“You watch. Indian and Chinese immigrants who typically vote Democratic will vote the other way because education for children is their number one issue. It’s why they came here.”
It wasn’t a good autumn for Joe Biden and the Democrats. The president’s approval rating was down to a Trump-like 41 percent in an NPR poll released on Monday.
Why?
British prime minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied to a question about what is the most important influence on his term of office with, “Events, dear boy, events.”
Biden isn’t that suave, but he would have some justification for blaming the Democrats’ tumble on a series of unfortunate events. But much of the ruling party’s growing unpopularity stems from inevitable outgrowths of their fundamental 21st-century political strategy of exacerbating divisiveness in the name of diversity.
And Democrats alienated Hispanics and, increasingly, Asians by anointing blacks as their moral leaders and deciding that black interests trump all others. Thus, in this new poll, Biden’s approval rating among Hispanics was only 33 percent. (Granted, that’s a small sample size, and the number is drawing attention precisely because it’s something of an outlier. But still, it’s another example of a trend worrying Democrats.)
The big decline in Biden’s polls happened in August during the tactically inept fall of Afghanistan. The press had been covering for him, but Kabul punctured the administration’s claim to competence.
Biden also bet heavily that he could double down on the already expansive Trumponomics with lavish spending on the Democratic Party’s Christmas wish list without provoking retail price inflation.
The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.
“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis.
The US military had a budget of $14 billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17 billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least $14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a five percent increase from the previous year.
“Months after US President Joe Biden’s administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent increase from last year,” Al Jazeera reports.
Upon the removal of US troops from Afghanistan, President Biden said the following in August:
“After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan — a cost that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan — for two decades — yes, the American people should hear this: $300 million a day for two decades. If you take the number of $1 trillion, as many say, that’s still $150 million a day for two decades. And what have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities? I refused to continue in a war that was no longer in the service of the vital national interest of our people.”
You would think a government so grieved over the loss of “opportunities” for the American people due to Afghanistan war spending would be eager to begin allocating that wealth toward providing opportunities to Americans at the end of that war. Instead, more wealth has been diverted to the US war machine.
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
With the United States out of Afghanistan, former members of the Afghan Security Forces who were once trained by the United States are joining Islamic State-Khorasan Province, better known as ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s regional affiliate. The result is all too predictable given America’s track record of inadvertently aiding the creation of extremist groups in the Middle East.
As it stands now, the number of former members of the Afghan Security Forces joining up with ISIS-K remains small, but it is growing, according to both Taliban fighters and other former members of the Afghan Security Forces.
One former Afghan official told the Wall Street Journal that an officer who commanded the Afghan National Army’s weapons and ammunition depot in Gardez joined ISIS-K after the Afghan army became defunct, and was killed last month in a firefight with the Taliban. The official also said he knows several other members of the Afghan Security Forces who joined ISIS-K after the Taliban searched their homes and ordered them to present themselves to Taliban authorities once the Taliban took control of the country.
The Wall Street Journal also spoke to a resident of Qarabagh in the Ghazni province who said his cousin, previously a member of the Afghan army’s special forces, disappeared in September shortly after the U.S. withdrawal and has joined an ISIS-K cell. The Qarabagh man also said he knows four other former Afghan National Army soldiers who enlisted in ISIS-K in the past few weeks.
ISIS-K became known throughout the world when a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and approximately 200 Afghans in an attack near the Kabul airport as the United States was completing its withdrawal in August.
Created in 2014 by former Taliban militants who were dissatisfied with potential peace talks and sought to take more drastic measures to fight the United States, ISIS-K has thus far played relatively a minor role in the network of extremist organizations operating in Afghanistan. Their relegation was a result of choosing both the Taliban and the United States as their enemies, as the nascent extremist outfit was ill-equipped to defend its territorial holdings in eastern Afghanistan, which the Taliban took from them in 2015.
Bradley Devlin is a Staff Reporter for The American Conservative. Previously, he was an Analysis Reporter for the Daily Caller, and has been published in the Daily Wire and the Daily Signal, among other publications that don’t include the word “Daily.” He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy. You can follow Bradley on Twitter @bradleydevlin.
Around midday on August 15, the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, was told by an adviser that Taliban fighters had entered the presidential palace and were looking for him room by room. This was not true, but Ghani, aware that ousted presidents do not have long lives in his country, hurried himself and his wife to a military helicopter and fled for Uzbekistan. Without time to fetch any personal belongings, he left Kabul in plastic sandals and a thin coat, according to a Washington Post account of that day.
Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good war” after 9/11, the one with a legitimate purpose and a happy ending. That also didn’t turn out to be true, but while the war’s momentum favored the Taliban for years, its final act had the suddenness of a guillotine, with a lot more pain. At Kabul’s airport, desperate Afghans clung to the sides of a departing U.S. cargo plane. Panicked families tried to get onto the diminishing number of evacuation flights. And 13 U.S. troops helping keep the airport open were killed in a suicide bombing. Just before midnight on August 30, the last U.S. aircraft and the last U.S. soldier got out of Kabul.
This defeat could have been an opportunity to rethink the logic of America’s war machine. That’s what defeats often do: They force you to reconsider the destructive tendencies that got you into the hole. One of those tendencies has been a nearly ceaseless rise in military spending that has little popular support. Even before the fall of Kabul, opinion polls consistently showed that only a minority of Americans think that the U.S. should spend more on its defense — just 26 percent in a survey conducted by Gallup in February. And on the day that the U.S. got out of Afghanistan, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the lone member of Congress to vote against the invasion in 2001, called on Republicans as well as Democrats to finally reconfigure the nation’s spending priorities. “Now is the time to shift our investments away from endless wars and toward addressing human needs,” she said.
Guess what happened?
To understand the next step, you need to go back to April, when President Joe Biden proposed a $715 billion Pentagon budget for 2022, which represented a 1.6 percent increase from 2021. Progressives like Lee were not pleased — and were even less pleased in late July when the Senate Armed Services Committee added $25 billion to Biden’s proposal. This “plus-up,” as it’s called, raised the budget to $740 billion, a 5 percent increase over the previous year. At that rate, military spending over the next decade would easily exceed $7 trillion, or four times more than the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better program that Biden is trying to push through Congress.
As US troops finally made their exit from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation, the Sunday shows—which have always aimed to set Washington agendas—were filled with guests who had direct ties to the military/industrial complex.
FAIR analyzed three weeks of ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC‘s Meet the Press during the Afghanistan withdrawal (8/15/21, 8/22/21, 8/29/21). We recorded 36 featured guest appearances and 33 roundtable participant appearances. Those who appeared on more than one show were counted every time they appeared; there were 24 unique featured guests and 32 unique panelists.
Of the 24 unique featured guests, only two were not from the US: Roya Rahmani, the former ambassador to the US from Afghanistan, and Yasmeen Hassan, the Pakistani director of the NGO Equality Now. The two were interviewed jointly in one CNN segment (8/29/21)—the only segment in the study to center on the situation of Afghan women.
MIC ties
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (Meet the Press, 8/29/21): “We surrendered to a jihadist organization and assumed that there would be no consequences for that.”
Twenty of the 22 unique featured guests from the United States had ties to the military/industrial complex. These MIC associates accounted for 28 of US guests’ 34 appearances. They included 13 appearances by elected officials who are recipients of military industry PAC money, 12 appearances by current or former government officials who serve or have served as consultants or advisors to the military industry, and eight appearances by former members of the military. (Some guests had multiple ties.)
The two exceptions were National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who appeared five times, and career diplomat and former ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker (CBS, 8/22/21). Even these exceptions didn’t stray far from the MIC orbit: Crocker was cozy enough to the military to be named an honorary Marine in 2012, and Sullivan was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a somewhat misleadingly named think tank that regularly takes five- and six-figure donations from various tentacles of the military/industrial complex.
No elected officials without military/industrial complex ties were invited on to discuss the situation in Afghanistan in the three weeks studied. Nor were any scholars, activists or civil society leaders aside from Hassan.
Service members returning home are being confronted with reports of American atrocities and war crimes; actions that they may have been party to. For some, the guilt of being responsible for creating terror abroad when they believed themselves to be in a war to end terror is overwhelming.
While enjoying some Saturday afternoon college football, I was treated to about a dozen reruns of a commercial produced by the Department of Veteran Affairs. Let me paint the scene for you:
A lone figure rests upon his pickup truck beside a lone oak upon a ridge in an otherwise rolling green prairie. The sky is a canvas of orange and purple as the sun sets on a peaceful day in the foothills of rural America. Suddenly, the imagery fades to a small silver case: a gun case for a pistol. Notably unloaded, the hands of the otherwise off-screen figure emerge to affix a lock to his sidearm, as even the case and separated magazine wasn’t enough to keep this soldier safe.
But safe from what? The voice over then chimes in:
“A simple lock puts space between the thought and the trigger. Learn how securing your firearms can prevent suicide.”
Look, I get it. The message they’re trying to convey is most suicides are an act of impulse. A veteran’s life may be saved if a little patience and deliberation is introduced into the equation. But it’s really hard to receive this advert as anything but a hollow gesture when the prescription provided by the VA is a gun lock without an ounce of reflection on the root cause of the crisis.
According to estimates, a little over 7,000 soldiers have died during military operations since the start of the “War on Terror” following the attacks of September 11. Meanwhile, suicides among both active duty and veterans of those conflicts have exploded to over 30,000, or more than four times those lost in combat. While these numbers are sobering, and possibly even erring on the conservative side, the real focus should be on what is driving the dilemma and how best to put an end to it. With the War on Terror now exceeding two decades, experts’ reasoning for the cause of the veteran suicide epidemic has evolved just as the wars themselves have evolved over those 20+ years. The most avid participants in regime apologism blame the diminishing public support for the terror wars for the rise in veteran mental health issues. While it’s true that Americans’ appetites for forever war is reaching all-time lows, as evidenced by the support for withdrawal from Afghanistan no matter how mismanaged, this explanation lacks an ounce of self-awareness for how long and costly the wars have been. Others have put forth that a rash of sexual assaults among personnel and a culture of “toxic masculinity” has led to increased mental health issues among service members. Nearly 1 in 4 servicewomen have reported cases of sexual assault, an embarrassment and a disgrace to the institution. The “boys club” may be to blame in equal parts for betraying its sisters in arms and convincing its brothers that they are weak to feel ill at ease. However, the weakest and most deceitful reason suggested may be that veterans are at severe risk of suicide because of their access to firearms. The rate of suicidal persons electing to turn to a firearm to commit the act has been used as fodder by gun prohibition advocates to attack the 2nd Amendment. This tactic not only belies an agenda totally divorced from concern for military veterans, it also implies veterans are among the least qualified to possess firearms for personal use rather than among the most qualified.
There’s another explanation worth considering, and it was perfectly illustrated right as the American occupation of Afghanistan was coming to a close. In an attempt to straddle the fence between bringing the War in Afghanistan to a long-overdue end while appeasing hawks who consider “withdrawal” to be synonymous with “surrender,” President Biden signed off on a drone strike against an alleged ISIS-K target. The unfortunate victims of said drone missile were not militants, but rather one Zamarai Ahmadi and his children, as even US military officials have openly admitted. Despite this admittance, no disciplinary action is expected as senior officials continue to “stand by the intel leading to the strike.” This is quite a callous and remorseless defense of “the intel” that ultimately concluded that Ahmadi, an aid worker who helped Americans during the occupation, deserved to die for the crime of loading his white sedan with jugs of water for his family. This incident is merely a microcosm of the role Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV) have played in the War on Terror. According to a recent report, upwards of 90% of the people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia were “not the intended targets.” In other words, nearly 9 out of 10 people executed by the American government were likely innocent civilians. Service members returning home are being confronted with reports of American atrocities and war crimes; actions that they may have been party to. For some, the guilt of being responsible for creating terror abroad when they believed themselves to be in a war to end terror is overwhelming.
It’s certainly a welcome change to acknowledge the suicide epidemic among American service members. But acknowledgement of the problem without any meaningful introspection on the cause signals that the US government is more concerned with its PR problem than with stemming the creation of more psychologically damaged veterans. There may be several reasonable explanations for the trauma American troops are experiencing, but no list is complete without a willingness to confront the damage that US forces have caused, as well as the damage they have received. Regardless of your position on the cause of the crisis, or of America’s foreign policy generally, it is disrespectful and offensive to the nation’s veterans to recommend that their best foot forward against depression is to secure their firearms.
Alan Mosley is a historian, jazz musician, author, and host of It’s Too Late with Alan Mosley. You can find new episodes of It’s Too Late on Odysee, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter by searching for “It’s Too Late with Alan Mosley” or “AlanMosleyTV.”
Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.
Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.
That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.
Aug 31 – Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.
Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.
Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.
It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.
That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government – and the “private” military-industrial sector – could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?
Sadly these children killed on Sunday, two of them reportedly just two years old, have been the ones forced to pay the price for a failed and bloody US foreign policy.
Yes, the whole exit from Afghanistan has been a debacle. Biden, but especially his military planners and incompetent advisors, deserves much of what has been piled onto him this past week or so about this incompetence.
Maybe if Biden’s Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman had spent a bit more time planning the Afghan exit and a lot less time obsessing on how to turn the US military into a laboratory for cultural Marxism, we might have actually had a workable plan.
We know that actual experts like Col. Douglas Macgregor did have a plan to get out that would have spared innocent lives. But because this decorated US Army veteran was “tainted” by his service in the previous administration – service that was solely focused on how to get out of Afghanistan safely – he would not be consulted by the Pentagon’s “woke” top military brass.
Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.
Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.
That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.
I’ve always said, “we just marched in, we can just march out,” and I stand by that view. Yes, you can “just march out” of these idiotic interventions…but you do need a map!
I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.
I still can’t find words to describe how insane it is that all the “experts” who spent twenty years being wrong about Afghanistan remain esteemed and wealthy while those who spent that time being right about Afghanistan remain marginalized and regarded as fringe kooks.
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Nobody gets “credit” for ending the Afghanistan occupation. Everyone involved in keeping it going for twenty years gets blame. That’s it. You don’t get a trophy for not murdering more people.
But it’s not surprising that the Afghanistan war took twenty years to end. If anything, the way the deck is stacked in favor of perpetual war, it’s surprising it happened that fast.
Military members who support imperialism get promoted. Those who get to the top go on to work for war profiteers. The war profiteers fund think tanks which promote more wars. The mass media report “news” stories citing those think tanks. These stories manufacture consent for more wars.
The war industry reinforces itself. Those who get to the top of the war machine move on to the private sector and spend their time lobbying for more wars which create more eventual Pentagon officials who go on to lobby for more wars. Peace should be easy. This is why it’s not.
It’s horrifying when you realize how much of the behavior of the most powerful military in history is driven by the simple fact that weapons manufacturers don’t make money if those weapons aren’t being used. The most powerful government on earth is stuck in a self-exacerbating feedback loop where the behaviors of the war machine are dictated by the war industry, and people wonder why it’s so hard to end wars. With a cycle this vicious, you can only end the wars by ending the empire.
This is what you get when mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit. As long as war is profitable, you guarantee that more wars will happen. As long as ecocide is profitable, more ecocide will happen. As long as corruption is profitable, more corruption will happen. Meanwhile, peace is not profitable. Demilitarization is not profitable. Nuclear disarmament is not profitable. Getting plastic out of the oceans is not profitable. Leaving trees standing is not profitable. Leaving oil in the ground is not profitable. Freedom is not profitable.
The religion of profit drives all human behavior. And it’s a death cult that will end us all if we don’t end it first.
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Some people seem to think it’s only justifiable to end a military occupation if you can continue to control everything that happens in that nation after your military occupation ends. This is the same as believing it’s never okay to end a military occupation under any circumstances.
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The mainstream media always cheerlead a US president’s foreign policy when it involves mass murder on an unthinkable scale and always criticize a US president when he tries to stop doing this. That’s all you really need to know about the trustworthiness of the mainstream media.
Corporate media is mind control at mass scale. People who identify as smart, independent thinkers have their minds altered by it every day, and they believe they came to those opinions on their own. Until this problem is addressed, none of our other major problems are going away.
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“How are we supposed to get everyone vaccinated if we don’t make it mandatory?”
Uhh, you don’t? You don’t begin with the assumption that the existence of a nasty coronavirus justifies forcing or coercing everyone to inject themselves with a brand new drug they don’t trust?
I mean, compelling people to take an injection that they are actually afraid of is a huge deal. Can we not at least agree on that? Can we not at least agree that forcing someone to receive an injection they fear would be so serious that you’d better have an amazingly bulletproof argument for doing it? I think so. And I don’t think such an argument exists at this time.
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It’s important to follow and be followed by people you disagree with. You’ll see a lot of crap, but you’ll also keep yourself from falling into a self-validating echo chamber and eventually finding yourself saying something like unvaccinated people should be denied medical care.
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Expecting a communism-oriented country to look like a utopia in the midst of a global imperialist war against communism is like expecting a family to look like a Norman Rockwell painting while they are being chased by wolves.
Saying communism doesn’t work because nations who try to espouse it don’t look like thriving utopias while they’re being relentlessly assaulted is like saying a new invention doesn’t work because a band of armed thugs kept shooting and stomping on it during the demonstration.
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Poverty is the result of an abusive system and telling the poor to “Get a job” or “Get a better job” has always enabled that abuse. Now that small businesses are being killed by that same abusive system, many who used to enable its abuses by saying this are becoming its victims.
Blaming poverty on the poor in a system that’s literally built on the premise of a permanent underclass has always been insane, but if you’re making good money and lack empathy it’s easy to think they’re just lazy. Only when such people are screwed by the same system do they see.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The military-industrial complex was inevitable. You cannot maintain a global order without the constant threat and application of mass military violence to hold it in place. It was inevitable that an industry would not only arise to meet that demand, but begin using the wealth it generates to manufacture support for more war.
During the Trump years the media wept for the poor kids in cages and ignored all the bombs he was dropping. Now the media ignore the kids in cages and weep for the poor neglected bombs.
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The US empire will literally invade a country so it can spend decades using the people who live there as target practice for its expensive new military technologies and then tell you to worry about motherfucking Cuba.
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Sure is a crazy coincidence how government foreign policy decisions that would advance humanitarian interests always happen to align perfectly with government foreign policy decisions that would be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers.
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Love how everyone suddenly started babbling about China taking America’s place in Afghanistan. Like Beijing’s been watching all the world powers smashing their heads against military interventionism in Afghanistan and thinking “Yeah that looks awesome, we should definitely try that.”
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Bush era war criminals are louder than ever right now because they’ve lost the argument. The Afghan “government” proved to be an illusion, proving they spent 20 years lying to us about what they’d been doing there, so now they’re trying to salvage their reputations and legacies.
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I can’t believe there are still highly influential people saying we need to keep raining military explosives on the Islamic world to make Muslims less extremist.
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Everyone’s freaking out that Afghanistan is invading Afghanistan.
The Biden administration is perpetuating and advancing all of Trump’s policies better and more efficiently than Trump himself and it’s hilarious that MAGA people still oppose him just because Candace Owens told them he’s a communist.
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The fact that Joe Biden’s mind has declined sharply in recent years is significant not because it means the US president can’t lead the country, but because it shows no US president ever leads the country. Republicans keep highlighting the fact that the sitting president’s brain doesn’t work to suggest that a Republican president would be more competent, but of course that’s not true. You’d just be swapping an impotent puppet with dementia for an impotent puppet without dementia.
The most powerful government in the world is run not by its elected officials but by a loose nationless alliance of plutocrats and government agency insiders who Americans never get to vote for. This has been obvious for a long time and gets more obvious by the day.
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The debate over Covid policies has split anti-imperialists, socialists, Assange supporters etc in a way that’s mighty convenient for the powerful. We could probably all be more open-minded, keep watching and learning, and not expect everyone to agree with us about everything.
Just as a general rule it’s probably wise to avoid “If you’re not for us than you’re against us” doctrines. I tend to back away slowly from anyone I see getting that way, and that impulse has always proved a healthy one. Mature adults can agree where they agree and disagree where they disagree and not have that be a major issue.
“Don’t blame the troops, a lot of them saw the military as their only path out of poverty.”
Ah so we come back once again to the problem being capitalism.
Rob the rich because you are poor and they’ll give you a prison sentence. Put on a uniform and go kill impoverished people overseas because you are poor and they’ll give you a medal.
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War profiteering is what you get when you mix capitalism with a globe-spanning power structure that works to maintain unipolar domination at all cost. The war industry surfs on the empire like dolphins on the wake of a freight ship, except in this case the dolphins also help steer and accelerate the ship.
The military-industrial complex was inevitable. You cannot maintain a global order without the constant threat and application of mass military violence to hold it in place. It was inevitable that an industry would not only arise to meet that demand, but begin using the wealth it generates to manufacture support for more war.
All the worst things in the world happened because some humans took some dumb thought in their heads a little too seriously. War, torture, genocide, slavery, exploitation, oppression, ecocide, it’s all because of a human tendency to imbue the noises between our ears with the power of belief.
Some primates evolved the capacity for abstract thought a while back and the giant brains relative to the size of the birth canal meant we have to spend our formative days helpless and surrounded by giants, which is very scary and inherently traumatic. As we grow we start taking our thoughts very seriously as we try to obtain safety and security in the midst of this cacophony, and then ego happens as a result of this.
So really all this drama is ultimately just a species that’s in an awkward transition phase where it hasn’t yet developed a mature relationship with its newly evolved brain matter. I bet the ancestors of birds looked really awkward for a while at first too, before they could fly. Flight in our case would look like a mature relationship with our big brains where thought exists as a mere tool that we can use when it’s useful and set down when it’s not, rather than as a compulsive force which dominates our experience due to our conditioned habit of giving it belief.
And of course it’s very possible that we kill ourselves off before we make it out of this transition phase; it’s happened to many other species before us. But either way this is temporary. Either way any belief that this brief chapter in our story is illustrative of “human nature” is silly.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
In the wake of yesterday’s FDA approval of the Pfizer shot, Biden’s Covid advisor Anthony Fauci has blasted back onto the television screens, screeching that while he likes freedom there are times we must give up freedom…and take the shot! Meanwhile Biden is demanding that the private sector turn into the shot police and install mandates on their workers and customers. As Afghanistan unravels, is this dramatic ramping up of authoritarianism at home meant to be a distraction?
MCViewPoint 