57 Comments

1. In “Story 9“ you talk about the 7 countries in 5 years as part of the strategy to run up the oil price and thereby support the dollar as a reserve currency. Can you please explain to me what Somalia has to do with all this? It is clear that Djibouti occupies a strategic location in the area, however they are still under the watchful eye of France. But why Somalia?

   It was interesting that earlier on in your conversation Dr Farrell talked about how the church corrects itself and how it was this ability which led to the abolition of slavery. I then recalled how in a previous report you had explained how slavery was abolished because the London banks couldn’t collateralise the slaves.

   That is why I love listening to you and Dr Farrell. It is a true mental work-out as you both come up with so many different ideas and interpretations.

   1. I have never looked into Somalia – will take a look as to why it was thrown into the pot. The church was instrumental in getting slavery abolished. However, I believe the thing that got them going was the Haiti rebellion and the London banks. IE the smart money at the top saw the long term dangers and needed a way to power over the various business and financial interests. Remember – the slave trade was a much bigger business for the French than for the Brits.

      1. No, I wasn’t aware of the French slave trade having been much bigger than for the Brits. Where can I find out more?

         1. Andrew:

            Just tried to find the article that compared the two trade volumes and not finding it. Wiki claims France was #3 behind Portugal and Britain. Will keep looking.

            Catherine

            1. Here is the piece I was thinking of. To be sure, important to go back to the books and check sources if you have time to do.
               http://slavenorth.com/columns/frenchslavery.htm
               FRENCH SLAVERY
               Recently I read a piece by an American living in Europe, recounting how he had found himself in heated argument with a Frenchman who hammered him with America’s rap sheet of historical faults and crimes — it looked like the usual list, if you’re familiar with that dreary experience.

               Among them, of course, was slavery. The American wrote that he largely conceded the point of slavery to his foe, remarking only that it was not really an American institution, just a Southern one.

               This seemed lame to me, not only because it was, in fact, a national institution, as I have been at pains to tell people for some years now, but because the American could have turned the tables nicely on the Frenchman, if he’d known a little more about French history.

               So, in case this ever happens to you, be prepared. Here’s a primer. Really, the essential numbers can be summed up like this:

               Slaver voyages: France, 4,200; British North America/United States, 1,500.
               Slaves transported: France 1,250,000, British North America/United States, 300,000.
               Slaves delivered to: French West Indies: 1,600,000, British North America/United States, 500,000.*
               In the history of the Atlantic slave trade, the French turned four times as many Africans into slaves as the Americans did, they used them far more brutally, and French slavers not only got a head-start on Americans, they continued the slave trade — legally — until 1830, long after the rest of Europe had given it up. And they kept at it clandestinely until after the U.S. Civil War. France officially abolished slavery in its colonies only 14 years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and then only under pressure from slave uprisings.
               The French New World settlers outstripped the Americans in their greed for slave labor. When the U.S. acquired Louisiana from France, the first governor sent out from Washington reported back that, “No subject seems to be so interesting to the minds of the inhabitants of all parts of the country which I have visited as that of the importation of brute negroes from Africa. This permission would go further with them, and better reconcile them to the government of the United States, than any other privilege that could be extended to this country. … White labourers, they say, cannot be had in this unhealthy climate.”

               French interlopers had jumped into the Atlantic African slave trade in the early 16th century, a century before the first Yankee set sail for Africa. Nearly 200 ships bound for Sierra Leone sailed from three Norman ports between 1540 and 1578. A Portuguese renegade, sailing under the French flag as Jean Alphonse, was one of the pioneers of the “triangle trade” between Africa, the New World and Europe.

               The French government sought to promote plantation economies in its West Indies colonies. With capital, credit, technology — and slaves — borrowed from the Dutch, these islands began to thrive as sugar export centers. The Dutch established the first successful French sugar mill in 1655. By 1670, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Christopher had 300 sugar estates.

               Realizing slaves were the key to this, a monopoly Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, largely financed by the state, was organized in 1664. A French fleet took many factories from the Dutch in Gorée and the Senegambia in the 1670s. In 1672, the French government offered a bounty of 10 livres per slave transported to the French West Indies. This spurred the formation of a second monopoly company, Compagnie du Sénégal, founded in 1673. By 1679 it had 21 ships in operation.

               French slavery totals in the 17th century were lower than they might have been due to incompetence, bankruptcies, and mismanagement and strict royal rules about buying from, or selling to, other empires. By the 1720s, however, French private traders had broken the monopolies and the slave trade boomed under the French flag.

               During the 1730s alone, the French shipped probably more than 100,000 slaves from Africa. The government raised the bounty per slave delivered to 100 livres, and in 1787 upped it again to 160. By the 1760s the average number of slaver ships leaving French ports was 56 a year, which does not sound like a large number, but they were big ships, averaging 364 slaves per boat. The attendant horrors of the Middle Passage, of course, were multiplied in the bigger ships. In 1767 the French overtook the British in sugar production for the first time.

               Conditions on sugar plantations were harsh (though French sugar colonies were no better or worse than Spanish, Dutch, or British ones). During the eight-month sugar harvest, slaves sometimes worked continuously almost around the clock. Accidents caused by long hours and primitive machinery were horrible. In the big plantations, the captives lived in barracks; women were few and families nonexistent.

               Compared to this, North American cotton plantation slavery featured much less ferocious labor and allowed family units to exist. Which is one reason France required a steady flow of thousands of slaves a year — to replace the ones the French had worked to death — while America’s slave population grew naturally even after the U.S. slave trade had ended.

               Nantes by far was France’s leading slave port. Between 1738 and 1745, Nantes alone carried 55,000 slaves to the New World in 180 ships. All told, from 1713 to 1775 nearly 800 different vessels sailed from Nantes in the slave trade. But Bordeaux, Le Havre, and La Rochelle were leaders in the trade, too. Saint-Malo, Harfleur, and Rouen also played a part. French slave ships bore such ironic names as Amitié (La Rochelle) and Liberté (belonging to Isaac Couturier in Bordeaux). The novelist Chateaubriand’s father, of Saint-Malo, was active in the slave trade in the 1760s. In 1768, Louis XV expressed his pleasure at the way “les négociants du Port de Bordeaux se livrent avec beaucoup de zèle au commerce de la traite des nègres.”

               In the late 1660s, the French settled the abandoned western half of the island of Santo Domingo, and by the early 1680s this new colony, which the French called Saint-Domingue, had 2,000 African slaves. By the 1740s, Saint-Domingue had replaced Martinique as the empire’s largest sugar producer. Its 117,000 slaves that year represented about half the 250,000 slaved in the French West Indies. Coffee, introduced in 1723, only made the plantations more profitable — and increased the demand for slaves.

               By the late 1780s Saint Domingue planters were recognized as the most efficient and productive sugar producers in the world. The slave population stood at 460,000 people, which was not only the largest of any island but represented close to half of the 1 million slaves then being held in all the Caribbean colonies. The exports of the island represented two-thirds of the total value of all French West Indian exports, and alone were greater than the combined exports from the British and Spanish Antilles. In only one year well over 600 vessels visited the ports of the island to carry its sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cacao to European consumers.” [Herbert S. Klein, “The Atlantic Slave Trade,” Cambridge, 1999, p.33]
               To keep the supply of African captives flowing, the French government had permanent establishments at the Senegal River and Whydah on the Gold Coast. French free traders worked seasonal camps from the Senegal to the Congo and even East Africa, where they became serious competitors to the Portuguese in Mozambique. The slaves they bought there went to the French Indian Ocean island colonies, which also were thriving on sugar exports.
               Slavery went deeper than this in French society. In the 17th century, the French navy galleons were manned by slaves, including hundreds of Turks (some of them captured by the Austrians after the Siege of Vienna). In 1679, the Senegal Company provided 227 African slaves for this purpose.

               Nor was their slaving activity limited to Africans. As late as 1820s the French were engaged in a slave trade in Sumatra, on the island of Nias (in the news recently as an earthquake site), taking 1,000 slaves a year from there to Ile de Bourbon (modern Réunion).

               The rise of the French slave trade meant the number of black Africans living in France grew. A law of 1716 clarified their position by allowing masters from the islands to keep their slaves captive while in France. But a law of 1738 decreed black slaves could not stay in France more than three years, otherwise they would be confiscated by the Crown (and likely put to work on the royal navy’s galleys).

               The motive for this was the French authorities’ eagerness to preserve their nation’s racial purity, as illustrated by a royal declaration of 1777 which forbade entry of any black into France because “they marry Europeans, they infect brothels, and colors are mixed.” The restrictions rarely were enforced, however, and six years after the 1777 decree a ministerial circulaire complained that blacks continued to be imported. Merchants in Nantes kept so many black men and women in their fine houses that they could give négrillons or négrittes to members of their household as tips, and by the time of the Revolution there were enough nègres in Nantes to form a battalion (which got a dreadful reputation for murder and pillage).

               The leading figures of the Enlightenment condemned slavery, but they made little impact on French popular or political opinion. Abbé Raynal in 1770 published a book (in Amsterdam) arguing that slavery was contrary to nature and thus wrong. The clergy of Bordeaux, however, demanded it be prohibited as an outrage to religion and the parlement of Paris ordered it burned by the public executioner.

               The French Revolution brought such antislavery men to power. English abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson were delighted and encouraged the French liberals to put their words into action. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in August 1789 had stated, “Men are born free and are equal before the law.”

               So you might think, in the interest of consistency, the French would have ended the slave trade and liberated their chattels at that time. You’d be wrong.

               A Société des Amis des Noirs had formed. One of its leaders was Condorcet, who urged France to follow the example of America, which had set an end date to the slave trade and where leaders from all sections looked forward to the day, expected soon, when American slavery would die a natural death. Condorcet held up America as an example to France in this regard because America’s leaders knew they would “debase their own pursuit of liberty if they continued to support slavery.”

               But the négriers of Nantes were powerful and influential. The Constituent Assembly took up the topic of the slave trade in March 1790. So far from curtailing slavery or the slave trade, it simply passed a decree, “Whoever works to excite risings against the colonists will be declared an enemy of the people.”

               The French Assembly even had the equivalent of the American three-fifths clause, which gave the West Indian colonies 10 deputies in Paris, even though they numbered only a few tens of thousands of free settlers. But the Assembly rejected a few free mulattoes who turned up among the West Indian deputies and refused to seat them.

               Shortly afterwards, a delegation from the newly founded and revolutionary Armée Patriotique of Bordeaux reached Paris and told both the Jacobin Club and the Assembly that five million Frenchmen depended on the colonial commerce for their livelihood, and that both the slave trade and West Indian slavery were essential for the prosperity of France. Another committee was then entrusted to make a report on slavery. That body, however, did little more than denounce attempts to cause risings against the colonists. Mirabeau was shouted down when he tried to oppose this. The assembly voted for the committee’s proposals for inaction and, until 1793, the French slave trade continued to receive a subsidy in the form of a bonus for every slave landed. Nantes in fact enjoyed its best year ever as a slave city in 1790, sending forty-nine ships to Africa. For the slave merchants in that politically radical city, the word “liberty” seems to have signified the idea that the slave trade should be open to all. [Thomas, p.522]
               Mulattos in Saint-Domingue, learning that their hopes for equality in the new system had been quashed in the Assembly, rose in revolt, and turmoil spread through the colonies. This forced the leaders of the Revolution to reopen the issue and condemn slavery — in principle. It was not enough. Saint-Domingue’s slaves then rose in a bloody insurrection. There were 450,000 blacks, most of them slaves, against only 40,000 whites (mulattoes numbered about 50,000).
               Finally, in August 1791, the Assembly declared anyone who landed in France to be free, but it was too late to save Saint-Domingue. The British had occupied the colony and re-instated slavery, and by the time they handed it back to France at the Peace of Amiens (1802) the French had gotten over their flirtation with emancipation and were back in the slavery business. Saint-Domingue fell in the only successful slave revolt in history and was reborn as the free nation of Haiti. Meanwhile the shortage of sugar in Paris that resulted from the slave revolt precipitated the riots that brought the Revolution crashing down from its high ideals into authoritarian repression.

               In 1794 the Convention in Paris declared the universal emancipation of slaves, but it did not actually outlaw the slave trade. Yet even this proved unenforcable; the colonies required slaves, and under Napoleon, slavery was reintroduced.

               The French never recovered Haiti, though they coveted it for a generation, and France’s slave trade had been temporarily shut down by the Napoleonic Wars. But after the restoration of the Bourbons the French retained Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana on the South American continent, all major sugar-producing colonies.

               If it had not been for British pressure, the slave trade might still be tolerated in France. But the British had taken a strong anti-slavery position. The French press railed at the British for using morality as a cloak for their supposed desire to rule the world. And the French desire to keep the British at bay, and to compete with them in the seas, seems to have had a lot to do with the French decision to turn officially against the slave trade.

               But it also is true that an abolitionist movement had taken root among the fashionable in Paris, headed by Madame de Staël and the Marquis de Lafayette. It was built on admiration of the English abolitionists, a rise of Christian morality, and a cult of le bon nègre. They began to circulate petitions and pamphlets. Prominent French writers led the opposition to the change, with racist diatribes against Africans.

               When the Duc de Broglie became prime minister, he brought abolitionist sympathies and opinions with him into the government. In 1817 the French government published a decree curtailing the slave trade to French colonies, but the enterprising merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux simply switched their destinations to Cuba.

               The entire slave trade finally was declared illegal in France in March 1818. But that merely converted a tolerated trade to a clandestine one. With the local banks and political interests dominated by slave traders and their money and marriage ties, there was little hope of enforcement. French officers expelled from the Navy after the Restoration had taken up the slave trade. Their comrades still in the fleet turned a blind eye to their activities, or were easily bribed to do so. The French filled in the market for slaves in Cuba and Brazil in place of the Spanish, who had foresaken the trade as immoral.

               Twice as many ships left French ports on the slave trade in 1819 as had sailed the year before. In 1820, the British Navy’s annual report on the fleet’s work in interdicting the slave trade noted that the Americans were next to Britain in their “good intentions,” “sincerity,” and practical work to end the trade. Spain, Holland, and Portugual got bad grades. “But France, it is with deepest regret I mention it, has countenanced and encouraged the slave trade, almost beyond estimation or belief.” It was so bad that “France is engrossing nearly the whole of the slave trade,” and in the 12 months ending in September 1819 “60,000 Africans have been forced from their country, principally under the colours of France.” They were taken mostly to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba. [Paul Johnson, “The Birth of the Modern,” p.330]

               As late as 1825, slave chains and manacles could be openly purchased in Nantes. On average, French négriers in the 1820s brought in 4,000 slaves per annum. Guadeloupe was the center of this activity, absorbing 38,000 slaves from 1814-1830. Martinique followed with 24,000, and French Guiana with 14,000. “[I]t was an unusual trade in that French merchants from Nantes continued to dominate the trade to the end and were the only Europeans still active in the trade after 1808.” [Klein, p.198] As late as 1830, Nantes kept 80 ships engaged in the slave trade.

               The French, like the Americans, even after they had ended the slave trade refused to stand for the British Navy — the only maritime power large enough to police the Atlantic — boarding and searching their vessels. Under cover of national prde, the merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux continued to ship slaves even after the American government had, like the British, begun to use its authority to curb the trade.

               In 1820, a British cruiser chased a French slaver, La Jeune Estele, whose captain, once he saw himself being overtaken, started throwing barrels overboard. In each was a pair of slave girls, age 12 to 14. Public opinion in Britain was shocked, but in France the people blamed the British.

               In 1821, an over-zealous U.S. Navy lieutenant named Stockton seized four French-flagged vessels off Africa, convinced that they really were slavers from North America. He manned them with American crews and sailed them to Boston. But the French government was outraged — at least one of the vessels, La Jeune Eugénie, certainly was French, and it was going for slaves. The French ambassador called on Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and loudly threatened war if satisfaction was not made. President Madison hastily backed down and assured the French that the Americans no longer would search vessels under French or any other foreign flag. Stockton’s supicions were reasonable, however. Slave traders of other nations often sailed under the French flag to avoid British searches.

               Only in 1830, under Louis-Philippe, was the slave trade made a crime and punishment enforced. A treaty with Britain even allowed British naval searches of French vessels in certain cases. Yet as late as 1848, recently imported slaves from West Africa were found on Martinique and Guadeloupe.

               During the 1840s, the government in Paris talked of the eventuality of emancipation, but it always found a reason not to act. One common excuse was that the government was too cash-strapped to pay the slaveowners the compensation they deserved for the loss of their property.

               Slavery finally was abolished in Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion by the government that came to power after the 1848 revolution, spurred by slave uprisings in the colonies. A year later legislation passed granting the owners of France’s 248,560 slaves compensation from a sum of $120 million francs.

               Even the end was not really the end. From 1850 to 1870 some 18,400 Africans were carried to the French West Indies illegally, probably by Cuban slavers.

               *Figures are from Hugh Thomas, “The Slave Trade,” Simon & Schuster, 1997. The numbers necessarily are estimates, but historians are in broad agreement about them. There’s a “low” and a “high” figure for African slavery, and Thomas’ numbers represent the low figure. But the overall comparison does not change much if you use the (earlier) higher numbers: Slaves delivered to French West Indies come in as 1,635,700, compared to 559,800 for British North America and the U.S.
               INDEX – AUTH

            2. Thank you for the link and the article below. It kept me busy the whole week-end.
               I was surprised to learn how many Russians were enslaved (hence the word “Slav”) and even more horrific to learn how very much well and alive slavery is still going on today.

2. As always an entertaining exchange. I do have a couple dissenting remarks, however:

   While I agree with the premise that culture is the essence of civilization, I fault the suggestion that only so-called ‘high’ culture is worthy. There is much to American civilization that is being lost and the majority of it is of a quotidian nature. Consider the Boy Scout Law: A scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent. Who among us could say they exemplify all of these? The virtue of patriotism is another example. (I will not claim that our government has not been the direct cause and deserving price-payer for the general decline of it in the US.) Another is the once proud quality of ‘Yankee Ingenuity’ –the one where Americans would do as the Marines profess: improvise, adapt, overcome. Now it’s more like buy, discard, complain. In the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. novel Player Piano, one scene had a technologically displaced worker (this was written in the 1950’s) resourcefully replacing an automobile’s failed fuel pump diaphragm with a hand-fashioned piece of leather cut from his cap. The narrator marveled that this capacity should be useless because of labor-saving devices, yet even then noted that “If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.” In Brave New World, Huxley offered the nefarious dystopian motto “Ending is better than mending” to encourage consumerism. How true are these visions today? And not a single one of our notably disappearing societal traits requires the slightest knowledge of, nor ability with, artist’s brushes or a musical staff.

   Next, I come to the perhaps more controversial matter of Trump and what he may or may not be doing with Netanyahu, the Bush family or Iran. In The Lord of the Rings, it fell to Frodo to carry the treacherous One Ring to Rule Them All to its destruction, and he had to do it despite his own weaknesses and doubts, knowing it was he alone with the mission, however unlikely he was to have been selected. Not everything looked great throughout the arduous journey, and he had to be in league with the hideous and unreliable Gollum for a time, despite the hazards of his associations. Think of The One Ring as The Deep State. Think of Gollum as one of Trump-Frodo’s less-savory allies. Temporary alliances should not be overlooked as valid steps on a path, however risky they might be. Certainly the president can be questioned, second-guessed and exhorted, and I would deplore anything resembling a shooting war whether in Iran or anyplace else where we have been long-term miscreants. But I think we probably need to still extend him the benefit of the doubt until he proves, rather than appears, to be unworthy of our trust.

   1. I voted for him. If he and Clinton were running again today, I would give him money and vote for him again. However FASAB 56 is THE WORST THING YET. The single largest increase in swamp power ever. You need to look that in the eye, John.

      Meantime, I agree that great culture is not all high culture. One of the reasons we won WWII is our boys could all fix the tanks themselves. When my uncle was a young boy, he and his best friend took a car apart and put it back together again one summer. IMO, beats staring at a screen.

      1. I started with complete works of Plato, Aquinas and Aristotle.

         1. Will look for lists and curriculum.

      2. I find FASAB 56 a terrible formalization of what has been the de facto mode of government operation for a long time. My hope is that the current presidency will declassify a lot of things, opening up a lot of questions about the funding of the previously unacknowledged hardware and activities. The mafia always keeps careful accounting, but lies in the entries themselves.

         1. I have been reading Paul Williams book on Operation Gladio. A good history for understanding how to got this bad. Why you are right that it has been going on for some time, FASAB 56 paves the way for major asset stripping and mercenary funding on a whole new level.

            1. It does look bad, but who knows? FASAB 56 could be a way to avoid prosecuting the wrong people along with the right ones. I think there is a way out of it by way of declassification. Meanwhile, that sounds like a good book. You may also be interested in this one “The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and The Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations,” by Ervand Abrahamian. Very topical, and runs parallel and concurrent with our early mischief in French-occupied Vietnam the way L. Fletcher Prouty casts it. Both were strategically disastrous CIA “nation building” operations. You and Joseph spoke once more of entropic forces and as I have alluded to previously, those forces are bound to let the cat out of the bag, no matter how much energy is put into the coverup.

            2. Yup. Agreed. 🙂

3. Catherine

   You may have an interest in this youtube as it discusses the background of Plato and paints a picture of the individual. Yes, it is over 4 hours, but listen for several minutes as it may help as you read Plato’s many books.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4KDxvz5D30

   1. Good one for the next drive!

4. Own the culture!
   There was a marvelous book and television series (available on YouTube) by Sir Kenneth Clark back in the 1970s called “Civilisation”. Particularly poignant were his concluding remarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt-vqdgvsoo

   1. How wonderful. He also quotes Yeats. Will post. Thanks.

      1. Glad you liked it.

         When Dr Farrell said that modern art is an attack on beauty, an attack on virtue, an attack on goodness, that reminded me of the inscription on the Frankfurt Opera House: “Dem Wahren Schoenen Guten” – (To the True, the Beautiful, the Good) – which has been the triad of Western philosophy since Plato.

         https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&rais=1&oiu=https%3A%2F%2Fc8.alamy.com%2Fcomp%2FDH06H4%2Finscription-on-the-alte-oper-opera-dem-wahren-schoenen-guten-frankfurt-DH06H4.jpg&sp=608037e423eccff595d064eaf9b8d009&t=default

   2. …and of course… in the series, Episode 1 “The Skin of Our Teeth”, has Notre Dame Cathedral within the first 3 minutes. 🙁

      Here’s the playlist link for all 13 Episodes.

      “Civilization: A Personal View” by Kenneth Clark – 1969 Broadcast

      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt3Pke412qVciCdn0jVjBquUNS4ClEVYa

      1. Imagine what he would say now.

5. Hi Catherine,

   Thanks for another great quarterly wrap-up. Looking forward to the second half.

   Minor but important point: speaking as someone who has been introduced to Indian culture intimately for five years, vis-a-vis an ex-girlfriend who was born and raised in England and moved with her Northern Indian family to California (her parents immigrated to England from India), I would have to say that Indian business ethics is very similar to Chinese business ethics (i.e. what ethics? Of course, this is a generalization with exceptions, but it’s a cultural observation.) In fact, according to a former professor of international business at San Francisco State University, in Indian culture “lying” is an accepted aspect of business transactions. Both cultures are very old with ridiculously high levels of competition for the simplest needs/wants, and *at the very least*, are the way they are because of their huge populations and limited resources.

   The level of corruption and chaos in South and East Asia are beyond what North America has ever seen and certainly experienced… so trusting China is not wise but trust in India may not be much of a better option.

   As a humorous take on this, here’s a clip from Indian-Canadian comedian Russell Peters on how Indians and Chinese can’t do business with each other (the first 5 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwtVkvIMnIc

   1. Point well taken. Thanks for pointing this out. Very much appreciated. Part of our challenge is that the G-7 cultures are having to trade and interact with cultures with very different standards. The flood of organized crime after the wall came down is a piece of it.

      1. Exactly on the standards. I’ve found that especially in North America, things that we take for granted as true and “standard” are further deconstructed and not taken at all as a standard in Asia. Looking at Asia from a North American lens, a teacher has talked about “the tyranny of expectations,” though it’s meant as a challenge we all face in life, more generally.

         Organized crime? Do you mean that organized crime from the former USSR and Eastern Bloc countries flooded South Asia and East Asia?

         If so, it makes sense that that would be a piece of it. But my impression is that organized crime in both areas has been around for thousands of years, depending on how “organized crime” is defined.

         1. Former USSR and Eastern Bloc flooded the networks into Israel and NY and Western Europe.

6. In response to Farrell’s comment ‘when has socialism ever worked?’ Didn’t it work pretty well under Qadaffi? Weren’t they all pretty well off / happy? I know he was largely a benevolent dictator, but wasn’t Libya at least called the ‘Socialist Something-or-Other”?

   1. Julian:

      I know little about Libya under Qadaffi. My impression was that it was an oil wealth country that shared the largesse with the people – like Norway – and wanted to help others in Africa be independent of the central banking warfare model. My impression was that it was a benevolent dictatorship that worked well – including for the people – but it was not run on a socialist model. I will ask Joseph on our next discussion.

      Catherine

7. Catherine

   Around the 2hr 36 min mark Joseph and you were discussing the lack of credibility of the Justice System. A few years ago people put on youtube the radio shows of Mae Brussell who was an OUTSTANDING researcher of American politics and the ins and out of the FBI & CIA from the late 40’s until the mid 80’s. This is before the internet and she kept all her data on index cards and connected the dots using timelines, events, and relationships to people to dig for the truth.
   I don’t know if you know her background, but her daddy, Edgar Magnin, was the rabbi for the Jewish Temple in Beverly Hills and was personal friends with many great entertainers, movie moguls and Presidents. I use to see him often at the Hillcrest County Club where many of the entertainers use to gather in the afternoon. His ancestor started the I. Magnin’s department store.

   Mae Brussell grew up in a very comfortable environment in Beverly Hills where her father entertained many of the rich & powerful people of the day. She got married, had a few kids and then the JFK event happened that changed her life from a housewife to moving to Carmel and becoming an avid researcher and exposer of truth that she shared on her radio show.

   The best I can describe Mae’s research is she gives the R rated version of history. Take a listen to a few of her radio shows that have been placed on youtube, she is truly remarkable as it is not about her, it is the information she shares.

   1. Could not agree more. Mae Brussell was an outstanding researcher and truthteller. Would love to have a biographer come on the Solari Report and tell us all about her. Will put it on the list .

      1. If you are serious then you better hurry as the best Mae Brussell source is Paul Krassner (Chicago 7) and he is 87 years old.

         I see he does have a twitter account under @ZenBastard (LOL)
         But I see he can be reached at paulkrassner@roadrunner.com

         Paul did the introduction on Mae’s Book “Investigations of Fascism in America”. Book covers items like Defense Industry & the Nazi link, how Nixon rose to power, many watergate witnesses met violent deaths, Patty Hearst kidnapping, John Belushi murder, John Lennon’s death.

         She has a great quote ” You can only solve a murder by knowing who is destroying the evidence”

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