"The Red Baron" Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten On The Success of The China Model

Apethorpe Palace, home of Tudor and Stuart monarchs, now the property of Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten, and made available for public tourism in July and August.

Wikipedia:

Jean Christophe Iseux, Baron von Pfetten zu St. Mariakirchen (born 11 November 1967 in Lyon), is a diplomat, academic and landowner.

Pfetten was the first European appointed as member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at local level.

Pfetten hosted a series of private meetings on Iran's nuclear programme attended by top military commanders from Iran and Israel as well as senior officials from the P5 nations.

. . .Pfetten received his BSc and MSc (Physics and Chemistry) from the University of Strasbourg, and, his Dipl. Eng. Geophysicist from the Institut de Physique du Globe (admissible to the Ecole Normale Supérieure) and thereafter won a European Erasmus scholarship. In 1989 he patented two inventions in the fields of nuclear submarine and of hydraulic fracturing which he presented at the SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers) Production Operations Symposium on April 7–9, 1991 in Oklahoma, USA. In the same year he received a master's degree in management studies from Templeton College, Oxford University and a Master of Philosophy in international relations from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. In 1992 he attained a master's degree in political science from the University of Bonn.

. . .Pfetten currently holds non-executive positions on the boards of several multinationals. Pfetten has been credited with attracting around 2% of total foreign direct investment into China since 2002.

. . .The Financial Times, Newsweek and The Spectator  reported that between June and October 2013 Pfetten organized two rounds of back-channel diplomatic meetings on the issue of Iran's nuclear program. The first round, hosted by the Institute for East West Strategic Studies and held at Green Templeton College, Oxford, brought together senior Chinese and Israeli officials. A second, more confidential round of talks, hosted by Pfetten in his French chateau, was moderated by former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke and French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. Attendees included Major General Huang Baifu, vice chairman of the China Institute for International Strategic Studies; a former chief of general staff of the Iranian Air Force; as well as General Doron Avital, chairman of the Israeli Knesset's Security and Defense Committee. Pfetten told The Financial Times that the "Track II" meeting was "aimed at persuading Beijing to take a more pro-active involvement in the Middle East" and emphasized 'the willingness of China and the US to work hand-in-hand in resolving the Iranian nuclear issue.'

Wikipedia:

Apethorpe Palace, formerly known as "Apethorpe Hall", is a Grade I listed country house, dating to the 15th century, close to Apethorpe, Northamptonshire. It was a "favourite royal residence" for James I. After restoration by English Heritage the house was sold in 2015 to Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten as his "private residence", under an arrangement where it is "open during July and August for pre-booked tours only", these managed by English Heritage.

An excerpt from, "Red Baron's Jacobean Apethorpe Palace marks its rebirth with party" by Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, June 13, 2016:

Just 18 months after Jean Christophe Iseux, Baron von Pfetten, spent £2.5m on a house with 48 bedrooms but no running water, he has decided to give a little party. A few score of his closest friends, including the Duke of Kent, are invited for champagne, music and dinner on Tuesday evening, with entertainment by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

. . .Von Pfetten, a diplomat, Oxford academic and champion foxhound breeder, has been nicknamed “the Red Baron” for his years as an adviser to the Chinese government on everything from inward investment to Iran’s nuclear programme; the Chinese guests will include a government member and the head of an oil company.

. . .The house served as a borstal for much of the 20th century until it was bought in poor repair by a Libyan businessman, Wanis Mohammed Burweila, said locally never to have spent a single night there. He left abruptly, never to return, after the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher at the Libyan embassy in 1984.

The house only survived through the heroic efforts of the elderly gardener, and the caretaker, George Kelley. Their salaries stopped but they kept the grounds in check, patrolling the house, chasing off vandals, putting buckets and saucepans under leaks, collecting dead pigeons and blocking up broken windows. Despite their efforts, the house seemed doomed to join the long roll call of lost mansions until the government finally stepped in to save it. Kelley, who was awarded an MBE in 2008 for his efforts, has now retired but returns most days to walk his dog in the grounds.

Von Pfetten insists Apethorpe will be a family home but not a closed world, and has signed an agreement to admit the public for 50 days of each of the next 80 years – this year by guided tours in July and August. 

An excerpt from, "Democracy in China" by Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten, Xinhua, March 7, 2023:

The re-emergence of China as a considerable source of economic and political power in the international sphere, the disturbances to Western democracy, and the attempt of various people to re-establish something akin to the Cold War between the West and the East, make it essential, if we are to avert another world catastrophe, that we understand each other better. In particular, the West needs to understand how China works today.

China and the West are deeply different in their culture and history. Western thought is based on a monotheistic tradition, derived from Christianity. There is one God, and religion consists of a bundle of elements, including ritual, dogma, eschatology and ethics. In Asia, on the other hand, there is no such bundle.

At the heart of the difficulty to understand China through a Western lens is the difference in logic between the West and the East. In practical terms, Western logic gives the Western world a Judeo-Christian principle of right and wrong (or black and white, with few shades of grey), while Eastern logic gives China a Confucian "Doctrine of the Mean" (principle of harmony with many shades of grey, and little that is black or white), where everything is in a transitional state of becoming (yin and yang).

Western social structure is based on extreme individualism, particularly in the Anglo-sphere, as opposed to the group-based system of China where family comes before the individual -- the individual still being respected within the group.

There are many other deep differences. The basically competitive and aggressive, militaristic world of the West, with constant wars, struggles and fights, is totally different from the tradition of China based on harmony, the avoidance of war if possible, and collaboration rather than competition (Sun Tzu).

. . .The multi-party system is difficult to apply to China for reasons to do with stability. China has experienced many appalling civil wars, invasions and outside imperialist pressures. This means that it is incredibly difficult to create a system that holds together a population of almost 1.4 billion people, extending over an area as large as Western and Eastern Europe and Western Russia combined. China is also culturally hugely diverse, with many minorities and many languages.

China's 2,000-year-old imperial and bureaucratic system, established by the first Qin Emperor in 221 B.C., is being replaced by a new system, which combines old and new. This is being done through consultation within the wider society at every level of the administration and with lively debates among intra-party factions. The process answers the modern principle of multi-party representation. I have witnessed this process during my time sitting at the CPPCC in Changchun, where wide-range consultations with local farmers were conducted at a grassroot level before any changes to internal directives were implemented relating to China's entry into the WTO.

. . .The Western system needs to be re-thought in the age of the Internet, heightened globalization, multiculturalism and massive technological and social changes.

The CPC's historic mission is to accomplish the rejuvenation and modernization of the Chinese nation, building-up the CSCDS to become a model that works for China, is not a threat to the world, and provides basic human rights for all. While many Western countries privilege "liberty" and individual rights, in China it is different.

More communal and less nebulous "rights" seem more important -- the rights to enough food, housing, jobs, security, peace, health, education -- and hope for the future. These are what the Chinese government has provided at an amazing pace over the last 40 years. It is not surprising, that the trust in the Chinese government by the people over the period 2016-2021 was over 90 percent, whereas it was below 40 percent in the United States, according to recent Pew Research Center polls.

Video Title: GLOBALink | CPC's ability to meet people's needs contributes to its success: expert. Source: New China TV. Date Published: October 11, 2022.

 

Video Title: China Insights - Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten. Source: youcafoscari. Date Published: December 18, 2015.

Late Merovingian France

 

"Late Merovingian France: History and hagiography, 640-720" 

by Paul Fouracre and Richard A. Gerberding, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996.

Wikipedia:

Richard A. Gerberding is professor emeritus and former director of classical studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He taught Latin and Ancient History courses at Willamette University between Fall 2013 and Spring 2015. 

Gerberding's early studies were in psychology but he became dissatisfied with the subject and switched to history which he felt offered a greater insight into human nature. Later, he was one of the founders of The Society for Ancient Languages.

Gerberding wrote the entries for "Gregory of Tours" and "Fredegar" in The Encyclopedia of Medieval France (Garland Publishing, 1995) and on "Pippin the Short" in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Germany (Garland Press, 2000). He wrote the chapter on "The Later Roman Empire" in Volume I of The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Wikipedia:

Paul J. Fouracre is professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Manchester. His research interests relate to early medieval history, the history of the Franks, law and custom in medieval societies, charters, hagiography and serf-lord relations in the eleventh century. His recent work on the cost of the liturgy, focusing on the social and economic effects of providing "eternal light", is a study of the interplay between belief and materiality.

Fouracre was co-ordinating editor of Early Medieval Europe from 2005 to 2009 and editor of the first volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History (2005). From 2014 to 2017 he was editor of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. He is a Member of the Chetham Society, serving as a Member of Council since 2004 and as President since 2005.

Description of "Late Merovingian France: History and hagiography, 640-720":

This collection of documents in translation brings together the seminal sources for the late Merovingian Frankish kingdom. It inteprets the chronicles and saint's lives rigorously to reveal new insights into the nature and significance of sanctity, power and power relationships. The book makes available a range of 7th- and early 8th-century texts, five of which have never before been translated into English. It opens with a broad-ranging explanation of the historical background to the translated texts and then each source is accompanied by a full commentary and an introductory essay exploring its authorship, language and subject matter. The sources are rich in the detail of Merovingian political life. Their subjects are the powerful in society and they reveal the successful interplay between power and sanctity, a process which came to underpin much of European culture throughout the early Middle Ages.

Slander Comes Before The Slaughter: From Ancient Rome And Medieval Islam To Modern Israel And Global Government

"In the summer of 782, ‘4500 Saxon prisoners were beheaded on a single day at Verden on the River Aller in northern Saxony, on the orders of Charlemagne, King of the Franks.’ So, bluntly, reported the author of the Royal Frankish Annals, the main Frankish narrative for the period, which were written up in 790 or so. By the time those annals had been put into print at Cologne in 1521, Charlemagne had come to be venerated as a saint, and also, with more historical justification, celebrated as the founder of both France and Germany. The annals made the beheadings at Verden known to a wide audience just as Germany’s identity was becoming contentious; Charlemagne’s reputation survived because the Saxon victims were thought to have been pagans, their fate necessary to his Christianisation of Saxony. By the 18th century, however, that no longer washed. French as well as German writers were appalled by the barbarian warlord whom Voltaire called ‘a thousandfold murderer’, and in the 19th century the events at Verden made Charlemagne a problematic hero for German nationalists. The issue was revisited by historians in the 1930s. To those, mainly northerners, who denounced the brutality, others, often southerners, replied that the exemplary punishment was justified by its outcome. Non-historians took sides as well. While Himmler put up a monument to the Saxon dead, Hitler forbade his chief ideologue, Rosenberg, from calling ‘a hero’ like Charles the Great ‘the butcher of the Saxons’, adding that ‘without violence, no one either in Charles’s times or in ours could have brought together the German peoples with their thick heads and their particularities.’

Charlemagne is still widely regarded by Western Europeans as a foundational figure. In 768 he inherited a Frankish kingdom covering modern France plus Belgium and Luxemburg, and extended it to include the Netherlands, much of Italy and most of modern Germany: by the time of his death in 814, he ruled an area almost exactly co-extensive with the original European Community. Scholars in all those countries have contributed to the huge modern historiography on Charlemagne. Aachen, where he made his capital from the 790s onwards, and where the Charlemagne Prize is awarded every year to the politician who has contributed most to European co-operation, is a site of memory for 21st-century Europeans. That his name is less well known in the UK is symptomatic of British isolation within Old Europe.

Yet Verden 782 stubbornly resists euphemism. Alessandro Barbero, in Carlo Magno: Un padre dell’ Europa (2000), notes that even before 782 the Franks were represented as new Israelites, and interprets the massacre as inspired by Old Testament precedents such as the slaughter of the Amalekites and Moabites. In Charlemagne (1999), a large book, Jean Favier mentions the event in a single line, without comment. Dieter Hägermann, in the still larger Karl der Grosse (2000), devotes four pages to exculpation. But German historians still differ sharply: what one recently characterised as ‘an orgy of violence’, another minimised by suggesting that the word decollare in the annals, meaning ‘behead’, was a medieval typo for delocare, ‘relocate’." - J. L. Wilson, 'Go away and learn,' London Review of Books, April 2004.

Barbarian. Infidel. Goyim. 

Regardless of the term a conquering civilization uses to classify the outsider, the enemy, and the stranger, the effect is the same: mass slaughter. 

In every imperial civilization, petty tribe, and religious cult, slander comes before the slaughter. 

Even Christians, known for their religious piety and turn-the-other-cheek approach to violence, murdered pagans who did not yield to the Christian God wherever they found them. During their heyday they killed with the best of them. They built churches on the worship sites of their enemies. The transfer of sacred geological power to Christian hands was always a bloody event.

The state killers today don't need religion to wash their crimes away but they do need something very close to it.

The terms in fashion today by the pedophile ruling elites to denigrate their victims before the coming global slaughter are "useless eaters" and "terrorists." 

The killing off of a majority of humanity is being dressed up with scientific reasoning and the lingo of state security. 

Modern climate science and climate security have always been linked with mass killing policies. The engineering of the weather serves a multitude of purposes, but at its core it is about global depopulation.

The gay and trans agendas are also mainly about the worldwide campaign to achieve a massive reduction in the global population.  

We saw during the manufactured Covid event that governments the world over are willing to kill their own populations by the hundreds of thousands at a time, especially the best and brightest in society. 

And that drawn-up event was only the start of the global genocide. They learned a lot during that crisis which they will apply to the next one with greater precision and will.

What they learned is that modern societies adapt quickly and comply to new social rules and standards almost instantly. 

In a matter of weeks businesses, shops, workplaces, and government offices were basically following the same script. 

At the end of the day man is a social animal, and where the herd is directed to go, even off the cliff, is a simple matter. It takes a few words from positions of authority to change the direction of society. And if that fails, violence against a rebellious few can bring the herd back into line. 

And we see this now most of all in a war-torn society like Ukraine, where the people in power are running away with loot to faraway islands while the large underclass of Ukrainians are being led to pointless deaths in eastern Ukraine.

In this case, the nearby enemy provided by the Russian threat was enough to secure early compliance from wayward Ukrainians, but the longer the war has gone on without success the greater the need for the captured Ukrainian state to sweep aside all pretenses and wage war against its own people.

In Iran, the turn towards tyranny happened quickly after the staged Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent war with Iraq. Wars allow for the consolidation of state power unlike anything else, which is why the state of Israel has been at war for its entire existence. Without constant war Israel wouldn't exist. It wouldn't know how to function in peacetime, without the eternal threat of enemies. 

What would Israel be without Palestinians or Jews without Goyim? What would a Muslim be without the Infidel to cast aspersions upon? 

Psychologically these cults and states wouldn't know how to operate. Slandering and slaughtering is all they have ever done.

The Concept of the Carolingian Renaissance by G. W. Trompf

 

"The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation" by G. W. Trompf, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979.

Wikipedia:

Garry Winston Trompf ("G.W. Trompf", born in Melbourne, Australia, on 27 November 1940) is emeritus professor in the History of Ideas at the University of Sydney and adjunct professor in Peace and Conflict Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney.

He is noted for research in the history of ideas, in religious studies, and in the anthropology of Melanesian cultures.

Trompf has been described as "Australia’s only historian of ideas," is considered a leading authority on Melanesian religions, and is noted for his development of "retributive logic" (the logic of payback) and his analysis of historical recurrence (the recurrence of similar events in the rises and falls of empires, in the history of a given polity, or in any two specific events which bear a striking similarity).

An excerpt from, "The Concept of the Carolingian Renaissance" by G. W. Trompf, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1973):

Any return to the "Renaissance debate" may seem somewhat futile, like the proverbial fouettement d'un chat perhaps, yet it may be refreshing to enter that worn battleground of historical controversy from a different angle, and to begin our "renaissance" investigations, not in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but in the eighth and ninth, not with Petrarch and the Quattrocento humanists, but with Northumbrian, Frankish, and Italian scholars of a very much earlier, less civilized Europe. Traditionally, the so-called Carolingian renaissance has found its embodiment in none other than the person of Emperor Charlemagne himself, alike acclaimed as unifier of the West, defender of the Roman Church, restorer of stability and justice to barbarian Europe, and grand patron of a cultural and artistic revival. From Charlemagne's own reign until the present day, scholars have spoken of this famed ruler, and the culture flourishing under him, in virtually the same breath. Leaving aside the acclamations of his own day, which were, as we shall see, adulatory enough, we can note a nostalgia for the Carolingian age d'or even among public and literary figures of the immediately succeeding generations. "Karolus bone memoriae," wrote Nithard, embroiled in the troubles which follow Charlemagne's death, "omnem Europem omni bonitate repletam reliquit. And memories of the new Davidic monarch drew out those heroic songs about his brave warriors doing battle with the new Philistines on the Spanish March. The Chanson de Roland was not alone as a medieval monument to Karolus Magnus; many were the legends about this revered Emperor, and for ambitious French monarchs, such as Philip II (Augustus) one could think of no one better to emulate than the one first "appointed by God to be the leader of all Latin Christendom." Charlemagne became a "saint"; in the Chanson, his white beard, his hieratic and patriarchal appearance implied a supernatural role as "God's vice-regent and the Father of all Christendom": in Dante's Paradiso he stands in the circle of Mars with such fine defensores fidei as Joshua and "the lofty Maccabee." Late medieval writers continued to extol; Charlemagne rated among the "Nine Worthies" popularized in de Longuyon's Les Voeux de Paon, artists did not forget him, and his name was uttered by the kings of France and the crusaders of Europe to remember and marvel. To some extent, of course, the greatness of his person overshadowed the civilization he fostered, but the Carolingian "age of gold" in general, with its unity, its chivalric idealism, still continued to seize the popular and scholarly imagination.

Rosamond McKitterick on Roman authority in early medieval Europe

Wikipedia:

Rosamond Deborah McKitterick (born 31 May 1949) is an English medieval historian. She is an expert on the Frankish kingdoms in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, who uses palaeographical and manuscript studies to illuminate aspects of the political, cultural, intellectual, religious, and social history of the Early Middle Ages. From 1999 until 2016 she was Professor of Medieval History and director of research at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and Professor Emerita of Medieval History in the University of Cambridge.

. . .McKitterick has been described as a "doyenne in her field; her decades of tireless research and teaching have been poured into a steady stream of major publications on Carolingian subjects." Thomas F. X. Noble considers McKitterick to be "one of the most original and productive historians of Europe's early Middle Ages".

Video Title: Rosamond McKitterick on Roman authority in early medieval Europe. Source: State Library Victoria. Date Published: February 21, 2017. Description:

In the 2017 Foxcroft Lecture, Cambridge scholar Rosamond McKitterick looks at how and why the authority of Rome was established in early medieval Europe.