Re: [-empyre-] Crusades, Collapse, 'n' Stuff

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

>From my part being completely convinced by the relevance of Warwick's
criticism and may be in the same side from my part I should be more radical
saying not may be but surely.

Islam as territory is not conquering but defending ?being exactly the cause
for it to be in war and having a multitude of diverse resistant people
whatever they are coming from such or such holy preacher, in the world... It
is not the question of money because financial money has not change; can be
oil can be money of weapons can be money of Narcotic drugs, can be values of
Wall street, can be money of prostitution (slaves at work whatever sexual or
not sexual work) it is indifferent at the moment it founds the best way for
increasing;-)

First: after the cold war Islam was the opportune otherness for dialectical
governance of the west... Both linking the question of oil and defence, a
strategic question of the economy of money into the question of power at the
south of Russia and China.

Second: paradox being that after having received a lot of money from the
part of Islam, can be from the oil, can be from opium base, at a moment this
partnership becomes too much interventionist into the power of interests
(energy, defence, money to tribute politics) for being alone as power in the
world, West decides to eradicate Islam for having the world in, distance of
the dialectical forces in presence. So what of the oil if there is no more
partnership as power? Get it. Take it, stool it (what we want it does not
matter of the sense)

It is both the question of the global property of the source for making more
money without local change of matter, by the way of military domination in
the name of defence, more the critical question of the predictable
economical domination of China...

Take a map of Middle East and see which impeachment subsists as "western
[named] free territory" from Indian Ocean till Mediterranean sea: but IRAN?

The question being at last the road from extreme South East (Islamic) till
Mediterranean sea through Islamic countries: don't you see that it is more
lightly by this way? But it is to note that every time the dollar devalued
it had the best impact in matter of US debt regarding Japanese credit, but a
large impact against eastern moneys round the Japanese Yen. In the end of
the eighties and the beginning of the nineties that have ruined the southern
east Asia which hoped next reaching the level for being represented among
the economically powerful countries waited for the meeting of Okinawa.. At
last there stayed 8 instead of becoming 12.

That was both the question of US debt and the western resolution of
financial place of Hong Kong for weakening it at the moment of the
retrocession, while having be established in high level of financial place
by the western power, suddenly would turn down for protecting the western
interests to front a financial door of China can being interventionist
through the western changes... (the last dialectical political economy
episode as economical war through the plasticity of the money ?dollar making
what it wants that it is not the situation of the enclosed euro).

One objective track that there is not crusade specially not from the part of
Islam being that laic Syria BUT helping Islam. So these countries whatever
ours (of our changes of "spice") are THEIR countries (Luther Blisset and A
hacker:) such as whatever Wall street being the invention of abstracted
value from the western territory of capitalism, it has become both the
abstract territory of social otherness at the moment there is not otherness
in matter of interest for increasing money... It is not a dialectical change
it is a dualist reversion.

Leave dialectics at the moment political does not practice more dialectics.

We have enter the paradox's times where there is no more dialectical enemy
but all otherwise Clausewitz theory us having entered the times of the war
which Canetti called the double mass: total extermination of what impeaches
the radical domination. One alone having to stay. Which side is the
conquest, which side is the defence?

What is counting it is to destroy the ecology of the surviving peoples in
these places.. If the dominant do not success for dominate the resistances,
whatever it would have cause a civil war between them, but at a distance
more they will success for killing these people form their impossible
ecology...

The last question being that one of the material territory as property of
defence and domination in the millennium of abstraction: steal the art works
of humanity through the instrumentation of the civil wars or take them out
of their territory of origin in the name of protecting them is equally
create value of money. But more bombing the archaeological sites is
iconoclast from the part of the occupant: what is the message BUT having a
transformation from a cultural territory into an indifferent territory... So
can being occupied without special attention.

But equally for stealing the resources: if your territory is not more a
cultural territory, it stays the pure very one of the spices (for example
oil)... Does not matter the people, more they will happen wide on the
territory more it will be good for the property of the indifferent territory
of the resource.

Thanks the western collectors (even from the East), do not be surprise that
after all what will be sacrificed by radical Islam itself on its own
destructed territories will be the pre-Islamic cultures which gave so much
interest to the thieves of the spices being the same culture...

So please the problem at last being nearest of a question such as a
radicalizing realization of iconoclast material world at the horizon of the
world of abstraction of the value (western sample under several shapes) when
the question of the life (bare life itself) stays the ultimate object of the
matter, and the matter of bare life surfing from poverty to richness, having
the middle class returning mass of servitude (for paying the tribute of the
cost of State administration of power and money) through the ultimate
absolute commodities can being food abstracted by the money, can be oil, can
be diamonds, can be art works as subliminal money.

But this is not a dialectic disposition, it could be a double entropy when a
critical interpretation persists in wanting to be stood out as the relevant
critical vision of a reality which does not correspond to it any more, I'm
afraid of that... 


On 3/12/06 18:16, "Henry Warwick" <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net> probably
wrote:

> 
> Crusade is irrelevant.
> 
> What matters are resources and the control and production of them.
> 
> The vagaries of culture are simply accidents of history. If Mohammed
> had convinced millions of people of atheism, or if the Xians hadn't
> completely mangled the golden rule from a double negative that
> encourages passivity to a double positive that recommends
> interference, I am sure the events would have played out differently,
> but the fundamentals would still have been the same.
> 
> What we are facing is something quite different.
> 
> =======================================
> The Crusaders aimed to free Europe of the economic hegemony of
> Islam,  not to destroy Islamic civilization.
> =======================================
> 
> And if one insists on using the lens of Crusade, then one can see
> that the west seeks hegemony over the oil that the Islamic locals now
> enjoy - but is that Crusade? I think not.
> 
> As I said, I don't think it's relevant. Also, I am uncertain as to
> whether it is actual or reasonable to think of a Western Roman
> "collapse", as much as it was a strategic withdrawal by the elite to
> more profitable places. Constantine could see, from his heinously
> expensive wars in Gaul, that Western Europe was a dud - a money pit,
> a black hole where wealth gets poured in and little else comes back.
> In energistic terms, it had a negative ER/EI - Energy Return divided
> by Energy Invested. He went broke chasing the barbarian army around
> France, and converted to christianity to loosen up the funds in a
> dominantly christian run Treasury.
> 
> Once he got back, he put his plan into action and declared the
> Official creation of the Eastern Roman Empire. And every rich family
> in rome with any sense at all invested in the east. West of Roman
> Power? Celts. Illiterate pagan "savages". To the north? Picts. Nutty
> people from Scotland who painted themselves blue, which gets them all
> hopped up and crazy. And the Northeast was populated by Huns and
> Goths and other unsavoury groups. To the South? The Sea, and beyong
> the sea? Excellent farms hard up against the largest desert on the
> planet. To the East? All The Money In The World. Big Rivers, and the
> ancient civilisations of what is now Palestine, Egypt, Greece,
> Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the Silk Road through Afghanistan...
> Let's see, Celts vs. Greeks. Picts vs. India. Goths vs. Persians.
> Hmmmm. Not a hard choice to make there!
> 
> Within 200 years, Rome was done, while still inhabited, and the
> Empire lived on: a few hundred years later it was still enough of a
> potent social notion that Charlemagne crowned himself the Holy Roman
> Emperor....
> 
>  From a post in a Bay Area Energy group, by Dave Fridley, author of
> the SF City Council Depletion protocol study proclamation (for which
> he deserves a medal, IMHO):
> 
> "In Roman times, 85-90% of the population were the energy producers--
> that is, the farmers--whose surplus energy supported the 10-15% of
> the population (including the emperor, army, musicians, artists,
> vagabonds, merchants and so forth) who were not directly involved in
> energy production. In
> the US today, 3% of the population (and vast amounts of fossil fuels)
> provides the surplus to support the 97% of the population not
> directly involved in energy production. In that regard, only the
> "elite" of the empire would have even noticed a material change with
> "collapse"."
> 
> Today, North Americans and Europeans are the elites.  Again, Fridley
> writes:
> 
> "Although some Roman historians lamented the passing of the Republic
> (which lasted for about 400 years--longer than ours--til about 40
> BC), I've never read anything of a self-aware group that looked at
> the material conditions of the empire and predicted collapse over
> some centuries in the future. That, I think, would be pretty much
> unlikely at the time, since in Western civilizations, at least, it
> wasn't until
> the publication of Thomas More's Utopia in 1516 that we ever viewed
> the future as a better place than the past, and thus see decline as
> something odd. Before then, the "Golden Age" of man--what
> civilizations aspired to, were always those of the past, and history
> was considered a process of degeneration. With this kind of world
> view, what exactly would "collapse" mean to one of the elite Romans
> and how exactly would it have mattered to the 90% of the population
> who lived in stasis?"
> 
> It's also important to remember why the romans would even bother
> invading some where as distant as England and Wales... Why? Tin. the
> Phoenicians were in Wales 1500bce. At the time, there was so much tin
> in Wales, it came up out of the ground in extremely rich ores of
> black, shiny, almost metallic, material. It was harvested and sent
> back to Phoenicia to make bronze. The Romans were Iron Age people,
> but bronze was still a vital metal, and tin had many other purposes.
> The production of tin peaked during Roman times and went into
> depletion. England became worth less to the Romans, and yet another
> reason to abandon Western Europe.
> 
> So, to talk of a "collapse" of the Roman empire, as Fridley notes, is
> an act of 20/20 hindsight. After Constantine gave up on it, it took
> centuries for Rome to be sacked and leveled by the nations it had
> violently oppressed. The Romans had no sense of a "utopian future",
> so calamity was always the word of the day. Again Fridley:
> 
> "Compare this as well to the worldview of the Chinese, who developed
> a sophisticated view of rise and fall that came from thousands of
> years of dynasties rising then collapsing. To a Chinese, this was a
> natural phenomenon, and they created a whole phenomenology around it,
> including the concept of "mandate of heaven" (tianming) that gave the
> emperor his right to rule, and the withdrawal of the mandate that led
> to the collapse of the dynasty, usually indicated by natural
> disasters. It survived to the 20th century even...the massive
> Tangshan earthquake of July 1976 was commonly seen as the event that
> withdrew the mandate of heaven from Chairman Mao, and indeed, he died
> 2 months later and his regime overthrown."
> 
> And a few years later the Gang of Four would sing musical commodities
> like 5.45:
> 
> Out on the street: assassinate all of them
> look so desperate declare blood war
> on the bourgeois state too!
> Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen
> The corpse is a new personality
> Ionic charge brings immortality
> Guerilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
> 
> Fridley continues:
> 
> "...Kunstler (I believe) had a good insight into this as well. He
> remarked on the phenomenon of "temporal amnesia"--the fact that we
> forget how things were after a period of change, such as living in
> the same place for a long time. This building is replaced. Those
> trees are planted. Social security benefits are reduced. Copays go
> up. Food prices creep up. After 10 years, things are materially
> different, but do you really remember how it used to be? Over several
> hundred years of collapse, who in Rome or Mesopotamia or any of the
> other major civilizations that collapsed have had the historical
> context to talk about "collapse"?"
> 
> What we have, and the romans didn't have, are the basic laws of
> physics that govern all energetic systems. One big rule is: you can't
> get more energy out of a system than what is already there. There is
> no energy fairy. When most work is done by hand, your farmers are the
> energy producers. When most work is done by hand, most work is in
> energy production.
> 
> Another big rule is: In a closed system, energy is never lost, it
> simply degrades in quality (thermodynamics - entropy).
> 
> These facts speak far beyond any localised temporal curiosities of
> "culture" or "religion" or any quibbling about that. It's all really
> very simple: look at yeast in a sugar/water solution. Do the math.
> The earth's carrying capacity for humans has been exceeded
> (youngquist: Geodestinies). The remaining conflicts of civilisation
> will be over the remaining energy stores and metal deposits (Klare:
> Resource Wars) The total energy content of society will retreat. Per
> capita energy and resource consumption peaked in the early 1980s (per
> Campbell and Duncan). The west has been innovating to do more with
> less. however, this cannot continue indefinitely (see first big
> rule). The non-west (the so-called South) has been bearing the brunt
> of it all and if resources reduce too quickly, many of those nations
> will go into a Malthusian die off. Some (east Africa) already have
> (declining rainfall and increased population have produced a
> ³Malthusian² situation where pressures on a less-productive resource
> base have exploded into conflict - per understandingsudan.org), and
> some are quickly descending (Nigeria - New Yorker Article by George
> Packer - Lagos as the model of the city of the 21st century).
> 
> Without natural gas, there will be no miracleGro and the productivity
> of the planet's farms will drop dramatically. Richer nations will
> have more resources to feed their people. The rest won't and will die
> off. Nations with especially abundant food resources (such as N.
> America) will be using substantial amounts of food for fuel to power
> their heavy transport systems (trucks, trains, aircraft, mining
> equipment). Eventually that will be abandoned, due to population
> pressures.
> 
> Nations of the middle east, predominantly Islamic, will face an even
> tougher time - similar to those presently faced in Africa.
> 
> Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (former Prime minister of UAE):
> "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a
> Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land
> Rover, but his son will ride a camel."
> 
> Crusade models don't really work: they presume the primacy of the
> superstructural cultural machine as guides for substructural resource
> exploitation. In fact, the superstructural issues (crusade, war
> against terrror, jihad, "somebody's got a bad case of the Mondays",
> rock and roll, hip hop, TV, whatever...) is actually just the excuses
> proffered by the elites to motivate the workers to act against their
> own self interests and murder other members of the working/peasant
> class, so that resources may be acquired in order to maintain the
> facade of civilisation that maintains socio-political heirarchies as
> linguistic amplifications of the social dominance patterns common to
> primates.
> 
> It's late - I have to go sleep now.
> 
> my best regards to all,
> 
> HW_______________________________________________
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