The Age of Exterminations (VI): The Great Famine to Come

The third horseman of the apocalypse, hunger, is traditionally represented with a scale in hand, symbolizing scarcity. Famines are not normally considered exterminations but, in many cases, they have been provoked by human actions. Today, we tend to see famines as a thing of the past, but there is a rule in history that what happened once may happen again, and it usually does. By a mere coincidence (or perhaps not), the same day when this post was published, President Putin said at the Valdai Club that  "a number of countries and even entire regions are regularly hit by food crises. ... there is every reason to believe that this crisis will become worse in the near future and may reach extreme forms." There have never been nearly 8 billion people on Earth, and what the future will bring to them is all to be seen.

 

 

This is the 6th post of a series that explores one of the darkest sections of human behavior, that of mass exterminations. Previous posts dealt with the extermination of the witches in Europe, of young men during WW1, of elderly people, of the rich, of the useless, and now this one about famines as a weapon of mass destruction. From now on, I think I'll move to different subjects, although I may return to this one, a little depressing but surely fascinating.

Imagine you are an Irish peasant living in the early 19th century. You stay with your family in a mud or stone cottage. A single room under a thatched roof, no windows, no chimney, little furniture. You pay a small rent to your British landlord by working for him. You eat the potatoes you cultivate in a patch near your home and you warm yourself using the peat that you dig out nearby. You haven't seen much of the world outside your village, but that's the place where you live, where you were born, where you have your friends and family, and where you have your social life. You own nothing and you are perfectly happy.

But your happiness turns into chagrin in 1845, when you see your potato plants turning black and curled, then rotting. You can't know that it is because of a fungus that attacks the potato plant, but you know that soon you'll be running out of potatoes. By the end of the year, the great famine begins. 

You didn't imagine that being poor would mean being so wretched. Owning nothing means that you can't buy food or bargain for it. You have no power, no influence, no relevance to the British landlords who don't care about you and about your family.  And you have no weapons, nor the military training that would allow you to rebel against your masters. If you can't leave Ireland, you have nothing to do but wait for death to come. 

In the years from 1845 to 1852, Ireland lost a quarter of its population as an effect of the Great Famine (the An Gorta Mór). In a few decades, Ireland's population was reduced to 4 million, half of what it had been before the famine. 

Was it an extermination? Yes, if you define the term as the death of a large number of people caused by human action (or inaction). And there is no doubt that the Irish disaster was not just the result of the chance arrival of a fungus that liked Irish potatoes. Ireland was heavily populated, certainly, but not much more than most European countries. So, what happened? 

For some, the fault lies squarely with the Irish who merrily went on having children without realizing that the population was growing beyond the limits of what their island could continuously support. For others, it was because of the evil English who refused to help the Irish when they were starving. Some even claim that the extermination of the Irish had been planned in advance. They call it the"Irish Holocaust."

It is unlikely that there ever was a plan to depopulate Ireland, the British had no reason to do that. But it is true that they behaved abominably with Ireland and not just at the time of the famine, although not worse than other colonial powers did with their subjects. Ireland never was a British colony, but it was treated as a colony. The land was exploited to the utmost possible level and the Irish were despised and considered only as cheap manpower -- of which there was an excess. When the famine came, the British government did very little to help, sometimes acting in ways that worsened the situation. So, yes, the term "extermination" is appropriate, even though nobody had planned it. History is a great wheel that rolls onward and crushes whoever it finds on its path. It was the destiny that befell Bridget O'Donnell, one of the many victims of the famine, of whom we have a drawing showing her with her starving children.

 

 

 

Now let's examine our times. Remember that if something happened once in history, it can happen again, and it usually will. We have been already told that in the near future "we will own nothing and we will be perfectly happy." This may not be a bad idea in itself, but if you think of the destiny of the Irish peasants, then it is ominous. Even more ominous is the fact we completely depend on fossil fuels for our agriculture, and it is guaranteed that their production is going to decline in a non-remote future. Could we face the same destiny of the Irish of the 19th century? After all, we live on an island, too, just much larger.  

When discussing these matters, it is traditional to be pelted with rotten Irish potatoes for being "catastrophists", but the question is legitimate and the fact that some predictions turned out to be overpessimistic, such as those by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, doesn't mean that a great global famine could not happen. But to avoid past mistakes, we need more detailed models of the future. One of the first studies that dealt with the global population trends was "The Limits to Growth" study of 1972.

 

You see, above, the results of the "base case" scenario calculation, the one which used the data that were considered the most reliable and accurate at the time. You probably know that the study was widely considered overpessimistic, then demonized and consigned to the dustbin of the wrong scientific theories. It was not. But it may have been overoptimistic in its projections for the world's population. 

Note how, in the calculation, the world population decline starts around 2050, some three decades after the start of the crash of the industrial and agricultural systems. Why is it that the population keeps growing while people are starving? Unlikely, to say the least. 

 

It is hard to quantify people's intentions to have children or not have them, so the modelers used past data on birthrates as a function of the gross domestic product (GDP). It was equivalent to "running in reverse" the demographic transition that took place in the 1960s when natality had collapsed in many regions of the world in parallel with an increase of the GDP per capita. The result was that the model assumed that a contraction of the GDP caused people to have more children. 

These assumptions were later reconsidered and different results were obtained in 2004. 

Now, the population starts declining around 2030, less than a decade after that food production starts collapsing, and that looks much more reasonable. Yet, even this curve has problems: would you really believe that in the midst of the great turmoil of the global collapse the result would be such a gentle decline? 

More likely, all the four horsemen of the apocalypse would enter the game and generate a disastrous general crash. This is called the "Seneca Effect."  You see the typical shape of the Seneca Curve in the figure: decline is much faster than growth.

Models such as the one used for the "Limits to Growth" cannot reproduce a really sharp Seneca Curve because they do not consider the many possible "tipping points" that may affect the world system. But the historical data tell us that the Seneca shape is the typical behavior of population collapses. Here is an example with the data for the great famine in Ireland (From Ugo Bardi's book "The Seneca Effect.") You can clearly see the "Seneca Shape" of the curve, with a sharp decline following growth. 

 

Here is another example, Ukraine, as shown in an article that I published on "The Journal of  Population and Sustainability," 

The Ukrainians didn't really starve after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but they suddenly became much poorer than before. The result was a lower quality diet and a collapse in the health care system. Add to that the general decline of the quality of life, then you can imagine that the Ukrainian population started to decline for two combined effects: the rise in mortality, and the fall of natality. Note how similar the curve is to that of Ireland. Other former Soviet Union countries show this kind of curves. It seems to be a general trend: when a serious disaster hits, the population starts declining almost immediately afterward.

If something similar were to happen at the world level, we would see it in just a few years after an economic or political crash. It is perfectly possible that it is exactly what's happening with the current crisis that sees a series of factors combining to bring the system down: health care collapse, food supply disruption, climate change, soil erosion and mineral depletion, financial crisis, and more. They are all pushing toward a global population crash that could start in the coming years. 

Could we call this population crash an "extermination"? That will depend on what governments will do. Surely, it is unlikely that they are planning a future famine, but how would they react if one comes? They might try to do their best to help, but they may also do nothing. Or they may well decide to actively push toward strengthening the crisis as a chance to eliminate people they do not like. 

If you are among those people who are not useful for the state (like the Irish peasants in mid 19th century) or, God forbid, a burden for the ruling elites, then you face hard times ahead. Your situation will be especially worrisome if you will be one of those "happy" people owning nothing, or at most electronic money that the government can erase at will. To say nothing about the electronic surveillance methods that leave you no chance to do anything they don't like or to go anywhere they don't want you to go. 

And, yes, it is perfectly possible that the coming crisis will appear in the form of an extermination by starvation: the third horseman on his dark horse. 

President Putin 's complete sentence at the Valdai Club conference: "Furthermore, a number of countries and even entire regions are regularly hit by food crises. We will probably discuss this later, but there is every reason to believe that this crisis will become worse in the near future and may reach extreme forms." Maybe he reads this blog?

A longer post of mine on the Irish famine subject was published on "The Oil Drum" in 2008. 

The Age of Exterminations (V): Suicide as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Regina Lisso, 21-year-old German girl, photographed in 1945 after having killed herself by ingesting a cyanide capsule. She was unlucky enough to find herself in the crosshairs of a major propaganda effort where the Allied and the German governments collaborated to convince Germans to commit suicide. It is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but we cannot exclude that it could be tried again in some indirect forms. 

This is the 5th part (one, two, three, and four) of a series dedicated to exploring a dark area of human behavior: mass exterminations. Here, I examine perhaps the darkest part of it: when the victims can be convinced to submit to be killed or even to kill themselves by lies and propaganda.  

During the last two years of WW2, the German and the Allied governments found themselves in an unholy alliance. Both wanted the Germans to fight like cornered rats up to the very last moment but for different reasons. The Germans were trying to postpone their defeat; the Allies wanted the destruction of Germany's military and industrial base. You can find this story told in some detail in my book "Before Collapse" (1). 

A side effect of this weird bipartisan effort was the rise of perhaps the first psyop in history that tried to convince an enemy population to commit mass suicide. In 1945, the British printed and distributed in Germany a propaganda postcard written in German and supposedly issued by the Nazi government. It provided detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (postcard "H. 1321") (2). Even more weirdly, the Germans collaborated with the Allies in pushing German civilians to commit suicide. Possibly, they were possessed by a mystic intoxication about glorious death but, more likely, the German government reasoned that mass suicide was an easy way to get rid of unproductive people, mostly women and the elderly. The result was the wide distribution of cyanide capsules to the population. One of those cyanide capsules was used by Regina Lisso, a 21-year-old girl who had no reason to die but who was caught in the madness of the propaganda storm (5). Other Germans used different methods: hanging, drowning, guns, and more. 

Nevertheless, induced suicide as a weapon of mass extermination turned out to be scarcely effective. There are no reliable estimates of the total number of victims in Germany. It is mainly because of the chaos of the last months of the war, but also because everyone wanted to keep a veil of silence on the story after the war was over. From what we know, it seems that a few tens of thousands of people chose to kill themselves. Not a negligible number, but only a minor fraction of the German population, at that time over 60 million. It was small also in comparison to the number of victims of the Allied bombing, which turned out to be a much more effective way to kill large numbers of German civilians. 

The poor results of the joint Allied/German suicide psyop in 1945 do not demonstrate that much more significant effects cannot be obtained. In history, there have been cases where the casualty rate by suicide was 100%. An example is the fall of the fortress of Masada in 73 AD, where the Jewish defenders chose to kill themselves and their families rather than surrender to the Romans. A modern example is when, in 1978, more than 900 followers of the religious leader Jim Jones killed themselves in an apparent case of mass poisoning. 

In both cases, there were no survivors left to tell how exactly things went, but it is clear that, in Masada, the defenders killed each other rather than committing suicide. In the case of Jones' followers, it may well be that many of the victims, if not all of them, were gunned down rather than poisoned (3). It seems to be easier to convince people to engage in a consensual suicide pact rather than killing themselves directly. It is perhaps because they hope to have a chance to escape death at the last moment. It happened at the siege of Jotapata (Yodfat) in 67 AD when the commander of the Jewish forces (Ben-Matityahu, later known as "Flavius Josephus") escaped the suicide pact of the defenders and defected to the Romans.

So, it seems that psyops cannot easily turn suicide into a weapon of mass extermination. Even in the worst situations, rather than killing themselves, people will engage in desperate attempts at fighting back. That was the case of the Japanese kamikaze pilots, or the Native Americans in the 19th century with their cult of the ghost shirt. 

Nevertheless, there may exist creative possibilities for a "soft" elimination of large numbers of consenting people. One way could be not letting them know that they are being killed. Alternatively, they could be convinced to kill themselves in ways that they don't recognize as "suicide." Both methods require deception, but that's not a problem: deception is part and parcel of the very concept of "Propaganda."

We all know the story of people quietly walking into gassing chambers after being told that they would have a shower. It is an example of the strategy of deception used in Nazi Germany to eliminate that fraction of the population defined as "Lebensunwertes Leben," ''life unworthy of life.'' It included not only Jews and other ethnic minorities, but also "Aryan" German citizens affected by malformations or just considered a burden for the state. In Germany, regular medical doctors used barbiturates to kill children and gas chambers to get rid of adults. Neither the victims nor their families were told of what was being done. Officially, the victims were hospitalized to receive medical treatment; later on, families received notice that, unfortunately, their relatives had not survived the attempt to cure them. The number of ethnic Germans killed in this way is estimated as around 300,000. Much smaller than that of the Jews and other ethnic groups exterminated, but still not negligible and probably ten times larger than the number of Germans who could be convinced to commit suicide. 

In our times, we have methods to get rid of people with their consent that were not available in Nazi Germany. In terms of "substance abuse," we have a wide choice of substances that shorten one's life expectancy and that are willingly ingested by people. In some cases, they are forbidden, although obtainable illegally (heroin, cocaine, and others). Some are marketed but advertised with severe limitations (alcohol and tobacco). In other cases, they are heavily advertised and widely available (junk food). We also need to mention that some medical treatments are widely recommended as good for your health, but nobody really knows if they really are (4), and in some cases, it is discovered only later that they are very bad. Maybe you remember the case of Thalidomide, but there are many more in the history of medicine. Surely, there will be more cases in the future.

Although effective, these substances are slow and messy ways to get rid of people, and they may generate unwanted side effects. For instance, cocaine taken every day will shorten a person's life by about 10 years on average, too slow to be interesting for exterminators. It is at least unlikely that the diffusion of heavy drugs in our society is the result of an evil plan of extermination, although some agencies of the deep state may well have a role in their supply and distribution. 

At this point, the question is whether the stress on our society could accumulate to a level in which we would start doing the things that were done in Germany during the Nazi period, that is, to exterminate people singled out for some physical factor, religious belief, or ideology. And there is no doubt that our society is heavily stressed although probably not so heavily as Germany was in 1945 (not yet, at least). 

Of course, the reaction to this hypothesis normally comes with the sentence, "It can't happen here," and clearly, we are not seeing our governments distributing cyanide capsules to the population. Nor do we have evidence that doctors are willingly killing their patients. But a basic rule in history is that if something happened once, it may happen again. 

So, never underestimate what psyops can accomplish, nor how evil the people in power can be! And if they were to start reasoning like the German government did in 1945, they have a number of options that we can only hope will never be put into practice.  

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Notes

(1) All traces of the infamous "H.1321" postcard exhorting the Germans to commit suicide seem to have disappeared from the Web. Why that happened is left to the reader to wonder about. Yet, the postcard can still be found at the "wayback machine"

H.1321 (and H.1380). This card, produced in March 1945, is entitled "Instructions for suicide by hanging." Seven suggestions are listed. The text is written in a ponderous and unusual style of German that required frequent use of a dictionary. The text starts on the back of the card (all text, no image) and is printed in red, giving the impression of being typewritten.



"If you want to avoid useless suffering, pay attention to the following instructions:


1.) Choose a strong cord, about the strength of a clothes-line. A thin one cuts and hurts.

2.) Tie the knot of the bow in a way that the bow will not tighten the cord. The cord must go unhindered through the bow.

3.) Grease the bow and cord well to achieve a sleek fastening of the noose.

4.) Avoid getting strangled before jumping, or you will have to struggle longer.

5.) Secure a full jump. This guarantees a break of the neck instead of getting strangled. Climb a chair or a table and fix the noose high enough (use a hook in the ceiling or wall), so that your feet will hang free after the jump.

6.) Put the neck through the noose. Make sure that the knot and bow are behind the neck, not in front of the throat.

7.) Jump courageously. If you want to be sure, then jump as high and bold as you can to fall down near your jumping location,”

The rest of the message appears on the front of the postcard, typed vertically at the left side.


“as if you wanted to make a joyful jump from the diving board into the water. The stronger the leap, the safer the break of the neck.


Don't hesitate!

The Horst Wessel standard is calling!

Hail Hitler!"

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(2) From Ugo Bardi's book "Before Collapse"

By September 1943, after the surrender of Italy, it must have been clear to everybody on both sides that the Allies had won the war, it was only a question of time for them to finish the job. So, what could have prevented the German government from following the example of Italy and surrender, maybe ousting Hitler as the Italian government had done with Mussolini? We do not know whether some members of the German leadership considered this strategy but it seems clear that the Allies did not encourage them. One month after Italy surrendered, in October 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, signed a document known as the “Moscow Declaration.” Among other things, it stated that:

"At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done … and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged. … most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done. … <else> they will be punished by joint decision of the government of the Allies."

What was the purpose of broadcasting this document that threatened the extermination of the German leadership, knowing that it would have been read by the Germans, too? The Allies seemed to want to make sure that the German leaders understood that there was no space to negotiate an armistice. The only way out left to the German military was to take the situation in their own hands to get rid of the leaders that the Allied had vowed to punish. That was probably the reason for the assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler on June 20th, 1944. It failed, and we will never know if it would have shortened the war.

Perhaps as a reaction to the events in Germany, on September 21, 1944 the Allies publicly diffused a plan for post-war Germany that had been approved at the Quebec Conference by the British and American governments. The plan, known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” was proposed by Henry Morgenthau Jr. secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Among other things, it called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a nearly Medieval technology level. If carried out as stated, the plan would have killed millions of Germans since the German agriculture, alone, would have been unable to sustain the German population of the time.

Unlike the Moscow declaration that aimed at punishing German leaders, the Morgenthau plan called for the punishment of the whole German population. Again, the proponents could not have been unaware that their plan was visible to the Germans and that the German government would have used it as a propaganda tool. President Roosevelt's son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger stated that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans."⁠ The general upheaval against the plan among the US leadership led President Roosevelt to disavow it. But it may have been one of the reasons that led the Germans to fight to the bitter end.

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(3) The story of the "mass suicide" in Jonestown is far from being clear. There were no survivors so the interpretation of what actually happened is mainly based on a tape with the last speech of Jim Jones, where we hear him exhorting his adepts to kill themselves. This is one of the many cases in which a mass killing event is explained on the basis of the near-miraculous survival of a tape where the evil guy of the story accuses himself of being the perpetrator. Another suspicious detail is that we know that the victims of cyanide poisoning normally die gasping for air, face-up, with their mouths open in a characteristic "grin" that you can see in the pictures of Regina Lisso. Instead, in Jonestown, nearly everyone died face down, and in none of the very few photos we have where we can see the face of the dead, we can detect the typical features of people dying of cyanide poisoning. Very few autopsies were performed, and it is likely that we'll never know exactly how these people actually died, but the hypothesis that they were gunned down, rather than convinced to commit suicide, cannot be excluded.

(4) The complexity of modern medicine is so high that even medical doctors may be at loss to understand what they are recommending. For instance, a large number of Americans are taking statins or other cholesterol-lowering drugs, and their use of statins is aggressively promoted. But is there evidence that statins significantly increase people's life expectancy? None at all, and statins have non-negligible side effects. So, why are people taking statins? Because their doctors told them so. And who told that to the doctors? At best, they read some scientific papers in a hurry and got the impression that statins are good. Or maybe they were convinced by the advertising of statin producers. Possibly, they know that statins are ineffective, but they won't take the risk of not prescribing them. In short, people take statins because everyone takes them.

(5) A commenter raised the question of whether Regina Lisso was really dead, since she looks relaxed, even beautiful in death. It is correct to doubt anything that comes from a government, and that picture was taken by a photographer working for the US army. But the setting, the posture, and all the details in the photo look just right. There are not so many photos of the bodies of people who killed themselves using cyanide in Germany, but in most cases, we see them lying face up, their mouths open, sometimes just a little, very much in the same posture as Regina Lisso. It also makes sense that it is a real photograph because the idea that a young and beautiful girl had killed herself to escape her "liberators," the US army, had no propaganda value for the Allies. 

 

Regina Lisso committed suicide together with her mother and her father, and the three of them are shown in several photographs easily found on the Web.  

The Age of Exterminations (IV). How to Kill the Rich

In our times, the Knight Templars have gained the fame of exceptionally good warriors. That may be more than a little exaggerated because when the time came to defend their leaders, arrested by the King of France, they vanished into thin air. Yet, the history of the Templars is interesting as a case of the periodic exterminations of the financial class in history. Could something similar happen to our modern financial tycoons, the Internet barons, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.? We cannot say for sure, but we cannot exclude that, either. The recent "incident" that shut down Facebook for a while may well be the harbinger of a reckoning to come.

"A house filled with gold cannot be defended." Lao Tsu, the Tao Te Ching

"All political power comes from the barrel of a gun." Mao Zedong

The Monastic order of the Templars (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), was founded in 1119 as a military force to defend the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. In time, the order evolved into a financial structure: the Templars became bankers and they developed a sophisticated money transfer system that helped pilgrims and warriors to move to and from the Holy Land and to transfer money from Europe to Palestine and back. They have been termed "the first multinational corporation" in history. 

As you may imagine, the Templars were rich, despite the term "pauperes" (poor fellows) in their name. They had land, castles, palaces, and, of course, plenty of gold and silver. The problem was that, with the loss of the last lands controlled by the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, at the end of the 13th century, they had become useless: no more crusades, no need of a banking system to finance them. 

At that point, the Templars attracted the attention of the king of France, Phillip IV, in dire need of money, as kings normally are. In 1307, he ordered the arrest of all Templars and the confiscation of their properties.  Most of the leaders were burned at the stake after that they had confessed under torture all sorts of evil misbehaviors: spit on the cross, deny Christ, engage in indecent kissing, worship the devil, and other niceties. 

As exterminations go, this one didn't involve large numbers: we read of 54 executions in France in 1310. Probably there were more in other countries, but the total cannot be higher than a few hundred. Nevertheless, it had a big impact: it is said that the fame of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day originates from the date of the arrest of the Templars: Friday, October 13, 1307.

The question is, of course, can it happen again? How about our class of hyper-rich, the "100 billion dollar club," that includes well-known names such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a few more? They are clearly going to become trillionaires in the near future. But a house full of gold is hard to defend, as we read in the Tao Te Ching. Could our Internet barons follow the destiny that long ago befell another class of financial tycoons, the Templars?

As usual, the key to the future is in the past. Examining the destiny of the Templars, we may understand the factors that may lead to the extermination of a powerful (but not enough) financial guild. 

First of all, why were the Templars exterminated? I argued in previous posts (one, two, and three) that certain categories of people can be exterminated and their possessions confiscated when they are 1) wealthy, 2) clearly identifiable, and 3) militarily weak, The Templars clearly satisfied the first two rules but not necessarily the third: after all, they were a military order. Yet, when the King of France descended on them, they didn't even try a military reaction. It may be that the prowess of the Templar Knights was much overrated: they were more like a private police force for a financial organization, not a real military force. But it may also be that it was exactly the presence of this force that hastened their downfall. Sometimes, a little military power may be worse than none at all, since it invites a decapitation strike. This is probably what happened to the Templars, exterminated just to make sure that they would not become a threat. 

The story of the Templars is just an example of a power struggle that has very ancient origins. One of the earliest written texts we have was written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna who complained with the Goddess that her temple had been desecrated by a local warlord. Enheduanna does not say if the warlord was after the temple's money, but we know that, at that time, temples were also banks, a tradition that remained unchanged for millennia. For instance, as late as during the first century AD, we have the record of a local leader who raided the temple of Jerusalem and attacked the resident bankers, most likely in order to finance an armed insurrection against the Roman governor. 

Temples and warlords remained in an uneasy relationship with each other during the Roman Empire, but a few centuries later, raiding Pagan temples became the normal way to finance the Roman armies, a tradition started by Emperor Constantine 1st ("The Great") during the early 4th century AD. Less than a century later, Emperor Theodosius 1st ("The Great") was the last emperor who still could find Pagan temples to raid for their gold and silver. Then, no more temples, and no more Roman Empire. 

And then, there was the time of the Catholic Church in Europe, which never officially acted as a bank, for a period even forbidding to charge interest on loans to Christians. That left the Jews as typical targets for raids and extermination, a tradition that continued for a long time. But the Church was nevertheless an economic powerhouse thriving on the donations of the faithful and on various economic activities, including owning vast swats of land, various kinds of manufacturing, and even employing prostitutes and managing brothels. It was a juicy target for the military leaders in Europe and the case of the elimination of the Templars was just the harbinger of much worse to come for the Church.  

During the 16th century, it was the turn of King Henry VIII to destroy the Catholic monasteries in England and confiscate their properties (a few monks and abbots were exterminated in the process). Later on, in France, a substantial part of the French revolution had to do with confiscating the Church's properties and beheading a substantial number of monks and priests. The wave of confiscations ended only when, in 1870, the Pope lost his last stronghold, the city of Rome, to the army of the king of Italy. This final battle, fortunately, didn't involve exterminations. 

Now, back to our times. Just like the last Roman Emperors had run out of Pagan temples to raid, our governments have run out of Churches to depredate. But some elements of the power game remain the same: if once temples were also banks, today banks are also temples. You can see that very well if you live in the US, where no respectable bank would renounce temple-like columns on the facade. 

But the question is not architectural: our society is possibly the most monetarized one that ever existed in history and the people who run our financial system yield immense power. That power, though, makes them attractive targets for another kind of power: the military one. Think of our Internet barons, Bill Gates and his ilk. By getting rid of a few tens of them, the government could cash in at least a trillion dollars in a single sweep. That is an amount of the same order of magnitude as the US military expenses in one year. Could that happen for real? 

Of course, right now, it is hard to imagine a court that sentences Mark Zuckerberg to be burned at the stake after having confessed under torture of consorting with the devil and other unholy behaviors. Yet, things that happened once in history can always appear again. 

It will all depend on a balance of factors: power, wealth, control, technology, and more. Something drastic could happen, for instance, if the US government were to find itself in truly dire financial straits. Then, the temptation of using military means to solve the crisis could become strong. After that all is said and done, as president Mao Zedong said, the origin of all political power is the barrel of the gun. Is the recent shutting down of Facebook a signal of a battle being already being fought in the ethereal "Metaverse" regions? Only time will tell.  

 

h/t Duen Hsi Yen

 

The Age of Exterminations (III). Why you Should be Worried. Very Worried

 Disclaimer. I am no prophet and I have no crystal ball. I am just trying to find patterns in history. And I think many historical events can be explained simply on the basis of the tendency of people to try to make money whenever possible, even at the cost of doing the most evil things imaginable. That sometimes leads me to making rather somber predictions, as in this post, the 3rd of a series on mass exterminations (part one and part two). Sorry about this, but think that I may well be wrong -- and I hope so! (above: a hospital in Chernobyl in 2018: is that the destiny of our health care centers?) 

The extermination of social subgroups is a relatively recent phenomenon in history but, unfortunately, it seems to have become more and more frequent in recent times. Often, as in the case of the witch-hunting age, extermination is the result of a perfectly rational attitude that develops in societies under heavy stress. When a social subgroup is relatively wealthy, can be identified, and can't offer significant military resistance, there are good chances that its members will be exterminated and their assets confiscated. That was what happened to the people branded as "witches" in Europe during the 16th and 17th century in Europe. Another classic case was that of the Jews, a few centuries later.  

At this point, considering that our society is surely under heavy stress, the question is: which subgroup could be the next target for extermination? I asked this question to the readers in a previous post of this series, but almost nobody could identify the right target. Now I think I can propose the answer:

The most likely target for the next extermination round are middle-class retirees. 

Retirees satisfy all the requirements: They are identifiable, of course, they are old! They are often relatively wealthy and, more than that, they cost a lot of money in terms of health care. Finally, they can hardly put up serious military resistance. Exterminating the middle-class elders would be both easy and profitable. 

Let's make a few calculations. In the US, there are nowadays about 46 million retirees living on social security. The US spends about 7% of its GDP on pensions, that is, about 1.5 trillion dollars per year (about $30.000/person/year). That's more than the about 1 trillion dollars that the US government spends for the military budget, bloated as it is. 

Assuming that you could remove just 10% of the retirees, it would mean saving some 150 billion dollars per year. But, in practice, much more than that if you take into account the health care costs. For instance, summing nursing care facilities and home care for the elderly, we are talking of something close to 300 billion dollars per year, and that does not include hospitalization costs.  The potential savings are truly huge: hundreds of billions of dollars. 

Of course, exterminating the elderly cannot be done using the same demonization techniques used in the past against the witches and the Jews. Old people are parents and grandparents and their offspring won't normally like to see them burned at the stake or gassed in extermination chambers. But extermination takes many forms, and it is rarely explicitly proclaimed. After all, it never happened in history that you could find a sign with the words "extermination camp" at the gate of an extermination camp. During WWII. for instance, the Germans were told that the Jews were just being relocated, not that they were being exterminated. In other cases, the people being exterminated were glorified as heroes. 

So, what form could the extermination of old people take? It would be done using well-known propaganda techniques, the main one being to state the exact opposite of what is being done. In other words, when the idea is to kill some people, propaganda will convince everybody that the plan is to do them a favor (do you remember the "humanitarian bombs" dropped on Serbia?)

In practice, the weak spot of the middle-class retirees is that they need medical assistance and that they cannot normally pay the skyrocketing costs on their personal saving. So, they could be gently removed from the state budget by degrading the public health care system while saying that it is being modified in order to protect them. A clever way of doing it would be to focus so much on curing a specific single disease that the result would be a decline of the care for the illnesses that mostly affect aged people: cardiovascular diseases and tumors. A parallel measure to intensify the effect would be to degrade the quality of the food available, making it become less nutritious and contaminated with all sorts of pollutants.This method would not affect the elites, who can pay for good health care and and good food, but it will hit directly those who live on pensions.

Now, let's take a look at the current situation. In 2020 the average life expectancy in the US has declined by nearly 2% for a total of 600,000 extra deaths, most of them old people. So, we are talking of some 20 billion dollars saved just in terms of pensions. But it is much more than that considering the saving in health care costs. These numbers are not large in comparison to the US GDP, but not peanuts, either. And what we are seeing is just the start of a trend. 

At this point, it is customary to start screaming: "conspiracy theory!" It is true that, in most cases, pretended conspiracies are based on nothing. The world is so huge and complicated that it is unthinkable to see what happens as the result of a group of evil people collecting, say, in the basement of Bill Gates' mansion in Seattle. The mechanism that leads to collective events is collective: society as a whole is a complex network with a certain ability to process information. It does that without being "conscious" of what is being done: there is no plan, no specific objectives to reach. But often society moves as a whole in a specific direction. 

In this case, Western Society seems to perceive the problem created by an excess of elderly people, and it is moving to solve it. It is brutal, yes, but only individuals have moral restraints, society as a whole has none. Every decision taken individually affects all the other decisions, and we are seeing the results. It is nothing new in history where, typically, everything that happens, happens because it had to happen.

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This said we have arrived at a worrisome (to say the least) conclusion. Most readers of the "Seneca Effect" blog are middle-class Westerners (maybe Mr. Gates reads my blog? Unlikely, but who knows?). And sooner or later we are all going to become middle-class retirees. Of course, we are not going to be "exterminated" in the literal sense of the word. That is, no firing squads, gas chambers, or the like. But we will have to live on a progressively poorer diet and we won't have the same kind of free health care that our parents and grandparents had. 

What can we do about that? The answer is, unfortunately, "very little." Of course, you'll do well in following a healthy lifestyle, exercise, try to avoid the worst kinds of junk food, all that. A sane mistrust in doctors and their unhealthy concoctions may also help a lot. But you have to face it: the life expectancy of the people who are alive today is going to drop like a stone. It will be a classic example of a Seneca Cliff. 

But is it so bad? I don't think we should take this as a reason for despair. At least, we'll avoid the sad trap of overmedicalization in which so many of our elders fell. When my father was 87, he had a heart attack. I remember that while we were waiting for the ambulance, he said, "I think it is time for me to go." He was not happy, but I think he understood what was happening to him and perhaps he savored the idea of being reunited with his wife, who had died the year before. But that was not to be. He was kept alive for five more years, every year worse than the previous year, until he was reduced to a vegetal, his mind completely gone, kept alive by tubes and machinery. Being humiliated in that way is not something anyone would desire. When it is time to go it is better to leave this world in peace. If possible, at home. 

Since this blog takes inspiration from the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, at this point I might suggest to you to read Seneca's "De Brevitate Vitae" ("on the shortness of life"). Seneca was not so great as a teacher of wisdom and he made some egregiously unwise mistakes (with Queen Boudica, for instance). But when his time came, he died an honorable death. The death of a true stoic. 

The Age Of Exterminations (II) -- How to Exterminate the Young

In 2018, I published a book titled The Shadow Line of Memory." It was the biography of an Italian intellectual, Armando Vacca, who did his best to fight for peace at the beginning of the Great War. He was eventually defeated and punished by being sent to the most dangerous frontline of that time, where he survived for no more than a couple of weeks. That book led me to study the story of how propaganda managed to win the hearts and minds of the Italians in 1914-15, resulting in Italy joining the war. The ensuing disaster is not usually listed as an "extermination," but the Italian losses amounted to close to one-third of the young men of military age at that time. If this was not an extermination, what was it? And I think there were deep reasons for it to occur. I thought I could propose this story to you now. You may find something in it that may help you understand a few apparently unrelated things that are happening nowadays. 

The power of propaganda is immense. It is so strong especially because people don't realize that they are embedded in it and the things that propaganda makes them do look like the most natural and obvious ones.  It was Baudelaire who said, "the devil's best trick is to convince people that he does not exist."

So, here is a story of a triumph of propaganda: how it convinced most Italians in 1914-15 that it was a good idea to go to war against their neighbors, the Austrians in one of the greatest follies of history, what our ancestors called, rightly, "The Great War."  

It all started when, in July 1914, a Serbian madman shot an Austrian Archduke. That caused the Great Powers of the time to attack each other in a sort of large-scale domino game. Austria attacked Serbia, Germany attacked France, Russia attacked Austria, and more. 

And Italy? It is a story poorly known outside Italy, but interesting for many reasons. Italy at that time was a nation of peasants, its economy was weak, and its military power limited. Sometimes, it was called the "proletarian nation," in contrast with the Northern "plutocracies," Britain and others. Italy was poor, but secure inside its borders: protected by the sea and by the Alps. No need to go to war against anyone. 

True, Italy had a grudge with Austria that had to do with some lands at the border that Italians believed were part of Italy. But Austria was already fighting on two fronts, Russia and Serbia. Its government surely would concede something to Italy rather than risk opening a third front. There is evidence that, indeed, Austria offered Italy to return part of these lands in exchange for Italy remaining neutral. 

Yet, less than one year after the start of the Great War, Italy had joined the allied powers and was at war with Austria. It was one of the most impressive examples in history of how propaganda can affect an entire nation. An avalanche of hate that engulfed everyone and everything. 

When in 1914 some people started claiming that Italy should have attacked Austria, their statements looked unreal, silly. What mad idea was that? Italy was not a great power: it had no interests to defend, no empire to create, no threat to fear. It had everything to gain by remaining neutral. The government was against the war. The Socialists were appalled at the idea that the Italian workers would fight their comrades of other countries. The Catholics couldn't accept the idea of a Catholic country, Italy, attacking another Catholic country, Austria. It just made no sense. 

But the war party refused to listen. Slowly, the voices for war increased in volume and in diffusion. It was an asymmetric struggle: on one side there was reason, on the other emotion. And, as usual, emotion beats reason. Italy, it was said, cannot afford to lose this occasion to show the bravery of its citizens. The idea of negotiations with Austria was rejected with an incredible vehemency. Italians, it was said, do not ask for what is theirs, they take it! Blood, yes, there was to be blood. It is a good thing: blood is sacred, it must be spilled for the good of the country!

When I was writing my book on this story, I spent much time reading the Italian newspapers of 1914-1915. It was fascinating and horrifying at the same time: I got the distinct impression of an evil force rising. It seemed to me that I was reading of the return of ancient rituals, rites involving bloody human sacrifices. Especially impressive was the story of a young Catholic intellectual, Giosué Borsi, who became so intoxicated with propaganda that he came to believe that it was God's will that he should kill Austrians. He volunteered, and survived for just a few days in the trenches. Truly, it was as if a malevolent entity was masterminding the whole thing. Maybe evil Chthonic deities do exist? 

Incredibly, this wave of evil grew to engulf the whole Italian media of the time. The Socialists ceased to oppose the war and some of their leaders, such as Benito Mussolini, switched to promote it. The Catholics, too, gradually joined the voices of those who were arguing for war, apparently believing that contributing to the war effort would give them more political power. During the "Radiant May" of 1915, young Italians marched in the streets to request that the government would send them to die. And the government complied, declaring war on Austria on May 24th. 

And the opponents? Those evil pacifists who had tried to argue against war? They were insulted, denigrated, and finally silenced. The war party succeeded in convincing everybody that Italy had not just one enemy, but two. An external enemy, Austria, and an internal enemy, the pacifists. They were the Austria-lovers, the spies, the traitors, the monsters who menaced the Italian people with their dark machinations. They were also smelling bad, they were dirty, and they ate disgusting food. When the war started, it was the time of reckoning for them. No more excuses: if they were of military age, they had to enlist in the army. 

We have no direct proof that there was a specific policy to send pacifists to die in the most dangerous areas of the front. But we know that it was what happened to some of them, including Armando Vacca, the person whose biography I wrote in my book. Instead, those on the other side of the debate were privileged. Mussolini, for instance, was sent to a quiet area of the frontline. From there, he emerged slightly wounded by the malfunctioning of an Italian artillery piece, and with the fame of a war hero.

We know what was the result of this folly: summing up direct casualties, the dispersed, and the wounded, Italy suffered more than two million losses, about a third of the males of military age at that time (as a bonus, add some 600,000 losses among civilians). Austria suffered similar losses.  You don't want to call it an extermination? If not, what was it?

The power of propaganda is well known, but there are many ways for it to appear. In the case of the United States, we know that in 1917 the government decided to intervene in the Great War to protect its investments in Europe. That implied creating and financing a propaganda campaign to convince the American public. The campaign involved creating the "Committee for Public Information," possibly the first Government propaganda agency of the 20th century. The techniques the committee developed were imitated many times in later history, especially by the German Nazis. 

How about in Italy? We have evidence that Mussolini's campaign for war was financed by some Italian financial lobbies, people who wanted to make a profit out of the war. But, on the whole, there was nothing similar to the Committee for Public Information. So, how could the pro-war propaganda be so successful?

I came to think that there was a reason for the extermination of so many young men. It was because the Italian society wanted to exterminate them.

Of course, it was not planned, it was never mentioned and, most likely, it was not even a thought that was entertained by those who pushed so enthusiastically for war. But the human mind functions in subtle ways and very little of what it does is because of some rational chain of concepts. 

Why do people kill? Most often, they kill what they are afraid of. So, could Italians be afraid of their own young? It could be. I came to think that it was, actually, likely. 

Go see the population curve of Italy before WWI. It is a nearly perfect pyramid. At that time, Italy had about 6 million males of military age, about 15% of the Italian population. What were these young men doing? What were they thinking? What did they want? Those who were in power at that time had good reasons to think that they would want their share of the national wealth.

Indeed, those were times of social and economic tensions, with Socialism and Communism claiming that a popular revolution would bring all the power to the people. And who would revolt against the current order if not those young men? Then, it made sense to get rid of as many of them as possible by sending them to die in great numbers on those remote mountains. 

As a strategy, it could have backfired. It did in Russia, where the result of WWI was that Communism took power. In Italy, the years after the war saw a Communist revolution nearly starting, but it was quelled by the ascent of Fascism. As always, history is not made with "ifs." What had to happen, happened. 

Whatever the cause, the great wheel of history started moving in 1914, and it didn't care who was going to be squashed into a pulp under it. Maybe the ancient Chthonic Gods of war were driving that wheel. Maybe they still exist, even though nowadays they seem to have taken different forms. Propaganda, for sure, can still do its job with the same methods: denigrate, demonize, insult, and scare people. It works. You can see it at work right now. 

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A reflection on the long term trends of propaganda

Propaganda in its modern form didn't exist up to a few centuries ago. In a not too remote future, it might cease to exist as well. Even right now, things are changing in the belly of the great beast that we call the memesphere.

Propaganda was so effective during the 20th century because the memesphere was vertically organized. At the time of WWI, for the more than 50% of the Italians who could read and write, there was no other significant source of information other than newspapers, and their number was limited. Then, as now, just a few newspapers had national diffusion and if they all took the same position, they would control the memesphere. 

The information people obtain in a vertical network is like rain falling: you can try to avoid getting wet using an umbrella, but you can't choose the moment when it rains or not. So, the Italian memesphere of a century ago acted like an organism, a giant societal brain that had to choose between war and peace. It could not stand in between: it had to decide on one thing or the other. And it was so tightly integrated that it acted as a whole -- there was no possibility of parts of it opting out. Those who tried to do that, the pacifists, were neutralized or exterminated.

The memesphere of today is not so different. People still rely for their information mostly on the equivalent of the newspapers of one century ago: what we call the "Media" -- entities that mediate between reality and the people. But it is also true that things have been changing and that communication is now much more horizontal than it used to be.

Reality is not what you read in the media. Reality is what you see and what the people you trust tell you they saw. You can use Heinlein's terminology: reality is what you grok yourself, or you are told by an impartial witness. This kind of horizontal communication is a different organization of the memesphere. It is today the galaxy of entities we call "social media" -- a misnomer because they are NOT media. Social media involve direct, horizontal communication among people, it is not "mediated." The "bubbles" that people who think alike create in social media are often criticized and reviled as dens of conspirationists, but they are exactly what the game is about. These bubbles are virtual holobionts embedded in the larger organism of the memesphere. If you create an internet bubble, a network of people who think in the same way, then this group is impermeable to propaganda. It is not a bug, it is a feature of the new memesphere.

You see how things are changing from how desperately the powers that be are trying to take control of the Web using censorship: the devil is not able anymore to convince people that he doesn't exist. Will the pacifists (or their modern equivalent) be exterminated again? Maybe. But maybe not. The great wheel of history keeps moving. It is not following a plan, it is not driven by evil deities: there is nobody driving it and it is creating its path as it follows it. And, as always, it doesn't care about those who are squashed into a pulp under it as it rolls onward. Change is the only thing that never changes. 

Why did the Taliban Win? Lessons From Ancient History

 

How did the Taliban manage to defeat the most powerful army in the world? One word: corruption. It is not new, it has already happened in many other cases in history. Here, I propose a comparison of the recent Taliban campaign with the case of the Numidian wars at the time of the Roman Republic.  (above: these fighters are probably Tajiki, not Taliban, but that does not affect the substance of my interpretation) 

During the 2nd century BC, the Roman Republic attempted to defeat the Numidians, a tribal population inhabiting a desertic area of North-Western Africa. Surely, the Numidian fighters were no match for the mighty Roman armies, yet the Numidian kings held on their own for decades. It was only in 105 BC that their last king, Jugurtha, was definitively defeated by the Romans.

The ups and downs of the Numidian wars left the Romans perplexed. How could it be that those unrefined Barbarians could keep at bay the Romans for so long? The opinion of the historian Sallustius was that the Numidians had used corruption to buy the Roman commanders. Sallustius reports that Jugurtha himself said about Rome, "Venal city! You would sell yourself if a buyer were to appear!".

Sallustius' interpretation is believable, even though it is not substantiated by historical data. Corruption is an unavoidable side effect of money and Rome was the most monetarized society of antiquity. The Romans had built their prosperity on the precious metal mines of Northern Spain and used their wealth to pay the large armies that they used to dominate the Mediterranean Region. But money is a double-edged weapon: it can be used to pay soldiers to fight, but also not to fight, or to fight someone they were not supposed to fight. 

Once corruption has infiltrated society, money becomes everything, and the rule of the game, at all levels, becomes enriching oneself. But what role did corruption play in the war, exactly? Sallustius diplomatically faults King Jugurtha, but the Numidian economy was small, the Numidians were mostly poor shepherds. Where would Jugurtha find the money needed to buy the rich Roman leaders? 

More likely, the Roman Army bought itself off. Setting up a military expedition implies a lot of money being spent at various levels for supplies, weapons, salaries, transportation, etc. And, at all levels, there are chances for bribery. Once the mechanism started, nobody in Rome really wanted Jugurtha defeated. As long as he was alive and fighting, there was money to be made. That's the likely reason why the war dragged for so long. 

On their side, the Numidians were not so badly affected by corruption simply because they were a tribal society. In this kind of society, interpersonal relations are governed by honor, revenge, fealty, and the like -- NOT by money. Trying to corrupt a tribal warlord is not easy: for one thing, where could he spend the money? Besides, a corrupt leader is always at risk of revenge from his own followers. The end result was that the Numidian fighters were fewer in number not as efficient as the Roman legionnaires, but more trustworthy and surely cheaper. 

The Roman surely realized what the problem was. But fighting corruption is always a difficult task, if nothing else because those who are supposed to fight it can be corrupted as well. So, how to solve the problem? There was an interesting trick that could be played. Powerful warlords were among the most corrupt of the corrupted, but with a twist. Whereas petty leaders profited from an ongoing war, rather than from a victory, the top commanders needed victories to gain prestige and money. So, they were efficient war leaders. The solution, then, was to give all the power to a warlord. 

That was already happening at the time of Gaius Marius, with the Roman Republic in a "pre-imperial" condition. In about one century, Rome would be turned into a full-fledged imperial state, ruled by a single, all-powerful emperor. Of course, the emperor could not be corrupted: he already had everything. 

Emperors could keep the empire together, at least as long as there were the resources for doing so. Then, with the exhaustion of the precious metal mines, the Roman state ceased to be a monetarized society. No more money, no more corruption. No corruption, no need for an emperor. And not even for a state. That's how history moves. 

Fast forward to our times, and we can compare the US campaign in Afghanistan with the Roman campaign in Numidia. With all their might, the Romans and the Americans were hampered by the enormous costs of their military apparatuses, in both cases amplified by corruption at all levels. In comparison, the Numidians and the Taliban fighters were much less expensive. 

It is true that the Romans did better than the Americans and eventually succeeded at subduing the Numidians. But think of just one thing: nowadays the descendants of the Berbers who fought the Romans in Numidia are still there, and still call themselves "Berbers." (more exactly ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵏ, ⵎⵣⵗⵏ, Imaziɣen) And where has the Roman Empire gone? Alas...

Note also that to estimate the degree of corruption of the Roman society we need to rely on qualitative reports. But for the degree of corruption of our society, we have more data, even though uncertain: look at this image (source).

That correlates the perceived corruption with the Gini index, a measure of wealth inequality (note that a high corruption index means LOW corruption and vice versa). The US is not in this diagram, but it is more or less in the middle. 

Note the correlation between corruption and inequality: the higher the inequality, the higher the degree of corruption. The least corrupt states (e.g. Denmark) are also the most egalitarian. The opposite holds for corrupt states, say, the Dominican Republic. 

It makes a lot of sense that inequality and corruption are correlated, even though we can't say that one of the two causes the other. More likely, they go in parallel. Of course, in order to corrupt someone, you need to have much more money than they have. Could you corrupt Bill Gates? Of course not, but Bill Gates can corrupt anyone if he wants to. Conversely, in an egalitarian society, it is hard to corrupt a person, especially if you are linked to him or her by bonds involving honor and respect. 

I don't claim to be an expert in Pashtunwali, the code of honor of the Pashtun Afghans, but it looks close enough to societies that I know, such as that of the Italian peasants. It is a section of the Italian society that has mostly disappeared, but it still existed not long ago, so that we can still figure out how that world worked. If you understand that, then it is not difficult to understand how a tribal society can sometimes defeat an empire. It is a question of persistence. It has happened, it will happen again. 

Finally note that, if corruption is linked to inequality, the fact that most Western societies have become more unequal during the past decades means that also corruption has been on the increase -- and that seems to correspond to the general perception. It means that the West is less and less able to win wars, although it may well keep fighting them for the sake of those who profit from them. 

Again, this observation seems to correspond to the events of the past 2-3 decades. Despite its immense military power, the West hasn't been able to gain a definitive victory even against much weaker opponents. Does that mean we need an incorruptible Emperor? 

Ave, Gates Caesar!

The IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille. Something Went Badly Wrong with the Environmental Movement

 

Performers from Hawai'i at the 2021 IUCN Congress in Marseille. I am not sure of what sense did it make to come by plane all the way from Hawai'i to Europe to discuss how to reduce carbon emissions. But I am sure these people were well-intentioned and doing their best. The overall result of the Congress, though, was disappointing. (Photo by Ugo Bardi).

In the year 2 CE (Covid Era), I had enough of seeing vitreous-eyed colleagues and students staring at me from stamp-sized images on a screen. So. I decided to make an attempt to reconnect in person with the world of sustainability and environmental science. The IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille looked promising and it was close enough to where I live that I didn't need to take a plane to get there. And I did. The result was, well, the best I can say is that it was disappointing, And that is perhaps an understatement. 

Please understand that I have no intention to disparage the effort of the people who attended the Congress. Most of them clearly did their best and the results were often interesting and sometimes even inspiring. Even the organizers did a good job with the management of such a large congress. My criticism is more general. 

Let me start with an impression. Every morning, the Congress Center in Marseille was ringed by an impressive screen of policemen in riot gear. I counted 12 police vans parked nearby, and there may have been more. Then, there were policemen in ordinary uniforms, at least one platoon of the French army in full battle gear, and an unknown number of mean-looking people in plain clothes. After you crossed the police ring, you still had to show your green pass, then you would be identified and tagged. Then you would go through a magnetic gate while your bags were x-rayed. After passing another control post, just for added safety, finally you could access the holy grail of the main hall of the Congress Center. At least, there was no crocodile-infested moat to defend it.

Was all that security needed to protect the good citizens of Marseille from those dangerous environmentalists? Or was it to protect the environmentalists from the dangerous citizens of Marseille? Of course, you could say that it was to protect the high-ranking politicians who attended the meeting. Maybe, but when President Macron came, the first day of the meeting, he didn't deem as appropriate to show his royal presence to the plebeians in the main hall. Instead, he manifested himself in a virtual form on a screen. He could have done that from Paris and saved some fuel for the presidential jet plane. What did he say? I don't know, I made a point not to listen to his speech. 

Anyhow, once you were inside, you had the distinct impression of being in a zoo -- or maybe swimming in a glass bowl. The environmentalists looked like those colored fishes that live happily in aquariums but would die almost immediately if released into the polluted Mediterranean sea. Whatever you did, you had the impression of being watched by the government, just as if you were a fish in a tank. 

Apart from the heavy sensation of irrelevance, what was being said at the Congress? What was being proposed? What ideas were being developed? Of course, I couldn't possibly have followed all the talks in the many parallel sessions, although I did my best to visit all the stands. But my impression was that we were not only in a glass bowl but that we all had gone through a dimensional gate and transported back to 20 or 30 years ago. More or less everything that was being said or proposed had already been said or proposed at least 10 years ago. Investments in environmental education, exhortations to consume less, buy local, save energy, keep the thermostat low, separate your waste, taxes on carbon, international treaties, all that. 

Just as an example, I talked with a French researcher about his project on reducing the light pollution of the night sky. A very nice idea, and he had some interesting tricks to show. But I had heard about it already 20 years ago, at least. And when I asked him how the project was going, he told me that they were doing their best efforts, and maybe some progress was taking place. But also that most people and most city administrators did not understand the idea and that they are all convinced that the more light there is, the better, and who cares about the night sky? 

So, it seems that we are stuck with doing again and again things that were proposed and tried during the past 20-30 years but didn't change the trajectory of the world's system. Apparently, environmentalists are convinced that something will change if we keep discussing the same things for the next 20-30 years. 

To be sure, the IUCN Congress had started with an ambitious goal: the idea that 30% of the Earth should be turned into protected wilderness areas. It was clearly inspired by Edward Wilson's "Half-Earth" proposal and it had been floating around before the Congress for long enough that many people became worried that something like that could actually be recommended. So, a "counter-conference on conservation" was held in Marseille the day before the IUCN one started. The idea was to denounce the 30% idea as the “world’s biggest land grab,” and to state that indigenous populations are the best protectors of the natural environment.

I think the counter-conference organizers were unduly worried. In the talks I heard at the IUCN Congress, I never heard anything about the need for 30% wilderness areas worldwide. I may have missed the relevant sessions, but for sure the subject was not prominent in the program. The idea appeared just as a minor blip in the "Marseille Manifesto" the final document that summarizes the congress conclusions. Most of it is pure verbiage, but they also say:

The Congress implores governments to set ambitious protected area and other effective area-based conservation measure (OECM) targets by calling for at least 30% of the planet to be protected by 2030

The choice of the verb "implores" says a lot about the actual power of the IUCN at the international level. When you go to the actual commitments to action in the document, you also find plenty of verbiage, but you read that "France" (it is not said which government body) is committed to "achieve 30% of protected areas nationally by 2022." Remarkably, no other government of the many that were present at the meeting took the same commitment. 

And here we stand. We have been doing our best for years, but nothing changes. All the ecosystem parameters are getting worse by the year, and we are running out of years. We may be doing the thing right, but we are not doing the right thing. But what is the right thing? Does such a thing even exist? Any suggestions?

  

9/11, the Coup that Failed. The Role of the Memesphere

Octavianus Augustus Caesar (63 BC – 14 AD). Perhaps the most successful leader in history, he didn't just become the absolute ruler of the Roman State but took over the role of the highest religious authority (the "Pontifex Maximum") and transformed himself into a living deity. He was able to turn a democracy into a dictatorship using techniques that were repeated many times in history. But the task was not always successful. It was the case of the 9/11 attacks that did not lead to an absolute dictatorship in the United States. Here, I argue that it was because of the different structure of the memesphere in the 21st century.

In 30 BC, Octavianus, later to be known as "Augustus Caesar," defeated his remaining competitors for the control of the Roman state and took the title of "Augustus," the absolute ruler of the Empire. The most fascinating element of this story is that Octavianus established the pattern of how a successful leader can take over the government and concentrate all power on himself. The recipe goes as follows:

1. Obtain sufficient funds for the task 
2. Enlist your supporters in a para-military or military organization. 
3. Obtain a high-level government position using a mixture of intimidation and legal means.
4. Exploit a dramatic event to scare everyone and obtain special emergency powers.
5. Never relinquish your emergency powers, but always increase them. 

This is what Augustus did: his money came initially from the inheritance he obtained from his grand-uncle, Julius Caesar, but surely also from the support of high-level people who wanted tight control of the Roman State. He used the money to acquire a military force that he used to intimidate the Senate and defeat his competitors. Then, he was nominated commander ("imperator"), a title that was initially supposed to be temporary. From his power position, he exploited the disaster of the defeat of Teutoburg, in 9 AD, to scare the Romans with the "Barbarian menace" to obtain even more power. In 12 AD, he took the role of "pontifex maximum" the highest religious authority of the time. Later on, he was worshipped as a living deity. 

The pattern of turning a democracy into an absolute dictatorship was repeated many times in history. In Italy, in the 1920s Benito Mussolini built his power base with money from the Italian industrialists and landlords who were afraid of a Communist takeover. He used the money to create the Fascist party and a paramilitary organization, the blackshirts, that he used to intimidate his adversaries. After the "March on Rome" of 1922, Mussolini and his party gained a landslide electoral victory in 1924. Then, in 1926, Mussolini exploited a failed assassination attempt against him to obtain special powers from the parliament. From then on, Mussolini never relinquished his position of absolute dictator until he was dismissed in 1943, and then assassinated in 1945. 

In Germany, the military-industrial complex supported Adolf Hitler out of fear of the Communists, too. Hitler created the National socialist party and the paramilitary organization of the Brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung). In 1933, the Nazi party won a majority in parliament and Hitler was nominated as Chancellor. Just a few months later, the Nazis exploited the Reichstag Fire in 1933 to stir up a wave of anti-communism. The German parliament passed the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave wide powers to the government. That was the first step toward absolute power for Hitler and he never relinquished it until he committed suicide in 1945. 

There are many similar cases and you see that there is a thread that starts from Augustus' coup of more than 2,000 years ago and leads to the events of 20 years ago: the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center in New York. 

Seen in the light of the historical record, the 9/11 attacks look like a textbook case of a leader who exploits a dramatic event to gain special emergency powers for himself (*). A joint resolution passed by Congress a week after the terror attacks gave the executive branch of government "unchecked power" to deploy the military at will. 

Yet, the 2001 attacks didn't lead to an absolute dictatorship. President Bush used his newly obtained power to incarcerate a large number of people and to wage war worldwide, but at the end of his mandate he stepped down from his post as he was expected to do. Today, after 20 years, there is talk of not renewing the "Patriot Act" of 2001. What happened that prevented (so far) the US from falling into an absolute dictatorship, as it had happened many times to other nations?

The simplest explanation is that the American people are so deeply in love with democracy that they would never accept being ruled by a dictator. Or, it may be that George W. Bush was not the right kind of leader. He didn't have the prestige of Augustus, the eloquence of Hitler, or the cunning skill of Mussolini. And he didn't have a personal militia to support him. Donald Trump was much more like the average populist would-be dictator but, in order to take over the government, he would have needed much more than horned shamans as his personal militia.

Maybe, but I think there are deeper reasons that made it impossible to create in the 21st century the kind of dictatorship that had been common earlier on in the West. Basically, it has to do with the way communication acts in society -- the structure of the "memesphere". 

In the Western societies of the 20th century, communication was dominated by the mass media, first in the form of newspapers, then radio and TV. These communication channels could be controlled in a completely pyramidal structure. Even though there might have been hundreds of newspapers in a country, the main ones were just a few and they could be tightly controlled by the Government or by the dark powers behind. The same was true for the radio and TV channels. 

In other words, the memesphere was purely pyramidal. Communication was vertical: the government decided what memes to propagate and imposed them on people by means of obsessive repetition. It was the definition of "propaganda," a technique already known in ancient Roman times, but that was especially common in the 1920s. 

But, in 2001, the Internet had already become an important communication force, shaping the memesphere in a completely different way. Direct connections among nodes in the memesphere allowed a certain degree of horizontal communication. The Internet-based memesphere was becoming a virtual holobiont able to process information in ways that a purely vertical organization did not allow. 

These two different mechanisms of communication were examined and quantified in a paper that I and my coworkers Perissi and Falsini published on Kybernetes in 2018. We noted how two different kinds of communication can be observed to compete: the "viral" (horizontal) mode and the "fallout" (vertical) mode. 

The possibility of horizontal meme spreading caused the development of a large number of "conspiracy theories" about the 9/11 attacks spreading over the Web mainly by person-to-person communication. These memes could be demonized, ridiculed, dismissed, and contrasted in many ways, but could never be completely eliminated. 

The result was that the polls consistently showed that a significant minority of the US population believed that the attacks were a false flag (*), while a majority kept thinking that the government knew about the attack plans but chose not to stop the attackers. So the government could not obtain the kind of blanketing communication that was possible with the traditional media. It may be argued that the impossibility of obtaining a 100% consensus is the main reason that prevented the taking over of the government by a populist leader. 

Now, 20 years after the 9/11 attacks, the media are still tightly controlled by the government, but the memetic conflict has become harsher. The media are engaged in an all-out attack against the Internet communication sphere. The dissent is now branded as "fake news" and actively suppressed on social media. But the Internet is vast and there are many channels of communication that the government seems to be unable to close.

The virtual battle is raging. It could lead to a return to a pyramidal communication network if the government manages to take control of the memesphere. Or that may turn out to be impossible and the fluid nature of the memesphere may remain alive, leading to a fragmentation of the social sphere. We are already seeing that. As always, we live in interesting times (in the sense of the ancient Chinese malediction). 

(*) These considerations do not depend on whether the official government version of what happened with the 9/11 attacks is true or not. After all, the Roman legionnaires at Teutoburg were exterminated by real Germanic warriors!