Moveable Feast Cafe 2018/11/04 … Open Thread

The documentary “The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire” shows Britain’s transformation
from a colonial empire into a global financial power. At decline of the Empire it was created a
global network of offshore areas to safeguard the financial interests of the City of London.
Their purpose? Hiding huge assets behind obscure financial structures on remote islands.
Today, up to half of global offshore assets are in British offshore territories. How did that happen?
What influence does the offshore world have on all of us today? This documentary explores and
identifies this in an impressive way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8

Knock ! Knock ! Europe is sleeping, or maybe watching, waiting, dreaming…at the good old days…or at the future, nearing. Don’t be afraid, count on that good old chess, keeping an eye on your clean dress, not to have a mess because of all out stress !

I see no fault with this summary of today’s world strategic situation:

“Monday November 5, the last day before the most important U.S. midterm election in history, will see Donald Trump speak at three rallies — in Cleveland, Ohio; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The fake-news press is hysterical that Donald Trump may have overcome the British-instigated McCarthyite witch hunt against him, aimed at provoking a war with Russia and China. This is exemplified by the War Party’s leading newspaper, the Washington Post, whose lead op-ed today by Dana Milbank is titled: “We Have No Excuses Now. Our Eyes Are Wide Open.” He details what he views as Trump’s evil ways, including: “He took Vladimir Putin’s word over that of the U.S. intelligence community, accepting Russia’s denial that it interfered in our election.” He concludes: “Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country? Or will we affirm that we are really the intolerant and frightened people Donald Trump has made us out to be?”

But the truth is far different than the evil {Washington Post} would have Americans believe. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, looking ahead to the critical meeting to take place between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on the sideline of the event honoring the 100th Anniversary of the World War I Armistice, taking place in Paris on Nov. 11, issued a statement: “Sleepwalking — Have we learned how the First World War Came About?” In reporting on her recent trip to Moscow, she notes that her many meetings with representatives of leading institutions gave her a “first-hand impression of what the Russian point of view of the strategic situation looks like. From the various steps taken by the West and NATO — NATO’s expansion up to the Russian borders, the build-up of the missile defense system in Romania and Poland which can be transformed into an offensive system within a very short time, the cancellation of the ABM Treaty, and now of the INF Treaty, as well as the different ‘narratives’ portraying Russia as the enemy image and Putin as a demon — the Russian leadership has very clearly drawn the conclusion that a major war cannot be ruled out.”

World War I had no legitimate cause. The British believed in the Halford Mackinder doctrine of “geopolitics,” that in order to sustain their power, based on their control of the seas and the global financial system, they needed to prevent any coalition of nations across Eurasia from achieving the power to challenge the Empire. Such development projects as Germany’s Berlin-Baghdad Railroad, or Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad, creating connectivity among the nations of Eurasia, were in themselves intolerable threats to the Empire. Better to blow things up with a “lovely little war,” to keep the world divided and weak. That war so destroyed Europe and so punished the loser Germany, that the rise of Hitler and the horror of World War II was the almost inevitable result.

And so, again today, the British Empire and its assets in the U.S. have unleashed hysteria and lies against Russia and China, against the “connectivity” of the New Silk Road. They are clearly willing to blow it up, if necessary to preserve the Empire — mistakenly called “our Western way of life” or the “rule of law.” What they fear most is the fact that nearly every nation of Asia, Africa, Ibero-America, and even many European nations, are openly joining with Russia and China in the new paradigm of “win-win” development through the Belt and Road, which could spell the end of the Empire — especially if the upstart President of the United States were allowed to carry out his stated intention to establish friendly relations between the United States and Russia and China. In addition to the sideline meeting with Putin in Paris, Trump plans to hold full summit meetings with both Putin and Xi Jinping at the end of November at the G20 Summit in Argentina, just a few weeks after the midterm election.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche concludes her statement by calling for an end to geopolitics altogether, to replace it “with a new paradigm of the idea of mankind as a whole…. If we have learned anything from the tragedies of the 20th century, then we must now learn to think about mankind in a completely different way.” Americans will be tested Tuesday, to reject the “Democratic” War Party, and to join the urgent campaign to build that new paradigm.”

Read for edification and delight: THE AMERICAN CREDO A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind, by H.L. Mencken. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org

Also from “Homo Neanderthalensis”

“…enlightenment, among mankind, is very
narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects
everyone — that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more
than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized.
This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority,
no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them,
perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized — though I
should not like to be put to giving names — but the great masses of
men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was
at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they
are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is
worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire
among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of
human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part
in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons
and usufructs modern medicine may offer — that is, provided he is too
poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a
bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public
libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has
at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more
tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers,
sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do
with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the
fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of
the air.”

“…so-called religious organizations … are nothing more, at bottom, than
conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very
accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the
man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life.
Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is
recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders — that no
man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they
propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man
infamous — by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then
by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in
them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the
ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often
attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their
followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is
on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance
cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as
surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely
the mob’s hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their
comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men;
they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be
prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of
education; they themselves can’t understand it. Ergo, its teaching must
be put down.”

“The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern.
He hates it because it is complex — because it puts an unbearable
burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search
is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their
aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what
seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous
education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern
pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of
chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic
among the submerged — and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other
such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple — and
every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays
him.

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is
explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men
toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest
outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought.
It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city
proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But
the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it.
It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the
irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with
loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former
throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human
knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened
men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth — a
Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences, demand
special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple
rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.”

If my calender’s correct, today’s the anniversary of Soviet Revolution.

I shall hoist a vodka. Then enjoy a communist day, pouring concrete…

Happy Day to all.

The cute little man praises his hero? Does he have heroes?

But since we have resurgent nazis now, it makes sense to rehabilitate Petain, no?

Truman tried to “save” Petain, which says something, eh?

https://www.rt.com/news/443372-macron-petain-nazi-collaborator/

The article points out that the same logic would apply to Hitler…and of course he too is praised, especially.

Quite honestly, I am shocked by the rehabilitation of nazis… And not only shocked, because the rehabilitation telegraphs a course, an intended course, into fascism, again.