Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

FITZ BALINTINE PETTERSBURG – THE ROYALPARCHMENT SCROLL OF BLACK SUPREMACY - 1925

This book is essential for reasons that have not been seen at the time and are still obscure today because most people look at such attempt at creating a new religion as futile and useless, if not plainly childish or delinquent: making money from the gullible audience. The fact that this document and the religion it contains target the black audience does not change this financial and commercial objective. But that is too simple to reject something without analyzing it at all because of its commercial dimension;

First it was written in 1925, when Marcus M. Garvey, to whom the book refers several times as a general or a prophet, was in prison  in Atlanta, Georgia at the time and he will come out of it only in 1927 when his five year sentence will be commuted by IUS President Coolidge to deportation to Jamaica, which meant he could never come back to the USA.

In other words some followers, and maybe some sharks, were taking advantage of the absence of the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the public scene to reach out and set up a new organization that would have a religious basis, knowing that Garvey’s constant reference to Jesus was no lip service but it was no affiliation either to any church at all. The point is important here. All Christian churches were originally European, hence white, and based on a sacred book that was interpreted as stating the racial affiliation of Jesus and all other characters from Adam onwards in the book as being white, including God to whose image man was created. We could have thought they might have moved away from this biblical reference, and in fact they did not.

The biblical reference is just hijacked and the white interpretation is rejected under the “name” of Adam-Abraham-Anglo-Saxon Anarchy which is Antediluvian and has nothing to do with what this document states as the reality. In fact Adam is nothing but a thief who stole an apple from the Tree of Life that the King of Kings in this document pretend to be the defender of, a fornicator along with Eve, the mother of all Evil, who is a harlot. And Abraham and Isaac are rejected because they do not have a book in the Old Testament. In other words they are fakes and usurpers.

The creation is said as being the result of a supreme and original divinity that invented theology and gave birth to King Alpha and Queen Omega, the eternal couple of sovereigns to rule the world, King Alpha being the King of Kings. You will find some contradictory elements in the document about this affiliation. The reference to the alpha and the omega is taken from Revelation 22:13: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” This reference is in itself surprising when we know that Jesus and all the other characters in the old Testament before Jesus’ New Testament spoke and wrote some Semitic language, Hebrew or Aramaic, for two of them, languages that could not have a letter corresponding to omega, and certainly not as the last one since omega is a vowel and Semitic language only have one vowel in their alphabet, aleph in Hebrew, which is written only when it is at the initial of a root like Adam: ADM derived from the word meaning earth adamah, ADMH. Otherwise vowels are not written as letters. It is all the more surprising to find this reference in this document because of the next assertion.

The author considers Ethiopia as being the cradle of this humanity with a possible alliance between this Black Ethiopian God or King of Kings with the Egyptian Pharaoh captured as a woman. I must say the passage is not that clear when we read over and over the absolutely procreative approach of couples that have to be heterosexual and come across this assertion: “At the Banquet in Egypt, King Solomon, The Black Man, made Love, with King Pharaoh, The Black Man’s Virgin princess.” (Chapter 23) Solomon and David are the only references in the Old Testament that the author of this document consider authentic, and he sees them as black, and here Solomon has interesting relationships with Pharaoh, though of course he is sexually paired with the black queen of Sheba in another passage. Of course Solomon and Pharaoh are understood as symbols of the Black Man and the Black Woman, but even so.

What is essential here is how the whole identity of this God of the Bible is entirely made black and the Virgin that gave birth to Jesus is of course the Black Virgin, hence Jesus was black. The objective is to rebuild the Temple of Solomon in Ethiopia but a lot grander and bigger.

The central principle is that of Black Supremacy and it is attached to the UNIA and Marcus Garvey. This Black Supremacy is paired with a total rejection of White Supremacy that had put Africa into slavery. The fate of the white race is not clear: will it be eliminated, exterminated or just side-tracked? It is not really and clearly said. What is said is that black men and black women are supposed to have absolutely no intercourse with white women and white men, respectively. Behind this black supremacy we meet with the principle of race purity that is so dear to Marcus Garvey. Of course the ban on sexual relations between men and women of the two races has to be understood as covering any gay or lesbian temptation. It goes without saying.

The point here is to interpret this rewriting of the Bible in “sable hue.” The black slaves were free Africans before the arrival of Europeans, or Africans that could be captured and sold as slaves to the Islamic world in northern Africa, from which they could redeem themselves. They were captured by African slave-dealers but starting at the beginning of the 16^th century they were sold to Europeans who took them to America. They could not imagine what was going to happen to them. That slavery became a tremendous trauma that lasted for three hundred years in the USA where it lasted longest, at the very least ten or twelve generations. That slavery was defined by people like Willie Lynch as the transformation of an African savage into a docile slave who stood on the ladder of farm possessions, under horses and over oxen and cows. Strangely enough the Trauma was so deep that it got integrated 100% by Garvey and the author of this document, so deeply integrated that the only possible escape from it was to claim absolute racial purity and total reversal of domination, with Garvey being slightly more prudent and asserting the total racial separation as an obligation in the modern world.

In other words these intellectuals, or militants, have integrated the Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome or Disorder of the descendants of slaves so perfectly that it is taken as the starting block from which the future will have to be built without any rejection and the only solution can be the inversion of the evil the black Africans suffered when brought to America, at least those who survived the passage.

That explains the style of this document. The author is in many ways delirious, entirely possessed by some kind of irrational vision that enables him to assert anything that fits his own phantasmagoric constructions. Paul Radin identifies this mental state of the religious man in The World of Primitive Man:

“. . . his temperamental make-up, one in which. . . we are dealing with individuals whose psychical unbalance and whose psychical crises are continuously present. . . He possesses a temperamental predisposition which frequently places him in the neurotic-epileptoid group.” (p. 79 & 94)

VAUGHN BODÉ – DĂS KÄMPF – 1963 – JEAN-PAUL GABILLIET – 2013

La première remarque à faire est que le livre est entièrement bilingue. En français à partir de la première de couverture et en anglais à partir de la quatrième de couverture. La postface de Jean-Paul Gabilliet est elle aussi en deux langues et a été traduite en anglais par Alexis Pernsteiner. Je ne dirai rien de cette traduction. Par contre je n’ai trouvé aucune part, dans les pages de copyright par exemple où cela devrait être mentionné, l’auteur de la traduction des légendes de la « bédé ». Je crois savoir qu’elle est de Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Si je me trompe autant pour moi.

Cette traduction d’ailleurs est souvent plus guindé que l’original car le ton n’est pas conservé entièrement. En effet l’utilisation  par exemple de la deuxième personne qui peut être du singulier comme du pluriel en anglais construit une référence personnelle en fait non référentielle, j’entends ne référant pas à la personne singulière, ou plurielle d’ailleurs, à laquelle les dessins s’adressent, le ou les lecteurs. Cette deuxième personne en fait réfère au soldat singulier du dessin qui subit la bêtise de la guerre, mais en lui donnant une valeur plurielle et donc a-personnelle, impersonnelle, générique. C’est vrai pour tout soldat. L’utilisation du singulier « tu » en français, tue, c’est le cas de le dire, cette dimension générique. Le traducteur l’a senti d’ailleurs car dans certains cas il préfère une troisième personnelle singulière impersonnelle et donc générique d’où un ton plus guindé que l’original.

On pourrait pousser plus loin car parfois il fait l’inverse comme page 36 :

« WAR is being awful tired and wanting to go home – so you do… »

qui devient en français :

« LA GUERRE, c’est quand t’es crevé et que tu veux rentrer chez toi… et que tu rentres chez toi… »

Je ne peux rien dire sur l’article devant GUERRE car il est de droit si j’ose dire, bien qu’il enlève l’adresse directe, le coup de poing que le nom anglais sans article porte en lui. Mais on perd ici la force de « awful » adjectif employé en adverbe et que le traducteur intégre à l’adjectif en utilisant « crevé » au lieu de « fatigué » mais cela enlève  la double rythmique trochaïque remplacée par deux syllabes non accentuées bien sûr puisqu’on est en français. Les trochées anglais sont une rythmique inversée de la rythmique naturelle et la plus courante et dynamique de l’iambe. Ici ces trochées donnent une sorte d’impression d’essoufflement, donc de grande fatigue.

Traduire « to go home » par «  rentrer chez toi » pose deux problèmes : d’une part « home » (« sweet home » bien sûr) est effacé et j’aurais préféré « rentrer à la maison » sans compter qu’alors j’aurais ainsi gardé la non référence personnelle, donc l’impersonnel, alors que Jean-Paul Gabilliet cataphoriquement rajoute une référence de deuxième personne du singulier, incité en cela par cette référence qui est générique comme je l’ai dit dans « so you do… » Mais la dimension générique de ce « you » anglais est perdue au profit d’une dimension d’adresse personnelle au lecteur de la légende.

La répétition de « rentrer chez toi » enlève la dimension automatique, non planifiée, non voulue, simplement réflexive (de l’ordre du réflexe) de l’anglais « – so you do… » On notera le tiret remplacé par les trois points de suspension. La valeur sémantique des deux n’est pas la même, le tiret anglais impliquant qu’il n’y a aucune réflexion et l’automatisme de l’ordre du réflexe non réfléchi est bien sûr fortement porté par le « so », reprise anaphorique de « go home ». On me dira que cela est intraduisible. Certes mais traduire « home » par « maison » aurait ajouté en français le subtilité de E.T. qui pointe son doigt vers son étoile et dit « home » et la version doublée dit « maison ». Je ne proposerai rien ici. Personnellement je ne traduirais pas un texte de ce genre. Je ne m’appelle pas Google ou Reverso qui ont la prétention de tout traduire.

La postface est honnête et donne les éléments factuels nécessaires pour comprendre. Mais je n’ai pas trouvé la référence que j’attendais à Mad Magazine qui a largement fait dans le genre caustique, antipolitique, antimilitariste, anti-establishment depuis 1952. J’attendais aussi la mention d’Art Spiegelman et de sa « revue » RAW qui en grande partie hérite du travail de Vaughn Bodé. Mais il y a d’autres précurseurs et d’autres héritiers.

Que dire ce cet « humour » noir et caustique sur la guerre qui en montre l’absurdité logique ou la logique absurde. Goya lui avait fait dans la barbarie cruelle ou la cruauté barbare. Je regrette aussi l’absence de ces dessins, croquis, esquisses, estampes, « bédé » avant l’heure des « Désastres de la guertre ».

C’est un peu comme quand un colonel pendant des manœuvres (tirs à blanc) inspecte le « front » sans avoir mis les plastrons et brassards blancs spéciaux pour les observateurs et qui se plaint ensuite qu’un appelé (cela se faisait encore en ce temps-là) tire que le colon « à blanc » certes mais à portée de flamme (la poudre de la balle à blanc brûle bien sûr et produit une flamme d’environ un mètre cinquante ou deux.

Ce serait un lieutenant dans des manœuvres qui donne l’ordre de jeter les bombes fumigènes sur la route devant son char sans réaliser que le vent lui souffle dans le visage, ce que l’appelé (cela existait autrefois) futé a remarqué et jette donc avec jubilation une fumigène d’un kilo deux mètres devant le char que le lieutenant, sorti des écoles militaires s’il vous plait, doit faire déplacer d’urgence.

Faites les mêmes choses en, guerre réelle et non en manœuvre et vous avez Vaughn Bodé. C’est d’ailleurs pourquoi la suppression du service militaire a été une catastrophe humoristique pour le commun des mortels qui savait prendre ses pieds dans bien du plaisir avec les sottises de certains jeune officiers inexpérimentés ou de certains vieux officiers engoncés dans leurs souvenirs de guerre réelle, comme la Guerre d’Algérie.

« GUERRE : C’est quand on met un rat affamé sous un casque lourd sur le bas-ventre, génital bien sûr, d’un Arabe uniquement vêtu de ses poils. »

Je vois le dessin d’ici, y compris avec la tête de l’adjudant qui ne manquait jamais l’occasion de raconter son histoire à une PFAT innocente (Personnel Féminin de l’Armée de terre) fraîchement arrivée à la CAR N°1 de Rueil Malmaison.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

LAUTNER – AUDIARD – LES TONTONS FLINGUEURS – 1963

C’est un film culte de son époque, juste après la fin  de la guerre d’Algérie. Et cela ne pardonne pas, pas le moins du monde. On a donc droit aux acteurs en vogue à l’époque dans les rôles de durs, et ceux qui jouent plutôt dans le roublard vicieux et enfin une actrice, et cela suffit dans ce milieu illicite et interlope qui joue à la fausse naïve totalement faussement innocente.

On n’en finit donc pas de mettre les durs à la botte de leur chef nouvellement promu par leur chef défunt. Ils veulent tous faire la banque et se barrer en se beurrant le fond de poche, sinon prendre la succession à condition de liquider le trouble fête. Alors c’est la guerre et il passe plus de balles sur l’écran que de mouettes dans le port de Brest.

Vous y découvrez un Paris vide de voitures, des Champs Elysées totalement désertés à cinq heures du matin, une église de quartier dans Paris est dont on ne nous montre pas le cimetière juste derrière, un lieu de tout repos pour gens aimant le silence, on nous impose u n peu de musique moderne de ce temps-là, un délice grinçant, du twist pour la bonne cause, un président du Fonds Monétaire International sourd et peut-être aussi aveugle, j’entends, et de la bonne oreille, celle qu’il me reste alors que deux sont déjà patraques, qui n’ entend que le bruissement des billets de banque et ne voit que les liasses des mêmes.

Amusant comme remise en ordre des affaires interloquantes de ce Paris de 1963. Et ils tombent les uns après les autres. Les camions brûlent, les voitures explosent, d’autres se retournent, on reçoit une bombe en cadeau d’anniversaire qui vient comme un cheveu sur la soupe et des poils sur une mamelle de vache. Et je ne dirai rien des embouteillages, j’entends la mise en bouteille d’alcool au moins frelatée dans des bouteilles tout ce qu’il y a de plus clandestin. Vive le pastis de contrebande : il monte facilement à 75 degrés.

Vous jouirez des DS de l’époque, de ces crapauds de la route, de ces grenouilles de boulevard et à l’horizon pas une seule grenouille de bénitier, un prodige pour un film français  Vous ne pourrez pas y manger le moindre petit curé. Ils ont tous viré leur cuti et se retrouvent tous sur les bancs du catéchisme, mais je ne donnerais la communion à aucun de ces messieurs car ils ont tous un air louche ou écumoire qui me fait froid droit dans le dos.

C’était le temps où les effets spéciaux étaient très réduits et il fallait donner l’illusion d’une action trépidante sans le moindre mouvement à l’écran. Une course effrénée mais statique, un vol de bolide du ciel mais entièrement sur place, un champion du cent mètres qui ne décolle pas de son starting-block, une bombe qui fait boum mais sans la moindre fumée, ou l’inverse peu importe pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse

C’était le bon vieux temps où l’illusion était dans le bruitage et dans la tête du spectateur. Aujourd’hui il faut tout mettre sur l’écran. C’est bien dommage. C’était bien plus amusant avant, même si cela ne pouvait pas vous donner un infarctus du myocarde ou de la cocarde ou encore de l’hydropéricarde.

Mais amenez votre en cas dans tous les cas car ils ne servent rien aux spectateurs, pas même le plus petit bobard ou un rencard sur un brancard. Bonne appétit.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MARCUS GARVEY – PHILOSOPHY AND OPINIONS OF MARCUS GARVEY – EDITED BY AMY JACQUES-GARVEY – 1923

This old book does not represent a constructed and well balanced  presentation of Garvey’s ideas, but rather a selection of many small excerpts, each one under s small title. Apart from some speeches at the end of the volume, and we cannot say whether these speeches are unabridged or full, everything else is tit bits of thinking in any haphazard jumble. We then have to extract a philosophy out of this patchwork.

These documents all have a unity in the fact that they are all from the Harlem period in Marcus Garvey’s life. He arrived in Harlem in 1916, coming from Jamaica. His problems with justice started as sson as 1922. He will find himself in prison in 1926 and will be deported back to Jamaica in 1927. He founded with some others the Universal Negro Improvement Association and organized the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World that lasted thirty days in 1920 with a mass rally in Madison Square Garden that brought together more than 25,000 people. Internationally he arrived in Harlem when the USA entered the War in Europe and moved many blacks from the south to the north to work in the war industry. Then this period (1916-1922) covers the end the war and the great changes that occurred in the world then and just after, particularly the Soviet revolution in 1917 that is actually referred to in the volume as being led by Lenin and Trotsky.

This mention of Lenin and Trotsky is important because the very first principle that emerges from this volume is that he has recuperated his main central concept from the Marxist catechism that was triumphing in Russia, and he has only replaced the word “class” in “class struggle” by the word “race” to produce a vision of everything in the world as being a “race struggle.”

For him there are three races.

·       The whites (this race is specified to be Europe and the west) who exploits the yellow and the blacks.

·       The yellow (this race is specified only once to be the Japanese) who exploit the blacks.

·       The blacks (this race is clearly identified as the Africans and Africa with no distinction whatsoever between North Africa, and Egypt is part of this Africa that covers all blacks in the world too and is only identified several times as Ethiopia) who are exploited by everyone.

The blacks are simply confronted to the simple choice:

1- recapture your autonomy

or

2- accept full extermination.

This choice carries in itself the answer. The problem then is how is that recapture supposed to happen?

This first principle is extremely radical and that will bring him a lot of hostility from the officials of the USA, all white of course, and from the moderate Black leaders and intellectuals, among whom W.E.B. DuBois is prominent. DuBois accuses him of being “dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious,” of having “absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization” and of only having “objects . . . shot through with bombast and exaggeration.” This came shortly after the period we are considering but is pretty final. Garvey explains this hostility with jealousy because they are moderate and he is radical and what’s more he has managed to build a mass movement.

The mass movement is UNIA and the various branches and organizations he created around this movement: like the African Legions and the Black Cross, service organizations for the Blacks, and commercial ventures like the Black Star Line aiming at importing African products to the USA and West Indies, and the Negroes Factories Corporation to develop Black business. In 1924, hence outside the period concerned here, he specified the “Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of Negro Problem,” as the president of UNIA.

“The UNIA and African Communities’ League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive and expansive society. . . [the aims are] to establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of pride and love; to reclaim the fallen; to administer to and assist the needy; to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa; to assist in the development of Independent Negro Nations and Communities; to establish a central nation for the race; to establish Commissionaries or Agencies in the principal countries and cities of the world for the information of all Negroes.”

This gives us some more organized vision of Marcus Garvey’s thinking. The motto of UNIA is “One God! One aim! One destiny!” that is a clear statement amplifying the quotation often attributed to Garvey: “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”

The first basic element after the race struggle is the religious reference to and inspiration from Jesus. The Jews are clearly and very emphatically accused of being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. The ideal attributed to Jesus is systematically presented in triads of terms like “a life of Love, Charity, Mercy.” “His innocence, His Love and His Charity” are attributed to Jesus. Africa is reduced to “Egypt, Ethiopia and Timbuktu.” God is referred to as being “the Great Omnipotent, the Great Creator, our Eternal Father.” Jesus is called “our Master, our prince of Peace, our Redeemer.” He has “conquered death, the grave and hell.” Then “we sing and shout with the angels, we ring our joy bells; we blow our horns.” These three ways of sending a message with our voices, our bells and our horns are “in praise” of Jesus who is “the Jesus, the Christ, the Emanuel to us,” a triad by the form that is immediately amplified by to titles set apart by their form: “the Son of Righteousness, the Prince of Peace.” Then the conclusion comes with another triad that “shout[s] our praises to God for freedom, for liberty, for life.” Some will say this triad is artificial since freedom and liberty are the same thing. And yet, are they reality?

Strangely enough Garvey’s racial approach of the world and religion leads him to alluding to the fact Jesus is white and he rejects it with a strange argument saying that God created all men equal in his own image, hence with no racial distinction or discrimination. He suggests even that Jesus can be seen as the Son of God and thus belonging to all humanity, to all races. He of course would reject the Mormon explanation that the black race was  created when Cain was rejected by God and made black as a punishment for his crime. But then his strong racial approach would imply Jesus belongs to all races, hence can be seen as white, black or yellow, and this is a no-answer more than an answer. In fact as we have seen in the objects of UNIA, culture is not taken into account. Here we are dealing with a strong cultural element that is part of the African heritage of the Black slaves. Africans are deeply committed to an animistic vision of the world and life. This transcending vital force present in all things is connected with a spiritual world beyond the surface of everyday reality, and evil is not part of this energy but the fact of the existence of bad spirits and ghosts who are the dead evil men: evil is brought into the world by man himself. This deeply animistic vision was able to integrate the Christian approach easily, in fact the Catholic approach, either French or Spanish. They then became Christians or they developed an African religious tradition, Vodun, in Louisiana and the West Indies, with an extreme and morbid form in Haiti with the Tontons Macoutes of late Duvallier Sr. Note this tradition goes far beyond the blacks since Anne Rice for one example used it in one of her vampire books and Arthur Miller used it in The Crucible. This deep religious African heritage produced a vast Christian movement among American Blacks that is present in the oration of all black public speakers of any type. This too is a direct African heritage founded on the rhythmic experiential and existential capture of life, in fact a polyrhythmic capture that is the other enormous contribution of African heritage to American culture, and today global culture. This again is missed by Garvey who does not consider culture as an objective.

This religious tradition produced the ideology of “the Everlasting Brotherhood of Man and the Eternal Fatherhood of God.” There is no surprise in the total absence of women and the mother. This is both African heritage and loss. Heritage in the capture of women as being secondary, of society as being dominated by men, but loss in the absence of the mother because the mother is the real source of the legitimacy of a blood line and humanity. But his God has no motherly nor feminine dimension, in pite ogf the fact that he says that God made two people in his image, Adam and Eve.

Then Marcus Garvey develops a pan-African approach of his Africanism. The Blacks as a race must regain their nation and that is Africa, seen and repeated as being a whole and integrating all the Blacks in the world who have to return to Africa to take part in the “colonizing” of Africa by the Africans. We have seen he considers the Africans in Africa to be divided in tribes within the African nation and these tribes are “backward.” But the objective of reconstructing Africa when it is liberated from the colonizing presence of the Europeans, is asserted over and over again and only one center appears in this racial Africa: Ethiopia. His dream of decolonizing Africa, the “dream of an African empire” can go as far as supporting the German Dr Heinrich Schnee who advocates that:

“America [should] take over the mandatories of Great Britain and France in Africa for the colonizing of American Negroes. . . . he says: ‘As regards the attempt to colonize Africa with the surplus American  colored population, this would in a long way settle the vexed problem . . . and simultaneously ease the burden of German reparations which is paralyzing economic life.’”

This Doctor Schnee suggests this at a time when all German mandatories in Africa have been seized and shared between England and France as war reparations: Cameroun was even cut in two for that purpose. This support is surprising because how could he trust, even very indirectly, the USA to do a better job at colonizing Africa than the English or the French, and how could he believe the USA would only send their ex-slaves and their descendants to Africa to do the job. American corporations would certainly think differently and anyway that would have been at the time running against the “manifest destiny” of the USA, a conception that had already been trampled upon with the participation in the first world war.

His dual vision of reality comes from the radical opposition between the black race and the white race, the oppressed and the oppressor, the master and his serf/peon/slave, the master again and helpless imbeciles, dependent slaves and servants. Deeply inspired ,by slavery, its denunciation and the call to bring down all kinds of servitude as he is, Garvey clearly describes the sufferings of black slaves and even of the black victims of segregation, though he does not see how the colonists of old turned Africans into slaves on the model of what Willie Lynch suggested and he does not emphasize the resistance of the Africans withçn that frame of extreme animalization and domestication of this American brand of slavery that had no equivalent in the West Indies and in French or Spanish colonies in Louisiana and central or south America. He also contains the germs of the two ways of solving what comes from these slavery and segregation.

He of course does not call it Post Traumatic Slave/Slavery Syndrome/Disorder as is done today. But he contains the germs of the Muslim solution in the recapturing of the inner soul and value of each black individual in the positive sides, actions and features of his/her ancestors, including of course as slaves in the past, and him/herself and his or her fellow blacks. He calls it pride and it is obvious you cannot recapture your value if you do not reconstruct your personal positive contribution to life, and that of your ancestors. This can only happen within a collective organization and action, that will necessarily lead to the shedding of some blood, of all blacks if possible.

On the other side he is extremely favorable to the direct accusation of the whites and the demand of the blacks that the whites make amends and provide reparations. This is more in the line of the traditional Black Christian approach that will be so well illustrated by writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, among others.

In other words Marcus Garvey in this book appears as a conscious person who knows about the suffering of his people, who knows that these people have to recapture power and control, but at the same time he neglects the tremendous cultural and artistic contribution of African heritage brought to American by the African slaves. Jazz was just in the making with the development of the radio in the 1920s and jazz was and still is a complete turn-around of history in which the slaves or ex-slaves become the driving cultural force of the USA, America and the world. He seems to be conscious of the two approaches we can take as for solving the black problem, though he does not clearly see that the enslavement of the slaves was a lot more than just plain physical. It created a lasting disorder in the psyche of the slaves and their descendents. But he is trapped by his own radicalism that makes him declare when arrested: “The Negro Ministry needs purging.” Such declarations could only lead to a de facto convergence of action between the moderate black intellectuals and the white police forces and establishment. This split between radicals controlling a mass movement and moderates controlling the avenues of power no matter how small and restricted will reproduce the structure of mental dependence long after the end of slavery till it finally was identified as a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And even so, the Christian approach and the Muslim approach remain differentiated. The divide has still not yet been bridged because of the strong and deep survival of the dual vision of the world cut into two antagonistic races, just the wame way as ideological and sectarian communism took a long time to die because of the strong ideological survival of the dual vision of society cut into two antagonistic classes, a vision that is still quite active in the minds of many trade-unionists for example.

Duality is stagnation or aimless erring in history and in any scientific project. Nothing is either A or B. it has also to be seen as neither A nor B and as both A and B. The second formula means that there is necessarily other solutions or protagonists than A and B.

Historically this volume is essential. It contains the germs of the future and at the same time the shackles that were to hamper the possible developments that were, still are times and might very well be still in the future blocked by a reductive dual antagonistic conception of the world and society. It takes a lot more than two legs to walk with all kinds of sensors in the body, but anyway you need both legs to simple put one foot in front of the other. Any pair of antagonistic concepts are just doomed to fail explaining and predicting the past and the future. That’s what I regret about this book, even if it was composed in 1923.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

EXPURGATED VERSION FOR AMAZON PÖLITICALLY CORRECT BIGOTRY

This old book does not represent a constructed and well balanced  presentation of Garvey’s ideas, but rather a selection of many small excerpts, each one under s small title. Apart from some speeches at the end of the volume, and we cannot say whether these speeches are unabridged or full, everything else is tit bits of thinking in any haphazard jumble. We then have to extract a philosophy out of this patchwork.

These documents all have a unity in the fact that they are all from the Harlem period in Marcus Garvey’s life. He arrived in Harlem in 1916, coming from Jamaica. His problems with justice started as sson as 1922. He will find himself in prison in 1926 and will be deported back to Jamaica in 1927. He founded with some others the Universal N**** Improvement Association and organized the First International Convention of the N**** Peoples of the World that lasted thirty days in 1920 with a mass rally in Madison Square Garden that brought together more than 25,000 people. Internationally he arrived in Harlem when the USA entered the War in Europe and moved many blacks from the south to the north to work in the war industry. Then this period (1916-1922) covers the end the war and the great changes that occurred in the world then and just after, particularly the Soviet revolution in 1917 that is actually referred to in the volume as being led by Lenin and Trotsky.

This mention of Lenin and Trotsky is important because the very first principle that emerges from this volume is that he has recuperated his main central concept from the Marxist catechism that was triumphing in Russia, and he has only replaced the word “class” in “class struggle” by the word “race” to produce a vision of everything in the world as being a “race struggle.”

For him there are three races.

·       The whites (this race is specified to be Europe and the west) who exploits the yellow and the blacks.

·       The yellow (this race is specified only once to be the Japanese) who exploit the blacks.

·       The blacks (this race is clearly identified as the Africans and Africa with no distinction whatsoever between North Africa, and Egypt is part of this Africa that covers all blacks in the world too and is only identified several times as Ethiopia) who are exploited by everyone.

The blacks are simply confronted to the simple choice:

1- recapture your autonomy

or

2- accept full extermination.

This choice carries in itself the answer. The problem then is how is that recapture supposed to happen?

This first principle is extremely radical and that will bring him a lot of hostility from the officials of the USA, all white of course, and from the moderate Black leaders and intellectuals, among whom W.E.B. DuBois is prominent. DuBois accuses him of being “dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious,” of having “absolutely no business sense, no flair for real organization” and of only having “objects . . . shot through with bombast and exaggeration.” This came shortly after the period we are considering but is pretty final. Garvey explains this hostility with jealousy because they are moderate and he is radical and what’s more he has managed to build a mass movement.

The mass movement is UNIA and the various branches and organizations he created around this movement: like the African Legions and the Black Cross, service organizations for the Blacks, and commercial ventures like the Black Star Line aiming at importing African products to the USA and West Indies, and the N****es Factories Corporation to develop Black business. In 1924, hence outside the period concerned here, he specified the “Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of N**** Problem,” as the president of UNIA.

“The UNIA and African Communities’ League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive and expansive society. . . [the aims are] to establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of pride and love; to reclaim the fallen; to administer to and assist the needy; to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa; to assist in the development of Independent N**** Nations and Communities; to establish a central nation for the race; to establish Commissionaries or Agencies in the principal countries and cities of the world for the information of all N****es.”

This gives us some more organized vision of Marcus Garvey’s thinking. The motto of UNIA is “One God! One aim! One destiny!” that is a clear statement amplifying the quotation often attributed to Garvey: “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”

The first basic element after the race struggle is the religious reference to and inspiration from Jesus. The Jews are clearly and very emphatically accused of being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. The ideal attributed to Jesus is systematically presented in triads of terms like “a life of Love, Charity, Mercy.” “His innocence, His Love and His Charity” are attributed to Jesus. Africa is reduced to “Egypt, Ethiopia and Timbuktu.” God is referred to as being “the Great Omnipotent, the Great Creator, our Eternal Father.” Jesus is called “our Master, our prince of Peace, our Redeemer.” He has “conquered death, the grave and hell.” Then “we sing and shout with the angels, we ring our joy bells; we blow our horns.” These three ways of sending a message with our voices, our bells and our horns are “in praise” of Jesus who is “the Jesus, the Christ, the Emanuel to us,” a triad by the form that is immediately amplified by to titles set apart by their form: “the Son of Righteousness, the Prince of Peace.” Then the conclusion comes with another triad that “shout[s] our praises to God for freedom, for liberty, for life.” Some will say this triad is artificial since freedom and liberty are the same thing. And yet, are they reality?

Strangely enough Garvey’s racial approach of the world and religion leads him to alluding to the fact Jesus is white and he rejects it with a strange argument saying that God created all men equal in his own image, hence with no racial distinction or discrimination. He suggests even that Jesus can be seen as the Son of God and thus belonging to all humanity, to all races. He of course would reject the Mormon explanation that the black race was  created when Cain was rejected by God and made black as a punishment for his crime. But then his strong racial approach would imply Jesus belongs to all races, hence can be seen as white, black or yellow, and this is a no-answer more than an answer. In fact as we have seen in the objects of UNIA, culture is not taken into account. Here we are dealing with a strong cultural element that is part of the African heritage of the Black slaves. Africans are deeply committed to an animistic vision of the world and life. This transcending vital force present in all things is connected with a spiritual world beyond the surface of everyday reality, and evil is not part of this energy but the fact of the existence of bad spirits and ghosts who are the dead evil men: evil is brought into the world by man himself. This deeply animistic vision was able to integrate the Christian approach easily, in fact the Catholic approach, either French or Spanish. They then became Christians or they developed an African religious tradition, Vodun, in Louisiana and the West Indies, with an extreme and morbid form in Haiti with the Tontons Macoutes of late Duvallier Sr. Note this tradition goes far beyond the blacks since Anne Rice for one example used it in one of her vampire books and Arthur Miller used it in The Crucible. This deep religious African heritage produced a vast Christian movement among American Blacks that is present in the oration of all black public speakers of any type. This too is a direct African heritage founded on the rhythmic experiential and existential capture of life, in fact a polyrhythmic capture that is the other enormous contribution of African heritage to American culture, and today global culture. This again is missed by Garvey who does not consider culture as an objective.

This religious tradition produced the ideology of “the Everlasting Brotherhood of Man and the Eternal Fatherhood of God.” There is no surprise in the total absence of women and the mother. This is both African heritage and loss. Heritage in the capture of women as being secondary, of society as being dominated by men, but loss in the absence of the mother because the mother is the real source of the legitimacy of a blood line and humanity. But his God has no motherly nor feminine dimension, in pite ogf the fact that he says that God made two people in his image, Adam and Eve.

Then Marcus Garvey develops a pan-African approach of his Africanism. The Blacks as a race must regain their nation and that is Africa, seen and repeated as being a whole and integrating all the Blacks in the world who have to return to Africa to take part in the “colonizing” of Africa by the Africans. We have seen he considers the Africans in Africa to be divided in tribes within the African nation and these tribes are “backward.” But the objective of reconstructing Africa when it is liberated from the colonizing presence of the Europeans, is asserted over and over again and only one center appears in this racial Africa: Ethiopia. His dream of decolonizing Africa, the “dream of an African empire” can go as far as supporting the German Dr Heinrich Schnee who advocates that:

“America [should] take over the mandatories of Great Britain and France in Africa for the colonizing of American N****es. . . . he says: ‘As regards the attempt to colonize Africa with the surplus American  colored population, this would in a long way settle the vexed problem . . . and simultaneously ease the burden of German reparations which is paralyzing economic life.’”

This Doctor Schnee suggests this at a time when all German mandatories in Africa have been seized and shared between England and France as war reparations: Cameroun was even cut in two for that purpose. This support is surprising because how could he trust, even very indirectly, the USA to do a better job at colonizing Africa than the English or the French, and how could he believe the USA would only send their ex-slaves and their descendants to Africa to do the job. American corporations would certainly think differently and anyway that would have been at the time running against the “manifest destiny” of the USA, a conception that had already been trampled upon with the participation in the first world war.

His dual vision of reality comes from the radical opposition between the black race and the white race, the oppressed and the oppressor, the master and his serf/peon/slave, the master again and helpless imbeciles, dependent slaves and servants. Deeply inspired ,by slavery, its denunciation and the call to bring down all kinds of servitude as he is, Garvey clearly describes the sufferings of black slaves and even of the black victims of segregation, though he does not see how the colonists of old turned Africans into slaves on the model of what Willie Lynch suggested and he does not emphasize the resistance of the Africans withçn that frame of extreme animalization and domestication of this American brand of slavery that had no equivalent in the West Indies and in French or Spanish colonies in Louisiana and central or south America. He also contains the germs of the two ways of solving what comes from these slavery and segregation.

He of course does not call it Post Traumatic Slave/Slavery Syndrome/Disorder as is done today. But he contains the germs of the Muslim solution in the recapturing of the inner soul and value of each black individual in the positive sides, actions and features of his/her ancestors, including of course as slaves in the past, and him/herself and his or her fellow blacks. He calls it pride and it is obvious you cannot recapture your value if you do not reconstruct your personal positive contribution to life, and that of your ancestors. This can only happen within a collective organization and action, that will necessarily lead to the shedding of some blood, of all blacks if possible.

On the other side he is extremely favorable to the direct accusation of the whites and the demand of the blacks that the whites make amends and provide reparations. This is more in the line of the traditional Black Christian approach that will be so well illustrated by writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, among others.

In other words Marcus Garvey in this book appears as a conscious person who knows about the suffering of his people, who knows that these people have to recapture power and control, but at the same time he neglects the tremendous cultural and artistic contribution of African heritage brought to American by the African slaves. Jazz was just in the making with the development of the radio in the 1920s and jazz was and still is a complete turn-around of history in which the slaves or ex-slaves become the driving cultural force of the USA, America and the world. He seems to be conscious of the two approaches we can take as for solving the black problem, though he does not clearly see that the enslavement of the slaves was a lot more than just plain physical. It created a lasting disorder in the psyche of the slaves and their descendents. But he is trapped by his own radicalism that makes him declare when arrested: “The N**** Ministry needs purging.” Such declarations could only lead to a de facto convergence of action between the moderate black intellectuals and the white police forces and establishment. This split between radicals controlling a mass movement and moderates controlling the avenues of power no matter how small and restricted will reproduce the structure of mental dependence long after the end of slavery till it finally was identified as a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And even so, the Christian approach and the Muslim approach remain differentiated. The divide has still not yet been bridged because of the strong and deep survival of the dual vision of the world cut into two antagonistic races, just the wame way as ideological and sectarian communism took a long time to die because of the strong ideological survival of the dual vision of society cut into two antagonistic classes, a vision that is still quite active in the minds of many trade-unionists for example.

Duality is stagnation or aimless erring in history and in any scientific project. Nothing is either A or B. it has also to be seen as neither A nor B and as both A and B. The second formula means that there is necessarily other solutions or protagonists than A and B.

Historically this volume is essential. It contains the germs of the future and at the same time the shackles that were to hamper the possible developments that were, still are times and might very well be still in the future blocked by a reductive dual antagonistic conception of the world and society. It takes a lot more than two legs to walk with all kinds of sensors in the body, but anyway you need both legs to simple put one foot in front of the other. Any pair of antagonistic concepts are just doomed to fail explaining and predicting the past and the future. That’s what I regret about this book, even if it was composed in 1923.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

DEXTER – EIGHTH AND FINAL SEASON – 2013

To wrap up the story in twelve episodes or chapters, that’s short, that’s fast, but that’s radical, à la Dexter. He manages to solve a ton of problems in these twelve episodes.

First he finds a surrogate mother for Harrison, and that was difficult to find. Luckily the only woman he had loved and that was still alive, apart from his sister turns up and re-activates some fundamental mechanisms. And Harrison likes her. She is very special but she wants to become a good girl.

He manages to solve the problem of his father and how his father, a good cop, could accept his adoptive son to become a criminal, how he managed to come up with the code, etc. In fact the symbolical mother surrogate of his, of Dexter, comes up to him and reveals who she is and what she did. She reveals that his father OD’ed on his heart drug when he could not stand what Dexter had become any more. Dexter hates that doctor Vogel that has nothing of a bird in that story, at most a vulture but that is no  bird you try to attract in your garden with a bird feed and a bird bath.

He has to solve a last case of a serial killer who is aiming at both him and Doctor Vogel. Her past is revealed and she becomes extremely dark and deep with one son killed by another, you know the story of Cain and Abel. And the killing son is sent East of Eden in some institution in England, or something far to the East. And there he is tortured into medical blankness since he is a criminal who deserves to be punished even if it is with drugs or some archaic violent treatment like electric shocks or other forceful manipulations of the body or the brain, and why not the mind and the imagination.

Of course the dear son who was buried alive in this institution plans a good case of arson, with seven dead people in the wing that burns, and himself among these seven, officially, because’ in fact he manages to get out, change identities and then move on, looking for mummy, Doctor Vogel, and all those she preferred to him, and first of all Dexter. And the blood trail can start under the police identity of the “brain surgeon” because he saws up the skull of his victim in a very special way and scoops out one very precise section of the brain and delivers these extracted sections to his mummy. A yummy appetizer for Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving celebrations.

He of course has to save his sister from private investigation and then to make her a star in the Police Department. So he finally comes over his need to kill with his last victim and gives him over to Deborah for her to arrest him. But a Federal Marshall comes up and he completely messes the case, frees the criminal who kills him straight away, takes his gun, shoots Deborah who shoots him but in vain. And things will not turn honky dory and there will be some complications. Dexter then has to close up the file and clean up the plate. Deborah disappears in a hurricane.

Finally he has to take care of himself and to protect Harrison and the substitute mother who has taken the boy to South America, and there is only one way. So he disappears with his boat into the hurricane. A tempestuous ending but it works.

And yet they more or less kept one card up their sleeves, I mean the producers, for a sequel in let’s say five or ten years, when Harrison reaches teenage and starts moving towards finding his father and recuperating the father model he needs and remembers from his tumultuous first four years. Check it all by yourselves with the DVDs how they manage to keep one bun in the oven in slow gestation.

You can always dream. But it is sure the author of the book series will be able to go on working with Dexter if he wants, though the last volume was announced a long time ago and will maybe finally come out next March (2014) and it is supposed to be entitled Dexter’s Final Cut, which promises quite some blood.

We’ll see. Que sera sera. Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? What will be, will be!

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

INTELLIGENCE IS NOT KURZWEIL'S MAIN INTEREST KURZWEIL VS HAWKINS & LANIER

https://synopsispaie.academia.edu/JacquesCoulardeau/Papers

Ray Kurzweil is using his MIT affiliation to sell a science fiction that is an absolute dystopia and some people of course take that for science, as should be expected from all MIT scholars.

But it is no science at all. Jeff Hawkins and Jaron Lanier give the necessary information to answer this dystopia, and we should think of what Wendy Hiu Kyong Chun says too (not covered in this paper) on the interfaced individual or subject. Here we would lmike to think of several dangers in Kurzweil’s painting of the future.

1- These nanobots of his will be intelligent, hence connected and they will communicate among themselves within our body and within a certain distance outside our body and they will always be controlled by the motherboard of their inventors. That’s more than Big Brother and his wired TVs. That’s even more than what Snowden revealed. [...]

More Info: A sorry "debate” is developing on Amazon.co.uk on my review of Kurzweil’s book Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.

Publication Date: Nov 26, 2013

Publisher: Editions La Dondaine

Location: Olliergues France

Research Interests:

Digital Subjectivity, Interfaced Human, Eternal Life of Human, Demographics,Singularity Theory, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, Ray Kurzweil, and Nanobots

Table of Contents

4.       RAY KURZWEIL – HOW TO CREATE A MIND – 2012

5.               Kurzweil still has some work to do to become realistic

http://drjacquescoulardeau.blogspot.fr/

6.       JEFF HAWKINS – ON INTELLIGENCE ­– 2004

7.       ONE HALF A MANIFESTO By Jaron Lanier

Critical reading of the basic principals of Cybernetic Totalism (Jacques COULARDEAU)

8.       JARON LANIER – YOU ARE NOT A GADGET – 2010-2011

9.       AMAZON.CO.UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R39WLXM9YE45LU?ref_=pe_780071_41837251