You, a loser tankie: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Me, a reasonable centrist: I erase my brain like Harry Dubois once a month. It's smooth as a whistle and very excited to vote for Kamala!
there is an opiate epidemic in the US; and if you know anything about the ruling class connection to the opium wars, and follow the history forward; with ruling class and mafia collaboration bootlegging, operation underworld, the KMT-Warlord and OSS/CIA drug emipres in Myanmar (then-called Burma) during the Chinese revolutionary civil war, the CIA's Nazis like Klaus "Butcher of Lyon" Barbie working with Pablo Escobar, the Iran/Contra shitshow, etc. you know it is still relevant. Also IT IS DEFINITELY STILL RELEVANT TO CHINA which means it is relevant to the whole world
Also the Iraq war caused ISIS and everything that came afterward and is still happening, including Operation Timber Sycamore shit and such events as ISIS in Syria attacking israel then apologizing.
Liberals were born outraged yesterday.
Major health crisis due to opiates in the US while the CIA was filling their lack budgets with heroin drug money from Afghanistan but trust me bros, it's not relevant
as relevant to today's politics as the opium wars
Yeah I agree, they're both extremely fucking relevant. Basically defined the West's role in global geopolitics
Libs telling on themselves when they say things like that is so funny. Like, I get that in some ways, it makes sense that if something happened a long enough time ago then it stops being relevant. But that's only really true of the stuff that makes local news. A major historical process like the Opium Wars literally shapes history for eternity: it determines crucial changes in the allocations of capital worldwide, impacts the entire society of major geopolitical powers, and shapes international relations forever because they have cascading echoes of tit-for-tat that will literally last until the end of human history. But if you're a liberal, I guess all of that isn't as important as the vibes and just using racist caricatures as the tea leaves to do geopolitical analysis with.
Also the Taiping Rebellion happening alongside and between the opium wars is probably one of the most important historic events of the 19th century with ramifications to the modern day. The European powers put their finger (heavily) on the scale for the Qing (for Opium reasons) instead of the historically progressive and also kind of weird Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
I can't even imagine the way China (and the world) would look if the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and their leader who they thought was Jesus' younger brother won. There'd probably not be a People's republic of China, but also probably no century of humiliation. It's hard to picture. Would it stay a kingdom, become a republic earlier or later? Would the wildly divergent Taiping Christianity sweep Asia? IDK
The neocon ideology that paved the bloody road to this war is actually now the established, largely uncontested foreign policy doctrine in most NATO member states, the "once in a century level of political juice" was used to make it not only a bipartisan stance in the US and the UK, but to completely silence all public opposition to it. And the only reason i'm aware of that is that i actually posess some degree of object permanence and am also old enough to remember how this total discursive domination happened a few years later in my country, which wasn't on board with the Iraq war and has been a prime CIA psyop target ever since.
The main learning from the catastrophic outcome in Iraq seems to be that it's more viable to do this shit in the form of proxy wars than to engage directly. But i'm honestly unsure if increasing instability in the Greater Middle East and killing a careful estimate of 3-4 million people during the Wars on Terror is even viewed as a catastrophic outcome in the US or if the regime in D.C. just goes "eh, not as we originally hoped for, but total chaos in that region is acceptable, too".
How isn't Iraq still relevant, all those people are the ones writing the Biden-Harris foreign policy 20 years later! To say these people have brains the size of a pea would be insulting to legumes.
And the opium wars are still relevant with Hong Kong protests and Chinese drug policies.
all the people who greenlit it and wrote opinion pieces about why it was great are literally all around and in power! you can send them rude messages on twitter if you like!
It was very funny when they'd get bullied on Twitter and act like the sacred decorum was violated and it's like "no, you got millions of people killed and displaced so you could get money, you are the affront to polite society" guys like Stephen Miller should never be able to show his face again. He should have to go around dressed up like the Unabomber whenever he buys groceries for the rest of his life. The audacity of these fuckers
And are now telling us that we definitely 100% should nuke Iran and that doing so will be super cool and easy.
Stupidity. In Fallujah alone there are still record numbers of birth defects due to the depleted uranium there.
I don't have a source but I remember reading white phosphorus still cause health problems there to this day
1,000% sure this person was totally all-in on the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but now tells people they never supported it back then and were always against it.
What militarized the Houthis? WHAT MILITARIZED THE HOUTHIS NERD?
Everything happens in a vacuum. No I mean like my vacuum specifically. I empty it frequently.
One of the side effects of a country not having any real history is that two decades might as well be 150 years to the average yank
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