Is there true aristocracy in the United States?

Aristocracy was a term which meant ‘rule of the best’ and included a war-like class that felt it had certain duties to lesser individuals. In the European Middle-Ages like in China and Japan a system of honorable behavior and respect for women was included, reason for the rise of the Renaissance in Italy. Even the brutality of war did not prevent a resurgence of interest in the arts, literature and a code of conduct that allowed for a highly civilized layer of society.

Not so with the bourgeois commercial and industrial upper classes who feel no duty at all towards others nor a desire to follow certain rules of behavior. Their only interest is/was to control the production and exchange of goods and the control of money. Devoid then of a civilizational urge, they are as hard boiled and deprived of civilizing potential as the ever struggling lower classes (poverty does not breed nobility). Especially in the US where the economic mobility and capitalist-like competition make everyone uncertain in status, the upper classes have no civilizing character distinct from the proletariat (vide Trump).

About the author

Gui Rochat is a certified cosmopolitan and fierce contrarian living in New York City.

Cover image: 18th century British aristocracy as visualized by Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon (1975).

WHAT TO DO? The world is literally hanging by a thread, nuclear war could start any moment.
(If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this: Experts: “In a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die.”)

If a nuclear war is to be avoided, the US should not set any preconditions for direct talks with North Korea.

Yea. What to do? There's no quick fix to the damage inflicted on the US population by decades of passivity, massive ignorance, runaway jingoism and constant lies. Gross mendacity issuing practically from the entire political class and the corporate media will not stop tomorrow—or ever. The whole damn corporate system has to be liquidated for that to happen. In fact, it is possible to imagine that even in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war, the old lies and liars will still be in power. Wars do not exactly bring sudden political lucidity to severely brainwashed people.

That said, it is imperative that those who do see what is going on, what is at stake, try and do something to derail the mad rush to Armageddon. There's no time to organize Third Parties or a new party by normal processes. So we are stuck with the existing whores in the political class, and these abject people respond only to one thing: their own political and (maybe) personal survival. If these bastards see a mighty surge of people calling and demonstrating with clarity in their demands and anger on their lips, they may grow enough of a spine to stem the warmongering and actually begin to isolate the main carriers of this disease, sociopaths like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, the Clintons and their cliques, and of course, the Liar in Chief and his clique of insane billionaires and militarists.

So call, fax, write and demonstrate, and support the long overdue growth of an antiwar movement. Stopping a nuclear war is the foremost issue of our time. Call your Congress buffoon and state in clear terms that you are fed up, and that you want change or else, and that you won't put up with any votes for more wars—anywhere.

This may sound counter-intuitive for us, to be advising you that you call your representative in a false democracy, a person obviously most likely doing the bidding of the plutocracy, those who brought humanity to this pass. But for reasons already mentioned, their own sense of short-term political self-preservation and opportunism, they may actually screw up the courage to do the right thing, for once, something these characters should have been doing all along without needing anyone to tell them to do the obvious. While you are at it, and if you can stomach it, also contact MoveOn.org and similarly pseudo democratic orgs, and challenge them to do the right thing or get lost. Please do this today. Or as soon as you can. Time is precious. Start by finding your Congressional (so-called) representative: http://www.house.gov/htbin/findrep

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What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

1 comment

shorty April 17, 2017 - 12:35 pm

Albeit rarely, my 5 years of Greek and 8 of Latin are “vindicated,” so to speak. Could not agree more with the assessment by Gui Rochat, especially the point about the absence of a “civilizational urge.” I would almost add that, besides the absence, there floats at large a contempt for any civilizational urge not directly connectable or connected to profit.

Therefore, it is meaningful that the head of the indispensable and exceptional nation appears, is, or has become the very caricature of himself, a gorilla thumping his chest.* Which would be amusing, were it not for the consequences of such pernicious attitude on the rest of the world (and indirectly even at home).

Post-Easter cheers!

(* No offense to actual gorillas, for whom this behavior is both natural and harmless, as they are above and outside the realm of human idiocy or pretense.)