Today I want to look at some more important but under-known history, while also remembering two incredibly normal human things that we almost never recognize. One is the way that we make assumptions about others, based upon ourselves. This can seem outright generous, especially when we’re arrogant, but it is always ignorant and disrespectful, even when well intended – because it ignores and dismisses their reality, over-riding it with our own ideas and projections.
The other habit that we share, but usually feel too ashamed about to honestly discuss, is that human animals take great emotional pleasure from hatred and contempt. It is philosophically ugly in every case, and yet universal (even heroes of peace like Gandhi and Martin Luther King got there by mastering and transcending, rather than never feeling, their hatred).
Where we really get into trouble is when these combine – so that we begin to assume – people who disagree with me, always have the most hateful possible motives in mind – but people who agree with me aren’t hateful at all, but rather virtuous in thought and deed – just like wonderful ME!
In other words, a view of our own side and the other, which is always total utter absolute horse-shit.
In Obama’s first presidential campaign he promised to codify Roe-standard Abortion rights as federal law. (Go look if you don’t believe me, or just consult your memory, if you are one of the fortunate few who has one of the rare functional units remaining in the western hemisphere).
What did he end up doing? He literally did not even bother advancing a bill to the house to vote on. Even when the Democrats held both chambers (sure thing). Yes folks, he promised voters he would win the battle for once and for all, and then when he had the power to do it, he realized – no wait, but if I really do something that substantial and lasting, we’ll have so much less fear and anger to run on, next time around…
Justin Trudeau promised to finally get all of our First Nations people clean drinking water (OMG so shameful – an international disgrace in every way) and to cancel Canada’s participation in the overpriced (and absolute piece of junk) F35 program. More broadly, the Liberals in Canada have long promised the combination of competent technocrats and steadfast (albeit tactically gentle) diplomatic resistance to American warmongering.
What did he end up doing? Eight years in, he announced that drinking water for Canada’s first peoples would be another five years (at least, of course – meaning, someone else’s problem) and we are now back into the F-35 program – even though (I wish I was kidding) the ENGINE is shit. (for my friends who are not aviation keeners, it doesn’t matter how fancy your dashboard is, if you can’t fly – and anyhow – the dashboard – more specifically the software, is even worse than the lousy engine).
Incalculably worse than this, we are economically rudderless (a leaked secret government report predicts crashing standards of living for at least the next five years – and righteous citizen unrest as a consequence of lousy policy) and one hundred percent on-side with American warmongering. More shocking still, the supposedly leftist party of Canada props up this war money and poverty promoting pompous poseur, even as he sells out the national interest itself to dangerous Yankee warmongers, all just to play for a few polling points. Beyond grotesque.
The man who thought blackface was appropriate for a school party, declared that large numbers of citizens had “unacceptable views” by power of telepathy (didn’t have the simple decency to speak to a single one, to find out what they actually thought). Mind you, Ottawa has a very long tradition of using force to silence the complaints of citizens from the west. Mark one imperialist redcoat playbook.
And just for the record, for those who haven’t investigated the question – what they were protesting was NOT the medicine – they were protesting STATE FORCE. And every citizen always has the right (some would say the ethical duty) to question THAT, or else we are no longer a democracy.
But the thing that shocked me most was the way he accused those most effective peaceful protestors in our history – during the Omicron wave – of being dangerous and irresponsible, but didn’t feel the slightest hesitation about calling an early election (yes, Canadian governments can cheat, and pick the election timing they think most favourable) during the orders of magnitude more lethal Delta wave.
What he keeps doing is what I was saying above – assuming that people who disagree, all do so for the most evil possible reasons – and people who agree must be fabulous, just like fabulous him!
Might be adequate for a grade school classroom – but it falls way short of a serious philosophy of governance.
Zelensky was of course elected because he promised to sign the Minsk II treaty, under which Ukraine would have remained neutral, the Donbas would have had language rights restored, and more cultural autonomy, and except for Crimea (the base of Russia’s black sea fleet for centuries) Ukraine would still be intact – and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded people would still just be worried about petty corruption and the shitty economy, instead of whether or not they would survive.
I am pretty sure that the bulk of the Ukrainian people still want peace most of all – and the fact that there are just as many Ukrainian men of military age who have fled as refugees as there are in the army, suggests that Zelensky’s turnabout, to back the right sector (and their CIA sponsors) instead of signing Minsk II, never reflected popular will (or hard-earned wisdom) at all. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is currently over forty five, and their legislators are now discussing drafting teenagers in huge numbers, as if the devastation of their entire society is not yet complete enough.
Makes me think of the striking anti war piece by Käthe Kollwitz “Seed corn must not be ground”
Trump was elected to build a wall and make America great again. He drove America completely crazy instead (the whole world is still waiting for that to settle down again, hopefully, one day).
Joe Biden? – well, you remember – Joe Biden promised to return peace, stability and sanity to America. Not only is the US now facing the prospect of THREE simultaneous wars – all of which they are likely to lose (seriously – but that’s a whole different essay) the economy is destroyed, and the wealthy-controlled media are desperately trying to pretend that the working class are just stupid, for thinking rent and food prices are out of control. Because look here, these abstract economic indicator numbers are lovely! The rich are doing great – so the bribes keep flowing (and the gaslight, too)
And I am still looking for ANY major Trump foreign policy, that Joe didn’t make ten times worse.
So – when we start from the assumption that someone who uses words which appeal to us must sincerely agree with us and also be just as good and decent and virtuous as (our own ideas about) ourselves – we can actually get into a huge amount of trouble and even wind up with the exact opposite of what we thought we were voting for or supporting. My church-going friends encapsulate this bit of wisdom especially well – no one quotes scripture better than the devil!
And since I have stopped trying to avoid controversy (and am trying very hard to “show my work”) I would like to offer my own anti-tribalist take on the ultra-passionate issue of abortion.
I am absolutely FOR a woman’s right to make decisions for herself without state compulsion. I see this as a key FREEDOM issue. The simple fact is, a whole lot of men are not honourable or sane, and without this key freedom, women’s lives can be bound to such evil men, for an entire lifetime. Requiring the government to enforce such an unending torture is unfair to both mother and child, in every possible way. Denying their essential love as nourishment connection and purpose because of the foul and forced circumstance, even if the potential mother has all of that in her to give.
BUT – I am also very ashamed of how long I made the very lazy leftist assumption that people who are concerned about the practise – are really mostly sadists who take outright pleasure in hurting and oppressing women. I also hate how often many on the left still laughingly dismiss life as irrelevant.
That lazy approach – defending our arguments by pretending our opponent can have no case except evil ignorance or bigotry, instead of understanding and then respectfully addressing their actual moral argument – in this case the simple and powerful truth that life does have sacred qualities that should always be considered – is way too common on all sides of everything now. Like we’d rather yell than discuss. Here’s a pro-tip though – discussion can lead to policy – yelling leads to powerless futility. We love to make straw-man bonfires and laugh, but with them, we celebrate the inevitability of irreconcilability even as we are actively choosing, creating and reinforcing it.
It is literally about whether we would rather enjoy denouncing others, or be nicer and make progress.
I am not trying to suggest that my argument would convince many on the other side – but showing basic respect for other humans and appealing to their moral reason also, instead of conflating their disagreement with a false position created to bolster our enjoyment of our other-hatred, would at least foster useful discussions between the most practical people in the middle, about establishing baseline healthcare and rights which will last, because they enjoy a solid legal foundation and popular support.
Writing is a funny thing to do a lot of. Some of the best advice there is, isn’t just counter-intuitive, the first few times you encounter it – it is outright offensive! One gem that bothered me for many years, but has absolutely proved its value to me since, is “Start as close as you can to the end of the story.”
As a beginner, you sort of want to go “Once upon a time” spend awhile setting the table and drawing the scene. But if you start much later in the arc of the thing you want to describe, you end up in the spot where all the drama happens and things start changing in fascinating ways, right from the start.
In (grossly simplified) terms – you can add what you need about how the characters all got to the crisis, as you carefully describe the way each of them responds to it, and to one another.
By starting with action, and reserving the timing of key information, almost like a comedian (for best surprise effect) you can give the reader something emotionally relatable and intellectually interesting.
Funny thing though, starting the story at the third act (dramatic climax) is not only punchy short story writing, it is one of the all time best tricks of propagandists. Especially because many of the key revelations about how the characters all got to the dramatic crisis, are skillfully hidden or (even more often) obscured by a false but emotionally compelling story, long enough to bend history forever.
The actual timing of the truth is something more like cheque clears + 20 years. We do eventually realize say, that the domino theory, used to justify the American invasion of Vietnam, was always false, and the whole thing was actually meant to intimidate the Chinese, indirectly.
But by the time we start finding where the power really was, and where the money trails really go, that money won by lying and destruction has long since been moved along and out of reach, and the culprits have most often grown greatly in power and prestige in the meantime. History geeks go “Ah ha! I KNEW it!” but the entire rest of the world shrugs and goes back to imagining that everyone who disagrees must be evil. A simple approximation which feels emotionally adequate for most cases.
Reading Kit Klarenburg’s stunning reporting on the Kosovo war, in which publicly owned companies were bombed more than FOUR HUNDRED TIMES – but almost no tanks or guns were destroyed – and the very same diplomats and pentagon officials who sparked the war, personally profited for decades afterward (stealing from Kosovars and American taxpayers both) made me suddenly sit up in my seat and remember Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky-distraction cruise missile attack on Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum (Now North Sudan), which just happened to hit the biggest and best (of course generic) pharmaceutical plant in the entire country, destroying it completely, almost exactly a year after it began operation (thanks to cooperation from many international partners).
Of course they said things like ‘precursor’ and ‘nerve gas’ at the time – but that evidence was since shown to be bunk, and no one ever uncovered anything being produced there, except medicine.
Buckminster Fuller had a very odd take on the world, but he was also friends with people whose worldview he opposed wholeheartedly, just because intelligence likes intelligence. One of his best pals was a senior director at CIA in the early days – and Bucky did work in his early life for mining conglomerates and mega investors, thinking about the world as one single (economic) system.
So when he called CIA Capitalism’s Invisible Army he wasn’t just trying to be witty. It’s actually just as useful an understanding as “the military industrial (congressional banking media) complex.” Clear and true – a reality anchor.
Chalmers Johnson spent his lifetime working for the American diplomatic service. He is why we now hear the word blowback so often, though I’m sure he’d wince at how often the point of it is missed.
Blowback is when the public in the west suddenly experiences consequences for something that they didn’t even realize our side did to someone else, often much much earlier. Yup – a third act shock!
And here is where we need to remember something important about the (well intended but ignorant) projection we do, when trying to understand others, as if they were simply reflections of (or else evil opposites of) ourselves.
Pretty much every other culture in the world knows more history than we do. More of theirs for sure, but a whole lot more of our history too, especially the psycho way we treat others around the world.
When people in China hear scolding from the west they think “Sure, but remember, when those bastards were in charge – 100 Million Chinese civilians died, and generations lived in serfdom.”
They aren’t wrong, we just think too fast to remember (and wrongly assume the stains are gone).
There is plenty they do wrong, no doubt, but they are still raising millions from poverty every year, and we have been going in the other direction for decades now. Again, shaky moral high ground, at best.
Starting the story of Ukraine from the invasion (halfway through the third act) instead of 2014, when the CIA backed coup overturned the democratic government, or 2008 when the neocons on the Democratic side drafted their latest long arc assault on Russia, aimed at breaking it up completely, or even way back in the Clinton years, when America broke its promise not to push Nato out further, in exchange for their cooperation with the reunification of Germany (already a massive strategic giveaway, from their perspective)…
Well, starting the story that late just gives us a tale of all blowback with no context. Fury and revenge might even seem appropriate (especially if you don’t realize the last round of that, caused THIS).
1956 is not a year we often think about in international affairs (like I say, we don’t do memory or history, but others really do, so it is worth thinking about the things they DO consider as they think!)
Also amusing – wikipedia skips the first and second act on this crisis. But aviation geeks know better!
Egypt was one of the African nations fastest out of the gate, when it came to asserting their post colonial identity (and arguably, they have been suppressed with dictators and billions in western ‘aid’ for decades, precisely because their revealed potential was so great). But though tensions with (and resentment of) the British were high, they were in the middle of massive development and tried to keep foreign investment flowing, even as they threw off the yoke of malign foreign interference.
But they ran into trouble, trying to modernize their military. The Americans didn’t want to sell them any modern warplanes at all, lest they use them on Israel. So Egypt bought some first generation jets from the superb manufactories of Czechoslovakia who made export versions of many Soviet designs.
Of course the western powers were most annoyed, and America even cut off funding for the crucial Aswan high dam (key to industrial development agriculture and flood control). In response, Nasser seized the Suez Canal, which up to then was still jointly administered (pilfered by) France and the UK.
Great choice for a revenue stream – a huge proportion of the oil for Europe moved through that channel and a lot of international trade, also. Unfortunately, ever since the English fleet went from coal to oil power, petroleum products and their export were deemed “Strategic” even beyond their raw economic effect. And yes – pretty much every nation took this position too, within a few years.
Paris was outraged, London was apoplectic! Tel Aviv was worried too (too many new planes, yikes).
So, rather than letting Egypt run a key Egyptian trade route, they decided to launch a war! There were aircraft carriers involved, more than five hundred planes staged from Cyprus and Malta (British) and powerful naval groups staged from Algiers (France).
To meet them, Egypt had only a few dozen pilots who were trained to fly these shiny new planes.
The conflict began with a surprise attack on all the airfields within range of the canal zone, and thanks to the surprise and coordination between all three armies, they made fast violent progress against Egypt. Curiously, for many years the UK officially denied any coordination (known as the Protocol of Sevres, for the curious or pedantic) but a hard copy is known to reside in the Ben Gurion archives!
So okay – great power armies coordinating with a highly motivated local military, surprise attack – you sort of assume you know where the story goes from here, right? The upstart is going down, for sure.
Yeah – not so much. Egypt demonstrated an effective low-cost response which all that power could not defeat – they just sunk blocking ships to completely obstruct the canal to all commercial trade.
Meanwhile, America was watching all of this with alarm, as was the still fresh and comparatively idealistic United Nations general assembly.
Not only were these worn-out prideful and overly irritable colonialists screwing up global trade (the Americans needed the canal running just as much as anyone) they were provoking massive outrage.
Plus, the great gamers in America were watching Hungarian popular unrest and badly wanted to coordinate an effective response from the west to support this, before Soviet tanks rolled in (as they soon did). But with a knight and a bishop careening off across the board, they just couldn’t get their game together.
Here – the weird cosmic author of this (actual history) does something really unrealistic, for which any author would be roundly punished. Instead of resolving the conflict with one of the characters we expect, doing something we expect, America reached out and spanked both Britain and France!
Like it wasn’t the butler who did it, or the jealous husband, it just was some totally random guy from three towns over, that you never even heard of before. Hey, unfair!
I don’t just mean they sent strong diplomatic words, either. The Americans specifically threatened the British, if you don’t back down right now, we will destroy the value of the British pound.
The British backed down – the French backed down – even Israel was forced to withdraw.
Here’s the thing though. Right up until that moment, the French and British were still one hundred percent sure that they were superior imperial leaders. Great nations on the world stage. Millions around the world believed it, too. Not that they didn’t resent the yoke, but they did fear the power.
But after that key cold war humiliation it was clear to the entire world that the French and British were both now officially second-rate powers. Vassals of an imperial America that has never liked to identify as such, preferring theatre posturing and projection of every moral variety yet discovered by man.
The old world imperial spell was shattered, never to be restored. I can’t help thinking that this also connects to the rapid drive to drive-out the colonial occupiers in so many African countries of the time. (Just as we see modern echoes in Macron’s petulance, as Africa spits in France’s face).
BTW – many people don’t realize that during the second world war, Vichy (Nazi collaborator) France handed what we now call Vietnam over to the Japanese army without firing one shot in its defence.
That America spent decades after WWII funding the French recapture of their surrendered colony – even after this complete dishonour – once again demands that we pay more attention to history. We would have known better, even in terms of simplest most obvious principle, if we were only watching.
The big point here is that the kind of arrogance that makes you think violence is helpful when you do it, doesn’t fade away slowly, it pops and is gone. And all the fear it used to generate, goes with it.
Now I want to geek out just a tiny bit here, and I want to ask you to try to avoid projecting, even though these matters are invested with a great deal of entirely righteous and understandable passion.
First of all – my single greatest hope about Biden was that he would reverse Trump’s hostility to China. Trump started a trade war, but Biden went way way further, violating the strategic neutrality which has been maintained for decades now, to help China save face, while US sells Taiwan arms.
Be clear – China plays a long game – always. They would have waited another half a century to finally absorb Taiwan in an especially weak (or friendly) moment. That is how their policy works.
We are the ones who insisted this should become a military problem. And because we insisted, the Chinese have made responsible plans to respond to our aggression in their sphere of influence.
So let’s just have a look at some results of professional US military planners war-gaming on Taiwan.
(And this was considered a mid-case outcome, not nearly as bad as the full-nuclear worst case)
900 US warplanes destroyed
Two US Aircraft carriers lost
Taiwan (and chip production) utterly destroyed.
Deep (panic driving) global recession – probably lasting a decade at least.
But the funniest twist of all? By trying to unfairly hold back China’s tech boom (Huawei in particular) the US forced China to start working on their domestic chip industry very hard (why Huawei is back) – they have already come up with a workaround, to produce far better chips than the photo technology the west has not embargoed should allow. They are scaling this production very rapidly, as I type.
So – not only will the US lose soldiers bases and vehicles (plenty of all) AND access to Taiwanese chip production (forever), the Chinese will actually be in a better position than the west to fill the (entirely western aggression created) deficit. Industrially, they are actually a lot like us, way back when we made stuff and were essential, only they are geared up for this century, instead of the last.
So – someone please tell me. Who, other than weapons manufacturers, big investors in arms stocks (including many congresspeople of both parties) and CIA contractors benefits from any of this?
Let me give you a clue – it sure as f@ck isn’t you – and it ain’t nobody in Taiwan, either.
(Though oil companies, mining concerns, high tech industries and many others, can and will certainly hop on to the parasitic bandwagon, to help suck even more public money away from social programs)
It is much much harder to be objective about the Russian case, for many of my friends. I get it, I do.
But we have to face some basic facts. The sanctions were designed to destroy the Russian economy, but they actually destroyed the European economy instead. Russia is growing faster than the EU or the US, and the restraints on their oligarchs were a GIFT! We assumed that because they were greedy and rich, and Putin is the symbol of all evil, therefore they must have been allies. Nope, they were pests and parasites, and we knocked them out for him, in a way he never could have.
Trying to keep Russia away from systems of international trade has backfired even more dramatically. Ever since the second world war, the US has forced others to use the dollar, making it the essential lifeblood of global trade (the most precise proof of their imperial status, if eight hundred overseas bases doesn’t already convince you).
In effect, this means the US gets a skim of the economy of the whole world, and nobody else likes it, but if they try to push back, they get shut out of the system altogether – and/or attacked and destroyed – which is even worse than the humiliation of surrendering to bribe-demanding gangsters.
BRICS is the alternative to the dollar that the global south has been demanding for generations. In effect, it is the last piece of colonialism coming off their necks, and they are cautiously jubilant.
Jubilant at the idea of actual national independence, instead of constant western capitalist extortion, but still cautious also, because so many are fearful of what the panicking hegemon might yet do to disrupt this gain for freedom, independence and multi-polar international progress.
Already it has gathered more than half of the population of earth, and even more hopefully, it is bringing traditional enemies together, to develop working relationships and long term partnerships.
And then there is the most brutal side of all. War stuff. Ukraine has brought us much bad news.
Russian equipment is more reliable and long wearing, designed for less extreme tolerances (lower tube pressure for artillery systems, for one example, meaning barrels last much longer) way less expensive and also way easier to improve steadily, as battlefield lessons suggest modifications.
Westerners did not notice a whole group of Clinton alumni assemble in 2008 to plot the piece by piece destruction of Russia, but Russia, like China, plays a long game. They noticed. They noticed the CIA backed Maidan coup in 2014 with even more concern. Also – they didn’t ever do a free trade deal with anyone, that involved exporting all of their factories and jobs to other countries.
Some of their factories are old, but they were designed with significant overcapacity in mind, meaning they can ramp up production just by bringing more machines on line and booking more shifts. (Why they are producing twice as many artillery shells as the US and EU put together, and are still increasing steadily, even as we flounder for cold war surplus, to send to Ukraine, stat!)
The western model, especially the super high profit high efficiency (almost zero jobs) automated factories so many investors here have favoured in recent years, are built to be used very close to their full capacity, which means turning up production requires building a whole new factory from scratch (many years away for us – versus hours days or weeks away for them).
Just as a telling detail I caught the other day – the US has sent so many stinger missiles to Ukraine that they estimate it will take between twelve and eighteen YEARS to replace them – depending on whether production can be effectively increased or not! (They can’t even say that, with confidence).
Anyone want to have a guess at how laughably obsolete a stinger missile will be in eighteen years?
(For noobs to the game, I’ll give you a little hint – it’s already pretty much obsolete now!)
And yeah – major sub assemblies for many American weapons have been made in China for so long that we don’t even have the machine tooling for them anymore – so have fun in Taiwan guys!
(and we’ll see just how well that works out for ya, in terms of the long game everyone else is playing).
Meanwhile, as the European economies slide into what promises to be a long term depression (there really is no prospect of cheap energy or industrial revival in the future, thanks to their various out of date national policies) they are hysterically promising to spend way way more on weapons!
Guys – hello? The way you do this without bankrupting yourselves is the way the Russians have been trying to do it for years – with diplomacy. And again, I’m not trying to say they are good guys, only that it is absolutely true that they have been trying to establish a secure (that is, low cost for both sides) European security framework for twenty years straight now. Rudely rebuffed at every turn (or strung along pointlessly and in bad faith, as with Minsk and Merkel).
So we are the ones who forced this game – and let me be clear about how that can be indirect and yet also clear, with an example from history which has been controversial longer than I’ve been alive.
Did the US know about the Pearl Harbour attack in advance, and cynically let it happen, just to get the general public angry and ready for war, even though Roosevelt had promised voters neutrality?
Yes and no – and I mean both the yes and no as positive – not a wishy washy compromise between them. No, even if they did intercept the radio signal “East Winds Rain” which began that astonishing and infamous feat of Japanese arms, they wouldn’t have known what to expect. It did shock them.
BUT they absolutely one hundred percent YES did know that cutting-off all oil exports to Japan very suddenly, would force them to take some drastic measures, or else let their fast growing industrial economy collapse. A humiliation the Imperial Japanese were just not willing to suffer.
One reason I feel confident in rejecting the popular conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew all, and let it happen (aside from a few great books by and about those who investigated this question at the time) is my reading of aviation understanding of the time. American imperial pride had a racist element, which lead them to dismiss Japanese aircraft as second-rate and no threat at all.
In objective (no racism applies) reality, the Japanese were making the best dogfighters in the sky.
Yes America wanted Japan to act up, but no, they had no idea they’d take that kind of a bloody nose.
There are many thousands of specialists in American government (and investors and partisans outside it) who are one hundred percent dedicated to wrecking other countries in a way that benefits America strategically, or American businesses in terms of stolen-cheap industrial inputs and massive corporate profits. No countries have more professional destruction resources aimed directly against their flourishing than Russia and China (though no country escapes the colonizers notice, either).
Those people are always going to be imperialists. They are always going to assume that we are a superior culture, even if we spend decades at war all around the world, without even knowing why.
And when we think about far off places with suspicions, we shouldn’t just ask – why are they like that? We should also ask – what would they be like, if we weren’t always trying to destroy them?
When Nicholas Burns (now director of CIA) was the US ambassador to Moscow, he reported back that in all of his discussions with Russian officials, businesspeople and even influential gangsters, the idea of Ukraine joining NATO was “the brightest of red lines” to absolutely all power factions in the country. Replacing Putin would not have made the slightest difference, anyone else they manoeuvred into power would feel exactly the same about it. Burns said it very clearly at the time. Such a provocative action on the part of NATO would almost certainly lead directly to war.
An especially crazy-making part of all this is that they never really meant the NATO membership offer sincerely at all (as Zelensky himself has belatedly acknowledged, with great frustration) the whole damn plan was a red rag before a bull, and a murderously cynical con on Ukraine. Good for no one on earth but a few psychos on Wall St and in the Arms Trade the American economy relies upon.
Now – having done the thing that our own side knew would lead to war (but in our racist expectations, never in our wildest dreams, expecting the bloody nose we have received) we are still sputtering like tin-pot imperialists, thou shalt, must not, smite smite smite!
But in the meantime, for the whole rest of the world, the bubble has already popped.
The third poorest country on the planet just chased away two American aircraft carrier groups – the definitive symbol of American power projection. Not only did they cause the US to launch multi million dollar missiles to shoot down drones that only cost a few thousand bucks a piece, they also demonstrated something profound and hilarious, that only keeners knew about before.
Even while Clinton totally betrayed the promise of the peace dividend we all expected after the cold war, expanding NATO recklessly (to promote NATO standard, that is American, arms sales) rather than building an industrial policy for a true peacetime America, he also wrecked the US Navy.
When it comes to the still impressive capability of American air power, there are two key support craft which make all the difference. Refuelling aircraft are what allow those fuel hungry planes to achieve practical range which their basic design does not in fact support, and reconnaissance, especially electronic and radar plotting, allows the missiles planes now fire, to be guided through the exact current Anti-Aircraft defences – even though many of these are now on trucks, and move constantly.
You can actually see the plots of long range Ukrainian missile strikes, and watch them deke around active radars, zig zagging in to a target, all thanks to NATO ISR (intel surveillance reconnaissance).
But when it comes to the US Navy, the key class of support ships which could replenish armaments while vessels were at sea (so they didn’t have to leave station, just to get more bullets) were entirely eliminated almost thirty years ago. This means that even for the fanciest (hyper expensive) American warships, they carry enough to fend off about a hundred missile attacks (couple million in drones for an adversary – and a quarter to a half a billion American taxpayer dollars in defensive missiles, to shoot them down) and then they have to go all the way back to port again, so they can return to their station without having to fear getting sunk by a cheap-ass drone from Radio Shack.
We f@cked around, we found out (FAFO). We have found our Suez moment, literally.
The question is, are we all so worked up with arrogant racist bloodlust, that we’d rather nuke the world than surrender our dominance and learn to cooperate with the rest of everybody at last?
Or are we actually the good caring people that we find so many reasons to insist we are, after all?
Hubris test.
If you’re still alive when you read this, then we haven’t quite failed it yet!
(and let us remember to thank all of the finest things in universe, for such small and precious mercies as that)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Finally found it – for those who are skeptical about Obama campaigning on Roe – here is some key background stuff from the irreplacably useful (and heartfelt) folks at Scheerpost. https://scheerpost.com/2022/05/14/obama-and-liberals-killed-abortion-rights/