L’ETAT C’EST MOI

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Paul Edwards

Louis XIV said it first, two hundred years ago.  I am the state.

As absolute ruler of France he wasn’t boasting, since during his long reign he did with that prostrate nation whatever he wished.  He made it stick until he died.

In the evolution of governments—all of them organs of control of elites—the great challenge, and the one factor that assures them long duration, is to strike a balance between pure enslavement and destruction of a people, and sustaining them at a level just above desperation, while their exploitation continues unabated.

Humanity has struggled for thousands of years to mitigate the vicious selfishness that created governments as its only defense, with very little success.  Infrequently, a form arose that allowed people the bare means to live, and yet prevented them—because  it provided those means—from hopeless, bloody, nihilist revolt.

Those systems that came nearest to balancing the subsistence needs of the people with the extreme greed of their exploiting classes tended to exist longer than those that did not.  That said, every governing system ever known has, in time, become static and corrupt, and come to an absurd and pathetic end.

Governments that exist today found ways to provide, however inadequately, for their people.  Those who now do it least well, or in some cases not at all, are in shambles, facing dissolution.

Rich Capitalist nations belong to elites that are now choosing not to honor the old formula.  Having had all real wealth for centuries—and by doling a pittance to lower classes, perpetuated their rule—elites have at last determined that there is no need to cede any of it, and that what was formerly let go must be reclaimed.

States that have kept their howling inequities camouflaged by granting their despoiled masses bare minimum economic security, are now acting to transfer even that niggardly husk away from the people so the elite can have it all.

At that point, a little before or after, a society usually crashes in chaos and blood.  This lesson elites never learn, since they have no empathy with real people, and no awareness of their own evil. Astoundingly, they take their arrogant indifference for virtue.  (In this regard, see this indispensable article: Why You Should Hate the Rich Even More (Chris Hedges w/ Rob Larson) .Ed)
In the Empire the elite selbstmord is led by Trump. He is not unique, only typical of his order, but he ranks at the top in that he embodies every one of its ugliest, and most pathic elements.

In the Empire that grew out of a nation supposedly governed by laws and principles, all that hoary pretense had long disappeared before this odious grotesque ever appeared at the national level.

He has risen to command posture because every element of the state that prevented its ruin has been eroded, devalued, and trashed, in order for the larcenous elite to possess everything.

Empires are always blind.  It can’t be otherwise.  Their tiny elites feel no need for human empathy or even awareness of the basis on which they exist.  They sense no threat till it is at their throats.

This was the case under Louis XIV.  His profligacy impoverished his people to the point of death by starvation, when his tax men could wring no more blood from them, but his “nobility” partied on, never imagining they could be murdered.  It shocked them.

Inequity now among rich nations is as bad but neither as brutal, nor as damaging, and its rapine is mollified with modern bread and circuses: porno, booze and dope.  The masses suffer far less physically, but far more psychologically.  Mental illness is rife.

The great diversion, beyond unstinted intoxication, is endless exacerbation of public manias with performance art politics, in which two sets of furious, old whores mud wrestle, morally naked, obscenely squealing to inflame people’s idiot prejudices.

Great battles rage over the right of certain humans to exist.  Both sides of hot and trivial issues are rabidly debated, only Zionism and constant war are excepted, because universally endorsed.

In a nation so deeply drowned in elite bullshit, so destructively miseducated, so profoundly ignorant of its own interests, it was inevitable that its rule be seized by a bolus of human sewage, and that its miserable, vacuous, braindead citizenry be conned and piped, by an embodiment of all its worst faults, into disaster.

That is where we are.  As Louis XIV had claimed, Trump is the state now.  Because there is no state, only the rotted shell of one, and a corrupted elite control device acting randomly in its place.

Now, through the debased, distorted lens of his shyster vision, great, irreversible decisions are being, and will be, made, and errors of vast and fatal consequence will transpire, and—as horrifying and desperate as that is to contemplate—the fate of our species may be finally and irrevocably, determined.

When an empire has so debased and lobotomized a people who once affected to care for law and justice—never mind that they never had any—with its noxious villainy, that they celebrate the merciless, criminal murder of the innocents of Gaza, and cheer an evil, proxy war it cynically initiated, then that people deserves to suffer a virulent human toxin as the Ahab of its ship of state.

The moment is critical.  The Iran war cannot end well, and may result in monumental tragedy for all mankind.  In that horrific case, The Empire will learn how retribution can come to those who, like Louis XIV’s aristocrats, thought they were untouchable.

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