Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

CLASH OF MENTALITIES, NOT CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

Abstract: “Being right” is probably the most important human notion: on this, pretty much all mentalities agree. “Right, by opposition to wrong” has been the driver of human evolution (the moral space, “right” as moral right, is just a subset of truth in general, and a frail one at that). Yes, the one with the science that is less wrong, the one who is more right, will tend to win wars.

Mentalities—collective cognitive-cultural software—change faster, and more deeply under the pressure of war. War is the ultimate selection mechanism for superior mindsets (as the Kremlin will find out to its sorrow). War forces reality checks that refute delusions. War is the ultimate confrontation with reality, it makes mentalities falsifiable (this is a generalization of what makes scientific sense possible according to Karl Popper).

Humanity progresses by throwing out the old software, and embracing newer ones. That process works “ONE FUNERAL AT A TIME” as Max Planck, the discoverer of the Quantum (E = hf) put it. [0]

War is the best way to get a lot of funerals, and thus to change mentalities in a hurry. 

Putin seems to have killed at least half a million Russian soldiers trying to conquer Ukraine from 2014 to 2025. That may not be enough to change Russian mentalities. It was only  after around ten million Germans died in World War Two, and around 5% of humanity worldwide, that Germany was ready for a serious re-examination of its once victorious mentality (it’s not completed yet). 

Let’s explore some of the most recent mentalities at play today, and how they relate to war.

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MAKE AVARICE GREAT AGAIN (MAGA); US Policy Repeatedly Prioritized US Advantage Over Civilizational Solidarity:. 

The entire planet can see the debasing spectacle of the US leadership trying to make money out of the invasion of Ukraine, sending billionaires to chew the fat with the Kremlin tyrants, as the US Deep Plutocratic State did after World War One and during World War Two … This is an allusion to the new 2025 Trump policy of SELLING US weapons to Europeans who then pass the weapons to Ukraine… Instead of the prior policy of giving weapons to Ukraine; even then, 90% of the US spending returned to the US Defense Industrial Base, which then acted like a subsidy for US weapon manufacturers [1]) . 

Except, this time, people are finally noticing this new version of MAGA. Turning war into a money machine is the mentality of the US Deep Plutocratic State, Major General Butler had already observed this, a century ago [2]. Much of US infrastructure, such as railroads and canals, had been built in the 19th century, on European credit (yes, even the Erie canal, financed by the state… using European capital).

The USA transitioned from an indebted nation to the world’s largest creditor after WWI (by the elegant maneuver of charging the French for every single bullet…This fact is NOT hyperbole although it may appear to be so to those with too noble an idea of US governance…)

Just as now, December 2025, thanks to Trump, all the US weapons sent to Ukraine are charged to European taxpayers: MAGA, Make Avarice Great Again!

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US NEFARIOUSNESS HIDING BELOW ACADEMIC LIES IN HOW THE US EMPIRE APPEARED:

It is often argued by US academia (which is mostly financed by US plutocracy, both directly and indirectly) that the grand old USA had no “nefarious” intent in breaking France and Britain economically and financially by using World War One as an instrument of financial ruin. It is of course impossible to believe this as Washington had been begged by Paris and London to stop evading the blockade of Germany, as early as 1914 (with the blockade on, Germany would have quickly lost the war). So, clearly the USA had evil intent, ignoring the fight for survival of France and Britain for years, knowing full well that, the longer World War One, the wealthier those invited to the White House would be, and the mightier the USA. 

Want more proof of nefariousness? The US seized German property, and distributed it to US plutocrats. The U.S. seized a wide range of German-owned properties after World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which empowered the Alien Property Custodian (A. Mitchell Palmer) to take control of assets deemed potentially supportive of the enemy, amassing roughly by war’s end the equivalent of the pre-war US federal budget!.

Starting in 1919, Wall Street was put, de facto, in charge of Germany. U.S. banks and investors earned interest and fees on large German and European loans (avarice again), while U.S. policy insisted that European Allies still repay in full their war debts to the United States, creating a circular and fragile system where German reparations were indirectly recycled to pay the Allies’ debts… (This explains why some French properties destroyed by the German army in 1914-1918 have still not been rebuilt)

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KREMLIN’S MENTALITY: STRAIGHT FROM THE CONQUERING MONGOLS: 

Facing those gory clowns from the US Deep Plutocratic Stater, are the Kremlin lunatics who apparently feel that the entire planet is all invading Mongols, not to say Mongolians, invading 4/7/365, all of them Nazis.

See “The Genesis Of The Kremlin’s Base Mentality” for the 800 years old context, starting with Aspasia’s quote: “A polity is a thing which nurtures men, good men when it is noble, bad men when it is base.”

The Muscovite state was built on Mongol administrative, fiscal, military, and terror practices. Could it have been different? Possibly, as Novgorod and Pskov developed republics, even under Mongol overlordship. Yet, a succession of Kremlin tyrants were highly successful (Ivan III in 1480 CE, Ivan IV, etc.) And this mentality has been solidly ingrained in Russian culture, depicting those who opposed the Tsar as traitors, and Ukraine is now reevaluating some classical Russian literature (Pushkin, Gogol, etc.).

After 1478 CE (capture of prosperous republican Novgorod to Tsar Ivan III the Great) and 1480 CE (end of the Great Stand on the Ugra, when the “Tatar yoke” became history), Muscovy retained Mongol governance logics: patrimonial autocracy, servitor nobility (pomest’e), terror as policy, frontier warfare mentality.

A conquest mentality reproduces and reinforces conquest mentalities. In 1654 CE, Ukrainian Cossacks signed an alliance, the Treaty of Pereyaslav with Moscow (against Poland-Lithuania), which the Kremlin decided to interpret as a treaty of submission. This brought continual encroachment on the Kremlin’s part, including the abolition of the Zaporizhian Sich in 1775 (under husband killer Tsarina Catherine The Great)  

The Treaty of Pereyaslavt illustrates a clash of mentalities: the Ukrainian Cossacks viewed it as a temporary military alliance, while the Kremlin (operating on the Mongol “submission” software) viewed it as eternal subjugation. This specific historical misunderstanding is still playing out in the 21st century.

Conveniently the Kremlin forgot that it used to be allied to Hitler and this is how the Nazis invaded Europe, East and West (or at least the parts which the Kremlin had not already invaded like the Baltic countries, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.) .

The Nazi tanks advancing through France, and the planes of the Blitz bombing Britain burned Kremlin oil. The Kremlin did not just give massive Soviet exports in oil, grain, manganese, rubber to the Nazis, but also rare elements necessary for modern alloys, food… bypassing the Allied (Franco-British-Commonwealth) blockade. Once the rare element pipeline from the Kremlin, in particular chromium, got cut off by the stupid Nazis themselves, they found out to their dismay that their jet engines melted… And the dreamed science fiction Wunderwaffen thereafter melted on the tarmac… 

The Kremlin alliance with Nazism was crucial. Consider simply oil: in 1944-1945, Germany ran out of oil. Germany couldn’t train its pilots anymore (that would have used oil necessary for combat). Jet fighters were dragged in position on the runways, pulled by oxen. So, seriously, Nazi tanks would not have invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France without Russian oil. The Great Reich in its greatest expression was greatly a Kremlin masterpiece, because, without the alliance with Stalin, Germany would have been stuck into what it truly was: a weak power..

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EUROPE COLONIZED BY ITS EX-COLONIES:

Colonial inversion is a real historical phenomenon (see Rome’s fall to Germanic elites, Persians taking control of the Damas Caliphate in 750 CE, Abbasid dependency on peripheral Turkic Mamluks, China’s repeated conquests by many steppe groups, Portugal becoming a province of Brazil, etc…)

So on the left the US Deep Plutocratic State, on the right, the Kremlin mentality. Under foot, Europe. Seen on the greatest historical scale, this is the case of the master civilization being occupied by its ex-colonies (“Rus” initially designated an ethnicity of Sweden). 

That the colonizer ended up being colonized shouldn’t surprise anybody: the present North American population exists because the preceding American population was mostly exterminated. Profiting from a shared genocide forges a community. 

Similarly, if at some point Russia extended over 24 million square kilometers, nearly a quarter of the ice free, non barren land on Earth, that was thanks to many a genocide and scorched earth policies (what is happening in Ukraine at the Kremlin’s claws is much less horrendous than the conquest of the North Caucasus in the 19th century when even forests got exterminated). 

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VIOLENCE CAN SET MENTALITIES, FOR BETTER OR WORSE, FOR CENTURIES:

When a civilization practices genocide for centuries and as a strategy, the civilization becomes genocidal. Reciprocally the rise of Europe can be traced to the Frankish strategy of dismantling Christian terror (inaugurated by emperor Constantine), practicing openness, and then outlawing slavery (launch of Francia, 481 CE-657 CE)

The road to hell or heavens can be taken after a couple of battles: the Frankish regime of refoundation of Rome the right way, was mostly the fruit of two battles: in the first one Clovis, representing legitimate Roman power, destroyed Syagrus’ rogue, illegal dynastic regime (486 CE). The other crucial battle was Clovis’ destruction of the Goths, ejecting them from Gallia (507 CE; the Goths had beaten the Romans for 250 years…).

The example of the Aztecs is revealing: they enjoyed war for war’s sake (“flower wars”), it fed the gods and also stomachs with proteins… But when the Conquistadores appeared, they couldn’t change mentalities on a dime, and instead ate some Conquistadores… Big mistake… Cortez’s army may have had 82,000 soldiers, 80,000 of them local enemies of the Aztecs. Also many cities produced weapons for the Conquistadores, especially bolts for crossbows. 

One speaks of Aztec civilization. Yes, the Aztec had a civilization, but it was recent and fragile. As far as their neighbors were concerned, Aztecs were basically savages, with a savage mentality, who had conquered their predecessors who had made all the discoveries. After settling a few differences, Cortez and his Native Mayan wife-princess interpreter found easy common ground, and an alliance was born. The Aztecs were more a derivative civilization, not creators like the Toltecs and the Maya. 

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OUTLAWING SLAVERY: NOT JUST A MORAL TRIUMPH BUT A TECHNOLOGICAL CATALYST. QUEEN BATHILDE’S STRATEGIC RESTRUCTURING OF FRANCO-ROMAN CIVILIZATION:

Bathilde was probably the Princess of Kent, thus very knowledgeable, self-assured, domineering and valuable. Captured by corsairs, she was sold to the Mayor of the palace (the French equivalent of what would be a Shogun in Japan 800 years later), She refused to marry him, escaped and then instead persuaded the Frankish Prince, only 14 years old, to marry her, ten years his senior. The king then died, and Bathilde was queen. Bathilde soon led the Imperium Francorum on her own, while having five children. In 657 CE her husband died, and the once enslaved queen exacted vengeance on slavery. Queen Bathilde outlawed child trafficking and the slave trade (within the Frankish empire). That abolition was not just a moral choice, it incentivized:

• free peasants,
• military service,
• technological substitution for slave labor.

This is the most spectacular example of a CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRESSIVE SHATTERING OF INFERIOR MENTALITIES. That was a DRASTIC departure from the Greco-Roman civilizational model, which depended upon slavery (as Aristotle pointed out). Bathilde also funded 5 monasteries which were, at the time, the equivalent of universities.. Because the Franks encouraged, and then mandated, the teaching of secular knowledge by religious establishments. When, 400 years later, in the 12th century, the Christians evolved the lunatic idea of requiring celibacy for clerics, professors rebelled, and the Cathedral Schools, which were the wealthiest schools were transmogrified into universities…

The first Franks/Europeans who visited China, a few centuries later, were amazed to see hundreds of Chinese lifting a single large trunk, a task which, in Francia, would have used few people, but lots of mechanical leverage (thus knowledge of the science of mechanics) and strong, large domesticated animals (labor horses or oxen made bigger, stronger and more docile by careful breeding).  

Queen Bathilde was extremely fierce. She was advised by some friendly bishops, and that came in handy, because she had to execute many hostile bishops (typically from very wealthy families with hundreds of slaves), who depended upon slavery to achieve the good life which Aristotle had lauded and explicitly related to slavery…Bathilde was made a saint two centuries after her death… So even the Vatican recognized that many bishops had to be eliminated…And that Aristotle had to be contradicted.

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ELEMENTS OF MENTALITY:

Colonies tend to be derivative in mentality and more simplistic, as their main energy consists in implementing their survivability… Colonies did not use genocides always: trade was another model; Greek colonies in Southern France were in excellent terms with the Native Celts).

Authors have pondered the clash of mentalities since before Caesar’s time. Actually Caesar used the psychological analysis of his enemy’s mentalities to gain advantage in battle: such is the core of his books. Much of the Roman army’s mentality was extremely refined, literate, disciplined, yet innovative and provided a crucial advantage in combat. 

There are elements of mentalities, and they travel around like pieces of genetic code. When a combination of some of them starts to win, it becomes dominant, and gets to be called a “civilization”, “religion” or an “ideology”, or a way of life (Romanitas, Graecitas). 

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WARS ARE MOST EFFICIENT IN CHANGING MENTALITIES:

Islam is the poster boy of how to change mentalities through conquest: Islam’s sword swept through the Middle East and adjoining areas in a few years of spectacular battles, and has been there ever since. However, Islam has been far from a monolith: many variants have evolved… Generally one battle at a time (the “Battle of the Camel”, lost by Aisha may have been the most important, turning Islam into something sexist not intended by the Prophet). 

Traditional thinkers deep in their academic burrows will pontificate that mentalities instead change through reflection, meditation and the haughty wisdom of the elite which they aspire to join (when they don’t belong to it already). That’s not supported by the facts. 

Some will whine that believing that more primeval forces contribute more to the advancement of thinking, sounds a bit like Hitlerism, advocating for the selection of the fittest and the strongest. Indeed, except, applied to mentalities: Fittest and strongest, mentalities.. .

It’s not deep German thinking from academic ivory towers which demonstrated that Nazism was weak and not mentally fit. Instead a world war which killed around 100 million people, 5% of humanity, exterminated Nazism. Here is a detailed case:

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The Case Of Max Planck: Enlightenment Through Mayhem:

Other German intellectuals besides Nietzsche saw Germany for what it had become.Einstein and his family fled to Italy, and Einstein studied in Switzerland to escape Germany’s “barracks mentality”. However, sponsored by Planck, Einstein ended up in Berlin at the pinnacle of German physics, served and helped by many top minds (like the mathematician Hilbert who helped Einstein with General Relativity). Interestingly, Max Planck was, in complete contrast with Einstein, a German nationalist (which explains their little plot pretending that Einstein discovered Relativity, the theory of Poincare’, Lorentz and others). 

War can act in the most devious ways to enlighten even intellectuals. In the first days of the world war that Germany launched on August 1, 1914, the world media related the deliberate killing of Belgian civilians, and even small children, the burning of libraries, etc. Major General Ludendorff had given the orders. Max Planck, head of the Prussian and Imperial Academy, was among the 93 famous German nationalistic intellectuals who signed a letter, the “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three” denying that German soldiers invading neutral Belgium had committed atrocities in 1914. That was completely impossible: Planck and his fellow 92 super intellectuals firmly believed the Germans to be intrinsically good. 

However as the war went on, Planck discovered progressively that this was not the case: neither the Belgians nor the French wanted to be conquered at all, and Great Britain agreed with them. One of Planck’s sons was made prisoner by the French, Planck could see Germany introducing chemical warfare, etc. 

After Hitler became Chancellor, Planck went to talk to him about the disaster that the mistreatment of Jews brought to Germany. Over an hour, Planck explained to the “Guide” that his university had been destroyed by Nazi policies. To his dismay, Planck realized  that Hitler was in his own world, and nobody could reach him there. 

In 1944 Planck’s other son was arrested by the Nazis for acts of resistance and executed in 1945 (when the Nazis were certain to lose the war they felt the urgency to kill as many of their enemies as possible, and that included plenty of Germans)..

Planck died in 1947. Planck’s shift mirrors a national cognitive shift. Counting round one and two, it had taken more than 12 million German funerals for most of the remaining Germans to realize the errors of their ways. .

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EUROPEAN DEFEATISM IS THE DOMINANT MENTALITY IN EUROPE:

Europe got severely defeated in the Twentieth Century. The Germans, who had just been unified by Prussia, embraced the latter racist, anti-Jewish, militaristic and imperialistic ways, and that well before committing a genocide in Namibia or launching a world war to subdue Europe (“1914”). Read Nietzsche why he hated Germans and why I am a good European instead of a German.

After Bismarck’s victory in 1871, Nietzsche saw the new German Reich as a triumph of militarism, nationalism, anti-Judaism, and beer-hall philistinism. He famously wrote in 1888:

“The Germans are now boring; they used to be merely uncultivated.”

(Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever” §4). 

Nietzsche, self-declared “good European”, believed the Reich turned Germans into obedient, sheep-like “good citizens” who worshipped power and success instead of greatness, and would bring the greatest wars and devastation to Europe in the 20th Century, and they did. Nietzsche thought German anti-Semitism was “the basest of all tastes.”

“The Germans – once they were called a people of thinkers: do they still think at all today? Germans now find thinking boring… I fear the Germans will soon have lost even their sense for music.” (Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack” §2)

“Good Germans, bad Germans – today there are only bad Germans.” (letter, late 1888)

Nietzsche was unfortunately right. It all came crashing down on August 2, 1914, when, without even bothering with a declaration of war, the Kaiserreich launched murderous war parties inside the French Republic. In the next four weeks, Germany would commit hundreds of war crimes in neutral Belgium, only to come to near annihilation when the French launched a successful, devastating counterattack east of Paris.(First Battle of the Marne).

France and Britain won World War One militarily. But economically, financially, diplomatically and in the realm of the crafty stabbing in the back, the US Deep Plutocratic State won. France and Britain, especially Britain, did not understand what had hit them. They should have resisted the USDPS: that was the only way to prevent round two, World War Two. 

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CEASEFIRE IN 1918, VICTORY DELAYED TO 1945, OR HOW US BECAME DOMINANT:

The Trump administration has pushed for a hasty ceasefire in Ukraine, giving Putin what he wants the most at this point, disarming Ukraine enough to ensure a Kremlin victory. We have seen that movie before, in 1918, when the USA flew to the rescue of Franco-British victory against the German tyranny and the USA established the US peace order, Pax Americana: Europe pays, US triumphs.

THE RIGHT MENTALITY IN 1918-1919 OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN TO EXTIRPATE WHAT BECAME NAZISM:

Plotting and executing a World War, as Germany did in 1914, is the ULTIMATE WAR CRIME (this is not just my words, but exactly, word for word, what the Nuremberg Trial wrote in 1945 when judging the Nazis). Ideally war criminals such as Ludendorff (chief of the German army) should have been arrested, tried and executed (he had personally ordered horrendous war crimes against civilians in August 1914 in Belgium, a neutral country deliberately attacked). 

This way, after being hanged as he deserved to be, Ludendorff could not have founded the Nazi Party… It should have been for representative democracies France and Britain to remake Germany in 1919, as it was remade after 1945. Only that way could WW2 have been avoided. WW2 happened because WW1 got to a ceasefire… Not to a victory.

The US attitude in 1918-1919 was transparent: US president Wilson’s insistence on a “peace without victory” said it all. It could only be explained by Wilson’s racism (and thus his pro-German attitude). 

Wilson, the most racist US president, could only be sympathetic to German racism. So France and Britain should have kept on going with the war, slow and steady, trying to take as few losses as possible, because the German army was done for, and the Southern Europe offensive, led by the French, had cut off Germany from food: one could count on the Serbs making sure it would stay that way. 

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If You Do Not Eradicate Destructive Mentalities, They Reconstitute Themselves:

Instead of finishing WW1 with a victory, the mentality in power at the time was peace at any cost and France and Britain ingratiating themselves to their creditors, the USA (which had as much empathy as an oven at Auschwitz; not a haphazard image: Auschwitz is what US policy brought). The ceasefire preserved German elites, and they had caused the war, it enabled the Dolchstosslegende, and incubated Nazism by preserving the very mindset which had brought WW1.The defeated German army retreated under its banners, as if it had won, and the survival of many hard core hyper nationalists soldiers and officers made the core of the Freikorps, and, within a couple of years, of the SA and the Nazi Party.  

The stab-in-the-back legend explained the loss of the war, not the fact that Germany had been incredibly wrong to have started that enormous mayhem, for an incredibly long list of wrong reasons..

Retrospectively, France and Britain ought to have refused to become the financial slaves of the USA, and informed the decomposing German government and its melting armed forces that they were requesting surrender without conditions. 

By then the USA had nearly two million soldiers in Europe (the Americans had brought the “Spanish” flu, and most of them had not approached the front). If they had refused to join France and Britain, the latter two would have an excellent ground to refuse US financial extortion. France in particular could argue that not one bullet made in France was ever paid by the US for the war of independence (most “US” bullets were French in the beginning of the WOI).

Marshal Foch, chief of all Allied forces, himself later said: “If they had not accepted the Armistice, three months later I would have been in Berlin.” The German army was retreating in panic up to 20 kilometers a day, was starved of food and ammunition, and the Kriegsmarine had rebelled…

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But the right mentality was not proposed, the moment passed, and immediately thereafter, the US became the stealth master of Europe, with US giants like Henry Ford financing the Nazi Party and its little army (to the point that in 1923, Hitler had a gigantic portrait of Henry Ford behind his desk in Munich in the sumptuous Nazi headquarters which distributed for free Ford’s book, “The International Jew”).

Wall Street intervened three times in the 1920s alone, to reconfigure German finances (the first intervention was putting an acolyte of JP Morgan as German Central Banker, with the practical effect of refusing to help reconstruct what the Germans had just destroyed in France and Belgium…)

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Nietzsche despised any mass mentality, not just the “German” Herd mentality. Nietzsche thought that any herd mentality would degrade thought—including modern egalitarianism. The reason for that is simple: if everybody thinks the same, there can only be that many ideas around, and no debate to foster more of them.

Thus mentalities that suppress individuality are brittle under war’s selective pressure…. Simply because they produce fewer ideas, especially prevent the evolution of superior ideas, and thus are more stupid as societies and as elites.

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EUROPE’S BEATEN DOG MENTALITY:

Mentalities shaped by trauma become inflexible; trauma from 1914–1945 added to effective defeat of the victorious righteous ones, France and Britain, produced an allergy to force, accentuated by the fact that the USA and its barking dogs insisted upon the monstrosity of European “colonialism” (those fierce canids were mostly the French existentialists and pseudo-leftists many of whom started their career by playing for Stalin or his Nazi friends, Sartre and De Beauvoir being the poster critters of this sorry show).

So WW1 and WW2 turned into Pyrrhic victories for the European democracies: the more they won, the more enslaved to an ever wealthier USA they became… And a powerful dictatorship in Russia was also helped by US plutocrats: Baku Oil Fields, offshore…In 1940, the USA refused to help the French Republic fighting the Nazis to death. In 1941, the US flew to the rescue of the Kremlin tyranny… after the Kremlin spent half the year being allied to Hitler: does that sound familiar? One must conclude that Washington viewed Moscow as an ally and Paris as a rival…

Thus Europe got severely defeated in the Twentieth Century by its ex-colony, the USA. After charging the French for every single bullet,  the U.S. financed post-WWI reconstruction on its terms (Dawes Plan changing reparations; later the Young plan); WWII Lend-Lease led to Bretton Woods dominance… The US delegation did not hesitate to substitute a document for another, turning around the resistance of the famous UK economist, Lord Keynes (presiding) that way….

The US Plutocratic Deep State was able to exploit Europe’s divisions… And this is still going on: one can see it in weapons’ procurement in 2025: Most Europeans prefer to buy US rather than say, French, and the reasons rolled out to justify that are generally vile lies (how could they explain that they have been bought?… They would go to prison…).

Europe has developed a deep-seated fear of power, a sort of allergy, caused by the horrors of the 20th century. So Europe tries to reduce power, its own power, as much as possible, a bit like a penitent of the Middle Ages, in a cold room open to icy winds, wearing a hair shirt, and embracing a religion the ancestors fought for 13 centuries. Verily, real morality is the opposite: only a power mentality will bring solutions, including to the various pollution crises, in particular the CO2 exponentiation and its incoming Jurassic climate. Militarily, refusing European power has just fabricated Putin, made China aggressive and now brought what looks increasingly like the collapse of civilization in (much of) Africa.

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IF YOU WANT CIVILIZATION, FIGHT FOR IT:

As the millennia passed by, civilization has progressed. Not surprisingly, the most advanced mentalities evolved in the parts where there was the most traffic (Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East is at the junction of Africa and Eurasia). Eurasia had three poles of industrial and mental creation: China, India and Europe. 

Europe contributed more than the rest, because the Celts had the best metallurgy, hence the best swords and ploughs. Christianism, the religion of the sheep, brought quasi immediate disaster, showing to the Frankish leaders what NOT to do. 

In particular the divisiveness caused by Christian Fundamentalists contributed twice to the fall of North Africa (so-called “Donatists” and others had been viewed as “heretics”, so North Africa was in a state of religious war, and fell first to the Vandals and then to the Muslims) 

The Franks thus reestablished a relaxed mentality in religious matters, and made military preparedness second to none (by fighting everything in sight, and themselves too). Result? Western Europe has been unconquered since the Fifth Century.

Thus it is war which created Europe. And Europe was extremely bellicose until the 20th century. The German tragedy 1853-1945 was a consequence of this bellicose mentality, but in a case of bellicose overstretched (it had happened before, in 843 CE during an horrendous civil war between the Franks; the result was a century of attempted invasions after that from Viking Magyar, etc…)

(Both France and Germany are drifting in 2025 towards bringing back the draft.)

The case of Asia is interesting: Buddhism once dominated India, for many generations. Meanwhile in China, Confucianism became all too often prominent. Buddhism has, in common with Christianism, a pacifism at all cost, turn the other cheek attitude. Confucianism, while allowing war against unjust rulers (as many Christian rulers did), is not very bellicose, either.

Arguably, the result was that India and China were repeatedly invaded. Not so much Korea, and not at all Japan. The latter two, like Europe, were ruled by ferocious military aristocracies whose effective task was the defense of the realm. In Vietnam, military leaders related to the Tran emperors formed private armies that repelled three Mongol invasions (while China succumbed to the first one).  

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US OPPORTUNISM EXPLOITED EUROPEAN SLUMBER:

Figuring out the greed, deception and back stabbing which enabled the US Deep Plutocratic State to take advantage of Europe is not anti-American… It’s just figuring out how blind and unaware Europe could be… Although that may be mostly the fruit from the eagerness of European elites to join their mightier US peers. 

The USA moved into a European slumber which has other consequences, for example with European pseudo-ecology (“Paris Accord”), which make Europe ever more powerless (literally) and the all too real deindustrialization which it helps foster.

But then of course, mentalities have long discovered that they compete with each other. The plutocratic main mentality is to foster itself, …because plutocracy is unnatural to human psychobiology… To do that, the fundamental trick is to depower the Plebs, thus deprive it of employment. 

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SI BIS REPETITA PLACENT: ONE MUST REPEAT THE FRANKS’ STRATEGY:

Propped by Bathilde’s outlawing of slavery, Western Europe led by a military aristocracy, went for developing science, technology and machines. By 1000 CE the Franks’ “Renovated Roman Empire OF Franks And Romans” had surpassed Rome in some important parameters with a great future.

While Europe repelled all invaders for 15 centuries, giving itself the smarts and powers to do so, India and China got repeatedly invaded, and their contributions to civilization, although formidable (the zero and  perfecting Greek numerals for India, gunpowder for China) were episodic, and overall added for much less than Europe, to the point they adopted (most of) European civilization with a vengeance. 

Humanity is at many crossroads. We have to choose the better mentalities, and that means the mentalities best able to organize human societies in the most powerful way… And who is the most powerful is determined by war. Thus, this is the age of war.

In particular, Europe must get out of its slumber, stop making the life of its citizens hell through mazes of taxes and ridiculous things, and throw out the defeatist mentality to re-embrace the bellicosity which made it so superior for so long (and yes that means colonizing the Solar System).. 

One should rather not advocate bellicosity for bellicosity’s sake…as Putin does, as Caesare Borgia, Cardinal at 18, son of a Pope) or Adolf Hitler (a notoriously deranged imbecile) did (while singing the praises of Islam, a war religion in his opinion). But one must be aware that, as the correct mentalities need to be selected and survive, activities akin to war must be embraced (many felt that way when they gave their vote for Trump). Humanity has progressed towards greater intelligence because the mentalities fostering mental superiority won.  

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RIGHT MAKES MIGHT:

Reading the preceding essay, some will sneer that it is not captive of the “purely humanitarian” approach. But that mentality of identifying sheep and human, a species error, derives from an all-too restricted view of “humanism”, “humanitarian” and “humanity”. Yes, humans are carnivorous apes, not perpetually grazing sheep. Reality is where humanity comes from. Intelligence reads between the lines of reality as presented to us by our perception and culture. And the reality is that human intelligence rested, in several ways, on carnivority. Being a predator helped humans being smarter and meat provided more energy and thus time to plot the next strategy. It also means that the human views of “goodness” and happiness are stratified and multidimensional.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ultimately identifies the highest form of eudaimonia with a life of philosophical contemplation… Interestingly, Aristotle was extremely intimate and a mentor of the men who killed the Greek city-states civilization to replace it by dictatorships under the overall label of “Hellenistic Regimes”. So Aristotle was not a good man, and when Athens figured out that the great philosopher was the Macedonian tyranny mastermind, he had to escape arrest and flee for his life.

In other words, insisting that traditional “humanitarianism”, viewed as a form of sleep, an extreme moderation and contemplation, is all the good there is, may mean the exact opposite, accepting the peace and quiet provided by what nHahah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. 

This essay is not a version of the “might makes right” philosophy. It is the exact opposite (the concepts are in common, but the logic is different). The Nazis believed that might make right… But they were not right, and that’s why they didn’t get the might. Although intellectual or moral superiority is ultimately irrelevant without the military power to enforce it or prevent its destruction, it is precisely the certainty of destruction which forces the superiority to become so superior that it is capable to steer superior beings to victory.

Only fools will make the category error of opposing a “Darwinian” selection of mentalities with “morality”… Because all “moralities” have been, themselves, derived that way!

In the world we presently have, most people take orders from higher ups or their institutions. However, for more than 5 million years of gathering humanity, it never could have engaged in that exact opposite of what made it evolve, otherwise we would never have graced the gloomy expanse of a brutal universe….In other words, the present organization of civilization, as any prior civilization, has been in violation of the fundamental metamorality of humanity: “Fais ce que voudras!” ([3]; Rabelais).

But then again, once one lives in cities, doing whatever one wants is not an option anymore. Tragic humanism was already evoked in Malraux’s La Condition Humaine (1933), in which struggle brings metamorphosis. Malraux treats conflict not as a regrettable accident but as the very medium through which consciousness becomes fully human. 

Mentalities are how one lives, or, more exactly, how one survives. 

At this point, in this age of means of global extermination, we want to find enough of a common mentality for most of us to survive (this is the concept hidden in the etymology of morality and ethos). It is crucial to realize that this will be obtained through conflict… So we shouldn’t shrink from confrontation: debate etymologically means: beating thoroughly.

Let’s debate!

Mentalities do not change through lectures, diplomacy, or moral suasion. Mentalities evolve into more refined and effective forms through the harshest possible feedback loops: humiliation, failure, catastrophe, and war. Europe’s, and the world’s, survival in the 21st century depends on relearning this lesson, that conflict can save, like nothing else can, as soon as possible.

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Realism in its rawest form is how the universe works. Everybody sometimes dies, the most significant question we can ask is what for. 

Delusion is fatal for what most people hold dearest: Whether it’s Aztec flower wars, Nazi race theory, or European pacifism. Hypocrisy can be very profitable: The U.S. world empire thrived by monetizing the conflicts of others, and recent European submission only accentuates this.

Reform is always violent: the French revolutionary wars lasted a quarter of a century and were a bloodbath, but they wrote what is now the world’s consensus on human rights.  Mentalities rarely change without the “selection pressure” of war. [4] 

Having challenged the all-too comfortable notion that “progress” happens through peaceful debate alone, I shall rest my case and let the bloody facts speak for themselves.

Patrice Ayme

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[0] Planck’s original statement, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,”

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[1] ~90% of U.S. aid (~$175B total since 2022, including $60B+ military) stays in the U.S., boosting defense jobs (38 states) and production (e.g., Lockheed Martin orders up). Economic “benefit”: GDP ripple from arms manufacturing, but net cost to U.S. taxpayers is real (~$18–50B in actual value transferred, per Economists for Ukraine). WWI/II parallels hold (e.g., Lend-Lease), but today it’s less “profiteering” than strategic Keynesianism—war as economic stimulus without U.S. boots on the ground.

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[2] Clash of Mentalities Versus Clash Of Civilizations. Harvard professor Huntington’s core argument, in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, posits that post-Cold War conflicts would increasingly occur along cultural and civilizational lines rather than ideological or national ones. Huntington identified eight or nine major civilizations: Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, Orthodox (Eastern Christian), Japanese, African, and possibly Buddhist. He argued that the West would clash most sharply against Islamic and Sinic civilizations. 

Huntington confused civilizations and religions, etc. Instead what we see is a dividing line between dictatorships and democracies and a big divide on how information is manipulated, and how to implement progress, and what exactly progress consists of. For example, just within the 100 variants of Islam, some are maximally compatible with the greatest, fastest advancement of civilization while others are the exact opposite…

China has integrated much of “Socialism” originating somewhere between the Rhine and Paris with purely “capitalist” elements (long thought to be “Western”, but actually invented may be even earlier in China). So China incorporated elements of Western European mentality which thrived in 19th century Europe. That way China is much more European now, in the best possible way, than the thoroughly corrupted degenerates in Brussels. 

China was never as isolated as it was long imagined to be: extensive contacts with the rest of Eurasia have thrived for the last 10,000 years. China was long and often under “Mandarin” control, an intellectual class of successful exam takers.But Korea next door (and often more than twice the area of all of Korea now) was ruled by a military aristocracy…which pretended to be a bit Buddhist, and a bit Taoist… Just like the one in Japan…

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[3] “Fais ce que voudras”, parce que les gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnie honnête, ont par nature un instinct et un aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse à accomplir des faits vertueux et les éloigne du vice, aiguillon qu’ils nommaient honneur.”L’abbaye de Thélème, François Rabelais, Gargantua, 1534 CE…

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[4] In the 17th century, the bloodbath was in England, in a succession of wars and revolutions which established Parliamentary democracy (4% of England population killed, 200,000; up to 20% of Irish population killed in Cromwell’s campaigns). The parallel movement in France, La Fronde, failed because Anne d’Autriche, the Regent, had nerves of steely privilege, and because it was not violent enough (Westminster established the “New Model Army” of 20,000 men to defeat the king). 

If the French Queen had been arrested and decapitated, similarly to what happened in England, history would have been very different; instead Anne replied haughtily to the president of the Paris Parliament:in 1648:“Monsieur, nous ne sommes pas en république!”.  

Elite mentality: Portrait by Rubens of the 24 year old Black Angel Of Bloody Death, Anne d’ Autriche,  Ana Maria Mauricia de Austria;, Reine de France for 51 years. She gave birth to the future Louis XIV 13 years, and 5 still born infants, after the portrait above. She became absolute monarch of what was by far the most powerful country in Europe when she was 42. The Fronde, following the three civil wars in England, started five years later. Anne knew very well what a republic was. But the arrogance of plutocracy has no bounds. “Monsieur, nous ne sommes pas en république!“