Tag: decline and fall

Kabul Has Fallen

The Taliban have already entered the capital city of Afghanistan, months earlier than expected:

This is the moment US diplomats are seen being evacuated from Kabul just hours before Taliban forces stormed the Afghan capital.

In a stark scene mirroring that of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, a US Air Force helicopter was seen taking off from the US Embassy earlier today.

The Chinook helicopter was seen taking to the skies above the city – just like in 1975 when a US Marine helicopter was seen evacuating embassy staff from Vietnamese capital.

Smoke was also seen rising from near to the US embassy earlier today as security staff work to burn any important documents, including CIA information, or material that could be used ‘in propaganda efforts’. The US flag is soon expected to be lowered, signalling the official closure of the embassy.

It comes as the US steps up its evacuation of Kabul with Taliban fighters quickly moving in ‘from all sides’. Shots were heard on the outskirts of the capital earlier today, much earlier than first anticipated, before fighters poured into the city.

US Intelligence officials had expected Kabul to hold out for three months, while UK ministers were hoping they had until the end of the month.

Leaders of the extremist group have today demanded the Afghan government surrender the city to them in a bid to avoid bloodshed – adding the chilling warning ‘we’ve not declared a ceasefire’.

As many as 10,000 US citizens are being evacuated from the city. Around 3,000 US troops are being sent to aid the mission.

Meanwhile, Special Forces units are joining 600 British troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade, including 150 Paratroopers, to begin airlifting more than 500 British Government employees out of Kabul.

It is believed that by Saturday night that the number of UK officials still in Afghanistan had been reduced to the ‘low tens’ – including ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow.

The UK Government says it aims to get British ambassador Sir Laurie and his remaining embassy staff out by Sunday night – amid fears the Taliban could seize Kabul airport within days.

Russia meanwhile today confirmed it did not intend to evacuate its embassy staff in Kabul.

This is a disaster and a national humiliation, but it is one that was both inevitable and obvious, predicted by me and by many others, for nearly two decades. And Russia has no need to evacuate its embassy staff, for unlike the USA and the United Kingdom, it is not at war with the Taliban and it has not been defeated by them.

The policy of Pax Americana enforced by our troops stationed around the world is not only a failure, it is leading to the corruption of the American military.

War is the health of the state, true, but unlike the tango, it does not require two. However, it has become clear that the neoconservative utopians in the administration do not see this undeclared and unconstitutional war as a reactive strike in self-defense, but more as a means of reshaping the global order. I expect this attempt to work about as well as Woodrow Wilson’s did in 1918.

It is not only the inevitable failure of this vision that concerns me. A military machine is a delicate creature, designed to do one thing very well—destroy the opposition. It is a well-known fact of military history that fighting troops and garrison troops are two very different things, and attempting to turn the former into the latter significantly impedes their ability to perform their primary mission.

History proves that no utopian vision, however sweeping, will ever bring a permanent peace. Let us then abandon visions of a global Pax Americana, bring our soldiers home, and only send them forth when war is necessary and declared. And when the war is won and the enemy is destroyed, bring the troops home again immediately. They deserve no less.

Bring them home from Germany, from South Korea and Italy. Bring them home from Kosovo, from Afghanistan and Kuwait, from Turkey, Spain, Iceland and Belgium. Bring them home from Panama, Portugal and Japan. Most of all, bring them home from Iraq. Now.

Our matchless soldiers have won the war—they cannot win the peace.

Bring Them Home, Worldnetdaily, February 23, 2004

UPDATE: Bagram airbase also fell to the Taliban this morning, surrendered by the Afghan troops who were defending it after the US withdrawal.

Discuss on SG.

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.

Run, run away

To absolutely no one’s surprise who knew the first thing about The Graveyard of Empires, the US empire is in what was always the absolutely inevitable full retreat from Afghanistan.

The Taliban seized the cities of Ghazni and Herat on Thursday, in the most dramatic string of captures since launching their offensive. Taking the strategically important Ghazni increases the likelihood the Taliban could take the capital Kabul.

There is also heavy fighting in the second largest city, Kandahar.

The insurgents have moved at speed, seizing new territories almost daily, as US and other foreign troops withdraw after 20 years of military operations.

The city of Qala-I-Naw also fell to the Taliban, who now control about a third of the country’s regional cities and most of northern Afghanistan. The group’s rapid advance has dealt a crushing blow to government security forces.

Sources have told the BBC that Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, is also now in the hands of the Taliban, though this has not been confirmed.

As it happens, Kandahar has already been taken by the Taliban, while the USA and the UK prepare to stage a recreation of the retreat from Saigon in 1975.

Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar, fell into the hands of Taliban insurgents, a spokesman for the militant group and local government officials said early Friday. A local government official later confirmed to the Reuters news agency that the militants had taken the city following “heavy clashes late last night.”

Hours before the Taliban claimed control over Kandahar, the US announced plans to deploy 3,000 troops temporarily to aid the evacuation of its embassy staff. Another 1,000 US soldiers will be sent to Qatar for technical and logistical support, and some 3,500 to 4,000 will be positioned in Kuwait to deploy if needed.

“We’ve been evaluating the security situation every day to determine how best to keep those serving at the embassy safe,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price. “We expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan in the coming weeks,” he said, adding the embassy would not be closing.

Britain is also deploying some 600 soldiers to Afghanistan to help evacuate UK nationals in the country, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said.

But the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan is just the punctuation mark. What we’re witnessing is the end of the US empire, with all the alien rulers, corrupt judges, illegitimate government, incompetent generals, foreign profiteers, and hordes of invading migrants, moral degeneracy, and declining religious faith, morale, and national confidence that customarily accompanies such events. If history is any guide, this is not going to be turned around, so it is time to stop thinking in terms of “preserving” and “conserving” and “restoring” that which is destroyed, and start thinking in terms of building anew with the benefit of the lessons learned from the decline and fall of the United States of America.

The lesson, as always, is this: sink the damn ships!

Starbucks is not the answer

Sadly, it turns out that putting a coffee shop and an art gallery on the corner is not the ticket to economic revitalization:

One of the most influential thinkers about cities in postwar America, wants you to know that he got almost everything about cities wrong.
If you live in an urban center in North America, the United Kingdom, or Australia, you are living in Richard Florida’s world. Fifteen years ago, he argued that an influx of what he called the “creative classes” — artists, hipsters, tech workers — were sparking economic growth in places like the Bay Area. Their tolerance, flexibility, and eccentricity dissolved the rigid structures of industrial production and replaced them with the kinds of workplaces and neighborhoods that attracted more young people and, importantly, more investment.
His observations quickly formed the basis of a set of breezy technical solutions. If decaying cities wanted to survive, they had to open cool bars, shabby-chic coffee shops, and art venues that attract young, educated, and tolerant residents. Eventually, the mysterious alchemy of the creative economy would build a new and prosperous urban core.
Today, even Florida recognizes that he was wrong. The rise of the creative class in places like New York, London, and San Francisco created economic growth only for the already rich, displacing the poor and working classes. The problems that once plagued inner cities have moved to the suburbs.
To make his case for the creative class, Florida subjected it to strange quantifications. Combining census data on occupation, education, “coolness factor” (based on the number of young people and the quality of “nightlife and culture”) and, bizarrely, the number of gay male residents, he developed a “Bohemia Index” to calculate this group’s magical effect on urban economic growth.
Florida reassures readers that all human beings are fundamentally creative animals, but only a third of us can make a living that way. The creative classes — to which you may, unknowingly, belong — include journalists, college professors, tech workers, graphic designers, and artists of any kind: basically anyone not working in the repetitious and decidedly uncreative manufacturing or service sectors.
The “creative classes” both diagnosed the present state of cities and offered recommendations for future action. Along with Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida has served as an inspiration for mayors, developers, and planners who pedestrianized streets, built bike lanes, and courted cultural attractions like art galleries and theaters.

So, as it turns out, entertainment is not the core of the economy. Someone had better let Disney know the bad news. I suspect they’ll need to come up with some other metric that serves as a more accurate proxy for race.

The Terrible Cowardice

This is a guest post from an occasional contributor who prefers to remain anonymous. Please don’t assume that he speaks for me or that I necessarily agree with any or all of his various assertions and conclusions.
The Terrible Cowardice of the Left
I grew up in England.
I came of age as the Spice Girls were soaring to the top of the hit parade.  ‘I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want’ echoed from every bedroom.  Girls strode around proclaiming the new age of GIRL POWER, boys insisted – unconvincingly  – that they only listened to the Spice Girls for the music.  It was the dawn of a whole new age.
Well, actually it wasn’t.  But we thought it was.
There was a girl at my school who I’ll call Jane.  She was one of the blessed, as far as looks were concerned.  I don’t think there was a single boy who didn’t lust after her.  A smile from her could brighten up your whole day.  She would have been a cheerleader, if we’d had cheerleaders.
There was also a boy who I’ll call Kevin.  He was a nerd.  Spotty, glasses, slightly overweight, maybe not the ugliest boy in the school, but certainly in the bottom ten.  He was the kind of person whose mere existence attracted bullies. I’d known him since I was a child, but we’d never really been friends. People who stood too close to him got bullied too.
So one day, Kevin takes it into his head to ask Jane – yes, JANE – out.  I’d never thought he had it in him. I never dared ask her out. But he did it.
Jane gaped at him, let out an incredulous laugh and told him, in no uncertain terms, that she wouldn’t go out with him if he was the last person on Earth.  She ripped him a whole new one.  Kevin staggered off, looking as though someone had punched him in the head.  Boys laughed, glad that they hadn’t been the target of her wrath; girls laughed and chatted about Girl Power.  Jane’s victory would have made her the most popular girl in the class if she hadn’t already held that title. I imagine Kevin wanted to blink out of existence and die. But he had to keep coming into school for the remaining year. People were rubbing salt into his wounds until we left for university.
There was another person  in this little story.  Gaston – believe me, the name fits – was a football player.  He was handsome, muscular, and had a habit of playing cruel jokes on his victims.  He was the jock’s jock.  He’d once thought it was amusing to shove my head down the toilet, then yank down my trousers when I tried to escape.  He was popular because students preferred to have him on their side than against them. It won’t surprise you to hear that Gaston started to date Jane in our final year of school.
A few weeks before we left the building for the last time, we were in the gym for our regular torture session.  Jane was wearing a skirt an inch or two above the knee, drawing all of our eyes.  And then Gaston takes it into his head to flip her skirt up, exposing her underwear.  We all saw.
Jane let out a nervous little laugh and brushed her skirt back down.
I can imagine just how humiliated she must have felt, at that moment.  If I – a boy – hated having my bottom exposed, it must have been far worse for her.  Everyone had been looking at her bum.  I expected her to tear into Gaston with all the vitriol she’d hurled at Kevin.  Girl Power, you know?
She didn’t, of course.  She tried to pass it off as a joke, but I could tell she was upset.
But why didn’t she light into Gaston?  Why didn’t she dump his ass on the spot?
She was scared.  Kevin might have been a boy, but he was no threat to her.  There were plenty of girls who could have beaten him up, in that school.  Gaston could have broken her effortlessly.  He’d beaten me up, once or twice.  No one wanted to get on his bad side, even if it meant accepting public humiliation.  She let him get away with it.
No one else tried to stop him either.  Gaston committed blatant sexual assault and got away with it.  And who could blame them?  The teachers had very little power to discipline their charges.  None of the boys or girls wanted to make an enemy of him …
I have no idea what happened to any of them, after I left school.  And I don’t really care.
A brave man or woman is someone who stands up to great odds, accepting the risk of serious injury, or even death, in the name of their cause.  Sometimes, this is as simple as standing up in front of an angry crowd and speaking the truth; sometimes, it is as complex as multi-leveled combat operations.  Many on the Left say that they are brave, that they are putting everything on the line.  But is that actually true?
It is easy to stand up to someone as puny as Kevin.  Jane was in no danger.  Even if Kevin was strong enough to hurt her, I have no doubt that all the boys would have piled onto him before he could do real harm.  We didn’t have virtue-signalling in those days, but we certainly did have white knighting.  Gaston?  It’s a great deal harder to stand up to someone so strong, so popular, so entrenched as the good guy that it would be difficult to undermine him.
The thing I’ve noticed about the Left these days is that it is largely composed of cowards.
Pretend, for the moment, that you’re a feminist.  You believe, very firmly, that women should have equal rights to men.  You may even believe that women are superior to men.  So tell me, why aren’t you protesting the migrant crisis in Europe?  Why aren’t you standing up for the rights of Muslim women?  Why do you not see Radical Islam as a threat to your very existence?
One possible answer, of course, is that feminists are more concerned with problems closer to home.  (Which ignores the fact that this problem is moving increasingly closer to home.)  But another is far darker.  Feminists are scared.  Western men do not, in general, have a habit of beating or shooting women who defy them.  And those who do are not regarded as heroes by the rest of the male population.  But Islamists?  Radical Muslims regard feminism – the radical notion that women are human beings, as Marie Shear put it – as poison.  They do NOT regard women as human beings.
This problem is deeper than you might suppose.  A person raised in a different culture might have very different ideas about the way the world works than yourself.  The idea that a woman who doesn’t cover herself from head to toe is just asking for it is horrific, as far as I am concerned, but that doesn’t mean that migrants don’t have that opinion.  And the idea that they are going to instantly change, the moment they set foot in the West, is laughable.
All the concepts we take for granted, that a woman can say ‘no,’ that underage children are not to be touched, are not graven in stone.  They’re cultural norms that have become part of our lives so much that it is hard to believe that others don’t share them.  But they don’t.
Or pretend that you’re a homosexual.  Conservatives may dislike homosexuals, but radical Muslims throw homosexuals off buildings.  Which one of these is the true threat to homosexuals?  Why aren’t homosexuals protesting migrants?
Because they’re scared.
On one level, the political elites in both Europe and America managed to declare discussions about immigration taboo.  This had the effect, for better or worse, of pushing such matters into the hands of the far-right.  But it also made it impossible for feminists or homosexuals or other liberal groups to oppose immigration without being branded racists or worse.  And while a person from the Right may shrug off the charge of racism, a person from the Left would take it far more seriously.  The Descending Hierarchy of Victimhood puts Muslims below feminists and homosexuals, thus providing cover for anything they do to anyone above them.  Anyone who challenges Muslims is ‘punching down.’
But on another level, people who question radical Muslims, people who oppose them, are threatened, attacked and sometimes killed.  This is a very real problem.  Feminists and homosexuals and leftists in general are scared of being hurt and killed.  And who could blame them?  No one is immune to fear.  It is difficult to muster the bravery to fight back when you know that everyone will side against you, that  authority, however defined, will not protect you.  Instead, they choose to deny reality and attack people who can’t – who won’t – hit back.
The Left has long since cast aside its ability to make moral judgments.  It is incapable of understanding that a person who has had a bad upbringing – or whatever – still needs to suffer the consequences of their actions.  Instead, it has created a situation where real threats are ignored and imaginary threats are blown out of all proportion.  Few on the left dare to oppose it for fear of being smeared by the ‘racist’ brush.  And it has betrayed its own people.
The good thing about this is that more and more people are becoming aware that the emperor has no clothes.  The bad thing about this is that a great many innocent people, feminists and homosexuals and everything else, will suffer for the Left’s cowardice in the face of the true enemy.

“Police have disappeared”

From Twitter:
“Police have completely disappeared from #Berkeley. People getting beaten up. Red flags being waved in the air.”

This is a surprise? Again? Really?
What part of “when seconds count, the police are 20 minutes away” failed to register with gun-owning conservatives?
Observations:

  1. The police have ZERO responsibility to protect you. None. This is settled case law. Never, ever, count on police protection from anything.
  2. The police work for the local mayor. The local mayor’s political allegiances dictate how the police will be utilized.
  3. This marks the third time – at least – that police protection has been proffered and then withdrawn.
  4. Street rallies serve no positive purpose, although they can be effectively used to demonstrate a) the politicization of the police as well as b) the violent lawlessness of the Alt-Left.

Why they spy

The Dark Triad Man explains the nature of government power, and why the techno-corporate state has erected the panopticon, in an excerpt from The Nine Laws:

Men rarely understand the nature of military power in the hands of governments.
The idiot believes that it is there to protect him, to enforce justice.
The common man thinks that it is used according to the law, sheltered within the principles of the culture.
The wise man assumes that human beings are fallible and their choices often self-serving; that the best interests and plans often reluctantly settle into the expedient and the tawdry.
The Dark Triad Man knows the truth:
State power is the tool of men with ruthless ambition, remorseless intention and brutal capacity who do not hesitate to shed blood, hide graves and rewrite history in their favor.
Concealment of capacity is among the most crucial components of freedom. For freedom exists in the dark world within a fearsome gradient, between the polarities of anarchy and totalitarianism, and at every spot between them the shade is merely a different hue of blood.
Thus concealment of plans from the organs of the State is vital to the preservation of freedom.
Concealment of networks from the agents of the State is the hypervigilant task of the insurgent.
Concealment of physical power from the intelligence of the State is the fearsome task of free men.
Do not trust the ruling power.
The ruling power always has more resources, more intelligence, more ruthlessness and more cruelty than you can imagine. And your survival depends upon concealment until the moment of decision.
The fool believes that his vote is a determining factor in the policies of the State.
The common man thinks that parties and coalitions and alliances represent his interests.
The wise man assumes that history and culture place boundaries on the system, which rights itself.
The Dark Triad Man accepts the truth: There is always a Caesar waiting with grim and immortal ambition, nestled in the heart of the nation, who seeks to rise to total power and views blood and atrocity and horror as mere laurels of valid drama upon his entitled brow.

Americans have been fortunate in the relatively mild nature of their ruling elite, which generously embraced the principle of noblesse oblige. But that elite has changed greatly in the last 60 years, and has largely abandoned that principle, which means Americans are unlikely to remain so fortunate for long.

The lost legacy

This is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascistic, utterly Stalinist, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. The whole legacy of the free speech 1960s has been lost by my own party.
– Camille Paglia
You will note that even the life-long Democrat, Camille Paglia, recognizes that there is no essential dichotomy between fascism, Stalinism, and political correctness.
In the meantime, the pro-free speech ralliers in Boston are vastly outnumbered by the anti-free speech counter-protesters.

Civil War 2.0

Whose side are you on, asks Pat Buchanan:

First in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would not lift up his sword against his own people and chose to defend his home state rather than wage war upon her.
This veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, “appears in the saying attributed to a Confederate soldier, ‘The rest of us may have … descended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert.’”
Growing up after World War II, this was accepted history.
Yet, on the militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of “racist and traitor.” A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in museums or tossed onto trash piles.
What has changed since 1965?
It is not history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.
What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores.
And the politicians are in panic….
While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?
In this Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?

This is why the Fake News is so desperate to draw a mythical line between Nazi vs Not-Nazi, rather than Nationalist Right vs Globalist Left, as the situation actually requires, because they know they fall on the weaker side that is actively opposed to American heritage and history and tradition.
And it is also why they are desperate to hide the obvious link between the coming civil war and post-1965 immigration. History clearly shows that there are only two ways to stop this war. One is to proactively break up the United States and implement population transfers, the other is to restore the pre-1965 population demographics through mass repatriations.
Neither solution is likely. Man seldom takes the opportunity to avoid war. That’s why he is doomed to fight them. The citizens of the USA are not exceptional in this regard.