2nd December

The mystery of living in different worlds is what interests me in this project. By now I have contended myself with knowing that it boils down to learning a vocabulary and a way of thinking that is unique to each world.

More than that, mutual awareness seems to play a role as well. Joly himself writes against a backdrop of Napoleon-Bonaparte’s language.

Tomorrow I can get a hold of what I hope is a proper historical account of the Second French Empire. I will hibernate a few days if not a full week before I continue my journal.

But today, I want to finish one more Dialogue.

The vision does become a bit blurry here. Joly suggests later various methods for acquiring agents, but none that could engulf half the population.

Machiavelli seems to believe that if his ministries are sufficiently pleasant in their outward appearance, all would be fine.

There is nothing special about it. We kill and eat around one billion pigs per year globally, many of which will live in “unsatisfactory conditions”, and certainly not a long and good life. Few people will ever witness the killing of these animals. Industrial killing at a planetary scale is nothing we even consider a problem. If we were to accidentally walk into a factory hall and witness the ordinariness of these killing factories, we would walk away with an eerie feeling that if we can learn to look at animals that way, we can learn to look at different cultures that way too.

A few quotes from the lexicon:

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

In 1997, Gail Eisnitz, chief investigator for the Humane Farming Association (HFA),[36] released the book Slaughterhouse. It includes interviews of slaughterhouse workers in the U.S. who say that, because of the speed with which they are required to work, animals are routinely skinned while apparently alive and still blinking, kicking and shrieking.

[…]

The HFA alleges that workers are required to kill up to 1,100 hogs an hour and end up taking their frustration out on the animals.[38] Eisnitz interviewed one worker, who had worked in ten slaughterhouses, about pig production. He told her:

Hogs get stressed out pretty easy. If you prod them too much, they have heart attacks. If you get a hog in the chute that’s had the shit prodded out of him and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole. You try to do this by clipping the hipbone. Then you drag him backwards. You’re dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I’ve seen hams – thighs – completely ripped open. I’ve also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward.[39]

The thing is that it is okay because we see the necessity of it.

“Animals are not conscious. Human beings are. We would never wilfully subject another human being to hard”.

Which is sound thinking, and obviously falls flat once we being to wonder how “human” our foes really are … or aren’t.

It doesn’t matter how diabolical Machiavelli makes things sound. If a despots sounds diabolical, it is only because we cannot peer under the blanket and see all those ugly little necessities that makes his mind tick. Necessities like “you gotta eat”.

Sounds dubious? Read on …

Case 166 before the International Court of Justice is a case in which Ukraine accuses Russia of violating two treaties: CERD under which the Crimean Mejlis ought to have been protected against being banned for extremism (they advocated Crimea returned to Ukraine) and ICSFT under which the Russians ought to have assisted in investigating money transfers which Ukraine found ended up funding terrorism. Recently the ruling came out, a rather mixed pot, generally in Ukraine’s favour but far from unanimous and not on all accounts.

What few notices is that the ICSFT plays the same role here as the proposed agreements that Machiavelli dreams of establishing across Europe.

We are not only in favour of rooting out armed dissent, we are obligated to help each other doing just that.

“But note that the ICSFT only covers funding of terrorism. A liberal government would never interfere in free speech”.

At this juncture the political role of the undercover operation becomes clearer. FBI have regularly been accused of infiltrating and setting up dissenting groups, luring weak individuals into criminal acts. All it takes is an agent who can push the theoretical talk a bit further into action.

The Church Committee concluded about the COINTELPRO:

Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a "potential" for violence — and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave “aid and comfort” to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.

FBI is not the matter. Our instinctive reaction that what we do is justified is what matters.

The “potential for violence” is key here. Name a more subjective term than that. A useful term in the hands of every racist and bigot that have walked the earth.

Liberal ideals are easy to put on the flag we raise each morning, but they have precious little to do with our most fundamental behaviour which is idealised in too much political theory.

Machiavelli continues along Hoover’s preferred lines on how to hire informers for his agencies:

I doubt there is a law enforcement agency in the world whose sympathies do not evolve in the direction of the enforcers rather than the enforced. How could we not be biased?

Barring rural districts where the worst problem is petty theft, most people are willing to trade liberal rights for security.

We as a culture need to grow past our obsession with the autocrats. All societies must balance the impossible choice between freedom and security.

It is a political wet dream that the biggest despots are also the worst exploiters of their people. The myth exists to make the choice easy.

Face the reality that all we have are hard choices, and then how does it look?

America is not “democratically backsliding” as the think tanks have it. They are temporarily opting for actions that they hope will lead to stability.

Towards the end of Louis-Napoleon’s reign he liberalised much in his society. By then the troublesome years of instability were behind him at least a decade.

Even the Prince is fake

Joly’s sophistication is at times a bit hamfisted. What does he see, when he looks at Napoleon III?

Historically we are a bit far removed from the era, but back in the days, a cadet branch, for instance a line of dukes related by blood to the reigning power, often attracted unfortunate individuals such as authors and philosophers who were expunged from the central court life and needed to place of refuge.

A prince in that sense refers to any male line descendent of royal family, and the title refers to the highest rank in the feudal system.

Such a prince Machiavelli wants seated at the “steps of the throne”, not the throne himself. A member of the Orléan cadet branch perhaps? Louis XIV’s brother and his descendants often cropped up as an alternative to the Bourbon line of king.

Today, we would look for foreign influence. It’s all about the funding. Being provided for by a Duke of Maine while in exile because your incessant wits brought you temporarily in trouble with Louis XV and his mistress is a lucky break. Seeking refuge to live with Frederick the Great while your books are banned in your home country sounds closer to receiving funding from Russia.

In fact, having Catherine the Great of Russia subscribing to your Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique biweekly magazine is as close to Russian funding as you can get.

Montesquieu shudders at the thought, but reluctantly accepts the necessity of a secret police

Keeping an opposition is a useful pressure valve.

Never judge. Today everybody accuses everbody of false flag operations. Are they really much different?

Routinely we defend our liberal ways until someone points at the clandestine CIA operations to which we usually shrug and brush it off with a “that’s business”. So which is it? Idealism or business?

The key takeaway is that we are the schizophrenics in the rooms. We have adapted so well to the absurdity of the situation that when we encounter disbelief over our disjoint reality, we react violently. We can commit atrocities in any corner of the world, and still be the good guys. How? By employing our tunnel vision. We burned their cities, but they used foul language once upon a time.

Joly also recognises the tempting possibility of inventing probable cause. Unrecorded fake crimes are a useful means to do a bit of investigation anywhere you want. Again, harsh accusations, but not necessarily true.

With enough secret police and enough of these ruses, the king can walk unscathed in society.

A love for the art indeed.

Visit Bellingcat for a moment and revel in the hyperreality that make up the second phase of insanity. First phase is the ideological warfare. Once we surrender to the ideology of our class, we become crusaders only caring about details like the armour and skillset of our foe.

The very fact that everybody keeps everybody else in their given position because nobody is able to rise above their own storylines seems to escape everybody.

Draw the curtain indeed.

Habeas corpus

Montesquieu then brings up the topic of individual liberty. Machiavelli can offer a great guarantee: Personal freedoms will remain. His is a liberal democracy after all.

And words are cheap. Much like today there are after all the odd legal necessity cropping up from time to time.

Joly splendidly keeps his feet on the railing between actuality and appearance. The spectacle, as the Situationists call it. Nowadays obviously inauthentic language has been second nature for generations. Perhaps because there is no breaking away from the might of the camera lens we live in an artificial work of art.

People love a good hanging, even in effigie. Rile up the bloodthirsty masses and the mere mention in proper defamatory settings will be enough to end a career.

This is considered fair game in voter dynamics. The tabloids would be more than willing to scoop up a name or two mentioned in the same context as a murderer or child molester.

How can it be that I sit here utterly unable to figure out if the Dialogue portrays a modern dictatorship or a country like Latvia?

It is because the driving force behind Joly’s despot is shared by all countries. All systems are despotic. The only critical parameter is whether we are on the inside or outside of the ideological event horizon.

Ideologies are like that: Like black holes. Once we are trapped inside the gravity well, all else escapes us and we lose the ability to be cognisant about foreign ideologies.

PARADISE LOST