Love Ali, Not The Concussions A Brutal Society Cherish

A society given to brutality needs brutes. Doing very bad things to heads, especially the heads of children, will help that way. It’s not a coincidence that the great age of Roman plutocracy was also the great age of gladiators, or often deadly chariot races (see the movie Ben Hur as reference there! Chariot races craze replaced thoroughly the rest of Roman intellectual activity, all the way to the time, in the Seventh Century, when the Arab Muslims smashed the empire).

I always esteemed the boxer who grew up as Cassius Clay, who was buried today, after decades of neurological decay.

In spite of the fact he decided he would become a Muslim named Muhammad Ali (after the Prophet and his son-in-law and cousin). I have something against people who decides that pre-Medieval systems of thought can teach higher morality. But Ali fought against the Vietnam War. He caused a scandal by observing:”I have nothing against them, Vietcong”. Then he refused to be drafted, but did not flee the USA. At the time, March 1966, that was tantamount to treason.

Appearing for his ordered induction into the U.S. Armed Forces on April 28, 1967, in Houston, Ali refused three times to step forward at the call of his name. An officer warned him he was committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. Once more, Ali refused to budge when his name was called. As a result, he was arrested. On the same day the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and stripped him of his world heavyweight champion title.

Bang Those Heads Hard, It’s Glorious. Ali Smashes Foreman’s Brains In Congo, Regaining (His) World Heavyweight Title.

Ali was denied a boxing licence in every American state, while his passport was confiscated. Thus Ali could not fight between the age of 25 and 29. By 1971, Ali’s position against the Vietnam War was widely shared, and courts started to reverse his conviction, and various official abuse he was submitted to. Thus Ali helped cognition in the US, and thus civilization, significantly.

The rest of Ali’s boxing career was glorious. However, thousands of blows to Ali’s head made him victim of a Parkinson-like disease. He just died from it. Ali recognized the nature of his disease, and its origin. His slightly younger brother, Rahman Ali, who, himself, had 20 strokes revealed years ago that his brother could barely speak and was unable to recognize him anymore.

***

So Why Are So Many Children Forced Into Concussion Sports? Is Not That Child Abuse?

Cassius Clay started boxing at age 12. He died at 74, after years of increasing ailment from his concussion induced illness.

Some will say Clay/Ali had a great life, thanks to all these concussions (Ali himself said something not far from that). They could point to Paulson, once a professional football player, who became the chairman of Goldman Sachs, then, as had already happened with Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary. As such Paulson gave orders not just to the Republican candidate for the presidency, but also to Barack Obama, who agreed.

My thesis is this: great Lords need great brutes to implement their rule. A solution is to tape their heads, compress the forebrains, build super brutes this way. A number of tribes, countries, societies did this, including in the Americas.

Similarly, concussion sports help to decerebrate the individuals most lethal to established order; young males. Hence the popularity of American football, Hockey, all sports requiring helmets because of constant shocks,

Concussions are only part of the problem. Another is drug abuse, or even time abuse to entice children into competition sports. Much of this happens in many countries, not just Russia, but also the USA (remember BALCO?), where the empire is mighty and nasty. In Russia, the FSB, which used to be known as the KGB, where Putin made his career, all the way to the top, is apparently involved in filling up athletes with illicit drugs, to help Russia win lots of medals at the Olympics, and other international competitions.

The USA is better organized than that: the intelligence agencies are not involved with drugs that way (they have higher pursuits). No need. They prefer to be involved with the so-called “social networks”, which one should perhaps know as the “spy networks”.

So celebrate the Cassius Clay then known as Muhammad Ali. But remember what made him live, increasingly, over decades, more and more, him who like to talk so well, like a thoroughly boiled vegetable. What killed Ali was the love of a particular society for concussions, and all the sports bringing as much concussions, and horrendous abuse, as possible. Professional American football players have been reported to have very short lifespans and very bad neurological diseases (not just Parkinson, Alzheimer and AMLS…) The subject is rather controversial, but not new: a century ago, just for that reason, a serious effort was conducted to make American football unlawful. After all, gladiator combat is unlawful, even in the US.

In any case, all these spectacle sports teach by example. And the example concussion sports teach is that monstrosity pays. And it pays very well.

Patrice Ayme’

Classical Nihilism: Shakespeare & Qur’an

Is life a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing? Shakespeare evoked the idea. He created a mood. Out of it Bush, massacring all the Natives? Shakespeare, the Master Thinker is much admired in the Anglo-Saxon world, and beyond (perhaps in the hope of seducing Anglo-Saxons by loving where they come from?) The Bard was gifted with words, but some of the terrible ideas he lent to his characters have seeped into the world consciousness, as we must approve of them. Maybe it was no accident, not all Islam, when a Jihadist from London executed many, for the camera, in the name of the Islamist State. (That assassin was executed by an American drone, a good usage of the technology… for a change!)

In 1984, a program of reintroduction of Golden Lion Tamarins brought nine of these heart melting primates from the Washington Zoo to a reserve to Brazil’s Mata Atlantica. At the time no more than 200 were left in the wild. However, Western zoos had their own populations, some dating several centuries (the cuties were popular at the French court).

If Shakespeare Feels Life Is An Idiocy That Signifies Nothing, Does It Mean We Have To Die? Oder Arbeit Macht Frei?

The Washington tamarins had been specially trained, for months to life outside. Logically enough, within weeks eight were dead. So much for Anglo-Saxon training (too much Shakespeare?). Subsequently, the Brazilians trained the tamarins themselves, with great success. (Now there are 2,000 in the “wild”. A “wilderness” full of freeways and high tension lines…)

The brutality, witchcraft, lethal ambition, and madness of a play such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth leaves images, and phrases, ideas and moods which pervade the Anglo-Saxon universe, and what it influences, namely the rest of the world from New Delhi to Beijing, Tokyo, even Moscow.

Who does not know “To be or not to be?”. It’s the opening sentence in Hamlet. The character is pondering suicide.

A new commenter on this site, Robin, subscribes to the Shakespeare cult, and quotes The Bard as an authority on my own idiocy. First Robin quoted the very last sentence of the following passage in MacBeth Act V scene 5::

LIFE’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Robin kindly explains that I am the idiot, by quoting me: “So on the eve of yet another disastrous day of tragedies, to read: “The more powerful we humans become, the more perfect our government has to be. Thus, the more We the Citizens have to be perfect. Thus, the keener we will have to be to find the truth, and impose it, when lives, or the future, are at stake.” made my blood curdle.

Yet another clarion call to humanity composed of rhetoric, but absent of meaningful content.”

Robin took a sentence from The Bard, and made it into an aphorism. I have several disagreements here, both with the method (Shakespeare did not talk about me, but about life), and with the aphorism itself.

Shakespeare seems to believe that a tale told by an idiot signifies nothing. Quite the opposite. Idiots and madmen have much to tell, that’s the all idea of Shakespeare, come to think of it.

I replied that Shakespeare here is in total contradiction, not just with humanism, but humanity itself. Humanity’s task is to give meaning to life. Shakespeare may have been an idiot full of sound and fury, like Hitler. As, indeed, the Nazis agreed fully with Shakespeare’s preceding quote. So they were destroyed by those who give meaning to life. May reciting Shakespeare literally be quite a bit like reciting the Qur’an literally?

Reading Robin, one see analogies: “As for Shakespeare, well, he pretty much stands alone – a man who invented 27% of our language… It is the ACTIONS, not the form, which produce results of good or evil.” Similarly, some doctors of the Islamist faith will say the Qur’an invented Arabic. And they would be mostly correct about the written form! As far as English and Shakespeare in concerned, it’s pretty grotesque to say he invented English. 85% of English is mispronounced Franco-Latino-Greek, and of the remaining 15% much is in common with Old Dutch, the language of the Franks…

So Shakespeare obsessed about “form”, and “Action” (see extract of Hamlet below). What happened to thinking? Is thinking in Shakespeare? Yes, “Conscience does make Cowards of us all”. (Hamlet below, again.)

Modern law has started to discover that THOUGHT CRIME is a real problem (notwithstanding that it was made fun of by the fashionable Sci-Fi author, George Orwell).

French and German law punish Nazi holocaust denial with prison. They have been imitated with a number of countries (including Hungary after 2010, where a would-be Nazi was since condemned to several years in prison suspended when he agreed to visit a number of sites where Nazis perpetrated holocausts, and to write a reports about what he learned after each visit).

Here is the beginning of Hamlet; we can either suffer, or commit suicide. Forget about political change:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes Calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,

The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely, [F: poor]

The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay, [F: disprized]

The insolence of Office, and the Spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his Quietus make

With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear, [F: these Fardels]

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn

No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of.

Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,

And thus the Native hue of Resolution

Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment, [F: pith]

With this regard their Currents turn awry, [F: away]

And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,

The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons.”

Be all my sins remembered

The fact remains that believing that “LIFE’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing…”

Is as bad as nihilism goes. For people like that why does killing children mean anything? Is it what they mean?

Why not engage in various inanities and murders, then, to give life some spice, more meaning? Was then G.W. Bush’s presidency straight out of Shakespeare, fretting on a stage, heard of it no more,  “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”… In other words, was G. W. Bush’s presidency straight out of Shakespeare, something classical, natural, a normal way of behaving?

It obviously was.

Shakespeare is a double edge sword, and the handle itself is a blade too. By grabbing it, as if it were a well of wisdom, one cuts all tendrils of wisdom.

Kudos to Obama for crying at the White House when evoking small children cut down by automatic weapons’ fire. And why were those small children killed inhumanely, tortured to death? Just because idiots telling furious tales, full of sound and madness, have decided life means nothing as long as it cannot be cut down by automatic fire.

Reading Shakespeare, just as reading the Qur’an, should be done very carefully, under advanced philosophical supervision. Lest it feeds the idiots with the mood that life signifies nothing, and thus may as well be welcome as a tale told by an idiot (Hitler, or some other “Prophet”?), full of sound and fury.

Wisdom is not just blossoming with sophisticated ideas, it also avoids reeking of foul, dangerous, sadistic, cruel, nihilistic, vicious moods.

Patrice Ayme’

Violent Politics, Violent Police

There were demonstrations in several cities in the USA, against police murders. Police induced deaths are a problem in the USA. Yet they are part of a system, which, by some measures, is the fiercest police state in the world. As the well-known Marxist newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, largest daily in the USA, revealed: ”Hundreds of Police Killings Are Uncounted in Federal Stats. FBI Data Differs from Local Counts on Justifiable Homicides.” The WSJ gives examples:

“WASHINGTON—When 24-year-old Albert Jermaine Payton wielded a knife in front of the police in this city’s southeast corner, officers opened fire and killed him. 

Yet according to national statistics intended to track police killings, Mr. Payton’s death in August 2012 never happened. It is one of hundreds of homicides by law-enforcement agencies between 2007 and 2012 that aren’t included in records kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest data from 105 of the country’s largest police agencies found more than 550 police killings during those years were missing from the national tally or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to the agency involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year.

Public demands for transparency on such killings have increased since the August shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo.”

These are the first demonstrations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (which produced a large demonstration in San Francisco, with more than 4,000 arrests). Freeways even got momentarily occupied by demonstrators.

The protests are about the police killing people who should not have been killed: a 12 year old playing with a plastic gun here, a teenager there, a guy brandishing a pocket knife (the latest, today in the center of Hollywood, where so-called “stars” are supposed to parade during “Academy Awards”). Or then the police smothers a suspect to death, for the camera, in New York.

WSJ again: “Law-enforcement experts long have lamented the lack of information about killings by police. When cops are killed, there is a very careful account and there’s a national database,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University. “Why not the other side of the ledger?”

Police violence is not directly about racism, it is worse. It is about the plutocratic order, where brute force is supposed to rule, rather than polished, policed, behavior.

Racism can be more easily remedied than a way of life. Or a way of fight.

How does the USA work? It’s a policed jungle. A jungle, with a police, a jungle adapted police. A jungle, with a justice, yielding the law, the law of the jungle.

One third of households in the USA are in possession of guns made to kill people. As the police are people too, this means that one third of potential arrests can result in a gunfight.

Thus American police views as prudent to shoot first and ask questions later. The police is also keen to arrest drivers for speeding (more than ten millions are arrested each year for speeding in California alone; quite a few of these arrests are bogus: I asked once an officer why he had stopped my friend, considering that other cars were driving at the same speed. He replied: ”Because there is only one of me.”

A speeding arrest can bring nearly a thousand dollars in the coffer of some jurisdictions (fines vary wildly, and are cashed, in part, locally). In any case, you are best advised to leave your hands on the wheel, fully visible, and dig in the glove compartment for your papers, only if asked to, by the always vigilant and trigger happy officer. Any other behavior is “extremely dangerous”, as a police officer explained to me.

Officers hold themselves in the dead angle, their hand on their gun. Just in case they have to engage in cautionary shooting.

Violent American police is the answer to violent American society. It’s a symbiosis.

So is American Justice.

Both police and justice are there to keep an aura of terror over all of society. And thus discipline. A Prussian discipline.

***

The Prussian Paradigm:

Now, all right, Prussia was violently, officially and legislatively racist against Jews, Poles and Slavs. It was part of its Satanic nature as a country a tenth the size of France, demographically, but with an army nearly as large, imbued by a tradition of mayhem.

The conquest of the Pagan natives of Prussia by the Teutonic Knights had been exemplary in its total ferocity on both sides; then the Knights themselves got annihilated by the combined Lithuanian and Polish nations… before rebounding as the Prussia of Frederik the Great, much admired by Hitler, but actually supported by Russia and Britain, and enormous ferocity.

In the end, Prussia defeated France, united all of Germany under its malevolent empire, before giving us the Kaiser, Hitler, and three wars with France, the last two of which it lost, leading to its eradication.

However, this Prussian show demonstrate that absurd, racist, unfair violence can work for generations, and build an empire.

A milder form of the Prussian “solution” was Great Britain itself: less racist, less ferocious, worked very well.

***

Why is Prussian discipline and exemplary punishment so important in the USA?

In first analysis, one can say that it is because people come from all over the world in the USA, forming a “nation of immigrants” to use the trite expression. To cement them together, discipline is needed. That and bondage of the mind through obsessive behavior pertaining to basketball, American football, baseball, charities, god, a reverence for paying for everything, and Thanksgiving.

In second analysis, though, Prussian discipline is also a paradigm for the reign of a force oriented society. Just as the power of police guns, the power of the powers that be, is unlimited: such is the mood imparted on the populace.

I am sympathetic to the cause of diminishing American violence, but asking the police to do it first, and believing that only the police needs fixing, is unrealistic.

Demonstrators know this, and protested “Justice” decisions, not just police action.

Advancing the cause of care, instead of the cause of profit, ought to have been the cause of the Obama presidency, but it did not happen.

***

Plutocracy Lite, Also Known As Congress:

Instead we got Obama-care, a parody. But also a paradigm for the hypocrisy of the ruling class, the CEO class, and professional politicians with business connected families and immense riches. The two most powerful politicians in California, under Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein, are extremely rich.

Feinstein’s personal worth is 45 million dollars: not bad for somebody who only did politics all her life.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Her husband, Blum, has been doing a lot of business with the top plutocrats in China.

As Roll Call puts it:

“Feinstein’s a classic case of one of the biggest faults in the reporting requirements: assets in Blum’s name may be reported in a broad category of more than $1 million, so the calculated minimum net worth may be a significant understatement.

Blum’s assets include holdings in Current Media, the company headed by former Vice President Al Gore that was sold to Al Jazeera. He has significant holdings through Blum Capital Partners in an array of businesses, including the Carlton Hotel chain and OZ Fitness.”

We can safely say that the Feinstein couple made hundreds of millions from political trafficking.

Out of the ten richest members of the Congress of the USA, eight are “Democrats”. So much for the Republican Party being the party of money.

The tenth fortune in Congress, an ex-Microsoft executive, is personally worth AT LEAST 40 million dollars. Her husband oversees the federal government’s online health care enrollment website, healthcare.gov. In other words, Obamacare. Need I say more?

This whole American picture would be interpreted as corruption in most European countries (except for Byelorussia, and Putin’s kingdom). However, in the USA, this is not interpreted as corruption, but as legitimate business, so the Perceived Corruption Index of the USA is low.

Some young people are getting agitated, as they realize that they have been had. Paul Krugman can tell them ad nauseam, that the USA is doing better than the rest of the world, but people in the street guess that the GDP is going up, because of all the money going to the richest of the rich, has been increasing in leaps and bounds.

And simple young people are right to be angry: a few weeks after bogus elections, it’s clear nothing will change. Another long term “Democratic” Senator lost her seat today, confirming the Republican wave, the greatest in sixty-five years.

On the positive side, now Obama will be able to genuinely claim that he cannot do a thing because of the Republicans.

On the negative side, because the President selected by Wall Street (greatest source of financing of Obama in 2007-2008), did not deliver, the street may have to deliver itself through less conventional means: a demonstration in Berkeley saw violence by well-organized demonstrators, some of them hiding behind “planet of the apes” masks. Tear gas, rubber bullets were flying, stores got vandalized, demonstrators sat in front of my car, my five year old asked questions (A U turn resolved the situation).

Fixing a violent plutocracy has never been done without even greater violence, history shows (even the Athenian Republic was re-established after the intervention of a Spartan army, an enormously significant detail often overlooked by conventional historians).

Fortunately, the USA is not all the way there.

But, as the ballot box has failed to deliver change, just as the Federal Reserve had to use unusual means of rekindling economic activity (namely by giving trillions of dollars to the banks which had caused the 2008 crash), it is high time to engage in unusual means of re-establishing democracy. Meanwhile getting the old corrupt bosses out is not a bad way to start.

Overall, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress which accompanied it, constituted a gigantic lie. And a lie to exert abuse and violence on We The People. So now push is turning to shove, and democracy is fighting back, so far timidly. Hope we can believe, at last?

Patrice Ayme’

Scathing Thinking

It is easy to be ironical, pose as a saint, and ponder:”Why stop at Isis when we could bomb the whole Muslim world? Humanitarian arguments, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East.”

I generally  like The Guardian’s Mr. Monbiot, and I understand he has to be funny and controversial to earn his keep. Yet, is that ethical? No. If “ISIS” (Daesh) could get its hands on Mr. Monbiot, they would saw through his throat as if he were another sheep (or Abraham’s son, whoever!). It’s something Fundamentalist Muslims have to do. I pointed  this dynamic feature in many essays in the past, such as “Violence in the Holy Qur’an“. It’s best addressed this way:

French Rafale Hunting True Believers In Ultimate Violence

Here are a few quotes from the first real chapter (“sura”) in the Qur’an. “the Cow”:

“A fire has been prepared for the disbelievers, whose fuel is men and stones.’ [Qur’an s. 2: v. 24]

“Disbelievers will be burned with fire.” [Koran, S. 2:39, v. 90]

“Jews are the greediest of all humankind. They’d like to live 1000 years. But they are going to hell.” [Koran, s. 2: v.96]

“Allah will leave the disbelievers alone for a while, but then he will compel them to the doom of Fire.” [Koran, s. 2:v. 126]

“Kill disbelievers wherever you find them. If they attack you, then kill them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. (But if they desist in their unbelief, then don’t kill them.) [Qur’an s.2:v. 191-2]

“War is ordained by Allah, and all Muslims must be willing to fight, whether they like it or not.” [s. 2: v. 216]

“Those who marry unbelievers will burn in the Fire.” [2:221]

“Disbelievers worship false gods. They will burn forever in the Fire.” 2:257″

That’s just the first chapter, sura 2, as I said. Nothing wrong with it, of course, if you don’t take it too seriously. But apparently too many take it all too seriously, as they learn little else.

The same problem arose with Christianity: was the Bible to be taken literally? It was solved by the Church’s Founding Fathers, around 400 CE, by deciding it was all allegoric, metaphorical, etc. The exact opposite decision was taken by one Caliph around 850 CE.

Hence the on-going need to flatten completely some systems of thoughts and moods infesting the Middle East, as Ebola does West Africa. As Monbiot points out unwittingly.

Says Monbiot:”Let’s bomb the Muslim world – all of it – to save the lives of its people. Surely this is the only consistent moral course? Why stop at Islamic State (Isis), when the Syrian government has murdered and tortured so many? This, after all, was last year’s moral imperative. What’s changed?

How about blasting the Shia militias in Iraq? One of them selected 40 people from the streets of Baghdad in June and murdered them for being Sunnis. Another massacred 68 people at a mosque in August. They now talk openly of “cleansing” and “erasure” once Isis has been defeated. As a senior Shia politician warns, “we are in the process of creating Shia al-Qaida radical groups equal in their radicalisation to the Sunni Qaida”.

What humanitarian principle instructs you to stop there?”

Then Monbiot in his stupidity, proposes to bomb Israel, Iran, etc. He forgets that Israel is an ally, and Iran used to be one, and could be one again. Besides both have more or less free elections. After the French started to bomb in Iraq, the Iranian president came over, and visited with the French president, in peaceful agreement about the necessity to flatten terrorists.

The leaders of the West made no mystery that they are destroying fanatics according to the prime moral directive, namely survival. Saving the Middle Earth is secondary.

It is true that, as I have been saying for decades, and now Monbiot repeats, the plutocratic connections between Assad and London, or the Saudi family and Washington, ought to be brought to light (actually Monbiot does not mention the former: too close to his employer, and his social circles, I guess…). There is a global plutocracy problem, and it has impacted the Middle Earth, from Ukraine, to Pakistan, Libya…

However, it is useful to consult with a bit of history, Mr. Monbiot. In 1936, similar arguments to the ones you brandish, under the guise of irony, were used to do nothing about the Civil War in Spain. The first step is the hardest, and that’s getting into the fray, and flattening those who want to flatten much of what passes for civilization, in this world.

Another point is that there was certainly something very wrong with the Christianity of the Inquisition. If such ferocious Christians existed today, had an army, and invaded, one should certainly intervene, and flatten them. It would be a matter of security of the Republic, civilization, and… peace. I am all for sending some Rafales against Louis IX, the so-called Saint Louis, a rabid murderous fanatic of the worse type, and give him the Qaddafi treatment. However, as he died nearly 750 years ago in Tunis, I will have to content myself with scathing criticism.

Islam is also a religion of Europe, and the USA, and ferocious, murderous Islamist organizations ought to be treated just as ferocious, murderous Christian fundamentalist organizations would be, if they were still around, killing and torturing.

By the way the present Pope is more than an hypocrite. He loves Opus Dei, the closest thing we have to the Inquisition, which took part in the massacre of millions of Spaniards, and has entangled itself with the West’s plutocratic circles… And probably Putin. The Pope just “beatified” the founder of Opus Dei. Opus Satanas is more like it.

This, of course indicates that the present Pope, below his benevolent smile, was in hock with the Argentinian dictatorship, as charged.

The present bombing in Iraq and Syria is highly targeted. The big bombs below that Rafale above are guided by laser beams, they land within a meter of the target. We are very far from the area bombing which flattened Hitler’s Reich. The French Air Force Rafale depicted can, and does, hunt, identify and destroyed individual vehicles (that’s how Qaddafi was targeted, hit, and, later died, after spending some time in a tunnel like a bleeding rat).

Scathing irony does not replace deep thinking, or, for that matter, scathing thinking.

Patrice Ayme’.

Unexamined, Unequitable: 9/11/73

I do not just believe in Systems of Thoughts but also in Systems of Mood. For example if one installs oneself in a mood of indifference, cruelty, or inequity, that mood, by affecting all of one’s neurochemistry, will pervade all of one’s mental system. This holds not just within individuals, but for entire superorganisms: societies. Logic is punctual, moods are global, they tweak all logics.

Charles Blow contemplates the“Occupy Wall Street Legacy“, and strikes an optimist note:“The rich have recovered, but the rest still struggle. This cannot long stand.” Yes, the people should stop struggling, and just humbly submit to their Lords before the latter get real angry, as they did on 9/11/1973. That’s when the legal government of Chile was assassinated, and replaced by a made in USA neoconservative butchery.

Major USA Crime Yet Unexamined

First the Chief of Staff of the army, a constitutionalist, had to be killed. General René Schneider was Army Commander-in-chief at the time of the 1970 Chilean presidential election, in which Salvador Allende won a plurality on September 4, 1970, on his fourth try for the presidency. A congressional vote was required to confirm the winner.

Allende was a Medical Doctor from the upper Chilean society. Having seen misery in hospitals, he founded the Unidad Popular (“Popular Unity”) coalition. He was minister of health in 1938, a deputy and a senator. Contrarily to what is often claimed, Allende was a socialist, not a Marxist. In personal conversations with his closest friends, he never evoked Marx. Allende lived in a mansion.

Hollande, the French president who waged war in Mali and wants to “punir le dictateur Assad“, is also a socialist. Yet he is not from the upper society and does not own a mansion.

The basic problem with Allende was that he was under the misconception that Chili was owned by Chileans.

The CIA spent 2.7 million dollars to defeat Allende in 1964, plus much more millions from Royal houses in Europe, the Vatican, Christian Democratic parties, the Catholic church of the USA, all sorts of frantic plutocrats. The money was used for what the ambassador of the USA, Edward Korry called “an enormous propaganda campaign” (American propaganda campaigns, Korry added, that he witnessed in many countries; even in Europe).

The same strategy was used in Italy in 1948, or Chili in 1970 (this time with a CIA seed of ten millions): create an anti-Socialist terror (source: Nixon’s ambassador to Chile, again).

Incidentally this shows that the concept of plutocracy is all-embracing, and that the Royal Houses are part of it. They should all be unceremoniously replaced by the Republic, and the main reason invoked ought to be, precisely, this sort of criminal conspiracies against humanity that they have been involved in. (Catalonia independencia is a good place to start!)

This is not just dead history: all those who repeat that Allende was a Marxist are still part, consciously or not, of that propaganda, that conspiracy, serving the masters.

Actually Nixon did not call Allende a Marxist. He knew better. Nixon called Allende a “bastard”, a “SOB”. Richard Nixon, the famous criminal,  decided he got a vote too. Nixon ordered that Allende would not go from quasi elected president to president. Nixon ordered the CIA to “smash that bastard” (revealed his ambassador, Edward Korry). Three Chilean generals met with the US ambassador. They informed him that the chief of the Chilean army would strictly follow the Chilean Constitution, and refuse to make a coup.

So Kissinger and Richard Helms (CIA chief) sent weapons and ammunitions to Chiliand personnel to Chili to assassinate general Schneider, October 24, 1970. Some of the weapons were sent by diplomatic pouch (without telling the ambassador). The result surprised Nixon. Full of indignation about that Washington-organized assassination, even rightist Congressmen voted for Allende, who was duly elected president.

Allende launched a program of nationalizations, in particular of USA owned banks and copper mines.  He also launched a national health program, free milk in schools, a pursuit of the land redistribution program already started under his predecessor, Eduardo Frei. Behaving exactly like the Roman Republic of old, the Chilean government limited the latifundia (large farms) to 80 hectares. That too was part of Allende’s electoral platform.

Allende brought up the lowest wages by up to 30%, while slowing inflation by a third. Fiscal spending went up from 21% to 27% of GDP. A huge housing program was launched.

The CIA convinced key Chilean military officers to carry out a coup. USA Defense Intelligence Agency agents secured the missiles used to bombard La Moneda Presidetial Palace (the film of the bombardment is easy to access on the Internet).

In light of all this, what to do with Mr. Blow’s optimism?

“The rich have recovered, but the rest still struggle. This cannot long stand,”  sings Blow. Why could not it stand? After plutocracy took power in Rome, it took more than 1,800 years for the a fully democratic constitution to return, in France in 1789 (contrarily to what Obama claimed last week, the Constitution of the USA, as it allowed for racial slavery until 1865, was not truly democratic). Interestingly, the Roman empire itself had officially returned by 800 CE. Thus democracy is more fragile than plutocracy!

Blows hopes that:“Extreme levels of inequality are politically untenable and morally unacceptable, and that eventually the 99 percent will demand better. “

Well it was unacceptable that the government of the USA would kill high Chilean authorities, just because American plutocrats owned the world’s largest copper mines in Chili. But where is the inquiry? There is a lot of flag waving on 9/11. But how many Americans know there are two 9/11s, and that, in a deep sense, both were engineered at the highest levels of the USA?

The inquiry in the death of the UN general-secretary was recently reopened, 52 years after the fact. Dag Hammarskjöld was shot down by the usual suspects (Anglo-Saxon mining plutocrats) and it was covered-up by the usual suspects (their accomplices in the USA-UK governments).

Unfortunately, instead of reopening the past to examine it carefully, right now the majority seems to be demanding that dictators be allowed to gas children in peace. Instead of asking what happened on 9/11 in 1973, the majority seems to be inspired by Uncle Vlad, the way it used to be inspired by uncle Joe.  

The economic theory in use today is, simply, wrong. First, to measure the economy, it evaluates riches, in other words, how the wealthy are doing.

Salvador Allende, president of Chili, had made a superb discourse at the United Nations, much applauded, where he explained that corporations answered to no one, and were above the law. This is why Nixon  gave the order to “smash Allende“. And Allende was smashed. To this day, how many thousands were killed is unknown.

“Eventually the 99 percent will demand better,” dreams Blow optimistically. However the only reason Martin Luther King was allowed to dream was because president Eisenhower had stood and delivered.

Ike comically said:”Earl [Warren, Supreme Court chief] wants big black negroes to sit next to small white little girls at school.” It was innocuously funny: Ike did send the army to enforce desegregation in schools in the 1950s. He did not ask Congress (against!) or public opinion (against!). The dream came after the fact.

Meanwhile in Chili, the daughters of two generals who were neighbors and good friends until 9/11 are running for the presidency. Ms Matthei’s father, Gen Fernando Matthei became a senior goon of Pinochet.

Ms Bachelet has already been president (one cannot do two presidencies in a row in Chili). She will probably win again (as her first presidency was excellent). Her father, General Alberto Bachelet, remained loyal to the Republican Constitution. He was arrested, tortured and killed. She wants to re-examine what happened on 9/11/73. So things are looking up in Chili.

Less so at that point in the USA. Hence the need for Professor in Chief Obama to enlighten the obscure masses, with basic lessons in ethics and strategy: “crimes against humanity are intolerable, repeat after me!” 

What the 66% have been demanding is that crimes against humanity be left unpunished. Why should the 66% demand an equitable society, when they don’t want to stop a tyrant who gaz children?

In any case, it’s high time for the USA to examine the murderous interference of Nixon in the completely legal government of a country that had been fully constitutionally democratic for about as long as the USA itself. And it’s high time not to forget that the same advisers who were behind Nixon (such as Kissinger and Friedman and Kaiser) were also the creators of the so called neo-liberal order… Which is neither new, nor liberal. But drenched in blood, inequity, misery, and the old tradition of killing people one cannot rob in peace.

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Patrice Ayme