A Rapid and Unexpected Collapse

It’s not the collapse of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan that is surprising, it’s the speed of the collapse, especially when compared to the collapse of the Soviet puppet regime there.

The 20 years of America’s and NATO’s war in Afghanistan has ended in ignominious failure – total and absolute. So, of course, did the Soviets’ war, but not quite so abruptly.

After the last Soviet troops crossed over the Friendship Bridge linking Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan, the mujahideen launched a major offensive, confident that they would be able to defeat the government forces in short order. Their offensive collapsed completely. The Afghan army stood its ground and not a single major population center fell into the hands of their opponents. It was not until two years later, when the post-Soviet Russian government of Boris Yeltsin cut off funding to the Afghans that the PDPA regime finally fell.

The contrast with what has happened this past week could not be clearer. Even after the Soviets had left, the troops they had trained and equipped fought hard and successfully. Today, the troops that America and its allies trained and equipped at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars have scattered to the four winds with only the slightest effort at resistance.

But, to be fair, the problem lies not in army exercises or crates of machine guns. The current batch of Afghans have had plenty of both. They outnumber the Taliban and are better supplied. The problem is one of morale: simply put, not many of them are willing to die for their government.

The PDPA had a well-deserved reputation for corruption, incompetence, factional in-fighting, and dogmatic, counterproductive policies that alienated the Afghan people, such as its Marxist assaults on religion and private enterprise. Meanwhile, the PDPA’s opponents, the mujahideen, the Taliban’s precursor, enjoyed substantial support from the United States, including signing for the delivery of sophisticated Stinger missiles.

The fact that the Soviet-backed government put up a better fight than its contemporary counterpart can, therefore, only have one explanation: Afghans respect their current rulers even less than they respected the socialist PDPA. And that is really saying something.

The neoclowns who run US foreign policy – and increasingly domestic policy as well – operate through corruption because they are wicked and because their primary weapons are a) deception, b) access to a near-infinite supply of manufactured money and c) human weakness. And while corruption is indubitably an effective means of degrading and destroying organizations, institutions, and traditions, it is an incredibly weak foundation for building anything from buildings to nations.

This is why the servants of Satan are always defeated in the end. They can’t hold onto their gains, even when everything is under their control, because they cannot build anything that lasts.

Two years after the Soviet empire retreated from Afghanistan, the empire itself fell. If the amazingly fast collapse of the US puppet regime is a harbinger for a similar series of events, the imminent fall of Kabul would appear to suggest that the collapse of the US empire will be even more rapid, and even less expected, than the fall of its Soviet predecessor.

And while it seems to have escaped mainstream observers, I tend to doubt it is an accident that the Taliban’s massively successful offensive comes just two weeks after the Chinese foreign minister recognized the legitimacy of the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan.

Discuss on SG.

Mr. Buchanan’s Questions

In which I answer Pat Buchanan’s questions about the failed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The questions that need answering. Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?

Yes. First, the Middle East and Near East have zero interest in Madisonian democracy. Second, what the US empire has been exporting for the last 40-50 years is not “Madisonian democracy”, but rather, a foreign imperialism that wears Madisonian democracy as a skinsuit.

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

All of them except for the Japanese armed forces. Even the highly-regarded Israeli Defense Forces are a little more than a Potemkin military, whose excellent historical reputation is primarily based, as the Israeli general Moshe Dayan observed, on the feeble capabilities of their historical opponents. And the US forces are observably inferior to the current Russian and Chinese forces, and, on the basis of their failures in Afghanistan, quite possibly to Iranian forces on the ground.

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

Democracy no longer holds any appeal anywhere, not in the Maghreb, not in the Middle East, not in Central Asia, and not in Europe. Everyone knows it is fake and gay and literally Satanic.

Who lost America’s longest war?

The neocons who have run US foreign policy since the first Bush administration did. Americans are fortunate that the neocons were unable to enmesh the US military in Syria or Iran, or the consequences would have been even worse.

To be more precise, if the Israelis are to be believed, a small group of Jewish Boomers whose fathers were followers of Leon Trotsky did.

In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit.

Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don’t think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you’re scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.

“If America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East.”

  • Charles Krauthammer, 2003

It is now obvious to the entire world that these neocons are evil, incompetent idiots who did, in fact, produce an epic series of historic disasters. And they should be held responsible for the catastrophic consequences they knowingly risked.

Discuss on SG.

Another day, another gatekeeper

One would think conservatives would stop falling for the traps that gatekeepers are laying for them, but then, they are conservatives. Now we’re being told Rumble is the new Parler:

Glenn Greenwald has urged internet users to leave behind YouTube’s ceaseless content-policing and migrate to Rumble, after he and a group of prominent pundits set up shop at the laissez-faire video platform. The veteran journalist, along with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and several other well-known commentators, have joined Rumble’s “deep pool of content talent,” the company said in a press release on Thursday. As part of the agreement, Rumble will provide the all-star content creators with resources to help them produce videos that will be exclusive to the site for a limited time.

The platform’s popularity has skyrocketed, experiencing a 25-fold increase in viewership over the past year.

Under the deal, Greenwald will continue his ‘System Update’ video program that he began while still at the Intercept and continued when he took up independent reporting at Substack. The show will appear on Rumble two hours before it is published elsewhere.

It’s not clear how much Greenwald is being compensated for the move, but he said the “ample funding package” would be used to pay for a “highly professionalized form of video.”

Translation: like Substack, Rumble is paying for “pundits” and recognizable “influencers” to use their platform. Of course, they’ll exert exactly the same content control that all the SJW-controlled platforms do, they just won’t be as obvious about it at first.

No thanks. I’ll stick with Unauthorized.

Discuss on SG.

How the vaxxed view the fate of the unvaxxed

McRapey waxes philosophical on how he and his fellow vaxxed should feel about the death of unvaccinated individuals:

So when your cousin/high school friend/neighbor and people like them who choose not to get vaccinated contract COVID and die, while the temptation is to be all, welp, what did you expect, you fucked around and found out, entertain the notion that, alongside anything else about the situation, they have been victimized by people who largely knew better. There are people who know that a virus doesn’t care about politics, but decided to frame it as a political issue because doing so ultimately allows them to sell pillows and nutritional powders and reverse mortgages and gold coins and whatnot to the people they terrified and made angry and ignorant, and because they think that in the authoritarian future they are working so hard to bring about, somehow they will be the ones wearing the boots instead of being crushed under a heel like everyone else.

Indeed, here in the second half of 2021, how bad should we feel about the COVID-related death of anyone who still chooses not to get vaccinated — with the full knowledge of the consequences of contracting COVID, and the spread of the rather-more-infectious Delta variant of the disease, and the ease of acquiring a shot (which here in the US is free to get, incidentally)? Is there a certain point where one throws up one’s hands, says, “well, you knew better, didn’t you?” and washes one’s hands of them?

As with so many things in this world, I think it depends.

Let’s begin by acknowledging a moral hazard inherent here. Mainly: there’s a difference between wondering how badly one should feel about the willfully unvaccinated dying of COVID, and hoping that they do. If you are in the latter camp, remember that wishing death on people almost always makes you the asshole in the scenario. I personally make an effort not to wish people dead, even as I acknowledge I have a list of people I think the planet would be better off without. I won’t mourn their sorry asses when they’re gone. I’m not going to hope they get pushed in front of a bus, however. And I’m not going to do any of that pushing myself.

With that acknowledged, I think we can separate the currently unvaccinated into three major categories:

1. Those who legitimately cannot be vaccinated: Children under the age of 12, and those over that age who have medical reasons that keep them from being vaccinated are generally blameless if they catch the virus. You should feel bad for them if they die, and if you additionally feel a bit pissed off that the willfully unvaccinated made their lives harder by not being vaccinated when they easily could be, then that’s perfectly all right. Because they did! And that’s an asshole thing to do.

2. Those who could be vaccinated but aren’t because they’re ignorant and/or have a head full of bullshit: This is the largest group, and personally I have some sympathy for them. Look, it’s hard to remember this sometimes, but lots of people don’t feel obliged to follow the news of the day with any assiduousness. When they do, they often get it from sources that a) have trained them over years to mistrust information that does not come from them, b) are lying to them because they have a financial motive for doing so. This informational ecosystem of bullshit has gone out of its way to frame a viral pandemic as just another political issue, which it’s fundamentally not. A virus doesn’t give a shit about your politics, only whether it can gain a foothold in your body.

But for millions of people, that framing has taken hold and at this point it’s impossible to shake. Your cousin/high school friend/neighbor railing about masks and “vaccination passports” on Facebook has been fed bullshit and accepts the idea that only the people feeding them bullshit are truly “objective” and trustworthy. We can go on and on about how that happened and the ultimate culpability of your cousin/high school friend/neighbor in their own ignorance and pleasure in pouring bullshit into their own head. But, for the moment, accept that they have been lied to, and are unfortunately not particularly well-equipped to break out of the framing that’s been reinforced to them, over and over, by the media figures and politicians they trusted (mind you, they will likely be furious if you point out the latter bit to them; they’re the free-thinkers, you see).

You can be sorry that because a vast right-wing propaganda machine thought it was more important to grasp toward power than to value human life, your cousin/high school friend/neighbor/whomever is now dead. Hopefully you will be motivated to avenge their death.

(There are people out there in the US not attached to the right wing who are also steering people away from vaccines, which I am noting here simply so people don’t bring up the point in the comments. Sure, they exist. With that said, let’s not pretend that the high correlation between the parts of the US that are deemed “vaccine hesitant,” and which parts of the US that voted for Trump in 2020, is some sort of wild coincidence).

3. Those who could have been vaccinated but weren’t because they were busy selling the lie: Dick Farrel, by all appearances, falls into that category. Not only did he apparently dine on the bullshit, he was also serving it up on his radio show and on (ugh) Newsmax. He was actively demonizing health experts and encouraging people not to get vaccinated. Who knows how many people found themselves infected, hospitalized, and dead because of his actions, and the actions of others like him in media and politics reinforcing each others’ bullshit. He went out of his way to peddle a lie and endanger the health of others, because among other things he thought there was some coin in it. I hope he brought a couple of coins for the ferryman when he went. That’s all the benefit he’s going to get out of them at this point.

My reaction to the Dick Farrels of the world is: I’m sorry their friends lost a friend, and I’m sorry for all the people they fed bullshit to who are currently in danger of contracting a dangerous but easily preventable virus because he encouraged them not to protect themselves with a simple, safe and efficient vaccine. If his death and deathbed conversion to the efficacy of vaccines serves as a useful rebuttal to all his previous bullshit on the subject, so much the better. Beyond that, I wouldn’t have wished him dead, and I’m glad he’s no longer able to tell other people not to get vaccinated. It’s too bad the former was required for the latter, but, well. Here we are. If it takes more deaths like his for it to sink in, at least they will not be entirely useless deaths. This is about as kindly as I can put that.

Now, it will be absolutely fascinating to observe how this slightly smug perspective begins to transform once the vaccinated population begin to realize that they are actually far more likely to die, either of Covid itself or of one of the many adverse vaccine effects, and worse, begin to suspect that they may have sterilized their children as well.

I just hope their understandable fear, rage, and violence is directed toward deserving targets, namely, toward the scientists and politicians and journalists who have done this to them, rather than toward innocent parties who were intelligent and aware enough to avoid stepping into the diabolical trap laid by the wicked.

“In many instances Stage 2 testing of the mRNA “vaccines” produced immune system failures within 6 to 18 months.”

Regardless, it would be wise to remember how they felt about the prospect of your death when they succumb to corona-chan or the adverse effects of their fourth booster shot.

Discuss on SG.