Sunday, April 30, 2017
Apocalypse, Marxist catastrophe, Trotstkyite nightmare
NOAM CHOMSKY – REQUIEM FOR THE
AMERICAN DREAM – 2017
How can someone who is so keen on language and words, a
linguist mind you, use the word “Requiem” in his title ignoring – and I am sure
he knows about it – that a requiem is composed and performed for something that
is dead and has no future, no possible resurrection, or maybe Noam Chomsky has
become a Catholic who believes in the resurrection of the dead. The title is of
course a provocation both revealing and self-defeating. And that’s what I am
going to discuss now.
Ten principles, and it has to be ten to avoid all kinds of
symbolism, you know, six and Solomon or David, seven and the holy week of
Genesis or the Passion, eight and the Second Coming, nine and the Beast, the
hours of Jesus’ death, eleven is the number of disciples with Jesus after Judas
has left and twelve are the twelve apostles. No let’s stay mathematical, cold
and non-symbolical. So ten it is going to be and the decimal system, the basis
of numeration devised by physicists and mathematicians and proclaimed as the
end of barbarity by the French Revolution that established the metric system as
the future of the world and the real measure of reason and intelligence.
The first point has to do with American history and the US
Constitution. It opposes two founding fathers and/or framers. James Madison,
the aristocrat who wants to protect the minority of the opulent against the
majority of the non-opulent on one hand. And Thomas Jefferson the democrat who
believes the US Constitution is there to guarantee equality and democracy for
all free men. Naturally, Chomsky knows all this at the time was a real farce
since, as he recalls, “free men” were only free white men and they excluded all
non-free white men: indentured white men, and all men who had neither real
estate property, nor commercial property, nor farmland property, since to be a
free citizen you had to have some property and pay some tax for it. These free
white men also excluded all women, all Indians, all Blacks, slaves or not
slaves. In fact, the body of free white men who could be citizens in that
society was maybe a few percent of the whole society, maybe five like in
England at the same time. But history is vicious and in spite of all the crimes
of this old American history, we have genericized the meaning to a very wide
understanding today.
And the crimes were, as Chomsky reminds us,
1- “decimating the indigenous population” (note how he
avoids genocide or even holocaust: some speak of 90 to 95% of the native
American population exterminated);
2- “massive slavery of another segment of the society” (why
on earth does he avoid the terms Black or African American, since anyway 90 to
95% of these slaves were Blacks, and 100% in the South, but this identification
would have brought the idea that there were a lot of non-slave black men and
women in the North and in the slave states that had been French or Spanish
because of the rule of manumission, but that would have brought something that
is clear: only the British Protestant and Puritan colonists in the British
colonies and then the USA practiced –
and this is still true – the theory of one-drop-of-black-blood, replacing the
practice of slavery with the practice of mass racism that is still alive in the
USA);
3- “bitterly exploited labor” (and he forgets to explain
what May Day is, when and where it started and Sacco and Vanzetti are not
quoted: that art with which Chomsky remains generic on such questions is
unexplained and probably unexplainable, or at least it’s better it remains
unexplained);
4- “overseas conquests” (that’s the wrong word because
overseas conquests are rare: Porto Rico and Hawaii: it could have been better
to speak of American imperialistic interventionism in the world since the
Monroe doctrine expanded after the first world war and the second world war to
the entire world);
5- “etc.” (true enough the list is long from Mossadegh to
Lumumba, from Korea to Vietnam and to Korea again), not to mention the Middle
East.
And his reference to Aristotle is the traditional Western
hypocrisy and short memory. Aristotle spoke for a slave society in
which the majority of the population was in servitude and the Roman Empire will
not be better and Aristotle was rightly used by Calhoun, the Southern slave
theorist, to justify his project of a US society that would be a perennial
slave society forever. Chomsky of course forgets this reference that totally
disqualify the reference to Aristotle.
It is then simple to come to this vision of society that is
cut in two: the rich and the poor, the aristocrats or the plutocrats at the top
(just a few percent) who have all power and the democrats at the bottom, all
the others, all set under the umbrella of “the poor.” This vision is the vision
that many in the world under the name of socialism and under the older probably
obsolete name of communism still defend when advancing their political projects,
especially their populist political projects, be it from the left like in
Greece (note the lefty coalition managed to get rid of the most extreme branch
of their movement through elections), in Catalonia, in Spain, in Portugal,
Italy or in France; or be it from the right in Great Britain, the Netherlands,
France, Italy and many other countries, including the USA where that extreme
right populist movement was the Tea Party and still is the Freedom Caucus and
Trump himself, all of them in the Republican Party, Lincoln’s party mind you.
Atrocious history!
The worst part in this dichotomy, in this binary vision of
the world, history, and the USA, is that he here and there evokes a third
“party” but he never integrates it in his analysis of the society and the
political system, just as if the US Constitution had not been able to shift
from two parties, Democrats and Whigs to two parties, Democrats and
Republicans, with a new party in place of one that died. True enough, any
two-party system that is cast in reinforced shielded concrete like the one in
the US cannot develop a multi-party system. Let me say here that this political
system with indirect vote for the President and the frozen two party system is
worse, I dare say FAR WORSE than the one-party system of the USSR or China. But
Chomsky does not even consider any reform of it: get rid of the indirect vote
for President and make all elections two-round elections. Only one-party systems,
Great Britain and the USA, still have that archaic system of a one-round
electoral system. In England where they have a three or four party system the
winner can be elected with a meager 30% of the electorate if there are four
candidates. That is absurd. And it is the people who defend this system who
come and give lessons to other countries, the country where it has become
common to have a president elected with a minority of the popular vote if we
follow Wikipedia: 1824: John Quincy Adams; 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes; 1888:
Benjamin Harrison; 2000: George W. Bush; 2016: Donald Trump; plus 1960: John F.
Kennedy who is debated because it is impossible to determine with absolute
certainty the popular vote of the three candidates.
And yet you will find the ferment of this necessary “third”
possibility that should be this necessary “multiple” perspective. The
Counterforce as he calls it page 41; “those who are interested in an
independent progressive party,” page 102. And as he says page 42 “the only
counterforce is you.” But he is not
able to really capture what he says here in full contradiction with what he
says later on, towards the end of the pamphlet, page 126: “the idea is to try
to control everyone, to turn the whole
society into the perfect system. The perfect system would be a society based on
a dyad – a pair. The pair is you and
your television set, or maybe now you and your iPhone and the Internet.”
And he has trapped himself so much in his dyad, in his dual
thinking, in his binary vision that he does not see that “you and your
television set” (I hope with some programs, not just the set) has a “you” who
is passive, even if he has 100 channels and can zap from one vision to the
next; and on the other hand “you and your iPhone and the Internet” is a lot
more open and can be open to first some active participation, and then some activity in search and reception of
multiple points of view and opinions. He just forgets that Roosevelt was the
President elected with the radio, Kennedy with television, Obama with the
Internet and email networks, and Trump with social networks. He wants to reduce
everything to money and the weight of the big corporations. But he forgets the
impact of media and thus he does not see that Trump has captured the daily
practice of the discontents today: they use Twitter to express their rage that
does not need more than 140 characters to express itself, even often a lot less
like “F*** the P*****!” with the use of stars and other symbols to avoid four
letter words or non-politically correct entities. But more and more people use
their iPhones, their smartphones and the Internet to actually counterweigh the
forces of the financialized offshored outsourced system. Counterweigh with
information and training and education, all three self-engineered,
self-retrieved and self-learned if not actually self-taught.
But what he has completely wrong is his vision of the economy.
He more or less accept the division of society in, on one hand, the extreme minority
of the plutocrats who advocate plutonomy and plutocracy instead of democracy,
and on the other hand the vast majority of the “precariat,” the “precarious
proletariat.” The allusion to Marx is so obvious that his vision of the total
dictatorship, he says a ‘totalitarian” situation, echoing the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie of Marx. We expect the dictatorship of the proletariat, sorry
of the precariat. He does not go that far but his vision is just as dramatic as
that. He considers that for the first time in history (of course he only speaks
of the history of mankind after they invented writing, which is a very short
period of time because in the long run the Homo Sapiens species met with
survival as a species several times, the most recent ones being when the Ice
Age locked them up into running, retreating and trying to survive on reduced
territory and reduced resources, and then when agricultural division of labor
was introduced in the Neolithic or a couple of millennia before, after the Ice
Age any way, that reduced life expectancy to something around 20 or maybe 19
years which brought the reproductive possibilities to at the most three
children maybe four with more than a 50% death rate before puberty, some say
75%. If it were that dramatic then we would not be here to testify.
But it is false because between the two extremes there is
the majority of the people that used to be called the middle class. But we have
to reanalyze it to requalify it as all the people who have jobs on the basis of
a partial or total college education, who are highly connected together in
family, acquaintance and local networks plus other global networks like
Facebook for sure, but more precisely as reviewers on Amazon and other
commercial sites, on LinkedIn and other professional sites, on Academia and
other independent research sites, on Reverbnation or Myspace and other musical
sites for people practicing music in a way or another, or on Medium and other
self-publishing sites. That’s the new middle class, the one that counts because
they are really representing the future of humanity, discussing, proposing and
confronting all kinds of new ideas. Trump was able to capture a section of this
new middle class who did not get from Obama what they were hoping to get, but
Trump essentially captured the old middle class: white, protestant mostly,
working in precarious or non-evolving jobs that can look like blind alleys, who
have a house and a mortgage, a couple of cars, and have a high school degree
and some of them a partial college degree or a short state university degree,
plus those in this group who have been made redundant and have been obliged to
accept a job that does not pay as well as before and has little future or is
precarious. What’s more he does not take into account the top layer of the new
middle class that has reached PhD level and have all kinds of executive positions
as university or college personnel including professors, or in average or large
private companies. That upper middle class is particularly active and dynamic
in hi-tech businesses, in startups, in the big new global companies like
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and many others. This new middle class is
not confronted to traditional unemployment like miners, particularly coal
miners, or car workers. These have been confronted with robotization and
automation for about ten to fifteen years, but the new middle class knows these
robots are also coming after their jobs, though most of these new middle class
people occupy jobs that would have employed three or more people before the
extension of robots and complex computer systems.
This revolution that is taking place under our noses is
going to put the plutocrats like Trump in the ditch because mines can be
reopened but they will be hi-tech and robotized. No jobs for humans, or very
few and highly qualified. Same thing with the car industry. Since people like
Chomsky or Trump have not done one single thing to think the problem through
and to imagine what is going to happen, they will be confronted with millions
of people getting redundant with robots and being fired. The USA are going to
face this tremendous transformation without any planning, preparation and
strategy. Whereas in China the one child family has been producing over the
last ten years and for decades to still come a labor movement that replaces
three or four low qualified jobs with one highly qualified job, in the west,
the USA and Europe, nothing has been done to face the problem except in
countries like Germany that have been facing labor shortage for several
decades. In the next few years the USA are going to be confronted to a dire
situation. If Ford does not open a factory in Mexico where they could have had
some workers still at a rather low salary and open it in the USA, they will
multiply by three or more the number of robots. In Flint General Motors had a
factory that employer several ten thousand people. The same production today
would work with at least ten times less workers and the difference would be
half the same number of robots. Chomsky does not see that, does not talk of that
at all.
So his announcement that the top plutocrats are not
capitalists since they negate the free open market economy that carries
capitalism is not going to improve the situation. His call to go BACK to the
free open market economy of capitalism is not going to bring a solution at all
to the robotization problem. In politics as I have already said he does not
propose any reform of the electoral system, of the political architecture in
the USA, an architecture that should be modified to enable more people to be
part of the democratic system that has to be improved and not invoked like a
catch word or a fetish.
His approach of the media is simply narrow minded. He
obviously does not know Marshall McLuhan who is the best inspiration you can
find to understand the effect of the Internet and smart phones on the psyche,
the behavior and the mental intellectual state of younger generations. The
Internet requires an active user who uses his mind to search and to find, to
extract, collect and restructure information. They are just doing that all the
time at work and it becomes a way for them to BE HUMAN in front of these
machines: use them creatively. The lowest common activity they practice on
their smart phones is communication with others. They have never been so much
social. Games and other lower activities are either for the uneducated minority
or for relaxing purposes. The few who spend hours playing poker on line are not
representative of what the younger generations are doing with the new media.
The worst part of the present wild financial capitalism we
are going through is the permanent debts people have that often exceeds what
you should have, and are able to really pay back, forcing them to get loans to
pay back due loans or debts, thus always remaining under this financial
dependence if not crushing weight. That will take a lot of time to “educate”
the public and to “regulate” the banking system to prevent such extreme
situations. The mortgage system has to be changed too and instead of the
capital being indexed on the real estate market, it should be frozen, and the capital
thus could go down month after month, and at most the interest rate could be
indexed on inflation or some other fair parameter or set of parameters. But
here we reach the main contradiction of this pamphlet.
At the end when he evokes the role of trade or labor unions
in the past that “were a very educational force” (page 149) he apparently does
not capture his contradiction since that’s the only solution he puts on the
table, though since unions hardly exist nowadays we can wonder how he is going
to do this education. But the contradiction is with what he said before about
propaganda and education. One author he calls for help on the subject is Edward
Bernays and the document is from 1928. At the time only two media were working:
the radio and the cinema and the talkies were just starting to appear on the
silver screen (the telephone was still marginal). So let me consider this
author is not very helpful in modern times. But since Chomsky invokes him in
support of his point of view on the role of education to turn the “bewildered
herd” into “spectators, not participants” let me quote what this author says
about the subject:
“Is this
government by propaganda? Call it if you prefer government by education. But
education, in the academic sense of the work, is not sufficient. It must be
enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through
the high-spotting of significant events, and the dramatization of important
issues. The statesman of the future will thus be enabled to focus the public
mind on crucial points of policy, and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of
voters to clear understanding and intelligent action.” (page 133)
In the present situation this approach is all wrong. People
are bombarded with all types of data and information, some propaganda, some
real knowledge or reflection, and they have to sort all that out all by
themselves. In other words, the “statesman of the future” is not enabled to do
anything in the line of bringing real and intelligent understanding and action
to the “masses” that are regimented for sure but on the basis of what they
think, what they feel, what they have experienced, what they have all-sensorially
as McLuhan would say received and absorbed. It is no longer propaganda but
direct manipulation of people’s emotions and fear and resentment and even
hatred.
And as for labor unions Chomsky should reflect on the role
they played in building what Chomsky calls “class consciousness,” a concept he
borrows from Marx again, this concept coming from a political dyad: there are
two basic antagonistic classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the working
class. Right now we are living under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We
have to unite to bring the socialist revolution that will get rid of this
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and we will be able to impose the dictatorship
of the proletariat under the guidance of the avant-garde party that will bring
together in direct action the active class consciousness elite of the
proletariat.
Chomsky cannot be that blind. But he is so pessimistic that
for him there is no hope, except a dream. What is strange is that the American
Dream he had buried in his title, is replaced by some formless, backboneless
and unorganized dream:
“There’s is a lot
that can be done [Note the irritating passive that is a very negative may to borrow Obama’s
motto, “Yes we can,” and make it a totally blind, submissive and abstract
phenomenon that does not even depend on our doing: if we demonstrate then a
miracle can be performed: how, by whom, when, where?] if people
organize – struggle for their rights as they’ve done in the past – and we can
win many victories.” (page 150)
And he concludes with Howard Zinn:
“What matters is
the countless small deeds of unknown people, who lay the basis for the
significant events that enter history.” (page 150)
Rosa Parks sure did a small little act one evening after
work but if there had not been someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., and a
whole network to inform him and bring him on the scene she would have died in
prison or even worse she would have been lynched. We need to have people who
are able to use modern media to get in touch with both the new middle class and
the old disappointed and discontented middle class and get them into an
alliance with all type of active minorities, ethnic, sexual, gender, cultural
or whatever to build a majority movement with clear objectives and based on
permanent action. I must say the Democratic Party right now is NOT the organization
that can take the leading position in this field, though they can play an
important role in the grassroots movement that may block some of the suicidal
reforms Trump is trying to bring through, not to mention his perilous and
absurd foreign policy only founded on military force and naked violence.
P.S. As a linguist who has followed Chomsky’s whole career,
I am not surprised by the dichotomic vision and thought he develops here. His
linguistics, since the very first publications of his in the mid-1950s till his
latest publications at the end of the previous century and the beginning of the
present century have been dominated by one formula he has never questioned or
modified: S = NP + VP. Without discussing this a priori principle, let me say
simply that the simplest of all sentences is composed of three elements (The
door is red.); that all languages except the most analytical languages like
European languages consider the verb as the center of the sentence that
projects its mental structure on the sentence that is of course at least three
functional elements; and when there are only two then the only nominal element
holds two functional positions. This Chomskyan dictum has in fact blocked many
possible developments: being unable to make translating machines effective,
then Google and others tried to develop such machines with practical automatic
mapping of the corpus of one language onto the corpora of other languages
considering correspondences established in such a way provide scientific
translation. It is good enough for a hotel booking form, but certainly not for
a poem by T.S. Eliot.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Prove that Israel helping ISIS ??
Friday, April 28, 2017
Welcome to the catalogue of publications, music and authors
Éditions La Dondaine – Catalogue @Academia.edu & @Slideshare. Net (84)
Editions La Dondaine - Catalogue
https://www.academia.edu/32703584/Editions_La_Dondaine_-_Catalogue
https://www.academia.edu/32703584/Editions_La_Dondaine_-_Catalogue
Abstract:
This catalogue contains all the
published or produced works from our various authors over the last four years.
Some are new in the profession, beginners in fact, some are young and some are
of a more advanced age or experience, but they all believe in the freedom of
expression and today in the age of cyberspace authors have to be cyber authors.
They have more than ever to do everything before publication and now they can
also self-publish themselves onto the wings of cyberspace. Then they have to
learn how to promote themselves, how to valorize themselves. The tools
available for that valorization and promotion are generic and empty, meaning
the content is produced by the authors themselves.
We never have had it so easy to reach out for the
realization of our works into a book that can circulate virtually all over the
world provided authors use the material networks around them to promote their
works from mouth to ear and the virtual social networks at their disposal.
What’s new today is that you have to create your own buzz in the world to ever
be or become someone or something. This in itself is not knew but the means
used to do it are original and so far reaching that you cannot see the end of
their extension.
Be sure more will come and remember a work that is not
produced or published will never reach any lasting fame. Jacques
COULARDEAU
Ce
catalogue contient toutes les œuvres publiées ou produites avec divers auteurs
ou artistes au cours des quatre dernières années. Quel que soit leur statut
professionnel ils croient tous que la liberté d’expression dans notre âge
cybernétique exige que l’auteur devienne un cyber-auteur. L’auteur plus que
jamais doit tout faire avant la publication et il ou elle peut aujourd’hui
s’auto-publier porté(e) par l’albatros du cyber espace virtuel. L’auteur doit
alors apprendre à se mettre en avant, se donner à voir, se promotionner. Les
outils pour cette valorisation et cette promotion sont génériques et vides pour
que l’auteur puisse y investir son propre contenu, sa propre image, la forêt
imaginaire qui doit cacher l’auteur de chair, de sang réel.
Nous
sommes ouverts à tous et tous les projets. Le succès n’est qu’huile de coude et
graisse de genou. Jacques COULARDEAU
Research Interests:
Asian Studies, Research Methodology, Literature, Humor, Poetry, South Asia, Biblical Studies,
and The
Apocalypse of John
Thursday, April 27, 2017
All the screens together and at once
CINEMA AND TELEVISION
Published Research
(March 2013 to today) & Reviews (February 2 to December 18, 2016)
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Published
on Jan 1, 2017
Cinema and
television have become obsessions in me over the years and today with the large
flat screen we have, with a universal, all zone and all standard DVD reader we
can access all the films that are available in the whole world on a digital
medium.
In the following pages, which are more a book
than a paper, I have brought together all the full studies published at Amazon
Kindle or on Academia.edu (these studies are extensive and I only give the
presentation and the front page of them. Then I have collected all the reviews
published on various sites, particularly various Amazon national branches over
about the last eleven months.
Be sure I also have
plenty of music, operas, books and other cultural artifacts in the field of
research and reviews (I just finished a 13,000 word article on Benjamin Britten’s
operas), plus creative writing (the lastest poetry volume is An Untellable Story, A Dramatic Confession, The
Nineteen stations of Saraphic Love, Amazon Kindle, ASIN B00UP4CX88) and at the
same time I go on with my basic research on the phylogeny of language with Homo
Sapiens over the last 250,000 years, plus the psychogenetics of language in our
modern world from before birth to adult age.
For you to be able
to find what is in this volume I have built a full table of contents with
hyperlinks. Have a good navigation.
Olliergues, France,
December 22, 2016
Screening is inescapable, dixit Kevin Kelly, the Great KK!
They tell us there is no escape from all
the screens that are going to invade our life and environment, and be sure, if
there is some money to make out of this new slavery they will impose it onto
us. We are their guinea pigs and mules and we will cultivate their cotton
fields while they crack their whips on well-tempered airs and on our backs if
need be.
Imagine the world in ten years when
screens are everywhere:
From the screen(s) in our bedroom when we
are woken up by the clocking in alarm;
To the screens in our bathroom to tell us
to wash properly behind our ears;
To the screens in our kitchen mixing our
cereals with milk, sour or not for breakfast;
To the screens in our cars or our buses or
our subway trains to go to work;
To the screens at our workplace,
everywhere including the toilets to entertain us with live music canned in a
screen,
To the same as in the morning when going
back home in our cars, in our buses, in our subway trains, in the streets too;
To the screens in our home for supper and
for television in the evening and in the bathroom to make sure we brush our
teeth on the proper rhythm;
To our bedroom till we go to sleep and yet
still going on all night to make sure we learn our lesson properly.
Good morning at all hours in the day not
to Big Brother but to Big Regressive and Repressive Womb with a screen all the
time there like an umbilical cord that feeds us our submissive sauce, drug,
morphine, etc.
What’s more all these screens can be eyes
and they look at you, at your face, at your eyes and they know everything about
you, even the type of porn you watch in secrecy and in privacy, and even the
one you dream of in your mental closet, and they cabn satisfy on the screen in
your glasses or on the screen on the microchips embedded in your brain anything
you have wanted to see and had never dared ask Mum, Dad, your teachers, the
local cops, your bosses, your priests, your friends and even your MPs.
That’s why it is high time we start
becoming screen-literate and we learn how to analyze the messages, decipher the
shackles they contain and liberate our brains and minds from the gladiator’s
net they are throwing onto us to keep us prisoners in that dungeon of
multimedia screened slavery.
I dedicate this long collection of views
and reviews to those who maybe still want to dream of a world that the screens
could not control, and particularly my friends Ivan, Serban, Michel, José, Maïté,
Paula and a few others who may know what is coming. If we can’t avoid this
inescapable, at least let us learn how to tame it, maybe control it. Catch the
elephant by the Trump and look into its eyes and maybe we might be permitted to
mesmerize it.
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau, Olliergues, February 14, 2017
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
An adventure conquering the mind of history and the world
From 2009 to 2015 Ivan was my student and then
assistant. He played a role that is important for us who want to penetrate the
mysteries of the cosmos, at times at the smaller scale of our own little self.
He was the one who reacted at first at the chapters of my research I submitted
to him for critical reading and such reactions are the sign of something that
is not perfect, clear or complete.
Then he moved to bringing some remarks and some data to
the research that was being done together and he finally jumped into the
shotgun seat and brought his own research on whole chapters of the work. When
we confronted our views it was sometimes tense, sometimes emotional, sometimes
intense, but always fiery and courteous as if we were in some old tournament
trying to conquer for both of us the golden fleece of the legend. . .
Ivan, and more recently Serban, have become part of this
long adventure or quest that finds its symbolical vestment in this question:
What was Cro-Magnon’s language?
Along with this research I dedicated during these years
several books of poetry to Ivan who more or less opened up some gates in my
mind that even Sri Lanka and Buddhism had not been able to open, at least
completely, though for me Pïdurangala and their Buddhist monastery and school
is sacred land.
Just dare explore some of these books and enjoy our
diversity. Human life would be so boring if we did not have such meeting of
minds and souls that are at times so different but that discover they can work
together and reach out to things they could not even imagined before. Some call
that love. I prefer calling it life.
Paris & Olliergues, October 10, 2016
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
THE INDIAN OCEAN THE MARE NOSTRUM OF HUMANITY
SUPERNATURAL, CAR CHASE OR JOY RIDE?
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE
Illustrations
Annunzio COULARDEAU
HANDEL'S AGRIPPINA MODERN
INTERPRETATIONS AND THE ROLE OF COUNTERTENORS [Format Kindle]
The US Supreme Court,
A
Universal Lesson in Constitutional Right
Jacques
Coulardeau & Ivan Eve
FOR A MOTLEY POLYCHROMATIC UNIVERSE
MARSHALL McLUHAN, UNDERSTANDINGMEDIA,THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN – ROUTLEDGE,
LONDON – 1964
THE INDIAN OCEAN
FROM ADMIRAL ZHENG HE
TO HUB AND SPOKE
CONTAINER MARITIME COMMERCE
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
& Ivan Eve
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
CIA or the CIA, never mind: they are imperialistic criminals
MATT DAMON – ANGELINA JOLIE – ROBERT
DE NIRO – THE GOOD SHEPHERD – 2006
NEW REVIEW in 2017
It was a nostalgic film in 2006 when the wars started by
George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq were turning stale and sinking in the
quagmire of all colonial and imperialistic wars. It was of course a comment on
these wars like when Edward Wilson says “We are trying to make wars small.”
That is sure right if we can say so without sounding sarcastic, even at the
time. They were in the process of getting their fingers into Vietnam after the
defeat of the Bay of Pigs and Cuba. Of course far worse was to come, precisely
Afghanistan and Iraq. They financed Al Qaeda in Afghanistan against the Soviet
who pulled out rather fast. And now the USA have to face them and some
dissidents or alternative factions in the fields George W. Bush decided all by
himself and like a big boy to invade.
That was a time when intelligence was important against
Hitler but they met with Soviet spies in Germany and they did not necessarily
have the upper hand. In fact, they were infiltrated very early after the war and
in spite of what the film implies, that was not the cause of their lack of
success and their future failures. They failed because the objective was wrong:
they wanted to manipulated governments and states in other countries, hence
their objective was imperialistic and that went against the grain of history
that was witnessing the fall of all big colonial empires and the withering of
any kind of imperialistic ambitions. They also went against the grain of the
new phase of our human development that was and still is based on economic
growth and welfare state policies.
But the film shows far too well that the life of such spies
is not a human life. Far from home, far from wives and children, entangled in
all kinds of affairs and constantly the target of rival spying factions that
try to get some information and leverage over you by getting something about
you that should not become public (blackmail) or by menacing your spouses or
your children.
The film is well performed by seasoned actors though the
shifting in time is at times difficult to follow in spite of the places and
dates given now and then, though not all the time (where is the scene in
Africa: Ivory Coast or Congo Kinshasa?). The most difficult problem was simply
Matt Damon who was running in the film from the late 30s to the early 60s and
he really was the same man not looking in anyway younger when necessary and
older when needed. It is surprising because nowadays the make-up department of
any studio can do a better job.
At times here and there we have some extremely arrogant and
irritating remarks that are supposed to be pieces of humor like the following:
Richard Hayes: I remember a senator once asked me. When we
talk about "CIA" why we never use the word "the" in front
of it. And I asked him, do you put the word "the" in front of
"God"?
That’s the arrogance of George W. Bush who was pushed aside
by Obama for eight years in 2008 who in his turn tried to have diplomacy
prevail, though he was obsessive and obsessional about cyber security and cyber
intelligence and had everyone in the world eavesdropped upon by the CIA. Note I
must be old fashioned and from outside the institution because I do say THE
CIA, but also THE FBI and a few others.
The film will tell you how foolish of Trump if he were to
start another front somewhere in the world. But there is no one more foolish
than, a populist politician or a circus clown. The difference is that when the
populist politician falls on his face it is in the midst of maximum destruction
and mass killings, whereas a clown falls on his face to make children laugh.
Sooner or later Trump will be the monster in the closet that will come out “if
you do not go to sleep immediately.” How many lateral, bilateral and collateral
victims will you count in six months? Already several thousands in just a few
weeks.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
OLD REVIEW, MANY YEARS AGO
This is an essential film to understand where the world
stands and where it is going in the present period. De Niro signs here a severe
and ruthless denunciation of the methods of the US government in the world
since they started the CIA at the end of the 30s. A young man, the son of a
dead-by-suicide officer of some sort, is recruited by the FBI to find out the
identities of the members of a fascist group that is in fact in the hand of an
American agent unknown of the FBI. He will then become an essential agent in
London during the war and in Berlin after the world, covered as a commercial
agent, and it is trade and nothing else, to exchange some fascist scientists
who are not too important for the Jewish scientists the Soviets are getting rid
of.
This will lead the main character who is the head of the
office in Berlin to recruit a KGB agent into his service. What is very strange
is that the CIA does not find out this agent is being recruited under the name
of another KGB agent (the CIA was un-informed on the subject which means they
did not cover the whole world and had weak points, just like the Soviet should
not have used the name of another KGB agent) and it is done with the complicity
of an English agent. This man will become the mole in the CIA when Cuba becomes
communist and when the US tries to organize the re-conquest in the Bay of Pigs.
The failure is so enormous that they decide that there must
have been a mole. And they start looking for it. The Soviet then start playing
cat and mouse with the main character and manage to compromise his son in the
business by making him fall in love with a woman in Africa, or at least have a
sudden desire for the woman that turns into love but this woman is one of their
agents. That titillates the man and he really digs out what he can dig out and
finds out the real mole by some simple action: to check a book that was offered
to that mole by some English agent when he was finally recruited by the CIA.
That book should have been checked and was not. Negligence
and non-professionalism. And this ex-KGB agent is never the object of the
slightest doubt even when another KGB agent arrives and pretends he is the man
carrying the name the ex-KGB agent has been recruited under. It is the son who
will pay, and pay dearly, for the amateurish caper, indirectly for sure since
the woman will be eliminated. So much for love among spies. But what is left
after this action is finished, a tremendous action with numerous intertwined
though clearly identified flashbacks over the whole period from the 1920s to
the mid 1960s?
First that this CIA was born in super-patriotic and
super-nationalist secret groups in the US, groups that ignore democracy and in
a way human dignity, since the new members have to go through a fight in the
nude, in mud and with the older members eventually pissing on them. These
circles and groups are dangerous. What's more they are so closed up onto
themselves that they lose somewhere the necessary objectivity and a negligence
becomes possible and a double agent can infiltrate the whole system. The second
lesson is that this CIA is supposed to reshape the world in conformity with
what the US wants.
This is also very dangerous, and there the film is totally
idealistic: the CIA can do what they want they can only slow down change in the
world, not reverse it, Latin America being the best case ever. It has never
been so nearly unanimously on the left, dark and deep pink if not completely
red, and only as a reaction to the US's use of the CIA to manipulate people.
These agents are also extremely inhuman. They have to forget all links with
family, friends, relatives, or any acquaintances.
They must be ready to betray all these in the name of their
mission and purity and kill every time it is necessary. They are kept under
constant surveillance either by the other side or by people on the US side that
no one knows. The film finally gives you one example of the El Ghraib torturing
methods and that really makes you shudder and shiver. And the tragic end will
be all the more pathetic when we know the victim was right and telling the
truth. A film you must see absolutely.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
