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 Ayme
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.
