In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro a few days ago, Dictator Assad pretended that, “In the beginning, the solution should have been found through a dialogue from which political measures would have been born.”
That was a lie: he shot peaceful secular demonstrators demanding an end to his tyrannical hereditary plutocracy, when protests started in 2011 (no other Arabic speaking dictator did this so massively). Then Assad repeated for the Figaro his refrain that 90% of the rebels are Al Qaeda. “The only way to cope with them is to liquidate them,” he said. “Only then will we be able to discuss political measures.”
First kill, then negotiate. Assad feels like Bruce Willis in the “Fifth Element”.
Assad should know: he is a liquidation specialist. “If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon.” Assad told Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri in 2004, a few months before two metric tons of TNT (seven Tomahawk missile warheads!) blew Hariri and dozens of other people into small bits. Hariri had been Prime Minister a total of ten years, and was the most prominent Lebanese politician. He and French president Chirac were pushing Assad’s occupation army out of Lebanon.
Why aren’t you worried about the Islamist rebels? They seem cruel and demented.
They are cruel and demented. The Assads made them so.
The Assad dynasty is about the worst of the worst. Smiles hiding criminal fury. It single handedly caused the Syrian civil war. Instead of ”liquidating” his countless enemies, an easier alternative, to reach appeasement, is to liquidate him.
As the sedate NYT puts it: “His violent reaction to the uprising led what was once a proudly secular society into a largely sectarian conflict between the majority Sunni Muslims and his small minority of Alawites, an obscure branch of Shiite Islam.
“For him there is nothing to lose,” a Damascus-based analyst said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “He cannot compromise. He has to see this through. He cannot rebuild; he cannot reconcile. He is stuck. He can rule over a pile of rubble – that is the best he can do.”
The New York Times ran the following day a report on the execution of 7 soldiers.
I read it, and send the following comment (the NYT censored nearly all my comments on Syria, something that makes me suspect a lack of neutrality on their part):
I find unbalanced that more than 95% of the NYT “pick” comments are statements using an irrelevant brutality to justify not punishing a crime against humanity by a government.
Now for the naive ones out there who are inspired by the years of infamy of the USA in 1939, 1940, when the USA refused to fight Hitler: the Assad family created that mess, and most of it, deliberately.
Although I strongly condemn Islamism, and wished the laws of war would be respected, in the case of an insurrection, it’s difficult to keep prisoners alive. Guerillas don’t run prisons. Besides, that the executions of those seven soldiers related in the NYT were brutal, and apparently unjustifiable, does not mean they were unjustifiable (the rebels claim those soldiers had committed war crimes, and recorded them in phones). The whole story was related by one of the rebles, who disagreed violently with the execution.
A rush to judgment is rarely a rush to intelligence. Thinking is harder than sinking.
Notice that when three USA divisions were engaged in the Second Battle of the Marne, in July 1918, they made nearly no prisoners. One of the reason? The American divisions, although victorious, suffered so many casualties, they were taken out of combat after a couple of days. American GIs, confronted to immense ferocity, rose to the occasion, and replied in kind.
Most probably, Syrian rebels are doing just the same, answering massacres by massacres, after decades of massacres.
End of my (probably unpublished) comment to the NYT.
(The GIs were also inspired by the Senegalese division by their side, which made zero prisoners, as the Senegalese knew full well that the Germans killed them racially like vermin! This sort of racial extermination went on in 1940, under Rommel’s 7th Panzer; however, by 1944, Marshall Rommel had realized that being a war criminal was not a good idea, so he ordered the arrest of the SS das Reich officer responsible of Oradour sur Glane!)
You see nothing good about Assad?
I share his official distaste for the Muslim Brotherhood. He can be amusing. As when he protested that comparing the Islamist dictator Morsi to a donkey was “an insult to the animal“. When he got to power, observers hoped that he would break away from his father’s dictatorship.
Yet, he became worse, as the Hariri assassination shows. Assad came to depend upon the Islamists to justify his own, much older terror. Terror will never end, as long as he is around. If he is not put out of commission, millions will die, and that’s the least of the problems that will arise.
Sec. of State Kerry derided common Americans as “Armchair Isolationists”? Makes you happy?
Kerry mentioned the liner full of German Jews that was turned back from the Americas, and sent back to Hamburg, and they all died. That was polite. I don’t have to be as polite as Kerry.
The USA plutocracy and its pet government, plus their honored homologues in the UK, formed the Deus ex-Machina that enabled Hitler.
You are obsessive. Plutocracy this, plutocracy that. What does plutocracy have to do with it?
Plutocracy is the rule of the Dark Side. That’s exactly what it means. Instead of the reign of Ahura Mazda, it’s the rule of Angra Mainyu. Plutocracy in that sense is more general than Jesus’ condemnation of wealth, it covers all the bad aspects of Satan as found in the New Testament and the Qur’an. Plus more.
Assad is a plutocrat in the worst senses of the term. Sometimes it’s a parody: his spendthrift wife was an investment banker in London. She is much admired there, a sort of Lady Di of Syria, rail thin.
Assad is expert at the dark art of an extremely rich family that killed hundreds of thousands to stay on top of the heap. He released thousands of Salafists to drown his legitimate secular democratic opposition, now he is whining that they are winning. His only future is death.
Assad’s plutocratic connections is why he is so popular in Britain. It’s again the same story with Britain, a semi democratic plutocracy, as in the 1930s, with Hitler and Mussolini: the plutocratic temptation. The men (and occasional women) who invented and financed Hitler were all plutocrats (as my uncle, who was in the know, told me when I was six).
Without the help, financing and investment of Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco would not even have fuel to move their tanks.
Stalin and Hitler hated each other!
They came to hate each other. But first they were allies. Even earlier, before Hitler, Stalin had helped Germany re-arm in violation of the Versailles Treaty. German generals trained in the USSR! That’s why they thought they could invade it successfully.
Britain did just the same, starting in the 1920s. There were very nasty exchanges about stealth German re-armement betwen Churchill and the French Republic, as early as 1929 (so pre-Hitler!). Without plutocrats from the USA, Nazism would not have been, and Stalin could not have developed his oil fields (thanks to pillars of the Democratic Party of the USA!).
Stalinism and Nazism were global phenomena inside which Anglo-Saxon plutocracy played a crucial role.
Can you be a bit more specific?
There is room for a 10,000 pages treaty. Not strangely, that treaty does not exist. Harvard forgot to study the subject (that Nazi songs were modified Harvard songs is a hint why!)
Jew hater Henry Ford massively financed Hitler in the early 1920s already. That’s how Hitler was able to constitute a well equipped private 5,000 men army by 1923. JP Morgan’s man was Schacht, the biggest man of the Weimar Reich; Rockefeller financed Nazi eugenics, etc.
Until 1924, Hitler was essentially an American propelled phenomenon. Some of these billionaire plutocrats, such as the Warburgs, were even Jewish. French intelligence at the time tried to expose all this, but it backfired and caused more hostility against France by those in the know in USA business circles. While the masses did not understand that they were manipulated by extremely vicious characters who had hedged themselves so that, whichever way World War Two would turn, they would profit from it.
Why would Jews support Hitler?
Just ask the peaceniks who support Assad. The head torturer Nazi Marshall who conquered Norway for Hitler was a pure Jew (Hitler then made him a “honorary Aryan“). Nearly 200,000 German Jews served in the Wehrmacht.
As Nietzsche insisted, the Will to Power tends to rule minds.
Fritz Thyssen, a top plutocrat, author of “I paid Hitler”, explained all this in great details (including later, the American plutocratic connection, with the USA government doing exactly what the hyper wealthy supporters of defunct Nazism told it to do). Don’t be surprised that Thyssen’s book is out of print, and out of reach of commoners.
Why do you always mix up the 1930s with today’s world politics?
For two main reasons. 1) The descendants of the bad actors of the 1930s and the institutions that supported them are still pretty much in power, and they use still the same highly conspiratorial methods. A method is to create, or support, very bad actors, such as Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco (in that order), and then leverage the mayhem they cause.
For example a casual look at how Egypt used to live like in the 1930s show a huge progression of Salafism Islam since. That can be traced back to the fact Roosevelt and his minions, to arrange ARAMCO and company, made a pact with Ibn Saud that involved the Muslim Brotherhood. As Roosevelt had just given half of Europe to Stalin, at Yalta, that all made sense as a great work of Pluto.
Eight years later, the CIA used Khomeini and his Shiites to throw down the democratically elected Mosaddegh (later assassinated).
2) The fact that some bad actors got away with, and leveraged themselves thanks to, crimes against humanity in the 1930s was noticed by other bad actors, who did the same. That danger is much greater now. The stakes are much higher.
Why are the BRICS so opposed to enforcing International Law?
Obviously because they intent to break it themselves. Several of them face huge rebellions in their own empires. About half of the PRC’s empire would be in outright rebellion, if not for heavy preemptive terror. India has lost control of a huge territory. Putin used huge brutality in the Caucasus, and is afraid to lose it all. Meanwhile he made the local Christian superstition into a state religion again.
What would you tell Hollande and Obama?
That they should hint to Putin and Xi that they have got it good, controlling giant territories not historically under Russian or Han control. Russian spans eleven time zones. That’s very good.
But Russia does not need to spread its military control in the part that used to be the core of the West, the Eastern Mediterranean. Same observation for Mr. Xi: he can keep on playing on the other side of the Himalayas.
Others, worldwide, ought to be told that it will be human rights, one way, or another. When the UN was formed, the obsession was to avoid war between nations. Now the obsession ought to change into avoiding the sort of decomposition one observed in the 1930s, a mix of fascism, plutocracy and destruction of human rights.
As the movie 2010 had it: “Europa is not yours, don’t attempt a landing there.” If Putin and Xi want a cold war, they will not win it any better than Brezhnev and Mao.
In general, the BRICS became what they are, because of capital flight towards them, from the West. Financial and intellectual capital. Embraer won’t be much, without Airbus’ help and the Western market.
If the BRICS threaten the core of the West, the West can fully reel back its plutocracy. To start with, the West controls at least two-third of the world’s GDP (Euramerica alone controls 55%of world GDP).
Considering the state of the planet, if order does not come to reign, it will have to be imposed. Auschwitz was secret, so the immoral ones could claim they did not know.
Instead Assad is loud and blatant, making the immoral ones who hide behind peace into obvious co-criminals. Damascus is not a swamp in a deserted part of Poland (as Auschwitz was). Damascus is the oldest continuously occupied city in the world. The rebels Assad gased there, are secular people fighting for survival. Assassinating their children is a crime as great as any crime known to humanity.
When the Second Cuban division invaded Congo in May 1978, the French did not ask the UN for authorization. France dropped paratroops, the 2e Régiment étranger de parachutistes over Kolwezi, and that was it. Cuba and France are in good terms now, precisely because France just said no, when it was time to say no.
Why do you say the West may have jurisdiction over Syria?
It’s a long story, and I should write a specific essay about it. However, in light of the G20 meeting, let me give a quick synopsis of the argument:
Syria was never really a nation, until it became a Roman province and reached its apogee under Rome. It was illegally seized in 636 CE by the Islamist invaders, using horendous methods. Looking that far back in the past may sound ridiculous, but the unlawful demolition of Israel by the Romans after the Second Judean war (explicitly recognized as illegal by emperor Julian around 360 CE) is the legal basis for the existence of Israel, as far as I am concerned.
France is the successor state of Rome. The Imperium Francorum is actually the fifth state of Rome, after the Monarchy, the five centuries long Republic, the Principate (starting with Augustus), and the Dominate (starting with Diocletian, around 300 CE).
Europe was officially a “Renovated Roman Empire” by 800 CE. Thus the states Francia spawned, not just France, and Germany, but Italy, Spain, Britain, actually all of Europe and its entire diaspora, are all successor states of Rome. That can be seen by looking at the Capitol in Washington and the (Roman!) law, all over.
After the First Crusade, Roman power was back in the Middle East, including in much of the green part of Syria. Legally, I do not see why it could be seen as having ever left. Call it the long arm of secular law.
That the successors states of Rome have jurisdiction over Syria is easier to explain than the presence of the Chinese or the Russian states over giant expanses they never controlled before (although Chinese armies were in Central Asia in 750 CE, after the Franks had destroyed the Damascus Caliphate). Something Putin and Xi should be made aware of: they behave as if they can mess up the historical core of the West. So why should no the West mess up with their empires?
Before and during World War Two, imperial fascist Japan generals conducted more than 2,000 gas attacks inside China. This was ignored by the world for years. But, as it turned out, not safely ignored. The act, and ignoring it, was a sign of collapsing ethics, worldwide.
There is No Hope but Hope. And Human Rights prophecize it.
Patrice Ayme
