- cross-posted to:
- geopolitics@lemmygrad.ml
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The west's position here at least in my eyes makes no sense at all. We are antagonizing everybody and fighting on the wrong side of two wars simultaneously, and losing. If there's some realpolitik endgame here I don't see it. Does the US think it can bomb its way back to the 90s?
Yeah I've been saying for a while now that current policy doesn't even make sense from the standpoint of maintaining US/Western hegemony. Ukraine is a military disaster, and worse, the sanctions against Russia have utterly failed in a way that emphatically demonstrates to the rest of the world the possibility of escaping Western economic dominance. And now we have a total abandonment of any possibility of moral credibility with the continued US support for the genocide in Gaza. Things probably won't change much (if at all) in the short term, but in the medium term or so we're going to see some serious consequences for these policy decisions, and in the long term the shadow of these events will be quite long, I'd say.
It feels like this show is being run by 2nd or 3rd generation failsons who can't quite live up to the standard the shrewd masters of the universe that were running the US post-WWII set.
I don't get what the plan is either to be honest. Perhaps from US perspective, they now realize that they lost their global hegemony and the goal is to force their vassals to cut themselves off from the rest of the world which would force them into complete dependence on the US. The worse the relations between the west and the rest of the world are, the easier it becomes to enforce bloc discipline.
IMO, I think there is something fundamental with the organization of the American political project. There is no more collective political projects compare to the liberal imperialism there is only individual interest (to climb the social ladder, money,etc.).
The emphasis of promoting PMC mindset within the bloated political bureaucracy inevitably lead to incompetence because the individuals have no incentive to better off the overall collective when it is probably easier to lower their heads and follow orders to maintain the status quo in a more and more everchanging world.
The end game here is just "China and Russia must be destroyed" China because it's an ebil gommie government and Russia because it has the potential to be a real rival to America in probably half a century.
The peculiarities of capitalist ideology prevent its adherents from seeing what's happening, it precludes the simple concept that runs counter to so much capitalist fiction "what can be individually rational can be collectively disastrous" the "rationale" usually being a mix of careerism, racism and zombie ideas that were crammed into their heads by neoclassical professors, all of which is reinforced by self-referential media
It all originates from the core of neoclassical economics; where the social relations of production are broken down into a simple black box, where labor goes in and capital comes out and class is never involved, it's purely technical, binary thinking manifest
This meme has slowly worked its way up the food chain; where now there is no such thing as micro or macro, material, resource constraints, struggle, nature, power, unforeseen variables, nope only a black box where rules go in and policy comes out, binary
And look it's made me the politician who worships this black box of capital a millionaire so obviously it's God
Sometimes I wonder if political actors are like... a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
There was a time when the actor was the original or close enough to the original that they actually had some ability to know what they were doing. But after many generations of actors following the previous actors, they all just kinda... forgot how to do things and are just coasting on vibes, aesthetics, and "this is how it was always done" until they either "cash out" or "crash and burn."
Nah, I think the West is just pre-emptively transitioning into fascism to bolster its chance to take on China (and Russia). Europe will sacrifice itself in the process to protect the American capital.
Of course, you can say that fascism is itself a suicidal path, but don’t forget that it still took the lives of millions and millions of people the last time a war was fought over it. And what’s different this time is that the fascists have nukes.
Update your analysis. The USA is the international reservoir of fascism. It's not "going to be fascist" and it's not new that fascists have nukes because the USA nuked civilians it considered bugs (Japanese, Asians in general) as a show of force to scare people it considered beneath them (Slavs). The European fascists were inspired by the American project and in particular the moderns forms of slavery, eugenics, and genocide that were perfected in the USA after they inherited them from England (eugenics), Holland (slave trade), Spain (genocide through rape and Catholic conversion), and France (genocide through ever larger scales of efficient mass murder).
When the world's only worker state defeated the fascists and marched to Berlin, the USA got involved in order to keep the fascists alive long enough to save them, in concert with the Catholic Church. Through Operation Paperclip they moved fascists all over the world, gave them tender love and caring protection, new identities, jobs, money, and property. Through the establishment of NATO they created the world's first nuclear-armed transnational military staffed entirely with Western Europeans who believed in eugenics, white supremacy, and even made many Nazi officers into NATO officers. Through Operation Gladio the USA used NATO to gather, protect, operationalize, train, arm, fund, modernize, develop and use the fascist militias all over Europe that emerged before, during, and after the Third Reich. To this day the USA continues to veto UN resolutions condemning fascism and banning the glorification of Nazis.
When we update our understanding with this context, it requires us to rethink what's happening in the West, how it's not a repetition of a mistake but rather an evolution of an ongoing and continuous process, and not through some mystical psycho-social lens but through a historical materialist lens. The USA was always and will always be fascist, which is why USA businessmen funded the Third Reich and there was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s. What's happening now is that same power structure losing control of global economics and global propaganda, while simultaneously the resistance has developed low-tech guerilla and hybrid-conventional strategies and tactics for protracted war against the empire.
The USA has only ever been one step away from industrialized mass murder domestically, and it may begin that if its border policies and its prison administration cannot manage the disruption caused by the restless masses. The USA is an active police state with near universal surveillance and has been for decades. After the Red Scare died down, it's only ever been one step away from rounding up, deporting, and executing leftists for their political positions. The question for us is "under what conditions will it make sense for these steps to be taken?"
Appreciate your write-up, but at present, Biden is still closer to a progressive liberal. Trump is a fascist though…
Biden personally championed laws in Congress to fund and arm the Israeli colonial army, to increase imprisonment of black people, to make such imprisonment worse and longer, and to increase the power and impunity of police. He increased the number of migrants imprisoned, increased the use of solitary confinement (torture) for asylum seekers, and oversaw a continuing degradation of life expectancy, quality of life, and labor power in the USA. He continues to use threaten war, including nuclear war, on chosen geopolitical rivals.
The "liberal progressive" you mention is an aesthetic, it's not a material reality.
Well, as the great Danny Devito once said "{self-death} is badass"...
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