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The following series of graphs show contemporary American views on past (and present) US wars by partisan affiliation. Pat Buchanan was fighting an uphill battle with Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War:
Vietnam is the least popular war over at least the last century and change, the second world war perceived to be the most justified.
That one-third of Republican voters are anti-war is mildly encouraging. That only half of Democrats are is not. At the end of Bush’s second term, just 17% of Democrats favored the Iraq war compared to 73% of Republicans. As neoconnery continues to morph into Woke cultural imperialism, the electoral realignment will complete. Democrats will be the messianic party of war, Republicans the ineffective opposition to it–kind of like it was the last time America First was a thing.
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Someone had to fight it. Buchanan was right.
Vietnam was probably the least mistaken of the lot, but the United States has otherwise fought a preposterous number of wars since�1900, few of which had any realistic hope of advancing the interests of the American people.
The MAGA Hat Brigade seems to disagree, though. Some of them want more. Recently appearing in the paid-subscriber comment threads of The Epoch Times:
The fellow who wrote the last almost certainly cannot even do anything about some black punk blocking the sidewalk, strutting with his hip-hop pants down around his ankles while cop-killa rap “music” blasts from his homie’s car at the curb. And if Officer Derek Chauvin arrives on the scene to take the situation in hand, why, the fellow will not lift a finger to help when Chauvin gets jailed for it.
But never fear, that brave fellow is going to eliminate those new military islands for us! No problem.
It's time to bring back all US forces overseas, except maybe skeletal forces in the U.K. and Japan.Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @dfordoom, @Radicalcenter
That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can't *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.Replies: @allahu akbar, @Anonymous, @anon, @prime noticer
Peter Turchin is a genius for focusing on data regarding the public mood and sense of shared morale and purpose instead of the traditional approach of focusing on parsing the moral and strategic dimensions of elite driven self-justification for various narratives and the direction of society. As Turchin points out, periods of elites agreeing with a well adjusted populace and looking out for them create happiness and intra-national harmony. But elites letting society corrode via poor impulses and sheer incompetence create pessimism among the general public, who become more depressed and angry at the growing reality that we can't unite together to achieve something worthwhile.Replies: @Charles Pewitt
It is safe to say that the majority of people probably don’t have an idea of what most of those wars are about, and that includes even being aware of the official ZOG propaganda versions of them.
These days probably more Democrats than Republicans would support a war against Russia.
Vietnam was probably the least mistaken of the lot, but the United States has otherwise fought a preposterous number of wars since�1900, few of which had any realistic hope of advancing the interests of the American people.
The MAGA Hat Brigade seems to disagree, though. Some of them want more. Recently appearing in the paid-subscriber comment threads of The Epoch Times:The fellow who wrote the last almost certainly cannot even do anything about some black punk blocking the sidewalk, strutting with his hip-hop pants down around his ankles while cop-killa rap “music” blasts from his homie's car at the curb. And if Officer Derek Chauvin arrives on the scene to take the situation in hand, why, the fellow will not lift a finger to help when Chauvin gets jailed for it.
But never fear, that brave fellow is going to eliminate those new military islands for us! No problem.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @Feryl
The fastest way that the U.S. can “arm” South Korea with a nuclear arsenal would be to withdraw all USFK elements. South Korea has a large and advanced nuclear industry of its own and can weaponize within weeks and likely will if no longer under U.S. protective umbrella.
It’s time to bring back all US forces overseas, except maybe skeletal forces in the U.K. and Japan.
It would also not necessarily worsen their relations with China. If they no longer needed to be paranoid about China they could pursue a sensible pragmatic policy towards that country. It might actually ease tensions in the region a great deal. And China might feel less threatened by South Korea and Japan as independent nuclear powers rather than US satellites.I agree, except that I think the US should withdraw from Japan as well for the reasons I gave above.Replies: @Charles Pewitt
• Agree
The giants of American Imperalism are Lincoln and Wilson. FDR was impressive but standing on the shoulders of his predecessors. With the empire well established more modern wars have been mere profiteering.
With the abandonment of conscription after VietNam and the fall of the Berlin Wall, endless war became something that happens on television. For Americans, with the notable exception of our veterans, endless war abroad is a background noise forgotten in the midst of domestic culture wars. The woke are mostly silent regarding war and peace. They are engaged with real problems like pronouns and of course, white supremacy.
Wars are a bit like interior decoration. A big power thinks it can make the world more attractive by removing this government and replacing it with another while another big power likes the world as it is.
They fight over the matter, break all the antiques and architecture and end up with an ugly monstrosity neither likes.
The odd thing is if they had just let things be they both would get more of what they wanted. Even the worst dictator isn’t immortal. They all die or get overthrown by their own countrymen ( Save for the hereditary communist dictatorship in North Korea). So saving South Korea from Kim Il Sung’s invasion may have been the only effective military action we took in the 20th century. Didn’t seem so clear at the time as Korea was a dirt poor nowhereland and Japan was still a pile of rubble but today they comprise a rich, advanced region of 170 million people allied with the United States. Truman’s interior redecoration of Japan and South Korea really did work.
You seem to be right.
Why is that, anyway?
Because the DNC is the prefered junior partner to the Deep State.
I've even heard rumours that many Russians go to church. How can you trust people like that?
The entire Russian nation is nothing but a basket of deplorables.
Why is that, anyway?
Because the DNC is the prefered junior partner to the Deep State.
It's time to bring back all US forces overseas, except maybe skeletal forces in the U.K. and Japan.Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @dfordoom, @Radicalcenter
If you had to forecast, how might that play out? Would South Korea find any natural allies, for example?
Americans have developed amazingly inane ideas regarding alliances, of course, but that is not what I meant. I make no assumptions regarding the utility of alliances generally, nor am I trying to solve another country’s problems, but merely wondered whether any other state would be sufficiently dismayed at South Korea’s hypothetical fall to risk action to prevent it—and whether advance arrangements (i.e. an alliance) to secure such action would be in South Korea’s interest, whether such arrangements could possibly be effective without Russian support, and so on. ‘Tis an idle question.
That Korea still has an unresolved civil war at cease-fire must bear upon the matter. If I were, say, Vietnamese or Subcontinental Indian, I might not wish to see Korea subjugated by China but still might not wish to entangle my country in another country’s civil war in which, at a turn of events, both sides might suddenly regard me as their common foreign foe.
Anyway, take the question narrowly or broadly as you like. Answer as (and if) you wish.
South Korea is as of now under no limitation in range for its ballistic missiles. Expect South Korea to develop long-range ballistic missiles that can hit not only all parts of North Korea, but Beijing as well.Japan. Both countries need to stop being juvenile and fixating on the past and move on to forging a serious alliance to balance the rising China.Agree. That's bad for not just South Korea and Japan, but also for us. But South Korea is quite capable and is unlikely to be subjugated by China.
I actually think that US-ROK and Japan-ROK relations would improve if we were to withdraw all our forces. We can certainly still be allies.
Pardon, Jay. I can reasonably be suspected under the circumstance of asking a question with a hook in it. It was not my intent to bait you in particular, but I should have admitted that the question does indeed have a hook.
If the question is not one you care to answer, then allow me to withdraw the question, but in any case allow me to withdraw the hook!
Vietnam was probably the least mistaken of the lot, but the United States has otherwise fought a preposterous number of wars since�1900, few of which had any realistic hope of advancing the interests of the American people.
The MAGA Hat Brigade seems to disagree, though. Some of them want more. Recently appearing in the paid-subscriber comment threads of The Epoch Times:The fellow who wrote the last almost certainly cannot even do anything about some black punk blocking the sidewalk, strutting with his hip-hop pants down around his ankles while cop-killa rap “music” blasts from his homie's car at the curb. And if Officer Derek Chauvin arrives on the scene to take the situation in hand, why, the fellow will not lift a finger to help when Chauvin gets jailed for it.
But never fear, that brave fellow is going to eliminate those new military islands for us! No problem.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @Feryl
One unstated obstacle to withdrawal in Asia is the fact that 90% of our semiconductor chip supply comes from Taiwan. We’ve recently realized the danger there, as evidenced by the new plants being built in collaboration with TSMC (tellingly, Japan is cutting similar deals with the Taiwanese for semiconductor development), but that’ll take time.
That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can’t *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.
Taiwan is doing that because other countries would have eventually just broken the patents and subsidized the production/technology domestically.
You imply that the U.S. leaving Asia is a choice. You have no idea what is coming.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
Please provide the numbers to support that. I believe you will find you are mistaken.Replies: @nebulafox
They fight over the matter, break all the antiques and architecture and end up with an ugly monstrosity neither likes.
The odd thing is if they had just let things be they both would get more of what they wanted. Even the worst dictator isn't immortal. They all die or get overthrown by their own countrymen ( Save for the hereditary communist dictatorship in North Korea). So saving South Korea from Kim Il Sung's invasion may have been the only effective military action we took in the 20th century. Didn't seem so clear at the time as Korea was a dirt poor nowhereland and Japan was still a pile of rubble but today they comprise a rich, advanced region of 170 million people allied with the United States. Truman's interior redecoration of Japan and South Korea really did work.Replies: @Supply and Demand
I went on a trip to Pyongyang with my university because we have an exchange program with the national language school there. The poverty of North Korea is grossly overstated. Most live in a comparable state to the Russian Far East. The ones who starve to death are political dissidents — and if the deep state was smart, they’d follow Kim’s model and starve every Trump voter to death immediately. It’s a shame they don’t.
That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can't *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.Replies: @allahu akbar, @Anonymous, @anon, @prime noticer
The U.S. and Japan are doing that because Taiwan’s independence is indefensible, and will inevitably be part of the PRC.
Taiwan is doing that because other countries would have eventually just broken the patents and subsidized the production/technology domestically.
You imply that the U.S. leaving Asia is a choice. You have no idea what is coming.
Vietnam was probably the least mistaken of the lot, but the United States has otherwise fought a preposterous number of wars since�1900, few of which had any realistic hope of advancing the interests of the American people.
The MAGA Hat Brigade seems to disagree, though. Some of them want more. Recently appearing in the paid-subscriber comment threads of The Epoch Times:The fellow who wrote the last almost certainly cannot even do anything about some black punk blocking the sidewalk, strutting with his hip-hop pants down around his ankles while cop-killa rap “music” blasts from his homie's car at the curb. And if Officer Derek Chauvin arrives on the scene to take the situation in hand, why, the fellow will not lift a finger to help when Chauvin gets jailed for it.
But never fear, that brave fellow is going to eliminate those new military islands for us! No problem.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @Feryl
Yes. It’s the enthusiasm for war, war and more war among some (and worryingly, I think it’s quite a large number) of the MAGA Hat Brigade that turned me against them.
Very few genuine MAGA supporters support this type of aggression.
PEACE 😇Replies: @J1234
It’s true that things aren’t nearly as bad as they once were. North Koreans my age (born in the 1990s) are physically stunted because of the famine they were born in. Those days are gone. Most North Koreans are aware enough of the outside world that the government has not bothered trying to portray the ROK as a Yankee pillaged impoverished hellhole for quite some time now.
That said, the Russian Far East isn’t exactly what I’d call prosperous. Russia’s got tons of empty or near empty villages caused by young people leaving for the cities: Russian companies in the area have actually contracted North Korean laborers (de facto slave labor, really) to make up the difference in the past. Similarly, China’s Rust Belt along the Russian border has tons of coaling cities that are like Detroit without the crime and gross general dysfunction. The Chinese government has offered generous incentives for young people to settle down and buy homes there, but without much success: many couples come, stay a year, then head back south due to lack of opportunities.
That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can't *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.Replies: @allahu akbar, @Anonymous, @anon, @prime noticer
Bullshit we can’t afford it. The hosts pay half the costs and the US government continues collecting record tax revenues. We can afford the world, and we’re going to get it.
It's time to bring back all US forces overseas, except maybe skeletal forces in the U.K. and Japan.Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @dfordoom, @Radicalcenter
I agree. And I think that would be in South Korea’s interests. It would also be in Japan’s interests to do the same thing. If South Korea and Japan were able to defend themselves they could pursue policies that are in the best interests of South Korea and Japan.
It would also not necessarily worsen their relations with China. If they no longer needed to be paranoid about China they could pursue a sensible pragmatic policy towards that country. It might actually ease tensions in the region a great deal. And China might feel less threatened by South Korea and Japan as independent nuclear powers rather than US satellites.
I agree, except that I think the US should withdraw from Japan as well for the reasons I gave above.
I say:
Australia must have nukes and the means to deliver them and too bad Donald Pleasance croaked in 1995 or he could have run the nuke arsenal as long as he didn't get as bombed as he was in that movie -- Wake In Fright(Outback) -- and then Australia goes back to the White Australia policy by imploding the real estate market and removing the foreigners and keeping the dug up stuff away from China but the Australian Ruling Class like the American Empire Ruling Class is in bed with the Chinese Communist Party and the Republican Party's top politician whore in the US Senate has a Chinese Han wife with clear and very shady connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
Find a sober Australian not as drunk as those people in Wake In fright(Outback) and let him be in control of the nukes.
Japan and South Kore and Australian get nukes and the means to deliver them and the American Empire goes offshore regional balancer with a strong disinclination to get dragged into any more nonsense interventions like George W Bush's Iraq War debacle.
The USA must go White Core America and use citizenship revocations and the like to remove a hundred million or so foreigners and their spawn from the USA.
Tweets from 2015:
https://twitter.com/CharlesPewitt/status/573272855124811776?s=20
https://twitter.com/CharlesPewitt/status/547489341925494785?s=20
The MAGA hat brigade should read William Henry Chamberlain’s America’s Second Crusade.
A legal PDF of the book seems to be available gratis online.
As always the Republicans are the war party. But the Democrats are running a scam when they appear to oppose war
Vietnam is the least popular war over at least the last century and change, the second world war perceived to be the most justified.
I say:
Baby boomer boobs got a point when they say they got phucked over by the sonofabitches who cooked up the Vietnam War and that rich boy turd Kennedy started the Vietnam War and that Scotch-Irish arsehole Johnson ramped up the Vietnam War and just like Boner Bob Dole Blue Pill said the Democrat Party starts all the wars — W Bush says hold my beer — and then we got guns and butter and from the 1960s to the 1970s starting the monetary policy inflation and then we got the Arabs causing so much trouble with oil that Larry Hagman as JR Ewing had to cook up a plot to create some detonations involving some Arab oil fields and that is the problem with Israel attacking Iran: Iran or its proxies will attack the oil installations of Saudi Arabia and the others and Texas is just fine with that.
TV show had the British Empire outpost in Yemen somewhere around Ay-Den that’s how it’s pronounced not Ah-Den. The American Empire took over from the British Empire and I suppose it’s the same type bankers and wankers that run England and the USA.
The Jews at the ADL had that rich boy scumbag Kennedy put his name on a book that promoted mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and that piece of shit Scotch-Irish rodentine lout LBJ pushed through the 1965 Immigration Act and the plan was to attack the European Christian ancestral core of the USA by using mass immigration as a demographic weapon.
Banker phuckers couldn’t get the federal funds rate to 3 percent last time the taper and both sides the Tweed politician whores in the Republican Party and the Democrat Party are just fine with the asset bubbles in real estate and bonds and stocks and everything else created by ZERO INTEREST RATE POLICY and all the other monetary policy machinations.
This is the third frigging asset bubble, starting in the 1990s, that the plutocrat- and privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank has inflated using monetary extremism — low or zero or negative interest rates, asset purchases, quantitative easing, dollar swaps, direct central bank purchases of sovereign and corporate debt, balance sheet ballooning, bailouts…etc. — and enough is enough, DAMMIT!
Yellen was pushing out the propaganda about 4 percent as the new normal federal funds rate years ago but I guess ONE PERCENT is the new normal now. Used to be 6 percent was the normal fed funds rate but those days are long long gone like a Willie Mays home run.
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1399719629258477572?s=20
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1399668886224637961?s=20
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1398193526253490177?s=20
This is true, but I think it’s more true of some of the wars than others. WW1 is probably the one that the vast majority of Americans really have no idea about, except a vague sense that we won and perhaps that the Germans were the bad guys. But it’s therefore sort of useful as a blank slate. You might as well ask the question,
“Was it good that our boys went into a meat grinder, got chewed up a bit, and ultimately helped defeat [designated bad guy]?”
The WW1 result shows that most Americans of both parties say “yes” — it’s only when they recall some specific details they were told about the war that people tend to turn against it (aside from WW2).
Democratic ignorance here probably goes double (though their anti-war instincts are still better than the jingoistic Republican ones). A disproportionate number of Republicans are old enough to actually remember some of these wars. Plus Republicans are more white and male. Knowledge of military history is highly divergent between the sexes — I’ve actually never known a woman who even thought that she knew anything about it, or who appeared to have spent more than 5 seconds in her life wondering how some war or battle was won or lost. And I think minorities are more likely to dismiss such history: “the white man’s wars”.
That's largely due to the extremely high level of propaganda dumped on US citizens for years, and the suppression of dissenting views. Ron Unz's article on the WW II propaganda is worth reading, but bear in mind that most of the propagandists like Edward Bernays got started in the gaslighting business back in 1915. By 1937 or so they had perfected their methods of Crystalizing Public Opinion via the use of Propaganda. (These are the titles of two books in the 1920's by Bernays.)
Back to WW I. Consider the Four Minute Men, who had US Gov. authority to go into any factory, mine or other place of business and harangue everyone with a "buy war bonds! Moar war!" message. Movies in 1916 were often showed on a single projector, so when the first reel of film was being rewound and the second one loaded, there would be a kind of intermission. Four Minute Men would fill the gap with a "buy more war bonds!" spiel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Minute_Men
What is "Liberty Cabbage"? It's sauerkraut, renamed in 1917 during the anti-German campaign of the US Gov. Is it the only example? Oh, no. One could go on and on.
I used to have some relations who were children in 1917, and could remember posters showing German Imperial soldiers with the big spiked helmet bayoneting Belgian babies. Rather like the "babies thrown out of incubators in Kuwait" lie of the first Gulf war.
The number of sheer, brazen lies that Americans have been told by their own government just between 1900 and 2000 is huge. It's a literal mountain.
So my guess is that a lot of people responding to that survey were simply expressing an enthusiasm for war in general, or a distaste for war in general. If you'd ask them if they supported US involvement in the Peloponnesian War or the Thirty Years' War they'd have given the same answer.Replies: @Liberty Mike, @German_reader
It would also not necessarily worsen their relations with China. If they no longer needed to be paranoid about China they could pursue a sensible pragmatic policy towards that country. It might actually ease tensions in the region a great deal. And China might feel less threatened by South Korea and Japan as independent nuclear powers rather than US satellites.I agree, except that I think the US should withdraw from Japan as well for the reasons I gave above.Replies: @Charles Pewitt
I agree. And I think that would be in South Korea’s interests. It would also be in Japan’s interests to do the same thing. If South Korea and Japan were able to defend themselves they could pursue policies that are in the best interests of South Korea and Japan.
I say:
Australia must have nukes and the means to deliver them and too bad Donald Pleasance croaked in 1995 or he could have run the nuke arsenal as long as he didn’t get as bombed as he was in that movie — Wake In Fright(Outback) — and then Australia goes back to the White Australia policy by imploding the real estate market and removing the foreigners and keeping the dug up stuff away from China but the Australian Ruling Class like the American Empire Ruling Class is in bed with the Chinese Communist Party and the Republican Party’s top politician whore in the US Senate has a Chinese Han wife with clear and very shady connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
Find a sober Australian not as drunk as those people in Wake In fright(Outback) and let him be in control of the nukes.
Japan and South Kore and Australian get nukes and the means to deliver them and the American Empire goes offshore regional balancer with a strong disinclination to get dragged into any more nonsense interventions like George W Bush’s Iraq War debacle.
The USA must go White Core America and use citizenship revocations and the like to remove a hundred million or so foreigners and their spawn from the USA.
Tweets from 2015:
It's time to bring back all US forces overseas, except maybe skeletal forces in the U.K. and Japan.Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @dfordoom, @Radicalcenter
Why do American soldiers need to be stationed in Japan or formerly-great formerly-Britain again?
The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is based in Okinawa but is capable of deploying anywhere in the world. We've been trying to move it out of Okinawa for many years. For some time, it was planned to move it to Guam, and a new Naval Hospital was built capable of handling 25,000 Marines and their dependents, completed in 2014, replacing the old Naval Hospital built in the 1950s but still perfectly serviceable, just too small for the anticipated patient load (Incidentally, I was born in the old hospital and worked there, so I felt a pang to see the wrecking balls go after it.) A TGIFs was built nearby in anticipation of all the new customers that would be showing up. But, alas, nothing much ever came of the plan. Guam (a bit bigger than Catalina Island) just didn't have room for an MEU, what with Andersen AFB on the north of the island, Big Navy on the south end, and the massive tourist complex in the center. Uncle Sam looked at Australia but that was a no go, too. So for now the Marines are stuck on Okinawa, not because they are needed there but because they have no place else to go.
Oh, the TGIFs went out of business and closed, and the new Navy hospital is quite grand but you could fire the proverbial cannon down its hallways and not hit a patient. It may be, however, the most beautifully-situated hospital in the world, sitting on a bluff overlooking the turquoise waters inside the reef to the Philippine Sea and its passing rain showers and rainbows beyond.
We have Army troops in S.Korea that should be withdrawn; in fact, should have been pulled out many decades ago: one of Jimmy Carter's campaign promises in the 1976 election was to withdraw our troops from Korea.
Here's a photo of the very busy Yokosuka Naval base, jammed with American and Japanese warships (that's the Ronnie Ray-gun in the back with all those cranes) The USN has been there for three-quarters of a century. It would be impossible to duplicate not only the facilities but the many generations of experience of the personnel based here. Many Japanese civilian workers have parents and grandparents who serviced and maintained American warships, and probably great-grandparents who did the same for Imperial Japanese Navy warships. May American naval personnel, like me, have grandparents and parents who were based at Yoko, and the city is as much home to them as San Diego or Norfolk.
https://i.imgur.com/A7kxFpX.jpg
The capital city of a nation is not where you go to find out what the actual standard of living of a nation is. Don’t forget North Korea has closed its border, not just to South Korea’s investment but closed the actual border with China due to Covid. South Korean news reports a new famine maybe brewing as both official and unofficial trade with China is blocked.
Israel makes those decisions. And their forebears. For 200 years now.
World War II was probably the worst war because all the troops never came home after that one. The old America died and was replaced by an empire. Support for the war was a largely bipartisan affair. In the 1940 election instead of the isolationist Robert Taft the NeverTafter Republicans nominated the Mitt Romney of his day, Wendell Willkie, a candidate FDR could easily portray as an out of touch rich fat cat and candidate of Wall Street.
Leftists of the day like Lillian Hellman and Dalton Trumbo had been staunch isolationists after the Hitler-Stalin pact but suddenly changed their tune and became ardent interventionists after Hitler invaded Russia. The isolationist movement collapsed after that. Some believe that Hellman had only achieved success because her husband helped her write her plays. I can believe that since her husband, Dashiell Hammett, was the best hardboiled detective story writer of his era. Only Raymond Chandler was in the same league.
There is a lot of strangeness in the 1940 election. Like the fact that Wilkie was a life-long Democrat who changed parties in 1939, just in time to be selected by a deadlocked Republican national convention. I think Ron Unz's article on WW II mentions some more details.
MAGA is the PEACE PARTY
Despite egregious provocation by the Ayatollah. MAGA did not buy into sociopath Khameni’s desperate attempt to start a war.
Trump’s administration attempted to shut down both Afghanistan and Syria. He successfully moved U.S. troops in Syria away from the Syria-Turkey border nullifying Deep State plans to embroil America in that escalation.
MAGA provided limited material assistance to Ukraine, avoiding Merkel’s attempt to provoke a new war there.
____
MAGA does not want war with China either.
MAGA realizes that the CCP is exploiting the U.S. via trade policy, immigration policy, raw material monopolies, etc. However, the genuine MAGA prescription for opposing CCP misconduct is “beating them at their own game”:
• Gearing up raw material production
• Limiting the Han presence associated with IP theft and other espionage
• Re-industrialization of U.S. manufacturing
As AE and many others have pointed out the USD is a mess. If the U.S. is an exporter, the weak currency issues can be dealt with. If the U.S. needs large quantities of unaffordable imports the problems are much worse.
____
Now that the NeoConDemocrats have been returned to their ancestral home. If the U.S. winds up in a fight, it is because:
The DNC is the War Party
PEACE 😇
This illustrates the problem of relying on anecdotes, such as picking a few comments, rather than broad-based evidence.
Very few genuine MAGA supporters support this type of aggression.
PEACE 😇
That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can't *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.Replies: @allahu akbar, @Anonymous, @anon, @prime noticer
One unstated obstacle to withdrawal in Asia is the fact that 90% of our semiconductor chip supply comes from Taiwan.
Please provide the numbers to support that. I believe you will find you are mistaken.
WW1 is probably the one that the vast majority of Americans really have no idea about, except a vague sense that we won and perhaps that the Germans were the bad guys.
That’s largely due to the extremely high level of propaganda dumped on US citizens for years, and the suppression of dissenting views. Ron Unz’s article on the WW II propaganda is worth reading, but bear in mind that most of the propagandists like Edward Bernays got started in the gaslighting business back in 1915. By 1937 or so they had perfected their methods of Crystalizing Public Opinion via the use of Propaganda. (These are the titles of two books in the 1920’s by Bernays.)
Back to WW I. Consider the Four Minute Men, who had US Gov. authority to go into any factory, mine or other place of business and harangue everyone with a “buy war bonds! Moar war!” message. Movies in 1916 were often showed on a single projector, so when the first reel of film was being rewound and the second one loaded, there would be a kind of intermission. Four Minute Men would fill the gap with a “buy more war bonds!” spiel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Minute_Men
What is “Liberty Cabbage”? It’s sauerkraut, renamed in 1917 during the anti-German campaign of the US Gov. Is it the only example? Oh, no. One could go on and on.
I used to have some relations who were children in 1917, and could remember posters showing German Imperial soldiers with the big spiked helmet bayoneting Belgian babies. Rather like the “babies thrown out of incubators in Kuwait” lie of the first Gulf war.
The number of sheer, brazen lies that Americans have been told by their own government just between 1900 and 2000 is huge. It’s a literal mountain.
In the 1940 election instead of the isolationist Robert Taft the NeverTafter Republicans nominated the Mitt Romney of his day, Wendell Willkie, a candidate FDR could easily portray as an out of touch rich fat cat and candidate of Wall Street.
There is a lot of strangeness in the 1940 election. Like the fact that Wilkie was a life-long Democrat who changed parties in 1939, just in time to be selected by a deadlocked Republican national convention. I think Ron Unz’s article on WW II mentions some more details.
I find the Dem response to WW2 really interesting. I wonder whether mistake/unsure leans female and/or nonwhite. Seems remarkable that it is so high given that WW2 is undoubtedly the most heavily propagandized war in human history and also since the US was attacked by Japan.
One theory I heard is Democrats turned against Russia after Putin passed anti-gay legislation.
I say:
Ruling Class of American Empire always had a problem with Russia and north Pacific region contestation for power in coastal China and the like and Seward buying Alaska from Russia was good deal for USA and when the Japanese did a prelude to Pearl Harbor with two sneak attacks on Russian naval assets you must ask the Russians why there was two Japanese sneak attacks rather than just one.
The current Democrat Party is using the anti-Russia stuff as a smokescreen to cover their treasonous push for hyper-globalization and anti-sovereignty extremism. Biden and the Democrat Party Ruling Class are working with Trump and the Republican Party Ruling Class to push nation-killing mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
I explained the Russia-Russia-Russia fixation of the Democrat Party in February of 2018:
Gessen brings to mind Sam Huntington questions:
Who are we as a nation?
What are we fighting for?
The Democrats are using the Russia — Russia — Russia — attack as a way of suggesting that they are in some way guardians of national concerns or national security. The Democrats are using pseudo-nationalistic rhetoric to distract attention away from the fact that the Democrats have gone global in their outlook.
The Democrats are now actively attacking the sovereignty and the particular national interests of the United States. In matters concerning immigration, foreign policy and legal structures, the Democrats are openly renouncing any attempt to govern the United States as a sovereign nation with concerns particular to the United States.
The Democrats treat illegal alien invaders as if they were American citizens. The Democrats harp on about humanitarian interventionism and the sovereignty-destroying notion of so-called “right to protect” in terms of foreign policy. The ruling class of the Democrats is just as much in favor of sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams and other transnational schemes as the Republican Party ruling class is.
That is why the ruling class of the American Empire is using pseudo-nationalism and this “Russia — Russia — Russia” nonsense to attack President Trump. Trump, in his own way, has done more than most recent presidents to draw out the evil treasonous scum in the Deep State and the American Empire’s ruling class on the big questions of sovereignty, immigration, trade and foreign policy.
President Trump should start talking more about how the ruling class is using fake nationalism to destroy the historic American nation. Trump should also talk more about how the ruling class uses the US military to advance the interests of the globalized plutocracy and certain other nations instead of the United States interests as a whole.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/even-masha-gessen-cant-take-the-medias-russophobia-with-a-straight-face/#comment-2213314
Less than 20 years ago Democrats called George W Bush a neocon (which he was). They tossed that term around a lot while not really understanding it. Now most of those same Democrats support a neolib agenda.
The US exited WW2 in glory and global power. I can see how ordinary Americans think it was worth it. Buchanan faced an unenviable task.
Similarly, the other wars appear to be as popular as it is likely that the respondees perceive the US to have won them. I suspect that the natural buzz around those, rather than victory per se, determines popular attitudes to them, especially the further back in the past they are.
One theory I heard is Democrats turned against Russia after Putin passed anti-gay legislation.
I say:
Ruling Class of American Empire always had a problem with Russia and north Pacific region contestation for power in coastal China and the like and Seward buying Alaska from Russia was good deal for USA and when the Japanese did a prelude to Pearl Harbor with two sneak attacks on Russian naval assets you must ask the Russians why there was two Japanese sneak attacks rather than just one.
The current Democrat Party is using the anti-Russia stuff as a smokescreen to cover their treasonous push for hyper-globalization and anti-sovereignty extremism. Biden and the Democrat Party Ruling Class are working with Trump and the Republican Party Ruling Class to push nation-killing mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
I explained the Russia-Russia-Russia fixation of the Democrat Party in February of 2018:
Gessen brings to mind Sam Huntington questions:
Who are we as a nation?
What are we fighting for?
The Democrats are using the Russia — Russia — Russia — attack as a way of suggesting that they are in some way guardians of national concerns or national security. The Democrats are using pseudo-nationalistic rhetoric to distract attention away from the fact that the Democrats have gone global in their outlook.
The Democrats are now actively attacking the sovereignty and the particular national interests of the United States. In matters concerning immigration, foreign policy and legal structures, the Democrats are openly renouncing any attempt to govern the United States as a sovereign nation with concerns particular to the United States.
The Democrats treat illegal alien invaders as if they were American citizens. The Democrats harp on about humanitarian interventionism and the sovereignty-destroying notion of so-called “right to protect” in terms of foreign policy. The ruling class of the Democrats is just as much in favor of sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams and other transnational schemes as the Republican Party ruling class is.
That is why the ruling class of the American Empire is using pseudo-nationalism and this “Russia — Russia — Russia” nonsense to attack President Trump. Trump, in his own way, has done more than most recent presidents to draw out the evil treasonous scum in the Deep State and the American Empire’s ruling class on the big questions of sovereignty, immigration, trade and foreign policy.
President Trump should start talking more about how the ruling class is using fake nationalism to destroy the historic American nation. Trump should also talk more about how the ruling class uses the US military to advance the interests of the globalized plutocracy and certain other nations instead of the United States interests as a whole.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/even-masha-gessen-cant-take-the-medias-russophobia-with-a-straight-face/#comment-2213314
Those evil Russians won’t even allow their children to be indoctrinated with homosexual propaganda. How much more evil can you get?
I’ve even heard rumours that many Russians go to church. How can you trust people like that?
The entire Russian nation is nothing but a basket of deplorables.
Nukes are worth more than allies.
Saddam: had his nuclear reactor blown up by Israel. Eventually lynched.The Kims: successfully develops nukes. Endures the horror of mean Hollywood movies and YouTube videos being made about them.
Pakistan: successfully develops nukes. Actually gets away with harboring Bin Laden. The mullahs draw the logical conclusion from the above about how much nuclear programs are worth, and (given what happened to Mubarak, a guy who was America's friend for almost as long as the mullahs have been America's enemies) how much you should trust anything Washington DC has to say. This is not hard stuff. And I'm saying this as a guy who favors unambiguous American withdrawal from anything Middle East related.Replies: @A123, @songbird
Here in Australia most people under 40 don’t even know that there was a First World War.
So my guess is that a lot of people responding to that survey were simply expressing an enthusiasm for war in general, or a distaste for war in general. If you’d ask them if they supported US involvement in the Peloponnesian War or the Thirty Years’ War they’d have given the same answer.
(1) Wilson's campaign slogan, "He kept us out of the war."
(2) FDR's October 30, 1940 speech, delivered in Boston, in which he stated:
"I've said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."
I had heard neither of the author nor of the book, dated 1950. Thanks for the tip.
A legal PDF of the book seems to be available gratis online.
So my guess is that a lot of people responding to that survey were simply expressing an enthusiasm for war in general, or a distaste for war in general. If you'd ask them if they supported US involvement in the Peloponnesian War or the Thirty Years' War they'd have given the same answer.Replies: @Liberty Mike, @German_reader
Prior to the US entering both world wars, the American public was overwhelmingly in favor of staying out of them. Both Wilson and FDR knew this. To wit:
(1) Wilson’s campaign slogan, “He kept us out of the war.”
(2) FDR’s October 30, 1940 speech, delivered in Boston, in which he stated:
“I’ve said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
So my guess is that a lot of people responding to that survey were simply expressing an enthusiasm for war in general, or a distaste for war in general. If you'd ask them if they supported US involvement in the Peloponnesian War or the Thirty Years' War they'd have given the same answer.Replies: @Liberty Mike, @German_reader
I thought Gallipoli was sort of a foundation myth for Australia. Is that already gone?
Most have no idea that there were two world wars. It's all blended into one amorphous mass. There was Hitler, and something about Poland being invaded, and Gallipoli, and these things happened a long time ago. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They have no idea which countries were involved or why. Obviously the Americans were the Good Guys and the Germans and the Russians were the Bad Guys, and China was probably one of the Bad Guys as well.
They have a vague notion that Gallipoli is in Turkey but there's no way they could explain what Australian troops were doing in Turkey.Replies: @sb, @V. K. Ovelund, @nebulafox, @German_reader
there’s no question about the Cold War. although some of those wars are direct parts of the Cold War.
how much do the opinions change based on the outcomes?
Korea and Vietnam were the same war, except in Korea, the US accomplished it’s objectives, and South Korea today is a great place. in Vietnam, it didn’t. and Vietnam sucks. was it ‘obvious’ up front that Korea would work and Vietnam wouldn’t? or is that hindsight stuff.
they’re more contentious because they are Cold War battles ostensibly to keep the communists from taking over most of the planet. but what if the US had just directly attacked and destroyed the Soviet Union and PRC like 2 years after 1945. instead of that delay period interwar, where people were doing a wait and see thing. then by the time it was obvious the communists were openly hostile enemies, it was too late to directly confront them.
also, if there was a direct question about the Cold War, with the US clearly winning the Cold War, do all the Cold War country sized battles get subsumed into that singular Cold War victory, or do they have to be broken out one by one like Korea and Vietnam.
Can a place be great and have a TFR below 1? Personally, I doubt it.
people talk about the US fighting against the wrong forces in WW2, and how actually, we lost huge in WW2. and some of that stuff is true.
but what they never talk about is how the US not only allowed PRC to survive and continue to exist, but actually helped them.
that’s about to turn out to be the biggest loss ever. they allowed a giant, 1 billion person sized communist direct enemy to live, so that within one human lifetime, they could come around and destroy us.
people don’t think about it like that, but never forget that the US intervened to stop Japan from eliminating PRC. US forces should have just let them be exterminated. somehow, the US back then didn’t see communists as the absolutely dire threat that they actually always are and will always be.
eliminate on sight. no talking, discussion, or negotiations.
how much do the opinions change based on the outcomes?
Korea and Vietnam were the same war, except in Korea, the US accomplished it's objectives, and South Korea today is a great place. in Vietnam, it didn't. and Vietnam sucks. was it 'obvious' up front that Korea would work and Vietnam wouldn't? or is that hindsight stuff.
they're more contentious because they are Cold War battles ostensibly to keep the communists from taking over most of the planet. but what if the US had just directly attacked and destroyed the Soviet Union and PRC like 2 years after 1945. instead of that delay period interwar, where people were doing a wait and see thing. then by the time it was obvious the communists were openly hostile enemies, it was too late to directly confront them.
also, if there was a direct question about the Cold War, with the US clearly winning the Cold War, do all the Cold War country sized battles get subsumed into that singular Cold War victory, or do they have to be broken out one by one like Korea and Vietnam.Replies: @songbird, @nebulafox
Many young South Koreans don’t seem to think so.
Can a place be great and have a TFR below 1? Personally, I doubt it.
how much do the opinions change based on the outcomes?
Korea and Vietnam were the same war, except in Korea, the US accomplished it's objectives, and South Korea today is a great place. in Vietnam, it didn't. and Vietnam sucks. was it 'obvious' up front that Korea would work and Vietnam wouldn't? or is that hindsight stuff.
they're more contentious because they are Cold War battles ostensibly to keep the communists from taking over most of the planet. but what if the US had just directly attacked and destroyed the Soviet Union and PRC like 2 years after 1945. instead of that delay period interwar, where people were doing a wait and see thing. then by the time it was obvious the communists were openly hostile enemies, it was too late to directly confront them.
also, if there was a direct question about the Cold War, with the US clearly winning the Cold War, do all the Cold War country sized battles get subsumed into that singular Cold War victory, or do they have to be broken out one by one like Korea and Vietnam.Replies: @songbird, @nebulafox
>Korea and Vietnam were the same war,
No, they weren’t, geographically, militarily, or politically.
Also, Vietnam sucks a lot less these days than it once did. It’s not a perfect analogy, but they are roughly around the same Wild West stage where China was 15, 20 years ago, to get an idea.
so your position is that it was obvious up front that America should just allow communists to take over Vietnam and not even bother trying to stop that from happening?
i'm sure there were county by country situations where the cost to benefit decision was clear up front. was this one of them? that seems like hindsight. Korea seems like the more dangerous venture, but the US didn't hesitate, and it worked out. so why would US leaders think Vietnam might not work out too.
likely the main problem is that by the time they went to stop the communists from taking over Vietnam, it was too late to do stuff like that anymore, because communists globally had advanced a lot, and only a stalemate was possible by then.
they should have kept the WW2 war machine rolling and just squashed the Soviets and PRC within a year or two, instead of giving them 20 years to build up. then the world would be a vastly better place today. that's probably why Korea worked and Vietnam didn't.Replies: @songbird
Gaddafi: gave up his nukes. Sodomized and left in ditch.
Saddam: had his nuclear reactor blown up by Israel. Eventually lynched.
The Kims: successfully develops nukes. Endures the horror of mean Hollywood movies and YouTube videos being made about them.
Pakistan: successfully develops nukes. Actually gets away with harboring Bin Laden.
The mullahs draw the logical conclusion from the above about how much nuclear programs are worth, and (given what happened to Mubarak, a guy who was America’s friend for almost as long as the mullahs have been America’s enemies) how much you should trust anything Washington DC has to say. This is not hard stuff. And I’m saying this as a guy who favors unambiguous American withdrawal from anything Middle East related.
• If Iran goes, Saudi Arabia must go in self defense
• When Iran and KSA go, Erdogan's Ottoman dreams will make him go
• When Turkey goes, Greece must go in self defenseWith Iran, and KSA, and Turkey, and Greece all-in... Who else would go? Greece probably needs a partner, and a Greco-Italian program would make a great deal of sense.Poland fears almost all of its neighbors. The only thing holding them back is international pressure, not national will. Or more likely, given the economics, Visegrad 4 bombs?
_____I can understand why the mullahs might have myopia and see immediate hope in a bomb. However, it is in the enlightened self interest of the current nuclear powers to quash the inevitable arms race before it starts.PEACE 😇Replies: @German_reader, @dfordoom
Japan mostly fought the Kuomintang forces, and the PRC was only founded in 1949.
that's what happened. that's why the US is about to lose control of the planet to China.
all the Allies had to do was wait for Japan to finish exterminating the Chinese bad guys. then they could swoop in, defeat Japan, and hand China back over to the good guys.
people talk about 'the wrong side won in WW2'. they underestimate their own statement. the really, really wrong side prevailed.Replies: @German_reader, @Daemon
Saddam: had his nuclear reactor blown up by Israel. Eventually lynched.The Kims: successfully develops nukes. Endures the horror of mean Hollywood movies and YouTube videos being made about them.
Pakistan: successfully develops nukes. Actually gets away with harboring Bin Laden. The mullahs draw the logical conclusion from the above about how much nuclear programs are worth, and (given what happened to Mubarak, a guy who was America's friend for almost as long as the mullahs have been America's enemies) how much you should trust anything Washington DC has to say. This is not hard stuff. And I'm saying this as a guy who favors unambiguous American withdrawal from anything Middle East related.Replies: @A123, @songbird
Wasn’t Bin Laden captured in the “Tribal Region” that is at best theoretically Pakistan? Functionality, it would be better described as South Afghanistan.
Many believe that Pakistan actively helped the Americans get rid of OBL. Proving that will be impossible. If it happened, any evidence has been carefully and deeply concealed.
The big problem is it will be a new multinational mass proliferation:
• If Iran goes, Saudi Arabia must go in self defense
• When Iran and KSA go, Erdogan’s Ottoman dreams will make him go
• When Turkey goes, Greece must go in self defense
With Iran, and KSA, and Turkey, and Greece all-in… Who else would go?
Greece probably needs a partner, and a Greco-Italian program would make a great deal of sense.
Poland fears almost all of its neighbors. The only thing holding them back is international pressure, not national will. Or more likely, given the economics, Visegrad 4 bombs?
_____
I can understand why the mullahs might have myopia and see immediate hope in a bomb. However, it is in the enlightened self interest of the current nuclear powers to quash the inevitable arms race before it starts.
PEACE 😇
You know the old saying that an armed society is a polite society? Well a nuclear-armed region is a peaceful region.Replies: @A123
• If Iran goes, Saudi Arabia must go in self defense
• When Iran and KSA go, Erdogan's Ottoman dreams will make him go
• When Turkey goes, Greece must go in self defenseWith Iran, and KSA, and Turkey, and Greece all-in... Who else would go? Greece probably needs a partner, and a Greco-Italian program would make a great deal of sense.Poland fears almost all of its neighbors. The only thing holding them back is international pressure, not national will. Or more likely, given the economics, Visegrad 4 bombs?
_____I can understand why the mullahs might have myopia and see immediate hope in a bomb. However, it is in the enlightened self interest of the current nuclear powers to quash the inevitable arms race before it starts.PEACE 😇Replies: @German_reader, @dfordoom
lol, he was “hiding” in the neighbourhood of the Abbottabad military academy (like 100 yards away according to some reports). How likely is it in a country like Pakistan that intelligence services don’t know who’s living next to a sensitive installation like a military academy?
"We didn't know anything about it, honest. We can't keep track of everything that happens in the frigid arctic hell of our most remote northern extremity, which is basically West Canada anyway."
Saddam: had his nuclear reactor blown up by Israel. Eventually lynched.The Kims: successfully develops nukes. Endures the horror of mean Hollywood movies and YouTube videos being made about them.
Pakistan: successfully develops nukes. Actually gets away with harboring Bin Laden. The mullahs draw the logical conclusion from the above about how much nuclear programs are worth, and (given what happened to Mubarak, a guy who was America's friend for almost as long as the mullahs have been America's enemies) how much you should trust anything Washington DC has to say. This is not hard stuff. And I'm saying this as a guy who favors unambiguous American withdrawal from anything Middle East related.Replies: @A123, @songbird
Not sure that it is realistic that either country could have ever developed nukes. Not enough human capital, IMO. Bought, maybe? But Iraq and Pakistan weren’t friendly. Libya helped finance Pakistan’s bomb, but the relationship deteriorated after political changes in Pakistan.
I’m waiting for some US intelligence asset to which the US government denies all links, showing up on the outskirts of one of the various US Air Force or Army bases in and around Fairbanks, Alaska.
“We didn’t know anything about it, honest. We can’t keep track of everything that happens in the frigid arctic hell of our most remote northern extremity, which is basically West Canada anyway.”
I wish these graphs were made on the same scale.
Taiwan is doing that because other countries would have eventually just broken the patents and subsidized the production/technology domestically.
You imply that the U.S. leaving Asia is a choice. You have no idea what is coming.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
What is coming? And how do you know about it?
I’ve been doing some reading about America in 1917 and it’s pretty interesting. There was this outfit called the American Protective League which doxxed and violently rounded up suspected slackers who didn’t report to the draft board. The APL was the Antifa of 1917, but on the right. Or the left, if you consider Wilsonian progressivism to be a leftist mind virus. In any case, a scary time to be an American male. Making it worse was that women were said to be enthusiastic snitches of suspected slackers. Lovely.
“No, they weren’t, geographically, militarily, or politically.”
so your position is that it was obvious up front that America should just allow communists to take over Vietnam and not even bother trying to stop that from happening?
i’m sure there were county by country situations where the cost to benefit decision was clear up front. was this one of them? that seems like hindsight. Korea seems like the more dangerous venture, but the US didn’t hesitate, and it worked out. so why would US leaders think Vietnam might not work out too.
likely the main problem is that by the time they went to stop the communists from taking over Vietnam, it was too late to do stuff like that anymore, because communists globally had advanced a lot, and only a stalemate was possible by then.
they should have kept the WW2 war machine rolling and just squashed the Soviets and PRC within a year or two, instead of giving them 20 years to build up. then the world would be a vastly better place today. that’s probably why Korea worked and Vietnam didn’t.
same difference. China was in a civil war, the communists were winning, and were pushing the good guys basically into the ocean. then Japan shows up and is destroying the Chinese bad guys totally. they can’t stop them. unless something changes, Japan will exterminate the Chinese bad guys. they get the miracle they need. the Allies save them and crush Japan. WW2 ends, and the Chinese bad guys get back to the business of pushing the good guys into the ocean, and setting up communist China.
that’s what happened. that’s why the US is about to lose control of the planet to China.
all the Allies had to do was wait for Japan to finish exterminating the Chinese bad guys. then they could swoop in, defeat Japan, and hand China back over to the good guys.
people talk about ‘the wrong side won in WW2’. they underestimate their own statement. the really, really wrong side prevailed.
It can be argued that the US made a big mistake in not supporting the Kuomintang more in the immediate post-war era, but your version of events is bizarre fantasy. There also was no way for the US to "squash" the Soviet Union in 1945 (probably not even with nukes, given their limited number then).
Also bizarre to worry about "losing control of the planet to China", when you're losing control of your own country.Replies: @nebulafox
That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can't *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.Replies: @allahu akbar, @Anonymous, @anon, @prime noticer
“That said, beyond keeping existing naval arrangements with Singapore and Japan preserved, I agree with Twinkie. Not least on the grounds that we simply can’t *afford* this crap anymore unless we want to go the way of the 1980s USSR.”
that’s exactly what’s going to happen to America. in a Cold War, the better economic nation prevails after decades of ‘battle’. America won the first Cold War because it had a bigger, better economy than the Soviets. more people, more efficiency, more tech. the Soviets couldn’t afford it, and eventually yielded.
China will have a bigger, more efficient, more advanced economy than the US, and will push America into bankruptcy. America won’t be able to keep up with China for decade after decade of this stuff. the 800 billion dollar defense budgets and 1 trillion dollar Social Security budgets and 2 million new third worlders per year will cause it to fail.
there probably won’t be a big, final battle in the Pacific between the US Navy and China. around 2040 or so the US will just throw up their hands and give up, exactly like the Soviets did.
that's what happened. that's why the US is about to lose control of the planet to China.
all the Allies had to do was wait for Japan to finish exterminating the Chinese bad guys. then they could swoop in, defeat Japan, and hand China back over to the good guys.
people talk about 'the wrong side won in WW2'. they underestimate their own statement. the really, really wrong side prevailed.Replies: @German_reader, @Daemon
The communists weren’t winning at all before the Japanese invasion, they had to flee to a remote backwater (where they sat out most of WW2, building up their strength for the post-war era), because the Kuomintang were massacring them. Without the dislocation caused by the Sino-Japanese war the communists probably would never have come to power.
It can be argued that the US made a big mistake in not supporting the Kuomintang more in the immediate post-war era, but your version of events is bizarre fantasy. There also was no way for the US to “squash” the Soviet Union in 1945 (probably not even with nukes, given their limited number then).
Also bizarre to worry about “losing control of the planet to China”, when you’re losing control of your own country.
Thanks.
The disposal of OBL was awhile ago, and to be honest I was not that interested in the details at that time.
What I never understood was sending troops to “get OBL” and leaving them after Mission Accomplished. If the U.S. brought troops to zero within 60 Days of ending OBL, it would have been easy to declare an unequivocal win.
Allowing time for ambiguity and mission creep was a mistake. Leaving now is still obviously correct. However, the US and USSR withdrawals share an absolutely identical theme. Cannot be portrayed as a “defeat”, but no way to make it a “win” either. Biden is executing the Gromov option, named after Colonel-General Boris Gromov’s actions (1988-89).
PEACE 😇
Perhaps people are misinformed on WW1
Clearly it was one of the biggest mistakes, and arguably the US should have fought alongside Germany if it had fought at all.
As Zionist propaganda wears off, more and more people will be isolationist.
America First, no more “immigrant” invaders, and zero support for Zionism.
Even Evangelicals are souring on Zionism now.
The Zionist era is now over. The fallout will be fierce.
The Anti-White goobermint is running out of monopoly monies.
Soon it will fall apart like a cheap suit.
Babylon will fall. First here and then in Palestine.
Jews will become the persecuted minority they always claimed to be.
What goes around comes around. Its a circular movement.
Payback is gonna be a nasty bitch this time…
so your position is that it was obvious up front that America should just allow communists to take over Vietnam and not even bother trying to stop that from happening?
i'm sure there were county by country situations where the cost to benefit decision was clear up front. was this one of them? that seems like hindsight. Korea seems like the more dangerous venture, but the US didn't hesitate, and it worked out. so why would US leaders think Vietnam might not work out too.
likely the main problem is that by the time they went to stop the communists from taking over Vietnam, it was too late to do stuff like that anymore, because communists globally had advanced a lot, and only a stalemate was possible by then.
they should have kept the WW2 war machine rolling and just squashed the Soviets and PRC within a year or two, instead of giving them 20 years to build up. then the world would be a vastly better place today. that's probably why Korea worked and Vietnam didn't.Replies: @songbird
I’d hate to think how pozzed Europe and America would be now, if communism had been crushed in 1945.
The president of South Korea was in D.C. recently and made an interesting agreement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea_Ballistic_Missile_Range_Guidelines
South Korea is as of now under no limitation in range for its ballistic missiles. Expect South Korea to develop long-range ballistic missiles that can hit not only all parts of North Korea, but Beijing as well.
Japan. Both countries need to stop being juvenile and fixating on the past and move on to forging a serious alliance to balance the rising China.
Agree. That’s bad for not just South Korea and Japan, but also for us. But South Korea is quite capable and is unlikely to be subjugated by China.
I actually think that US-ROK and Japan-ROK relations would improve if we were to withdraw all our forces. We can certainly still be allies.
Insurance.
More or less. I don’t think many Australians under 40 could place it in even the vaguest historical perspective. They know it was glorious and noble and heroic and that we were the Good Guys. But their understanding of WW1 is non-existent. If you told them that Russia was on the same side as Australia our side they’d be flabbergasted. They’d be shocked if told that Russia was our ally in both world wars. You’d get looks of disbelief if you told them Japan was Australia’s ally.
Most have no idea that there were two world wars. It’s all blended into one amorphous mass. There was Hitler, and something about Poland being invaded, and Gallipoli, and these things happened a long time ago. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They have no idea which countries were involved or why. Obviously the Americans were the Good Guys and the Germans and the Russians were the Bad Guys, and China was probably one of the Bad Guys as well.
They have a vague notion that Gallipoli is in Turkey but there’s no way they could explain what Australian troops were doing in Turkey.
For those of us whose Australian connection goes back a while WWI was quite a major event in many family histories - huge casualty lists , country split on conscription , Protestant/ Catholic conflict , Empire loyalism vs Aussie nationalism etc etc .
WWI vets were still quite a feature during my childhood ( I'm getting on )
Maybe I should get out moreReplies: @dfordoom
From scratch, no. But if someone were to show them, yes. North Korea also benefitted from the A.Q. Khan network. The Norks provided technical data for ballistic missiles in return.
Stop muddying the waters with facts. He was having a nice paranoid fantasy and now you’ve spoilt it.
• If Iran goes, Saudi Arabia must go in self defense
• When Iran and KSA go, Erdogan's Ottoman dreams will make him go
• When Turkey goes, Greece must go in self defenseWith Iran, and KSA, and Turkey, and Greece all-in... Who else would go? Greece probably needs a partner, and a Greco-Italian program would make a great deal of sense.Poland fears almost all of its neighbors. The only thing holding them back is international pressure, not national will. Or more likely, given the economics, Visegrad 4 bombs?
_____I can understand why the mullahs might have myopia and see immediate hope in a bomb. However, it is in the enlightened self interest of the current nuclear powers to quash the inevitable arms race before it starts.PEACE 😇Replies: @German_reader, @dfordoom
There’s nothing enlightened about it.
You know the old saying that an armed society is a polite society? Well a nuclear-armed region is a peaceful region.
-1- How can you rely on all parties to be rational?
-2- When things go bad, how will collateral damage to civilians be minimized?
-3- Will all of the armed nations have adequate integrity to prevent leaking to non-state actors?
Admittedly, #1 is a current problem with mentally infirm Biden. However, more leaders with launch authority yields more opportunities for irrationality.
Even if there is a desirable end-state, the development period would be unstable & highly risky.
• Any of the current powers could intervene, preempting the acquisition.
• Each arms race participant that "gets there first" has a very transitory period for immediate use to maximum advantage.
PEACE 😇
__________
(1) https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2020/03/what-really-happened-gunfight-ok-corral
They should have been. Done, thanks.
Most Americans only know the lies taught in schools and presented in our corporate media. If they were exposed to the truth, these stats would be vastly different.
Why entering World War I was a mistake:
Why entering World War II was a mistake:
Why entering the Korean war was a mistake: (appears next week)
Why entering the Vietnam war was a mistake:
that's what happened. that's why the US is about to lose control of the planet to China.
all the Allies had to do was wait for Japan to finish exterminating the Chinese bad guys. then they could swoop in, defeat Japan, and hand China back over to the good guys.
people talk about 'the wrong side won in WW2'. they underestimate their own statement. the really, really wrong side prevailed.Replies: @German_reader, @Daemon
“American” education, everybody.
Most have no idea that there were two world wars. It's all blended into one amorphous mass. There was Hitler, and something about Poland being invaded, and Gallipoli, and these things happened a long time ago. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They have no idea which countries were involved or why. Obviously the Americans were the Good Guys and the Germans and the Russians were the Bad Guys, and China was probably one of the Bad Guys as well.
They have a vague notion that Gallipoli is in Turkey but there's no way they could explain what Australian troops were doing in Turkey.Replies: @sb, @V. K. Ovelund, @nebulafox, @German_reader
That isn’t my impression but I grant you that maybe a majority of people now in Australia didn’t have family in Australia at the time of WWI
For those of us whose Australian connection goes back a while WWI was quite a major event in many family histories – huge casualty lists , country split on conscription , Protestant/ Catholic conflict , Empire loyalism vs Aussie nationalism etc etc .
WWI vets were still quite a feature during my childhood ( I’m getting on )
Maybe I should get out more
For younger people the personal links are becoming very tenuous. When I was born family members who actually served in the First World War were still alive. But if you're under 35 then WW1 was something that affected your great-great-grandparents' generation. The personal link is almost non-existent. It's not personal, it's just history. And very few people today have even the slightest knowledge of history.
The lack of historical perspective among the young is terrifying. I met a Millennial recently who didn't have the remotest idea when Shakespeare lived, didn't know he wrote plays and wasn't sure if he was English or not.Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
Vietnam was probably the least mistaken of the lot, but the United States has otherwise fought a preposterous number of wars since�1900, few of which had any realistic hope of advancing the interests of the American people.
The MAGA Hat Brigade seems to disagree, though. Some of them want more. Recently appearing in the paid-subscriber comment threads of The Epoch Times:The fellow who wrote the last almost certainly cannot even do anything about some black punk blocking the sidewalk, strutting with his hip-hop pants down around his ankles while cop-killa rap “music” blasts from his homie's car at the curb. And if Officer Derek Chauvin arrives on the scene to take the situation in hand, why, the fellow will not lift a finger to help when Chauvin gets jailed for it.
But never fear, that brave fellow is going to eliminate those new military islands for us! No problem.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @Feryl
What drives support for a war is heavily determined by public unity being a factor in its justification. Young Boomers tended to be either extremely for or against Vietnam, while the older generations had had enough war in WW2 and Korea and needed a break from body counts. People have more ill-will regarding Vietnam not because the war itself but because it (much like 1960’s civil rights legislation and expanded welfare) began the division within Americans that’s been widening ever since with cyclical cool downs driven by fatigue/apathy (the 80’s and 90’s) followed by ugly flare-ups driven by rage and frustration.
Peter Turchin is a genius for focusing on data regarding the public mood and sense of shared morale and purpose instead of the traditional approach of focusing on parsing the moral and strategic dimensions of elite driven self-justification for various narratives and the direction of society. As Turchin points out, periods of elites agreeing with a well adjusted populace and looking out for them create happiness and intra-national harmony. But elites letting society corrode via poor impulses and sheer incompetence create pessimism among the general public, who become more depressed and angry at the growing reality that we can’t unite together to achieve something worthwhile.
I say:
David Hackett Fischer focuses on the ancestral origins of the USA and the financialization underlayment of historical forces and that might be better than this Turchin guy on overproduction of malcontents and the discontented ruling-class-in-waiting.
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America and The Great Wave: Price Fluctuations And The Rhythm Of History are good books although I haven't read the Price Fluctuations book too deeply.
Fischer himself is a boob politically because he had kind words for globalizer mass immigration fanatic John McCain but Fischer's books are good.
Now there is no economy; there is no free market; there is no capitalism; and there is no free enterprise; it is all central banker shysterism and if the Fed raised the federal funds rate to 6 percent and if the Fed stopped the asset purchases and the balance sheet ballooning and the continued purchase of mortgage-backed securities and government debt that would immediately implode the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate.
Teddy Cruz and Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and Rick Scott and Tom Emmer are all disgusting treasonous politician whores who push mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
The rancid Republican Party Ruling Class must be politically and rhetorically decapitated and removed from power because the Republican Party donors and the Republican Party politician whores are evil scum who continue to attack the European Christian ancestral core of the USA by using mass immigration and multiculturalism as demographic weapons to destroy the historic American nation.
Ron Klain and Corn Pop's pal Biden are now using mass legal immigration as a wedge issue to separate the Republican Party donors -- and their kept whores like Teddy Cruz and Rick Scott -- from the proud and brave Republican Party voters. GOP Donors vs GOP Voter split on immigration: ain't we done seen this before? Trumpy tactic for sure.
Corn Pop's pal Biden and Klain did the same thing with throwing conjured up cash around and saying they will tax the plutocrats and the corporations a bit more to pay for it.
Klain and Corn Pop's pal Biden see it like most of us but the human filth scum like Teddy Cruz and Rick Scott will keep pushing the crud that the GOP donors want.
Most have no idea that there were two world wars. It's all blended into one amorphous mass. There was Hitler, and something about Poland being invaded, and Gallipoli, and these things happened a long time ago. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They have no idea which countries were involved or why. Obviously the Americans were the Good Guys and the Germans and the Russians were the Bad Guys, and China was probably one of the Bad Guys as well.
They have a vague notion that Gallipoli is in Turkey but there's no way they could explain what Australian troops were doing in Turkey.Replies: @sb, @V. K. Ovelund, @nebulafox, @German_reader
This entire comment, worthy of Tacitus, ought to be graven monumentally in granite, that future archaeologists might excavate it and future historians might spin out its meaning.
Some future Gibbon ought to base his Decline and Fall of the Australian Empire upon these words. Learned young men will study ancient scripts like Sumerian cuneiform and 21st-century English that they may enjoy the leisure of reading the graven prophecy in the original.
https://pbfcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/PBF209-Now_Showing.jpg
* (((democraps))) push harmful radical ideas
* recucklicans briefly oppose them and always throw the fight
Now that you understand how The Uniparty works, nothing will surprise you again.
Peter Turchin is a genius for focusing on data regarding the public mood and sense of shared morale and purpose instead of the traditional approach of focusing on parsing the moral and strategic dimensions of elite driven self-justification for various narratives and the direction of society. As Turchin points out, periods of elites agreeing with a well adjusted populace and looking out for them create happiness and intra-national harmony. But elites letting society corrode via poor impulses and sheer incompetence create pessimism among the general public, who become more depressed and angry at the growing reality that we can't unite together to achieve something worthwhile.Replies: @Charles Pewitt
Peter Turchin is a genius for focusing on data regarding the public mood and sense of shared morale and purpose instead of the traditional approach of focusing on parsing the moral and strategic dimensions of elite driven self-justification for various narratives and the direction of society. As Turchin points out, periods of elites agreeing with a well adjusted populace and looking out for them create happiness and intra-national harmony. But elites letting society corrode via poor impulses and sheer incompetence create pessimism among the general public, who become more depressed and angry at the growing reality that we can’t unite together to achieve something worthwhile.
I say:
David Hackett Fischer focuses on the ancestral origins of the USA and the financialization underlayment of historical forces and that might be better than this Turchin guy on overproduction of malcontents and the discontented ruling-class-in-waiting.
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America and The Great Wave: Price Fluctuations And The Rhythm Of History are good books although I haven’t read the Price Fluctuations book too deeply.
Fischer himself is a boob politically because he had kind words for globalizer mass immigration fanatic John McCain but Fischer’s books are good.
Now there is no economy; there is no free market; there is no capitalism; and there is no free enterprise; it is all central banker shysterism and if the Fed raised the federal funds rate to 6 percent and if the Fed stopped the asset purchases and the balance sheet ballooning and the continued purchase of mortgage-backed securities and government debt that would immediately implode the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate.
Teddy Cruz and Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and Rick Scott and Tom Emmer are all disgusting treasonous politician whores who push mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
The rancid Republican Party Ruling Class must be politically and rhetorically decapitated and removed from power because the Republican Party donors and the Republican Party politician whores are evil scum who continue to attack the European Christian ancestral core of the USA by using mass immigration and multiculturalism as demographic weapons to destroy the historic American nation.
Ron Klain and Corn Pop’s pal Biden are now using mass legal immigration as a wedge issue to separate the Republican Party donors — and their kept whores like Teddy Cruz and Rick Scott — from the proud and brave Republican Party voters. GOP Donors vs GOP Voter split on immigration: ain’t we done seen this before? Trumpy tactic for sure.
Corn Pop’s pal Biden and Klain did the same thing with throwing conjured up cash around and saying they will tax the plutocrats and the corporations a bit more to pay for it.
Klain and Corn Pop’s pal Biden see it like most of us but the human filth scum like Teddy Cruz and Rick Scott will keep pushing the crud that the GOP donors want.
I’m reminded of this bit of satire:
Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and Rick Scott and Tom Emmer are treasonous politician whores who push mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
McConnell is married to a Han Chinese lady with clear and extremely shady ties to the CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY and McConnell voted for Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
The rancid politician whores in the Republican Party and the treasonous GOP donors must be removed from power immediately.
The evil and putrid Republican Party Ruling Class is using mass immigration as a demographic weapon to attack and destroy the European Christian ancestral core of the USA.
Republican Party voters are proud and brave and patriotic and great people of love and kindness — well, a good portion of them, anyways.
Saddam’s diddling with nuclear facilities was before my time, but I do know that back before the Gulf War days, he was rich enough to do things like that.
Libya, like North Korea and Iran, was in touch with AQ Khan, who could procure the components and technical advice needed. One of his main contacts, BSA Tahir, was a Malaysian: a country which does have the industry needed to produce high quality tech, transmitted through friendly Islamic rendezvous points like Dubai.
After 9/11, things took on a different tone. Gaddafi knew from painful personal experience in the 1980s how the US could lash out when hurt, and decided that giving up the nuclear chip was worth secure relations with the US.
He didn’t count on a Harvard professor disinterested in such mundane things as “geopolitical stability” and “credibility” coming to power at a time of turmoil, though, anymore than the monarchs of Central and Eastern Europe counted on it 100 years earlier.
Most have no idea that there were two world wars. It's all blended into one amorphous mass. There was Hitler, and something about Poland being invaded, and Gallipoli, and these things happened a long time ago. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They have no idea which countries were involved or why. Obviously the Americans were the Good Guys and the Germans and the Russians were the Bad Guys, and China was probably one of the Bad Guys as well.
They have a vague notion that Gallipoli is in Turkey but there's no way they could explain what Australian troops were doing in Turkey.Replies: @sb, @V. K. Ovelund, @nebulafox, @German_reader
If its anybody’s founding myth, it should be modern Turkey’s, because that’s when Ataturk began his rise to prominence. Even the AKP doesn’t dare publicly disown his memory too much.
Anyway, don’t feel too bad. Many Americans my age are genuinely shocked by the appearance of non-black slaves in “Gladiator”.
We're now a society in which people live in an eternal present. Everything prior to their own childhood is just a huge dark nothingness.
Younger people don't even pick up a few historical snippets from television. They know that Nazis are evil but they probably don't know that Nazis existed before Trump. Nazi is just a word that means a really really bad person.
You have to remember that Millennials who comment on UR are likely to be very very untypical. They're politically engaged and likely to be history geeks. In fact that's true of people of all generations who comment here. We actually read books.Replies: @iffen
It can be argued that the US made a big mistake in not supporting the Kuomintang more in the immediate post-war era, but your version of events is bizarre fantasy. There also was no way for the US to "squash" the Soviet Union in 1945 (probably not even with nukes, given their limited number then).
Also bizarre to worry about "losing control of the planet to China", when you're losing control of your own country.Replies: @nebulafox
If the IJA didn’t invade when they did, Chiang would have completely crushed them, probably within a year or two. Especially if his German advisors stuck around longer.
>It can be argued that the US made a big mistake in not supporting the Kuomintang more in the immediate post-war era, but your version of events is bizarre fantasy.
I think there are things the US could have done better with post-1945 China, but I doubt anything we could have done would have changed the outcome of the civil war. The stuff that led to the Communist victory had already happened, either during the war years (hyperinflation, military losses culminating in Ichigo, Communist growth in countryside, etc, etc), or during the immediate aftermath of the war when the Communists got access to all the stuff in the Northeast that the Soviets or Japanese hadn’t already looted.
Interestingly, if Mao managed to get his invasion of Taiwan off before Stalin launched the Korean War not least to preempt that, history could have been quite different, complete with a Sino-American rapprochement 20 years before OTL. But that’s alternative history, hence speculative history.
Corn Pop’s pal Biden is a geezer boy globalizer scumbag treasonite but the rancid Republican Party politician whores will not even mention WHITES.
Whites have interests and they must be advanced and fought for and the coward scum in the GOP will not do it because their donor masters keep them on a politically correct leash.
One realizes that “Gladiator” was ahistorical, but that was a fun flick. All it lacked was Charlton Heston to play the role of astronaut-charioteer Moses Ben-Hur.
For those of us whose Australian connection goes back a while WWI was quite a major event in many family histories - huge casualty lists , country split on conscription , Protestant/ Catholic conflict , Empire loyalism vs Aussie nationalism etc etc .
WWI vets were still quite a feature during my childhood ( I'm getting on )
Maybe I should get out moreReplies: @dfordoom
It was a big thing in my childhood too, but I’m also getting on!
For younger people the personal links are becoming very tenuous. When I was born family members who actually served in the First World War were still alive. But if you’re under 35 then WW1 was something that affected your great-great-grandparents’ generation. The personal link is almost non-existent. It’s not personal, it’s just history. And very few people today have even the slightest knowledge of history.
The lack of historical perspective among the young is terrifying. I met a Millennial recently who didn’t have the remotest idea when Shakespeare lived, didn’t know he wrote plays and wasn’t sure if he was English or not.
Please provide the numbers to support that. I believe you will find you are mistaken.Replies: @nebulafox
I’m citing Sebastian Hou, from Hong Kong’s CLSA. Cursory web search will give you what you need. More details can be found here: it’s not the semiconductor end product, per se, where the US does excel, but how deep Taiwan is down on the supply chain for the chip material.
https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-SIA-State-of-the-Industry-Report.pdf
The Taiwanese are particularly dominant when it comes to the cutting-edge stuff. The PRC’s semiconductor industry has come a long way, and is probably on par with Singapore and Japan at this point, but it’s still a bit behind Taiwan (and South Korea). TSMC’s founder is on record with doubts about the ability to replicate similar results in fabrication in Arizona, which partially reflects sour grapes about the lack of concrete incentives we’re giving the ROC beyond security-vaccines, for example-but also does reflect very real concerns given the mass hollowing out of the American economy in the past 30 years to be a service sector/financial/web app wooden titan.
The above statement is not equivalent to the previous statement:
One unstated obstacle to withdrawal in Asia is the fact that 90% of our semiconductor chip supply comes from Taiwan.
"Semiconductor chip supply" is a reasonably obvious statement that refers to discrete devices. We can count all the places where such devices are fabbed, globally. Please write more carefully.
It is true that chip fab requires a lot of specialize stuff, including machines such as scanners. Nikon was the world leader in steppers, seems be the same in scanners. It is not a Taiwan company.
https://www.nikon.com/products/semi/history/
As far I know, ultrapure silicon in industrial quantities is also a niche owned by a Japanese company.
TSMC’s founder is on record with doubts about the ability to replicate similar results in fabrication in Arizona,
There could be any number of reasons for such a statement, starting with "talking your book".
but also does reflect very real concerns given the mass hollowing out of the American economy in the past 30 years to be a service sector/financial/web app wooden titan.
A wooden titan that is #2 or perhaps #3 in manufacturing.
Please be more careful.
I’m pretty confident that if you throw a few really really basic historical questions at any Millennial/Zoomer anywhere in the Anglosphere you’ll be staggered by the answers you’ll get. If you ask them when Napoleon lived you’re likely to get answers that are off by several centuries. Ask them when Alexander the Great lived and you’re likely to get answers that are off by a millennium or two.
We’re now a society in which people live in an eternal present. Everything prior to their own childhood is just a huge dark nothingness.
Younger people don’t even pick up a few historical snippets from television. They know that Nazis are evil but they probably don’t know that Nazis existed before Trump. Nazi is just a word that means a really really bad person.
You have to remember that Millennials who comment on UR are likely to be very very untypical. They’re politically engaged and likely to be history geeks. In fact that’s true of people of all generations who comment here. We actually read books.
For younger people the personal links are becoming very tenuous. When I was born family members who actually served in the First World War were still alive. But if you're under 35 then WW1 was something that affected your great-great-grandparents' generation. The personal link is almost non-existent. It's not personal, it's just history. And very few people today have even the slightest knowledge of history.
The lack of historical perspective among the young is terrifying. I met a Millennial recently who didn't have the remotest idea when Shakespeare lived, didn't know he wrote plays and wasn't sure if he was English or not.Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
The hollowing out of the public education of children and teens in the United States is familiar to me, but how did it come to pass in Australia?
it’s not the semiconductor end product, per se, where the US does excel, but how deep Taiwan is down on the supply chain for the chip material.
The above statement is not equivalent to the previous statement:
One unstated obstacle to withdrawal in Asia is the fact that 90% of our semiconductor chip supply comes from Taiwan.
“Semiconductor chip supply” is a reasonably obvious statement that refers to discrete devices. We can count all the places where such devices are fabbed, globally. Please write more carefully.
It is true that chip fab requires a lot of specialize stuff, including machines such as scanners. Nikon was the world leader in steppers, seems be the same in scanners. It is not a Taiwan company.
https://www.nikon.com/products/semi/history/
As far I know, ultrapure silicon in industrial quantities is also a niche owned by a Japanese company.
TSMC’s founder is on record with doubts about the ability to replicate similar results in fabrication in Arizona,
There could be any number of reasons for such a statement, starting with “talking your book”.
but also does reflect very real concerns given the mass hollowing out of the American economy in the past 30 years to be a service sector/financial/web app wooden titan.
A wooden titan that is #2 or perhaps #3 in manufacturing.
Please be more careful.
Mitch McConnell is lucky that Kevin McCarthy might be an even bigger bought and paid for politician whore than he is.
The ruling class of the rancid Republican Party is evil and it must be removed from power.
Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy push mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
Rick Scott and Tom Emmer are just as treasonous and unpatriotic as McConnell and McCarthy and Scott and Emmer are the bagmen who will hand out the cash from the nasty scumbag GOP donors to the GOP politician whore candidates for the 2022 election.
Most have no idea that there were two world wars. It's all blended into one amorphous mass. There was Hitler, and something about Poland being invaded, and Gallipoli, and these things happened a long time ago. Maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They have no idea which countries were involved or why. Obviously the Americans were the Good Guys and the Germans and the Russians were the Bad Guys, and China was probably one of the Bad Guys as well.
They have a vague notion that Gallipoli is in Turkey but there's no way they could explain what Australian troops were doing in Turkey.Replies: @sb, @V. K. Ovelund, @nebulafox, @German_reader
Sounds pretty extreme, but then most normal people probably don’t know (or care) much about history. Thanks for your reply!
I don’t really know that much about the details of China’s civil war myself (have only read somewhat summary accounts), but I recall commenter “reiner tor” mentioning that the US had an arms embargo against the Kuomintang during the crucial phase of the civil war (because the Kuomintang were corrupt and undemocratic or whatever, a bit like Carter’s stance towards the Shah). iirc “reiner tor” got that from one of Frank Dikötter’s books. But I can’t really judge how important policies like that were for the defeat of the Kuomintang.
it’s possible i got my sides mixed up in the China situation, year by year. my apologies. but the communists won, one way or another, and could have been stopped early on, like they were in Korea. in fact US caution over the Soviets seemed to be what caused them to hesitate to drive the communists back deep into China itself.
i’ll maintain my hypothesis that stopping communists early is a lot less difficult, stopping them late is very hard, and that’s probably why it became increasingly difficult to halt the spread of it nation by nation after the 50s. it’s like a snowball rolling downhill.
by the way, there is basically no American education about this particular topic. China civil war. it’s not covered in public schools, or even in college, unless you’re a history major. it wasn’t covered even in the 70s and 80s, in the time before the Woke era. you’re on your own if you want to read about China in the 20th century. i took AP US History and got a 5 and none of this was on the test. it covered 1492 to 1945 and that was pretty much it. but i’m afraid to think of what the AP test looks like now. better study hard on Harriet Tubman.
I suppose our public education hasn’t done them any favors, but was it really that much better in the past? And not just for elites, but for people near the median for IQ and intellectual curiosity?
I’m usually considered an early Millennial, but I recall my middle/high school curriculum being only slightly Harriet-Tubmanized. We spent most of our time on standard Western Civ and American History material. It’s just that most of my peers (at pretty good schools) didn’t care to learn much, and so they didn’t.
It didn’t help that history is mostly relegated to the realm of unmotivated coaches and such (I hated those guys and was always trying to subvert and undermine them in class, I was kind of a precocious snot), but I was fortunate to have a few teachers with MAs in History who were passionate about the topic. It made no difference to 90% of my peers, and I recall them treating clueless coaches about the same as the guys with MAs.
But I'd agree that most people's knowledge of history and culture has always been pretty shallow.
you hate to think how GREAT America would be right now if all the jewish communists and marxists were exterminated by 1945?
instead, the US saved them, then injected them into it’s bloodstream. who is doing all the pozzing again? oh right, (them).
imagine a Russia never devastated by jewish communists. what a terrible thing.
imagine an America not being destroyed right now by jewish communists. the horrors of a healthy, sane society.
yes indeed. exterminating jewish communists and marxists on site and all their fellow gentile travelers is a really, really bad idea. the Cold War was great for everybody. and China taking over the world will be ideal.
If communism had been crushed completely in 1945 America would have been pozzed by the end of the 1950s.
You know the old saying that an armed society is a polite society? Well a nuclear-armed region is a peaceful region.Replies: @A123
Well armed polite societies still had gun fights. However, as they were often will trained and skilled societies. Accidental shooting of uninvolved parties happened, but was fairly rare. Even when things went squirrelly, such as the OK Corral, stray round injuries were zero: (1)
If you want to sell you analogy, “nuclear-armed region is a peaceful region” there are three primary issues to overcome:
-1- How can you rely on all parties to be rational?
-2- When things go bad, how will collateral damage to civilians be minimized?
-3- Will all of the armed nations have adequate integrity to prevent leaking to non-state actors?
Admittedly, #1 is a current problem with mentally infirm Biden. However, more leaders with launch authority yields more opportunities for irrationality.
Even if there is a desirable end-state, the development period would be unstable & highly risky.
• Any of the current powers could intervene, preempting the acquisition.
• Each arms race participant that “gets there first” has a very transitory period for immediate use to maximum advantage.
PEACE 😇
__________
(1) https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2020/03/what-really-happened-gunfight-ok-corral
It’s a really fascinating topic, as is the WWII, Nanjing decade, and warlord periods proceeding it.
TLDR: it was meant to pressure him into negotiating with Mao. George Marshall had this idea of a coalition government where the KMT and Communists could share power, which illustrates how the American government didn’t really grasp how uninterested Mao was in any kind of deal with Chiang and vice versa. This was one of many misperceptions that harmed the KMT-US relationship, throughout the war: above all else, vastly overestimating the ROC’s nominal capabilities on paper by 1942 while having this weird mix of putting Chiang on a pedestal while simultaneously refusing to understand what made him tick, hence incomprehension at his negative relationship with the UK, Stilwell, etc. The pressure to move north in 1946 didn’t help, either, and as I alluded to, the Communists got a massive influx of new weapons and machinery thanks to the USSR’s invasion of Manchuria right on the heels of their wartime growth.
(Of course they didn’t trust each other. One had massively and bloodily attempted to exterminate the other because Chiang believed-correctly, as it turned out-that China would have to be united to stand any chance of successfully fending off the Japanese. As you already know, Mao would spend most of the war consolidating Communist power in the countryside while letting the KMT take the brunt of the Japanese attack, contra to Communist propaganda. And to some degree, this was also personal: Mao’s second wife had been beheaded by a KMT-allied warlord back in 1930.)
But as I said, while I don’t think actions by FDR and Truman helped, I also don’t think it was decisive because the critical factors in the eventual Communist victory had already happened by 1946. Above all, one of the really underestimated factors was hyperinflation. This was fatal because of the KMT’s structural weaknesses dating back to the warlord era. Chiang was a dictator, but not one whose power was so absolute that he could enforce his will on various regional power brokers. As you could imagine, this sort of decentralized patronage network became deeply corrupt when the hyperinflation came, which was heavily resented by the people.
Anyway, thanks for your informative comment.Replies: @nebulafox
Before�1960, the standard history curriculum was not designed to demoralize American youth or dissolve the authentic American people, but yes, in retrospect, it may always have been substantially nonsense.
When Napoleon quipped (if in fact he did so quip), “History is a set of lies agreed upon,” I took his quip as a mere mischievous provocation, but am no longer so sure.
U.S. Readers with elementary-school children can read them Eggleston’s old-style American history. Recommended.
I'm sort of ambivalent on the mythos that tends to surround traditional history. Take Columbus. I was taught that Columbus was an unambiguously great man. "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." He was a genius who was trying to prove the world wasn't flat and all the idiots around him doubted it and thought he'd sail off the edge of the world.
I think the criticisms of him are half-right. He was kind of a bastard, and a lucky one at that. Really what we can say, to the man's credit, is that he made a big ballsy move that paid off, that inspired other brave ballsy moves made by explorers through the centuries. And he demonstrated enough competence that he mostly made it to the New World and back in one piece. We both know that if some female 15th century Amelia Earhart had been allowed to lead a bold exploratory fleet into the Atlantic and it accomplished nothing and sunk and every soul aboard perished, she'd be the greatest hero in maritime history.
But I guess that sort of nuance around Columbus -- brave, bold, successful bastard -- just can't be taught one way or the other. Either we're building up national and civilizational heroes or we're tearing them down. Given a binary choice, I suppose I advocate building them up. But it's not in my nature to let go of the more nuanced truth.Replies: @iffen, @nebulafox
Lol, that’s pretty funny, such coalition governments were the usual prelude to total communist takeover in Eastern bloc countries (most notably Czechoslovakia in 1948). Seems like a rather naive idea in retrospect.
Anyway, thanks for your informative comment.
We're now a society in which people live in an eternal present. Everything prior to their own childhood is just a huge dark nothingness.
Younger people don't even pick up a few historical snippets from television. They know that Nazis are evil but they probably don't know that Nazis existed before Trump. Nazi is just a word that means a really really bad person.
You have to remember that Millennials who comment on UR are likely to be very very untypical. They're politically engaged and likely to be history geeks. In fact that's true of people of all generations who comment here. We actually read books.Replies: @iffen
Do you think that this is different from the past?
I think social media is re-creating the conditions of pre-industrial society in which people would spend their whole lives in a tiny social bubble and never have any exposure whatsoever to the wider world or to anyone outside their own immediate social circle. Ironically for most people the world of social media is like living in a tiny village and never interacting with outsiders and never becoming aware that such things as history and culture exist.
Put it this way. The past was bad, but the world of today is worse.Replies: @iffen
The Pyongyang metro has 15% of the country’s population inside it. If that’s not a representative slice, you have impossible standards.
I've had conversations with numerous defectors. Those privileged from Pyongyang and those from the countryside speak of vastly different lifestyles.
Thanks, but I think you misunderstood my point. I wasn’t asking if historical education in the past taught more truths. I was asking if we really think a lot more people in the past learned the lessons it was trying to teach, true or not.
I’m sort of ambivalent on the mythos that tends to surround traditional history. Take Columbus. I was taught that Columbus was an unambiguously great man. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” He was a genius who was trying to prove the world wasn’t flat and all the idiots around him doubted it and thought he’d sail off the edge of the world.
I think the criticisms of him are half-right. He was kind of a bastard, and a lucky one at that. Really what we can say, to the man’s credit, is that he made a big ballsy move that paid off, that inspired other brave ballsy moves made by explorers through the centuries. And he demonstrated enough competence that he mostly made it to the New World and back in one piece. We both know that if some female 15th century Amelia Earhart had been allowed to lead a bold exploratory fleet into the Atlantic and it accomplished nothing and sunk and every soul aboard perished, she’d be the greatest hero in maritime history.
But I guess that sort of nuance around Columbus — brave, bold, successful bastard — just can’t be taught one way or the other. Either we’re building up national and civilizational heroes or we’re tearing them down. Given a binary choice, I suppose I advocate building them up. But it’s not in my nature to let go of the more nuanced truth.
LOL
I'm not sure how one could improve on this.
I'm sort of ambivalent on the mythos that tends to surround traditional history. Take Columbus. I was taught that Columbus was an unambiguously great man. "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." He was a genius who was trying to prove the world wasn't flat and all the idiots around him doubted it and thought he'd sail off the edge of the world.
I think the criticisms of him are half-right. He was kind of a bastard, and a lucky one at that. Really what we can say, to the man's credit, is that he made a big ballsy move that paid off, that inspired other brave ballsy moves made by explorers through the centuries. And he demonstrated enough competence that he mostly made it to the New World and back in one piece. We both know that if some female 15th century Amelia Earhart had been allowed to lead a bold exploratory fleet into the Atlantic and it accomplished nothing and sunk and every soul aboard perished, she'd be the greatest hero in maritime history.
But I guess that sort of nuance around Columbus -- brave, bold, successful bastard -- just can't be taught one way or the other. Either we're building up national and civilizational heroes or we're tearing them down. Given a binary choice, I suppose I advocate building them up. But it's not in my nature to let go of the more nuanced truth.Replies: @iffen, @nebulafox
We both know that if some female 15th century Amelia Earhart had been allowed to lead a bold exploratory fleet into the Atlantic and it accomplished nothing and sunk and every soul aboard perished, she’d be the greatest hero in maritime history.
LOL
I’m not sure how one could improve on this.
The other 85% of the population lives very differently than that elite 15%. North Korea has perhaps the greatest restriction on movements by the population of any nation in the world, and only those rewarded by the regime is allowed to live in Pyongyang. The rest of the country lives in crippling poverty and deprivation unimaginable even in the better developed Third World countries (though the last few years have been much better than the two decades preceding them).
I’ve had conversations with numerous defectors. Those privileged from Pyongyang and those from the countryside speak of vastly different lifestyles.
Well up to the 19th century the average person was almost certainly breathtakingly ignorant. I think there was a brief window from about the late 19th century up to maybe the 1980s during which the average person probably picked up at least a very basic smattering of knowledge about things like history, art and literature. At least enough to know that Shakespeare wrote plays, to know roughly when the American Revolution and French Revolution happened and to know that Julius Caesar lived before Napoleon.
But I’d agree that most people’s knowledge of history and culture has always been pretty shallow.
The Poz is not a product of marxists or communists. It’s a product of good old-fashioned home-grown American liberalism. It’s not the Chinese communists spreading the Poz. And to a very very large extent the Poz is a product of capitalism.
If communism had been crushed completely in 1945 America would have been pozzed by the end of the 1950s.
Anyway, thanks for your informative comment.Replies: @nebulafox
Thanks. I’ve learned a lot from you about the European angle to WWII, which I am not as familiar with, for what it is worth.
Well, Mao was a very effective propagandist who had the added benefit of a lot of his propaganda being based in truth. It wasn’t just Chinese who were impacted. You had the usual gang of vaguely leftist people in the State Department, but you also had more sober people who gradually began to view Mao as a potential Asian Tito. This wasn’t a terrible idea: Mao was deeply hostile to Stalin’s attempts to make him into another docile satellite leader. But he needed a lot more from Stalin than we probably could have gave. As I mentioned, part of why Stalin wanted to press the Korean War before Mao invaded Taiwan to finish off the KMT was to ensure he would stay estranged.
You want to know something really funny, though? At the end of their lives, Mao and Chiang kind of warmed to each other and started toying with the idea of reunification in their old semi-relevant way. When Chiang finally died in 1975, Mao-who was facing down his mortality himself-did not react with the exuberance that his guards did.
(Oddly enough, Mao also seems to have had a sincere affection for Richard Nixon, as another man whose “greatness” was not appreciated by contemporaries. Obviously, both he and the Soviets had a difficult time understanding Watergate, with the latter viewing it as a shadowy coup of some kind. This stuck after his death. During the official normalization in 1978, the Chinese insisted he be invited to the White House, or they wouldn’t show. Carter was deeply hostile to Nixon, as was the country as a whole, but they got their way. Looks like this Cena stuff started earlier than taken for…)
Sorry for my rambling, it’s just really interesting stuff that departs from traditional narrative.
I do. I readily admit that most people have always been shockingly unaware of their own history and culture but I do think the situation now is somewhat worse.
I think social media is re-creating the conditions of pre-industrial society in which people would spend their whole lives in a tiny social bubble and never have any exposure whatsoever to the wider world or to anyone outside their own immediate social circle. Ironically for most people the world of social media is like living in a tiny village and never interacting with outsiders and never becoming aware that such things as history and culture exist.
Put it this way. The past was bad, but the world of today is worse.
It's always "Paradise Lost," never found in the here and now, or waiting to be discovered.
Always driven out of Eden, never taken in.
Anyway, I'm old enough to remember many older people who were illiterate. (Of course I am from a section of the country that had higher rates of illiteracy.) Plenty of kids still dropped out of high school and the schools were still failing to pass kids in those days. After a couple of failed grades, many would just give up and drop out. They don't fail to pass kids these days.
The point is that I am cautious about these types of comparisons. I'm not sure we are doing apples to apples.Replies: @dfordoom, @Wency
I'm sort of ambivalent on the mythos that tends to surround traditional history. Take Columbus. I was taught that Columbus was an unambiguously great man. "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." He was a genius who was trying to prove the world wasn't flat and all the idiots around him doubted it and thought he'd sail off the edge of the world.
I think the criticisms of him are half-right. He was kind of a bastard, and a lucky one at that. Really what we can say, to the man's credit, is that he made a big ballsy move that paid off, that inspired other brave ballsy moves made by explorers through the centuries. And he demonstrated enough competence that he mostly made it to the New World and back in one piece. We both know that if some female 15th century Amelia Earhart had been allowed to lead a bold exploratory fleet into the Atlantic and it accomplished nothing and sunk and every soul aboard perished, she'd be the greatest hero in maritime history.
But I guess that sort of nuance around Columbus -- brave, bold, successful bastard -- just can't be taught one way or the other. Either we're building up national and civilizational heroes or we're tearing them down. Given a binary choice, I suppose I advocate building them up. But it's not in my nature to let go of the more nuanced truth.Replies: @iffen, @nebulafox
Columbus was recognized by his contemporaries as a bastard even by the standards of the time, to be fair.
Great Man theories have their flaws, but if you try to reduce history to just forces and trends, without room for individuals to make their mark, you cannot explain a lot of history. The sheer over-correction from the aftermath of WWII is apparent, IMO.
My impression has been though that at least after Stalin’s death Mao was actually more ideological and extreme than the Soviets were. iirc leading Soviets, with their WW2 trauma, were horrified by how Mao more or less called for a final armed confrontation with the capitalist powers and told them that China with its massive population could easily shrug off the effects of a nuclear war. He also started accusing them of becoming lax and betraying Marxism-Leninism, which the Soviets of course resented and saw as a sign of ingratitude, given all the assistance China had received from them. So it seems to me the pro-Mao State Department officials were right that the Sino-Soviet relationship was not without tensions and couldn’t last (as it eventually didn’t), but wrong in underestimating the depth of Mao’s ideological delusions.
I think social media is re-creating the conditions of pre-industrial society in which people would spend their whole lives in a tiny social bubble and never have any exposure whatsoever to the wider world or to anyone outside their own immediate social circle. Ironically for most people the world of social media is like living in a tiny village and never interacting with outsiders and never becoming aware that such things as history and culture exist.
Put it this way. The past was bad, but the world of today is worse.Replies: @iffen
Is it just me, or is “The Golden Age” always in the past?
It’s always “Paradise Lost,” never found in the here and now, or waiting to be discovered.
Always driven out of Eden, never taken in.
Anyway, I’m old enough to remember many older people who were illiterate. (Of course I am from a section of the country that had higher rates of illiteracy.) Plenty of kids still dropped out of high school and the schools were still failing to pass kids in those days. After a couple of failed grades, many would just give up and drop out. They don’t fail to pass kids these days.
The point is that I am cautious about these types of comparisons. I’m not sure we are doing apples to apples.
I'd suggest that both classical liberalism and Progressivism encouraged the same sort of mindset. Even Democratic Socialists believed in a future Golden Age.
And consider the Cult of Science that developed in the early to mid-20th century. Again millions of people sincerely based their whole outlook on life on a belief in the future Scientific/Technological Golden Age.
And these were not minority beliefs. These were in many cases the beliefs of the majority of the population.
It was really only in the 1960s that a minority of social conservatives started to think in terms of the Golden Age as something that had been lost and I don't think that mindset was all that common until the 90s. And I suspect that it's still a minority view.Replies: @Mark G.
Oh, that’s absolutely true: I’m not trying to understate how radically committed to his own brand of Marxism he was. Ultimately, the Cultural Revolution revolved around preventing any sort of Soviet style noklementura springing up. But Mao was also a committed nationalist, no less than Chiang. It was not a spirit of internationalist idealism that led to the PLA intervening in Korea, but the fact that Stalin completely beat him diplomatically in the lead up to the war, and Mao knew it: he got the invasion off before he could invade Taiwan. The underlying fissures were there even before the ideological split, and they were an odd Communist parallel to Chiang’s rocky relationship with his own allies during the war.
State officials misjudged what Mao needed and prioritized, above all finishing off Chiang. Stalin did not. And he was really good at rubbing Mao’s nose in that when they met.
It's always "Paradise Lost," never found in the here and now, or waiting to be discovered.
Always driven out of Eden, never taken in.
Anyway, I'm old enough to remember many older people who were illiterate. (Of course I am from a section of the country that had higher rates of illiteracy.) Plenty of kids still dropped out of high school and the schools were still failing to pass kids in those days. After a couple of failed grades, many would just give up and drop out. They don't fail to pass kids these days.
The point is that I am cautious about these types of comparisons. I'm not sure we are doing apples to apples.Replies: @dfordoom, @Wency
Not always. Look at 20th century history and the popularity of ideologies such as communism and fascism (I’m talking about Mussolini-style fascism) which very definitely were based on the belief that the Golden Age was in the future. And millions of people really did sincerely base their whole outlook on life on a belief in the future Golden Age.
I’d suggest that both classical liberalism and Progressivism encouraged the same sort of mindset. Even Democratic Socialists believed in a future Golden Age.
And consider the Cult of Science that developed in the early to mid-20th century. Again millions of people sincerely based their whole outlook on life on a belief in the future Scientific/Technological Golden Age.
And these were not minority beliefs. These were in many cases the beliefs of the majority of the population.
It was really only in the 1960s that a minority of social conservatives started to think in terms of the Golden Age as something that had been lost and I don’t think that mindset was all that common until the 90s. And I suspect that it’s still a minority view.
Where people locate a Golden Age probably has a lot to do with whether they value material progress the most or have a more religious view of things and think the purpose of life is to follow the will of God and then get into heaven. In a highly religious era, cathedral building might take priority over building hospitals and in a more materialistic era just the opposite might take place.
It's hard to say who is right and who is wrong here. I tend to highly value material progress but am aware others don't agree. Maybe they are right and I'm wrong. Everyone has to decide that on their own. Since material progress took off during the 18th century Enlightenment, I highly value Enlightenment ideas but many conservatives locate that era as the beginning of a decline that has extended up to the present. I tend to avoid those sorts of arguments. I might argue that classical liberalism might be more likely to lead to material progress than Marxism but wouldn't argue with someone who says material progress is unimportant. If someone, for example, wanted to join a monastery and become a monk because that would make them happier they should. Them becoming a monk doesn't harm me.
I'd suggest that both classical liberalism and Progressivism encouraged the same sort of mindset. Even Democratic Socialists believed in a future Golden Age.
And consider the Cult of Science that developed in the early to mid-20th century. Again millions of people sincerely based their whole outlook on life on a belief in the future Scientific/Technological Golden Age.
And these were not minority beliefs. These were in many cases the beliefs of the majority of the population.
It was really only in the 1960s that a minority of social conservatives started to think in terms of the Golden Age as something that had been lost and I don't think that mindset was all that common until the 90s. And I suspect that it's still a minority view.Replies: @Mark G.
.
Where people locate a Golden Age probably has a lot to do with whether they value material progress the most or have a more religious view of things and think the purpose of life is to follow the will of God and then get into heaven. In a highly religious era, cathedral building might take priority over building hospitals and in a more materialistic era just the opposite might take place.
It’s hard to say who is right and who is wrong here. I tend to highly value material progress but am aware others don’t agree. Maybe they are right and I’m wrong. Everyone has to decide that on their own. Since material progress took off during the 18th century Enlightenment, I highly value Enlightenment ideas but many conservatives locate that era as the beginning of a decline that has extended up to the present. I tend to avoid those sorts of arguments. I might argue that classical liberalism might be more likely to lead to material progress than Marxism but wouldn’t argue with someone who says material progress is unimportant. If someone, for example, wanted to join a monastery and become a monk because that would make them happier they should. Them becoming a monk doesn’t harm me.
It's always "Paradise Lost," never found in the here and now, or waiting to be discovered.
Always driven out of Eden, never taken in.
Anyway, I'm old enough to remember many older people who were illiterate. (Of course I am from a section of the country that had higher rates of illiteracy.) Plenty of kids still dropped out of high school and the schools were still failing to pass kids in those days. After a couple of failed grades, many would just give up and drop out. They don't fail to pass kids these days.
The point is that I am cautious about these types of comparisons. I'm not sure we are doing apples to apples.Replies: @dfordoom, @Wency
The 1980s or 1990s seem a lot better than today in some ways. Though I admit, as an intellectually curious person, I do enjoy the Internet as a source of information. But also, crime was higher. If you happened to get mugged or shot in a crack-ridden downtown, then it probably didn’t matter to you if society was less pozzed.
To get to a point in the 20th century when crime was better or about the same as today, you need to go more decades back, when certain other social indicators were worse. If those happened not to affect you, then great, it was a golden age. If they did affect you, maybe not so great. But for all that, I think I’d still take that era over today if it meant raising my children in the 1950s environment my father described having grown up in, even though his parents were lower-middle class and I’m upper-middle.
What I can also say (and have said before), without any sort of reservation, is that basically nothing that matters has improved in 10 years and many things have gotten worse. Even computing devices (including smartphones and video games) were mostly done improving. If I take it back 20 years, those things have improved meaningfully, but not much else. 20 years ago we were about to jump into a stupid War on Terror, but I liked that war better than the War on Sanity we’re currently in the midst of losing.
And yeah, a lot of the time things are getting better in some ways and worse in others.
I do think that there was, overall, more optimism in the period from 1945 up until the 80s. The vast majority of people seemed to believe that things were going to get better and go on getting better. We seem to have lost that.
It's interesting that people were more optimistic during the Cold War.
I think that sometimes the idea that things were better in the Good Old Days is just an illusion. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes society really is falling apart and sometimes it isn’t.
And yeah, a lot of the time things are getting better in some ways and worse in others.
I do think that there was, overall, more optimism in the period from 1945 up until the 80s. The vast majority of people seemed to believe that things were going to get better and go on getting better. We seem to have lost that.
It’s interesting that people were more optimistic during the Cold War.
There aren’t really any American soldiers stationed in Japan. There are Naval, Naval Air, Marine Air and Air Force personnel. Marine and Naval air power is concentrated at Iwakuni and Atsugi and sea power at Yokosuka and Sasebo. The only forward-deployed aircraft carrier in the Navy is based at Yokosuka. We need our Navy bases there for supply, maintenance and repair reasons, as well as to be able to immediately project power. We also need to be in Japan as that country is our strongest and most reliable ally in the region and it has recently committed to building a second full-size (not helo) aircraft carrier to counter China’s planned six. We are increasingly cooperating with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces as well as other regional naval forces, and Japan is the logical focus for air and naval power to oppose the expansion of China.
The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is based in Okinawa but is capable of deploying anywhere in the world. We’ve been trying to move it out of Okinawa for many years. For some time, it was planned to move it to Guam, and a new Naval Hospital was built capable of handling 25,000 Marines and their dependents, completed in 2014, replacing the old Naval Hospital built in the 1950s but still perfectly serviceable, just too small for the anticipated patient load (Incidentally, I was born in the old hospital and worked there, so I felt a pang to see the wrecking balls go after it.) A TGIFs was built nearby in anticipation of all the new customers that would be showing up. But, alas, nothing much ever came of the plan. Guam (a bit bigger than Catalina Island) just didn’t have room for an MEU, what with Andersen AFB on the north of the island, Big Navy on the south end, and the massive tourist complex in the center. Uncle Sam looked at Australia but that was a no go, too. So for now the Marines are stuck on Okinawa, not because they are needed there but because they have no place else to go.
Oh, the TGIFs went out of business and closed, and the new Navy hospital is quite grand but you could fire the proverbial cannon down its hallways and not hit a patient. It may be, however, the most beautifully-situated hospital in the world, sitting on a bluff overlooking the turquoise waters inside the reef to the Philippine Sea and its passing rain showers and rainbows beyond.
We have Army troops in S.Korea that should be withdrawn; in fact, should have been pulled out many decades ago: one of Jimmy Carter’s campaign promises in the 1976 election was to withdraw our troops from Korea.
Here’s a photo of the very busy Yokosuka Naval base, jammed with American and Japanese warships (that’s the Ronnie Ray-gun in the back with all those cranes) The USN has been there for three-quarters of a century. It would be impossible to duplicate not only the facilities but the many generations of experience of the personnel based here. Many Japanese civilian workers have parents and grandparents who serviced and maintained American warships, and probably great-grandparents who did the same for Imperial Japanese Navy warships. May American naval personnel, like me, have grandparents and parents who were based at Yoko, and the city is as much home to them as San Diego or Norfolk.
Very few genuine MAGA supporters support this type of aggression.
PEACE 😇Replies: @J1234
I agree. I don’t think that characterizing the MAGA movement as pro-war is accurate at all. It’s possibly even intentionally misleading.
I will say, however, that a very large number of MAGA people were also George W. supporters back in the day. This of course includes much of the high profile punditry such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (a Trump supporter for a while) whose enthusiasm for the Iraq war 15 years ago has been greatly deemphasized today. But rather than hypocrisy, I believe this is a manifestation of transformation…a positive thing, and a result of the profound (but relatively hidden) influence of Pat Buchanan, among others.