Tag: history

Tragedy and Farce

It is said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Although, in some cases, it’s just the same old thing over and over again. So once the British Armed Forces complete their stunning and brave conquest of Russia, they can head south to refight the war in the Falkland Islands. Or, as I suppose we had better get used to calling them again, the Malvinas.

The row over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands has erupted again after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina issued a statement asking Britain to start negotiations over it again. In a statement issued on Wednesday, the South American country said it intended to restore sovereignty over the islands and intended this to be done through diplomatic means.

This is what the country believes is the “only possible way to restore the exercise of its rights”.

It’s a bit amusing to think of Britain threatening to use what little military force it has to defend British sovereignty off the coast of Argentina when it didn’t use it to resist an ongoing and active invasion of its own island by millions of invaders. Ironically, if Milei hadn’t been foolish enough to spurn Argentina’s BRICS invitation, the Argentines probably could have peacefully taken control of the islands with full support from Russia and China before the end of 2024.

The whole globalization interlude is looking less and less like the end of history and more and more like a truly retarded period of human history that caused far more problems than it could possibly have ever solved.

Here’s a truly contrarian prediction. Whereas the current mainstream perspective is that Anders Breivik was a monster and Norman Borlaug was a scientific saint, before the end of the 21st century, Breivik will be seen as a William Tell-style national hero and Norman Borlaug will be considered a worse historical enemy of Mankind than Hitler and Mao combined.

I could be wrong, of course. It’s entirely possible that no one will remember Breivik because Norwegians and Swedes are as extinct as the Agawam or the Wicocomico, and that Borlaug and his Green Revolution mean nothing to the mixed-race hunter-gathers roaming across the ruins of Europe and America.

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Sykes-Picot is Dead

The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916. The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence.

Pepe Escobar describes the geo-strategic significance of the Yemeni-imposed restrictions on Red Sea traffic and how they have proven vastly more effective than the G7 sanctions on Russia:

In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated.

Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now.

The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.

Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.

Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions.

It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.

For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.

Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers.

All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?

The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.”

This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.”

That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.

How Yemen changed everything, PEPE ESCOBAR, 28 December 2023

I find this move by the Yemenis, presumably made in coordination with China, Russia, and several of the Arab nations, to be utterly fascinating, and more importantly, indicative of how far ahead of Clown World the BRICS strategists appear to be thinking. While I was certain that the impotence of the US Navy was a) going to be demonstrated before 2030 and b) that demonstration would have a significant effect on the way in which the nations regarded Clown World going forward, I assumed that it would be necessary for someone to sink a carrier or three in order to demonstrate that impotence.

But this is a much more elegant approach, as the observable reluctance of the US Navy to risk any direct engagement with what is, on the international scale, a sixth-rate power, demonstrates that impotence even more clearly than the loss of an entire carrier task force in the South China Sea could. After all, only Russia possesses the striking power of the Chinese military, but most of the nations in the world have resources that exceed that of Yemen; even the military capabilities of Croatia and The Democratic Republic of the Congo are rated ahead of Yemen in the 2023 Global Firepower rankings.

It’s one thing for Russia to prove that the Empire can’t push it around, it’s another thing for the nation ranked 74th in the world to do so.

If it is not yet clear to everyone that the US empire is in rapid decline, we can be confident that it is entirely apparent to everyone whose opinion matters.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the US government continues to demonstrate that it has not yet learned anything from the consequences of its recent attempts to poke the bear.

The United States has called for working groups from the Group of Seven (G7) countries to explore ways to confiscate hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets, the Financial Times reported this week. The United States, backed by the UK, Japan and Canada, has proposed setting up preparatory work for expropriating over $300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves that were immobilized by Western nations after the start of the Ukraine conflict.

The EU, where most of the assets are blocked, is more wary of a direct confiscation, fearing possible retaliation from Moscow if the money is taken. Currently, €210 billion ($230 billion) of Russia’s reserves are held in the bloc’s financial institutions, with €191 billion in Belgium, €19 billion in France, and €7.8 billion in non-member Switzerland.

Stealing Russian assets is not the greatest plan in the world when Russia is going to be in a position to simply march some of its 1.5 million mobilized troops into some of those nations and take whatever it wants from whomever it wants within the next two years. Notice that the G7 countries which are within marching distance don’t appear to be quite as enthusiastic about offering Moscow yet another casus belli.

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A Tale of Two “Nationalisms”

I posted the following on Gab:

It’s really rather remarkable that self-styled “pagans” are still attempting to attribute to Christianity what are the obvious and inevitable consequences of Western post-Christianity. The mass invasions and moral inversions of the last 70 years are quite literally anti-Christian in every sense, even when they are still cloaked in Churchian-sounding nonsense. Christendom has a long and successful historical record, whereas neither the post-Christian European societies nor the post-Christian USA will last much longer. Russia is on the rise due to its Orthodox Christian revival. Therein lies the only viable solution. Nationalism is good. Christian Nationalism is better.

JungleEaglesNest1488 @voxday white nationalism the best

@JungleEaglesNest1488 No, you retard. There is no such thing as “white nationalism”. Nation is a subset of race. White nationalism is an ignorant concept invented by US mongrels to make up for the fact that they don’t have an actual nation. Swedes are not Scots. Color nationalism has failed everywhere it has been tried, beginning with the red nationalism of the 1800s.

Please do at least a modicum of research into the historical attempts over the last 200 years to create a) red nationalism, b) yellow nationalism, c) black nationalism, and d) Arab nationalism before you waste any more time advocating a retarded ideology that is absolutely doomed to total failure. One cannot build a subset on the basis of a set. This really isn’t that hard to understand.

Der Weisskunig @voxday @JungleEaglesNest1488 You admit to a Nation being a subset of a race, so how can Christian Nationalism be a thing then? Racial Nationalism makes more sense than Religious Nationalism even when if we use your logic.

@DerWeisskunig @JungleEaglesNest1488 Because you don’t understand what “Christian Nationalism” is and is not. Christian Nationalism is not “a nation of Christians” in the civic national sense. It is not a nation that is comprised of Christians of different races and tribes. It is instead an existing nation, such as the English, or the Scots, or the Swedes, who have ordered their society on a Christian basis.

The Bible makes it clear that “nations” are coherent entities which are judged on the collective basis of their nationals’ behavior. Ergo, a nation can either reject or embrace Jesus Christ as an integral aspect of its social order.

Russia is presently the best example of a Christian Nationalist nation, even though its imperialist history renders it both imperfectly Christian and imperfectly nationalist.

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They Know They Lost, Right?

It’s no wonder that NATO has been demolished in Ukraine with military leadership of this intellectual calibre and historical knowledge:

The Ukrainian government needs to look at what Germany did in WWII to stand a chance against Russia, according to Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army forces stationed in Europe. Hodges, who retired as a lieutenant-general in 2017, has long been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine. In an interview with the Australian YouTuber Perun, published over the weekend, he repeatedly cited examples from the Second World War to argue that Kiev can defeat Moscow on the battlefield. “They are gonna have to increase production of ammunition and weapons in Ukraine,” Hodges said. “Some of these things are already happening, but it is possible when you are at war to increase production, even with Russian missiles raining down on your cities.” “I mean, think about what Germany did in 1944. Aircraft production for the Luftwaffe peaked in 1944. That’s after more than two years of steady bombing by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Corps bombing the hell out of German cities. But yet German aircraft production increased. So I think Ukraine can do that with some improving efficiency. Some Western companies are already there helping,” he concluded.

On the one hand, he’s right. Germany did increase its aircraft production in 1944. And so did Japan, which not only increased its shipping tonnage produced in 1944, but even managed to build more aircraft in 1945 than it did in 1942.

  • 1942: 8,900
  • 1943: 16,700
  • 1944: 28,200
  • 1945: 11,100

On the other hand—–and I would argue this is the more salient point—–both Germany and Japan were not only defeated militarily, but were defeated so comprehensively that they were forced to surrender unconditionally and are still under military occupation nearly 80 years after their respective surrenders.

Forget the Kiev regime. Forget Ukraine. And forget NATO. Anyone who knows anything about military history recognizes that both of them are already finished, they simply haven’t stopped quivering yet. The USA is now facing global military defeat on every single front, even as it is prostrate before the biggest invasion in all of human history.

At this point there appears to be nothing that can stop the All Nations Alliance from defeating Clown World. And for those who would cite the US and Israeli nuclear arsenals as a possible emergency measure, I repeat: there is nothing. I didn’t understand it when I first read the book as a child, but in retrospect, Jeff Sutton was telling us what the programming was back in 1968.

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Gunning for the Dollar

Russia is openly advocating for other nations to follow the lead of itself and China in abandoning the dollar standard for international trade:

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in a statement, that it is very important for all the BRICS member states that they develop sustainable financial relations and settlements within the organization. He made the statement while speaking on Monday at the Russia-China Financial Dialog in Beijing, where he was conducting meetings with Lan Foan, his Chinese counterpart.

The BRICS alliance of developing nations, made up currently of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been hashing out ways for member countries to make payments in local currencies. The bloc wants to accelerate its growth by reducing its reliance on the US dollar and the euro.

Siluanov said, “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries. Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them.”

We have the rare historical privilege to witness the decline and fall of an empire. While we tend to think of such things as being sudden and catastrophic events, they actually tend to take place over such an extended period of time that most of the empire’s inhabitants don’t even realize anything is changing until well after the changes have taken place and they have become accustomed to the consequences.

The events of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take place over century. The decline of the US empire is only measured in decades at this point, but even at this accelerated rate, it is taking place too slowly for the average individual to comprehend, even if he is sufficiently acute to notice some of the changes.

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Social Media is MPAI in Action

I posted this on Gab:

War is not a sport. Fatalities are not points. You cannot tell which side is winning a war simply on the basis of comparative KIA. Remember, the Allies took 77 percent of the total casualties in WWII. And yet, the Axis lost the war.

I’m sure it will surprise precisely no one to discover that the Smart Boys policing the Internet couldn’t restrain themselves.

@voxday Did the “Axis” really lose? I concur with General George Patton: “Gentlemen, I’ve come to the inexcusable conclusion that we defeated the wrong enemy. We should have aligned with the Fascists to defeat the communists, not aligned with the Communists to defeat the Fascists.”

Yes, the Axis really fucking lost WWII. Under no possible interpretation can it be said that the Berlin-Toyko-Rome Axis, which is the full and proper name for the WWII military alliance collectively known as “the Axis”, did not lose the war. The signatures on the various surrender documents should suffice to prove this beyond any reasonable doubt.

The particularly stupid thing about this specific Smart Boy posturing is that regardless of whether he and General Patton were correct to conclude that the wrong enemy was defeated, the point is that it was, definitively, defeated.

@voxday 77%??? WTF??? ONLY if you count the Russian casualties as Allies!

The Soviet Union absolutely were among the WWII military alliance known as “the Allies” which were opposed to “the Axis”. Not only that, but the Soviet Union was easily the most important Ally, and almost certainly could have won the war by itself. Both the USA and the UK faced only a fraction of the Axis forces that the Soviet Union did, and fielded military forces that were only a fraction of the forces fielded by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union defeated the primary Axis element, Germany, with help from the USA and the UK, but it almost certainly would have defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan without any help if the two Anglo states had stayed out of the war.

The Lesson, As Always, Is This: More than 9 times out of 10, the average individual would be best served by remembering to shut the fuck up instead of offering one’s unsolicited opinion. And that goes double for the self-styled Smart Boys.

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The War on Christmas 2023

The current phase of the War on Christmas began with the desacralization of the Christian holiday, which combined an attempt to create alternative secular carols with the creation of alternative fake holidays like Hannukah(1), Festivus, and Kwanzaa.

However, it’s very clear that as the Greatest Generation has mostly died out and the Boomers have become increasingly irrelevant, the younger generations are not falling for what has always been an anti-Christian psychological operation.

It’s interesting to see how the subversive attack on how Christians celebrate Christmas was considerably more successful than the attempt to wage open war on the holiday by pushing alternatives to it. In fact, it now appears that the attempt to push alternatives on the population has backfired, by making Christians cognizant of the importance, if not the necessity, of defending their own holy days.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

(1) While “the festival of lights” is a legitimate rabbinical holiday that has been celebrated by religious individuals for centuries, the ethnic “Hannukah”, as it is presently advertised in the USA, and, to a lesser extent, the UK, is no more historically genuine than Festivus or Kwanzaa.

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Off the Record

Seymore Hersh writes a posthumous, must-read expose of one of Clown World’s most insidious and destructive clowns, the late Henry Kissinger:

When I arrived at the Washington bureau in the spring of 1972, my desk was directly across from the paper’s main foreign policy reporter, a skilled journalist who was a master at writing coherent stories for the front page on deadline. I learned that around 5 pm on days when there were stories to be written about the war or disarmament—Kissinger’s wheelhouse—the bureau chief’s secretary would tell my colleague that “Henry” was on the phone with the bureau chief and would soon call him. Sure enough, the call would come and my colleague would frantically take notes and then produce a coherent piece reflecting what he had been told would invariably be the lead story in the next morning’s paper. After a week or two of observing this, I asked the reporter if he ever checked what Kissinger had told him—the stories he turned out never cited Kissinger by name but quoted senior Nixon administration officials—by calling and conferring on background with William Rogers, the secretary of state, or Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense.

“Of course not,” my colleague told me. “If I did that, Henry would no longer deal with us.”

Please understand—I am not making this up.

Kissinger, who had made no public remarks about my writings on the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, suddenly invited me to the White House for a private chat. I had just returned from a reporting trip to North Vietnam for the Times—I was the second mainstream American reporter in six years to be given a visa by Hanoi—and we were to discuss it. I had written about North Vietnam’s view of the secret peace talks Kissinger was conducting with the Vietnamese in Paris, but that was not the issue. He wanted, so I concluded, to stroke me. There was no question that, as a total loose cannon suddenly installed at the Times, I was of special interest.

He asked me about my impressions of the North Vietnamese, as seen in a closely watched three-week visit to Hanoi and elsewhere in the North. I had been taken to areas that were under heavy American bombing attacks and witnessed the North’s amazing ability to repair bombed-out rail lines within a few hours after an attack. Extra rails and the equipment needed to make repairs were hidden every few hundred yards along the tracks from Hanoi to the main harbor in Haiphong.

He asked about the morale of the residents in Hanoi. I told him I had seen no signs of panic, fear, or desperation in my many unguarded (so I believed) walks throughout the city. Every morning, in fact, a group of schoolboys en route to class who had seen me when I first arrived would walk by my hotel in central Hanoi at the same hour—I made a point of being outside then—and cheerfully say ‘Good morning, sir!” in English to me. But I was always aware that I was in enemy territory.

The schoolboys and other anecdotes prompted Kissinger to summon a prominent former ambassador who was his senior aide for matters related to the war and say to him, in front of me, in obvious mock anger: “This fellow is giving me more information about the morale in the North than I get from the CIA.” I remember thinking “Is this it? Is this all he’s got? Does the guy really think this kind of obvious flattery is going to win me over?”

I met Henry Kissinger on the same night, and at the same party, that I met Donald Trump. What was fascinating that it was not Trump who was the center of attention, despite his wealth, fame, and Ivana looking rather slinky despite her age. It was Kissinger upon whom all of the wealthy and powerful were fawning, and around whom they were clustered.

Apparently they knew quite well where the power was centered. And while I was not at all favorably impressed with the man himself, I was impressed by everyone else’s reaction to him.

This quote, I believe, epitomizes everything one needs to know about Henry Kissinger.

The deadline for the front page was around 7 pm and close to that time Al Haig telephoned me. “Seymour,” he said, which got my attention—those who knew me, including Al, called me Sy—and said the following words, which I will never forget: “Do you believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in police state tactics such as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself and your beliefs and your nation to give us one day to prove your story is wrong.”

Needless to say, Kissinger not only did it, but was caught red-handed while doing it by the FBI.

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Thereby Raising the Question

“We are a people that has been kicked out of every place we’ve ever lived for 2000 years. Every. Single. Place.”
—State Rep. Randy Fine, (R-Israel)

I’m no historian, of course, but I don’t recall either Florida or the USA having been around for 2,000 years. Well, I suppose it’s an improvement that they’re no longer pretending to be real Americans who love football, apple pie, and Christmas.

It certainly doesn’t look like as if they’ve learned anything from the last 2,000 years or that the pattern is going to change anytime soon.

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