When Big Ideas Are Needed, But Lacking, Extinction Is A Solution:
Obama gave his “Farewell Address” (the most interesting bits of which I could have written myself… or maybe I did, come to think of it, much earlier…). Yet, he made a snide remark about those who believe the whole US system is so corrupt, that decent people should not touch it. Well, he does not understand. Some political systems are so flawed, they cannot be incrementally improved.
That was true of Sparta and Athens, in the greatest age of Greece (for drastically opposite reasons which amounted to the same). The Greek political system (yes, there was such a thing), a set of moods and ways, was so unsustainable, it was threatened with extinction. And it sure got extinguished (Pericles, restricting Athenian nationality; Poleis, fighting all over, for often ridiculous reasons, were a serious problem).
The solution? Union. What Sparta refused to even talk about. We are in the same global, worldwide, situation as Greece, by the way, and the solution is the same. The one which was not seized, and could not be seized, because Greek civilization was too flawed in some of its moods (such as the one about honor…) Something to be said for Trump’s desire to sort it out peacefully with Russia…
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Much of the US system is, fundamentally flawed:
Especially in some its meta-features. Meaning? The Founding Fathers were lying in the matter of which civilization they truly wanted. Greed was foremost to them, and they hid that below big words. As long as this is not a well-known point, the entanglement between many of the worst flaws of the present civilization will stay unexamined.
If one lies too much, one cannot think enough. This is true of society, as it is of individuals.
One such ruling mood is the lack of examination that presided over the elaboration of the American Republic. The Founding Fathers stole, and brandished, a lot of their soaring rhetoric from philosophers (most of them French), precisely to hide the fact they were the exact opposite.
Slavery Made Washington, & America, Rich. So Did Holocaust. Refusing To Look At The Truth, Enabled These Behaviors, And Lives To This Day, as General Mood, The PC Mood. Gentleman In Black Is Colonel George Washington, On His Lands, 1753.
Thereupon, a great tradition of lying, fake news, dissemblance, was launched. (Somewhat related accusations can be directed towards the mother civilization, namely France; however, in France, a tradition of excoriating some presidents (called kings, centuries ago), or even a tradition of ferocious philosophical wars is firmly installed…)
Obama, in his “Farewell Address”, claimed “America” (the US, actually, there is imperialism, the Monroe Doctrine, in the over-claiming word “America”) is always improving (and exemplified this by the “smooth transition to a new administration”). Maybe. However, it’s like saying a plane trying to take-off sees its speed always improving. Right. Yet, one has to clear the trees. One hundred H bombs would cancel the “America” show, forever.
Obama talked as if the US would profit mightily from further incremental improvements, as if there was all the time in the world. However he himself admitted that the calamitous effects of “climate change” will be upon us soon, and that they may the only thing the next generation will be doing. (He left war out of it, but that’s how changes shows up, always.)
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The Evil Origins Of The American Republic,
the USA, have been carefully hidden, to enable the citizenry careful denial that such are some of the traits which animate them. Thus enabled, said citizens are free to pursue, or let their masters pursue, the same ways and means, slightly translated to new settings.
To progress, one has to question the origins, and one’s origins. Those are not questioned enough in the USA. Therefrom the origins of American “naivety”. American “naivety” is a cover-up. Being outwardly naive enables one to practice evil, while claiming, to high heavens, that one is nothing of the sort.
Obama evokes the “corrosive influence of money in our politics”, and he sheds ((crocodile) tears, no doubt feeling all the good money coming his way: all theater, George Washington’s style. Actually, he loves the money. Most of us, normal types, would.
What did I just suggest? That the slave mentality is one of the things that is being inherited (that’s the part of the Trump revolution others missed: those who voted for Trump, voted against the slave mentality imposed upon them, and that they welcomed, for all too long!)
The results, of so much mental inertia, of course, could be catastrophic; whereas said mentality just enslaved some continents, while devastating others, we are now all the continents, all the Natives, squirming on the chopping block.
President Washington was a slave master. A slave investor. A slave driver. A vicious, conniving exploiter of his fellow-man, exploiting loopholes in law to keep on torturing his fellow-men, by the hundreds, on a very personal basis. Should he have the capital city named after him? Get to know him better, before jumping to the affirmative. As The Economist puts it in The first president, slave-owner. The spectre of slavery haunts George Washington’s house,
Jan 5th 2017, WASHINGTON, DC:
“When Washington was 11, he inherited 10 slaves from his father; when he died five decades later, he owned 123 of the 317 slaves who lived and worked at Mount Vernon. In that time the estate grew from a fairly modest farmhouse with 2,000 acres to a 21-room mansion and nearly 8,000 acres. It was in this way that the first president became rich: by buying, owning and sometimes selling people and by forcing them to work for him, under pain of flogging, beating or being sold away from their relatives and friends. There had hitherto been little acknowledgement at Mount Vernon of this dreadful blot on Washington’s reputation, or of the hundreds of black slaves who lived and worked there.”
This abominable stain on the start of the American Republic was covered-up for decades of fake news:
“Insofar as slavery was mentioned at all in the plantation house’s literature and by its guides, it was to talk up the second thoughts on owning people Washington claimed to have had in the second half of his life. He thought it better, he wrote in 1778, to “get quit of Negroes”… This apologetic view of Washington’s slave-owning is still espoused by many school textbooks and historians… many Americans were surprised when, at the Democratic National Convention in July, Michelle Obama alluded to the fact that slaves helped built the White House.”
Slavery was an elaborate abomination. It was the free market (of people, as usual) in all its splendor. No indecency was left unturned:
“…an exhibition on slavery, “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at [president] George Washington’s Mount Vernon”, describes the lives of 19 of the slaves who lived on the estate. Sambo Anderson, for example, a carpenter, born in West Africa, whom Washington appears to have purchased in the 1750s and freed in his will. His wife and children were owned by the estate of Martha Washington and handed on to her inheritors after her death. Anderson spent the rest of his life saving money, from his work as a beekeeper and hunter, in order to buy the liberty of a handful of his children and grandchildren.”
To this day, The Economist recognizes, a mood of cover-up, of hiding the truth, and of fake news dominate the exhibition of the First President’s disgusting being:
“Even in the slavery exhibition, there is little sense of the violence Washington visited on his slaves—the whippings and beatings, the slaughter of his slaves’ dogs he ordered to prevent them alerting their masters to the approach of his overseers. Much is made of his growing misgivings about slavery. But there is too little recognition that this appears to have been at least in part motivated by economics; by growing less tobacco Washington reduced his demand for slave-labour.
For Washington’s slave-owning was not, as the experience of Mount Vernon might suggest, a painful footnote to a great life, but as central to it as anything he did. Washington’s zeal for efficiency, order and money-making are all part of his mythology; these qualities help explain his success. They were also the spirit in which he traded in and worked his slaves. He approached the business of buying slaves as he might livestock, insisting, “all of them to be strait limbed, & in every respect strong and healthy with good teeth”. He worked them into the ground, expecting that “every labourer (male and female) does as much in 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow.””
Washington always refused to free his slaves, as Lafayette urged him to do, for years. They were friends; at the battle of Yorktown, when the British army had to surrender, there was one American army, but also two French armies, one of them headed by Lafayette, and one French fleet, which had defeated,and put to flight, the British fleet. Understand that the tradition, the culture and the legal system Lafayette came from, had outlawed slavery more than 11 centuries prior. Washington came from a tradition, a culture, a legal system, which had reinstalled slavery, 160 years earlier, to maximize profits.
In truth, the US First President was a great beast of abomination (as I have pointed out in writing for more than eight years: see “Plutocracy Originated Slavery and Racism”). The Economist notices that Washington’s misgivings about slavery are given prominence in contemporaneous exhibitions. A type of Fake News. Fake News of the deepest type.
“Less prominent attention is paid to Washington’s lifelong efforts to protect the system that made him rich. In 1783 he signed the first fugitive slave law, which authorised the recapture of escaped slaves in any state and the punishment of anyone found harbouring fugitive slaves. He also sought to circumvent anti-slavery law for his own purposes.
Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery of 1780 ruled that any slave who entered the state with an owner and stayed longer than six months must be freed. Because Philadelphia was America’s seat of government at the time, this gave Washington a headache. His solution was to surreptitiously arrange for his slaves to be cycled in and out of the state every few months (“I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington” he wrote to his personal secretary in 1791). Only twelve weeks before he died, Washington was still trying to track down a slave who had escaped three years earlier, having learned that Martha Washington planned to give her away as a wedding present.”
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The Dark Side Created The USA In No Small Way:
To start with, just as slavery was central to President Washington’s successful life, slavery, and holocausts, were central to the success of the early American society, and its Republic: enslavement and extermination enabled to get rid of the American Natives, their control of the continent, and made the European colonists immensely rich.
Slavery, introduced in the first few years of the English colony, in 1619 CE, was unlawful in England (since the Frankish conquest of 1066 CE; slavery was unlawful in the Frankish/Roman empire since 655 CE!) Slavery was actually unlawful anywhere in Europe (out of the Muslim controlled area).
However, slavery made the cultivation of tobacco possible, to the point the English American colony became highly profitable.
By comparison, the French colony in Canada did not allow slavery, nor holocausts. Thus French Canada depended only upon trading furs with the American Natives: thus Canada was much less profitable than the slavery propelled English colonies.
The clashes with English authorities about “taxation without representation” were real. However, they were not the main bone of contention. The real, main problem was that real estate speculators and greedy colonists were eager to spread their colonization, and destruction of Native American societies, west of the Appalachians. Whereas the English authorities felt more decent, and wiser, to stop the holocaust (OK, certainly they also wanted to keep control). This was the main cause of the US war of independence, and no accident that a real estate speculator such as Colonel Washington played a central role.
Nor is it an accident that this fact is still covered-up (below the “taxation without representation argument”).
The Economist pondered that “panegyrics to Washington’s generosity and humanity leave little room for the horrors he oversaw. For an alternative view, your blogger asked a young black security guard at the slavery exhibition what he made of the first president’s much vaunted second thoughts on slavery. “You know, I’ve been studying this quite a bit since I started working here”, he said. “People say George Washington was against slavery. I say actions speak louder than words”.”
Indeed. Actually there is a remedy to all this.
Why should we pay attention to all this history? Because yesterday’s origins created today’s reality. Civilizations have moods and meta-moods. US religiosity is entangled with the desire of not wanting to know too much what is really going on. The Bible justified holocausts and enslavement, and the mood that, whatever good men do, it was ordered by God. That overall mentality is still in power, and enabled by the imperial manner of many an US institutions, and the aura they bathe in.
As the USA has become the world’s most influential power, the roots of the American mentality, greed, slavery and holocaust, should be carefully examined.
As whom many have depicted as a clown is going to be endowed by the immensely evil power of thousands of nuclear devices, each capable of annihilating a city in seconds, it is worth remembering how the whole empire got launched.
European conquered America, because they succeeded to do, what the Nazis (stupidly) dreamed they could do in Europe (Nazis had seen too many “Westerns”, and even absorbed all too well the idea that Westerns were fake news, to some extent, thus that Americans were not for real…) To put it even more bluntly, Nazism, for real, armed with the Bible, not the Swastika, is how the West, but also the Eastern Seaboard, and the fly-over country in between, was conquered.
The unexamined life may be too unworthy to keep on living.
And the obverse is true. A thoroughly examined life is much more worthy. Athens had only 60,000 citizens, yet dozens of them among civilization’s most prominent intellectuals. Total democracy endows with total power!
How? Any Athenian could pretend to the highest functions: they may be bestowed on him (many offices were drawn by lot). So all paid attention to what was going on. Obama had only to pay attention to what big money and gigantic power wanted him to do.
Was if why Obama shed a tear in his farewell address? Full of sorrow, for his departed soul, as he looks at the hopeful face of his youngest daughter? Remembering that he was the Faust in chief? President of all the little Fausts out there?
Time to study in greater depth the roots of our moods, lest we want to shed even more tears.
Patrice Ayme’
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