Did the Catholic Church really rule that Native Americans have no soul? How propaganda can still affect us after half a millennium

 

You may have heard a common version of the story of the "Controversy of Valladolid." It says that during the 16th century, a court convened by the King of Spain and staffed by Catholic priests decided that the Native Americans had no soul and that, hence, could be enslaved or exterminated at will. It is one of the many legends that surround us. The Valladolid Court of 1550-1551 actually ruled in favor of the Natives, forbidding their enslavement. But they were enslaved and exterminated anyway. The ruling of the court was distorted and turned into a propaganda piece that accused the Christian Church of being the instigator of the extermination. And many people still believe this story after nearly five centuries!  But so is propaganda, one of the most powerful (and evil) technologies ever devised by humans.

Not long ago, I was taking a foreign friend to visit Piazza Signoria, in Florence, showing him the many statuary pieces lining the square. All wonderful pieces, in many ways, but also disquieting for their depiction of murder and death. Today, nobody could get away with a piece of art where a man beheads a naked woman. And yet this is exactly what one of the main pieces in the square shows to us, Perseus and Medusa, in an unbelievably cruel depiction of a murder. 

As we walked past the Perseus, I told my friend, "you see, there is an invisible wall that cuts the square in two. On one side, there are older pieces of statuary, all with Christian themes: David and Goliath, Judith and Holophernes, and more. On the other side, you have pieces inspired by classical myths from the Pagan age: Hercules, Perseus and Medusa, the rape of the Sabines, and others." 

It was at that point that something clicked in my mind: "why exactly does that invisible wall exist?" The question arrived together with the answer. The wall is related to the "Controversy of Valladolid," a debate requested by King Charles 5th of Spain in 1550 to decide the fate of the Native Americans. It is an event that still reverberates in our perception of history, but distorted and transformed into the opposite of what it was by propaganda. But let me start from the beginning

The 16th century had been a century of military triumphs for Europe, and for Spain in particular, with the conquest of Mexico and Perù. That had brought a question for the new rulers: what to do with the Native inhabitants? Were they to be given rights as citizens of the Spanish Empire? Or should they be enslaved for their own good?  King Charles 5th of Spain, an enlightened ruler, convened a court in Valladolid to discuss it. After two years of debate, the court ruled in favor of the Natives and the King duly enacted laws banning their enslavement. But the story was not going to end there. There were enormous financial interests in Europe that dictated that the Natives should have been used as expendable, cheap labor. And it the Valladolid Court had said that it was not to be done, then down with the Valladolid Court and the Christian principles at the basis of the ruling. And down with Christianity, just as well. 

It was a profound paradigm shift in European views, still reverberating in our times. Perhaps the best place to see it is just where the Perseus stands: In the Piazza della Signoria square, in Florence. In a few decades, Europe had completely switched from an art inspired by Christian principles to one inspired by Pagan ones. A reflection of the debate at Valladolid, where one of the two discussants, Juan Gines de Sepulveda cited Aristotle to argue that if civilized societies, such as the Greek and Roman ones, permitted slavery, then it could be practiced even in modern Europe. 

It was a blueprint for what was going to happen, with European society starting to model itself on what Europeans thought was the ancient Greek society. One of the results was the invisible wall in Piazza della Signoria. Cellini's piece with Perseus and Medusa, brutal as it is, acquires a specific meaning when understood in the frame of the enslavement and the extermination of the Natives. The strong survive, and the weak perish. Perseus personifies the winning Europeans, Medusa the weaker Natives.

In time, the proceedings of the Valladolid Court were turned into the legend, common nowadays, that the court was charged to decide whether the Native Americans had a soul or not. Some versions of the story say that the court had decided that, maybe, they didn't have it -- they were beasts. It was probably the result of the distorted interpretation of a book by Bartolomé the Las Casas, one of the discussants at Valladolid. He described how the decisions of the court were ignored in his "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies" (1552). The book was turned into anti-Spanish propaganda by those who were actually exterminating the Natives, the British, and North European colonists. The Catholic Church received such a blow from this campaign that it never completely recovered from it. 

This is one of the most evil legends around us because it condemns the honest efforts that many people of good will expended trying to save the Natives. But we still believe this ancient propaganda, nearly half a millennium later! The evil Goddess named Propaganda still deceives us.

 

Below, you'll find a post by Paul Jorion that tells the true story.  

This text by Jorion was also discussed in a previous post on the collapse of science. See also this post on how the Perseus is related to Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. 

The "quarrel" or "controversy" of Valladolid (1550-1551)

June 23, 2021 Paul Jorion

 

This text will find its place in the panorama of anthropology that I am writing at the moment. As this is a subject that I am new to and where I cannot avail myself of any expertise, please be so kind as to point out to me any factual errors I make. Thank you in advance !

 

In 1550 and 1551 a debate took place in the city of Valladolid in Spain, which would go down in history as the “quarrel” or “controversy,” bearing the name of this city in the province of Castile and Leon.  

What was it about? It dealt with the Christian European civilization behaving like an unscrupulous invader on a continent of which it knew nothing, within populations of which it was until then unaware of the very existence, which it then discovered in real-time as it grew. advance in the territory of the New World, and the devastation that accompanied this advance.  

What all this meant as to how the victors would now treat the vanquished would be the question posed in a great debate that would cover a period of two years and where two champions of Spanish thought at the time would face off. Great intellectual and ethical problems had to be resolved in the scholastic tradition of a disputatio, before the enlightened public of what we would today call a commission, which would decide at the end of the debate which of the two speakers was right. There were basically only church people there.  

Two thinkers were on stage, both solemnly defending opposing points of view. They clashed at the level of ideas by mobilizing all the art of dialectics: that intended to convince, an art developed specifically for the speeches held in ancient Greece on an agora. To defend one of the points of view, Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1490-1573) considered, in a word, that the inhabitants of the New World were cruel savages and that the question was, basically, how to save them from themselves. To defend the opposing point of view, there was the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) who affirmed that the Amerindians were, like the Europeans, human beings, whose differences should not be exaggerated, and that the question was about integrating them peacefully into a Christian society by conviction rather than by force.

The brutal conquest of Mexico took place from 1519 to 1521, it was no less bloody than in Peru from 1528 to 1532. We are now in 1550, almost twenty years after this last date. The situation, from the point of view of the Spaniards, is that they have won: the huge empire of New Spain has been conquered by secular Spain. It is a victory, even if internal quarrels continue, on the one hand between the colonized, as at the time of the conquest, which their incessant dissensions had fostered, and on the other hand between the colonizers themselves, manifested by a litany of palace revolutions and assassinations of conquistadors between them, in Peru as in Mexico.  

But the time has come for Charles V (1500-1558), “Emperor of the Romans”, to take a break. We must think about how to treat these conquered populations, decimated in equal parts by battles and massacres, and by the ravages of smallpox and measles, against which the local populations were helpless, having no immunity to these diseases hitherto absent from the continent. It is considered today that Mexico had some 25 million inhabitants on the eve of the first landing of the Spaniards in 1498. In 1568, the population was estimated at 3 million and it is believed that in 1620 there were only a million and a half Mexicans left.  

The phase still to come would no longer be that of Mexico or Peru, whose conquest was completed and where colonization was then carried out well, but that of Paraguay, which would begin in 1585, thirty-five years later.

Charles V, was an enlightened sovereign, like his rival François 1 ^st. They were contemporaries: two thinking kings, not only just kings, but men who had questions about history, knowing that they were major players. They shared a conception of the world enlightened by the same religion: Catholicism. The reign of Charles V will end a few years later: in 1555. It will then be his son Philip who will become sovereign of Spain and the Netherlands. Later, in 1580, he will also be King of Portugal. Charles V demands that any new conquest be interrupted as long as Las Casas and Sepulveda exchange their arguments on the question of the status to be recognized for the indigenous populations of the New World.  

Charles V had not, however, remained indifferent to these questions even before: already in 1526, 24 years before the Valladolid controversy, he had issued a decree prohibiting the slavery of Amerindians throughout the territory, and in 1542, he had promulgated new laws which proclaimed the natural freedom of the Amerindians and obliged to release those who had been reduced to slavery: freedom of work, freedom of residence and free ownership of property, punishing, in principle, those who were violent and aggressive towards Native Americans.  

Paul III was the pope from 1534 to 1549. In 1537, thirteen years before the beginning of the Valladolid controversy, in the papal bull Sublimis Deus and in the letter Veritas Ipsa, he had officially condemned, on behalf of the Catholic Church, the slavery of the Native Americans. The statement was "universal," that is, it was applicable wherever the Christian world could still discover populations unknown to it on the surface of the globe: it was said in Sublimis Deus: " and of all peoples that may be later discovered by Christians ”. And in both documents, so in Veritas Ipsa too: "Indians and other peoples are true human beings."

When the quarrel began, Julius III had just succeeded Paul III: he was enthroned on February 22, 1550.

The general principle, for Charles V, was that of aligning with the Church policy. In the "quarrel" or "controversy" of Valladolid, one of the moments of solemn reflection of humanity on itself, it is not the Church, but the Kingdom of Spain, which summons religious authorities , experts, to try to answer the question "What can be done so that the conquests still to come in the New World are done with justice and in security of conscience?"

It is heartbreaking that the television film “La controverse de Valladolid” (1992), by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, with Jean-Pierre Marielle in the role of Las Casas and Jean-Louis Trintignant in that of Sepulveda, as well as the novel by Jean- Claude Carrière, from whom it was inspired, took such liberties with historical truth that it was affirmed that the central question in the quarrel was to determine whether the Amerindians had a soul. No: this question had been settled by the Church without public debate thirteen years earlier. Sublimis Deus affirms that their property and their freedom must be respected, and further specifies "even if they remain outside the faith of Jesus Christ", that is to say that the same attitude must be maintained even if they are rebellious to conversion. It is written in the Papal Bull Veritas Ipsa that Native Americans are to be “invited to the said faith of Christ by the preaching of the word of God and by the example of a virtuous life. »In 1537: thirteen years before the commission met.

The question of the soul of the Amerindians was of course raised in Valladolid, but in no way to try to resolve it: on this level, the issue was closed. In reality, it had been resolved in the real world by the Spanish invaders: it would have been possible to summon young men and women of mixed race in their twenties to Valladolid, including Martin, son of Ernan Cortés and Doña Marina, “La Malinche”: living proof that the human species had recognized itself as “one and indivisible” in the field and that the question of whether these people, whom their mother could accompany if necessary, dressed in Spanish fashion, and most often militants of Christianity in their actions and in their words. Whether or not they had a soul, would have been an entirely abstract and ridiculous question, the problem having been solved in the facts: in the interbreeding which took place, in this reality that men and women have recognized themselves sufficiently similar not only to mate and immediately procreate, but to sanctify their marriage, in a sumptuous way for the richest, according to the rites of the Church. Circumstances, it must be emphasized, the opposite of the rules that were followed in North America, while in the case of Protestant settlers in their almost all - except Quebec - from the end of the 16th century.

The meetings in Valladolid were eld twice over a month, in 1550 and then in 1551, but most of the texts available to us are not transcripts of the debates: they are correspondence between the parties involved: Juan Gines de Sepulveda, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and the members of the commission.

Las Casas had first been himself an encomendero, a slave settler: he led plantations where Native American slaves were originally found, plantations in which, reacting to the Church's commands to give back their freedom to the natives enslaved, he had replaced on his own authority the labor of Amerindian slaves that he ceased to exploit with other laborers: blacks imported from Africa. This will be a great regret in his life, he will talk about it later. Most of the encomenderos were not as attentive as Las Casas to instructions from the mother country or the Vatican. Already in 1511, in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos, who exercised a decisive influence on Las Casas, refused the sacraments and threatened with excommunication those among them whom he considered unworthy. Here is his famous sermon:

"I am the voice of the One who cries in the desert of this island and that is why you must listen to me with attention. This voice is the freshest you have ever heard, the harshest and the most tough. This voice tells you that you are all in a state of mortal sin; in sin you live and die because of the cruelty and tyranny with which you overwhelm this innocent race.

Tell me, what right and what justice authorize you to keep the Indians in such dreadful servitude? In the name of what authority have you waged such hateful wars against those peoples who lived in their lands in a gentle and peaceful way, where a considerable number of them were destroyed by you and died in yet another way? never seen as it is so atrocious? How do you keep them oppressed and overwhelmed, without giving them food, without treating them in their illnesses which come from excessive work with which you overwhelm them and from which they die? To put it more accurately, you kill them to get a little more gold every day.

And what care do you take to instruct them in our religion so that they know God our creator, so that they are baptized, that they hear Mass, that they observe Sundays and other obligations?

Are they not men? Are they not human beings? Must you not love them as yourselves?

Be certain that by doing so, you cannot save yourself any more than the Moors and Turks who refuse faith in Jesus Christ. "

Las Casas' reflection led him to give up this role of planter and he took a step back for several years. Charles V then offered him access to vast lands in Venezuela on which he could implement the policy he now advocated towards the Amerindians: no longer the use of force, but the power of conviction and conversion by example. Las Casas was a Thomist. Following the line drawn by Thomas Aquinas, he read in human society a given of nature. It is not a question of a cultural heritage, that is to say of the fruit of the deliberations of men, but of a gift from God, so that all societies are of equal dignity, and a society of Pagans is no less legitimate than a society of Christians and it is wrong to attempt to convert its members by force. The propagation of the faith must be done there in an evangelical way, namely by virtue of example.

Facing Las Casas, Sepulveda stood: an Aristotelian philosopher who found in the texts of his mentor, not a justification for slavery, absent in fact from the texts of the Stagirite, but the description and the explanation of the slave society of ancient Greece, represented as a functional set of institutions: a legitimate model of human society. Sepulveda considered slavery, obedience to orders given, to be the status that suits a people who, left to themselves, commit, as we can observe, nameless abominations. Sepulveda finds argument in the atrocities committed, in particular the uninterrupted practice of human sacrifice, for which the populations brutally enslaved by the dominant society of the moment, constitute an inexhaustible source of victims, but also their anthropophagy, as well as their practice of incest. in the European sense of the term: fraternal and sororal incest within the framework of princely families in Mexico, "incestuous promiscuity" if you will, in the pooling of women among brothers, a difficulty that the Jesuits later encountered in the case of the Guaranis of Paraguay, which they will resolve by banning the “longhouse”, the collective dwelling of siblings.

Las Casas responded to Sepulveda by stressing that Spanish civilization is no less brutal: "We do not find in the customs of the Indians of greater cruelty than that which we ourselves had in the civilizations of the old world." Very diplomatically, he draws his examples from the past and says "formerly:" "In the past, we manifested a similar cruelty", highlighting for example the gladiatorial fights of ancient Rome. He also drew an argument from the monumental architecture of the Aztecs as proof of their civilization.

If the two points of view differed, and even if their positions were considered diametrically opposed, the two parties agreed on the fact that the invaders not only have rights to exercise over the Amerindians but also duties towards them, and in particular, in the context of the time and the question to be answered. There is no dispute between them as to the duty to convert: this is the dimension strictly speaking "Catholic" from the very framework of the debate. Their difference lies in their respective recommendations of the methods to be used: peaceful colonization and exemplary life for Las Casas and, for Sepulveda, institutional colonization based on coercion, given the brutal features of the very culture of the pre-Colombian populations.  

Let us remember that the context was extremely brutal texts on both sides. Las Casas, at the end of his life, will write a small book devoted only to the atrocities committed by the conquistadors, a small book that propaganda consistently used against Spain to advantage its rivals: the Netherlands, France and England, although this does not mean that these nations will not also be guilty of the same crimes in the territories that they will annex in their business colonial. Mutual surveillance therefore of European nations vis-à-vis possible abuses committed by others, from a diplomatic perspective of foreign policy.

The controversy officially ended in 1551 when Charles V, on the recommendations of the commission, formalized the position defended by Las Casas. It will therefore be by invoking the Gospels and by example that conversion will have to continue and not at the point of the sword.  

A victory which, however, will not immediately have enormous consequences on the ground, any more than the papal bulls had had before it. The encomenderos will only weakly respect the injunctions coming from the mother country. Wars between Amerindian tribes will continue despite the presence of missionaries and a small military contingent. The Bandeirantes of Sao Paulo will organize raids, supplying the encomenderos with prisoners, who will be on the plantations, as many de facto slaves. Etc.

A year after the controversy was over, in 1552, Las Casas undertook to write his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias , the very brief account of the destruction of the Indies, which will therefore be his testimony on the destructions and the atrocitie, of the colonization of New Spain by the Spaniards.  

When, from the end of the same century, missions are founded in Paraguay, called "Reductions", it will be in the exact line of the proposals of Las Casas.

It will be essentially Las Casas who will obtain, thanks to his vibrant plea in favor of the local populations, that the question of slavery would be closed once and for all in Central and South America: there will be no indigenous slaves, Amerindians will be considered as full citizens and, as an unexpected consequence, since the Church has not pronounced on the question of knowing whether Africans could be enslaved or not, the Spanish and Portuguese authorities will consider that the decision in favor of the position of Las Casas opens suddenly the possibility of a systematic exploitation of the African populations to draw from them the stock of slaves required by the plantations of the New World. It is Las Casas who will be in a way responsible for an acceleration of the slavery of Africans insofar as the authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, by discouraging the enslavement of the Amerindians, will indirectly encourage the planters to turn, as a replacement, towards the slave trade in African blacks, a situation in which Las Casas found himself at the time when he was encomendero. In his correspondence, at the end of his life, he bitterly regretted having been indirectly the cause of an aggravated enslavement of Africans.  

The sincere concern of Bartolomé de Las Casas to spare the Amerindians, will have preserved them from the even more tragic fate of their brothers and sisters of North America within the framework of an essentially English colonization at the start, made of spoliation and genocide, without any interbreeding. 

 

How to talk about the gas crisis at a party

This is a real conversation that took place a couple of weeks ago although, of course, it is revised and rearranged in this written version. The protagonists are me and a friend of mine, Antonella. Imagine us holding glasses, at a party. 

Antonella: Ugo, you know, I was visiting a town on the coast, last week. They want to install a big regasification plan, there.

Ugo: I heard something about that.

A. The people, there, don't want the plant. They say it is dangerous. What do you think about that?

U. It might be dangerous, in some circumstances.

A. Yes, but do you think it is a real danger?

U. It is a long story.

A. But we need to do something. don't we? If we need energy, we need to import gas.

U. Really, it is not so simple.

A. Ugo, you never tell people what you really think. For once, could you tell me what's going on?

U (after having taken a deep breath). The situation is critical, to say the least. We won't be able to have new regasification facilities in Italy before 2023, if we are lucky. And even those planned won't be sufficient to replace Russian gas. Even if we were able to build more, liquid gas coming from overseas is much more expensive than Russian gas, and not infinite, either. If the war doesn't stop, we won't have sufficient gas to heat homes and to power the electric grid this Winter. And the Italian industry won't be competitive in the world market with the coming gas prices. That may mean a collapse of the economy, social disorders, and even mass starvation. And because of the leaks of methane, natural gas is worse than coal in terms of damaging the climate.

A ....................

U ...................

A. Of course, we can use hydrogen, right?

U. ............

She walks away, glass in hand.

I wrote a similar post about climate a few years ago, with the same person as the protagonist. 

How to Beat Propaganda: the Grokking Strategy

We CAN beat propaganda, but it takes some effort to avoid falling prey to the simple, yet effective, methods that the powers that be (PTB) use to control us. You need first of all to understand that there is no such thing as an "authoritative source." All sources can be wrong, and many are there to trick you into believing that something is true when it is not. So, you need to listen to everybody and trust nobody. In this way, you can "grok" your information and not be grokked by the PTB.

I remember how, as a young scientist, I spent long hours at night perusing scientific journals in my department's library, at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The administrators wisely kept the library open all night for us, students and postdocs, to nibble at the treasure of knowledge stored there. It was the equivalent of what we do today when "surfing the Web", it was just slower and more laborious. But it was a great experience: I soon learned that not all the articles found in scientific journals were trustworthy, nor were the scientists who had published them. When I started my career, frauds and lies in science were still rare, but even in "high-level" scientific journals, there were plenty of evident mistakes, unjustified assumptions, sloppy work, or, simply, irrelevant babbling. 

It was a different story when I was a student. As a student, you are supposed to be "trained." The term comes from the Latin "trahere, ‘to pull.’ It implies that your teachers can force you to learn whatever they think you must learn. So, you can pass exams in college without having understood anything of what you regurgitate to your examiners. But things change completely when you become a professional. You must learn to consult many sources and sift good information from the bad. If you are a good professional, you listen to everybody and trust nobody.

We can describe this attitude by the term "grokking," invented by sci-fi author Robert Anson Heinlein to indicate the kind of in-depth understanding that professionals have of their field. In Heinlein's fictional Mars, "to grok" also means "to drink." You assimilate knowledge just like you assimilate the water you drink. It is strictly related to the concept of "empathy" as discussed by Chuck Pezeshky in his blog. (It is also part of the concept of "virtual holobiont," but let me skip that, here).

The "grokking-style" learning is based on the idea that you don't trust a source just because it is "authoritative." No. You are the one who decides whether what you are being told is true or not. And you base your evaluation on having more than one source, and critically evaluating all of them. It applies to scientific research, but also to all kinds of information collection in ordinary life. Or, at least, it should apply if you want to really understand what you are learning. 

It is here that we have the problem, a big problem. Universities don't teach you how to grok. Probably, it is because the old saying is true: nothing worth learning can be taught. At least, not in the traditional way. Even good professionals are often completely naive when they leave their specialized field and are exposed to propaganda. Yet, it is not impossible to learn how to grok. It is a recursive affair: you must grok how to grok!

Nowadays, with a tsunami of propaganda submerging all of us, I am discovering that many people I know use the same grokking strategy that I use. Typically, we avoid TV and mainstream media, and we use aggregators, feed readers, and similar ways to access multiple sources. Many people seem to have developed this learning strategy by themselves. Not long ago, my good friend Anastassia showed me how she does it: she has hundreds of telegram channels she follows. She clicks on the titles of posts that seem interesting to her, reading them if they turn out to be really interesting. She doesn't trust any of them, but she listens to all of them. I have a feeling that there is some correlation between this style of learning and the fact that she is among the brightest people I know. 

Personally, I tend to use feed readers rather than Telegram (I described the method in a previous post), but it is the same idea. In addition, some blogs and sites are structured as aggregators, and they will do a good job for you by alerting you about new information arriving (a good one that I follow is Raul Ilargi's "Automatic Earth."). In any case, you want to be in control of what you receive: so, no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing like that, even search engines are biased. You don't want others to decide what you see. You want to be in control of the information you receive. You listen to everyone, and you trust no one. 

This method of managing information has the advantage that it makes you nearly invulnerable to propaganda. I say "nearly" because we are all human beings, and we all tend to believe in what we would like were true. But, surely, a good grokker is a hard target for the classic propaganda techniques that consist mainly in suppressing the sources of contrasting information. Then, by repeating the same thing, over and over, it becomes true (you surely remember Karl Rove's statement about "creating our own reality"). If you watch TV, you are their slave, but if you are reading this blog, you probably aren't. So far, it is still possible to collect a fan of information sources sufficiently distant from the official truth to be able to grok the situation. 

On the other hand, there are problems with this strategy. One is that, by abandoning the mainstream sources, you risk rolling down the other side of the disinformation hill. In this case, you'll find yourself fishing out rotten morsels from the soup of madness that often surrounds "alternative" news sources. You know, things like the moon landing hoax, graphene in the Covid vaccines, viruses that do not exist, and the like. It is bad information that comes in part from people who have gone Martian coconuts, and in part from paid disinformers who just want to trick you. As an example, Igor Chudov makes a good case for the "viruses do not exist" meme as a psyop created by the PTB. He even could identify the site that created the meme and diffused it. You risk "inverse grokking," which means that the powers that be are grokking you!

The other problem, much more serious, is that if you are a serious grokker, you place yourself outside the mainstream beliefs and views. You may find that your friends and family think that you are "strange," that when you walk toward someone you know in the street, she may cross the street to avoid getting close to you. And woe betides those who try to discuss with non-grokkers. You will be ignored (at best), ridiculed, and even insulted by people whom you thought were your best friends. I don't have to tell you that being in this situation can be bad for your mental health and, in some cases, for your physical survival. You may remember the ominous sentence about the unvaccinated, “what do we do with these people?” expressed by Canadian prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It sounds very much like what was said about the "Jewish Problem" in the 1930s. You know how some people thought they could solve it. Some solutions are truly final.  

So, knowledge carries a risk, something that has been known from the time of Adam and Eve. On the other hand, we are always seeking truth, an activity that every good person on this planet should pursue. And so, onward, fellow grokkers! All you have to lose is your ignorance. 

If you have time, you can tell me in the comments the way you use to gather and process information. I suspect that many readers of this blog are good grokkers, but many of them may use creative methods. 

In the following, some excerpts from a post by "John Carter" which inspired these reflections of mine. Note, though, that if you read his whole post, you may notice that not even he is completely immune from being grokked by reverse propaganda. Probably it is also my case.... alas. See also a recent post by Todd Hayen on "Off Guardian" that expresses very similar concepts. 

What Are Your Sources?

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties." - Francis Bacon

Excerpts from a post by John Carter on his blog, "Postcards from Barsoom"

"Where do you get your information from? What are your sources?"

I really hate this question.

Part of it is that a lot of the places I tend to go to collect information would strike the normie as batshit insane conspiracy sites. Once you're on the other side of the great hyperreality bifurcation, you're experiencing a world in which very fundamental assumptions of the old societal mainstream, ranging from 'what is true' to 'what is moral', are no longer taken for granted and, indeed, are widely rejected.

Another part of it is that a great deal of what gets circulated within the hydra originates with anonymous or pseudonymous writers. By the very nature of communicating one's thoughts from behind a veil, it is impossible to verify whether they really know what they're talking about. A normie used to the anodyne pronouncements of credentialed experts being fellated by talking heads on CNN will find the idea of taking seriously the words of random Internet schizos to be a bit jarring.

But the single biggest reason I dislike this question is that it's the wrong question. 'Sources' have absolutely nothing to do with how I gather information; and from what I've seen, that's true for most of us.

The general assumption in normieland seems to be that there are reliable and unreliable sources of information. The former carry the stamp of approval of established authorities, who go to great lengths to ensure that the information they communicate has been extensively vetted for accuracy, with obvious mistakes removed by dedicated teams devoted to the rigorous vetting of every piece of information that gets included. The latter consists of wild speculations, rumours, and crazed ramblings. There's some nuance there - most people will admit that politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate marketing executives will usually put some spin on the information they communicate - but in general the heuristic that gets applied is "there are reliable sources, and unreliable sources; all you need to do to have an accurate view of reality is to limit your information diet to the former and ignore the latter."

....

When you're attempting to scale the walls of Chapel Perilous in the weird corners of the Internet, you don't have the luxury of relying on authoritative sources. The very concept of 'authoritative source' loses all meaning, and of necessity one develops a very different approach to information gathering and belief formation. Inside the datastream of the Internet, no one perspective is privileged as being unimpeachable. Nothing is to be trusted. Nothing is ever to be 100% believed. Everything one comes across, from any source, whether an established blogger with hundreds of thousands of daily readers or some rando in the comments section, is greeted with more or less the same response:

Here's what I do; and I suspect it's pretty much what the rest of you do, too:

I've got a variety of news aggregators I tend to go to, each more or less reflecting the worldview of the individual or team who maintains them through the lens of the topics that attract their attention. I skim these feeds and occasionally click on something if it catches my own attention. There are a few forums that I frequent, where various topics are discussed, and people share links to things they think are interesting together with whatever impressions they have of them. Social media plays a similar role; while I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, I do subscribe to a couple of hundred Telegram channels, some of which I'll peruse throughout the day, once again clicking on anything that looks interesting. Add to this an archipelago of blogs which provide some degree of original analysis, but are mostly the Internet's editorial page; in these cases, I gravitate towards those authors I find to be consistently interesting. Then there are podcasts and livestreams, most of which take the form of a free-ranging conversation between hosts and guests.

In most cases I have no idea about the identities or credentials of the authors, and I could generally care less. The contribution of an anon on 4chan can be every bit as insightful and correct as the analysis of a facefag whose CV I can review in detail. Equivalently, the facefag can be every bit as wrong as that of the shitposter. The salient detail is not the identity of the person originating the information, but the structure of the argument.

When perusing something, at the same time that I'm evaluating the information, I'm also evaluating the worldview that produced the information. What are the ideological biases of the author? Is he a libertarian, a post-liberal, an old-school leftist, a nationalist, a trad-Catholic, a deep ecologist, a neoliberal managerialist, a critical race theorist? Does the author have something to gain from what he's writing - is he trying to get me to buy something, or being paid to advance a perspective that will enrich his paymasters? The author's perspective is inseparable from the argument being put forward, as it structures what the author considers to be interesting, and what he believes to be axiomatically true and false - creating attentional foci and blind spots.

This doesn't mean that something is to be rejected or accepted merely because it conflicts or accords with a worldview I find personally agreeable - that's ultimately just a version of the 'authoritative source' mindset, one that leads straight into an echo chamber. In principle, valuable insights can come from almost anywhere. The purpose of the exercise is rather to discern the model of reality that produced the perspective leading to the information being organized as it has been.

All models are by their nature simplified schema that fail to capture the full complexity and nuance of the world. They emphasize some things and omit others. That's why it's important not to get overly attached to them. However, some models are more accurate than others, much more likely to correctly predict unfolding events. By foregrounding the models that produce the hot takes, one begins constantly testing these models against one another. As events unfold, one notices which models are more, and which less, accurate. New information can then be evaluated on the basis of the model that generated it, and its probability of being accurate weighted accordingly.

As this goes on, one inevitably begins to construct one's own model of reality, simply by combining the elements that seem to have worked from the models that one has been exposed to. There's nothing particularly special about having a model of reality - we all do, of necessity; the advantage lies rather in that this process becomes conscious and deliberate. One makes one's own model, rather than simply accepting whatever model is offered by 'authoritative sources'.

The normies still trapped in the mass media holodeck cling to the certainty that their 'reliable sources' can be trusted, and the result is that they inhabit a nightmare world of shifting illusions that has driven them quite entirely mad. It frequently happens that they wake up to one or another of the lies of which the control system is built, but having perceived the deception on a given topic, they react by looking for an authoritative source elsewhere that they can rely upon. Invariably in this case, they get trapped in a different lie - trading the regime ideology they've left behind for a new ideology, one that they accept whole as uncritically as the one they were raised with. That's what that boomer in the bar was looking for. His first instinct, upon being confronted with plausible arguments that he'd been systematically misled by the legacy media, was to reach for something he could trust. To trade one gospel for another.

In truth, there are no reliable sources, and there never have been. Paradoxically, it's only by letting go of the desire for reliability, by holding things conditionally rather than absolutely true, and by constructing one's own provisional reality model, that one can find one's sea legs on the shifting and uncertain waters, and successfully navigate the ocean of the real.

_________________________________________________________

To finish, an updated list of the blogs I follow (UB)

1. Anti-EmpireAlgora Blog
2. Bracing Views
3. Brownstone Institute
4. Climate Etc.
5. Clive Best
6. ClubOrlov
7. Collaborative Fund
8. Consent Factory, Inc.
9. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
10. Edward Slavsquat
11. eugyppius: a plague chronicle
12. Exapt Press
13. Fear of a Microbial Planet
14. Fight Aging!
15. francocardini.it
16. Geopolitica.ru RSS feed
17. Glenn Greenwald
18. Gut Microbiota for Health
19. http://www.theblogmire.com/feed/
20. Il Chimico Scettico
21. Il Pedante
22. Il Pedante
23. imetatronink
24. Impressions of a Holobiont
25. It's About Empathy – Connection Ties Us Together
26. Julian Jaynes Society
27. Just Emil Kirkegaard Things
28. Kelebekler Blog
29. La cruna dell'ago
30. La Cruna dell'Ago
31. Lettera da Mosca
32. Madam Mayo
33. Marty's Mac 'n' Cheese
34. Mattias Desmet
35. Meryl’s COVID Newsletter
36. MILITANZA DEL FIORE
37. Moon of Alabama
38. Nuova Accademia Gnostica S.A.W. di Firenze
39. OffGuardian
40. oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith
41. Our Finite World
42. Paolo Gulisano blog
43. Patrick J. Buchanan – Official Website
44. Peak Oil Barrel
45. Peter Turchin
46. Post-Woke
47. Postcards From Barsoom
48. Prof. Harald Walach
49. Rational Ground – Clear Reasoning on National Policy for COVID-19
50. Resistenze al nanomondo
51. Resource Insights
52. Retraction Watch
53. Roy Spencer, PhD.
54. Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
55. Shrew Views
56. Simon Sheridan
57. Steve Kirsch's newsletter
58. Tehran Times
59. Tessa Fights Robots
60. The age of loss
61. The Automatic Earth
62. THE CLUB OF ROME (www.clubofrome.org)
63. The Inquisitive Biologist
64. The New Normal
65. The Philosophical Salon
66. The Reading Junkie
67. The Slavland Chronicles
68. The Upheaval
69. The van says…
70. The Vineyard of the Saker
71. Trust the Evidence
72. Umanesimo e Scienza
73. Unmasked
74. Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts

Note added after publication: Several people have expressed surprise at the fact that I placed 74 links in the list. "How can you follow so many blogs?" they ask. The fact it that I don't "follow" all of them. I skim through the list of titles and I open the links that I think are interesting. Then, I may or may not read the whole post -- some people publish posts that are so interesting that I can't miss them. But not all those linked here, only a minority Note also that almost all these links refer to single-author blogs which publish no more than one-two posts per week -- often even less frequently. I make an exception for "The Automatic Earth" by Raul Ilargi, which publishes daily, because it is so interesting. But some links that you see in the list above have already disappeared from the updated list. For instance, I removed "Tehran Times" -- too many posts, and too flatly aligned with the Iranian government. 

Ukraine: The Battle for Flat Mountain

 

Monte Piana ("Flat Mountain") in the Italian Alps. A bloody and protracted battle was fought there during WWI between the forces of Italy and of Austria-Hungary. One more example of how often history rhymes. This ancient battle may tell us something about the current situation in Ukraine

Monte Piana in Northern Italy is a place that deserves to be seen, It is a strange mountain with a flat plateau at the top, located in the middle of the rugged Dolomite Mountains. An eerie place that still maintains relics of the bloody battles that were fought there between 1915 and 1917. 

There is a dirt road that takes you to the top, at over 2200 meters in height. There, you can walk along the gentle slope of the plateau, an area of less than one square km. It is difficult to imagine how so many people could have fought and died for that chunk of land. And yet, it happened. The number of casualties is unknown, but it is estimated as between 10,000 and 20,000, some say many more. If the ghosts of all the dead were to congregate together on the plateau, they would form a crowd of the density that you may see in a city park on a warm Sunday. Maybe they do that on moonless nights. 

On the plateau, there is very little left of the great battles of more than a century ago. You can see shallow depressions on the ground that, probably, mark the hits of artillery shells. There are traces of old trenches and fortifications, wood splinters that, probably, were part of barracks or fences. It takes a certain degree of imagination to picture in your mind how life must have been for those men who found themselves stranded there, surrounded by spectacular mountains. A scenario of incredible beauty. The kind of beauty that kills. 

The story of the battles of Monte Piana is simple: it was an open-air slaughterhouse. The Austrians occupied the North Side, the small plateau, while the Italians occupied the Southern side, the larger one, The two plateaus were separated by a natural trench that marked the boundary of the two sides during most of the war. The Italians would resupply their forces, and bring back the wounded and the dead, using a road that they built expressly for that purpose (it still exists). The Austrians would do the same on the other side, using a precarious cable car that arrived at the top.   

The problem for both sides was that they were in the range of the artillery pieces placed on nearby mountains. Howitzer shells continuously battered the area and that forced both armies to build tunnels in the sides of the mountain, where they would be reasonably safe. But some soldiers had to man the trenches on the plateau, and that meant crouching down all the time, trying to make themselves as small as possible, hoping that the next shell would kill someone else. They could do little more than wait until their unit, reduced to a small fraction of its initial strength, was replaced with a fresh one. 

On that miniature battlefield, the Italians were more aggressive than the Austrians and, every once in a while, the survivors of the artillery barrage were told to run toward the enemy with their bayonets. A run toward death: every time, they were mowed down by the Austrian machine guns; one of the slits from where they fired was still there when I visited the plateau, a few years ago. Sometimes, the Italians would be able to gain a foothold in the Northern Plateau. They were always repulsed by an Austrian counterattack. 

What's most impressive about this story is how futile it all was. Even assuming that one of the two sides could have conquered the whole plateau (and both did for short periods during the early months of the war), they could not have kept it, and in any case, it would have been useless. Anything placed there in the open would have been blown up to smithereens by the howitzers placed on higher ground around. So, why engage in that absurd battle? Why, instead, not use the troops to fight somewhere where there was a chance to break through the enemy lines? But I can imagine the headquarters of both sides: could someone propose to retreat and leave the plateau to the enemy? Unthinkable: it is a question of National honor. 

And so, the slaughter went on for about 2 years. Then, in late 1917, the Austrians broke through the Italian lines at Kobarid (a city that the Italians call "Caporetto") and nearly succeeded in knocking Italy out of the war. The retreating Italian army abandoned Monte Piana and the Austrians occupied it without fighting. About one year later, the starved and demoralized soldiers of the Austrian Empire marched back North. It was now the turn of the Italians to occupy the Monte Piana plateau without fighting. The whole story was futile as it could possibly have been.

I searched the Web for contemporary images of the battle for Monte Piana, but I couldn't find any. In the Italian press, you find almost nothing about the events on the plateau, except for occasional reports of the heroic death of someone there. It seems that two years of useless slaughter went unrecorded and nearly unknown. Not too surprising, since there was nothing to report except about failed attacks to conquer positions that were not worth conquering anyway. So, in terms of the futility of battles, you may take a look at this clip from "Return to Cold Mountain," which shows a scene that may have been similar to the battle for Monte Piana: a massed bayonet attack against a well-defended higher position. Beautiful music, stunning scenery, it may give us some idea of what the futile attacks against the trenches of Monte Piana were.

And now, let's see if this sad story can teach us something about current events. Compare the absurd battle of Monte Piana with the current one, just as absurd, in Ukraine. In both cases, we have a flat area where the fight is dominated by long-range weapons. It was artillery on Monte Piana, it is still artillery nowadays, although more precise, and more long-range, with drones dominating the battlefield. So, the battle has taken very much the aspect of what was World War I. Trenches, soldiers standing there while battered by the enemy artillery, little or no chance to maneuver using tanks or other mobile weapons. The times of Guderian's panzergruppen of WWII seem to be gone, perhaps forever. Recently, the Ukrainians have gained some territory by massing troops on specific objectives along the battle line, but it seems to have cost them dearly. In a certain way, the Ukrainians are behaving like the Italians at Monte Piana, attacking, while the Russians are playing the role of the Austro-Hungarians, defending and counterattacking. 

Of course, history never repeats itself, but there is some rhyming, here. If things go nowadays as they went during WWI, the battle in Ukraine will be completely futile, a useless slaughter of young men on both sides. The war will be decided somewhere else. It will end when one of the two sides, NATO or Russia, collapses economically, just like it happened in WWI -- where the economic collapse of the Central Empires eventually gave the victory to the allies. 

And now? Who will collapse first? Time will tell, but the useless slaughter continues. And history continues to rhyme, as it always does. 

 This post is a condensed version of a section of the book that I published in 2018, titled "La Linea d'Ombra della Memoria" (The Shadow Line of Memory) -- in Italian. It tells the story of a forgotten hero of WWI, but it is a wide-ranging discussion of the history of the "Great War."  

"The Bird is Free." Will Elon Musk Become Grand Duke of Mars?

 

The news of the day is that Elon Musk took control of Twitter and promises to abolish censorship. At the same time, the platforms most plagued by censors, FB for instance, are taking a bloodbath in the market (Twitter is doing much better!). It is part of the evolution of the Web, an entity much too complex and structured to be controlled by dumb creatures such as "fact checkers" and their AI henchbots. We don't know what Musk has in mind: he may plan to become the next US president or maybe to rule Mars as Grand Duke. In any case, he seems to understand better than many others how to use social media as a communication tool. 

It is said that the Grand-Duke, of Tuscany, Cosimo 1st, (1519 – 1574) used to sit, unseen, behind a low window of his palace to hear what people passing by were saying. He wanted to know what his subjects were thinking of him. He needed to: it was part of his ruling method. He used an iron fist when needed, but he also used a velvet glove to turn enemies into friends. For instance, the masterpiece of statuary, "Perseus and Medusa," was cast by a former enemy of his, Benvenuto Cellini, whose skills Cosimo admired. 

The "Perseus" is still standing in Piazza della Signoria, in Florence. With it, and with other pieces, Cosimo 1st was carrying out a propaganda campaign where he presented himself as the "monster slayer" Perseus: a stern, but just, ruler. But he needed to know how his message fared with its targets. In this case, the citizens of Florence themselves informed him by commenting aloud while looking at the statue (probably knowing that the Duke was listening from the window, nearby) and writing their comments on small pieces of paper that they glued to the pedestal. We don't know what they said and wrote, but, apparently, they thought that the statue was too much on the "stern" side and too little on the "just" one.  The Duke was disappointed enough that he never paid Cellini for the work he had done. I told this story in detail in an earlier post. 

There are many ways to operate a propaganda campaign. In ancient times, of course, they didn't have the technologies we have nowadays, but the problems were the same. Rulers could not reach citizens individually, but they would "broadcast" their power by means of impressive imagery and buildings. Then, the people had a certain capability of sending messages back to the rulers. And some enlightened rulers, such as Cosimo 1st, knew that a ruler who doesn't know what his subjects think doesn't survive for long. But, to hear what the citizens say, there is a need for a certain level of freedom of expression. It was a good way of ruling: Cosimo was a true Renaissance Man, who patronized art and science and did not oppress his subjects too much. He reigned for 32 years and started a dynasty of Grand-Dukes that lasted up to 1737. 

In time, propaganda evolved. The "mass media," first the press, then radio and TV, started being fundamental during the 20th century. They are great broadcasting technologies, but they are extremely poor in terms of two-way communication. With the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century, people were receiving messages from their rulers, but they could not talk back to them. The only way for governments to know what people were thinking was to rely on spies, but that was usually overdone. In the Soviet Union, in Iran at the time of the Shah, and in many other places, what you said to a friend could end up being reported to the police, and you risked disappearing in the night, forever. Soon, people lost all interest in expressing their opinion to anyone. 

The problem with totalitarianism is that it is rigid and inflexible. Rulers tend to think that the fact that nobody criticizes them means that nobody disagrees with them, they get absorbed into their internal squabbles, and they soon lose track of what the real problems are. That's one of the reasons why totalitarian states are not usually long-lived. A good case is that of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, in Italy. One of the most totalitarian states of its times (and perhaps in known history), the total control of the media by the state was matched only by the total incompetence of the government. And it ended with the great leader hanged upside down, as it was perhaps unavoidable.  

How about our times? By the end of the 20th century, Western propaganda was a sophisticated machine that worked on the principle that "the devil's best trick is to convince you that he doesn't exist" (Baudelaire said that). It was structured in such a way that it gave the citizens the impression that they were free to express themselves. It was obvious, though, that opinions contrasting with those of the government would always remain confined to spaces occupied only by visionaries and crackpots. It was a form of "invisible totalitarianism." 

  

But technology always changes things. The Web and social media were the equivalents of a monkey wrench thrown into the works of the smooth Western propaganda machine. The elites soon realized that they could hardly control the system when anyone could use it at a low cost. And anything could go viral on the Web, out of control, no matter how subversive. That led to a scramble to take control of the Web. 

So far, the action has been mainly with the search engines: those who control them, control the Web. If you have experienced "shadow-banning," you know how effective it is, and how defenseless you are against it. In more recent times, we saw soft banning supplemented with true banning. A large tribe of so-called "fact-checkers" appeared on the main social platforms, cracking down on whoever said something that their employers didn't want to see diffusing on the Web. With the idea that social platforms are private spaces, it was argued that the 1st amendment does not hold there, The account of a former US president on Twitter was canceled, and even top-level scientists were censored. Sometimes, just linking to peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals could lead to your account disappearing in the night, forever. 

Some people absolutely love censorship. But many (perhaps most) users of social media didn't like to be watched from over their shoulders by those overzealous nannies who pretended to know better than them what is true and what is not.  That generated criticism, and some attempts to rein in the censors. But, so far, we only saw censorship increasing its reach and becoming more pervasive.

Except for the news of the day: the bird is free! Elon Musk bought Twitter and promises to eliminate censorship.

What's happening? There are several possible interpretations, but at least something is clear: those who rule us are not a monolithic entity, as the Communist Party was in the Soviet Union. There are several would-be world rulers who are vying for power behind the scene. Musk may actually be smarter than most of them and able to understand that you gain nothing by silencing those who disagree with you. Suppose he wants to become the next US president, or maybe the Grand Duke of Mars, then he has to think like the Grand Duke of Tuscany did. He needs to know what people think because he can rule only if people agree that he is the ruler. Ruling by force and oppression is inefficient and, often, the ruler ends up hanged by the feet. So, Musk may well understand that he needs to leave some space for people to express themselves. The bird may not be completely free, but it has to be able to fly. 

We seem to be in a transition moment (we always are). The Internet is under pressure by the attempt of controlling it by the powers that be, turning it into a tool for a totalitarian government (in China, the government may have succeeded at that). But, at the same time, some members of the elites are realizing that the Internet is a much better tool if used according to its characteristic of a two-way communication system. The Internet may allow us to generate a new governance system that might be more effective and just than the old totalitarian systems. It might be part of a "new Renaissance" that could take some aspects similar to the way Cosimo the 1st ruled in Tuscany during the 16th century. Maybe. But, as always, the future will surprise us. 

Is Fascism Returning?A Reflection on the Centennial of the March on Rome

 

An image of the "March on Rome" of the Fascist blackshirts that took place a hundred years ago, in October 1922, and that brought Benito Mussolini to power in Italy. Look at him at the center of the photo: he already looked like an actor playing a role on stage, the strong man with a square jawline. It was a posture and a mask that he would maintain unaltered for more than 20 years as absolute ruler of Italy. That mask would eventually become him and devour him, taking him to his doom. Today, there doesn't seem to be any more space for such macho dictators, but totalitarianism is not gone, it is taking different forms. 

Italian version

On July 25, 1943, the leader of the Italian government, Benito Mussolini, was arrested on orders from the King of Italy. That day, my grandfather was on vacation with his family on the hills. Coming back home by train, he walked out of the station without having read the newspapers of the day, so he was still wearing his Fascist party badge. Someone told him that it was not a good idea, but he refused to take it off and, for a few days, he stubbornly insisted on wearing it. It took several days before he was forced to realize that the days of Fascism were over.

I am telling you this story to show you that Fascism in Italy was not something imposed by jack-booted thugs wearing black shirts. My grandfather, surely, was not one: I remember him as a kind man who loved children. But, during its heydays, Fascism was a truly totalitarian phenomenon. It permeated every facet of life: at school, at work, in the family, everything. And it was diffuse in all social classes: from the nobility to the workers. But what was it, exactly? An idea? A political party? A person? A hallucination? Or what? 

Fascists saluted each other by outstretching their right hands in the "Roman Salute," which the Ancient Romans never used. They would recognize the "fascio" as a symbol of unity, a meaning that it probably never had in Roman times. They claimed to have rebuilt the Roman Empire by conquering a country, Ethiopia, that newer was part of the ancient Roman Empire. They shared with each other some typical ideas, such as nationalism, racism, the idea of self-sacrifice ("me ne frego,") and a love for uniforms and military parades. In terms of policies, Fascism was a mix of socialism, nationalism, paternalism, imperialism, and more, often in contradiction with each other. It could be anything, but, in practice, it was mainly one thing: Benito Mussolini himself, the Duce degli Italiani,  the absolute ruler of Italy. 

During the Fascism age, the propaganda machine of the Fascist party ran unopposed and saturated the Italians' worldview. The power of the Duce grew so much that it probably went beyond the expectations of his sponsors, and perhaps of Mussolini himself. It became a common slogan that "Mussolini ha sempre ragione" (Mussolini is always right), and he would bask in public ceremonies where he was revered by "oceanic crowds". The Italian people had completely delegated to him all powers. They had regressed to the role of children obeying the orders of their stern father. Mark Oshinkie correctly described this phenomenon as follows (not referred to Italian Fascism, but valid for it, too),

Overall, per Jean Piaget, they thought like eight-year-olds. And as did Cub Scouts, they exhibited a pack mentality: the dysfunctional kind. 

This image (author unknown) nicely summarizes the essence of Fascism, just as of all forms of totalitarianism:

How could it happen that so much power was bestowed on a single man? In part, Mussolini's success was due to sheer luck, but also to his capability to bluff, and his willingness of catching a good opportunity when it appeared. More than all, he was a master of propaganda, one of the first politicians in history to use the new mass media -- the press, movies, and the radio -- for self-promotion. As a politician, Mussolini knew even too well that all politics is based on finding someone to blame. And he was selling to his sponsor the idea to deflect the rage of the working class to foreign targets, away from the Italian elites. Pivoting on a series of myths that were already diffuse at that time, he blamed the troubles of Italy on the decadent Northern Plutocracies, the evil Soviet Communists, and the inferior African races. In this way, he managed to obtain support from those sectors of Italian society which had been fighting each other before Fascism: the workers, the financial sector, the industrial sector, the military, the intellectuals, and the King of Italy himself. 

But Mussolini was not just a politician. He was a great salesman, too, one of those people who don't just sell things, they sell dreams. He sold to Italians the dream of a new Roman Empire and that they, the descendants of the ancient Romans, would be the new masters of the world. And Italians bought that dream enthusiastically. For 20 years, Italy saw a wave of Roman symbols, banners, fascis, people dressed in togas, and speeches about the new Empire. If you visit Rome today, you can still see four maps of the expansion of the Roman Empire on the wall of the ancient Forum, placed there in 1934. A fifth map, now removed, depicted the modern Italian conquest of Libya and Ethiopia. Was it a political program? If it was, it failed miserably. But at the time, evidently, it looked like a good idea.    

For some 20 years, the Duce was Italy, and Italy was the Duce. You could say that he was playing the mythical role of the "Sacred King," concentrating on himself the glory and the responsibility for all that was happening, good and bad. And everything that happened was written in the Celestial Gantt Charts, up in the sky. Glory is a harsh mistress, and no man can keep his mind sane for a long time while staying at the top, surrounded only by adulators and sycophants. By the late 1930s, Mussolini had become a caricature of himself: his mask of strong-jawed man had devoured him, turning him into a bumbling fool who had lost contact with reality, and who threw Italy into a series of absurd wars that ended with a humiliating defeat. Mussolini played the role of the sacred king up to the end, when, in 1945, he was ritually sacrificed, atoning with his death the atrocities committed in his name.

And now, about our times: can Fascism return? And if so, in which form? Clearly, humans have a fascination for strong leaders and, today, Western media are quick to label a foreign leader as a "dictator" or a "new Hitler." But few modern leaders seem to be able to approach the level of power that Mussolini had. Our "color revolutions" borrow some elements that Mussolini pioneered with his March on Rome, but they are a different thing, piloted by foreign powers and designed to create chaos. In 2020, Donald Trump may have tried something like a "March on Washington," but his militia, despite including a propitiatory horned shaman, turned out to be pitifully ineffective. 

Should we conclude that the age of Fascism is over? Maybe it is, at least in the aggressive form that it had assumed with Mussolini and his imitators. But totalitarianism, surely, is not over. On the contrary, it is on the increase. We see it very well with the current rise of censorship, groupthink, propaganda, control, encroaching on personal freedom, and more. But all that is arriving without the presence of a "great leader," at the top. What's happening? 

I think that Simon Sheridan has a key observation, here. In examining the Covid story, he interprets it in terms of the "devouring mother" -- an archetype that goes in parallel with that of the sacred king, but that's different in many ways. From Sheridan's site: 

Drawing on the work of the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, Sheridan makes the case that the archetype that has been dominant in the west for several decades is The Devouring Mother, a shadow form whose primary qualities include gaslighting, emotional manipulation and guilt tripping all in the name of protecting her children. Sheridan switches between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic to show how The Devouring Mother permeates all levels of society from interpersonal relationships and employment through to large scale political and social movements including corona.

So, the West may have experienced an "archetype switch" during the second half of the 20th century, when propaganda moved from promoting the rule of dominating fathers (or sacred kings) to that of devouring mothers, also known as "castrating mothers." Sheridan's idea makes a lot of sense. When the corona pandemic appeared, no strong leader emerged with the promise of bombing the evil virus to submission. On the contrary, the strong man of 2020, Donald Trump, was positively damaged by his attitude that many perceived as callous and uncaring. At most, we saw the emergence of suave grandfatherly figures, such as Tony Fauci, who adopted gaslighting as his main communication tool. And "Science" took the role of the devouring mother.  

There is a logic in this archetype switch. A sacred king is a real person, while the devouring mother is an abstraction. From the viewpoint of the elites, an abstract archetype is much better. "Science" can be easily controlled by corrupting those who speak for it, the scientists. Instead, a great leader can hardly be corrupted: he has all the power, and so he can have everything he wants. Another advantage of having raised science to a god-like role is that if (when) things start going bad, politicians and officials can reasonably hope to be able to get off the hook (in a literal sense), by blaming the scientists for having misled them. Mussolini was hanged upside down, but you cannot hang science. That does not prevent the possibility that individual scientists will be hanged, just like the Nazis at Nuremberg. But the elites don't care about scientists.  

These phenomena are another step in the evolution of the communication technology we call "propaganda." It had its infancy in the 19th century, matured with the dictatorships of the 20th century, and is still growing and morphing into new forms that, sometimes, we have difficulties recognizing and understanding. In any case, technology is power, and the problem of power is control. 

The modern forms of propaganda are immensely powerful, even near divine if we see them as ways of "creating reality" -- once a prerogative of God alone. But whereas God is benevolent and merciful, propaganda definitely is not. Its main tool is hate, and it uses it with glee to exterminate huge numbers of people. 

The Covid propaganda campaign had started with a theoretically benevolent purpose: saving grandma from the threat of a deadly virus. And yet, it soon became a hate campaign against the evil "no-vaxxers." It may well be that the people who started the campaign were surprised themselves by how the small creature called "coronavirus" had been turned into a Chthonic deity, just as those who supported Mussolini were surprised to see him turning into a sacred king. Fortunately, the Covid story is clearly losing its grip on people's minds. Perhaps it is being suppressed by the same entities who created it, not wanting to lose control of their creature. For the time being, they have returned to the old and tested methods of hate-mongering, as we see in the current demonization campaign against the Russians. 

So, have we reached "peak propaganda"? Maybe, but it may also be that we'll see it morphing into something new and more sophisticated. The new creature called "Metaverse" may offer new avenues for the powers that be to control their subjects. But history always goes in cycles, old ideas come back and disappear, always the same and always different. In a century or so, we saw dictators take the shape of ancient sacred kings, the evil dragoness Tiamat reappearing as a minuscule peduncled creature, human sacrifices performed on an immense scale, and, recently, nearly all the churches of God worshiping a golden calf called "Science." What else are we going to see? 

In the end, it is the human mind that creates myths, gods, and monsters. It is keeps them alive, and gives them the power to harm people. Propaganda is just an amplifier of these powers -- evil is all in the mind of the believer. You have to resist this evil, and you can if you remember that reality is not what appears in TV or in the media. Reality is what you see and what you touch. It is your friends, your family, your partner, your children. It is the ground you touch, the flowers you see, the singing of birds. Just stay human, and Fascism will never return.