Gandhi, Or How “Non-Violence” Can Foster War And The Established Order

Abstract: Gandhi, superficially a fanatical advocate of “non-violence” had an impressive number of maleficent agendas, and in particular, worked hard for years against the war against Hitler and other fascisms. This is troubling in several ways, including Gandhi’s explicit advocacy of the established order, his racism against blacks and “unbelievers” (we will not talk about sleeping with little girls for now).

Gandhi, was long an advocate of the caste system, and was no reformer, said untouchable Ambedkar, India’s first justice minister, co-author of India’s Constitution, someone who knew Gandhi well, In the guise of “self-reliance” Gandhi pushed for Hindu nationalism, including the Ashoka Chakra, with its 24 spokes, which thrones in the middle of the Indian flag. 

Gandhi’s refusal to fight the genocidal Hitler, and long flirtation with fascism, east and west, while promoting a specific superstition, and related oligarchy, contributed to ever increasing the Hindu-Muslim rift. (After this aiding and abetting for partition, Gandhi switched, as opportunistic hypocrites anxious to cover their tracks tend to do.)

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Non-violence in the face of violence, some of it initiated in an underhanded fashion, is a losing proposition for humanity’s progress. So Mr. saintly non violent ended his life  as the most hated person in India, and accused of the worst crime: abetting India’s partition. 

Gandhi’s inheritance is a subcontinent divided by a nuclear armed confrontation… And that was completely useless: the subcontinent would have become de facto independent anyway. 

Canada’s head of state is a distant monarch… All the more remarkable, as Canada, differently from India, suffered from two distinct genocides…, 

Considering the adversarial relationship of Gandhi with progress, one may wonder about Gandhi’s enduring appeal. The answer is simple: Gandhi advocated non violence at any cost, including the cost of perpetuating the savage past (a past Gandhi lauded, including the caste system). Thus Gandhi was a friend of the plutocratic principle, the power of evil, and the power of the established establishment. So Gandhi has become an information operation of the plutocratic order, promoting supine behavior, fed by a shallow knowledge of Indian politics… That may not be the wisest strategy as Hindu nationalism, an inheritance from Gandhi, has never been so strong.

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Gandhi’s Assassination Was The Product Of Gandhi’s Himself:

Many great historical assassinations have occurred for unclear motives: Henri IIII and Henri IV of France, even the Archduke of Austria in 1914 (he was a strong supporter of peace), or JFK…  

Gandhi, though, was killed for explicit reasons: abet, bait and switch of tribal violence. Gandhi was assassinated, by the firing of three bullets into Gandhi’s chest and stomach at point-blank range…. That was the final assassination attempt against Gandhi. A preceding one had involved hand grenades in a crowd. So apparently some begged to differ about Gandhi being all about love and non violence. And they dared to belch some hate back… All over the Indian subcontinent.

Gandhi, after meeting with the fascist mass murderer Mussolini, actively opposed the war against his “dear friend” Hitler. Gandhi, as the main architect of inter-ethnic conflict in India, arguably caused the death of 10+ million of the subcontinent… 

I would argue that this happened as a result of long term consequences from Gandhi’s positions concerning Nazism… Positions which were no accident: Gandhi long supported the caste system in India (although later he opportunistically changed his advocacy)… Hitler established a caste system in Germany. 

I am far from being the first one who suggests that Gandhi’s active lethal hypocrisy and rabid religiosity caused mayhem. Gandhi’s assassin, Godse felt that the massacre and suffering caused during, and due to, the partition could have been avoided if Gandhi and the Indian government had acted to stop the killing of the minorities (Hindus and Sikhs) in West and East Pakistan.

India, said Godse, was not being run by public opinion, but by Gandhi’s whims. Godse added that he admired Gandhi for his lofty character, ceaseless work and asceticism, so that his influence outside of the due process would continue while he was alive. Gandhi had to be removed from the political stage, so that India can begin looking after its own interests as a nation.

In Godse’s opinion, “the only answer to violent aggression was violent self-defense”. Godse stated that “Gandhi had betrayed his Hindu religion and culture by supporting Muslims at the expense of Hindus” because his lectures of ahimsa (non-violence) were directed at and accepted by the Hindu community only. Godse said.

 “I sat brooding intensely on the atrocities perpetrated on Hinduism and its dark and deadly future if left to face Islam (Pakistan) outside and Gandhi inside, and . . . I decided all of a sudden to take the extreme step against Gandhi…

Therefore, I bowed before Gandhi when I met him, then performed my moral duty and killed Gandhi.”

Gandhi’s “dear friendship” with Hitler, praise for and official visit to Mussolini, complete with reviewing a honor guard, was more of the same ideals Gandhi embraced… India’s Muslims disagreed deeply with Gandhi on that position, as Islam is (supposedly) caste-less… and thus the rift started. In a letter to Churchill dated July 23, 1940, with Britain fighting for survival, Gandhi wrote:

“I would like you to take this from me as a declaration of war against the war. I have not come to ask you to surrender India. I have come to ask you to end the war. You have only to retire and the whole of India will applaud you.“

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Mahatma Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress (INC), the largest political party in India at the time. Gandhi opposed India’s participation in the war and called for non-cooperation with the British war effort. However, the British authorities mobilized enormous, and enthusiastic Indian resources for the war.

Muslims of India had their own political organization, the All India Muslim League, which was established in 1906 in Dhaka (now in Bangladesh). Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who is often referred to as the “founder of Pakistan.” disagreed with Gandhi and supported the British war effort for years (that’s remarkable, considering Islam’s hostility to Judaism).

Mahatma Gandhi made abundant derogatory or offensive remarks towards “kafirs” (an Arabic word meaning “unbelievers” here used apparently for the Blacks)… 

“I observed with regret that some Indians were happy to sleep in the same room as the Kaffirs, the reason being that they hoped there for a secret supply of tobacco, etc. This is a matter of shame to us. We may entertain no aversion to Kaffirs, but we cannot ignore the fact that there is no common ground between them and us in the daily affairs of life. Moreover, those who wish to sleep in the same room with them have ulterior motives for doing so. Obviously, we ought to abandon such notions if we want to make progress.” ~ Vol. IX, p. 257

“Some Indians do have contacts with Kaffir women. I think such contacts are fraught with grave danger. Indians would do well to avoid them altogether.” ~ Vol. X, p. 414…Mar. 10, 1911

The wheel depicted on the Indian national flag, which is also known as the Ashoka Chakra, has 24 spokes. Under Gandhi’s impulse, as early as the 1930s, the Ashoka Chakra was adopted as the emblem of India.

The 24 spokes on the Ashoka Chakra represent the 24 virtues mentioned in the ancient Indian text, the Jataka Tales. These virtues include non-violence, truthfulness, purity, self-control, and generosity, among others. The Ashoka Chakra is named after the Indian emperor Ashoka, who ruled from 268 to 232 BCE. Ashoka became a Buddhist fanatic and spread  Buddhism all over India and Asia. However, towards the end of his reign, Ashoka became increasingly paranoid and ruthless, and he was involved in wars with neighboring kingdoms. A succession war after his death led to the fragmentation of the Maurya Empire. As Gandhi, Ashoka tried to impress by his do-goodism: All men are my children. As for my own children I desire that they may be provided with all the welfare and happiness of this world and of the next, so do I desire for all men as well.

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Gandhi is often viewed as a national and global icon of peace, nonviolence, and social change, and he continues to inspire people around the world with his ideas and example. But the truth was anything but…

Until 1922, Gandhi purported the caste system as unalienable. Then, citing its importance for the development of our country, he wrote that caste was:“…responsible for durability of Hindu society, seed of swaraj (freedom), unique power of organization, means of providing primary education and raising a defense force, means of self-restraint, natural order of society, and most important of all, eternal principle of hereditary occupation for maintaining societal order.”

Gandhi even threatened to fast to death to prevent Untouchables from having separate electorates, because that threatened to confirm and reveal the caste system as a cruel and discriminatory system that damned the lower castes to suffer every possible indignity and prevent their social ascent. But to Gandhi “the hereditary principle is an eternal principle,” and “to change it is to create disorder.”

These views become even more problematic in Gandhi’s work ‘The Ideal Bhangi’ (Bhangi is the lowest sort of untouchable). In ‘The Ideal Bhangi’, According to Gandhi, having ‘bhangis’ around is necessary for society because they sanitize the latrines and maintain community health. Calling for equal recognition for the ‘bhangi’, Gandhi mapped out the responsibilities of an ‘ideal bhangi’:

“In my opinion an ideal bhangi should have a thorough knowledge of the principles of sanitation. He should know how a right kind of latrine is constructed and the correct way of cleaning it. He should know how to overcome and destroy the odour of excreta and the various disinfectants to render them innocuous.”

Here the problem is that Gandhi’s glorification of a barbaric practice gets repeated and cited several times to justify manual scavenging..This touches on a more fundamental problem with Gandhi. Gandhi was against machinery and modern civilisation. In contrast, following an argument as old as Aristotle, Ambedkar argues that modern machinery enables humans to have leisure. And leisure, in turn, is the primary precondition for culture and civilization to thrive, which makes human life worthy of its existence.

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AMBEDKAR’s SCATHING CRITIQUE OF GANDHI:

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an economist, Indian social reformer and politician, and the first JUSTICE MINISTER of India, was a prominent critic of Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy of non-violence. Ambedkar, who was himself a Dalit (formerly known as “untouchable”), disagreed with Gandhi’s approach to social reform, or lack thereof, particularly with regard to the caste system and the treatment of Dalits in Indian society.

Ambedkar believed that Gandhi’s emphasis on non-violence was deliberately ineffective in addressing the structural injustices of the caste system, and that it perpetuated the status quo by discouraging oppressed people from engaging in militant forms of resistance. Ambedkar argued that Gandhi’s promotion of manual labor, such as spinning cloth on a charkha, was a form of symbolic politics that did not address the underlying social and economic inequalities faced by Dalits and other marginalized groups. Gandhi was explicitly for the social status quo, because of the stability it provided with.

Ambedkar also disagreed with Gandhi’s approach to politics and his vision of an independent India. Ambedkar observed that Gandhi’s emphasis on Hindu values culture, and religion ignored the diversity of India’s religious and cultural traditions. Ambedkar also viewed Hinduism as regressive, and vowed early on to stop being an Hindu, precisely because of Hinduism’s attachment to injustice. Ambedkar believed that Gandhi’s vision of a decentralized village-based economy would be inadequate for addressing the challenges of modern industrialization. In all this, time proved Ambedkar right.

Worse, the Gandhian idea of ‘trusteeship’ is ostensibly geared towards the elimination of class struggle in the relationship between employers and employees and between landlords and tenants. Gandhi promoted generalized love between the haves and have-nots! Ambedkar, being a trained economist, was highly skeptical of the rich protecting the interests of the poor.

One can thus see why Gandhi became so popular with the plutocratic establishment and its plutocratic universities: by arguing against active violence frantically, and, in particular against the idea of revolution, Gandhi fostered passive violence and an unfair establishment of society…

Ambedkar warned about Gandhism as ‘conservatism in excelsis’ that ‘helps those who have, to keep what they have and to prevent those who have not from getting what they have a right to get’.

Ambedkar declared Gandhian philosophy to be suited only for the privileged leisure class, which is vindicated by the class status of the present torch-bearers of Gandhism.

Ambedkar’s opus dissects and concludes that the ideals of Gandhi are ill-suited for the aspirations of a democratic society.

Ambedkar, from his unique vantage point of being an ‘untouchable’ and a philosopher, and India’s first Justice Minister, indicted the highly Brahminised status-quoist formulations of Gandhi. The foundational conflicts between Ambedkar and Gandhi were not merely personal, but rather epitomize the fault lines of caste that run wide and deep across the social fabric of India.

Hence Gandhi’s hypocritical non-violence message. And its resonance! Even after Hitler had declared war to the USA, killed millions of Jews, millions of Poles and millions of Slavs and other civilians, invaded much of Europe, Jeanette Rankin refused to vote for war against Hitler. She was the first woman elected to the US Congress, and the only US Congress person to vote against war against atrocious mass murdering infamy. So yes, pro-Hitlerism was a contagious Ghandian characteristic…. She had already done the same in WWI. She wrote:”There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense…. You can’t win war anymore than an earthquake.” So she said, in practice, let’s invade Europe, kill all the French, Jews, Poles, Slavs, whoever, because we can’t compromise.

Rankin traveled many times to India and was an ardent follower of Gandhi. This Gandhian partisan of genocide is reverred to this day. 

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The nuclear confrontation that is the most lasting fruit of Gandhi’s distracting antics is not over yet, and could result in further mass death. Real pacifists know it would have been better if India had followed the path of, say, Canada.

Those who don’t know the details, where devils hide, may suggest that there was a racist component to British administration in India. However regrettable and unjust and plain intolerable, those policies did not seem to have risen to the genocidal policies practiced against the French and Native Americans in Canada (forced ethnic cleansing, separation of children from parents). However bad genocidal policies got in Canada, the enormous country is not split in two states confrontation.

Gandhi was a friend of evil-rule (pluto-kratia), and this is why he is viewed as so politically correct. “Non-violence” is the first advocacy of the established order. Without violence, the establishment perpetuates itself, meanwhile exhausting its ecological support, and thus bringing mayhem ever closer.

The argument must be made that India, and the world, would have been much better off without Gandhi’s influence. The insistence on “non-violence” is now prominent in all the western partisans of Putin. According to them, resisting the genocidal invader is an imperialist plot… the very concept Gandhi brandished persistently in the 1930s and 1940s… More deeply, even, the embrace of non-violence has prevented significant action against the ever more powerful global plutocracy and some of its consequences, such as the climate catastrophe.

In India itself, Modi, the nationalist Prime Minister, is more popular than ever. And Gandhi’s worst cultural inheritance lives on.

Gandhi had young girls, children, sleep with him in his bed, a practice he indulged in industrially, and that the Me Too movemente has belatedly noticed. Gandhi slept naked with young female companions, inside the same bed. He called this “the custom of the ashram,”. Some girls who shared a bed with Gandhi were young as 13 or 14 years old. In particular, he slept with his grand niece, a teenager. Gandhi declared that was to test his willpower to abstain from sex. 

Gandhi had come round to the fantastic, not to say demented and fantasmagoric, view, as Indian historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in the second volume of his two-volume biography of Mohandas K(Mahatma) Gandhi, “that the violence around him was in part a product or consequence of the imperfections within him”. And those imperfections, which he scrupulously recorded and publicised, included the “nocturnal emissions” (wet dreams) that had occurred in the years 1924, 1936 and 1938 to spoil a record of celibate living that began in South Africa in 1906, and which led each time to bouts of self-disgust. So Gandhi slept with young girls to prove to himself that he was pure.

There’s a Western impulse to view Gandhi as the quiet annihilator of caste, a characterization that’s categorically false. He viewed the emancipation of Dalits as an untenable goal, and felt that they weren’t worth a separate electorate. He insisted, instead, that Dalits remain complacent, waiting for a turn that history never gave them. Dalits continue to suffer from the direct results of prejudices sewn into the cultural fabric of India.

History, as Arundhati Roy wrote in last year’s seminal essay “The Doctor and the Saint,” has been unbelievably kind to Gandhi. This has given us the latitude to brush off his prejudices as mere imperfections, small marks on clean hands. Apologists will insist that Gandhi was flawed and human….

These are the mental gymnastics we engage in when we’re eager to mythologize. The vile traits Gandhi exhibited persist in Indian society at large today—virulent anti-blackness, a blasé disregard for women’s bodies, careful myopia around the piss-poor treatment of Dalits. It’s not a coincidence that these very strains of Gandhi’s rhetoric have been stamped out of his legacy.

Modi claims to be a follower of Gandhi: non-violent, etc. So Modi promotes the best path to war, Hindu nationalism and values, marginalizing gigantic minority groups such as Muslims… However, in economics, Modi promotes foreign investment and economic growth through measures such as tax reform and infrastructure development… approaches which are anti-Gandhian…

A refined knowledge of what is wrong with Gandhiism can only help the world… One thing that is prominent is the naivety and gullibility of Gandhi’s followers. That way they are similar to all the followers of advocates of the established order… And that includes say Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, all partisans of dictatorship, so oligarchism… Why? Because the established order, by definiton, is tyranny, or at least hereditary oligarchy, which Gandhi explicitly and persistently advocated as a superior good. 

So these simple minded followers need to learn that mellifluous discourses are generally a trap. Hitler, for example, when he was running for office, always presented himself as an advocate of justice, peace and minorities… Lenin and Stalin, of course, were building a workers’ paradise... And so on. 

Some may object that the true nature of Gandhi’s evil manipulations is a theoretical debate. However, it’s eminently practical: the pro-Putin use this conceptual arsenal, straight from Gandhi. Lying is in general perfectly logical. And the reputation of Gandhy promoted by the dominant plutocratic universities is a huge lie. They try to make us believe Indai became independent because of “non-violence”, when in truth India became violent because of this pseudo non-violence. And this goes all the way down in the nitty gritty of mass mayhem. 
Mahatma Gandhi was PM Nehru’s mentor, Gandhi advised against compromise with the Muslims, because he wanted Britain out ASAP, ten months ahead of schedule. Gandhi went on the record with his famous:
“If India wants her bloodbath, the Mahatma declared, she shall have it.“
How much of a bath is it going to be?

Patrice Ayme

Recapitulation:

Gandhism is an excellent, live example, of love weaponized, virtue displaying to achieve, stealthily, while claiming the opposite, horrendous aims (partition of India, Hindu rule, Casteism, Passeism, Brahmanism).

Horror shows claiming to be the opposite of what they were are legions in history, in particular, Western history. For those who don’t know, Hitler’s electoral program was the exact opposite of his implementation (that’s why so many Germans voted for him: they believed the love and peace displayed!)

Many people in the West are still subscribing to Gandhism, hook, line and sinker… because all we need is love and non violence, which is the plutocratic domestication mantra, what one needs to believe to avoid revolutions… Obviously that all we need is love was denied by Hitler (“dear friend” of Gandhi) and Putin.

Gandhi tried to project a sweet image… very successfully in the privileged classes out of India. But reality is quite the opposite, hence the many assassination attempts against him. His assassin, Godse, explained (part of) the situation well. The subject is relevant to Putinism, and the related ambiguous attitude of the ruling Western plutocracy… which wanted us so much to love and non-violate Putin and his ilk.

Research As Moral Principle: The Case Of The Energy Crisis

Energy, Justice, Research

Humanity is search. Humanity is when evolution has become conscious, and searches for solutions to the point of inventing problems to resolve. This, like the evolution of the universe it animates, runs its course. Resistance is futile.

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Is Using Fossil Fuels Moral?

Biden just allowed a major oil project, on Federal land, in Alaska [1]. Is that moral?

Morality Is Not So Much What’s Good, But What PERDURES:

What’s morality? Is morality the avoidance of evil? Nobody understand fully what evil is, because one would need to understand the future thoroughly.

Morality is from Old French moral (14c.) and directly from Latin moralis “proper behavior of a person in society,” literally “pertaining to manners,” coined by Cicero (“De Fato,” II.i) to translate Greek ethikos (see ethics)… ēthikos “ethical, pertaining to character,” from ēthos “moral character,” related to ēthos “custom”…

Greek ēthos “habitual character and disposition; moral character; habit, custom…. An important concept in Aristotle (as in “Rhetoric” II xii-xiv).

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We are literally fumigating the planet, among other problems. Leaders blow hot wind on it all, by enjoying the fruits of pleasing the powers that be. 

The world needs energy. Historically, most energy usage, per capita, has been in the so-called “West”… which has now offshored industry to China, as it used to offshore energy to dictators. 

Justice demands that, on a worldwide basis, energy usage, per capita, be the same for all (or, at least, that there is enough energy to satisfy people’s basic needs, including maximum educational availability, which is not the case now). 

Thus, and as observed, energy usage will augment, worldwide. 

Now 84% of primary energy production, worldwide, is from fossil fuels… the same quotient as in 1980, when the alert was sounded about the necessity of cutting emissions of CO2. The lack of progress in decarbonation was mostly due to a systemic campaign against nuclear energy, which started under president Carter.   

Solar progressed enormously, but is land hungry. Wind is intermittent, and, as the greenhouse planetary heating makes the wind belt migrate towards the poles, it is likely that wind will peter out. 

So what we need is new energy sources: green hydrogen (killed by Obama on day one of his presidency, thanks to the fossil fuel lobby), new and safer small nuclear fission, thorium, and thermonuclear fusion. So a gigantic investment in research should be made (China already connected new nuclear tech to the grid). Meanwhile, one must gain time… And that means new fossil fuels, hopefully cleaner. 

Fossil fuel propaganda claims that its own decline is around the corner. The graphs show that’s a lie, but it’s OK, as long as more money goes towards research in new, decarbonated energy. 

The truth is that we just don’t have the technology right now to decarbonate most of primary energy production. We need more science, bringing in revolutionary tech like room temp superconductors, or photovoltaics which can work at night (using infrared).

We presently need fossil fuels, so that civilization will not collapse. So using fossil fuels is moral, when no alternative can be found. But we also need to stop traveling as if there is no tomorrow and stop heating stuff as if we were Neanderthals, and heat pumps didn’t exist. The San Francisco Bay Area government’s regulatory commission met and 20 votes for, none against, decided to outlaw the sale of fossil fuel heaters and furnaces, starting in 2030. The regulatory commission declared that somebody had to lead, and it may as well be the Bay Area. Notice that California prouces fossil fuels… Also notice that there is such a thing as a Bay Area government, an accord between 110 cities… A democratic thing. It gives more manoeuvrability than Switzerland, while democratic… 

We also need to find, and deploy decarbonated solutions from science to be discovered next.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In How Big of a Climate Betrayal Is the Willow Oil Project? March 16, 2023. The New York Times says:

President Biden approved ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska, the announcement landed simultaneously with the thud of betrayal and the air of inevitability. On the campaign trail, Biden had promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”

No slowdown: Below is the global primary energy production graph. Right, it includes decarbonated sourse such as nuclear and intermittents (aka “renewables”)… BUT, notice, they are basically neglectable!

FREE TRADE FALLACY

We have just one civilization today: everybody, among common folks know what everybody else thinks. Yet, as resources previously used, such as fossil fuels, falter, civilization and the understanding of the universe which makes it possible in its present state, have to progress (not enough scientific and technological progress as needed, was the proximal cause of Rome’s failure). So it is crucial that really new, and correct, ideas be introduced (and not just in science).

If Those Are Best Friends Who, What Is The Enemy? Cockroaches? Those Among We The People Who Are Viewed As Cockroaches?

Yes even countries such as Saudi Arabia are part of this global civilization. And Saudi Arabia is fully part of the debate of what civilization means, and what it will have to consist of, looking forward. Watch France give the Legion d’Honneur to the heir of Saudi Arabia, and its Interior Minister, arguably the principal ideologue of the hardening of the Saudi line, inside out. So, in other words, while France fights the Islamist State (“Daesh”), France gives the nod to the hardening of the Wahhabist doctrine of Saudi Arabia (which, historically, was very minor in Islam), the ideology of ISIL. The results are increasingly strange: Salafist/Wahhabist terrorists attacked police and soldiers in Tunisia today. The security forces fought back. The coordinated assaults were shown, live, on the Internet. One could see young passersbys applauding the security forces in full combat (at least 28 terrorists got killed, plus seventeen fighting police and civilians who applauded the police).

Such contradictions are rife, all over the world. Look at “free trade”.

Globalization Of Trade Without Globalization Of Law Results In Plutocratization. This Is Exactly What Happened To The Roman Republic, & Why It Faltered

Free trade, well done, is indeed excellent. However, the West has been exporting science, technology and know-how, while not investing in a way commensurate to making this sort of export sustainable.

In other words, here is civilization’s problem: the learning, teaching, and research functions have been starved, relative to what the (critical) situation requires.

The result has been a collapse of manufacturing and related high worth employment in the countries who recently led progress in science and understanding (with the result that, like Republican Rome, the knowledge and wisdom of the most advanced countries is increasing faltering relatively to the flow of new ideas which civilization need to survive).

To make matters worse, said “free trade” has happened in the shadows. So-called high-tech companies have made fortunes, while paying no taxes: France just hit Google with a 1.6 billion Euro tax bill. Such companies and their principal owners had found ways to escape most taxes, thus starving the governments, hence the fundamental research their trade rests on.

So free trade can work, but only if it’s fair. As it is, most money flows are hidden (in so-called “Dark Money” and “Dark Pools”), and the owners are also hidden (thus escaping taxation and corruption charges, not just against them, but also against the politicians they influence).

Last week European Commissioners were caught promising ExxonMobil that the Transatlantic Trade Pact under negotiation with Obama would allow companies such as ExxonMobil to escape local legislation, including labor, taxation and pollution laws.

So the Republicans may be lunatics. But, in a world already ruled by lunatics, they are no doubt welcome.

Fair, just, and profitable  international trade requires a registry of all ownership and detailed trading activity, worldwide. Otherwise the sort of Republic we enjoy worldwide (as institutionalized by the United Nations) will know the same fate as the Roman Republic: an increasing sinking in the turbid waters of mindless will to power and tyranny.

Patrice Ayme’

[P/S: A shorter, trade only version of the preceding essay was selected as a New York Times’ “Pick”. Since I have complained stridently about NYT’s censorship, I have to be fair and to recognize appreciation too!]

What Ails FIFA?

FIFA, the world’s football association, a corporation, has come into the crosshairs of the American Justice system. I inquire. My way, all the way down the Dark Pools of the New World Order.

By the word “Football” I follow international usage: “Football” was created in Britain in the Nineteenth Century, it involves striking a ball with a foot.

American “Football” is more prone to involve running with a ball one cradles, throws around and grabs with one’s hands, until one crashes into someone, head first. Its main interest may be concussion, as it promotes the idea that the more one bashes one’s brain, the better, and most successful, one deserves to be.

FIFA stands for:  Fédération Internationale de Football Association. The French name is already difficult for true Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, as it implies something not fully under their command. Hey, who would want such a good thing to come to an end? Command and order are everything. In the USA, those who have it all, and are in command, have achieved a level of relative income as high, or higher than in any of history’s most arrogant plutocracies:

The Rich In The USA Are Not Just Wealthier, They Are In An Other World. They Want That World To Become Yours, The Local Judge Will See To It

What ails FIFA?

Money.

There are 600 million practitioners of Football in the world, making it, by far, the world’s most popular sport (Football is known as “soccer” only in the USA.)

Thus private television companies have been keen to purchase the rights for the Football World Cups. And they have been ready to spend whatever it takes, so enormous the profits from advertising to come.

The countries which have been able to muster large amounts of money to serve the World Cups monopolize these events. It takes a lot of investment in infrastructure for being able to organize a World Cup (several events with around 100,000 spectators each are held at the same time).

However there is a laudable desire to rotate World Cups among the 209 nations members of FIFA.

In the next rounds of World Cups, the USA and Great Britain were candidates. Both countries routinely organize Olympic games, and like money they spend and command to come around back to where they feel it belongs. Many of the TV companies which spend so much money on Football World Cups are giant Anglo-Saxon monopolies (or subsidiaries thereof), leveraged to giant, Anglo-Saxon dominated banks. (In other words, the usual puppeteers are pulling the strings.)

However, World Cups soon to come, were attributed to Russia and Qatar, infuriating those who view themselves as the true and righteous owners of the world.

So the British and American master puppeteers mobilized the means they usually order around, their intelligence services, James Bonds, international and national police, the NSA, CIA, FBI, “Five Eyes”, and the “Justice” systems, to remind the FIFA who was the boss. The uppity servants at the FIFA, including the usual French and Swiss suspects, were rolled out under a cloud of suspicion. Anglo-Saxon plutocracy is good at treating the innocent as if they were culprit.

This is why Russia’s Putin considers the head of FIFA to be a hero.

Naturally, genuine progressives, democrats and republicans want FIFA to be clear of corruption. However, American Football, the one played by crashing into other people’s brains deliberately, is much more corrupt than the sport which FIFA administers, while not under investigation by the authorities of the USA. In spite of the giant amounts of money circulating in all sorts of ways, and the medical and moral hazard it represents.

After all concussion is a huge problem in American Football, much more than in FIFA’s football (although it exists there too). And the quantities of money spent, and the way they seem to corrupt what should be the main function of education in so-called “universities” are alarming.

In general, the circulation of giant quantities of money in so-called “Dark Pools” and “Shadow Banking”, related to tax havens (most of which are in the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence) is the essence of corruption nowadays, and the leaders of FIFA are very small players in that game. Focusing on FIFA is a way to divert attention, and make everybody believe, once again, that the center of the plutocratic empire is white as snow.

So one may say that FIFA is suffering not just from too much money circulating around. It also suffers from easily falling under American anti-corruption laws targeting non-Americans. And from having forgotten that the world’s most popular game should respect the wishes of the authorities and powers that be. One can play the game, as long as one follows the rules written in the USA. FIFA, by the standards of the USA, is a small corporation which forgot that it is there to serve much larger American corporations and interests.

Journalists linked FIFA leadership with corruption, bribery, and alleged vote-rigging pursuant to the election of FIFA President Sepp Blatter and the organization’s decision to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively. These allegations led to the indictments of nine high-ranking FIFA officials and five corporate executives by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges including racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. On 27 May 2015 several of these officials were arrested by obedient Swiss authorities, who launched a criminal investigation into how FIFA awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Those among these officials who were also indicted in the U.S. are expected to be extradited to face charges there. Switzerland is a country with no more population than the San Francisco Bay Area (8 million). The difference is that just one San Francisco Bay Area company is present all over the world Internet: it makes the “routers”, specialized computers that direct Internet traffic. CISCO (yes, San FranCISCO): get it?) The Internet was invented by CERN, now it is the source of profit for giant American corporations, mastering the world with ever increasing power, telling the president of the USA where he is going to sleep.

By far, the highest paid executives in the world are not at FIFA, but in the corporations of the USA. And that’s the entire point which FIFA forgot. The remedy would have been to attribute a World Cup to the USA.

As I listened to reaction in Europe, in various countries, European pundits did not follow the preceding approach. Instead they tended to marvel at the American Justice system, how thorough it was. Yet, in the end, a few tenths of millions of dollars at most circulated under the table. When an individual such as Elon Musk makes 12 billion dollars in seven years thanks to lots of subsidies of various types in the reign of Obama I, nobody investigates this hefty compensation: neither journalists, nor justice, nor what passes in the USA for intellectuals (MIT’s Chomski).

Europe is doubly at fault: first it does not have Federal structures of investigation and prosecution, as the USA has. Second, and worst, it’s naive to not realize that, had the head of FIFA walked around proudly with Obama, as Elon Musk did, the money, much greater amounts of money, would have circulated in the New World Order, where it belongs (at least that’s what the New World Order feels). The American system would then have anointed FIFA.

Thus instead of one possibly suspicious payment of 2 (two!) million dollars to the head of the European Football association, Michel Platini, one of the world’s greatest football player, ever, one would talk billions, but billions that would flow where American corporations exert control, and thus where American plutocracy commands. Trillions of  “payments” in service of the New World Order as managed form the USA, that’s not corruption, but the Free Market at its best.

American CEOs head the world’s most powerful corporations, and are paid like kings. It’s hard work to be so mean. And this is just the dusting of snow, on top of the iceberg. The real power if in Dark Pools. The corporation known as FIFA forgot its place in the pecking order. Let them eat cake in American prisons, learning, the hard way, who, in this world, is really the boss.

Patrice Ayme’

Great Cities A Must, So Tax Superrich Hard, Everywhere.

Shallowness of thinking is a sin. Many view it as a creature’s comfort., though (“Thus spoke the Tyranosopher”). OK, not a sin in the Bible (otherwise the Bible would have put itself out of business!). But it’s a dangerous consequence, and temptation from the Internet and “multitasking”. For shallow thinking one of my reference is Paul Krugman, the most respected “liberal” (USA) or “progressive” (anywhere else) in America and Europe.

Krugman wrote “Inequality and the City” an editorial, where he depicted the success of New York, and pointed, all too moderately, and somewhat disingenuously to its features. Here he goes, with a striking disinformation hook at the end:

“New York, New York, a helluva town. The rents are up, but the crime rate is down. The food is better than ever, and the cultural scene is vibrant. Truly, it’s a golden age for the town I recently moved to — if you can afford the housing. But more and more people can’t.

Rich Gets Into More Expensive Housing, Low Lives Sleep Outside

And it’s not just New York. The days when dystopian images of urban decline were pervasive in popular culture — remember the movie “Escape from New York”? — are long past. The story for many of our iconic cities is, instead, one of gentrification, a process that’s obvious to the naked eye, and increasingly visible in the data.

Specifically, urban America reached an inflection point around 15 years ago: after decades of decline, central cities began getting richer, more educated, and, yes, whiter. Today our urban cores are providing ever more amenities, but largely to a very affluent minority.

But why is this happening? And is there any way to spread the benefits of our urban renaissance more widely?

Let’s start by admitting that one important factor has surely been the dramatic decline in crime rates. For those of us who remember the 1970s, New York in 2015 is so safe it’s surreal. And the truth is that nobody really knows why that happened.”

Did he really say that? “Nobody really knows why” New York became safer? Really? Never heard of Mayor Giuliani? (Giuliani was several times presidential candidate.) He was tough on crime, strong on “profiling”.

The USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world (with the Seychelles islands). Eight million people are under justice supervision. Police brutality helped. This may be why nobody Politically Correct knows why New York is so much safer; nobody wants to know why. Hard thinking is always uncomfortable.

As soon as plenty of police brutality videos surfaced, and the police was reined in, crime rates exploded. That was in 2015. That is, a few months ago.

Paul Krugman does not want to praise the virtues of daily fascism as far as direct repression is concerned. Not PC. However, he dares to be a little bit, very delicately, NON PC:

“But there have been other drivers of the change: above all, the national-level surge in inequality.

It’s a familiar fact (even if the usual suspects still deny it) that the concentration of income in the hands of a small minority has soared over the past 35 years. This concentration is even higher in big metropolitan areas like New York, because those areas are both where high-skill, high-pay industries tend to locate, and where the very affluent often want to live. In general, this high-income elite gets what it wants, and what it has wanted, since 2000, has been to live near the center of big cities.”

I already mentioned this: the new young elite is less dumb and wasteful that the one which preceded it. Krugman, correctly playing psychologist:

“Still, why do high-income Americans now want to live in inner cities, as opposed to in sprawling suburban estates? Here we need to pay attention to the changing lives of the affluent — in particular, their work habits.

To get a sense of how it used to be, let me quote from a classic 1955 Fortune article titled “How Top Executives Live.” According to that article, the typical executive “gets up early — about 7 a.m.. — eats a large breakfast, and rushes to his office by train or auto. It is not unusual for him, after spending from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. in his office, to hurry home, eat dinner, and crawl into bed with a briefcase full of homework.” Well, by the standards of today’s business elite, that’s actually a very relaxed lifestyle.

And as several recent papers have argued, the modern high earner, with his or her long hours — and, more often than not, a working partner rather than a stay-at-home wife — is willing to pay a lot more than the executives of yore for a central location that cuts commuting time. Hence gentrification. And this is a process that feeds on itself: as more high earners move into urban centers, these centers begin offering amenities: — restaurants, shopping, entertainment — that make them even more attractive.”

Notice Krugman does not mention the Darkest Side: having the rich living only among the rich… Let alone correctly colored. I have observed this many times: entire neighborhoods, cities, islands, secluded enclaves of the 1%.

On this Krugman is a bit naive:

“We’re not just talking about the superrich here, or even the 1 percent. At a guess, we might be talking about the top 10 percent. And for these people, it’s a happy story. But what about all the people, surely a large majority, who are being priced out of America’s urban revival? Does it have to be that way?

The answer, surely, is no, at least not to the extent we’re seeing now. Rising demand for urban living by the elite could be met largely by increasing supply. There’s still room to build, even in New York, especially upward. Yet while there is something of a building boom in the city, it’s far smaller than the soaring prices warrant, mainly because land use restrictions are in the way.”

It is true that land use restrictions are a huge problem (in the San Francisco Bay Area, cities which want to build skyscrapers next to train stations, have been blocked… Mostly by the superrich, who do not want the poor, mediocre and thoroughly medium to rise up in the sky. The result has been the greatest gridlock in the USA).

Here is how Krugman concludes: “But will that understanding lead to any action? That’s a subject I’ll have to return to another day. For now, let’s just say that in this age of gentrification, housing policy has become much more important than most people realize.”

Trust Krugman to be as hard as a soft-boiled egg. Krugman, or why moderation is a sin. All what Krugman said was true, but it is “non-controversial“, namely everybody knew it already. Is that what the top thinking on the left can be? With moderates like that, who needs Republicans?

Something Krugman does not say:

NO HIGH TAXES ON SUPERRICH, NO GOOD CITIES:

Housing policy, thus the built-up of infrastructure, is crucial for the economy… and for comfort: infrastructure deteriorates, and has to be worked on continuously. Let alone modernized.

Private infrastructure in a city, depends upon PUBLIC infrastructure (water, electricity, basic transportation, basic police, justice, schools, government).. Thus, because of the necessary involvement of public infrastructure, PRIVATE infrastructure requires more PUBLIC spending.

Hence a thriving PRIVATE economy requires more PUBLIC economy, hence more taxes on the wealthy (Canada’s Trudeau, the new PM, advocates just this).

An example is schools: they can be made profitable, thus private, as long as they cater to the top 10% To cater to everybody, thus make a sustainable city, taxes will have to be augmented and redistributed to public schools. So sustainable cities will require a change in the philosophy of the socio-economy.

Ah, something else: taxes cannot just be restricted to the cities, as then the superrich will escape again. So they have to be national. And even international. And “Dark Pools”, “Shadow Banking”, Tax Havens, Delaware, have to disappear.

Building thriving cities is about not destroying the planet: cities are more efficient. Most of humanity lives now in cities, and the proportion will have to go up.

Don’t trust the superrich, don’t let them call themselves “philanthropists”, as if they could tax themselves. Latest clown here is the Facebook founder, who got free advertising everywhere, for his pledge to “give 99% of his fortune away“. Meanwhile he will keep on enjoying it, while claiming he does not, before he can convert it into tax-free vehicle, for himself, his wife, and child, Bill Gates’ style. It is rather sad to see so many applauding some clowns whom I do not find funny.

Politics is named after cities, so is civilization. Cities can, and will have, to save the biosphere, as they can be made more efficient, and smarter, than any alternative. And what is cities’ greatest historical enemy? Plutocracy.

One must crush infamy, and thus plutocracy, and it’s exactly why taxes were (mostly) invented.

Patrice Ayme’

DSK, Hillary, & Spiritually Corrupt Justice

HOW GENERALIZED PROSTITUTION PERVERTS SPIRITS & JUSTICE:

Hillarious Clinton: Will the Joke Be On Us Again?

Ex New York Senator and Secretary of State Clinton made her first major campaign speech. In New York, with the reborn World Trade Center in the background, as she pointed out. She looked fantastic, spoke even better than that, and promised plenty of candy to anybody who voted for Obama.

Is she for real? We now know Obama was not for real: when he could have done everything, in the beginning, he did nothing. I got very depressed (I am intimately involved). Now Obama has stooped, for all to see, to ally himself with such right wing extremists that even plutocrat Pelosi voted against him. Obama fights to enable plutocratic corporations to sue the government of the USA, one of the many seductions of the TPP. That Trans Pacific Partnership is negotiated in secret, among the haves, as it should.

Tigers & Plutocrats Have A Sense Of Right Which Makes Them Even Worse

[Siberian/Amur Panthera Tigris Altaica.]

Is Hillary for real? It’s hilarious: there is no choice. The excellent Senator of Vermont (Green Mount in French), Bernie Sanders, has a much better program: to make the USA like France (hopefully without the tyrannical French law, administration, and taxes on the middle class).

Bernie’s program could be paid, if, and only if, the taxes on the rich got as high as they were in the 1940-1970 period. However the vulgum pecus has been conditioned to identify with the wealthiest, spiritually speaking. An hilarious form of corruption. Bernie would lose to Jeb Bush, as a result.

It’s hard to have a democracy when common folks’ spirits are those of dogs conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs, to salivate, each time they hear of wealth and mentors.

***

Carlton Affair: Sex Drawing Rights?

Carlton is a luxury hotel in Northern France where Dominique Strauss-Kahn (“DSK”), ex-head of the International Monetary Fund, was suspected by French “judges” to have organized an international prostitution ring. How likely did that sound? Not too much: no government prosecutor could be found to prosecute DSK about this. But the judges persisted in their search for judgment of whom Manhattan (aka Wall Street) found right to jail. Perhaps the honorable French judges hoped to qualify as honorary Wall Street Very Important Persons, or something equally worthy. In this plutocratic world, consideration by the wealthy has become everything (wealth can even get you passports fast!). Wall Street inspired “justice” has been relentless to find that whoever looks like strong competition is in breach of the law of the USA.

After four years DSK and 13 other co-defendants were found not guilty whatsoever. DSK said: “Tout cela pour ca. Quelle destruction.” (All this for this, what destruction.)

DSK of course deserved his punishment: he drew for hundreds of billions of SDR. DSK was then ripe for retaliation, extortion, vulture justice. See how it all started, from that well known left wing propaganda outfit, CNN, which wrote in 2011: “IMF calls for dollar alternative”:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The International Monetary Fund issued a report Thursday on a possible replacement for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The IMF said Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, could help stabilize the global financial system.

SDRs represent potential claims on the currencies of IMF members. SDRs can be converted into whatever currency a borrower requires at exchange rates based on a weighted basket of international currencies. The IMF typically lends countries funds denominated in SDRs

While they are not a tangible currency, some economists argue that SDRs could be used as a less volatile alternative to the U.S. dollar.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, acknowledged there are some “technical hurdles” involved with SDRs, but he believes they could help correct global imbalances and shore up the global financial system.

“Over time, there may also be a role for the SDR to contribute to a more stable international monetary system,” he said.”

This is what Keynes wanted to do, as head of the commission in charge of setting up the world financial system in 1944-45. Lord Keynes, who could not be accused to not be a racist plutocrat, found himself in a total fight with the government of the USA. Enable to stop Keynes, the USA finally made a forgery, and substituted the forgery during the signing ceremony. This is how the dollar became the world’s reserve currency (a move that torpedoed Europe as an independent financial actor). But here is again CNN Money, from 2011:

“The goal is to have a reserve asset for central banks that better reflects the global economy since the dollar is vulnerable to swings in the domestic economy and changes in U.S. policy.

In addition to serving as a reserve currency, the IMF also proposed creating SDR-denominated bonds, which could reduce central banks’ dependence on U.S. Treasuries. The Fund also suggested that certain assets, such as oil and gold, which are traded in U.S. dollars, could be priced using SDRs.

Oil prices usually go up when the dollar depreciates. Supporters say using SDRs to price oil on the global market could help prevent spikes in energy prices that often occur when the dollar weakens significantly.”

As many men of power, DSK was sex-crazed (although this is a tangent, it’s an important one: when you are at war, trying to impose your power, you need extreme aggressivity, and, in males, sex and aggression are roughly connected; so sex acts as a relief; the present French president is supposed to go around like a crazy rabbit, although he looks like nothing; Dr. Goebbels, the Nazi, a deformed midget, was even worse; his hatred of Jews was born the day a beautiful Jewess dared to turn him down; when the time came to take out Assad, the sex crazed Hollande had the balls, but Obama lost his; Hillary, a hawk who long watched Bill, has her own domination hormones; she actually said something very strange, exciting, scary and extremely revealing, in her own discourse in New York, I have to check the transcript, before writing it down here…).

So DSK was easy to bring down, by making sex charges against him. In the Carlton Affair, extremely expensive prostitutes operated on several continents, including the USA (yes, the USA is a country-continent). For the occasion, apparently corrupt (French) judges, posed those ladies of sex as “victims”.

However, there was no evidence whatsoever DSK ever paid a dime for sex. He was adamant that he never did, that defeated the purpose (seduction from his good looks, I guess…). So who paid those hard sex workers, to pose as victims? Those ladies who charge a thousand Euros a night? The judges? People whom the judges should have known about? Girls want to know.

Some will sneer that I proffered the heavy accusation of corruption against judges, without any direct proof, and that, this is, per se, a crime.  Yes, it’s a crime, as implementing a plan to draw trillions of dollars worth of SDR by DSK was a crime. To paraphrase president Jefferson, some crimes it’s our duty to commit.

There are two types of corruption: what is labelled as such in some countries under some laws. The plutocracy of the USA is notoriously equipped with laws to accuse rivals of corruption. In China, president Xi had the ex-security chief, Zhou Yongkang, condemned to life in prison, for corruption. In an officially secret trial. Corruption, there too, is in the eye of the beholder. Xi’s family is said to own hundreds of millions of real estate in Hong-Kong alone.

The other type of corruption is mental. The spirit itself is corrupt. It is broken-with. In the case of Obama, the left, the spirit of the left, with the help of the naive, such as yours truly, elected someone whose spirit was, deep down, straight out of the London’s Financial Times. The spirit of the left was ruptured-with the spirit of the Financial Times.

When the currency of one country controlled by Wall Street, is the world’s reserve currency, there can’t be economic, financial, and social justice, worldwide. This is the spirit which break the spirit of justice. Whether French judges were aware of this, is unlikely. Instead, they got carried away by a weird spirit of justice which defined the partisan of SDRs as the devil incarnate, and blackmailing high class prostitutes into confirming this, was viewed as justice.

The tiger is most dangerous, when he believes he fights for justice. Yet, there is no justice when the very spirit of justice has been corrupted by anything far removed from correct human ethology. Sex is ethological, the dollar as world reserve currency is not.

Will Clinton be able to undo some of what her husband did, when he himself undid president Roosevelt’s Banking Act of 1933? Why not? That would be the best way for her to divorce him, and impose whom ought to have been really the boss, and rule, with a less corrupt spirit.

At some point, the true leaders of the human spirit realize that to leave behind a nicer place in the sun is more important than to get to a place in the sun. Obama got to his place, played big boy on the town, forgot it took balls to be the real thing, communed with the spirit of London’s Financial Times, and wasted our times. A mother may be keener to leave a better prospects for Earth behind.

Patrice Ayme’  

Camus Mudified

I read on an Academic site in the USA that: “Albert Camus supported French colonialism”. That struck me as grotesquely incorrect. An horrendous statement. (And I am not particularly in love with Camus’ work.)

Unsurprisingly, my retort was not published. Amusingly the initial essay was called “Stifling Discourse On the Left”.

Why was I stifled? Because it’s obvious to all “bien-pensants” (well-thinkers) that the stifling French rule in Algeria was a terrible, colonial thing.

Once a citizen of the USA expressed that opinion, that the colonial French deserved what had happened to them in Algeria. He was a geologist, an old friend of my dad. You know, the way friends are made in the USA: fair weather, and not too deep, politically correct in all American ways.

My dad an Algerian born geologist who discovered Algerian oil and gas (while employed by an Algerian oil company). He found the verbal trashing of his homeland inspiring. He retorted: “Certainly, there would have been no civil war in Algeria, if the French had killed all the Natives, the way it was done in the USA”.

The American “friend” was not amused at all. He and his family ceased all and any contact with ours. So much for the great American friendship. His name was Birdstall.

Camus was brought up by his mother in Algeria, where he was born, under extremely modest circumstances. Poorest of the poor. Saved by the Republican educational system (when it still worked). To call Camus’ family background “colonial” is an insult.

The excuse to trash Camus is always the same. After he got the Nobel in literature, a student called on him to take a stance about the civil war in Algeria. Camus retorted, off the cuff, that: ”Si j’ai a choisir entre ma mere et la justice, je choisirai ma mere” (or words to this effect). “If I have to choose between my mother, and justice, I will chose my mother.”

Well, “justice” is a social construct. One may well find oneself in conflict with it. Just ask dozens of millions of Mitteleuropa citizens, in the 1930s and 1940s. Or any country, just before a revolution. Algeria was in a revolution in the 1950s, justice was taking a back seat to motherhood.

It has become common opinion that the good guys were from the Front National de Liberation. The opinion was all the more common as it advantaged the USSR… and the USA.

However, most people living in Algeria did not support the FNL. How do I know this? Among other things, there was a vote! In the early 1960s, more than 60% of the Algerian population voted for the new French Constitution.

That was the first, and last free vote Algerians would get.

As The Economist put it in 2001: ”… given that the French army by the end of the 1950s had more or less won its war in Algeria, why did Algeria nonetheless gain its independence? If Mr Stora is puzzled, Mr Wall is not… French public opinion was sickened; the French intelligentsia was outraged by the practice of torture; and, “just as important”, America could not accept French policy.

Did Charles de Gaulle, summoned back in 1958 to meet France’s constitutional crisis and end the Algerian war, realise all this? Conventional wisdom is that he was France’s far-sighted saviour, accepting almost from the outset that the loss of Algeria was inevitable. Mr Wall, having trailed through both French and American archives, disagrees. De Gaulle’s acceptance of Algerian independence was a belated pragmatism, forced on him by his failure to win over the Americans, first under Eisenhower and then under Kennedy.

…pessimistic implications for the future… the United States was a critical force in pressing France to accept Algerian independence.”

That’s also my opinion. To make matters worse, the average French population was anti-Algerian racist (both against Muslim and Pieds Noirs)… And so was De Gaulle (who made very clear racist statements).

That was not just criminal, but thoroughly idiotic.

Why? Because it made a travesty of reality under the guise of political correctness, when all it was reflected a subjugation to the USA’s White House, and its attached plutocratic Congress.

What was the idiocy?

Most people in Algeria who did not support the FNL. (Nor did they support the French colons, who were a small, distinct class… And they did not support those colons for the same reasons that they did not support the FNL).

Sartre, and many “intellectuals” support of the extremely cruel FNL was an offense against civilization (later pursued with Sartre’s support of hard core “Maoism”).

The FNL advocated publicly terror torture of toddlers. That some elements in the French army used torture on some terrorist suspects is a separate issue. The French army never advocated publicly to torture toddlers.

Do you want to live in a country where the leaders have advocated torturing toddlers? Few would. So, when De Gaulle, on orders from the USA, gave Algeria to the FNL, he was being treacherous and stupid: of course most Algerians wanted to move to France, as being overruled by blood thirsty tyrants had little appeal.

So De Gaulle did his best to prevent that mass exodus. Still, the pressure is still on, and 52 years later, it’s much easier for an Algerian to immigrate to the USA, than to France.

And guess what? The present president of Algeria, Bouteflika, a corpse in a wheelchair, is an ex-general from the original FNL.

So what of Camus? In truth Camus begged to differ with most of the French intelligentsia, which was more into being a well thinking herd, than really thinking, and this is why he got trashed. Still is.

Camus wanted the Algerian Civil War to stop. Camus wanted the Republic to be strong, and motherly. But the Republic is relatively weak, and getting weaker. Those who conquered entire continents (Anglo-Saxons, Russians) are stronger. Their reasons are thus better. If nothing else they sit on all that oil and gaz. Even if the ground explodes cataclysmically, nowadays, with all that warming:

http://mic.com/articles/95232/those-massive-black-holes-discovered-in-sibera-are-even-more-alarming-than-scientists-thought

(Thanks to Alexi Helligar for informing me of this!)

It does not matter. The ground explodes? War is their friend. Let there be war. It’s just a matter of not being on the losing side. A chorus of well-paid intellectuals singing their praises, is most helpful. Yesterday the Bible, today those who recite their well honed version of history.

Dragging Camus in the mud by modifying his beliefs is deeply dishonest. So was the devastation of 1962, when many populations which lived in Algeria before Islam was invented, and Arabic written, 3,000 kilometers away, found themselves in a worse tyranny than they were under Paris’ boot. (Only the Jews could flee in majority; many ended in Israel.)

The future of Algeria? Just wait for the oil and gas to run out. Then the other shoe will drop.

Patrice Ayme’

Fix Iraq? Judge Bush

The war started by G.W. Bush in 2003 is still on-going. The quick gains of 11,000 Islamist warriors, routing a much larger “Iraqi” army is explained only by the support of the Sunni population and of many of those who made Iraq work, before Bush destroyed it.

That Jihadist army is an international body headed by Iraqis (of Al Qaeda obedience, in the past), financed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, sprinkled with some of Saddam Hussein’s generals and even some French (!) and Chechen. After the rout of Wednesday, Iran immediately rushed military “advisers” to the Shiite power in Baghdad. (Iran hated Saddam Hussein, and hates the Sunnis, all the more as the most sacred Shiite sites are south of Baghdad.)

Our Leaders: Greedy Mass Murderers

The mistake the USA made was to dissolve the 700,000 strong Iraqi army and the Baathist, secular party that held Iraq as a civil society. That mistake was actually a crime, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention outlaws the destruction of a state. That the state was deliberately dismantled by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld is beyond question: so thorough was the dismantlement of the state, that all-important Iraqi museums and archeological sites were left defenseless.

Thus Bush and his ilk attacked not just Iraq, but all of humanity, not just by the atrocious examples they gave, but by the destruction of humanity’s memory.

Bush used to repeat: ”Saddam Hussein killed his own people.” Right, and Bush killed many times more. During the Iraq-Iran war, a war the West perhaps instigated, and, certainly actively supported and collaborated with, 5,000 civilian Kurds got chemically assassinated. Hussein and “Chemical Ali” were judged for this, and executed.

However, the number of Iraqis killed, after Bush’s attack, and consecutive to it, is of the order of 500,000, or maybe much more. So:

Saddam: 5,000 killed. Hanged.

Bush: 500,000+ killed. Painting.

Blair: 500,000+ killed. Still an authority of the EU, loudly praying for more bombing of Iraq.

Now the old Baathist and old Iraqi army are counterattacking. And there is nothing the USA can do: the counter-offensive is mixed with the (Sunni) population, so aerial strikes are not an effective, nor moral, option.

All there is to do is watch. If one wants to help, maybe one could put Bush and his accomplices on trial for war crimes. That would impress the Iraqis. That would build some real clout. But will the USA have the guts?

Let me explain slowly: the respect of law comes only from the fact all men, and children, know early on, that all are the same as far as the law is concerned. The lower moral types, those obsessed by the market, those who claim all the time that anything can be fixed through buying and selling, those who claim we are living in a globalized world, those tiny critters who rule, have to be treated the way they advocate.

They have to understand, with their tiny minds, that the market is nothing without the government, and the government nothing without an army driven by morality.

If it’s a global market, then, it’s a global morality. That means, a global law.

It’s high time for the USA to judge its war criminals. As France judged her own. How difficult is it to write a warrant of arrest for a guy who, by his wanton, cruel, and vicious acts, brought the death of hundreds of thousands of people?

And don’t forget Blair the Liar. Unbelievably that murderous Bliar, a plutocrat with more than eight residences, and an enormous fortune made as a payment for his satanic activities, is the “European Peace Envoy to the Middle East”. He is of course advising to commit more murderous bombing in Iraq.

Blair said he could not be judged for his war crimes (whereas Desmond Tutu and many other prestigious personalities advised that he should be). His argument was that the United Nations allowed the attack in Iraq. That’s actually false. What’s true is that a vote authorizing the attack did not happen.

The French Republic warned Bush that any attempt at the UN to allow for an attack would result in the exact opposite, namely an explicit interdiction of such an action, and that France had the votes in the Security Council.

So there was no authorization vote. The EU ought to be ashamed to use Blair in any function except as the main attraction in the International Criminal Court. Instead, Laurent Gbagbo, an Ivoirian president who allegedly used undemocratic means to stay in power too long, is going to be judged.

Gbagbo, in the worst possible case, was co-responsible of the deaths of few thousand people.  Blair, at least half a million (Bush would not have gone to war without Blair).

Gbagbo versus Blair: now, that’s true racism. Blair is just white, a plutocrat connected to the highest leading circles, and a pseudo converted Catholic (Blair cynically used that religious calling to say that he won’t have done it without the Lord’s agreement; so, on top of everything, the creep is straight out of the Crusades!)

The British and USA government officials deliberately lied to the United Nations. That sort of manipulation, by itself, to justify a war of aggression, is a war crime (the legal precedent being Von Ribbentrop at Nuremberg). Von Ribbentrop was hanged, as deserved. But then why are Blair and Bush still free to run around?

France executed around 40,000 Nazi collaborators in the 1944-48 period. Including an ex-Prime Minister (Pierre Laval)… And some authentic World War One heroes. Sometimes, recovering one’s honor, hope and human rights, let alone a Republican, Democratic Constitution, requires some work. And some courage. Can the USA step to the plate?

The Jihadist army is propelled by the prestige attached to fighting the bloody mass murdering tyrant Bachar Assad, scion of Assad. Thus the action of the USA and Britain, by  not striking the monster last summer, contributed to the Jihadist cause.

Ladies and gentlemen interventionists, you want to help Iraqis? Show them what democracy is about. It starts with justice. You want to help Iraq? Judge and condemn those Westerners who threw it into murderous chaos. They are easier to arrest than Ben Laden. And they killed much more people. And they are a much graver case. They are to civilization what a tumor is to a brain. Shall I repeat their names, or you still don’t get it?

Patrice Aymé

Imperial Justice Wins

The EMPIRE Of JUSTICE HELPS DEFEAT EMPIRES Of EVIL

Morality is not just about being righteous, and feeling good about oneself. Morality, especially in a civilization, is also about long term survival. What happened to the Xi Xia is a good example. The high moral ground should be the first to be held in war.

Thus if a tribe wants to survive, it helps to be more moral than the opposition. Morality does not guarantee survival, but it helps to insure it. The extermination of the Xi Xia civilization, the greatest Buddhist empire which ever was, by the Mongols, is a case in point. They had made an enemy who looked insignificant… until he came back, at the head of the best army of the times.

Minorities ruling vast empires have existed before. The Mongol empire extended from Croatia to Iran, India and South China. Yet, the Mongol army was composed of only twenty tumens of 10,000 cavaliers each (they recruited many helpers, and defectors, local, or not, though, fighting the Song, the southern Chinese with Iraqi gunners, and into Europe with Chinese rocketmen corps). Superbly efficient military ethics made it like clockwork. Yes, even morality can help an army directly.

Genghis Khan, like Muhammad before him, taught his followers that they should keep all their energy to fight others, rather than to kill each other.

Xi Xia Could Not Fly Away From Mongols

Yet, morality is not sufficient to rule. And morality is not just about posing. First, morality is about being smart, as instructed by history.

We don’t have the money to feed the hungry, whine the silly ones, and they propose to cut fundamental research about life or the universe. For the silly ones, understanding the universe is a deeply felt tragedy. After all, it goes against their grain.

The truth, though, is that hunger has to do with war. And war is something that needs to be understood, because war has always been the ultimate arbiter of the fate of civilizations.

Under Stalin’s USSR, one hundred million adult Russians ruled over half a billion people, then 20% of humanity.

The greatest Buddhist polity, ever, was an empire, the Western Xia, the Xi Xia, south of Mongolia.

Bad Location For Weakness

Xi Xia got the bad idea to enslave a young Genghis Khan. Xi Xia was eradicated, just as the Buddhist empire that covered most of India earlier, was eradicated. Thereafter, Buddhism lost influence.

Repeating word for word dictator Putin’s lies is no way to understand war, or history. But it’s a good way to let plutocracy, led by a brute, triumph, and bury civilization.

The average wealth of 110 million adult Russians in 2013 was $11,000. However the median wealth was $870. Thus, if wealth was equally distributed in Russia, the average Russian would be 12 times richer. But don’t worry, oh silly ones who love Putin because he is a strong master of weakness: revolution in Russia won’t happen tomorrow. 110 Russian billionaires, Putin’s Pretorian guard from hell, detain 35% of Russia’s wealth.

The first time that I heard that giving food to people as if they were pigeons was more important than learning to think better, I was a child and men were landing on the Moon. A family of austere European people, oozing with contempt, informed me that my moral system was completely skewed. Instead of watching the lunar surface, mesmerized, I should have empathy about feeding the poor, and spite for those who had preoccupations that went beyond filling the plates.

However, I was from Africa. And what I gathered on that deprived continent, was that understanding is the most important food there is. Food and peace come from understanding, not the other way around. And understanding is one: what we learn from nature bring us models that carry to humanity, as humanity, and its world, are of and within, nature.

If one wants to fight malnutrition in Africa, one had to understand the world, first.  Those European people who denied that struck me, not just as posers, but as hypocrites on the side of exploitation, whether they knew it, or not (BTW, BHL falls directly under that critique, as I explained in the past!).

I knew well that people were not starving from lack of food, but from lack of organization to provide them with food.

In the following decades, it turned out that starvation and war ravaged Africa. It was certainly from empires, the wrong sort of empires.

The empires of plutocrats and local kinglets and warlords. For example the philosopher BHL ravaged the primary forests of Africa, and made lots of money, power and influence for himself, with the complicity of the French presidents. He was one of many. The crimes of those associated to Coltan, Rwanda and some high tech companies in the USA were much greater: more than 6 million died in the ensuing war.

At this point, the potential world agricultural food production is enough for about 12 billion people. However, subsidies are given for agriculture in the richest countries: that is a sneaky form of exploitation, as it makes the less developed parts of the world dependent upon the agribusiness of the richest, by killing local food production (and thus, in the long run, killing by starvation the local population).

Advanced countries agricultural subsidies are a form of war and exploitation of the most disadvantaged (and also a war against the biosphere, as they typically involve unsustainable methods).

This also means that, wherever there are starving people it’s from war. As observed. Thus, putting a bag of rice on one’s shoulder is not optimal: it’s an irrelevance, and an hypocrisy.

What’s needed is an empire, an empire of justice, not an empire of more rice. Justice brings rice, rice does not bring justice.

Imperial Fail: What’s Left Of Xia

This has been understood to some (small) extent: the International Criminal Court has judged exclusively (so far) African leaders.

One needs much more understanding in how the human mind works.

Fortunately, Hitler, and his cortege of plutocrats was seen before. Now that Putin and his cortege of plutocrats is in plain sight, there may be enough understanding to not repeat the same mistakes about how to treat the collective madness.

All the more as, and I explained this thoroughly, see my: “Reverse Yalta, Free Ukraine!”, the present madness is a direct continuation of one started more than 100 years ago. The study systems of thoughts can exhibit astounding continuity, from the Kaiser, to Czar Putin.

Indeed fascist imperialist Prussian Plutos were best friends with Lenin and Stalin. After the latter were ferried by the former in a special train from Switzerland (always neutral except in the matter of making money) to Russia, the latter promptly made peace, offering to the Kaiser Eastern Europe. The alliance between Stalinists and Hitlerists became official in August 1939, in a vain attempt to dissuade the French Republic to launch a world war. But that alliance had been going on, all along, as the USSR allowed renascent German fascism to turn around the safeguards the Versailles Treaty had set against massive German re-militarization.

Psychologically, we have the same set-up as usual: the plutocrats in Moscow, with their giant bank accounts in Londongrad, feel they have the Western democracies by the throat, same as their ancestors in the 1930s, when they called Berlin home.

Confronted to force serving evil, only a greater and smarter force can win. For once, Obama has been acting near to perfection. Putin did not attack this week, as he wants to look benign before the United Nations General Assembly vote tomorrow. But make no mistake: his generals are telling him time works against him, and the rest of Ukraine is for him to take.

As I explained in 1938?, Hitler moved against Austria before a free vote could be held. After conquering Austria, and Crimea, Hitler, and Putin, were able to organize referenda with exactly 97%, for their dictatorships.

Ukraine is to vote May 25. Putin’s tanks will attack before that, except if he gets persuaded something horrendous lays in his future, should he do so. Can the West look sufficiently scary? That is the question.

War primes everything. War makes history. That, Putin, former head of the Russian Gestapo (KGB, FSB) knows all too well.

Patrice Aymé

Emotions Are Not Free

People say: ”Oh, we are free to think and feel as we see fit!” But this is not true in several deep, even brutal, unavoidable, ways, many of them hidden. Elites have always known that hearts are the core of what needs to be controlled. On this their power rests, since before there were pyramids, and they stood.

Only 7,000 Gestapo agents watched 80 million Germans. Hitler could not have held Germany with them alone. So how did Hitler do it? With very strong emotions.

Pascal famously said: “Le Coeur a ses raisons que la Raison n’a point.” Those reasons of the heart deserve to be known, not just because they are reasons, too, and not just because they dictate to rationality itself, but also because they can be manipulated in ways that ought to be, and are already partly, made unlawful.

Instead of denying that there is spiritual and emotional control out there, as the meek insist, I propose to embrace control… be it only to dissect it with gusto.

Throughout the reigns of Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, “progressives” and “liberals” have been played like violins. It has not been much better in Europe.

In both cases, the People was persuaded to engage in public service by forking public money to private banks so that the hyper rich could stay hyper rich (it was done with semantic smokes and mirrors. To this day, most of We The People understands nothing to what happened).

How was We The People made so blind? To start with, even indignation was in short supply.

Pulling at their heart strings of We The People just so, enabled ever increasing plutocratization. That’s done by hammering continually the fallacious association between bad economy, and deficits. And thus impregnating the emotion, in the public, that public spending is bad (and thus implicitly that the rich ought to go tax-free).

How hearts can be bent out of their natural shape.

A well-known saying is that one person’s freedom ends where another nose’s starts. But that’s not so easy: after all, just threatening to hit someone else is an assault. Also what about public nose, public space, etc.? Are plutocrats not infringing on everybody’s public space when they made society so that only their money is endowed with power?

In any case, all and any law controls actions. However, controlling emotions and thoughts is just controlling the origin of actions.

The best minds of the (French) Republic, after a monster fight to death with racial mass murdering fascism of the demented type, in the period 1914-1945, were confronted to a paradox: Germany was, in 1900, the most literate country in the world. However enough of the German population got maneuvered into beastly madness to make their nation the tool of monstrosity.

What went wrong? The heart. German hearts had been taught wrong. Nietzsche screamed this from every roof top, by 1888, and before. A teenager such as Einstein fully agreed, and fled Germany (Einstein the rebel, later did enough discoveries for 4 or 5 Nobel Prizes in physics, most of them for work in… Quantum Physics).

German hearts had been bent out of shape by the plutocrats who owned Germany (enabled by a somewhat self-destructive alliance-symbiosis with various Anglo-American plutocrats).

Starting even before the World War was finished, many medium level intellectuals in France deduced that an example had to be made, to strike the hearts even more than the certainly grandiose, but somewhat suicidal, Republic’s attack against Hitler in September 1939.

So the French Republic executed more than 40,000 Nazi collaborators, with a judicial ferocity that even republican Rome never knew. But not just this. Anti-hatred laws were passed.

Some will object: ”Wait, they execute all these collaborators, and then pass anti-hatred laws? Is not that self contradictory?” No. You see, the collaborators were guilty. Those they killed were innocent. Anti-hatred laws are against the killing mood. Killing killers is also a way to kill the same killing mood, especially for future reference.

So let’s recapitulate: the criminal insanity that gripped Germany, a pure product of plutocratic control, was a case of total manipulation of the deepest heart strings. The same happened in places such as the USSR, where dozens of millions were killed because of the emotional deformation of common moujiks.

One could see something similar in the USA when G.W. Bush launched his legion in a war of aggression in Iraq. It was a time when most citizens of the USA goose stepped behind Bush, just because an employee of the CIA, Bin Laden, had killed .1% of the number of individuals that the actions of Carter had killed in Afghanistan. Of course that made no emotional sense: the USA had started it all, and pursued it all, and taught Bin Laden the nastiest ways. Instead of marching to Baghdad, justice ought to have marched to Washington.

Yet, just as German hearts had been taught it was all the fault of the Jews, and Russians, that of the Capitalists (whatever that is), the Americans got emotionally persuaded that it was all the fault of Bin Laden’s enemy, Saddam Hussein (whatever “it” was).

So hearts are already getting manipulated. It’s high time that justice gets to see how lawful those manipulations are. It’s all a question of manipulating hearts for the best. As it is already done, all too often, for the worst.

For example the fossil fuels plutocrats have made the public in many Anglo countries (USA, Canada, Australia), hysterical CO2 deniers. How? The fossil fuel maniacs spent enough money to incite heart manipulators to teach the right notion. Hence a new religion, climate denial. A religion made to serve the likes of the Koch brothers, mighty plutocrats them all.

As long as the emotion that there is nothing wrong with fossil fuels, and CO2 reigns, it will be hard to do anything serious against the CO2 mania. How to feel right about it? Well, maybe by realizing that spewing CO2 is a form of hatred. And there the law can help.

Hatred is an emotion, but it is not a free emotion anymore. It is an emotion under watch, that can be struck by the law.  

Hate speech has become criminal, even in the USA. The fact such laws were duplicated from France does not make them any less American. Total freedom of expressed emotions is already a thing of the past, and rightly so.

I have no problem doing the same at the United Nations, and even using anti-hate laws as a ram against customs that I don’t like (such as circumcision, or regimes that are too satanic). So it’s a matter of legislating my superior taste… ;-)!

Some, such as Tom Alex, a contributor to the comments on this site, have objected that: “How can feelings be criminal? This is absolute totalitarianism, where the state -and actually a FOREIGN state- believes it can and should have a say and furthermore control and penalize feelings through some judge. Plutocrats would absolutely love that. Been fired and have hard feelings towards your ex-boss? You’re a hateful ****, and should go to jail. Posting against plutocrats? You’re spreading hate.”

The origin of Tom Alex’s worries were my approval of the indictment of Bob Dylan for “public insult and incitation to hatred”, for comparing (existing, innocent) Croats to (dead) Nazis, and justifying a hatred (existing) Serbs are supposed to “sense” when exposed to their “blood”, the usual recital of those who want to justify hateful antagonistic atavism.

A few points: one can have all the feelings and thoughts one wants. The problem is PUBLICLY EXPRESSED hateful emotions, of the UNJUSTIFIED type.

Thus, the devil is in the details. I am going to come out with a stridently hateful (some will say) essay against (the hateful gross and mass murdering friendly leadership of) Japan. I don’t mind, it’s the exact target of that mental torpedoes volley. What I will publicly say is both true and justified. That makes it completely different.

Zola went to jail, big time, during the Dreyfus affair for the famous “J’Accuse!”. In it, him, and other top intellectuals, accused publicly the elite of the French Republic of a criminal conspiracy. Well, they were right. Ultimately, everybody got exonerated, starting with Captain (later Colonel) Dreyfus. More than that: anti-Judaism in France got lethally wounded (this is why most Jews in France survived WWII’s Gestapo, whereas nearly all Dutch Jews died).

If I suggest that French and Croat Nazi collaborators of the worst type ought to have been executed. Well, that’s OK, because those were terrible people doing horrendous things. A trial would determine that those people ought to have suffered the worst treatment, indeed. In this spirit, Norway, the Netherlands, and others, re-instituted the death penalty against Nazi collaborators after WWII, just for them. Fine.

Having strong anti-UNJUSTIFIED-hatred laws will help the search for truth.

And that’s what we need. You want to hate KGB’s Putin, or Tojo-loving Abe? Be my guest. And do it publicly, and question why Russia and Japan need to humiliate themselves that much, while, implicitly, thanks to the brutality they deploy and worship, threatening us all.

The calculus of hate and aggression needs to be refined. Because justice and progress need to be armed and stronger than the alternative.

For example GW Bush ought to be prosecuted for war crimes. Among them, war of aggression, a hate crime.

Attacking North Korea, even preventively, would not be a war of aggression, as North Korean leaders already threatened the USA (and others) with nuclear strikes (!). Similarly, France’s unilateral attack of Hitler in September 1939, was not a war of aggression, whatever the Nazis said at the time. Indeed, the Nazis had repeatedly attacked civilization and human rights first.

Hating hatred for real requires justice to be involved. One cannot leave plutocrats, be they the Kaiser, Stalin, or G.W. Bush to be free to mold, knead and brutalize hearts as they see fit. As civilization progresses, and becomes ever more intelligent, just as a matter of survival, so justice has to.

Patrice Aymé

***

Notes: On French trans-national jurisdiction. There is a common European citizenship. It’s entirely in the realm of French justice to react when citizen of the same polity (Europe) are hated by whoever, be it a citizen of the USA.

Moreover, for questions of Human Rights, French justice tends to apply worldwide.

On the USA’s indifference to the plutocratic obscenity, a learned emotion: Watch Obama meeting, twice, with all the plutocrats he could find, in December 2013. First with the health care crats. Just six of them, around the table with their crat in chief, made 100 million dollars, in the preceding few months. One could see the problem of USA health care, just there: the filth of riches.

Then there was the meeting with the high tech spies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.): how can we manipulate the truth? By flaunting his associations to the hyper rich he regularly begs for money like a pigeon hungry for crumbs, Obama has taught everybody in the USA a weird, twisted, masochistic, debasingly insane emotion, gratification by plutocratization. A new sort of bully pulpit. Call it the pigeon perch.