussian” colonels, and generals to be executed, that should have been done. Their successors would have been in turn, more enthusiastic at executing the Nazis in a timely manner.

Sometimes, civilization is all about executions.

(A dark Obama, his wings laden with smart bombs just passed by… This one has been told to man battlefields exclusively, if he is really as smart as he wants the rabble to believe he is.)

How did the Germans become the greatest, less excusable, mass criminals of the twentieth Century? By not being punished vigorously enough in a timely manner.

BASF chemist Fritz Haber, a Nobel Laureate, had developed the processes used to make ammonia. Haber came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon. After the war, Haber should have been caged like the wild and dangerous beast he was, and left there to eat dry bread and water for the next thirty years.

That would have emphasized Rabelais’ point, published in 1532 CE, that “Science without conscience is only ruin of the soul.” Instead, some people still harbor respect for Haber, that despicable degenerate, to this day. And please don’t tell me he is honorable because he made ammonia; somebody else would have.

Haber’s violation of international law and common human decency was one of the many moral compromises that foreshadowed greater horrors. As the world war Germany had deliberately started drained manpower from its chemical factories, Bayer Chief Executive Friedrich Carl Duisberg lobbied for a novel solution: importing forced labor from occupied Belgium.

In other words, all what came to be known as “Nazism” was taught to Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s generation by their forefathers. Their unpunished forefathers.

German fascism kept on going, through sheer mental inertia. It gazed more than ten million civilians in WWII.

The Germans, amusingly, were told never to do this again, and signed a very strong treaty about this, never using gas militarily. In 1944-1945, Adolf Hitler’s kingdom of the beasts was perforated by the invading armies of his enemies. Hitler, and the top Nazis knew they were going to die, and that their world of horror was being annihilated. They were total fanatics. Martha Goebbels, wife of ephemeral Reich Chancellor and propaganda chief Goebbels, would poison her six children (although some of her children tried to resist the monstrous author of their days).

Hitler disposed of dozens of thousands tons of stockpiled nerve agent, and the means to deliver them (hypersonic long range rockets and several types of jet bombers). Hitler used his V2 rockets to bomb London and Paris. He could have ordered to gas London and Paris. But Hitler had been gazed in 1918 (by the French). He knew the consequences would have been terrible: Germany would be gazed back, to start with. So the Nazis did not use gas. They did not even consider the usage of gas. On the battlefield.

A moderate mullah, Hassan Rouhani, was just elected president of Iran (on the first turn, by surprise). International sanctions on Iran have been so severe that Iranians chose someone who has always been keen to negotiate with the West (he had been fired from his nuclear negotiator role for being too keen that way).

The best way to encourage people to vote for moderates is by punishing firmly nasty people such as chemical Assad. The systematic use of chemicals cannot be left so unpunished that it keeps on being used. The mood of using gas, expecting to get away with it, could expand, spreading to other countries, in all sorts of ways.

There are of course many other reasons to go to war in Syria, some all the way back to 638 CE, when, after a four year war, characterized by the illness of the emperor, huge tactical blunders, and a lot of luck for the enemy, the Roman empire lost Syria… to fanatics. The best way to fight fanaticism is early on.  

The Western military intervention in Syria will have to support only secular, anti-tyrannical forces. Assad knows this. So he (and co-plotting Iran) released craftily religious fanatics (Al Nusra) to pollute his own opposition and give him a Western palatable excuse to kill it. Another complication is that there is a triangle of hatred, mutual support, and co-dependence between the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt), the Saudi family (Arabia, oil), and Washington (Wall Street, Dollar, Plutocracy running amok). All these are invested in Syria.

Well, maybe it’s a good occasion to break the cycle. The USA’s oil production is becoming considerable, and the USA is not dependent of the Saudis anymore…

In any case, the usage of Sarin has made the situation clear and transparent. That, by itself, gives enough of a moral reason to go to war in Syria.

Don’t forget that the origin of the concept of morality is sustainability. A world were tyrants use weapons of mass destruction so that their wives can shop till they drop, is not sustainable.

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Patrice Ayme