Guido Preparata's website

[Jan Klimkowski]

To the gems above, and the entire interview is exceptional, I will simply add....

The Phony War:

LS: When Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, would it have been possible for France and England to end the war within a few weeks or months if they would have attacked Germany at its western borders?

GP: Military historians have to answer this question. My understanding is that they certainly could have done so, but that is an imaginary "if"; because if Hitler had known that the Allies would have certainly intervened from the outset, as the various defense (and bogus) pacts they had underwritten commanded them to do, he would have never struck. So ...

LS: Even though the Soviet Union also violated the integrity of the territory of Poland, France and England did not declare war towards the Soviet Union. Why not?

GP: Because these were all rehearsed moves to get the Germans eventually involved on two fronts. For three years, the Allies let the Western border sleep, why? The big "why" of World War II ... and the carnage they allowed to happen in those three years (1941-1944) ... Nobody likes to broach that topic, for obvious reason - patriotic delicacy, noblesse oblige ...

LS: To talk in terms of chess: was the "castling" between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill in May 1940 a real change of British policy?

GP: They make it appear so, but it's a deception. The English power elite is a monolithic bastion: fissuring in currents and seemingly antagonistic blocs to adapt to the shifting exigencies of any power game is a tactical device older than prostitution itself.

LS: What was actually the reason for Hitler to begin "Operation Barbarossa"?

GP: He acted as though he thought he had an agreement with Britain: Eurasia to Germany, the seven seas and the rest of the world to Britain. It is indeed mind-boggling how Germany's General Staff could have fallen for such a gargantuan deceit. In principle, Anglo-America, which is a maritime imperial league (buttressed by missile and air power), will fight tooth and nail to keep Eurasia sundered until, that is, it finds a way to own it entirely itself ...

It's about Power, not Economics:

GP: French economist Alain Cotta explained the euro set-up very well in a recent book (Sortir de l'Euro ou mourir a petit feu, Plon, 2011). The euro is as un-European as could be: it is evidently the brainchild of Anglo-American interests. The intent, as ever, is to constrict Europe financially so as to render it politically incapable of striking out on its own, and eventually asserting itself once more as the chief continental rival.

The idea of the euro is as follows: first, assign the lead to Germany as chief partner / banker / accomplice of the plan, chief economic force of the Union, and chief exporter; then let all the other weaker players (PIGs, Spain, Italy), who produce virtually nothing, indebt themselves vis-a-vis Germany and Anglo-American banks, which, in turn, make good money from the yield on these eurobonds (the debt spiral). Concomitantly, any kind of manufacturing / artisanal potential on the part of Europe's minor partners is systematically wrecked and incapacitated by the flood of Chinese imports (China: the other key accomplice in this triangular crippling of Europe), which are themselves crafted by laborers slaving for wages that are less than a tenth of the West's.
Thus Europe, partly through Anglo-America's strategic savvy and mostly through her own despairing fecklessness, is perennially fettered, constipated, anemic, moribund. That Greece would have been the first link to snap was known far and wide ever since this dismal show was launched 10 years ago. Funny to see how, for the past year or so, The Economist has been shrieking hysterically over the euro crisis, depicting in apocalyptic brushstrokes the prospects of its eventual collapse: funny, and revealing, to see British interests wailing so loudly, they, who are not even members of the euro. Eh bien, justement.

The lobotomization of America:

What we have in the US, instead, is a system governed by an ever-more oligarchically diseased, and outwardly aggressive, bureau-technocracy, which, internally, presides over a gradual privatization of public functions, a sweeping commercialization of all spiritual endeavors (higher learning and the arts), and a virtual monopolization (corporatization) of all economic activity. The combined impact of this insectifying / privatizing / monopolizing devolution has so indentured and enfeebled the nation's middle-class as to have transformed American society into a pervasively barbarized termitary with the highest crime, brutality, and incarceration rates of the post-industrialized world.

One of the prominent cultural (viz devotional) derivatives of such a disquieting process is a now ominous and televised worship of violence in all its forms - eg, from the grotesque realm of wrestling and the downright savagery of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to slasher/dismemberment horror (the Saw saga), an avalanche of porn of the most degrading forms channeled inter alia by GM and AT&T, and the glorification of industrialized holocaust as well as a crass pulp-mythologizing of ancient Sparta or Imperial Rome cut for semi -illiterate audiences. In its main outlines, America's present socio-economic and cultural model is to be analyzed in depth so as to prevent its adoption by, and diffusion to, the rest of the world.