TRUTH DIGGING CONSISTS IN UNMASKING EVILS:
Abstract: I celebrate the Iraq invasion my way, pointing out some of the devils, or evils traditionally ignored. The lack of learning after the disastrous Iraqi crusade is directly due to the persistence, in the USA, of the power structure that brought the war. The war itself was a giant red herring to hide much worse, the collusion between Washington and some of its worst creatures.
A red herring that between 2003 and 2007, killed more than a million Iraqi. A red herring that caused morality in the USA to collapse, and stay collapsed, every day that the war criminals are not prosecuted (interestingly many major French politicians are on trial in France for unlawful activities in Iraq. for much lesser alleged crimes than the ones Bush and company would be charged with).
Often devils (O’Connor, Saint Louis, Joan of Arc) are still viewed honorably.
With Saint Louis, the Dark Side overwhelmed any other side. Contrarily to his reputation. [In the Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 76 meters high, that he had built in 33 months.]
This failure to perceive devils for what they are is a consequence of the same cognitive-moral failure that brought us Bush, and his adulation by the sheeple. A lack of attention to the details, where devils lurk. Ever since there were evil beasts, and they wore camouflage, precisely because they were evil.
Democracy only survives if a truth machine, elucidating all hidden devils. If the devil is in the details, only the devil knows the truth. Truth should strive to go where evil lurks.
WITHOUT CORRECT DETAILS, HISTORY IS JUST THE HOUSE OF DEVILS:
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Said Edmund Burke, who added: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”
Sounds good. Yet in Burke’s mind, his version of history called to invade France, destroy the Constitutional government there, and replace it by the Ancient Regime of time honored plutocrats and theocrats. Never mind that king Louis XVI himself had spent all his long reign trying to make plutocrats pay. The alternative was default. So Louis called for a revolution.
Burke yearned for the likes of Saint Louis. Somebody who kills in good faith.
Saint Louis was a co-patron of the Order of Saint Francis. By modern standards, he would have been caged immediately (see below). Nice to see the present pope being unaware of these intricacies. So he was with the Argentinean dictator Videla who he used to feed.
Never mind that Louis XVI himself, as king, had initiated, condoned, and literally signed on the French Revolution. Burke’s murderous policy was implemented, bringing the death of millions, in France alone. And many times that, over all of Europe. Armies roamed from Lisbon to Moscow.
In the end, Human Rights won, which revolted Burke so much, that he thought moral to risk killing much of Europe for it (as France was three times england, and as the government there was constitutional, to call for an invasion was to call for devastation throughtout Europe, as, indeed, happened).
Unfortunately for Burke and his followers, Human Rights are now the core of the charter of the United Nations. That god who Burke had the presumption to help, is in full retreat, except in the most desolate places (that will include the vacuity of many an American youth’s mind).
Burke was a hero to crypto-fascists such as Hayek and Friedman, who provided the “intellectual” justification for atrocious dictatorships from Chili to Argentina, all the way up to Mexico, just as Heidegger provided it for Nazism. Hayek, Friedman and their ilk, actually provided the ideology for the new plutocratic order we are enjoying nowadays, all the way to Moscow, Cyprus and Dubai. (More on these forsaken pirates havens in another essay soon.)
So Burke lives to this day, in very many places, including the red hot anti-French hate among a significant part of the Wall Street journal readership (I’m a subscriber, so in a good position to judge.)
In a similar vein, the famous elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, started his mesmerizing work, “Mein Kampf” with pages of (anti-French pseudo-) history. Same idea as Burke: hit on human rights hard, right away. Only then did the fascist Guide switch to the ethological description of Jews in Vienna.
By April 1945, and 70 million dead later, the Guide conceded he had been misguided all along about the Germans and the Slavs.
So it’s not just enough to remember history, it’s important to know history, that is the facts as they really happened. History is about the details, and the devils therein, all of them. Leave none unturned.
PLUTOCRACIES USE THOSE POOR DEVILS, MERCENARIES:
In “Marches Of Folly“, an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman asks: “Did we learn anything from Iraq?”.
“Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.”
Let me comment here right away on Krugman’s “somehow”. “Somehow” is the crux. A quick historical reminder helps to understand the madness that gripped the USA.
A similar situation happened after the Second Punic War. Carthage’s own mercenaries revolted, and attacked Carthage. Carthage defeated them with great difficulty.
Why did Carthage employ armies of mercenaries? Because it was a plutocracy. At that time, the Roman republic was a rather direct democracy. So Rome could bring up armies of citizens, who were fighting for themselves. Self motivation made Roman soldiers much more determined than any of their paid adversaries.
The lesson of that disaster was that Carthage had to become much more democratic. Ironically, considerably enriched by conquests all over, plutocracy simultaneously took Rome over (and that was going to lead to the crash of Greco-Roman civilization).
How does this relate to the “somehow”? Very simple.
Carter, the very Christian president, had launched war, secretly, against Afghanistan. Although he had entire armies of goons at his disposal, the Geneva Fourth Convention violator in Washington needed more, to attack an entire country. Using a mercenary army raised by the Saudi plutocrats was the solution implemented in 1979.
Al Qaeda was initially an organization created by the CIA and the Saudi Intelligence Agency: they literally went to fetch the young Osama Bin laden in Turkey. As he was very pious, the bellicose side of the Qur’an could be manipulated to guide him, by making him believe he was as good as anyone to interpret the sacred texts. Then the godless goons taught Al Qaeda how to conduct asymmetric warfare against the Afghan republic (attack schools, not the military).
The entire political, plutocratic and propaganda class of the USA was immersed in all this. And it worked well for 15 years, until, well, just as with Carthage, the mercenaries understood they were being played, and underpaid. Then they turned against the hands that had taught them. The result: an asymmetric war between the gigantic army manipulated by Washington and the mercenary force. And then 9/11.
By then the Washington establishment had to admit everything, namely that, since 1945, it had instrumentalized Salafist Islam, in Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, etc. Or then it had to deny everything, and be more in power than ever. It just had to tell a good story, and stick to it. The story was that on 9/11, the sky was very blue, and then planes came out of nowhere.
Just charging bin Laden presented the inconvenience that some were bound to dig, and ask how bin laden appeared on the scene. It was best to go charge an enormous red herring first, with the largest imaginable lies possible ( a technique used and explained by no less than the German Chancellor above). The very size of the lies would have distracting properties, all by their absurdity. So Powell went to the UN with kindergarten drawings.
How does one disguise all this mess? Under which carpet does one hide it? Well, war against Saddam Hussein. (It also had the advantage of destabilizing the Middle East, and that is to Israel’s colonizing advantage.)
PLUTO PROFITS FROM WAR, ANY WAR:
Here is Krugman again: “Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake – that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.
There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war – having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted – left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.”
Counter-intuitively, many of the war party of the USA love a bigger and more influential Teheran: with a bit of luck, Teheran will do like Saddam, feel overconfident, and offer a casus belli. Then full war against Iran could be joined. However, of course, not all wars can be won. Overall, although it may not look like it to the clueless, the war against Iraq was a defeat for the USA.
The USA has a lot of false friends in the Middle East. The SIA is feeding Al Nusra, a Syrian Salafist army in Syria, and something will have to be done about that, and soon.
Krugman again: “So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.”
Why would they look as if they learned something? That would mean they went, somehow, through something untoward, that something adverse happened, to THEM. It certainly did not happen to them; they are richer, and more domineering than ever. Fortunes were made. Not far from New York, a war profiteer built for himself a sort of Versailles. Don’t expect to see this sort of data points, or giant architecture, appear in USA Main Stream Media (it was on French TV).
ATROCIOUS WAR CRIMINALITY IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN:
The USA invaded Iraq. Now it has completely lost that war. 4,500 USA soldiers died, and more than that in allied soldiers and mercenaries. Dozens of thousands of other soldiers were gravely wounded and millions got psychologically damaged by suffering, or inflicting extreme violence.
After the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a naive decision parroted by many other Americans around the country: he enlisted in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who killed nearly 3,000 men, women and children. Little did he know that those enemies were in Washington, where the war had been fully engaged July 3, 1979. Little did he know that these enemies were just American mercenary forces. As a good vacuous American youth, he was unaware that his own government had already caused the death of three millions, not three thousands, in Afghanistan.
Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan – where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated – but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by resistance fighters. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again. For the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks, and now intent to die by withdrawing treatment. Neofascists should not worry: Young will not count as an Iraq war casualty.
From Young’s letter, published on TruthDig:
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans-my fellow veterans-whose future you stole.
Young goes on to attack the “cowardice” of Bush and Cheney for avoiding military service themselves, and to encourage them to “stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”
(Read Young’s entire letter here.)
Not to worry: plutocracy is also a mood, where all values are inverted. Greed is viewed in more regards than altruism. As far as Bush and Cheney are concerned, Tomas Young is just a loser, with not enough brains to make the correct investment.
It goes without saying that international law ought to be brought to bear on all war criminals. Justice is not just about trying Serbs and Africans. Plutocrats should qualify too.
One of the USA’s main axes of exploitation, since 1945, has been to instrumentalize Salafist Islam. That was initially used against Britain, France, and even Israel (times change.) The difference between now and 60 years ago, is that many of the Salafists have realized they have been played (and first of all the Iranians; OK, technically the term “Salafist”, the “old ones” does not usually qualify Shiites, but I am generalizing, for semantic convenience!)
The hostility of the USA against the French republic during the Franco-Algerian civil war made a bad situation irreversibly worse:
ONGOING FRANCO-ALGERIA DRAMA:
51 years ago, on March 19, 1962, the Evian Accords finalized the transfer of power from the French Republic to the (“Algerian”) FNL (Front National de Liberation). Officially, this was a good thing, a step forward, the flow of history. In truth, it was basically a transfer of power from one terrorist organization, to another.
That was a disaster for the populations concerned. About 15% of the people living in Algeria fled, living everything behind, and many committed suicide. Algeria has known dictatorship ever since, first from the FNL, then from the military. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the following decades, at the hands of terrorists (from official Algerian numbers).
There is no doubt that the French state behaved extremely badly in Algeria, starting in 1945. Before that, it was just behaving badly. There is also no doubt that the FNL was an extremely nasty terrorist organization.
So there is nothing good to celebrate there. And the mayor of Perpignan, a major French city had the courage to recognize this simple fact today, that a very bad thing happened on March 19, 1962. The mayor ordered to bring down the French flags, and circled them with black.
Truth always start with an emotional admission. Even in mathematics, or science.
The politically correct emotion about the Evian Accords has been, for 51 years, that they were good, and necessary, however grim it was to sign them. They went with history. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The French republic’s abuses in Algeria were not wiped out clean by another 51 years of abuse, starting with abusing truth.
Confronted to that sort of past, in Algeria or Iraq, where reality is viewed as unbearable, there is only one principle worth having first. Namely that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, can prevent nasty outcomes. Especially those lies festering to this day.
Because, of course, the basic reasons for the Franco-Algerian civil war, are festering to this day, just on a grander scale. And now, the USA, instead of pulling nasty (Salafist) strings from the shadows (against France, BTW), is now on the frontlines (with France, happily).
The main reason why Germany is, finally, doing so well nowadays, is that a lot of the truth finally came out about some very bad ways German minds used to consider politically correct to operate under, while knowing no others.
WITH SAINTS LIKE THAT, WHO NEEDS DEVILS?
Not that only Germany has to be freed from simplistic, hence devil laden history. It’s not just that the American Founding fathers were slave masters. By contemporary standards, Saint Louis was a vicious criminal, and, at best, would have been interned as an insane maniac (he had declared, in writing, that nothing could be more pleasing to him than planting a knife into a non believer’s gut, and then playing around with the blade, once so inserted; why the Catholic church considers such a creep a saint rests on the fact that Catholics are not familiar with the lives of their most famous saints. and of course, that the church hierarchy is deeply evil).
Speaking of saints, the most revered Joan of Arc was a peace breaker. Paris and London had come to terms, and decided to reunify the kingdom (Treaty of Troyes). The king of England reigned over France. Unfortunately, he died within 2 months. His infant son was supposed to reign upon his majority. Wise people in England and France knew that this was an excellent arrangement, because, France being much bigger than England in all ways, there was no risk she would be gobbled up by England (contrarily to misrepresentations ever since). End of the 100 years war.
But then Jeanne, or rather the forces behind her (Yolande of Aragon) , from the south (Armagnac, Bourguignons, etc.) stepped in.
Jeanne restarted the Franco-French(-English) civil war. This time London and Paris were on the same side. Jeanne had quite a difficult time seizing Paris. Why such a divisive theocratic war monger is admired to this day is no mystery. Once Bush was selected, I mean when Charles VII had been unconstitutionally made king, there was no turning back. Jeanne d’Arc had to be made into a saint, or at least the judgments against her thrown out.
So will say it was better that England and France kept fighting each other for another 4 centuries: war is a force that gives us meaning. Perhaps. However, it’s neither wise, nor glorious not to teach in detail the reality of what happened. What happened is that Joan of Arc is another Christian “saint” who killed millions, and whose message, bloody sword in hand, voices from god in her head telling her war was all we needed, for no rational reason, is really not something one anyone wise would want to promote.
History is sometimes made by rats. As the famous sayingobservation has it, a rat gnawing through a dike can drown a nation. Now to this list of most creative creatures, we can add Sandra O’Connor, a so called “Justice”. Not only she has no notion of history, or justification, but that most fundamental human instinct, regret, central to learning anything important, has been extinguished in her. Her excuse? She is a “Westerner”. (Is that supposed to mean she has a gun instead of a head?)
Speaking of handing the presidency to plutocrat Bush, the vacuous Sandra reverted to a three year old persona. Said she: “There’s no point in my, at this point, saying I regret some decision I made. I’m not going to do that.”
Another bratty behaviour she may want to consider is to stop breathing and turning all blue until wiser people take pity. The Sandra girl by ordering to NOT recount Florida, gave the presidency to plutocrat Bush. The one who won the popular vote by two million, and also won Florida, Al Gore, was given a Nobel Prize instead of the presidency of the USA, to calm his nerves!
The point, O’Connor baby, is that, by saying that you regret your unconstitutional demolition of democracy, you would turn your back to Pluto, and join humanity. At least, symbolically speaking. That’s better than nothing. And better than staying forever, in the judgment of history, not just somebody who should never have existed, a one person democracy destroyer, but someone who persists into not even regretting her badness, contrarily to, say, Darth Vader.
It’s astounding one has to spell such an elementary truth to a big time Supreme Court “Justice”. Why are people such as these next to god? (Answer: because their very mediocrity insures that they will do the bidding of the plutocratic order.)
As the Romans knew, but O’Connor, and most of the truly bad soldiers of evil, do not want to admit: Errare Humanum Est, Perseverare Diabolicum! (Error Is Human, Persevering Diabolical!)
Going for the truth, and yanking it out of the entanglements where it lurks is always hellish in character. After all, woe onto those through whom scandal arrives.
Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Hell, it’s the others.” (L’enfer, c’est les autres): that was a neologism, an unusual way of using “autres”. It is mistranslated as “Hell is other people”, a different idea.
More generally, hell comes with the full reality that requires us to understand we would become obsolete, lest we change our minds. It may be painful to visit hell, but that’s where the hardest truths are lurking. Being ultimately good means turning hell into heavens.
Patrice Ayme
