NO ISEGORIA, NO PARRHESIA: Why The US Election Was Fraudulent

The recent US elections were deeply fraudulent in a way which should worry even the left (and the rumor has it that Chinese president Xi, a dedicated socialist, was upset by the way the billionaires treated the elected US president, Trump). To see the problem one has to understand on which pillars democracy has to stand. In the run-up to the 2020 US election, the ownership or dominance of all the US media (including pseudo-public media) by the US plutocracy caused the following:

1) There was no isegoria. 2) There was no parrhesia. 3) Global Deep Plutocracy owns all the media, thus most minds, and the parrots know nothing else. 4) Early voting happened before even the first debate. Many people changed their minds, they had already voted. Even worse, in California, anonymity of voting was forsaken, as there were no double envelopes, when voting by mail. Rabid partisans are conditioned to claim none of this is of any consequence: that, per se, is an even deeper sort of fraud, the inability to understand the concepts of freedom and equity.

Those who do not know isegoria and parrhesia, those pillars of democracy, are condemned to read until the end of this article… As a civic duty.

In the last 15 years, many US states used voting machines leaving no paper trace (Georgia just switched back to leaving a paper trace, so can make, and is making, a recount, because the presidential vote was so close, it’s the law). That the elections were fraudulent in spirit is beyond a challenge: when I voted, my identification was not asked. That was in California, the most populous US state. I could have been anybody voting in my supposed name. An extension of this idea is “vote harvesting”… votes considered as some harvest workers can pick up. So a “Democrat” goes to a place and pick up the vote of someone else, for example in a nursing home. That “vote harvesting” enabled “Democrats” to capture most Congressional seats of Orange County in 2018 (a traditionally “Republican place). All this is done by volunteers right now, and many are complete fanatics at this point. “Democrats” applaud frantically, not considering for an instant that fascist methods, once established, have been successfully used by the right: consider the history of Italy and Germany after 1918… Swings and dubious methods on the left helped justify the right to do exactly the same in retaliation. The left attempted to seize the government, the Freikorps reacted by killing the left: Rosa Luxemburg led to Hitler. Just as the right wing (claiming to be left wing) crackdown on Trump by billionaires will lead Xi, or Putin to crackdown against their own opposition, real or potential, using similar methods.

Vote harvesting should be allowed only if done by government officials following strict regulations, and under oath that they would not influence the votes they “harvest”. Public observers should be required for all and any vote counting. Mail-in voting should not be allowed until debates are completed. Future elections at play! And voting machines should never be connected to the Internet!

What is ISEGORIA?

It is an abbreviation from the Greek, meaning same (iso) right to address an assembly (agora). Basically it means all and any citizen has a right to talk to any assembly (without being considered to be disrupting the peace).

What are modern “assemblies”? Any social networks and all and any media (how the transition from private to public is made is often easy to determine: any organization getting public help, or public shareholding, is public, not private; that means in particular “private” universities are actually public; also any organization viewed of “public utility”).

When Main Stream Media, what I call plutocratic media, blocks comments, it is violating isegoria. There should be a governmental organization, the department of isegoria, related to the TRUTH & RECONCILIATION BRANCH of government, but also under legislative and judicial advisory, in charge of receiving complaints and administrating punishment.

What is PARRHESIA?

It is what the French call “Franc Parler”… The ability to speak… frankly, candidly. The Franks were known to say it as it was… because they feared nothing, except for the sky to fall on their heads as the old Gallic proverb has it… Foucault: “It consists in saying – without dissimulation or reserve or rhetorical ornaments that could codify it and hide it – the truth. The saying it all (“le tout dire”)  is at that moment: saying the truth without hiding anything, without hiding it in any way at all”.

Today I talked with my plumber. He is afraid that his wife, a nurse, would catch COVID. So I gave him the last good news from the RNA vaccines of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed… The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. He took a secretive look and told me: “This has got to stay between us. Don’t tell anyone I said this. The Democrats could never have done it. We have these vaccines thanks to Trump.“

The one on the left owes much to the one on the right. Diogenes was the ultimate representative of parrhesia: he spoke truth to power. When Alexander (“The Great”) asked him what he could do for him, Diogenes replied that he could stop casting a shadow (something which had both a literal, and metaphorical sense). prehistoric women, though had parrhesia, because it turns out that, from South America to Eurasia, prehistoric women were BIG GAME hunters… Thus knew how to use poisoned arrows. In other words, they packed heat, and could dress whichever way they liked, and talked as they wished.

So my plumber is afraid to say what he thinks, although he is big, strong and fully grown. Even if the truth is as simple and obvious as observing Trump promised nearly four billion dollars to Pfizer and Moderna for producing 50 million doses of a COVID vaccine by the end of the year 2020 (the help from Operation Warp Speed to Moderna was more than two billion dollars).

In other news, recently the punks who rule the streets nowadays the “caravans of criminals” (Oakland PD dixit) have got in the habit of burning people alive. Hey why not, who is going to inquire?

The NYT asks rhetorically, in its colossal stupidity: “Who Would Firebomb a Homeless Encampment? California’s fire threat is colliding with its homelessness crisis.” Well, the answer is very simple: those the NYT has falsely claimed were discriminated against, and those who pull the strings, and should not be discouraged anymore to engage in their criminal activities, according to the NYT. I am not saying that discrimination does not exist, or that there is no systemic discrimination. Far from it. I am saying, instead, that it is the criminals who ask to defund the police: they have to profit most. And so really down and out people are burned alive, while criminals feel on top of the world.

Actually a dear friend of mine, who had lived in his truck for 45 years, has just been burned to death… inside his truck. More about this some other time (I’m a bit shocked). When a country is led by criminals, criminality prowls the streets…

This should not last though: Kamala Harris wants to become president, and she knows what she needs to do to get there. Being the way she is: pretty tough… with the weak and disposable…

Without isegoria and parrhesia, the powerful, the world’s wealthiest families, who won all the world’s media, mold minds as they wish. There is then no democracy, because minds molded by the most powerful have no power of their own. The Global Deep Plutocracy correctly viewed Trump as an existential threat. But Trump was just a vehicle for one idea: down with the GDP cult.

And Trump won, by the way. Asked today by a (selected, tame) reporter about joining the Paris (pseudo) Climate Accord (about all countries polluting as they wished, except Europe and US will have to give money) Joe Biden said: “This… like other things… WILL REQUIRE NEGOTIATIONS“. Joe has become a follower of Trump. Good. And Trump himself was a follower of the revolt against the GDP. And that will go on. Hopefully…

Patrice Ayme

 

NO ISEGORIA, NO PARRHESIA, NO DEMOCRACY.

All Twentieth Century US presidential elections, and most elections in the “democracies”, have long been flawed, as democratic processes, for reasons which are generally not explained with the sociological, psychological and historical depth they require.

In a nutshell, one cannot have democracy without ISEGORIA… Isegoria is the right of all to address equally the public space. Classical media and social networks are subsets of the public space.

Isegoria is violated by the monopoly power the plutocracy, as a class, exerts on the media, by its literal ownership of it. One also needs another concept, PARRHESIA… “to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking“. Oligarchic ownership or control of media works in the interest of the oligarchy, not in the interest of truth, and especially not of truth pertaining to We The People. Hence the importance of so-called “social media”… an attempt to bring back isegoria and parrheisia… and the only one possible… at this crucial stage of civilization.

The lack of isegoria and parrhesia were long used by the Global Deep Plutocracy to increase its power, and now more than ever. Not a good harbinger of a rosy future.

The media owning plutocratic class was able to steer the debate about the suitability of Joe Biden as President by avoiding all the subjects which could have hindered him seriously, and, first of all his role in engineering wars, and the supremacy of the financial plutocracy. This was achieved by denying isegoria in a way which should be illegal (but is not).

An example: I sent dozens of comments to the New York Times mentioning the role of Biden in the invasion of Iraq (I have been a subscriber of the NYT for decades). All my comments were all censored, because no US citizen should be exposed to such reality, the connection of Biden with the destruction of Iraq. Now this sort of steering of public opinion should be completely unlawful. This is not a question of Biden versus Trump, but of propaganda versus reality. By hiding Biden’s role in unjust war and unjust financial architecture, it is the latter which are been hidden… If Biden had not been around, the establishment would have found an alter ego.

Besides the question of guilt (of Biden) there is the question of character (of Biden). Why did Biden get involved in the death of millions of people, and what does it say about his proclivities? And why is the US citizenry averting its eyes, especially the self-declared “progressives” from the subject?

Exposed to a situation where war could be a solution, why should not Biden jump on it, when he was involved in wars of choice for no good reason but pleasing his hyper wealthy friends and sponsors?

The answer, that news outlets can do with the public as they please, because they are private, is philosophically incorrect. Monopolies are not private, they are imposed on the public. Overall, less than a dozen legal persons control national US news feed. They can mind mold all, and did!

The New York Times is the “newspaper of report” in the USA, it has plenty of prerogatives, including being the biggest information source in the USA. So when the New York Times decided Stalin was cuddly and Hitler did not kill Jews, so it was, and the US public came to esteem both fascist dictators… enough to refuse to get involved in a timely manner.

The US public was taught to become intolerant of those who, like the French, wanted to do something about Stalin and Hitler. The USA refused to provide help to France and Britain in a timely manner, even when the two representative democracies declared war to Hitler. This US attitude came to be called “isolationism“… But it was not that, it was isolationism from hurting fascism… While US plutocrats were amking crucial deals with fascist regimes all over the world, for example, providing them with fuel And that impudently called “isolationism” had been cognitively imposed by the New York Times and its ilk… because, first of all, Wall Street had organized Germany (in the 1920s and 1930s), and the assets it was invested in were doing great there.

Think of it: if the US President had declared that the USA would provide help as needed by the French Republic, Hitler’s own military would have staged a coup against him. We know this, because said military informed the US and UK authorities as early as 1937. But then both the US and the UK were happy that the French Republic was the only determined enemy of the Nazis. France had everything to lose, the US, everything to gain, and Britain was confused (Britain stopped being confused after Madrid fell to the Nazis, with Franco and Mussolini in tow)…

To this day, none of this is over the cognition horizon, let alone debate in the social space. However, it had major social implications, worldwide… then in the 1940s, but also now in the Twenty-first Century. Because it shows how much the ruling oligarchy can rule the cognition space. For example, this is why the energy crisis causing climate change has not been solved: ruling media deliberately steered the debate into fake considerations…

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This holocaust in Iraq was rendered possible by a lack of isegoria. Biden’s Policy At Work In Iraq (Fallujah): US soldiers exterminating the natives, just another three millions to go… But let simple minds keep on saying Trump is monster, that will keep their little minds in tip top shape… While they submit to their masters and mind modelers of the Global Deep Plutocracy. Biden-Bush’s henchmen in Iraq did the preliminary work for enabling FRACKING in the USA. Yes, reality is complex, but the sheeple is simple. So the sheeple cannot handle conspiracies, which can only be rejected by its simple mind.

The Global Deep Plutocracy hates Trump: Trump damaged their “Free Trade”, which is neither free, nor a trade, and their grip on the world, and minds which leaves no space for democracy. If EVIL-POWER (Plutocracy) has all the power, DEMOS-KRATIA (Democracy) has none. It’s very simple. That’s why those who did not learn to lie to themselves in academia, understand that plutocracy, the self-declared “elite”, is incompatible with democracy: they are simple, not contrived minds. And this is why those whose salaries are paid by the plutocrats (employees of the top universities) do not. Academia is a prostitute (that means that academia is for sale… and was actually bought, and is now owned). Why do you think that the wealthiest prostitutes (Harvard, etc.) are the most esteemed? Since when is thinking coincident with wealth?

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THE FORMS OF SPEECH DEMOCRACY CANNOT DO WITHOUT:

There are several completely different, yet related concepts in speaking publicly: free speech, rhetoric, isegoria, parrhesia. One should not confuse isegoria with parrhesia… The former is the right to address assemblies equally, the second is closely related to what the French call “franc-parler“… To speak frankly. Without franc-parler, there cannot be parrhesia. Parrhesia is the royal road to higher philosophy.

Isegoria is an abbreviation for: all having the SAME speech capability in any PUBLIC PLACE. It is a different notion from free, sincere, open speech… Parrhesia. Democracy is pretty much impossible without having both. Michel Foucault gives a good description of the latter (Berkeley, 1983)

Etymologically, “parrhesiazesthai” means “to say everything — from “pan” (everything) and “rhema” (that which is said). The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse. In parrhesia, the speaker is supposed to give a complete and exact account of what he has in mind so that the audience is able to comprehend exactly what the speaker thinks. The word “parrhesia” then, refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what he says. For in parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion. And he does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks. Instead, the parrhesiastes uses the most direct words and forms of expression he can find. Whereas rhetoric provides the speaker with technical devices to help him prevail upon the minds of his audience (regardless of the rhetorician’s own opinion concerning what he says), in parrhesia, the parrhesiastes acts on other people’s mind by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes.

https://foucault.info/parrhesia/foucault.DT1.wordParrhesia.en/

Real philosophers are inclined to practice parrhesia… And it is frequently used against those who practice it, by using rhetoric, to some extent its adversary… we saw a bit of that in the Trump against Global Deep Plutocracy duel. Trump practiced parrhesia, and it was used against him, thanks to lack of isegoria and colossally vicious, misleading and disinforming rhetoric.

Could the Greeks have gone too far with frank (parrhesia) debate (isegoria)? Maybe. Maybe this is why Magna Grecia, the Great Greece of southern Italy could not resist the well organized armies of Roman peasants, because Magna Grecia was not united enough to be a military force. One has to keep that in mind when scattered democracies (consider Europe) confront anti-democratic states and ideologies…

Europe was not conquered for 15 centuries… Nor was it a democracy during all that time, but rather ruled by an armed aristocracy (a bit like the Roman republic greatly was)…

Patrice Ayme

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