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We are witnessing the end of the United States military Empire. As well as the rise of a unified Asia.
There are all sorts of articles on this subject. Most out of the United States are pretty limited in scope. No one is looking at the big picture, and instead what they see is evil or frightening. But it need not be.
First, lets look at history…
All credit to the author. And note that it was formatted to fit within this venue. The article is titled “The Last Days of Rome: How A Great Empire Fell With Barely a Whimper“, and it makes some very interesting points.
…
Unlike the valiant last stand by Constantine XI in Constantinople which marked the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Roman Empire in the West did not fall after a notable battle. Indeed, it is perhaps ironic that one of the greatest empires in history surrendered rather meekly without much of a struggle. Although the end of the empire is said to have occurred when Odoacer marched into Rome and deposed Emperor Romulus Augustus on September 4, 476, the end was nigh for quite some time.
A Fragmented Empire
Although Diocletian managed to bring the disastrous Third Century Crisis to an end by taking control in 284, the Empire was fundamentally weakened. Aside from widespread economic strife throughout the Empire in the fourth century, the tribes of Germany significantly increased their populations and became more of a threat.
By 376, an enormous influx of barbarians from across the Danube threatened the Eastern part of the Empire, and the Romans suffered a disastrous defeat at Adrianople in 378 when Emperor Valens died with most of his army. By the end of the fourth century, Emperor Theodosius was reliant on barbarian warlords who lacked discipline and loyalty. It was the equivalent of allowing wolves into the chicken coop.
To make matters worse, Theodosius had to contend with the usurper Magnus Maximus who declared himself Emperor of the West in 383. Theodosius finally defeated his enemy in 388 but with heavy losses on both sides that only served to weaken the Empire. When he died in 395, his sons Honorius and Arcadius became emperors. Both were incompetent and little more than puppet rulers.
Sack of Rome
Much like the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 was the beginning of the end for the Byzantine Empire, the Sack of Rome in 410 can be seen as the start of the Western Empire’s last days. The King of the Visigoths, Alaric, first attempted to invade Italy in 401 but was repelled by Stilicho at Pollentia the following year. When Emperor Honorius ordered a massacre of Goths serving in the Roman military, some 30,000 of them defected to Alaric in 408.
He laid siege to Rome that year and forced its citizens to pay a sizeable tribute to prevent them from starving to death. Alaric did not want to destroy the Empire; he just wanted a recognized position within its borders. After another siege in 409, he tried to negotiate with Honorius the following year. The influence of an enemy Goth during negotiations angered Alaric, so he laid siege to Rome once again. This time, he succeeded in breaking through and sacked the city.
Oddly enough, there was relatively little destruction during the three-day sacking of Rome. Alaric invited barbarian slaves to join his army, and a large proportion was happy to do so. He had no intention of remaining in Rome and decided to sail to Africa. However, his ships were battered by storms, and he died of fever. Although Alaric did not remain in Rome to conquer it, the sacking of the city was an indication of just how weak the Empire in the West was. The countdown to its demise began in earnest.
A Continued Collapse
The Empire disintegrated further throughout the fifth century. It lost Carthage to the Vandals in 439 and was at the mercy of Attila the Hun during the 440s and early 450s. After successful campaigns against the Eastern Empire, he turned his attention to the West, and while he suffered defeat at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451, he invaded Italy. Attila accepted a favorable peace treaty but planned to invade Italy once again before his death in 453.
After a brief resurgence under the rule of Emperor Majorian (457-461), the Empire once more plunged into chaos. A Germanic general called Ricimer entered Rome in 472, but he died just six weeks later. Over the next four years, the Western Empire had a succession of Emperors who were little more than puppets for barbarian warlords.
A Sad End
In 475, a man named Orestes drove the Emperor Julius Nepos out of the capital Ravenna and declared his 16-year-old son as Emperor Romulus Augustus. The teenager was never recognized as the ruler outside Italia, and when his father refused to grant federated status to the Heruli, its leader Odoacer launched an invasion. He chased Orestes to Pavia and then Piacenza where the Emperor’s father was executed on August 28, 476.
On September 4, 476, the Senate compelled Romulus Augustus to abdicate, and it is typically on this day that the Western Roman Empire is said to have officially fallen. The unfortunate boy remained in Ravenna, but instead of executing him, Odoacer showed mercy by sending him to live in Campania. The fate of the last Emperor of the West is unknown because he disappears from the historical record.
Although 476 is used as a convenient date to mark the end of the Empire, it is a little more complicated. The deposed Julius Nepos continued to claim that he was the Emperor of the West until he was murdered in 480. In the meantime, Odoacer began negotiations with Zeno, the Emperor of the East. Although Zeno accepted Odoacer as viceroy of Italia, he insisted that the barbarian continue to recognize Julius Nepos as the Emperor in the West.
Odoacer invaded Dalmatia when he learned of Nepos’ murder while in 488, Zeno authorized the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great’s invasion of Italia. After five years of indecisive fighting, Odoacer and Theodoric agreed to rule jointly, but the Ostrogoth betrayed his new ‘ally.’ At a banquet celebrating their new arrangement in 493, Theodoric’s men slaughtered Odoacer’s troops, and he cut his rival in half.
And so one of the greatest Empire’s in history ended not with a fearsome battle, but with a sorry capitulation. Its hold on the East lasted for almost 1,000 years after that, and while the Byzantine Empire also fell apart meekly, the final battle at Constantinople was at least more befitting of a regime’s downfall than the slow, painful demise of Rome.
Likewise, we can expect America to die with a whimper.
Indeed, unless [1] World War III occurs, or [2] the United States government starts acting and behaving like people who care for America, the nation is destined the long slow crawl towards the gutter. It will be just like Rome. With insignificant minor events as defined by technology rather than structure.
Let’s consider China. Indeed, let’s understand what contemporaneous Chinese think of America through the lens of their own history.
The Rise and Fall of the Han Dynasty
Although the brief Qin dynasty managed to unite the Warring States of China, the Han dynasty is considered to be the second great Chinese imperial dynasty after almost 800 years of Zhou control. The Han had such a profound impact on its nation’s culture that the word ‘Han’ ultimately referred to a person who was ethnically Chinese.
The short-lived Qin dynasty (221-206 BC) began with the unification of six warring states. Led by a man who proclaimed himself the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the empire unified China for a brief period before Qin died in 210 BC. The result was a vicious civil war which was won by Liu Bang who defeated Xiang Yu. Liu led the Han since 206 BC and after four years of fighting, finally got the better of Xiang after surrounding him at the Yangzi River where his rival committed suicide. From 202 BC until his death seven years later, Liu was known as Emperor Gaozu of Han, the first leader of the dynasty.
He decided to pick Chang’an as the empire’s new capital as all major roads converged there; it was also the eastern end of the legendary Silk Road. Within 200 years, the population of the city grew to approximately 250,000 as it was the economic, cultural and military center of the nation.
When the emperor died in 195 BC, his wife Lu Zhi tried to take the empire for her family. She murdered all of her husband’s sons born to concubines and mutilated his favorite mistress. The Empress embraced nepotism by installing relatives in positions of power, replacing those who had been loyal to the emperor. Emperor Gaozu’s heir apparent was his teenage son, Liu Yang who became Emperor Hui of Han. Once he found out what his mother was doing, the frightened emperor took great care not to disobey her.
Rise & Fall of the Lu Clan
Emperor Hui did not have any children so when he died in 188 BC; his mother showed that she was the real powerbroker in the Han dynasty by placing one ruler on the throne before removing him for someone else. During the reigns of her handpicked emperors, Lu Zhi issued imperial edicts and picked family members as kings, military officers and officials.
Once Lu Zhi died in 180 BC, the King of Qi (grandson of the first emperor) raised an army to fight the Lus but before they could engage, the Lu Clan was destroyed by a coup. The King of Qi did not become the new ruler; instead, the King of Dai, Liu Heng, became Emperor Wen and ruled until 157 BC.
Stability & Prosperity
Wen was succeeded by Emperor Jing who ruled until 141 BC. The near 40-year period of combined rule by these two men was an era of stability and prosperity for the Han dynasty. While the Qin dynasty was known for its cruelty, the Han tried to show a different face of power by issues multiple amnesties, reducing tax on agricultural goods and abolishing mutilation as a legal form of punishment.
However, kingdoms that rebelled against the Han were ruthlessly dealt with as their territories were reduced and in some cases, kingdoms were abolished altogether. The result was an increase in the number of kingdoms and commanderies.
Emperor Wu was one of the longest reigning Han rulers; he became the leader in 141 BC and ruled until his death in 87 BC. Although he had to contend with the Xiongnu and fought a lengthy war with this enemy, literature, poetry and philosophy flourished under Wu. The ‘Shiji’ was written by Sima Qian, and this Historical Records text set the standard for later histories sponsored by the government. The Shiji recorded information about ‘barbarians’ that lived on the borders of the empire among other things.
Emperor Wu also established Confucianism as the kingdom’s basis for proper conduct and education.
China regained a number of territories under his rule with new commanderies formed in Korea. In 101 BC, the Han conquered Ferghana and several neighboring regions which enabled them to steal a large quantity of horses. At this stage, China had control of important trade routes around the Taklamakan Desert. The nation traded its coveted silk and gold for items such as grapes, wine, broad beans, and alfalfa.
Fall of the Western Han
The death of Emperor Wu resulted in a variety of social and political conflicts that eventually led to the downfall of the Western Han dynasty. The Empress Wang Zhengjun oversaw the succession of emperors and ensured her male relatives took the throne one after another.
In 8 BC, her nephew, Wang Mang, became General-in-Chief but was removed from office less than a year later. Pressure from his supporters ensured he returned to the capital in 2 BC.
The following year, Emperor Ai died, and as he had no son, Wang Mang assumed the title of regent over Emperor Ping.
When Ping died in 6 AD, Empress Wang confirmed Wang Mang as the acting emperor. Although he promised to relinquish power when the child Liu Ying came of age, he clearly decided that he enjoyed being emperor.
Wang Mang started a propaganda campaign, announced the end of the Han dynasty and proclaimed himself the leader of the new Xin dynasty in 9 AD.
Rise & Fall of the Eastern Han
To Wang Mang’s credit, he tried to change the unfair land ownership situation but failed. In 23 AD, a rebellion led by a group called the Red Eyebrows sacked the capital city of Chang’an and beheaded the unfortunate Wang Mang.
The court of the Eastern Han dynasty was laden with scheming and intrigue during the first century AD as there was no real line of succession.
Most of the emperors died relatively young with no heirs, so a close relative usually became the next ruler. Towards the end of the second century AD, eunuchs had far too much power in the royal court, and the people ultimately grew tired of government corruption.
The Yellow Turban Rebellion of 184 AD threatened the capital city (Which was Luoyang since 25 AD), and six years later, a warlord called Dong Zhou captured the city and placed a child named Liu Xie on the throne.
Although the young boy was a member of the Han, Zhou was the real leader, and he proceeded to murder all the eunuchs and burn the city to the ground.
A succession of battles significantly weakened the empire, and in 220 AD, Liu Xie agreed to abdicate and allowed Cao Pi, King of Wei, to take over. This marked the end of the Han dynasty and the formation of the Cao Wei state which was a major player during the period of the Three Kingdoms.
Confusing?
In China the nation was ruled by the elite. Much like America is ruled by the elite in Washington DC. And this rule involved all kinds of “back stabbing”, “power plays”, “alignments”, and subterfuge. And that is what we see here. The entire dynasty was broght down by the very people who were supposed to make it last, and work; the leadership.
But they were far too preoccupied with petty squabbles, wealth and power, and politics that they let the empire dissolve around them. Sure, there had capable people, and technologies at their disposal, but their interest wasn’t in the good of the nation.
It was themselves.
Let’s look at America today…
The best articles are the ones that come with a historical perspective. They are the best. And here is one right here. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have. What is surprising is that it comes right out of America. Imagine that someone stuck their head out of the echo-chamber bubble to throw this one together.
Of course, all credit to the original author. Note that it was reformatted to fit this venue, but the content stays the same. You can read the original article HERE.
How Empires End
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” – Thomas Jefferson
Histories are generally written by academics.
They, quite naturally, tend to focus on the main events: the wars and the struggles between leaders and their opponents (both external and internal). Whilst these are interesting stories to read, academics, by their very nature, often overlook the underlying causes for an empire’s decline, – reports the Internationalman website.
Today, as in any era, most people are primarily interested in the “news”—the daily information regarding the world’s political leaders and their struggles with one another to obtain, retain, and expand their power. When the history is written about the era we are passing through, it will reflect, in large measure, a rehash of the news. As the media of the day tend to overlook the fact that present events are merely symptoms of an overall decline, so historians tend to focus on major events, rather than the “slow operations” that have been the underlying causes.
The Persian Empire
When, as a boy, I was “educated” about the decline and fall of the Persian Empire, I learned of the final takeover by Alexander the Great but was never told that, in its decline, Persian taxes became heavier and more oppressive, leading to economic depression and revolts, which, in turn led to even heavier taxes and increased repression. Increasingly, kings hoarded gold and silver, keeping it out of circulation from the community. This hamstrung the market, as monetary circulation was insufficient to conduct business. By the time Alexander came along, Persia, weakened by warfare and internal economic strife, was a shell of an empire and was relatively easy to defeat.
The Tang Dynasty
Back then, I also learned that the Tang Dynasty ended as a result of the increased power amongst the eunuchs, battles with fanzhen separatists, and finally, peasants’ revolts. True enough, but I was not taught that the dynasty’s expansion-based warfare demanded increases in taxation, which led to the revolts. Continued warfare necessitated increasing monetary and land extortion by the eunuchs, resulting in an abrupt decrease in food output and further taxes. Finally, as economic deterioration and oppression of the citizenry worsened, citizens left the area entirely for more promise elsewhere.
Is there a pattern here? Let’s have a more detailed look—at another empire.
The Spanish Empire
In 1556, Philip II of Spain inherited what was regarded as Europe’s most wealthy nation, with no apparent economic problems. Yet, by 1598, Spain was bankrupt. How was this possible?
Spain was doing well but sought to become a major power. To achieve this, Philip needed more tax dollars. Beginning in 1561, the existing servicio tax was regularised, and the crusada tax, the excusado tax, and the millones tax were all added by 1590.
Over a period of 39 years (between 1559 and 1598) taxes increased by 430%. Although the elite of the day were exempt from taxation (the elite of today are not officially exempt), the average citizen was taxed to the point that both business expansion and public purchasing diminished dramatically. Wages did not keep pace with the resultant inflation. The price of goods rose 400%, causing a price revolution and a tax revolution.
Although Spain enjoyed a flood of gold and silver from the Americas at this time, the increased wealth went straight into Philip’s war efforts. However, the 100,000 troops were soon failing to return sufficient spoils to Philip to pay for their forays abroad.
In a final effort to float the doomed empire, Philip issued government bonds, which provided immediate cash but created tremendous debt that, presumably, would need to be repaid one day. (The debt grew to 8.8 times GDP.)
Spain declared bankruptcy. Trade slipped to other countries. The military, fighting on three fronts, went unpaid, and military aspirations collapsed.
It is important to note that, even as the empire was collapsing, Philip did not suspend warfare. He did not back off on taxation. Like leaders before and since, he instead stubbornly increased his autocracy as the empire slid into collapse.
Present-Day Empires
Again, the events above are not taught to schoolchildren as being of key importance in the decline of empires, even though they are remarkably consistent with the decline of other empires and what we are seeing today. The very same events occur, falling like dominoes, more or less in order, in any empire, in any age:
The reach of government leaders habitually exceeds their grasp.
Dramatic expansion (generally through warfare) is undertaken without a clear plan as to how that expansion is to be financed.
The population is overtaxed as the bills for expansion become due, without consideration as to whether the population can afford increased taxation.
Heavy taxation causes investment by the private sector to diminish, and the economy begins to decline.
Costs of goods rise, without wages keeping pace.
Tax revenue declines as the economy declines (due to excessive taxation). Taxes are increased again, in order to top up government revenues.
In spite of all the above, government leaders personally hoard as much as they can, further limiting the circulation of wealth in the business community.
Governments issue bonds and otherwise borrow to continue expansion, with no plan as to repayment.
Dramatic authoritarian control is instituted to assure that the public continues to comply with demands, even if those demands cannot be met by the public.
Economic and social collapse occurs, often marked by unrest and riots, the collapse of the economy, and the exit of those who are productive.
In this final period, the empire turns on itself, treating its people as the enemy.
The above review suggests that if our schoolbooks stressed the underlying causes of empire collapse, rather than the names of famous generals and the dates of famous battles, we might be better educated and be less likely to repeat the same mistakes.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely. Chances are, future leaders will be just as uninterested in learning from history as past leaders. They will create empires, then destroy them.
Even the most informative histories of empire decline, such as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, will not be of interest to the leaders of empires. They will believe that they are above history and that they, uniquely, will succeed.
If there is any value in learning from the above, it is the understanding that leaders will not be dissuaded from their aspirations. They will continue to charge ahead, both literally and figuratively, regardless of objections and revolts from the citizenry.
Once an empire has reached stage eight above, it never reverses. It is a “dead empire walking” and only awaits the painful playing-out of the final three stages.
At that point, it is foolhardy in the extreme to remain and “wait it out” in the hope that the decline will somehow reverse. At that point, the wiser choice might be to follow the cue of the Chinese, the Romans, and others, who instead chose to quietly exit for greener pastures elsewhere.
Editor’s Note:The US government is overextending itself by interfering in every corner of the globe. It’s all financed by massive amounts of money printing. However, the next financial crisis could end the whole charade soon.
The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a global economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve ever seen before.
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The soaring contempt and smug exceptionalism made me almost gag on my weetbix as I read this. I've never met an empire more in dire need of a slap down...
-Posted by: Patroklos | Apr 14 2021 19:50 utc | 6
For shits and giggle, I often read some of the policy papers that are generated out of Washington DC. They are fantastical and outlandish and shows that either [1] America is a nation run by herd-mentality idiots, or [2] that they are so enraptured in their own echo chamber that they don’t realize what fresh-air is. Here is one such policy paper.
It is from RAND.
Which is a big “Think Tank” out in Washington DC that loves war, like I love sex, pizza and wine.
I love sex, pizza and wine.
It’s a hoot. I’ll tell you what.
Here’s access to the document yourself, and a nice summary with my MM comments thrown in for some points of stability.
Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue
How do Russia and China challenge U.S. national security and global influence?
How can the United States meet those challenges?
Russia and China represent distinct challenges to U.S. national security.
Russia is not a peer or near-peer competitor but rather a well-armed rogue state that seeks to subvert an international order it can never hope to dominate.
So Russia; enormous Russia with a population larger than the United States is a "well armed" rogue state.I can agree that it is well-armed. But, a rogue state?Arogue state otherwise known as an outlaw state, is a term appliedby some international theorists to states that they consider threatening to "the world's peace".
This means being seen to meet certain criteria, such as [1] being ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian governments. [2] That severely restrict human rights. That [3] sponsors terrorism and [4] seeking to proliferate weapons of mass destruction.
By these criteria, it is America that is a rogue state.
Yet, the term is used most by the United States, and in his speech at the United Nations in 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated this phrase.
In contrast, China is a peer competitor that wants to shape an international order that it can aspire to dominate.
Yes. China is a peer competitor with the Untied States, and in many areas it has surpassed the Untied States.
But this idea that it wants to "shape an international order" that it can dominate is flat-out false.
It wants to follow confucianism values in cooperation and harmony so that all can benefit. Of course China wants to put the Chinese people first. This is the function of all governments. But to call a peaceful nation that hasn't been involve din a war for over 50 years desirous of dominating others is really outlandish.
4 Confucian principles that are integral to a moral life and a moral society[1] Development of the self. The development of the self and the cultivation of virtue and morality are crucial to Confucius’ vision of a harmonised world.[2] Filial Piety. Filial piety is a love and respect for one’s parents. ...[3] Theimportanceof tradition. ...[4] We must behumane. ...
No wonder that RAND and those psychopathic personalities in Washington DC are confused with China. these values are completely alien to them.
Both countries seek to alter the status quo.
But only Russia has attacked neighboring states, annexed conquered territory, and supported insurgent forces seeking to detach yet more territory.
Russia assassinates its opponents at home and abroad.
Russia interferes in foreign elections.
Russia subverts foreign democracies.
Russia works to undermine European and Atlantic institutions.
And so does the United States. Historically this is known as spy-craft, international politics, and intrigue. It's not a reason to go to war over.
In contrast, China’s growing influence is based largely on more-positive measures: trade, investment, and development assistance. These attributes make China a less immediate threat but a much greater long-term challenge.
True. China is not an immediate military threat.
But the only challenge here is whether the Untied States is able to compete with it. After throwing away it's scientists and engineers, it's going to be a hard slog trying to compete with "diversity directors" and "accountants".
In the military realm, Russia can be contained, but China cannot.
Its military predominance in east Asia will grow over time, compelling the United States to accept greater costs and risks just to secure existing commitments.
But it is geoeconomics, rather than geopolitics, in which the contest for world leadership will play out.
It is in the domain of geoeconomics that the balance of global influence between the United States and China has begun shifting in China’s favor.
Key Findings
China presents a greater geoeconomic challenge to the United States than Russia does
China’s per capita GDP approaches Russia’s; its population is eight times Russia’s, and its growth rate three times.
As of 2017, China’s economy was the second largest in the world, behind only that of the United States. Russia’s was 11th.
Russia’s military expenditure is lower than China’s, and that gap is likely to grow.
Russia is far smaller, has poorer economic prospects, and is less likely to dramatically increase its military power in the long term.
You can tell just how out of sync this entire paper is when they start using GDP instead of PPP for comparison values. I argue, rather convincingly I must add, that if you remove the top 0.1% of the super-billionaires out of America in your GDP calculations, the GDP slides way down to a value that is half of China's GDP.
Also the level of crime and corruption is far lower than what you see in America. Thus you can make and create things with far, far less effort and money.
Thus you really cannot make the comparisons that are being made here.
It truly is like comparing apples with bananas.
Russia is a more immediate and more proximate military threat to U.S. national security than China is but can be countered
Russia will probably remain militarily superior to all its immediate neighbors other than China.
Russia is vulnerable to a range of nonmilitary deterrents, such as sanctions on the Russian economy and limiting Russian income from exports of fossil fuels; multilateral efforts would be more effective than U.S.-only operations, however.
China presents a regional military challenge and a global economic one
Militarily, China can be contained for a while longer; economically, it has already broken free of regional constraints.
Russia backs far-right and far-left political movements with a view to disrupting the politics of adversarial societies and, if possible, installing friendlier regimes. China, in contrast, seems basically indifferent to the types of government of the states with which it interacts, increasing its attractiveness as an economic partner.
Recommendations
In the security sphere, the United States should continue to hold the line in east and southeast Asia, accepting the larger costs and risks involved in counterbalancing growing Chinese military capabilities. Meanwhile, Washington should help its regional allies and partners to field their own antiaccess and area denial systems. Finally, the United States should take advantage of any opportunities to resolve issues and remove points of Sino-American tension, recognizing that its bargaining position will gradually deteriorate over time.
In the economic realm, the United States needs to compete more effectively in foreign markets, persevere and strengthen international norms for trade and investment, and incentivize China to operate within those norms. Given China’s efforts to take technological leadership in the long term and the potential advantages that such leadership brings, the United States also needs to improve its innovation environment. Measures could include greater funding for research, retention of U.S.-educated foreign scientists and technologists, and regulatory reforms that ease the introduction of product and process improvements into businesses and the market.
In responding to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the United States should move to secure its own preferential access to the world’s largest markets, the industrialized countries of Europe and Asia; assist nations in increasing connectivity with the world economy; work with partners to ensure more transparency in China’s Belt and Road projects; and increase support to U.S. exporters and investors.
In all these challenges, the United States will be more successful coordinating action with allies and trading partners.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation perspective series. RAND perspectives present informed perspective on a timely topic that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND perspectives undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
i don't know that the usa has any type of long range strategy... and i don't think they care who dies, or what mess they make of other places on the planet either... it seems the usa is intent on serving the god of mammon only.. this certainly works for wall st and the military industrial complex... i really don't think concern for the welfare of other nations, or the planet for that matter, are any considerations washington gives at this point... and to have the same brand of neo cons in bidens gov't as the previous bunch, is not a positive sign either.. it is hard to appreciate the constant hate towards russia these people have.. i find it impossible to understand in fact..
It’s a nice day out. And maybe too nice to complain about the mess the United States is today. But that’s life, don’t you know. Human constructions, nations and people, come and go. But the weather, society, the birds and the bees continue oblivious to whatever the United States does.
Too nice a day to worry about the collapse of whatever the heck it is. But it’s happening whether we want to watch or not. Meanwhile it’s not only the “rank and file” citizenry; the “Joe Sixpack” in the “flyover states” discussing this, but also the “elites” in the posh enclaves inside the elite residential areas of the North east. And they so banter about…
Here we have a couple of elites chatting about what’s going on.
While (initially) laws might say that everyone is equal, what actually happens is that certain types of people (psychopaths) tend to gobble up all the “power” over time. Thus resulting in a society of “elites” who rule over the nation.
These elites are talking.
I found it interesting, not only for the way that they are approaching the current situation; all, but also for what they know, and what they are oblivious to. As people used to say in the hills “He might be smart, but he has shit for brains”…
These people talk about life inside of the Washington DC “beltway”, and the various “alphabet” agencies while they live in their nice plush estates, inside their gated communities. You cannot blame them. They are not oblivious to what is going on in America, and in the rest of the world on the international scene, instead, they view it from a set of “eyeglasses” that is alien to the rest of us. thus their discourse, and bantering about has value and is valuable to us.
It’s worth taking the time to absorb…
Here's a pretty good read about what America is, and who the "leaders" are. It came from Culture News, and I edited to fit this venue. the author wrote long expansive paragraph-long run-on sentences that was difficult to read. But aside from that, and my own artistic flourishes in this particular article, the content remains intact. It's a good read. All credit to the author.
Please note that I interjected quotes and comments from the “Joe Six-pack” audience at the start of each section, just to keep everyone grounded. They are in dialog boxes.
The Codevilla Tapes
The historian of American statecraft and spycraft and conservative political philosopher Angelo Codevilla talks about the ruling elite, Jonathan Pollard, and the rise of the techno-surveillance state—and the consequent demise of the American Empire.
That’s the terror and the beauty of American life in a nutshell.
It is the answer to the secret of how 300 million people from many different places can live together between two oceans, sharing a future-oriented outlook that methodically obliterates any ties to the past.
All prior lived experience is transformed into science fiction…
…or else into self-serving evidence of …
…the present-day moral, intellectual, and technological superiority of the brave imagineers…
…those who are fortunate enough to live here, in the “Now”, while all who came before them are cursed.
It’s out of control
Yes it is.
Thanks for pointing out the planning of US aggression. One hopes this is all brinksmanship on all sides.
If the plan is to take Crimea, then the USA has completely lost its mind and is hellbent on extinction rather than face collapse of 'the greatest country in the history of the world.'
It's understandable that those wanting to see the USA get its ears boxed are frustrated by Putin/Russia's strategy of repeatedly 'turning the other cheek.'
Rather than weakness, we can see now how Russia has consolidated its alliances, developed advanced weaponry, and consistently worked within International Law and not the Rules Based International Order of Might Makes Right.
The United States and its equally bankrupt allies/vassals face a three-front battlefield - Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Obviously the supply chain is a problem.
So, dear friends, the question is: How batshit crazy are the folks pulling the strings?
No one can or does control such fantasy-driven machinery…
… which seems incapable of operating in any other way than it does, i.e., in a space with no beginning and no end…
… but trending always toward utopia perfection.
Learning to accept imperfection and failure may be an emotionally healthy way for adults to negotiate the terrors and absurdities of human existence, but it is not the highway to the perfectibility of man or woman-kind.
Because the large-scale explanations that Americans offer each other about how their country works, or doesn’t work, arise from working backwards from the expectation of some future storybook perfection…
…Americans tend to be either childishly conspiratorial or cartoonishly stupid…
…because those are the types of explanation that tend to win out…
…once you stipulate an ever-more-perfect-and-glorious future…
…as the inevitable outcome of whatever snake oil it is that you are pitching to the suckers.
The Snake Oil Addiction
To my mind, the most chilling sentence uttered in this whole affair was by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He said "that any attempts to start a new military conflict in Ukraine’s war-torn east could end up destroying Ukraine".
Lavrov never speaks like this and the Russians do not bluff.
Zelensky signed a decree recently stating Ukraine's intent to take back the Donbass AND Crimea! This means if Ukraine attacks, Russia WILL intervene and destroy Ukraine as we know it. I think it means Russian tanks will roll on Kiev to stop this war forever.
Moves like recalling the US Ambassador are very ominous and usually prelude all out war between nations. Combined with Lavrov's warning, Russia is giving all possible signals it is ready for war with Ukraine AND the US.
In today’s America, these explanations come in the form of shallow and sweeping identitarian polemics (“white people” or “globalists” run “everything”)…
… indecipherable academese backed by graphed coefficients (people are motivated by “rational self-interest,” as calculated by academics)…
… or as appeals to a glorified and abstracted historical past (“the Founding Fathers,” “the melting pot”)…
…whose promises of future perfection may have seemed real enough to past generations, but must now grow ever more distant with every new iteration of Moore’s law.
Who is in control?
Martyanov is correct in the sense that the USA can only claim to be "universal" (empire) as long as it keeps the European Peninsula in its hold.
psychohistorian @ 4 states that the USA would still be the world empire even if it loses Europe because it has the financial system. But this financial system, including the dollar standard, would mean jack shit without Eurasia. The Americans would lose, by definition of the term, the petrodollar if it were to lose Eurasia, plus most of the world trade. The USD would have nothing to back it up as the world standard fiat currency; at most it would still be a strong, well-respected fiat currency (a la Swiss Franc, Pound Sterling, Euro, Yen and now the Renminbi) which would probably still be the currency used in Latin America and the Pacific region - but the power to enforce economic sanctions the USA has today would be instantly over.
Without its great foothold in the European Peninsula, the USA would certainly lose any serious claim to be a world empire. Maybe if it somehow would be able to keep the Middle East (through Israel and Saudi Arabia) - but that would probably be a Justinian version of the American Empire, not the Good Ol' American Empire of the times of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
If it were to lose the European Peninsula, the USA would just have Japan, South Korea, Australia and other Western Pacific islands as its last serious footholds in Eurasia. It would be what I called here sometimes a "Byzantine" USA - essentially a Western Empire, with some footholds in the Western Pacific, memories of a glorious long gone past. It would not mean the end of the American Empire by any stretch of the imagination (the true end of the American Empire can only be achieved by internal conflicts/contradictions, not external), but it would certainly mean the beginning of another era (a much less glorious one) of its history, for sure.
Which is not to say that America isn’t governed by an elite class, just like China, or Japan, or France is—only that the ability of that class to actually rule anything is even more constrained by the native culture.
The idea that an advanced technologically driven capitalist or socialist society of several hundred million people can be run by something other than an elite is silly or scary…
…the most obvious present-day alternative being a society run by ever-advancing forms of AI, which will no doubt have only the best interests of their flesh-and-blood creators at heart.
Yet it is possible to accept all of this, and to posit that the reason that the American ruling class seems so indisputably impotent and unmoored in the present…
…is that there is no such thing as America anymore.
In place of the America that is described in history books…
…, where Henry Clay forged his compromises, and Walt Whitman wrote poetry, and Herman Melville contemplated the whale, and Ida Tarbell did her muckraking, and Thomas Alva Edison invented movies and the light bulb, and so forth…
… has arisen something new and vast and yet distinctly un-American.
That for lack of a better term is often called the American Empire.
Which in turn calls to mind the division of Roman history (and the Roman character) into two parts: the Republican, and the Imperial.
The American Empire
I guess the Russians made clear they mean business:
"What happened and how this could be, that mighty Ukraine and her US handlers suddenly want to prioritize "political and diplomatic way". Well, here is some snippet of suddenly a much more peaceful mindset with a bit of explanation of this sudden (not really) change:
The United States on Thursday said it was discussing Russia’s military build-up near the Ukrainian border with Nato allies as fresh reports showed Russia deploying ballistic missiles to the area. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that Washington was “increasingly concerned” about what has been described as Russia’s largest military manoeuvres in the area since the break-out of hostilities in eastern Ukraine in 2014. “Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this week alone. These are all deeply concerning signs,” Ms Psaki told reporters on Thursday."
And suddenly the Ukrainians become angels of peace: ""Liberation" of Donbass by power means will lead to mass loss of life among civilians and military personnel--this is unacceptable for Kiev, stated the Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Ruslan Khomchak. "Being dedicated to universal human values and norms of humanitarian law (I am under the table trying to get up....), our state places the life of its citizens on the first place (I tried to get up, fell again...)",
While containing the ghosts of the American past, the American Empire is clearly a very different kind of entity than the American Republic was…
…starting with the fact that the vast majority of its inhabitants aren’t Americans.
Ancient American ideas about individual rights and liberties, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth, may still be inspiring to mainland American citizens or not…
… but they are foreign to the peoples that Americans conquered.
To those people, America is an empire, or the shadow of an empire, under which seemingly endless wars are fought…
… a symbol of their own continuing powerlessness and cultural failure.
Meanwhile, at home, the American ruling elites prattle on endlessly about their deeply held ideals…
….of whatever that must be applied to Hondurans today…
…and Kurds tomorrow…
…in fits of frantic-seeming generosity in between courses of farm-to-table fare.
Once the class bond has been firmly established, everyone can relax and exchange notes about their kids…
… who are off being credentialed at the same “meritocratic” but now hugely more expensive private schools that their parents attended…
… whose social purpose is no longer to teach basic math or a common history….
…but to indoctrinate teenagers in the cultish mumbo-jumbo that serves as a kind of in-group glue that binds ruling class initiates (she/he/they/ze) together…
…and usefully distinguishes them from townies during summer vacations by the seashore.
America is run by a class of people
A quick consideration on the MIC question.
It is patent that the USA, at this stage of its development, depends almost entirely on its defense industry - which is backed up and insulated from the law of capitalism by the State - on keeping its technological prowess.
We already know that, as the world's financial superpower, the USA is destined to deindustrialize (because that's the price of keeping the USD as the standard fiat currency without incurring the danger of hyperinflation). As it deindustrializes, another part of the world must industrialize - in this case, Asia (China in particular). That's the conditio sine qua non for the financial hegemony to exist without quickly self-destructing, i.e. another part of the world has to industrialize, you can't have a financial superpower without an industrial superpower, as the commodities are what back up money (as Marx once said, the use value is the Träger des Tauschwerts, the surface over which the house of cards can be erected).
By exclusion, the USA can only keep its status as the financial superpower as long as it keeps absolute control over the Seven Seas (most of trade still happens through the sea), which means a strong defense industry must be kept at the behest of the financial sector (Wall Street). The Defense industry is, therefore, the exception to the rule - alongside the electronics-communications system (which gives material form to the financial system, to the USD and the stock market) - over which the USA cannot escape. If it can keep recycling USDs through multi-billionaire defense contracts with other countries, the better, as it gives another life extension to the USD. This is what happen in the famous Petrodollar scheme, where Saudi Arabia denominates its oil in USDs by buying American T-bonds, but also American military weapons and systems, which keeps Saudi Arabia sovereign and intact to keep its oil reserves denominated in USDs, in a virtuous cycle.
That's why arms sales are so important to the USA: it keeps, at the same time, its domination of the Seven Seas and therefore of world trade thus keeping its financial system the dominant one, and decelerate its inevitable deindustrialization process.
The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone.
Under whatever professional job titles…
… the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats…
…university bureaucrats,
…corporate bureaucrats,
…local, state and federal bureaucrats,
…law enforcement bureaucrats,
…health bureaucrats,
…knowledge bureaucrats,
… spy agency bureaucrats.
At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices…
…with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers.
They do so in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders.
Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances.
All those people together comprise a class.
For themselves, and only for themselves.
I’ve never commented before. I’m in South Africa, with family members in Palestine and family members who’ve lived through WWII.
I truly hope that Russia has a strategy to make the US Mainland (I also have many American friends I dearly love) carry some of the consequences of anglozionist adventures abroad.
The world is imploding/exploding under the weight of Western hegemony.
None of the people I love (including my dearest family and friends or myself) will probably survive consequences a conflagration of this type could unleash. But what option is there to responding to ongoing geopolitical abuse by the US-ZIO-EU? How sad! Five billion years of evolution and this is what it comes to?
Another thing that residents of the broad North American expanse between Canada and Mexico have noticed is…
…that the programs and remedies that this class has promoted, both at home and abroad…
… have greatly enriched and empowered a small number of people, namely themselves.
While the broader American population continues to decline in wealth, health, and education.
Meanwhile, the American Empire that the ruling elite administers is collapsing.
The popularity of such observations on both the left and the right is what accounts for the rise of Donald Trump, on one hand, and of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other hand…
… among an electorate that has not been historically distinguished by its embrace of radicalism.
Add those voter bases together, and perhaps 75% of Americans would seem to agree that their country, however you think of it, is in big trouble.
And that the fault lies with the country’s self-infatuated and apparently not-so-brilliant elite.
Why Empires Fall
Xerxes, Russia (or any other country) is unlikely to “make the US Mainland carry some of the consequences of anglozionist adventures abroad”. This could only happen in a “post-war/Nurenburg” type scenario, once the US has already been defeated. What they will do, and have been doing, is to separate from the US monetary system, work together with other resistance countries, and let the US isolate itself and fade as a result of this.
Fortunately the US empire has been weakening, and other countries developing and strengthening and working together under an ostensibly fairer paradigm. The worm has been turning against the empire. This is something to be happy and hopeful about.
Every student of history has their own theory about how and why empires fall.
My theory is this:
The wealth of any empire flows disproportionately to the capital, where it nourishes the growth, wealth, and power of the ruling elite.
As the elite grows richer and more powerful, the gulf between the rulers and the ruled widens…
… until the beliefs and manners of the elite bear little connection to those of their countrymen…
… whom they increasingly think of as their clients or subjects.
That distance creates resentment and friction.
In response to which the elite takes measures to protect itself.
The more wealth and power the elite controls, the more insulation it must purchase.
Disastrous mistakes are hailed as victories or are made to appear to have no consequences at all.
This is done in order to protect the aura of collective infallibility that protects ruling class power and privilege.
What happens next…
the US sociopaths want to do in Europe much the same as what they did in Iraq - but using different means/proxies:
Create a situation of much chaos in a chosen country, as a relatively modern state dissolves, and use that as a pretext both to inject themselves even more into that region's affairs, and also to spread the 'contagion' of 'chaos' to other surrounding states..... where the US sociopaths who run the Empire will try (again) for regime changes in the surrounding nations (from Serbia to Georgia to the other Black Sea states) and beyond.
that the puppet Zelensky has been off to Qatar and next Turkey is a sure sign that these mindless people in the US national security state are going to try once again using the psychopathic jihadists as one of their means to inject instability, terror and chaos into the region.
on top of all that, as many commentators have already pointed out, as soon as Russia intervenes in a big way (if it does go that route), the Nord-Stream project is over with, Germany is without its gas and gas hub plans - plus there's now no gas/oil going to Europe via the Ukraine.
So two birds with one stone: northern/central Europe is then even more dependent on the US for energy, as well as 'protection' from the big bad bear.
What happens next is pretty much inevitable in every time and place…
…Spain, France, Great Britain, Moghul India, you name it…
… Freed from the laws of gravity, the elite turns from the hard work of correct strategizing and wise policymaking…
…to the much less time-consuming and much more pleasant work of perpetuating its own privileges forever.
In the course of which endeavor the ruling elite is revealed to be a bunch of idiots and perverts who spend their time prancing around half naked while setting the territories they rule on fire.
The few remaining decent and competent people flee this revolting spectacle, while the elite compounds its mistakes in an orgy of failure.
The empire then collapses.
Sanity Check
Interesting to see the sudden back-peddling by the Kiev mouthpieces. I see a few different things going on here. First, and the biggest, is that I have come to believe that Russia (and China) has finally had enough, what with the constant pinpricks of the Trump years and now the absolute vitriol and diplomacy-killing antics of O'Biden, and have decided that everything else has been tried, the only way the US will listen is if it gets its nose bloodied, and bloodied good. Too many years of no consequences. So with this in mind, I believe Russia (and perhaps China) are actually looking for a good opportunity to inflict pain.
In the hopes of confirming or disproving my theory, I recently traveled out to a vineyard in Plymouth, Northern California. There I found Angelo Codevilla.
He, who along with Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is one of the few American political philosophers who combines a deep sense of the Western moral and philosophical traditions with a hard-nosed sense of how the American political system actually works.
While I am naturally more inclined toward Walzer-ism, I thought it would be fair minded to give Codevilla a hearing, despite the fact that he identifies as a conservative Catholic rather than as a liberal Northeastern Jew.
As a sometime student of intelligence work, I will also admit to being an attentive reader of Codevilla’s book Informing Statecraft.
Which together with Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost offers a fair guide to the karmic evolution of the U.S. intelligence community.
Codevilla’s former boss in the U.S. Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had this to say about his protégé’s book:
Woodrow Wilson once spoke of the demands that would be made on Presidents in the age to come; demands of a kind that could only be met by “wise and prudent athletes, a small class.” Such is Angelo Codevilla; one of the small class of intelligence analysts who has actually been there. Read him; although I plead: Do not invariably agree!
What follows is an edited record of our conversation, which began when I arrived at the Codevilla vineyard in the evening and then continued the next morning, after the Codevillas invited me to spend the night at their house and then served me a delicious breakfast.
***
The Ruling Elite
David Samuels: In 2010, you wrote an article, which then became a book, in which you predicted the rise of someone like Donald Trump as well as the political chaos and stripping away of institutional authority that we’ve lived through since. Did you think your prediction would come true so quickly?
Angelo Codevilla: I didn’t predict anything. I described a situation which had already come into existence. Namely, that the United States has developed a ruling class that sees itself as distinct from the raw masses of the rest of America. That the distinction that they saw, and which had come to exist, between these classes, comprised tastes and habits as well as ideas. Above all, that it had to do with the relative attachment, or lack thereof, of each of these classes to government.
David Samuels: One of the things that struck me about your original piece was your portrait of the American elite as a single class that seamlessly spans both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Angelo Codevilla: Of course, yes. Not in exactly the same way, though; what I said was that the Democrats were the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.
The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.
The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.
David Samuels: As a young person moving through American elite institutions, I was always struck by the marginal status of those other people you mention, Republicans. Clearly, they were not as bright as me and my friends were, which is why they were marginal, even if they had an easier path to some kind of dubious status as pseudo-intellectuals in their second- or third-rate party organs. That hardly mattered, though. The New York Times was the important newspaper, and it was a liberal newspaper. The New Yorker was an important magazine, and so it was a liberal magazine. Right-wing types might look instead to the Conservative Review of Books, published out of Mobile, Alabama, or the Jesuit review of something or another. But nobody was quaking in their boots about how such places might review your work. All the cultural capital was on the Democratic side of the ledger.
Angelo Codevilla: What a marvelous recitation of ruling class prejudice.
Of course, you would not have judged them to be nearly as intelligent as you folks were. And you probably didn’t imagine that others would think you less intelligent.
David Samuels: Let them rant and rave about their conspiracy theories and whatnot. They didn’t matter.
Angelo Codevilla: Well, they didn’t matter. Because of the power that you wielded, because of the institutions that you controlled.
Now let me give you an alternative. In France, with which you tell me you are acquainted, you have meritocracy in government and institutions. Meritocracy ensured by competitive exams. I, and a bunch of nonliberal democrats as myself, would be absolutely delighted if institutions like TheNew York Times, TheAtlantic, were to open their pages to people who bested others in competitive exams. But of course, they’re not thinking at all of doing that. As a matter of fact, the institutions of liberal America have been moving away from competitive exams as fast as they know how.
In living memory, and I’m an example of that, it was for a time possible for nonliberal Democrats to get into the American foreign service, and if they did as I did, and scored number one in their class, they would have their choice of assignments. But now, you have all sorts of new criteria for admission into the foreign service, which have supposedly ensured greater diversity. In fact, what they had done was to eliminate the possibility that the joint might be invaded by lesser beings of superior intelligence.
David Samuels: There is a curious mélange of dispensations under which people are escorted into the grand ballroom of the good and the great, right? Category one were with high test scores. Then there were the children of people who had gone to these institutions in previous generations, whose parents have money and might be named Cabot or Lowell. Then there were the admissions categories that cover you in the opposite direction—4.8% African Americans plus at least one white person who grew up without shoes in the mountains of West Virginia. These covering cases were useful because they could be trumpeted as proof of how far and wide the net was cast. All of which went to show that the most meritorious people were all gathered together in this place, and were therefore fit to rule everyone else.
Angelo Codevilla: Merit as defined by what?
David Samuels: I have no idea.
Angelo Codevilla: Merit as defined by the capacity to be attractive to those at the top of the heap. In other words what you have is rightly called not meritocracy, but co-option.
Now it is one of the fundamental truths of our co-option that it results in a negative selection of elites. That each group selects people who are just a smacking below themselves, so that generation after generation, the quality of those at the top deteriorates.
David Samuels: Are you suggesting that the all-white Christian male elites, who largely inherited their status from their parents, were more deserving of their elevated status than their more diverse counterparts, like the people who ran American foreign policy under President Barack Obama?
Angelo Codevilla: I don’t know that the statesmen of the 1920s and ’30s were any more meritorious than the folks under Barack Obama, because they themselves were not selected by any meritocratic criteria, as you suggest. However, I do know, having taught college for many years, that the amount of work that was done by college students 50 years ago or more was considerably greater than the amount of work that is done by college graduates today.
David Samuels: As a graduate of two elite American universities, I am entirely willing to grant that point.
Angelo Codevilla: Them that don’t work so much don’t learn so much, usually.
David Samuels: There is something funny to me about your description of these people as the “elite” or a “ruling class,” though. I picture grand country homes like in the Masterpiece Theatre production of Brideshead Revisited. But if you look at your American elite, you find earnest bureaucratic types living in collegiate apartments with Ikea furniture.
Angelo Codevilla: No. Not Ikea furniture.
David Samuels: You’re talking about a class of people who are academics or lawyer-bureaucrats living on federal government and NGO salaries.
Angelo Codevilla: They have far more money than people who don’t have similar government attachments. The fact is that proximity to government power has meant, and does mean, more money and greater possibility.
David Samuels: I think about the tech oligarchs who park their multibillion-dollar fortunes offshore.
Angelo Codevilla: I would dispute that.
David Samuels: Really? How many tens of billions of dollars has Apple parked offshore? How much money do Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg pay in taxes?
Angelo Codevilla: Apple and Bill Gates have secured their money, not so much by relocating, but by having become the biggest lobbyists in the country. That is the source of their financial security.
The point of the ruling class is precisely the confusion of public and private power. This is, in fact, this is becoming in fact a corporate state. Which by the way was pioneered by one of my former countrymen by the name of Benito.
David Samuels: So, when you’re talking about the ruling class, you’re positing a continuum between the Silicon Valley oligarchs with their hundred-billion-dollar fortunes and these public employee and NGO types.
Angelo Codevilla: I am indeed. That is the meaning of the word party. The Democratic Party is in fact composed of the very people that you are talking about.
Parties are by nature coalitions, each part of which benefits from the other. But they share certain things in common. One of them is contempt for Americans who are outside of their ranks.
David Samuels: You call those contemptible people the “country party.”
Angelo Codevilla: Precisely. Here, I’m borrowing an 18th-century British term.
David Samuels: I thought it was a good term because it brings to mind country music.
Angelo Codevilla: That too. Have you ever been to Branson, Missouri? Do you even know what it is?
David Samuels: I gather it’s neither Aspen nor Hollywood.
Angelo Codevilla: Branson, Missouri, is an entertainment center, larger in every way than Hollywood. It is located in Branson, Missouri, in the Ozarks. It is one of the homes of country music stars and starlets. It’s a huge complex of every kind of family entertainment, from bass fishing to theater, music, museums, anything you can imagine. Now the fact that you have never heard of it typifies the limitations of the ruling class.
David Samuels: My oligarchical snobbery.
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, no. You haven’t even risen to that.
David Samuels: I’m a piker. I bet $5 on the trifecta at the dog track.
Angelo Codevilla: It typifies the limitations of the ruling class mind, not even to understand that over which you are lording it.
David Samuels: So, what role do the poor and disadvantaged people of America play in your scheme? As I’m sure you understand, the reason we members of the elite class accumulate so much money and power is to be good allies for those who are less fortunate than we are. At least that’s what they teach my children in these schools that cost $35,000 a year.
Angelo Codevilla: You certainly do teach them that. It is a youthful pretense. It is a pretense to which the Roman patricians did not stoop.
David Samuels: But eventually they did, right? Constantine got them. The nobles all made public displays of their Christian charity.
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, go back. The Roman patricians call these unfortunates clients. Their relationship with their clients is precisely your relationship with the unfortunate and the poor. They are your pawns, the people whose votes you take.
David Samuels: So, when I express my sincere concern about transgender rights, you would presumably accuse me of manufacturing a new category of clients—and at the same time, a new class of bigots for me to self-righteously oppose.
Angelo Codevilla: You are not manufacturing a class, or rather you are exploiting that class’ weakness to turn that class into clients.
Most of all, what you are giving them—which really in a sense they crave more than anything else—is a sense of grievance against the rest of America. Grievance is the handle by which you push these pawns into your cultural wars.
David Samuels: What an ungenerous way to describe my noble instinct to help the less fortunate. Do the less fortunate truly have nothing to be aggrieved about, here in America?
Angelo Codevilla: Whatever they have to be aggrieved about, that grievance serves your instrumental purpose. Their grievance is your happiness. If they didn’t have a grievance, you’d try to manufacture it. Their having a grievance is an occasion for you to, to sharpen it, to scratch it, and to make it more relevant to them than it otherwise would be.
David Samuels: So, what exactly does the authority of the beneficent class I am supposedly part of, and which you seem to abhor, rest upon? There is the inherent rightness of my views, of course, which is proven by science—
Angelo Codevilla: Well, no. It is founded upon your will to power.
David Samuels: But look at all the wonderful benefits we elitists have to offer, like Davos in the wintertime. Why shiver out in the cold, Angelo?
Angelo Codevilla: Let me crib my response to you. Verily, verily I say unto thee, they have their reward. Do people in your class know where that comes from?
David Samuels: I’m a Jew, so I get a mulligan on quotations from the New Testament.
Angelo Codevilla: I read the first part of the Bible as well as the second, so you ought to read the second as well as the first.
David Samuels: So people have insisted to the Jews throughout our history.
Now tell me: How does your eccentric description of the American elites square with what we know to be the American democratic system? Congress makes the laws. The president of the United States is in charge of the executive functions of government. And then there’s the Supreme Court, which makes sure everything’s constitutionally kosher.
What you are describing is a kind of semiconspiratorial extraconstitutional elite superstructure whose actions do not accord with American civics textbooks or what I read in the newspaper.
Angelo Codevilla: Thank you! Right over the plate.
You are describing, and the textbooks describe, what used to be the American system of government, which has not existed since the late 1930s. The last attempt to revive that system, to make it rise up out of the overlay of administrative agencies that the New Deal built, was the Supreme Court of Schechter Poultry vs. the United States, 1935, the essence of which decision was to say that a legislative power cannot be delegated. Were that maxim to be enforced, the FAA, the FCC, and on and on, all of these agencies would cease to exist because they are, quite literally, unconstitutional. Now the Supreme Court has held them to be constitutional under the fiction that they are in fact merely filling in the interstices of laws. However, your average law passed by Congress these days consists almost exclusively of grants to these agencies to do whatever it is they wish.
Which is why, when Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare that we would only know what it contained after it was passed, she was entirely correct. She was describing the way the American government works, which is in fact, to use your words, a vast conspiracy between the best lawyers on the outside and the best lawyers on the inside of government. They call each other, both on the inside and the outside, stakeholders. And the rest of us are what, scumbags?
David Samuels: Deplorables.
Angelo Codevilla: Deplorables, yes. But we’re not stakeholders, we who are neither regulators nor regulated entities, but rather ordinary people. We are not parties to this covenant.
There’s a lecture given by James Wilson, the signer of the Declaration of Independence and the head of the first American law school, about the difference between American law and law everywhere else in the Western world. Elsewhere, law came from power. In America, positive law will be valid only if it was in accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s god.
David Samuels: But that’s not the basis of the revolt of the deplorables, or the country party, as you call it.
Angelo Codevilla: The basis of the revolt is simple. We realize that you hate us and therefore we hate you back. And we will take anybody, not that we found this man who fits our description, because Donald Trump didn’t fit anybody’s description of what they wanted. But we will take anybody who’ll take a swing at you.
Which is why I originally wrote at the back of that essay, that this revolution would be for the better or the worse. Because of the urgency that the country class felt. For getting out of all of this.
David Samuels: You seem to have had a marvelous life, though.
Angelo Codevilla: Fraught with all manner of difficulties. I had several job offers just as I was finishing my comps, and then I got drafted. By the time I came out of the service, there were no jobs to be had. And so first I worked at a jerkwater college in Pennsylvania. Too awful for words, I got out of there, but I couldn’t find anything else. So I did the only thing that I could do, which is to pass exams. I got into the foreign service. And then from there to the Hill and then to Stanford to the Hoover Institution and then to Boston. While I was on the Hill, I also taught ancient and modern political thought in Georgetown.
I probably would have done better for myself and my family if I stayed in the foreign service. Or, in the depths of my depression I got admitted to Berkeley Law school. But hey, you’re right. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
David Samuels: You got to write. You got to think. You got to see the kinds of things that were going to feed your writing.
Angelo Codevilla: I got to teach a lot of students, several of them are teaching right now. And they’re doing good work. Books, we’ll see. I don’t think I’m going to write another book because the last one I wrote, hell of a good book, didn’t sell very much. But who knows. If I get some time off of the vineyard here, and I don’t get too many irrigation systems going wrong or things like that, I’ll write some more.
***
The Rise of the Surveillance State
David Samuels: You have some real knowledge of how the American intelligence community thinks and operates, from your days as a staffer working for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Angelo Codevilla: Senate staffer in control of the intelligence budget. My senator was the chairman of the Budget Subcommittee of the Intelligence Committee. Which means that the budgets came through him and therefore through me. And back then we had markups and we could punish those who were not forthright with us, and we did.
David Samuels: How do you understand the seemingly unchecked growth of this globe-spanning American surveillance apparatus, and how do you understand the danger of that apparatus being turned to domestic political purposes?
Angelo Codevilla: There’s always danger inherent in secrecy. And you know secrecy of course is central to intelligence operations. Secrecy most often is used not for the good of the operation, but to safeguard the reputations of those who are running the operations.
The agencies, like all bureaucracies, have always tried to aggrandize themselves, build their reputations, in order to make and spend more money. Get more high-ranking positions. Get more post-retirement positions for their people in the industries that support them. They’ve done exactly what bureaucrats in other agencies have done, neither more nor less.
But the business they’re in, which involves surveillance, is uniquely dangerous, because surveillance is inherently a political weapon. Inherently so. And there is never any lack of appetite for increasing the power of surveillance, and for increasing the reach of surveillance.
Fortunately, especially in my time on the Hill, we had pretty good resistance against bureaucratic attempts to increase the reach of government surveillance over the rest of the country.
Then along came 9/11, and congressmen, senators, who didn’t know any better, were rather easily persuaded, and for that matter Presidents—George W. Bush being exhibit number one—were very easily persuaded, that giving the agencies something close to carte blanche for electronic surveillance would help to keep the country safe. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 2008 to accommodate the practices which had evolved extralegally under George Bush, which essentially allowed the agencies to wiretap at will, so long as they claimed that this was for foreign intelligence purposes. In this regard, they claimed that what they were doing was within the spirit, if not the letter, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which stated that any warrantless collection of electronic intelligence, bugging and other means of collection in finding intelligence, could capture the communications of U.S. persons, only incidentally in the course of capturing the communications of foreign targets.
The 2008 amendments legalized this practice, and added the capacity of the agencies to compel communications companies to help upstream collection of emails etcetera, which would then be recorded. The act, rather the amendment, contains an even longer list of apparent restrictions on how these intercepts of Americans may be used. But these restrictions are basically for show because, essentially, once the foreign intelligence surveillance court authorized a particular operation the practical means of judicial review of what has happened, of how it is being carried out, are so complicated as to be unworkable. And besides, what the hell do judges know about the substance of these things?
Therefore, to get to the point of your question, this increased power and lax attitude conserving it posed a temptation to use these tools for the convenience of the administration in power, which was made much more likely by the increasing identification of the senior ranks of the intelligence community with your ruling class. To the point that these people, being ordinary sentient human beings, believe what the people at the top of their class are saying about the opposition.
David Samuels: We are good, and they are bad.
Angelo Codevilla: We are good and these opponents of ours, which mean to take over our positions, are bad people, they are dangerous to the country, and therefore why not look for every possible means of keeping them out of office?
David Samuels: You were directly involved in the drafting of the original FISA law in 1978.
Angelo Codevilla: That’s correct.
David Samuels: In the aftermath of the Church Committee revelations, yes?
Angelo Codevilla: Right. Now you use that term “the Church Committee” in the context that it was something that was antagonistic to the intelligence business. It was not. The Church Committee was a joint operation between, let’s call it “the left” inside the intelligence community, specifically the CIA, and their friends on the Hill. The result of it was that the left component of that bureaucracy has control of the CIA now.
The drafting of FISA was a cooperative enterprise between the Democratic majority, at that point, of Congress, the staffers being all Church Committee staffers, every one of them. And the ACLU. What I’m calling the establishment left. They were the drafters.
But the impetus of the drafting came from the FBI, primarily, and secondarily from the CIA, the NSA. The reason for their pressure was that the left had sued individual members of the FBI for having wiretapped them during the Vietnam War, in their communications with North Vietnam, communist Czechoslovakia, the KGB, and so on. Now they didn’t like that, and they wanted to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again.
So the point of FISA from the standpoint of the left was to keep that from happening again. The point of FISA from the standpoint of the FBI etcetera was never to be in a position to be sued again.
David Samuels: Right. A judge signed it. So now it’s legal.
Angelo Codevilla: Right. What the FBI etcetera demanded was preauthorization. We will not do any wiretapping unless it is preauthorized. Unless we are ipso facto clean.
Now the objections to FISA were primarily of a constitutional kind, mainly that wiretapping for national security was an inherent part of presidential power. The president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. And that was a true objection.
I however made a different objection, although I agreed with the constitutional objection. I said that pre-authorization, pre-clearance of wiretapping, would be an unendurable temptation for people in the agencies to do whatever the hell they wanted. They would be exempt from the prudence that the fear of being sued would impose.
My objection caught the eye of the American Bar Association at the time, which organized a debate on that subject at the University of Chicago Law School, with me on one side, and a local law professor by the name of Antonin Scalia on the other.
Scalia took the position that the danger, which I described, which he found real, was minor compared to the need to get the agencies doing their job vigorously. We see how the future turned out.
I must note that Scalia is a southern Italian. And I am a northerner.
David Samuels: When you saw the Snowden revelations about Stellar Wind and these other collection programs which then were retroactively legalized—what was your response?
Angelo Codevilla: “What else is new?”
David Samuels: Along with the impetus of 9/11, do you feel that the technology itself fundamentally—
Angelo Codevilla: Sure. Technology itself increased the possibilities. And it would have taken real self-restraint for people to say, “No. We could do this, but we won’t.”
David Samuels: We fear the future threat to the constitutional order.
Angelo Codevilla: We ought not to have such powers.
David Samuels: Please remove me from temptation, said no one, ever.
Angelo Codevilla: Well as a matter of fact, Christians do “lead us not into temptation” all the time.
David Samuels: You do say “lead us not into temptation,” but I am not aware of the Christian prayer that says “please take away the chocolate cake while I’m in the middle of eating it.”
Angelo Codevilla: Well, St. Augustine said exactly that, you know, “Lord make me pure, but not yet.”
***
Are Assange and Snowden heroes or villains?
David Samuels: I was an early and avid supporter of Julian Assange, who is now the devil for both the Democratic and Republican elite factions and appears to have vanished into a dark hole. But I have always defended him, because I felt that at the heart of his project, and no one else’s project, was a fundamental insight into how information was controlled and moves in the modern surveillance state, and how to confront it using the actual tools that are now in play.
When people said, that’s not journalism, I have always looked at them and said, “Yeah, it is. Or at least, it’s more like journalism than most of what passes now for journalism. It is a method for making public the fundaments of how the country is actually being governed.” I don’t know how you’re supposed to have a democratic society without that kind of transparency into the bureaucracies that spy on us and lie about it—and have turned a supine press into these pathetic hand puppets.
If you look at the universe of government bureaucrats and contractors and all the rest, there are now well more than a million Americans with some form of top secret or higher security clearance. Now I can accept that something is properly a secret if only five people know it, or if 40 people know it, or even 400 people. But there is no such thing as a secret that is shared by 1 million people. That is an anti-democratic exercise of power by a bureaucracy.
Angelo Codevilla:I agree with everything you said, up until the time you got to numbers. Because military operations involve a lot of people. Some intelligence operations are essentially military operations which put people’s lives at risk. The line must be drawn where the military is involved.
However, every word you said concerning Julian Assange, I agree with. Every last word.
David Samuels: Did you understand Edward Snowden to be a knowing Russian agent? As someone who was used and manipulated by the Russians?
Angelo Codevilla: I do not know. What is fairly clear is that Snowden entered government service with the idea of doing something like what he did, which certainly removes him from the category of whistleblower. He is certainly no innocent.
But regardless of his motivation, I am glad that he existed. And I’m glad that he did what he did.
The United States does not suffer, and has never suffered, from a lack of knowledge about the rest of the world on the basis of which to make foreign and defense policy. OK? And that is a fundamental fact. And because of that, all the fancy arguments that you must sacrifice this and that for the sake of intelligence, I think are false.
David Samuels: One of the minor scandals that startled me in the late Obama/early Trump interregnum was the unmasking scandal, which struck me as much more significant than people seemed willing to credit at the time. I mean, the fact that someone leaked an intercept to David Ignatius may be a crime, but it was hardly news to me. I mean, people leak stuff all the time. That’s how Washington works.
What struck me as much more significant was the defense that “oh, actually most of these unmasking requests came from Samantha Power, in her job as U.N. ambassador.” And then it turned out it wasn’t her sitting at her desk all day long unmasking hundreds of names of U.S. citizens. It was someone she deputized in her office. She didn’t even know about these requests, or most of them, or so she claimed.
It was news to me that ordinary low-level bureaucrats and political appointees now sit at their desks all day reading raw intercepts targeting American civilians, collected under the pretext of gathering foreign intelligence. A 26-year-old assistant can sit there all day long reading your email, based on the three-hop rule. I don’t think that’s what—
Angelo Codevilla: What the authors of the FISA had in mind.
David Samuels: Authors of FISA, authors of the U.S. Constitution, you can pick your authors. Yet that has became normative reality, right?
Angelo Codevilla: Look. Most people who have a title in Washington don’t do their work. There’s always the chief assistant to the assistant chief, they’re the ones who do the work. And so yeah, they get deputized.
David Samuels: So now we have this surveillance apparatus that Snowden, James Risen, and others have detailed, which provides daytime reading material for bored 26-year-old assistants, which means that material can easily be repurposed for—
Angelo Codevilla: Any purpose under the sun.
David Samuels: That is a very powerful weapon for this bureaucracy to have.
Angelo Codevilla: That’s the point.
***
When Jeff Bezos Has Dinner With the CIA
David Samuels: The guys working in the White House whether under Obama or Trump aren’t writing the code for their surveillance systems. Neither are the nice people at the CIA. They’re all writing checks to Silicon Valley.
I saw the other day that Jeff Bezos, who’s one of the most dedicated champions of democracy and the free press in America, the guy who says that democracy dies in darkness, I saw that his company, Amazon, provides all the data storage for the CIA. Now as a reporter and as a citizen, that makes me confident—
Angelo Codevilla: Ha, ha.
David Samuels: —that Jeff Bezos’ newspaper, The Washington Post, is reporting without fear or favor every day on Jeff Bezos and all these CIA and DoD contracts with Amazon, because they have such a strong incentive to make sure that everything’s on the up and up. And by the way, Amazon is definitely not listening in on your private conversations through the listening devices—in the form of digital assistants like Alexa, Echo speakers, and doorbells with spy cameras in them—that it is installing by the millions in American homes.
Angelo Codevilla: May I give you a quick answer to your larger question?
David Samuels: Yes.
Angelo Codevilla: It depends on who goes to dinner with whom. That’s how Washington works.
David Samuels: That can’t be your answer, so let’s take it from the top. There is a company called Amazon, which now has monopolistic position A, in the field of books and all printed material distributed in America, and B, in a whole host of other industries ranging from diapers to blow-up pool toys. It looks like a classic monopoly trust. You have Google, which has a near-monopoly over the search function, the leading portal to most information on the internet, and holds a monopoly on search advertising. You have Facebook, which controls 78% of entries onto the internet now through their platform. So, you have these three monopolistic companies, right, one of which also owns the only major newspaper in Washington, D.C., and which control the movement of information throughout the entire society.
Now, another arm of Silicon Valley controls storage and access to the information that the government agencies gather on the society. And all of the money earned from both these pursuits flows back to these people, who are richer than any class of people in America since the robber barons. They got so rich by sucking out the life’s blood from five dozen different industries that employ people and destroying the 20th-century press, which played a key role in maintaining our democracy.
Now I look at that, and I say the power is out there. You look at it and you say no, my lad. It’s about who has dinner with who in Washington.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh no, no, no. You misunderstand me. The ruling class transcends Washington. Part of it is in Silicon Valley, it’s in every major university town in America. It’s in Sacramento. And then you ask, what is it that ties it together?
David Samuels: Right, the poor associate professor of gender studies with his or her little espresso machine.
Angelo Codevilla: The poor associate professor of gender studies, number one is not so poor. Number two, she gets her living from the same partisan connection that Jeff Bezos does. She is part of the same party as Jeff Bezos, who has God knows how many billions.
David Samuels: A large fortune.
Angelo Codevilla: But his power as you have pointed out substantially consists of his connection with government. Although I must say one thing contrary to an absolutist view of the ruling class. That the four major trusts that you mentioned are in large part—have in large part grown naturally, organically. They’re securing themselves by government power. But the government did not force anybody to shop with Amazon.
David Samuels: Ah! As a matter of fact, Google and Facebook secured their monopolies and their ability to commit massive and ongoing copyright violations thanks to a little-known provision of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed by Congress in 1996 in response to a series of moral panics that engulfed America at around that time. Those included the McMartin nursery school witchcraft case—
Angelo Codevilla: Oh ho ho ho ho. I remember that.
David Samuels: There was a generalized hysteria about pedophiles running nursery schools and satanic rituals involving small children. And this became part of a hysteria so significant that Congress had to pass a law. And the law specifically targeted this phenomenon which was almost entirely imaginary, even if in a few specific instances it might have also been real, as is always the case. Except for the Jews baking matzo with the blood of Christian children, of course. We didn’t actually do that.
Angelo Codevilla: You didn’t?
David Samuels: No. Matzo tastes bad enough as it is.
So the Communications Decency Act was set up to prevent pedophiles from sharing pictures of child sexual abuse over the newfangled internet. In response to which, two farsighted members of congress, Ron Wyden and Christopher Cox, who fancied themselves experts on the digital frontier, wrote into the Communications Decency Act a section stating that internet providers shall not be considered to be publishers and that if you provide internet service or platforms or hosting you are not subject to any of the liabilities that traditionally attach to publishing information.
Now, all of a sudden, thanks to the wisdom of the U.S. Congress, two classes of publishers were created. One class, traditional publishers, had to spend a lot of money on fact checkers, editors, lawyers, and other people because they could be held legally responsible for the information that they published in their newspapers. Another class of publishers, internet publishers, like Google at the time and Facebook as it emerged, were free from all of these potential torts. So Facebook or Google could put up any damn thing they wanted—
Angelo Codevilla: Yeah, except the fact that Google and Facebook supposedly exercise no control.
David Samuels: That’s clearly a lie, especially now. They are obviously not the telephone company.
Angelo Codevilla: Very interesting. At which point, one can challenge that exemption.
David Samuels: Except it’s now too late. They ate the 20th-century American press.
Angelo Codevilla: Let me give you the tiniest, tiniest glimmer from the margins, the very, very remote margins, of all of this, so you can understand my perspective. Q: There is a dream that unites progressives and bureaucrats and wealthy technologists. And where does that dream come from?
A: It’s a dream peculiar to this class. Other classes have been united by different dreams.
Q: Is it a substitute for religion? A: Yes.
When I started working for the Senate, some folks at the agency figured out that I wasn’t a run-of-the-mill staffer. So I was visited by one of the old boys who took me up to the director’s office—the director wasn’t there at the time. He took me up via the director’s elevator, he had a key. And showed me all around and was very, very clubby with me. Then they took me to his house, which is overlooking the Potomac, with these large wolfhounds sitting about. And essentially, he said the equivalent of “all this could be yours.”
David Samuels: My son, if you play the game.
Angelo Codevilla: If you play the game. I said to myself, “Hmmmm, what did the Lord say to all this?”
But it really is a matter of who has dinner with whom. I have worked in Washington long enough to know that people would sell their souls for invitations to be at certain tables. To be allowed to speak with this person or that. In the end, it’s all social.
And how do you become social? You express the same thoughts, you have the same tastes. You vacation in the same places. You love the same loves, you hate the same hates.
David Samuels: This is a very Italianate explanation.
Angelo Codevilla: No, it’s not. You have the wrong idea about Italy. I’m from Northern Italy. I believe this is a hardheaded explanation of a soft but powerful reality.
David Samuels: These are all people who are connected to the power of government.
Angelo Codevilla: Either physically, i.e. economically, or emotionally—power. The dream of sharing power. The gender studies professor not only gets her money eventually from government, but she dreams of being part of a world-transforming enterprise.
David Samuels: Here, I agree with you. There is a dream that unites progressives and bureaucrats and wealthy technologists. And where does that dream come from?
Angelo Codevilla: It’s a dream peculiar to this class. Other classes have been united by different dreams.
David Samuels: Is it a substitute for religion?
Angelo Codevilla: Yes.
David Samuels: Is that its primary emotional charge?
Angelo Codevilla: Well, I don’t know about primary. Look, the primary element is, as we Christians were taught, pride. That is the sin of sins. There is nothing that moves human beings quite so much as the desire to be on top of other human beings.
David Samuels: It’s interesting. I’m a Jew. But there are things that are lacking in our tradition, just as there are things that are very well developed in our tradition. You know, decent food can be lacking in our traditions.
Angelo Codevilla: However, not in Italy.
David Samuels: Oh, my God. The Jewish food in Italy is fantastic.
Angelo Codevilla: The Jewish food in Italy is fabulous.
David Samuels: I see that more as a reflection on Italy than the Jews.
***
Henry Kissinger Meets the Demon Emperor
David Samuels: Judaism as it has existed for the last 2,000 years is an exilic tradition. The religion took the place of both the rituals in the Temple and the state itself. It was all ritualized. So for a 2,000-year-old tradition that’s remarkably elaborated and rich and subtle in so many areas, you have remarkably little discussion of political power—including the sins related to power, the proper ways to exercise power, all that was outside the experience of these people because they were politically powerless. Religion took the place of statecraft.
Israel hasn’t necessarily helped. Why do Jews want political power? To keep themselves from being exterminated. Why does a Jewish state want a strong army? Because if you don’t have one, people are going to wipe you out. In the Middle East, that’s a pretty ironclad rule. These are not very subtle or complicated ideas.
Angelo Codevilla: But there are plenty of Jews in Europe who are very well acquainted with the theory and practice of exercising power.
David Samuels: Of course, but—
Angelo Codevilla: But these Jews were not real Jews. I mean, they were not religious Jews. They happened to be Jewish but they were primarily socialists or whatever.
David Samuels: Or Henry Kissinger.
Angelo Codevilla: What a fraud.
David Samuels: He is an egomaniac and he is highly manipulative and he is a flatterer and a courtier. But Henry Kissinger sure ain’t dumb.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh no. He’s very smart. Very smart.
David Samuels: And one has the sense, that if he had really spent the time working on a biography of Metternich, that it would have been fantastic, too.
Angelo Codevilla: Yes! Look, the man never had time to be a scholar. He was taken up immediately into the world of conferences and power. And he navigated it masterfully.
David Samuels: Plus, he had the emotional capacity to get down on his knees and pray to Jesus with Richard Nixon after five whiskeys. And you look at Trump and you’re like, that’s what’s needed here too. Right?
Angelo Codevilla: What would Kissinger do with Trump? Who knows. This man Trump is something else.
David Samuels: I have a name for Trump: The demon emperor. Because I feel like he’s like a figure that you’d find in some Chinese chronicle, right? There was a time of terrible chaos, social disintegration, and then a Mongol invasion. They breeched the Great Wall and did this and that. And in those moments, the Demon Emperor would arise and take power. He had the head of a pig and the body of man, and he was known for his vile excesses and the terrible rampages that he’d go on, and his desecrations of ancient scrolls. Everyone bemoaned him.
But there was a certain virtue, at times, in certain moments, to having the demon emperor around. Yes, he raped 150 virgins in surrounding villages and all their families were very upset and there’s no reason he should have done that, and he defiles the very ground he stands on, and indeed, no one of noble birth would consent to marry his daughter. At the same time, he defeated the Mongols.
So, the real question isn’t whether Trump is vile, but rather what has he actually done, aside from being vile?
Angelo Codevilla: Putting a parenthesis in the conversation, talking about Chinese epics. Are you familiar with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?
David Samuels: No.
Angelo Codevilla: You should be. This is a book that describes the tradition between—or rather I should say the end of the Han Dynasty around 200 A.D. The book was written over maybe 200 years. And it is partly prose, partly poetry. And it’s considered one of the great classics of Chinese literature. The Chinese government a couple years ago did a—condensed it into 95, 45-minute TV episodes. Beautifully acted, with gorgeous costume. With English translations that read something between Shakespeare and Thucydides.
Captivating.
I started watching it, I couldn’t stop. I mean my poor wife was left alone. And it conveyed as deep an insight into Chinese character as I’ve ever seen. To get Westerners to empathize with Chinese characters takes some doing. And you can download it, it’s free. The Chinese government has made sure you can download it for free.
***
The Progressive High Church Mass
David Samuels: Where does the ethos of a class come from?
Angelo Codevilla: Here I speak with the prejudices of an academician. Because the ethos of the academy changed, evolved. And what drove the change was the growing contempt of professors for our civilization. And you Jews ought not to feel that you are any less the enemy of these people than we Christians.
I should say the defining feature of the ruling class is a certain attitude. And that attitude developed in the academy, and that attitude became uniform throughout the country because of the uniform academy. The uniformity of the academy transformed itself into the uniformity of the ruling class.
David Samuels: Because that was the institution that credentialed the otherwise uncultured American masses?
Angelo Codevilla: It credentialed the mind and the habits. The habits of the heart. It credentialed the habits of the heart. The habits of conversation. The habits of work. The habits of logic. The habits period.
Can you imagine a bright kid coming in contact with that kind of intellectual fraud? The smartest ones will say, “hey, I don’t want to be part of this.” He’ll do something else. He won’t be taken in. Which means that this class will continue to degrade itself.
David Samuels: Just as it would be wrong to understate the importance of who has dinner with whom in Washington, it would be wrong to understate the extent to which the class you dislike is moved by an idea: The rational scientific functioning of the bureaucratic state. That’s their God. I may find this attachment emotionally bizarre, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Angelo Codevilla: You’re saying the same thing in two different ways. Why is it that they have dinner together? It is that they believe that they share something terribly important. And that is precisely what they believe to be their stewardship of all things good.
Once upon a time, thus moved, they believed that they were holier than thou. Now they simply believe that they’re trendier than thou. In other words, they share the most valuable thing, which is not devotion to God but devotion to their own corporate mission. Their own corporate status. Status and mission. Status being the priests of the salvific religion of science and progress.
David Samuels: Yeah, that’s right. There is a monkish sense of devotion.
Angelo Codevilla: You’re going far too far with using the word “monkish.”
David Samuels: They exist! These people exist.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh no, no, no. They exist but they’re very few.
I taught in Boston for many years. And believe it or not, I put my kids in the highest-ranking schools in Boston, and I had to go to a parent meetings and school celebrations. And these were, in fact, secular masses. With, including, believe it or not, the breaking of bread.
Bread! Simple bread, passing it around. There’s a kind of faux simplicity. You have fake Puritans too.
David Samuels: Now the idea of the worship of the corporate bureaucratic state, right? You have a religion that is capable of attracting, if not the adherence of the majority of the country, then maybe 40% of them.
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, no, no, no. Not 40%. This is an elite attraction. Which attracts people who naturally, very naturally, want to rise above others.
Again, as a kind of professor, I came across hundreds of young people who very naturally ask the question, how can I rise in life?
David Samuels: That is my job. I am young, I am supposed to rise.
Angelo Codevilla: I am supposed to rise in my life, how can I do that? And I in good conscience explain to them that the paths are there and the ladders are being provided. And they will take you to these places. You will, however, have to adapt yourself to the mindset of these folks.
Now, if you insist on being independent minded, don’t bother. But if you do insist on being independent minded, also realize that these ladders will not be available to you.
A lot of kids will come and tell me how much they enjoy my classes and how much they like the ancients, the way I taught the ancients. And I said to them: “Look. There is no future for you in following the likes of me. I cannot give you the kinds of internships and prospects for employment and writing that others can.”
David Samuels: But they also were successful it seems to me, in inculcating parts of their faith in what you would describe as their client base. Right?
Angelo Codevilla: No, no, no, no, no. Clients, certainly not.
David Samuels: They win elections in some places.
Angelo Codevilla: Sure, they win elections. Not through faith but through pure clientelism. And don’t forget, especially nowadays, more and more nowadays, by fostering hate, by fostering resentment against others. If you are on our side, you’re on the side of the good. But more important than that, on the other side are people who hate you.
This is especially true with regard to blacks. They want to put you back in chains! What utter nonsense.
David Samuels: Jews are subjected to the same kinds of disciplinary activity. Don’t you understand that the right wingers are all secret neo-Nazis who are planning to pack you off to the gas chambers? I’m an FDR-type liberal, but I find those attempts to trigger some fearful reflex to be incredibly demeaning and offensive.
Angelo Codevilla: People believe mistakenly that Jews are especially smart. American Jews have proven to be dumb, politically. What is political stupidity? Political stupidity means not knowing which side your bread is buttered on.
Jews have taken to believing the leftist propaganda that the Christians are somehow their enemies. Where in fact, there is no group that is friendlier to Jews in America.
The more Christian you are, the more let us say pro-Jewish we tend to be. And why? Well for this very simple reason. That if you read the Bible, you don’t grow up rooting for the Philistines.
David Samuels: American Jews come primarily from Poland and from Russia, where the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches often played a very nasty political role and also preached a pretty harsh supersessionist doctrine. They were not friendly to Jews. Now that’s very different from American Protestantism, and also American Catholicism.
Angelo Codevilla: The Christian faith has always been an outgrowth of Judaism. That’s not contention, that is a fact.
David Samuels: Any group that has a scar, you can press on the scar and profit.
Angelo Codevilla: Well, yeah. But Jews are supposed to be smart.
David Samuels: It’s embarrassing to be the object of this kind of primitive manipulation. And both sides do it. You know how they really talk about you, you know what they say behind your back. They’re gonna make your kids bow down to Jesus! Now vote for me.
Angelo Codevilla: Working on the Hill, I would see these Jewish lobbyists breaking their heads against the left. Whereas if they’d gone to conservatives, they would have been greeted with open arms and gotten exactly what they wanted.
***
The Cruxification of Jonathan Pollard
David Samuels: You were working on the Hill when Jonathan Pollard was thrown in jail for life to cover up the crimes of Aldrich Ames and others.
Angelo Codevilla: Oh, that’s a really big subject.
David Samuels: Would you say that the treatment of Pollard happened independently of the fact that he was a Jew?
Angelo Codevilla: Oh heavens, no. No, no, no. Since you’re asking this question to me, you obviously have read that I did what I could to champion his release. Having nothing to do with the fact that he was a Jew, and everything with the obvious falsehood of the accusations on the basis of which he was sentenced.
David Samuels: Right.
Angelo Codevilla: He certainly committed espionage. And rightly merited prison for a couple of years. Instead he got a life sentence. Which ended up to be 30-something years. Why? Certainly not on the basis of the indictment. I mean, he was accused and pleaded guilty to precisely what he did.
What I know, which a lot of other people did not know, is that given his clearances, he could not possibly have done the things on the basis of which he was sentenced. It was simply impossible for him to do that. And every time I pointed that out to people in intelligence, they would make an argument which was untenable. Mainly that the revelation of facts in reports is tantamount or can easily lead to the revelation of sources and methods.
Nonsense! The compartmentation of American intelligence is premised precisely on the notion that this is not possible. Or extremely difficult. And although it is theoretically possible, one would have to show precisely how it did happen. And nobody even tried to do that.
Furthermore, Pollard was sentenced on the basis of a memorandum, which is yet secret. For our judicial system, to sentence anyone on the basis of any secret proceeding is about as un-American as anything yet.
David Samuels: Have you read that memorandum?
Angelo Codevilla: Hell no!
David Samuels: Did anyone ever offer you a summary of its contents?
Angelo Codevilla: Well, sure! But it had been only in the most general terms, to which I would say, oh? Show me how that’s possible.
You know, if somebody says, well and by the way, the snowballs in hell were not melting. I’d say, what? How is that happening?
David Samuels: How do you understand his treatment?
Angelo Codevilla: Oh horrible, horrible.
David Samuels: No, I’m asking why.
Angelo Codevilla: Why? Well, OK. The CIA has all kinds of social-political prejudices. The first thing I learned that I did not expect to learn when I went to my job on the Hill was just how controlled and defined by certain social norms the CIA is. That it is a kind of club that secures itself through co-option. And that co-option involves the furtherance of a whole bunch of prejudices.
So, the straightforward political prejudices are, in no particular order: liberalism, prejudice in favor of the Arabs. You probably are not aware of the corporate prejudices that existed in the favor of the Soviet Union. And they were very, very powerful at CIA, as opposed to DIA or NSA.
To give you an example of these political, pro-Arab prejudices and how they work, when specifically relevant to the Pollard case: When Israel bombed Iraq, the CIA came to us and they formed this committee, and railed at the Israelis for having spoiled this wonderful relationship we had with this wonderful man, Saddam Hussein. I remember at the time sitting next to Pat Moynihan who gave me the elbow and chuckle.
I would say that the majority, by far, of the intelligence committee, laughed at—this is Bobby Ray Inman. And they were cheering on Israel. Hey, bomb more!
But CIA was coming to notify us that in fact they were cutting off the flow of certain intelligence to Israel. And they were doing so in great anger. Now these items of intelligence which were being cut off were precisely the items of intelligence that Jonathan Pollard supplied to them.
David Samuels: They were hurt!
Angelo Codevilla: They were hurt! They were hurt and they took it out on Pollard. How far did this attitude which I just described blend over into anti-Semitism? I don’t know.
David Samuels: Right.
Angelo Codevilla: But if I were a Jew, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me to think that it did. And even though I’m not, I sure would have my suspicions.
So that’s the essence of my attitude, attitude and subsequent involvement, such as it was, in the Pollard case. I mean I saw number one, that the reason for the CIA’s anger was wrong. And in fact, the United States had every reason to cheer what the Israelis did. And most Americans did, as a matter of fact. And later on, the subsequent administration thanked the Israelis for having done precisely what they did.
So the CIA was wrong in that regard. And they were doubly wrong in convincing that imbecile, Caspar Weinberger, to write that un-American memorandum. And that judge should be damned by his profession for having paid attention to it. You don’t sentence people on the basis of a secret memorandum. You just don’t do that in America.
David Samuels: The basis for his sentencing is still classified. So who can say for sure if his sentence was unjust.
Angelo Codevilla: Well, no. We can say. It doesn’t matter that it’s classified, because it alleges something that couldn’t possibly have happened. You can classify it, but that doesn’t make it any truer or any likelier to be true. In fact, it makes it less likely to be so.
***
Secrecy and the Rule of Law
David Samuels: Now this opens up the last subject that I wanted to talk about at some length. Which is, what happens when secret intelligence becomes the basis for actions within the domestic sphere. This seems to me like a gathering storm cloud over this country and the freedoms that most of us still believe are ours.
Angelo Codevilla: Right, quite so. Two things happen. The first bad, the second worse.
The first is that policy or action made on the basis of information that is not generally available tends to be bad policy. Secret policy doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that ordinary policy does. And the people who make it do not themselves feel the necessity to be as careful at all that they do as they otherwise would be. So you get sloppy policymaking. You get people riding hobby horses. Not thinking through what they’re doing. And you end up with unintended consequences.
The second is that policymaking on the basis of information not generally available allows one to cut out one’s opponent, allows one to make policy partisan. More partisan than it would otherwise be.
David Samuels: Would you say that the Iraq War was an example of that?
Angelo Codevilla: Yes, in the following way. And we’re talking of course about two Iraq wars and then the criticism applies to both in a different way.
The first Iraq War, that is the original invasion of Iraq, happened because the president was under entirely reasonable pressure to do something serious, something definitive, about terrorism. And he concluded in his heart of hearts that overthrowing the regime would have been most vocal in its advocacy of anti-Americanism, and anti-American terrorism, would eliminate one of the major sources of terrorism, and also send a healthy message to other regimes that were in their own ways fostering terrorism.
But, when the subject was moving about inside the highest levels of government, great resistance was encountered to this. And the Bush administration found itself searching for a rationale for that invasion that would minimize opposition from within the government and the ruling class in general. And they sent up a whole bunch of trial balloons in that regard, and the trial balloon that got the least resistance was the trope about the weapons of mass destruction. About which the evidence was always terribly sketchy. But they found that to be the most bureaucratically tenable explanation, and so they went ahead with it. That was a mistake made intramurally, which compromised the eventual support of the larger population.
So much for the first Iraq War. The second one, being the occupation, that was decided in an even less transparent manner. We know that there was intense lobbying on the part of CIA and State for the occupation. And lobbying by the Saudis for that same course. How all that interacted and how George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and friends soldiered all of that out and came to that particular decision, we still do not know. And they ain’t about to tell us.
And so, we ended up with an occupation which would ostensibly be for the purpose of democratization, but which number one, shied away from democracy because everyone involved realized that democracy meant that the Shia ruled. So as a fact, the day-to-day effort of the occupation, the one that cost so many American lives, had nothing to do with democratization. It had everything to do with preserving a role for the Sunnis.
The U.S. government never fought that war with the intention of crushing the Sunni opposition. They never fought that war with the intention of crushing the people who were shooting at Americans. And then ended up, in fact giving up on that war and paying those very people, in what was otherwise known as the Surge.
A whole bunch of idiots, Fox News conservatives count the Surge, the so-called Surge, as a great success. Great success in what?
Again here, this is as good an example as you will find of the wages of making policy in a nontransparent manner.
David Samuels: There was one quote, I forget who it came from, but it came out of an interaction of one of the reasonably high-up war planners in the Defense Department and a journalist for, I think it was, The Atlantic. And the quote was that power creates its own reality. So it doesn’t matter what we say, because even if it’s not true now, by the time we’re finished we will make it true. And therefore there is no real difference between statements that are true or false, as long as we make them.
Do you have the sense that a similar attempt to manufacture reality was at play in what at this point are the still-unknown interactions between the CIA, the FBI, and the Obama White House with regard to the surveillance of Donald Trump’s associates, and the attempt to suggest some vast Putin-Trump conspiracy to game American elections, and whatnot?
Angelo Codevilla: I don’t think that it went that far. Or I should say, I don’t think the people involved thought about it that deeply.
David Samuels: I would agree.
Angelo Codevilla:I think what you had was a small pooling of resources to tweak the news cycle with regard to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, which then turned into something very major.
David Samuels: After the election.
Angelo Codevilla: After the election. It was, like Watergate, a minor attempt to gain marginal advantage. Which then, unintended by the people involved at the time, became something very big, which escaped everyone’s control.
I believe that there are a whole bunch of people in Washington right now who are quaking in their boots because the House Intelligence Committee has shaken loose some of the documents involved. Because in the long run there are no secrets in Washington. And one can then wonder about the quality of the people who imagined that the things they did could remain secret.
It really was a marvel. The idea was that if we all say it together long enough and we shout it loud so nothing else can be heard, then it will become the effective truth, Machiavelli’s verita effettuale. But I mean, there is a limit to this. I have some close personal friends who are more on the left, and I said to them: OK. Where’s the evidence? Who did what when to whom? Where are the quids and where are the quos? What’s going on here? And all they could say is, “Well, the investigation is going on.”
What is not clear is just how much of the reality will come into the public’s consciousness.
David Samuels: Whose fault is this?
Angelo Codevilla: The fault here is not of Democrats on the left. The fault here is of Donald Trump and his friends who have refused to enforce the most basic laws here. The most obvious one is Section 798, (18 U.S. Code), the simple comment statute. Now anybody in the intelligence business knows that this is the live wire of security law. It is a strict liability statute. It states that any revelation, regardless of circumstance or intent, any revelation period, of anything having to do with U.S. communications intelligence is punishable by the 10 and 10. Ten years in the slammer, and $10,000 fine. Per count.
Now the folks who went to The Washington Post and The New York Times in November and December of 2016 and peddled this story of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Trump and the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, these people ipso facto violated §798.
Considering these matters are highly classified, and that the number of the people involved is necessarily very small, identifying them is child’s play. But no effort to do that has been made.
David Samuels: But doesn’t that failure in turn point to what is, to some extent, the root of this entire drama, which is that Donald Trump seems unfamiliar with and temperamentally at odds with the executive function that he has now assumed?
Angelo Codevilla: That’s certainly true. But you have to go beyond Donald Trump, to Republican power holders in general. These people far more than Donald Trump would be inclined to forbear for the sake of comity with the ruling class. And what kind of comity are we talking about? We’re talking about social comity. Because if you follow the law in this case, you end up putting former directors of CIA, FBI etcetera behind bars. They, and a whole bunch of their subordinates. Maybe a dozen people here would end up behind bars.
David Samuels: We’ve come to accept that certain classes of people are in fact above the law.
Angelo Codevilla: We have come to accept that.
The election of 2016 was precisely about whether anyone in America is above the law. The reason why so many people did not vote for Hillary Clinton is the feeling that she and her ilk were above the law, were acting as if they were above the law, which happened to be entirely true. Now the fact that the Trump administration is acting according to the same premise, i.e., that some people are above the law, is evidence that the revolution that the voters wanted in 2016 has only just begun.
***
Conclusion
It’s interesting to read the opinions of others. Especial if they come from the Washington “beltway”. It’s almost like they are a completely different “animal” than what the rest of us are. I suppose it goes along with my belief that the super elite have evolved into something other than what the rest of us are. They are another creature entirely. It’s not that they are clueless. For they indeed have intelligence. I just wonder if they have scruples and understanding. That’s all.
But that’s just me.
One thing is for certain, they think that they are better than you and I. They are driving the United States into a massive war that does not have an exit. It’s crazy, it’s dangerous, and while they might be intelligent, they sure are out of touch with man’s humanity.
And his humility.
That frightens me.
But they seem oblivious to it all. It’s like people coloring a coloring-book with crayons inside a large RV that is being driven by a drunk madman. These fools haven’t a clue as to what dangers are being toyed with. Sheech!
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my Oligarchy Index (which is part of my SHTF index) here…
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Empires are a real pain in the ass, don’t you know. They are always off concocting one war or the other. Bombing places into oblivion, and just threatening others with all sorts of trouble. They collapse trade, invention, scientific development, society, religion and the environment. But yet, it all continues.
What stops all this madness?
Internal collapse. That’s what historically ends the insanity.
You can tell a empire from a normally peaceful nation by it’s “telltales”. Which are uniformly, and historically stable;
Military bases everywhere.
The most powerful military in the areas that they occupy.
The use of their currency for financial transactions.
On-going wars or conflicts.
Justification for war using “righteous and just” excuses.
Disruption of trade.
Now, it’s pretty obvious to everyone (except the most bone-headed ignorant) that the USA today is a military empire and it is going “down” shooting as it collapses internally. The signs are all there and obvious.
But we are not going to talk about THAT, right now.
John Whitehead.
We are going to talk about something else. We are going to talk about the crimes of the empire when it is still functioning. Because, as soon as it collapses, everything is forgotten and forgiven (apparently). And that is really, really bad, and a serious problem. For how can you learn form your mistakes if you always conveniently forget the past?
“Oh, let by-gones be by-gones.”
Now, one of the big things about these military empires is that they are always invading the “little guy”. They are always invading and taking over smaller and peaceful nations. Either directly or indirectly (like the CIA and it’s many tentacles).
Hey!
Fun fact! Did you know that the United States is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars right now? Yeah. It is. Bet you cannot name them all. And you also wanna know something else? They are all smaller and unable to defend themselves from the nuclear super-power.
Harry Dunn
Well…
Perhaps it’s time for me to butt-in and say a few word about all of this. Eh?
The scarlet pimpernel.
When the British Empire was at it’s peak, it too invaded nations on the slightest whim. And the excuses were the same as they are today “because we should take precautions”. And so, let’s look at one of those little nations states that the British Empire overran and conquered…
The following is a reprint of an article titled “British Invasion of Madagascar” and Authored by John W. Osborn, Jr.. It is reprinted as found with only minor editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author and his work.
British forces were compelled to invade the island Madagascar off the coast of East Africa amid fears of a Japanese invasion.
By John W. Osborn, Jr.
“The first I saw of Madagascar and the last after adventurous months ashore was the eerie color of the soil,”
…a British novelist turned security sergeant would write a decade later.
“It gave to the sky, the vegetation, and the people a strangeness, even a deathliness which still shadows my recollections of the island. For the soil and the dust which rose from it to cake our skins and clothes, our eyelids and nostrils was not brick-colored or terra cotta but the color of dried blood.”
Lying 240 miles off the southeast coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, at 226,658 square miles Madagascar ranks just behind Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo in size among the world’s islands.
But with a population in 1942 of just 3.4 million, it had one of the world’s smallest densities, five persons per square mile.
Only 25,000 were French, the rest a mixture of African with ancient arrivals from Malaya and Polynesia dizzyingly divided into 18 sub-ethnic groups such as the Antandroy, the “people of the bush brambles,” and the Tsmimihety, the “people who do not cut their hair.”
Madagascar
Though discovered by Europeans in 1506, its French rulers did not bother to take possession until 1897. Under the rule of Vichy collaborators, the island was ignored and isolated for most of the war; however, events in the Pacific brought it briefly into the action.
As World War II raged on all over the globe, the people of Madagascar lived their lives in peace and tranquility. Knowing full well that they were safe as being uninteresting and of little importance int he grand scheme of things.
When he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor in his London headquarters, the leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, asked an aide what he thought the consequences would be for France.
“The Indian Ocean becomes a major theater of operations, and Madagascar suddenly takes on strategic importance. The Japanese will try to seize it,”
…the aide astutely answered.
In Japanese hands, the magnificent harbor of Diego Suarez at the northeast tip of the island and the naval base a mile to the south at Antisare could choke off Allied supply lines to India and Egypt.
De Gaulle appealed to the Allies to take Madagascar, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill vetoed the idea.
“Our hands are too full,”
…he cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and told his chief of staff,
“Madagascar must still have low priority.”
But then the Japanese captured Singapore and Burma. They landed on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. With Ceylon threatened, the British war cabinet decided on July 12, 1942, to seize only Diego Suarez rather than all of Madagascar.
“The rest of the enormous island was of less strategic importance,” Churchill later explained. “With the memories of Dakar in our mind, we could not complicate the operation by admitting the Free French. The decision was taken for a purely British expedition.”
Churchill called the campaign for Madagascar …
“our first large-scale amphibious operation since the Dardanelles.”
Operation Ironclad got underway just 12 nights later, winter clothing seen loaded amid rumors of a commando operation against occupied Norway. Rear Admiral Neville Syfret commanded the aircraft carriers Illustrious and Indomitable,the battleship Ramillies, a pair of cruisers, nine destroyers, six corvettes, and an equal number of minesweepers.
Maj. Gen. Robert Sturges commanded 13,000 troops.
During the effort to gain control of the port of Diego Suarez on the island of Madagascar, British soldiers come ashore with their equipment on May 5, 1942.
“It was the nearest I would come to realizing a conception of ‘adventure,’”
…Sergeant Rupert Croft-Cooke later wrote. He had already had his share of extraordinary experiences, working in a circus, traveling with a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, and wandering Europe in an old bus. The writer was now heading for the strangest of all.
The convoy rounded the Cape of Good Hope, spent five days docked in Durban, South Africa, to load supplies, then headed north into the Mozambique Channel separating Madagascar from the African mainland.
Facing the British would be 8,000 unenthusiastic local conscripts along with Foreign Legionnaires and tough Senegalese soldiers from West Africa. “We were told in a whisper that we had agents ashore keeping us informed of every defensive measure of the enemy,” Croft-Cooke wrote. The top British agent on Madagascar since November 1940 was Percy Mayer, a businessman whose work took him all over the island, while his wife, much admired in what passed for society with her looks and piano playing, tapped out his messages to Durban in their bathroom.
“But,” Croft-Cooke recalled, “when the last night came and we realized that in the small hours, the landing would start, the prospect, viewed in the tropical sunlight, suddenly seemed forlorn, uncertain of success, exceedingly dangerous.”
The campaign for Madagascar opened at 4:40 amon May 5, 1942, with the attack at Diego Suarez.
Fairey Swordfish and Albacore aircraft from the carriers bombed shipping at anchor in the harbor and destroyed most of Vichy’s 30 aircraft on the ground, while the fleet shelled the town and paratroopers descended.
Caught in town, Percy Mayer rushed from his hotel room into the street. Unluckily for him, he ran right into a Vichy patrol. When he was searched, secret messages were located on him. He quickly found himself in a cell at Antisare’s naval base, told he would be summarily executed, and was at least offered a priest.
Only the air strikes had been real. The naval bombardment had been star shells and signal rockets, light instead of heat, the “paratroopers” merely dummies. The real attack was taking place on the island’s western side, at Courier Bay and Ambarata.
“Firing at night is not to be contemplated, the entrance to the bay being considered impossible,” a French staff report confidently concluded. Royal Navy minesweepers were nonetheless able to skillfully navigate the shoals, reefs, and mines and then drop buoys for the troopships to follow.
After coming ashore on Madagascar, British soldiers of the King’s African Rifles assemble on the beach.
Commandos and East Lancashire regulars proceeded to scale the 50-foot cliff overlooking Courier Bay. “We moved up to a gun position which we could see clearly in the moonlight,” a Royal Artillery captain serving as a forward observer related.
“Strangely enough, all was quiet and deserted, no sentries were posted, and no sign of life of at all. As dawn broke, we saw some buildings and went in to investigate. There we found the gunners all in bed.”
There was little initial opposition. “In sweltering heat, loaded like pack mules with ammo and grenades, we marched against a hot wind across the 8-mile isthmus to Diego Suarez,” one Commando remembered. When the Commandos and the Lancashire troops reached Diego Suarez at 4:30 pm they finally met bitter resistance.
Sergeant Rupert Croft-Cooke and the 29th Independent Brigade, in the meantime, had come ashore at Ambarate. He dragged his motorcycle to shore, kicked it to life, then joined the advance up the single, dusty road 21 miles east toward Antisare.
“There was no sound of firing, no glimpse of the enemy,” he wrote. “Ten miles or more distance were covered before we saw anything but red earth and florid vegetation.”
“Soon after noon, the battle started,” he continued. He had been traveling 20 yards behind the Bren carrier that the 29th’s commander, Brigadier Fredrick Festing, was riding in. Known as Frontline Frankie, he was, as usual, hundreds of yards ahead of the column when firing suddenly broke out. The British rushed to cover behind the roadside trees and bushes. After five minutes, one of a half-dozen supporting Valentine tanks clanked up. As he walked toward it, Festing saw Croft-Cooke and yelled, “Been fired on much, sergeant?”
“No sir, not at all.”
“I’ve got to speak to that tank,” Festing said and started whacking the turret with his walking stick. More irritated than impressed, Croft-Cooke rode back down the road to rejoin his security section.
The prospect of a Japanese invasion of Madagascar threatened the security of British interests in the western reaches of the Indian Ocean and along the coast of East Africa. However, Vichy French resistance to the British occupation of the island resulted in some difficult fighting before Madagascar was secured.
Festing drove the Vichy defenders back with armor, then a bayonet charge. Hours later, descending a hill and coming to a bridge across a stream, the British vanguard came upon a dilapidated corrugated iron building with a sign that said “Robinson’s Hotel.”
It was actually a store.
“In every village of Madagascar, we afterward learned, there was a Chinaman’s store, usually a tin shanty,”
Croft-Cooke recalled. It was quickly taken over as field headquarters for Festing and Sturges, with Croft-Cooke in charge of the guard detail. All the while, the ancient Chinese proprietor served tea, chattering in his unique brand of French.
Three miles from Antisare, the surprised British ran into a network of pillboxes and trenches the Vichy soldiers called the Joffre Line. Percy Mayer, still sweating out his appointment with the firing squad, had reported on it, but the information had never reached Sturges.
“The firing was now intense and from all sides,” Croft-Cooke related. “Our own artillery and the French 75s were audible in the universal racket of mortars, machine-gun and rifle fire.” Festing threw in his armor, only to have it stopped by a 2,000-yard-long antitank ditch. The last four of the Valentines and two of the six light Tetrarch tanks making up the rest of the operation’s armor were knocked out by artillery fire. Their crews leaped out and fought Senegalese soldiers hand to hand to reach safety. Festing recommended Captain Peter Palmer, killed trying to save his wounded driver, for what would have produced the campaign’s only Victoria Cross, but he was instead awarded the Military Cross.
A long day came to a merciful end at 6:30 pm. “Now, it was deep night, and the crowded stars of the southern hemisphere shone brightly,” Croft-Cooke wrote. To prevent snipers from crawling up in the darkness, the British set the surrounding grass on fire. “I watched the blazing hills and the black shapes of our men against them, and tried to realize that this was a battle, and not merely a rather fantastic night in a strange country.”
Sturges prepared to launch a predawn attack, expecting “a good scrape which would end when we were at breakfast in Antisare.” Actually, he was having his breakfast at 7:30, still at Robinson’s. “It was quite clear that the attack had failed. It was an unhappy moment,” he admitted.
There were more unhappy moments to come. Despite the fires, snipers got through—a naval signalman sitting next to Croft-Cooke fell forward without a sound, a bullet between his eyes. Then, Robinson’s came under heavy artillery shelling, sending everyone but the Chinese owner dashing to cover. Sturges headed back to the coast to board Syfret’s flagship Ramilliesat 2 pm, “hot, begrimed, and unhappy,” in Syfret’s words, and requesting a diversionary seaborne raid against Antisare.
In less than 30 minutes, the destroyer Anthonywas setting out to race 100 miles around Madagascar with Captain Martin Price and 30 Royal Marines. One of them was Syfret’s valet, who begged to go, Syfret agreeing only with reluctance. He later admitted, “I did not expect a score to survive the night. The next hours were not happy ones.”
Lieutenant Commander John Hodges took the Anthonyinto Antisare Bay in pitch darkness at 8 pm, hoping to make a surprise landing, but searchlights on shore came on. Hodges steadily maneuvered through a gauntlet of fire at 30 knots toward the docks. With no time to stop, he overshot the dock, reversed in by the stern while Price and his Marines jumped off, and then headed full speed back out to sea.
Price divided his Marines to seize objectives. Those rushing the gate at the naval depot where Percy Mayer was taken for execution came under rifle fire. Grenades tossed in response soon had the commander emerging with a white flag. A bugler beside him started to sound the ceasefire. The Marines, mistaking it for an alarm, knocked him down and then apologized. Inside, 50 British prisoners taken in the morning’s failed assault on the Joffre Line were liberated, but not Percy Mayer. Luckily, he had not been shot: sensing defeat, the French had ostensibly paroled him.
Price armed the prisoners and soon had Antisare under control, and despite Syfret’s fears, he had not lost even a single Marine. “This was a brilliant diversion,” wrote Churchill. Price was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for it. Sturges ordered a final assault on the Joffre Line at 8:30. Phone calls from Antisare reported that Price’s raid had broken Vichy morale, and at 11 pm, the burst of signal rockets illuminated the black sky, announcing that the Joffre Line had fallen.
The last holdouts in Diego Suarez gave up in the morning. “It was as though we had won a hard game of rugger, and neither team appeared to have any ill feeling,” Price commented.
Rupert Croft-Cooke saw nothing sporting about the score in losses, for 105 British had been killed and 283 wounded, while Vichy French losses were 145 dead and 336 wounded. “There was little for triumph in our entry,” he wrote. “We were angry at the idiotic obstinacy of the French, who had fought and killed many a good fellow. And why? Because an octogenarian marechal at home had ordered them to do so.”
Another soldier was just as angry: Charles De Gaulle. He was in Washington, D.C., to mend relations with President Roosevelt when a reporter awakened him at midnight for a comment—the first word he had received of the invasion. For the moment, the British preferred to deal with the local Vichy authorities. They would find them as hard to handle as De Gaulle, but for a different reason.
A Grumman Martlet fighter aircraft of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm No. 888 Squadron flies past the old Queen Elizabeth-class battleship HMS Warspite off the coast of Madagascar.A Grumman Martlet fighter aircraft of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm No. 888 Squadron flies past the old Queen Elizabeth-class battleship HMS Warspite off the coast of Madagascar.
When the police, customs officers, teachers, and other assorted necessary functionaries were summoned to the town hall in Diego Suarez and asked by the British to continue working, they protested, one of them asking how it would endanger their pensions to, ironically, collaborate with the occupiers.
The British made the gesture of threatening to jail them so they could claim later they served under duress. Croft-Cooke, for one, could not hide his disdain for such people “who, thinking that their pensions might be lost or their good name obscured in the eyes of their government, refused to admit the one consideration which should have counted with a Frenchman as it did with an Englishman: the defeat of the Boche who sprawled across France and of the Jap who occupied Indo-China.”
Croft-Cooke got on with his own security work, freeing imprisoned Gaullists, rounding up Vichy sympathizers for questioning, and starting a dogged pursuit of two German agents. He even governed for a while as an acting district officer. “I came to like the Malagasy, his innocent mendacity, his primitive timidity, his talent for storytelling, his indolence, courtesy, and sweetness,” he later wrote.
In the meantime, the British left the French in control of central and southern Madagascar, to his irritation. He wrote in 1953,
“One day, I suppose, we shall be told why it was that having taken the only strongly defended port in Madagascar, we remained precariously within an area of 100 square miles before attacking and controlling the rest of the island.”
Three years before, Winston Churchill had explained why. In the fourth volume of his World War II history, The Hinge of Fate,he included a telegram to Admiral Syfret regarding Madagascar. “It must be a help and not a hindrance. It must be a security and not a burden. We cannot lock up field troops there for any length of time,” it read. Syfret had, in fact, concurred. “I think, as far as our occupation of Diego Suarez is concerned, the French will adopt a policy of live and let live.”
Before long, though, the Japanese again forced Churchill to change his mind, this time directly.
“We had settled down to life in that scruffy little seaport as though we would remain there forever,” wrote Croft-Cooke. On the night of May 29, 1942, sudden explosions in the harbor shattered that tranquility.
Ramillieshad a 20-foot hole blown it its side. An oil tanker was sunk. “Where had they come from? What did it portend?” worried Churchill.
It had been a Japanese midget submarine. Attempting to escape after doing the damage, it ran aground on a reef, the two crewmen swimming ashore to be cornered and killed two days later.
During the next two months, several more midget submarine attacks destroyed 34 ships totaling 150,000 tons. The (erroneous) assumption—the midgets actually launched from Japanese fleet submarines—was that the Japanese were operating from the ports still in Vichy hands: Majunga on the west coast, Tamatave on the east. The premier of South Africa, Jan Smuts, put particular political pressure on Churchill, cabling, “Madagascar is the key to the safety of the Indian Ocean. It all points to the necessity of eliminating Vichy control from the whole island as soon as possible.”
The British first responded with bombing missions into Vichy territory by the South African Air Force. One aircraft with a pilot named Jones went down, and Croft-Cooke was sent on a rescue mission to get him back. Jones, though, had salvaged a machine gun from his wrecked bomber and was leading his crew to safety when they were suddenly faced with a French officer and 40 men.
As operations to secure Madagascar continue in November 1942, British soldiers dismantle a roadblock that has been erected to impede their overland progress.
“I must ask you, gentlemen, to consider yourselves my prisoners,” said Jones, firing a burst from the machine gun into the air. The Malagasy accompanying the French officer scattered.
The Frenchman responded, “I surrender unconditionally.” With his prisoner in tow, Jones reached the coast to be picked up by the Royal Navy. Croft-Cooke also found the German agents he was hunting. After receiving a tip, he nabbed them before dawn while they were sleeping in a hut.
“The west coast ports were needed for control of the Mozambique Channel where our convoys were molested by the U-boats. The governor-general remained obdurate. Further operations had to take place,”
…wrote Churchill. In the end, the decision was finally made to occupy the remainder of Madagascar in a three-stage operation named Stream Line Jane.
Stream would be a landing at Majunga, followed immediately by Line, a march on Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, finishing with Jane, a landing at Tamatave. A convoy of reinforcements including the famed King’s African Rifles (KAR) sailed from Mombasa to rendezvous in the Mozambique Channel with Croft-Cooke and the 29th Brigade on the night of September 9, 1942.
Another writer, Kenneth C. Gandar-Dower, was with the reinforcing troops that night. He had flown a rickety two-seater from England to India, later exploring Kenya and the Belgian Congo and publishing accounts of his exploits. The war provided him more opportunity for exotic adventure as a correspondent covering first the invasion of Ethiopia and now Madagascar.
“The world was dark and empty for us—and Madagascar,” he wrote of that night at sea. “I did not know what lay ahead.” What did lie ahead was an episode that would go down in British lore as the Battle Before Breakfast.
The invasion force appeared off Majunga at 3 am. “Between the troopships, something was moving, a little black blob that seemed to have no shape,” Gandar-Dower wrote. “After a while, I realized it was not alone. There was another, and another, and another.”
They were assault craft carrying East Lancashire troops and Welsh Fusiliers to the beach nine miles out of town. When daylight came, his ship moved to 400 yards from shore, and he watched “little figures crawl slowly up cliffs of white chalk, following the convolutions of a winding track, halting, going on…. It was if we cut away half an ant hill, replaced by a pane of glass, and through the glass, were watching ants at war.”
In fact, he was watching a feint attack like the one at Diego Suarez.
Croft-Cooke was coming in with the real landing force, headed straight for the docks. “It took an hour and a half to reach the shore,” he related, “and before we had done, dawn had arrived. We could see Majunga in the rosy light of sunrise, a white city among palms. At first, it seemed peaceful enough, but as we were within earshot, we could hear the sound of machine guns, and we knew the French were resisting. We caught a glimpse of the Commandos hurrying up a narrow street and saw our men along the white sand of the beach.”
The Commandos landed at 5:20, quickly overwhelmed the machine guns then swarmed into the town. Croft-Cooke followed, pushing his ever-present motorcycle through the surf and sand. “The fighting was almost over, but a few shots were still audible to give me the illusion of taking part in a fight for the town,” he recalled.
The Commandos met only scattered resistance as they occupied the bank, post office, and residence of the regional administrator, and in 90 minutes, the battle—such as it was—ended with a dozen British dead. Commandos trying to flank the town had run into a far different, more determined opponent.
“As we traveled up the river,” Fred Munson remembered, “the tide began to go out, and we began to run aground on a sandbank. The river was full of crocodiles, so before we could get into the water to lighten the craft and push them off the sandbanks, hand grenades were thrown into the river to keep the crocodiles at bay.”
In Majunga, the garrison commander, Major Didier Martins, got caught in bed at the time of the attack but managed to get himself slightly wounded in the left elbow and, no doubt for the benefit of his Vichy superiors, made a show of presenting himself with a theatrically oversized sling.
“Did my men fight well?” he asked.
“Magnificently!” the British commander played along.
As at Antisare, finding a bugle to call surrender proved difficult. A young British officer was sent to the Martins home for a white flag. He found Madame Martins hysterically barricaded in her bedroom.
From outside the door, the officer explained why he was there and assured her that he was not going to rape her. The door finally creaked open, and a trembling hand passed out a broomstick and bed sheet. “A curious gaiety spread through the town at lunchtime,” Croft-Cooke observed. “We were openly welcomed, and the hope was expressed we should occupy the capital before long.”
By then, the KAR and a South African armored car column had set out 250 miles southeast to do just that. They covered 131 miles in just 18 hours, only to be slowed to a crawl by the first of some 3,000 roadblocks Vichy forces were eventually to put up all over Madagascar. The KAR worked around the clock dismantling the obstacles and met their only serious opposition 150 miles from Atananarivo, at the mountain village of Ariba.
Senegalese troops kept the KAR under heavy machine-gun fire until a sergeant named Odillo, whose British officer had been killed, led his platoon around the Senegalese and then came screaming down on them wielding three-foot-long, curved panga machetes.
“After firing to the last, one of the Senegalese would jump out and try to scuttle through our lines. We dropped a number of them like rabbits,” the KAR colonel said. Four of the KAR died in the fight, while the eight wounded were laid without rancor or bitterness alongside Senegalese casualties, though neither would accept being put next to a Malagasy conscript.
British colonial troops fire their field artillery pieces toward Vichy French entrenchments on Madagascar. Defending their government’s sovereign territory, the Vichy soldiers were defeated after several sharp fights with the British forces. This action took place near the village of Ambositra.
After 13 days, the column reached Atananarivo to be met by a Special Operations Executive operative, Royal Navy Lieutenant Peter Simpson Jones, standing by a Renault in a crisp, new tropical suit. He and a companion had delivered a radio set to another agent, but their dinghy had capsized in Madagascar’s notoriously shark-infested waters while they were rowing out for pickup. The companion drowned, but Jones was rescued by a fisherman. At his court-martial, at which he was sentenced to five years in prison, the Vichy prosecutor had suggested, “Don’t you think in the next world war,you might do better to join the artillery?”
Percy Mayer’s piano-playing, radio key-tapping wife, who spent several anxious weeks expecting arrest, was also safe. Governor General Armand Annet had fled, and with no one to take the surrender, a British officer walked into the radio station to politely request airtime for a not quite historic announcement:
“At 5 pm, our troops occupied Atananrivo. Everything is quiet. That is all.”
Five days earlier, the Jane portion of the operation had taken place. With the surf at Tamatave too rough for landings in the dark, the plan was to intimidate the town into surrender with an overwhelming show of naval force. “They might bluff up to the last minute, but not beyond it. The guns would never have to fire,” Gandar-Dower believed, but he was proven wrong—for three minutes.
That was how long the British bombardment went on after the French had rejected a 10 AM ultimatum. They hoisted a white flag at 10:03. Gandar-Dower sloshed ashore, bowler hat on head, camera in one hand, typewriter in the other, to witness a great deal of activity—soldiers in firing positions, rushing about, kicking in doors–but no action. “It was,” he wrote, “like a Hollywood assault, which was being held up by the failure of the other side to put in an appearance.”
An old woman shuffled up to him to ask if the battle was over. It was, he said, and soon he and the British were marching into town, at their head, a young lady “in the shortest of bathing costumes and pair of first-class legs.”
Even though Stream Line Jane had been successfully completed, the campaign for Madagascar would drag on for six senseless weeks. With a mix of defiance and delusion, Governor General Annet had sent off a crazed cable to Vichy: “Our available troops are preparing to resist every enemy advance with the same spirit which inspired our soldiers at Diego Suarez, at Majunga, at Atananarivo, where each time the defense became a page of heroism written by La France.”
British troops affected widespread landing don the West coast of Madagascar, including the ports of Majunga and Morondava. At Majunga, opposition, which was only slight, was soon overcome and the civil and military authorities arranged the surrender of the town. British Bren gun carrier on the road in Majunga, Madagascar, Oct. 5, 1942. (AP Photo)
He had fled 190 miles south to Finanarantsoa, and the KAR had set off in pursuit. Gandar-Dower followed in a confiscated Citroen truck, bicycle, and pirogue, admitting, “We saw little of the war, but met with a great deal of curious adventure.”
Rupert Croft-Cooke was having his own adventure with a lieutenant and a half-dozen soldiers searching for a French lieutenant with 100 conscripts. Along the way, they had encountered crocodiles, chasing them off with rifle shots. They later came upon a female English missionary, alone, forgotten, and resigned to staying after over 40 years.
“Five hours of being paddled up a crocodile-infested river in Madagascar to a collection of native huts does not prepare one for such an encounter,” Croft-Cooke wrote. Then he and the lieutenant finally had their discussion with the French officer:
“You have, of course, some soldiers?” the Frenchman asked.
“Yes,” the British one replied. “We have some soldiers.”
“Naturally, they are armed?”
“Naturally.”
“Automatic weapons, I presume?”
“Tommy guns.”
“You have, perhaps, some other forces in the area?”
“We have.”
“With some artillery, no doubt?”
“Certainly.” It was back at the coast.
“Ah. You will excuse me a moment.” He immediately wired Annet, “Occupied today by British forces armed with automatic weapons and supported by artillery.”
The campaign became one more of annoyance than action as the stubborn Vichy put up hundreds more roadblocks. “When I shut my eyes and think of Madagascar, I see one enormous roadblock,” Gandar-Dower remembered.
The French laid melon-sized rocks exactly 20 yards apart for miles and erected 18-foot stone walls. In the last significant action, the KAR turned an attempted ambush on itself, marching 30 miles around to attack from the rear, killing 40 and taking 800 prisoners. The Malagasy, always quick to run from battle, were now running away for good, deserting in droves. Even worse for the Vichy, law and order were breaking down. Croft-Cooke was an official witness at the execution by firing squad of a Malagasy for the unprecedented murder of a French settler.
After a five-week march, the KAR reached Finanarantsoa, only to find that Annet had fled another 190 miles southwest. With the KAR still in pursuit and after almost being killed when his staff car was strafed from the air, Annet finally sent his aide, Captain Louis Fauche, to negotiate surrender. In a 650-mile march, the KAR had routed 6,000 defenders for a loss of five British officers killed, six wounded and 20 Africans killed, 76 wounded.
Fauche agreed to surrender with the curious condition that it did not go into effect for another 10 hours, until 12:01 amon November 6, 1942.
The reason turned out to be, to the very end, about career concerns. Having the campaign last for exactly six months qualified the French for medals, promotions, and even cash awards, but any chance was dashed days later. To cap the fruitless futility of it all in Madagascar, the Germans occupied Vichy France.
Churchill was modestly satisfied with the campaign for Madagascar. “We had gained full military control over an island of high strategic importance to the safety of our communication with the Near and Far East,” he noted. “The Madagascar episode was in its secrecy of planning and tactical execution a model of amphibious operations. The news arrived at a time when we sorely needed success. It was in fact for long months the only sign of good and efficient war direction of which the British public were conscious.”
De Gaulle was angered at being left out. Kenneth Gandar-Dower, by contrast, later wrote, “It was for me a fascinating experience, an isolated six weeks of strange adventure.” He admitted that it was “certainly more than an exercise, but very much less than a war…. The French consciously or unconsciously conducted their defense according to formula. The first was ‘maximum results for minimum expenditure.’ The second: ‘resist as long and as fiercely as you can without loss of life—either French or British.’” Gandar-Dower’s exotic adventuring and writing ended when his transport was torpedoed en route to Ceylon on February 12, 1944.
Rupert Croft-Cooke soon left Madagascar for his next and last wartime posting, India. He spent most of his postwar life in other out-of-the-way locales, including Morocco and Tunisia, after serving six months in prison for homosexual activity in England in 1953, but he was through with Madagascar. He later wrote, “I shall never go back to Madagascar with its blood-red earth and creeping shadows.”
He continued with his prolific, if ultimately forgotten, writing and in 1953 published his account of events in Madagascar titled The Blood-Red Island. Tragically, Madagascar would become that, and not just from the soil. An uprising in 1947 against the French was crushed with perhaps 100,000 dead, and independence in 1958 was marked by more violence and tribal strife.
Empires come and go.
No empire stays around for long. They all have a half-life. This is simply because humanity cannot exist, let alone thrive under an empire. It just cannot.
Empires come and go.
Some thoughts…
It is easy, so very easy, to get caught up in the history of the past. So and so, directing troops of Mr. XYZ and using the artillery of ABC attacked the hamlet of ZZZZ. So exciting. So interesting. So fascinating.
And the geo-political issues… well it is often simplified to “it had to happen, as other decisions were in motion”. Like “we had to invade Madagascar to stop the Japs (the Japanese) from invading Africa, or the Middle East, or the Mediterranean sea.” It was a necessity. They all argue.
Now…
Pause.
Think.
Look at a bigger, a much bigger picture.
No, I’m not talking about the Japanese Empire fighting the British Empire. Or the Russian Empire fighting the German Empire. Or the American empire fighting the world.
Nor, am I talking about the bankers and their control of the finances of the world. (For they tend to be the major players in all this nasty wars and fighting nonsense.)
I am talking about something, much bigger.
Something much bigger than earth-wide politics.
There are so many people, involved in so many aspects of human society that it is one big enormous mess. Everyone is fighting and striving for the bits and crumbs left over on the ground. The “news” is off yelling and screeching one narrative after the other in rapid and rabid succession. And even though you have a kind of allegiance to one side of a complex social-economic coin, the truth of the matter is something else entirely.
We are all puppets.
The American oligarchy has created factions that they pit against one another so that the peasants (debit serfs = you) will not rise up and kill them all.
And with all this confusion going on…
…and all this turmoil, just how can anyone sort any thing out?
The owners of the Earth have a say on what goes on…
What if you were an extraterrestrial looking at this entire event. What if you were watching dispassionately. What would you think about all of this? What would you think of the British invading a tiny island (ok, maybe not so tiny) off the coast of Africa?
What would you think?
Why was the UK busy invading Madagascar?
Why?
Why was the British busy invading Madagascar?
Why, indeed.
What was all this about?
At that time, the entire globe was plunged into war. Empires fought empires. And there were a bunch of them. Don’t you know.
And afterwards…
The British Empire collapsed in stages.
Leaving only two empires remaining. The Soviet Union Empire, and the United States Empire.
In the late 1980’s the Soviet Union Empire collapsed, and that left the United States Empire that maintained sole dominance of much of the globe.
From the 1980’s to today (2020), forty years…
It’s been non stop military wars, military development, military bases. All either open or covert. And while all this has been going on, the internal structure, and balance of what America was founded upon has rotted away. And what is left?
Nothing much.
Americans (and the rest of the world) are “burned out”. They want all this fighting, bickering, and torment to end. They just want to live their lives in peace.
And now today…
You all have a Casino owner for a President, and a cabal of war-mongering neocons that are gonna show the world that America is still the toughest bully in the world. Meanwhile, the media is full of fear, fear fear to control an increasingly upset population of debit serfs, and modern slaves in the urban centers.
Conflict is all but certain…
All of the indicators are pointing to this in alarm!
From 2020 through 2025, will be a very testy and trying time for America and for Americans. However, things will start to get much better and by 2030, everything will be just fine.
We know what is going on.
We know what is happening and why.
But…
You know, if I was an extraterrestrial, and my species was in charge of the earth I would look at things quite differently. I really would.
An extraterrestrial head’s up.
In fact, I would not care at all about the details. Let the humans fight among each other. Let them sort things out. My concern would be long term and everlasting damage. But even at that, there would be some leeway provided.
I would do the following…
I would isolate the biggest troublemaker (the USA from the rest of the world).
Economically, and by trade.
By treaties with other nations.
Keep the citizens of that nation fighting among themselves.
I would allow the nation to collapse.
No support for new technology.
No intervention of any type.
Instead, I’d make new alliances with healthier nations.
In fact, all things being equal, I would permit limited global war engagement.
Sometimes it’s better to kill the rabid dog before it infects others.
Isolation of the battlefield(s) to the American nation.
Permit and encourage shunning or isolation of the rabid nation.
Change the system
I would permit and encourage the development of other forms of commerce.
And, other forms of finance.
And, other forms and systems of society.
Allowing traditional governance with a heavily monitored presence.
Now, with this under consideration, is that not what is going on now?
Sentience selection and sorting. A fight for the dominant sentience for humans. Shall it be “Service for self” (The American neocon, and Oligarchy preference), “Service for others” (Which is more Buddhist, and representative of China, and Russia.) or a continuation of the current state with a segregated humanity. One that has two sentience’s for mankind; a ruling “Service for self”, and a subservient, servant class “Service for another” sentience?
What is going on today…
Let’s look, shall we…
For Americans
it’s confusing. The rabid dog is barking up a storm, jumping around all over, and has started to rollover and over on the dirt, causing you and your fellow fleas great discomfort. To make matters worse, some fleas actually cheer the dog on. Telling everyone else that they have never had it so good, and that the dog must bark to preserve their “flea society”.
It’s all a big mess on the back of that nasty rabid dog.
You are here.
So to understand how to survive and get through the next couple of decades, understand that you all (if you are Americas) are fleas on a very sick and rabid dog. He’s running around everywhere, barking up a storm and digging holes all over the yard. The other dogs are afraid of him, and the farmer has got his shotgun out because he doesn’t want his prized poodle, and collie torn up by the rabid pit bull. Will he pull the trigger?
For the rest of the world
Well, you are a flea on the back of one of the other dogs in the yard. You know that the farmer probably will not shoot your dog. But that crazed rabid dog has been barking and snarling at your dog for some some time now. If the farmer does not shoot, the crazed rabid dog will tear your dog to pieces…
Whats going to happen?
Well…
Time is our friend. Not our enemy.
And the invasion by America of another nation will only accelerate the coming end of the United States. Not delay it.
MAKE NO MISTAKE. Things are falling into place as they should. And do not get too caught up on all the details, and the lies spewing forth from the dying nation.
A big reminder…
What you think the universe is, what you think reality is, and what science is … well, it’s all wrong. The reality that we inhabit is quite different than what you all think. And when I say that things are happening and following a plan because that’s the way it is …
… well, believe me. OK.
Strange coincidences…
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America is following the same sort of evolution that all nations experience. And as the United States sunsets into the mire of folly and corruption, I find myself musing about the past and other historical precedents. I’ve looked at Germany, and Rome. I’ve looked at some of the more promising nations in South America, and I’ve looked at some of the amazing stories from China. From what I can tell, stability in a nation requires a combination of skills. Some of which might include intelligence, but it certainly includes both emotional / social skills and a degree of ruthlessness in use.
Here we look at Empress CiXi.
She is a well-known historical figure, well at least by the Chinese. She is virtually unknown in the West, and if you were to ask any of the Portland Protestors about her, they wouldn’t have a clue as to what you were talking about.
This is a reprint of the article titled “Empress Cixi Brought China Into The Modern Age — And Wasn’t Afraid To Kill Her Enemies” written by James Burch and published on October 14, 2019. It has been reformatted to fit this venue and all credit to the original author.
Empress Cixi Brought China Into The Modern Age — And Wasn’t Afraid To Kill Her Enemies
Some suspect that Cixi killed her dead son’s pregnant wife so she wouldn’t have to compete for power with a legitimate heir.
Within
Beijing’s Forbidden City, beyond the imposing gates and the great
halls, lie the buildings that once housed the emperor’s harem, an
institution that evokes a time of oppression. But it was out of these
quarters that a woman born in obscurity and confined as a concubine came
to transform the world’s most populous empire.
History long depicted the Empress Dowager Cixi as a scheming despot
who brought her country to ruin. But this scapegoating is not only
simplistic, it’s inaccurate, as the flawed but skilled de facto ruler
brought China into the modern age.
Wikimedia Commons; Cixi in c. 1890, when she was around 55 years old. This photo was taken by court photographer Yu Xunling and colorized by Imperial Court painters.
Cixi: Teenage Concubine
The girl who would one day be called Cixi was born in 1835 to the
Yehenara clan. Her father seems to have been a regional administrator,
although reliable details about her family and early life are lacking.
The Yehenara, like the Qing dynasty rulers, were ethnically Manchu,
which afforded them special status above the Han Chinese majority.
At age 16, she stood before the Xianfeng Emperor and was chosen for
his harem, assigned to the lowest rank. In the Qing Empire, life as an
imperial courtesan carried more prestige than you might imagine. It
certainly offered more security than most people had during her
lifetime. As concubine, she received the title “Noble Lady Lan.”
Wikimedia Commons – The Xianfeng Emperor was without a son until Cixi came along as a concubine.
Two years into his reign, the emperor had inherited a country in
crisis. The Taiping Rebellion, a civil war on an apocalyptic scale, had
begun across China and would ultimately leave at least 20 million dead —
twice the death toll of World War I.
Capital Of A Suffering Empire
In 1856, Cixi ensured her influence in the emperor’s court after
giving birth to his only son and heir. Soon enough, she was the second
highest ranking woman in the palace. Nonetheless, her son would
officially belong to her superior, the Empress Zhen.
The Xianfeng era was not going well. In addition to the endless civil wars, Great Britain continued to push back against Qing Dynasty isolationism. In 1856, allied with France, the British again went to war with China.
In 1858, the imperial court fled from the Anglo-French forces, who took the capital and looted and burned the emperor’s Summer Palaces.
Wikimedia Commons – China suffered a defeat to the Anglo-French forces in this battle of the Second Opium War, 1860.
The Xianfeng Emperor died in 1861, leaving the empire in a precarious
position. In this context, during the royal court’s exile in Rehe
province, the newly titled Empress Dowager Cixi, began her consolidation
of power.
Filling The Power Vacuum
According to the dying wishes of the Xianfeng Emperor, eight high
ministers would form a Grand Council to advise his five-year-old
successor, the Tongzhi Emperor. Cixi, meanwhile, had formed an alliance
with a higher-ranking colleague, now the Empress Dowager Ci’an. They
maintained that they were to be the boy emperor’s official co-regents,
with the power to approve or reject any edict.
The empresses dowager went ahead to Beijing ahead of the funeral
cortege. They received the cooperation of Prince Gong, one of the late
emperor’s brothers and a believer in modernization. Cixi, Ci’an, and
Prince Gong staged a coup and led charges of disloyalty by three
ministers they deemed to be hostile to their own power base.
Cixi intervened on behalf of the condemned, reducing their sentences
from death by slow cutting, to decapitation for one, and suicide by
strangulation for the others.
Prince Gong in 1860, as photographed by Felice Beato.
Three Rulers And A Puppet
The senior Empress Dowager Ci’an would oversee the palace, while Cixi
took the lead in affairs of state and politics. Prince Gong was the
visible face of the trio, since decorum required that Cixi listen to
meetings from out of sight. The young Tongzhi Emperor retreated from
public affairs during his upbringing.
The young Tongzhi Emperor disliked studies.
The terms of peace after the Second Opium War punished China. Western
countries now could establish enclaves along China’s coast. But the
Qing court could enlist the help of the French and British in fighting
the Taiping rebels. Cixi encouraged the adoption of foreign military
technology and guidance.
A new school, the Tongwen Guan, taught international languages and
science. Cixi favored many proposals for industrialization and
modernization, collectively known as the Self-Strengthening Movement,
although she opposed railroads, saying the noise disturbed the dead.
Cixi had developed a close, and perhaps romantic, friendship with An
Dehai, one of her eunuch attendants. The favor she showed him did not
sit well with Prince Gong and court officials. In 1869, they had the man
beheaded.
The Tongzhi Emperor came to rule in his own right at age 17, but had
less interest in governing than in sheer entertainment. When he
dismissed Prince Gong from his court, he received a stern,
protocol-breaking lecture from Cixi and Ci’an, and their ally was
reinstated.
An Dehai, the Empress Dowager Cixi’s favorite eunuch, was beheaded by Prince Gong and his allies. Cixi apparently did nothing to stop them.
The Tongzhi Emperor died at age 18, and rumors suggested syphilis as
the cause, given his multiple affairs with prostitutes. Modern review
has ruled that out, but the gossip is a measure of his public image.
Surprising Reversals
Cixi hadn’t gotten along with her son’s wife, the Empress Xiaozheyi,
who regarded the former concubine as an inferior. Suspiciously,
Xiaozheyi died very soon after her husband, along with her unborn child.
Cixi then adopted her three-year-old nephew, who became the Guangxu Emperor. Oddly, she ordered
him to call her his “royal father.” Ci’an emerged as the principal
regent of the period, as Cixi was suffering bad health. But in 1881,
Ci’an herself died of a stroke. Cixi was again in command.
The Guangxu Emperor assumed power at age 18 in 1889, and Cixi
nominally went into retirement on the outskirts of Beijing, though
foreign governments sometimes wrote to Cixi directly, bypassing the
emperor.
The Empress Dowager (center) with courtiers in 1902, the year following the Boxer Rebellion. Empress Xiaodingjing stands second from left. Yu Xunling, photographer.
In 1898, Cixi opposed a rapid modernization program, called the Hundred Days’ Reform. Advocated by the emperor and his advisors, the plan proposed a constitutional monarchy.
Cixi worked to block the reforms, and to remove the reformers, executing those who didn’t manage to escape first. The Guangxu Emperor was placed under house arrest on an island adjacent to the Forbidden City, and would never again wield power.
Anti-foreign sentiment in China coalesced into the Boxer Rebellion,
named for its organization’s martial arts practices. In another turn,
Cixi expressed sympathy with the movement. In 1900, militias attacked
the coastal mini-colonies. Following the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion,
Cixi publicly apologized for supporting it, and China made restitution
payments to the countries affected.
Cixi now changed course again, advocating for a limited monarchy. She
stood for photographs and painted portraits in a kind of charm
offensive, offering prints to palace visitors.
But as her health failed, Cixi arranged that yet another child would
be next in line for the throne, a declaration she made from her deathbed
before her death on Nov. 15, 1908. Just the previous day, the Guangxu
Emperor had himself died of arsenic poisoning. Cixi was buried in a
palatial tomb east of the capital.
Upon hearing the news of the deaths, anarchist Wu Zhihui referred to
Cixi and her nephew as a “vermin empress and vermin emperor” whose
“lingering stench makes me vomit.”
This portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi was painted in 1905 by Dutch artist Hubert Vos.
Self-Serving Usurper Or Brilliant Leader?
In the Republic of China, Cixi was a target for contempt. Her image in the English-speaking world was colored by the book China Under the Empress Dowager,
written by John Otway Percy Bland, a journalist, and Edmund Backhouse,
an utter fraud, whose fantastical stories Bland chose not to question.
The early Chinese Communist Party had no love for any “feudal”
tyrants. Only in the 1970s did anyone question the melodramatic
caricature of Cixi as a “Dragon Lady,” an unfortunate nickname that
remains.
Modern historians credit the Empress Dowager Cixi for pulling China through difficult times, while others vilify her for her numerous executions and opposition to crucial reforms that would have risked her own hold on power. It’s remarkable that she held onto power for 45 years — but at what cost?
Conclusion
You have just learned about the life of those in power.
Do you actually believe that things are different today?
Oh you might call the type of governance different, and you might have different technologies, and different societal constructs, but the fact remains that the lifestyles of the wealthy, the famous, the rulers and their first tier actuators do not resemble ANYTHING like the subjects that they rule over.
It doesn’t matter if the year is 1908…
Or 2008.
There is a fundamental change in the personality of a person who obtains power. We say that they are “corrupted”, but that’s not really accurate. They change.
They change.
They become something different.
This different “thing” can be monstrous or glorious or something in-between, but they do and actually change.
As such…
You cannot expect them to think as you do. You cannot expect them to experience life as you do. You cannot expect them to understand you, your needs or the relationships that you have with your friends, or your industry or your pastimes. For that all is alien to them.
They might as well be from another planet.
If mankind is going to advance in any way, we have to recognize that power changes humans into something else. And that once a person in put in charge of the reigns of power they can NEVER return back to a “normal” state of life. And for the world to be a better place; one where humanity interacts peacefully and coexists with the environment, we must recognize that power is too dangerous to entrust to individual humans. And that for proper and safe governance, some other system must be put in place that differs SUBSTANTIALLY from any other system already implemented on the planet.
Ponder a spell about the implications of that.
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You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Normally I’m not that surprised with things that happen. I know that there is no such thing as coincidences, and that the American military empire is collapsing and thrashing all about. But you know, even I can be bitch slapped from time to time. And this is one of those times.
No shit!
yes. I had bought into the story about the ammonium nitrate warehouse being an accident. I really did. I knew about the Donald Trump / Pompeo shit about the biological weapons attacks on China, the NED, and all that nonsense in Hong Kong. But, you know, I figured that he wouldn’t REALLY start blowing shit up. Not really.
Oh, boy was I wrong!
I just couldn’t believe that Trump would do such a thing. This is true, even though I realized that it was quite a coincidence that this port was earmarked for the Chinese BRI (Belt and Road Initiative), and that suddenly it was destroyed in a completely massive “accidental” explosion. And all of a sudden, a gateway to the BRI is completely obliterated.
An accident?
A coincidence?
Photographs, both visual and thermal, say otherwise.
Not to mention that both President Trump and the Lebanese government has confirmed this to be the case.
The following is a reprint of an article on Veterans Today. It is titled “Updated: Israel hits Beirut with nuclear missile, Trump and Lebanese Govt. confirm”, and written on August 15, 2020. Edited to fit this venue. All credit to the original author and the post.
Updated: Israel hits Beirut with nuclear missile, Trump and Lebanese Govt. confirm
Trump confirms this was a bombing, not an accident and is immediately scourged by pro-Israel press…starting with the Daily Beast.
Overwhelming evidence that Israeli F 16s had just finished an attack run on Warehouse 12 when the large explosion occurred. We have dozens of reliable eyewitnesses and many videos, sound and even the planes pulling out of a dive, not birds, they don’t fly 350 knots, not normally. (Lots of birds were flying away, they look exactly like birds)
Lebanese govt and Hezbollah now accepting that ammonium nitrate was in no way involved. Lebanon is built on rock and everything has to be blasted. The Lebanese know explosives, know how to use AN and all in Lebanon know this is a hoax. AN is not explosive, it burns even in an explosive slurry (ANFO) unless very large TNT charges are used to initiate.
All involved in the AN story, the Russian ship tale, or claiming it exploded are now terror suspects though most are simply internet idiots. AN is debunked.
This video has Trump’s real statement, he is 100% behind VT (embarrassing)…
Investigators are now looking at a two pronged and complex Israeli attack using a probable nuclear tipped Rampage missile (new design) while covering with an F 16 attack and possible conventional explosive. At this point, this is most likely as seen by investigators.
Rampage missile.
Narrative Rewritten
And now to the original story which has been hacked, backward counted by Google and so much more. We love it… VT was right once again while world media just published cheap slop. This never would have happened before early dementia Reagan got on the ‘free enterprise’ train for consolidating America’s wonderfully diverse privately owned local and regional independent media.
#Breaking #Syria President Assad orders all borders and ports in the country open to #Lebanon, orders caravans of ambulances to head to #Beirut and ferry injured to hospitals in #Damascus, and launches an air bridge of medical and food supplies between the two cities
Absurdity squared: YouTube and Facebook “Fact Checkers,” employed by the people VT claims staged the attack are wiping the evidence from the internet…who would have guessed it.
…by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor, with…
Nahed al Husaini, VT Bureau Chief Damascus
Jeff Smith, VT Editor, IAEA Nuclear Inspector/Particle Physicist
Actual Photos of the missiles
This is the original video frame, never posted anywhere, that proves everything on Facebook and YouTube which was taken down is real.
This is the grandfather of them all, one carefully validated as untouched and genuine.
Infrared images of the missile itself prior to impact:
Infrared photos of the missiles
Set II Different camera, different angle
Frame 1 BeirutFrame 2 BeirutFrame 3 Beirut
This is the same missile seen from a slightly different angle on impact.
Israeli Delilah missile carrying 6 kiloton (6000 tons of TNT equivalent) nuclear missile (unretouched photo via VT Damascus) Tineye says this is a unique image and doesn’t appear anywhere on the web. We, however, are always suspicious when something seems ‘too good to be true.’
This is an infrared video which shows, at 6 seconds, the missile coming in and hitting…
This infrared video makes much more sense than ammonium nitrate on its own. Yes NH4NO3 is an oxidising agent and explosive under the right conditions, it is also very stable.
Judge for yourself. Doctored video? Different location? Or #Beirut attacked?
pic.twitter.com/T0LnUqDvoy— Darren of Plymouth 🇬🇧 (@DarrenPlymouth)
August 6, 2020
This is the video that was removed from Youtube for “violating content”.
Pixel analysis says this is a good photo. Thus, debunking it will become a huge issue. An army of trolls is already on Twitter and Facebook.
” First explosion was caused by Gabriel anti ship missile of Israel. The second explosion was caused by Israeli Delilah missile from F16. Our country is in complete jeopardy with this lazy and corrupt regime.”
This is the radiation signature of the explosion received from a source in Italy, submitted to VT by the International Atomic Energy Agency (UN).
So it is actually a NUCLEAR WEAPON.
Evidence of a nuclear fission event in the Eastern MediterraneanTrump confirms attack (nuclear not mentioned) and has suddenly become an “Enemy of Israel” (In 2015, Trump was referred to VT as a source of intelligence briefings. Eventually his staff turned to InfoWars and Steve Bannon. You can see how that has worked out.)
The media in the west claiming that this massive nuclear like explosion is from "fireworks"
-NO THE HELL IT WAS NOT!-
My heart is so heavy 💔😔😭
-Prayers for Beirut, Lebanon 🇱🇧pic.twitter.com/yAom0z9ZgG
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) August 4, 2020
Official statements from Lebanon
VT: A general in the Lebanese Army reports that Israel dropped a tactical nuclear weapon on the port of Beirut today. He reports that this was done to collapse the current political regime there and revolt against Hezbollah.
Their denial, almost identical to Israel’s supports this hypothesis.
As the lies begin, nothing about this explosion, the mushroom cloud or the strength of the explosion is fireworks, which was the first lie, then ammonium nitrate fertilizer, they say under 3k tons, which was stored for years to use on Lebanon’s golf courses, when they decide to build them. No, nothing about today is funny.
Israel statement
We also add that earlier today, Netanyahu’s statement which we believe is Israel taking credit for the attack. Beirut is still bomb damaged by Israel from 2006. How you take Netanyahu’s statements as outlined in Times of Israel today, is a matter of faith, trust or conjecture.
نتنياهو قال اليوم بأن اسرائيل ستفعل”ما هو ضروري"لحماية نفسها،تهديد لحزب الله- ما يفسر التفجيرات في #بيروت
-Netanyahu said “will do what is necessary in order to defend ourselves”. An obvious warning to Hezbollah, and this explains the explosions in #Beiruthttps://t.co/8ZVLNBA31A
— Reem Al-Harmi ريم الحرمي chez moi 🏠 (@Reem_AlHarmi) August 4, 2020
“Getting reports from Beirut, a tactical miniature nuclear bomb has been used to attack the port, nuclear experts and researchers have randomly pointed out to the reacted particles in the fire ball.
Even if there is going to be a government cover up for peace and political implications in the coming hours, one thing is clear, it is a clandestine operation by some anti-Lebanon foreign agency not by some random terrorist (non-state actor).
Terrorists involved in Urban Warfare in ME do not have access to these highly advance tactical weapons. If they have it now, then someone is equipping them for political gains. Let us wait for the official statements from Lebanon. I hope our friends from Beirut are safe.
As per my latest source of information from Beirut. There is going to be a government cover up. The story about “Nitrate in the containers” is going to be declared as the original cause of the second massive explosion that caused the major damage. This will become the official narrative in the msm.
However, what influential and credible sources from Beirut are telling me is this: “The Beirut explosion is about 100 times the energy than the 2015 Tianjin explosion, or 5.4 kilotons of TNT equivalent (using linear extrapolation from Tianjin, which involved 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate).
Conventional nukes against Japan had 15 to 21 kilotons. But this explosion is different, it is because of modern tactical nuke that contains up to 10 kilotons of the hybrid material including uranium. It is this reason why we still have acid and radiation in the air. The storage facilities near the grain elevator are NOT marked for hazardous material storage, but are instead marked for general cargo. Therefore, you can guess it, what we will be fed in the coming hours.” – Ghayet Ali
” First explosion was caused by Gabriel anti ship missile of Israel. The second explosion was caused by Israeli Delilah missile from F16. Our country is in complete jeopardy with this lazy and corrupt regime.”
Hezbollah, we are told, is expected to retaliate against Israel and they say there is no way for Syria not to be brought in.
IAEA Confirms
Jeff Smith of the IAEA confirms this is a nuclear explosion.
The lies about fireworks in ships and fertilizer are what we always get. You don’t store either one downtown in a major city like Beirut under any circumstances. Not much farming in Beirut and they don’t celebrate the 4th of July there.
The smoke could well be missile fuel which may mean a missile storage facility was hit by Israel. We have confirmation from Israel that they were planning to attack Beirut 5 days ago in retaliation for Hezbollah’s military attacks on Golan, which were not reported anywhere.
We are told Lebanon asked for nuclear investigators from Russia but there is no attempt to protect the site which, even if this were a modern clean weapon, still be radioactive.
New video shows nature of the blast a bit better. We will keep updating.
Beirut Governor Calls Explosion a ‘National Disaster Akin to Hiroshima’
“A fire brigade of 10 people arrived at the scene. What happened is very similar to what happened in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They drove to the scene and disappeared. This is a national disaster for Lebanon. We do not know how we are going to deal with this”, Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud said. (Sputnik/Moscow)
“Israel has nothing to do with the massive explosion that rocked Beirut on 4 August, the country’s parliamentary TV channel has announced. A similar statement was made by an anonymous Israeli official in an interview with Reuters, while the country’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi alleged that the blast was likely an accident caused by a fire.” (Sputnik/Moscow)
Initial Report 2
Earlier/VT: Two explosions in Beirut, one a conventional guided bomb followed by a small nuclear weapon. The target is now confirmed to be a Hezbollah missile storage facility.
One hospital in Beirut has said it is treating more than 500 injures and is unable to receive any more patients. Tens of the people injured will need surgery and the hospital is appealing for blood donations.
-Follow the latest here: https://t.co/R2Lh904JkCpic.twitter.com/xn85sUgs7q— SkyNews (@SkyNews)
August 4, 2020
This is the second explosion, that looks like the plasma ball of a nuclear explosion to me, note the white colour indicating extremely high temperatures – no conventional explosion burns so hot. Also note the great height of the plasma ball – it is taller than the grain silo. I am very strongly reminded of the nuking of Tianjin a few years ago.The warehouse to the east he speaks of is the black building shown in the video stills above.
A large explosion has been heard in the Lebanese capital Beirut. Security sources said a number of people were injured during the widespread destruction across the city, with residents reporting windows being blown out and ceilings collapsing
-Read more: https://t.co/27zh8LaW5npic.twitter.com/SZ82gxAA7Z— SkyNews (@SkyNews) August 4, 2020
Initial Report 1 – The “official explanation”
This smells like a cover story, I very much doubt there were any fireworks involved, the small explosions seen in the videos were more likely to have been munitions cooking off due to fires started by the first explosion.
RT has just covered the explosions and quotes a Lebanese govt. minister:
Health Minister Hamad Hassan told local media that a ship carrying fireworks exploded in the port. Video footage lends weight to his explanation, as it shows a small explosion followed by the crackling of fireworks, before a second and massively destructive blast.
Local residents have shared images showing extensive damage to property. The office of the Daily Star newspaper was smashed by the blast, with windows blown out and furniture flung to the ground. France24 correspondent Leila Molana-Allen said that her apartment was “blown apart,” adding that she thinks the blast was caused by a “missile from a jet.”
It looks very much like the Lebanese have invented the ship full of fireworks story to cover the truth. Molana-Allen is almost certainly correct – that it was some kind of missile or guided bomb dropped by a jet fighter-bomber.
Or are they going with the one we have heard so many times before when tactical nukes have been used – that it was a store of explosives that went up:Of course they would deny it was an attack, no-one ever admits a nuke went off, it’s terribly bad for public opinion.
Sodium nitrate, basically a big fertiliser bomb, nope, not buying that at all, this is the cover story they appear to be going with.
This local lady describes a feeling of melting, that sounds like radiation hitting her – being hit by radiation feels like heat, it burns you.
Awareness
People in Beirut,Lebanon needs to stay indoors due to the recent Firewooks/nuclear explosion that happened in Beirut. The smoke is filled with nitric acid (Red/pink/purple smoke) which is toxic and can form an acidic rain.
#BeirutBlast#Beirutpic.twitter.com/eyKYSiVJZ0
— Women_Advocate🧕🧕🧕 (@hauwa_farouk) August 4, 2020
I don’t agree with the assessment that it was a fine particulate explosion, that wouldn’t explain the white hot plasma ball, only a nuke can explain that.
The media in the west claiming that this massive nuclear like explosion is from "fireworks"
NO THE HELL IT WAS NOT!
My heart is so heavy 💔😔😭
Prayers for Beirut, Lebanon 🇱🇧pic.twitter.com/yAom0z9ZgG
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) August 4, 2020
Windows blown out 7km away indicates a huge blast, again, suggesting this was indeed a nuke.
The phones going down is probably due to the EM pulse that nukes produce.
The “nay sayers” suggest that people are watching birds. Like sparrows, pigeons, doves, or maybe parrots. Like this. I’m sure that this is a parrot…
Or, it just couldn’t be a nuke. Right? Stations would pick up the radiation.
These stations would measure the alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Since the gamma radiation travels at the speed of light, the stations would be able to register the exact moment the weapon was detonated.
Well, suddenly this station went off line. Imagine that!
It is now reported as “malfunctioning“.
Funny thing this…
Well, malfunctioning station or what, Italy says they are getting radiation readings that are worthy of note…
Conclusion
It seems that Trump authorized the use of 6kt mini-nuke to destroy the port of Beirut. This was conducted by aircraft of the Israel Air Force, and they apparently used two missiles.
Gabriel anti ship missile.
Israeli Delilah missile carrying a 6kt mini-nuke.
Radiation readings in Europe has confirmed that a nuclear warhead was used.
Trump has admitted to participation and direction of this attack. But he did not confess to using nuclear weapons.
This effort puts a immediate pause on the Chinese Belt and Road initiative with a port on the Mediterranean sea.
Trump scares the living daylights out of me. He had no qualms about unleashing a biological weapon to kill multitudes of Chinese with the COVID-19, and is now using nuclear weapons in the Mediterranean Sea. He has two complete assault carrier task forces off the Chinese coast and is working to provoke war with Russia.
What is wrong with this man?
Do you want more?
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You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
While I am just “so-so” as a word smith, there are other that are more perceptive and better suited to document the decline and collapse of the American Global Empire. Here, we have a writer who editorialized how he believes America is starting to get involved in yet another “cold war” with China. I read his writing, found them brilliant, but feel that he is missing out on the big picture. America is collapsing all around us.
There won’t be any “cold war” where the world is on “America’s side”, and the “evil empire” is isolated.
Nope. Instead, China will continue to be aligned with Russia, and will continue to design, invent and manufacture high-end, high quality products. While the cheaper products and simpler constructions will be made in third-world nations for export to Americans at ridiculously high prices.
Americans in turn will continue to be manipulated, taxed, and generally forced into government-sponsored servitude of one form or the other. Social mobility will be non-existent. And American will live eating the cheapest foods, possessing the cheapest gear, and working the longest hours while praising their “inherent freedoms”…
The following is an article titled “The new Cold War with China has cost lives against coronavirus” written by Max Blumenthal@MaxBlumenthal for the Chicago Reader. It was edited to fit this venue, but aside from that, left intact. All credit to the author.
More than any event since the financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rotten foundation of American empire.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has called his country’s fight against coronavirus “the People’s War,” while President Trump calls the disease "the China virus."
-Narendra Modi; SHEALAH craighead
March 19, 2020, was a milestone for the People’s Republic of China.
After enduring over two months of an epidemic of novel coronavirus,
China reported that it experienced its first day without a new case of
locally transmitted infection. After placing 46 million residents in
Wuhan and 15 other cities under quarantine, mobilizing thousands of
medical professionals to the front lines, building new hospitals
practically overnight, and implementing cautionary measures
such as forcing banks to disinfect cash, the country turned a corner in
what its president, Xi Jinping, called “the People’s War.”
Throughout the crisis, leaders of the World Health Organization
(WHO) heaped praise on the Chinese government. “Its actions actually
helped prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Tedros, as he is known, added that he was “very impressed and
encouraged by the president [Xi’s] detailed knowledge of the outbreak.”
Tedros’s assistant, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who also visited China, was
astounded by what he observed: “What I saw was a tremendous sense of
responsibility, and of duty, to protect their families, their
communities, and even the world, from this disease,” Aylward marveled
in a televised interview. “I left with such a deep sense of admiration
for the people of Wuhan and for Chinese society in general.”
During the early days of the crisis around Wuhan, Chinese
authorities took some ham-fisted measures to suppress public discussion
of the outbreak. Perhaps Beijing was in denial about the gravity of the
epidemic, or terrified of its societal ramifications. It was not long,
however, before the Chinese government made the genome of the virus
public, shared detailed information
about the virus with the international community, and provided
intelligence to the WHO, which relayed it to the U.S. Center for Disease
Control (CDC). In fact, Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar recently revealed
that the CDC first learned about coronavirus from Chinese colleagues on
January 3. Tragically, while Beijing was buying valuable time for the
West to prepare for the lethal pandemic, and losing the lives of medical
personnel in the process, Washington chose conflict over cooperation.
Almost as soon as news of the viral outbreak reached the West,
mainstream pundits turned up their noses and sneered at China’s
aggressive response. A now-discredited January 24 op-ed
published in Slate and authored in conjunction with the Democratic
Party-affiliated New America Foundation proclaimed, “Many of China’s
actions to date are overly aggressive and ineffective in quelling the
outbreak.” The Los Angeles Times reinforced the condescending line, mocking President Xi’s efforts to rally Chinese citizens as “shoddy propaganda.” At around the same time, the cover of the neoliberal Economist magazine depicted China as a global disease infecting the planet—an authoritarian plague that threatened the free world more than any pandemic.
For his part, Trump has referred to the sickness as the “China virus,” deploying xenophobic bile to deflect blame for weeks of inaction. (“We have it totally under control,” the president insistedon January 22,
trying in vain to calm markets. A month later, Trump claimed without
evidence, “The people that have [coronavirus] are getting better.”) By
March 14, as coronavirus exploded throughout New York City and Seattle,
Joseph Biden took to the stage of a Democratic presidential debate and
painted the sickness as a foreign weapon of mass destruction. “This is
like we are being attacked from abroad!” he bellowed. CNN debate moderator Dana Bash proceeded to push
the candidates to propose “consequences” China should face for the
coronavirus–not lessons the U.S. could learn from China’s successful
fight against it.
In reflexive and mostly bipartisan fashion, the U.S. political
class has exploited a pandemic to ratchet up hostility against China.
While the rising power is a necessary partner against a gathering storm
of disease and societal unraveling, too many in Washington are unable to
see Beijing as anything other than the greatest single threat to
American global hegemony.
Over the past seven decades, the U.S. has encircled China with hundreds of military bases,threading
bombers, naval warships, and nuclear-tipped missiles into a
geopolitical noose. President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” designated a
full two-thirds of U.S. naval forces to contain China, setting the
stage for a new Cold War. Trump’s national defense doctrine formally
enshrined the strategy by declaring “great power competition” with Beijing and Moscow as the Pentagon’s top priority. A trade war followed, with the U.S. jailing a CEO of the Chinese telecom company Huawei, banning its 5G technology, and slapping hefty tariffs on $112 billion on Chinese imports. Dubiously sourced stories
of Holocaust-level human rights violations by China supplied the new
Cold War with heartstring-tugging background music, drawing suggestible
Western liberals into the hostile narrative.
The same U.S. leadership class that launched the first Cold War and
reignited it during the Obama and Trump eras has also presided over a
systematic degradation of America’s public health system. While the task
of providing health care was handed over to corporations, the number of
beds per 1,000 Americans declined steadily from 4.5 in 1975 to 2.5 in
2014, according to the CDC.
Having left its citizens on the verge of mass suffocation by a ghastly
respiratory infection, the U.S. government has little to offer them
today beyond Cold War bluster and corporate bailouts.
More than any event since the 2008-09 financial crash, the
coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rotten foundation of American
empire—and it has only begun to exact its toll. By March 19, the day
that China declared victory over coronavirus, the U.S. achieved a
milestone of its own: it boasted the sharpest increase
in deaths and new infections per day of any country in the world. New
York City had become ground zero for the sickness, with 10,000 new
cases. At one Brooklyn emergency hospital, a doctor melted down over the
lack of resources. “It’s a disaster,” he fretted.
“We just had a half dozen staff test positive. We have 17 ventilators
left in the institution. Some staff can’t come because they’re getting
wiped out.”
In hospitals across the country, emergency room doctors have been
forced to fashion their own masks, or to simply wear a bandana over
their faces. Doctors badly needed N95 air-filtering respirator masks to
protect themselves from infection while they treated patients hacking up
toxic sputum. The Trump administration has invoked the Defense
Production Act, a Korean War-era provision that would enable him to
compel American businesses to produce urgently needed products.
Revealingly, Trump has refused to implement the act on the grounds that doing so would mimic Venezuelan-style socialism.
While doctors wait in vain for N95 masks, a bipartisan group of 130
lawmakers made their real priorities clear when they issued a call for a
massive buildup of F-35 jets. “Full funding is needed for the delivery
of new weapons and critical capabilities necessary to keep the F-35
ahead of our adversaries,” the lawmakers wrote in a March 19 letter to the Pentagon, demanding 98 new stealth fighters at a cost of $94 million each.
If anything has been more elusive than protective masks—and less
functional than the accident-prone F-35—it is America’s coronavirus
testing system. Testing kits were magically provided to entire NBA teams
and A-list celebrities with symptoms, but ask any average American in
need where they plan to get screened, and you’re almost certain to draw a
blank. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confessed
in testimony to Congress,“The idea of anybody getting [tested] easily
the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for
that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not.”
Inside China, an already effective coronavirus screening regimen is
likely to improve thanks to an innovative test that can be administered
in airports, and that produces results in just 40 minutes. The creator
of the groundbreaking test, Weihong Tan, was a professor at the
University of Florida’s cancer research lab until last year, when the
Department of Justice targeted him
with a McCarthy-style investigation. Accused by a Cold War-crazed U.S.
government of failing to disclose Chinese funding for his department, he
returned to Hunan University, where he found ample government support
for his lifesaving research.
With its hollowed out public health-care system overwhelmed by a
pandemic in just its early phase, the U.S. has sat and watched as China
embarks on the largest international humanitarian mission in modern
times. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has effusively thanked China
for donating two million surgical masks, 200,000 N95 masks, and 50,000
testing kits to hard-hit areas of Europe. After welcoming a massive
delivery of Chinese aid to his country, Serbian President Aleksandar
Vucic angrily accused the EU of abandonment:
“European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairytale. The only
country that can help us in this hard situation is the People’s Republic
of China. For the rest of them, thanks for nothing.”
In response to China’s humanitarian crusade, the Trump administration’s National Security Council has rolled out
a coordinated propaganda offensive blaming China for “covering up”
coronavirus. Ironically, the same corporate networks that have spent the
past year clamoring for Trump’s impeachment have provided the White
House with an eager megaphone for its anti-China crusade. A report by
CNN, for instance, suggested dark motives behind China’s delivery of
ventilators and masks to Europe, claiming Beijing was “possibly trying
to curry favor.” On Twitter, trending hashtags like #ChinaLiedAndPeopleDied have suddenly materialized, amplifying the Trump administration’s influence operation.
While China and the tiny, U.S.-embargoed nation of Cuba send medical brigades to hard-hit regions of Europe, Washington is sending the world sanctions and shows of military force.
The Trump administration has zealously weaponized coronavirus to drive
its “maximum pressure” policy of regime change against Iran, where the
death toll is approaching 2,000. During a March 18 press conference,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed to ramp up crushing sanctions on Iran, even though (or perhaps because) the economic blockade was preventing the country from purchasing vital medicine and ventilators. In Venezuela, meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have increased the cost of a coronavirus test to three times more than in non-sanctioned countries.
Those who find Trump’s actions at home and abroad deadly and
dangerous must take heart that his opponents in the Democratic Party
have united behind Biden, who seems to forget where he is at times. One of the 76-year-old former vice president’s most recent public appearances
saw him in a makeshift studio in his Delaware home, staring off into
the distance in a stupor, seemingly frozen in confusion, until his wife
shuffled him off camera. Dogged by rumors of dementia following a
comically stumbling performance on the presidential trail, where his shell of a campaign has been sustained by some 60 faceless billionaires,
Biden disappeared for an entire week in mid-March, as the crisis
reached its apex in the U.S. He finally resurfaced on March 23 for a
deeply uninspiring online livestream that pitted the stammering
candidate against a barely functional teleprompter.
As the pandemic spreads across the country, college students have
descended on the beaches of South Florida for the spring break beer bash
that has become a rite of passage for the young and mindless. The
state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a Harvard graduate who was
narrowly elected after warning his African American opponent would “monkey this up,”
defended his decision to keep beaches open for the annual bacchanal.
“If you have a Floridian that goes and walks their dog, like a married
couple on the beach,” De Santis eloquently explained, “as long as you’re not within six feet of each other, they view that as a healthy thing.”
With the shores wide open for randy fun, a widely-watched video circulated on Twitter showing a sun-burned bro gawking
at a bikini-clad woman slurping a Bud Light through the rear end of a
bent-over co-ed and exclaiming, “Nobody gives a fuck about coronavirus
here!”
Shelter in place and grab a protective mask if you can find one. The deluge has just begun. v
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misidentified Xi Jinping as the premier of China; he is the president.
Conclusion
It will not be long now. Four years tops. Maybe as early as one year. Figure all Hell to unravel around 2023 or so.
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The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a recently emerged human pathogen that has spread widely since January 2020. Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7.
Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity.
We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period.Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6.
We further show that quarantine and contact tracing of symptomatic individuals alone may not be effective and early, strong control measures are needed to stop transmission of the virus.
- Title: The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated
There’s a sizable percentage of people (Americans) who have absolutely no concept of what war is like. When elements of war starts raising it’s ugly head, they come up with other ideas and excuses what it could be. Anything but war. Anything but posturing for war. Anything.
To most Americans, war is a distant concept. It is something that you do in far-away third-world shit-holes. It’s where you tromp through deserts or slosh through jungles. It’s where you are issued an “assault rifle”, ride in helicopters and expensive sleek jets blow up Arabs riding white Toyota trucks.
That’s not war. That’s a “police action”, or as I like to refer to it… “conflict lite”.
Real wars occur when one nation tries to suppress another nation.
Hitler attacks Poland.
Japan attacks China.
Syria attacks Kuwait.
Suppressing China’s Rise
Lose-lose is a situation where no participant has any option that is positive. As such, strategy in a lose-lose situation is aimed at minimizing loss as opposed to winning.4 Examples of a Lose-Lose Situation - Simplicable
The United States has spent the last three years engaged in efforts to suppress China’s rise.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
It’s called a “lose – lose” strategy because (since the USA and China are both economically co-dependent) the only way to suppress China was to accept suppression of the USA in the process.
The idea was that China would “lose more” than what America would lose.
This is the Alt-Right “standard narrative” that “China needs the USA more than the USA needs China”.
So they implemented it on all sorts of levels…
Radical protests by “pro democracy” agitators in Hong Kong.
Uyghur Muslim assaults and aggression.
A on-going propaganda war.
Pressure on Taiwan.
Arrest of the President of Huawei.
Propaganda against advanced 5G, AI and robotic technologies.
A plague that wiped out the wheat crop.
A virus that wiped out the Chicken and poultry industry… in waves.
A virus that wiped out the pig industry, propagated by advanced drones.
Now, the deadly lethal COVID-19 virus on CNY eve of all times!
Some of it is so obvious that you have to be in complete denial not to acknowledge it… like the Arrest of the CEO of Huawei in Canada. Apparently her Chinese company sold products to Iran. And the United States wants everyone to boycott Iran.
Well, nationality is just an excuse… don’t you know.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
Another example is the on-going biological warfare being conducted against China. Trying to decimate it’s livestock, it’s chickens, it’s pork, it’s wheat crops…
…didn’t work. Though.
Oh… it’s just bad luck. Right?
Or as one website stated… “It’s God’s will”.
Good one that.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
And now the COVID-19 coronavirus attack on CNY eve. I mean, if it would have happened on Christmas eve, most Americans would be suspicious. But they aren’t.
Its just a “nothing burger”, don’t you know.
Conflicts look like this. Open your eyes.
You see people. Major conflicts start JUST LIKE THIS.
And everyone around you is in denial.
Just . Like . This.
Byretaliatinginthedecades-old tariff war, Trump hasnochoice. Either China eventuallybankruptstheUnitedStatesortheUnitedStates bankrupts China. Finally, thereisthethirdcommonsensedesiredoutcome: bothpartiessettlefor free trade withzero tariffs.
- Trump's Strategy in the China Trade War
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
A hidden war…
When Hitler banned guns in Germany, the American media didn’t make a peep. When Stalin started starving the Lithuanians, the American media called it just bad weather and poor planning. When unrest started to hit Bosnia, the American media called it “isolated terror events”.
Trump’s key figures in the China Trade negotiations. All are neocons who earnestly want a lose-lose strategy.
The geo-political situation today is very complex. I cannot predict what will happen. I really cannot.
But you and I have a front-row seat to it.
Unfortunately.
The “big guns” came out to suppress China…
What I can say is that the COVID-19 bioweapon attack…
…and it actually was one – ask Xi Peng …
After all, he put his military on DEFCON ONE over it. Why are all the nuclear silos fully manned right now? Why is the Navy on high alert? Why are 100% of the militia called up? Why are all ports and entry points under lock-down? Why are all incoming packages frozen in customs and the internet completely locked solid?
Because of the... flu?
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
… is that China handled the COVID-19 event exceptionally well. And the COVID-19 virus…
… still…
…it still got loose.
President Trump appoints VP Pence to handle the COVID-19 outbreak. He referred to it as Democrat Hype, and a “Hoax”. He further claimed that it is not as bad as the flu.
Not at all what the Trump Administration was expecting.
The decision to utilize biological warfare against China was hatched in the White house, and most certainly by resident neocons within the administration.
Now all people are getting infected. Not only Asians. And the mutation is observable. The current strains running through Iran, Italy and the USA are off-shoot “branches” from the “original” Chinese COVID-19 viral strain.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
People(!) brace yourself for some spicy times. You can believe whatever you want. You can believe this is natural if you wanna. You can believe that China is the scourge of the Earth and the USA is a gift from God. You can believe anything your heart desires…
But…
The USA is not China.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
The USA does not have the ability to handle a large influx of seriously ill people. It cannot handle people dropping like flies in the middle of the street or while they are driving their cars. It cannot handle disruptions of the food and petrol supplies. It cannot handle large conditions that tax the medical system.
You all know this is true.
Which is why many Americans are running to the gun stores first, then getting food.
Panic shopping in the United States. No one thinks that this is really bad, but they are stocking up just in case. How do I know? Well, no one is wearing a mask. They are also in a crowd. Further, they are not buying food, they are buying towels and soda. They believe that the COVID-19 is “just” another strain of the flu.
I take no joy in this. It greatly saddens me…
… and now to my point in all this…
Introduction
There’s a sizable percentage of people (Americans) who have absolutely no concept of what war is like.
They think that war is 9-11, that it is Pearl Harbor, that it is bombs exploding, and fires raging, and sleek jets flying.
Oh… sometimes.
But in reality war, real war, is not the made-for-television narrative. It is something that is usually done in secret, behind the scenes.
War is ANY conflict between nations.
War can be any kind of conflict between nations. Whether it is subtle, organized, planned, overt, or serendipitous. Scene from the Chinese movie with Jet Li titled “Fearless.”
Most wars are conducted in secret and hidden behind curtains of confusion and obfuscation. It’s “CIA type stuff”. It’s strange events “out of the blue”.
It’s a leading doctor gets sick here, and a report ends up missing there. It’s mass deaths in a obscure location over there.
It’s things like an explosion inside the North Korean nuclear weapons silo.
It’s things like pigs and chickens start dying all over China…
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
When elements of war starts raising it’s ugly head, they come up with other ideas and excuses of what it could be. Anything but war. Anything but posturing for war. Anything.
Anything.
But people, listen up.
There will not be any announcements. No one is going to point at a person, place or thing and tell everyone to start fighting it. Instead, it will be conducted behind the scenes for a long time…
You see, it would be an absolute failure of the governments on both sides if it broke out into the open.
Scene from the movie about an out of control pandemic that hits the United States; “Carriers”.
It will be the worst kind of enemy; one that you cannot see and hurt and attack.
Like the movie "Invasion of the body snatchers."
This is a war that China has been dealing with since 2017, and keeping quiet and just smiling. But they have been dealing with it; fighting with it; and just keep on keeping on. They keep plugging away like the energizer bunny.
It’s got a visible face and a hidden face.
No one wants the true situation; that the agents of war; the COVID-19, has mutated to infect everyone and has washed up on the shores of the good ol’ USA.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
You had all best be wearing a mask and exercising rigorous hand washing discipline, as well as avoiding all contact outside of your homes.
Starting RIGHT NOW.
A taste of war
The neocons in the Trump administration strongly believed that they could launch this COVID-19 and it would be contained within China, and only kill Asians. They were convinced because their “experts” told them that this is what would happen.
Which explains why Trump and his administration keeps on saying the narrative that it isn't as bad as the flu...
The neocons expected that it would cause mass casualties that would overwhelm the Chinese hospital system. They figured that with a mortality rate of 10% it would cripple China for years.
The “experts” said…
Orville Schell (his father was the co-founder of Helsinki Watch) has been a card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which represents the highest, deepest echelon of the National Security State, and which has architected the anti-China consensus at the highest level of government and leadership in the US.
If we go to war with China--kinetic conflict--this will be in large part the doing of the CFR.
See here for a sampling of the type of tripe they routinely throw out about China. Remember, this is considered the elite "expert consensus".
The WHO is lying for China when it praises its response. https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty (Compare this to what Dr. Bruce Aylward reported. Dr. Aylward was previously the UN lead for the Ebola outbreak, and he would know what he's talkng about).
Xi is aping Stalin
https://www.cfr.org/blog/china-likely-enter-another-long-period-severe-dictatorship
China is the perfect dictatorship https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/podcast-perfect-dictatorship
China is the bully of Asia https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/podcast-china-bully-asia
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
But…
…that didn’t happen.
China enacted DEFCON ONE. They locked the entire nation down. They took immediate and fast action and was able to control the mortality rate to 3% in the infected areas.
A 3% mortality rate is what you have when you go into DEFCON ONE, build three hospitals, offer free medical care, and lock the entire nation down. It's what you get when you take drastic action to control a weaponized viral pathogen.
But you can expect a much higher mortality rate when you are dealing with for-profit hospitals, a media that is saying everything is fine, and a government run by the "deep state".
Maybe, China would have collapsed by now, if China was like America with [1] a contentious political structure, [2] a huge and slow moving bureaucracy, and [3] a culture of being a “lone wolf” where it’s every man for himself…
Maybe…
But…
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
The Neocons made terrible assumptions…
But that cartoon image of China is seriously wrong.
China took a whole bunch of steps when they realized they had to repurpose big chunks of their hospital systems to [respond to the outbreak].
The first thing is, they said testing is free, treatment is free.
Right now, there are huge barriers [to testing and treatment] in the West. You can get tested, but then you might be negative and have to foot the bill.
In China, they realized those were barriers to people seeking care, so, as a state, they took over the payments for people whose insurance plans didn’t cover them. They tried to mitigate those barriers.
The other thing they did: Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals].
Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment].
And (fourthly) they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.
- Bruce Aylward
China is not the United States. It is a very serious nation that does not mess around. It is run by experts who are in their positions through merit, not popularity.
And more…
The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher.
If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early.
Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work.
This is sophisticated health care.
They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.
This suggests the Chinese are really good at keeping people alive with this disease, and just because it’s 1 percent in the general population outside of Wuhan doesn’t mean it [will be the same in other countries].
- Bruce Aylward
The suppression strategy was a terrible mistake.
The people who came up with this suppression strategy were wrong.
Somehow the COVID-19 virus mutated. Whether it was a natural mutation, or had "help" from a lab is unknown. But the inherent "safety protocols" mutated away and resulted in an indiscriminate virus instead of a "safe and controllable" weaponized virus.
Like in the original "Drudge Dred" movie titled "Demolition Man" where the evil leadership resurrected Wesley Snipes with training to become a master criminal. And Judge Dred trained to knit. Only they added a special mind block - you cannot kill the leadership.
Wesley Snipes tries but can't. The evil leader laughs, and looks at him... his new puppet. So Wesley snipes orders his chief henchman to kill him instead.
It's sort of like that,
Wesley Snipes plays the evil villain that was trained to become a master criminal by the current government leadership.
Plus…
None of the neocons have any real-world experience with the horrors of war. They don’t know that things can go “tits up” very quickly and FUBAR, then “all bets are off”.
You know, it's not just war. It's projects. It's industry. It's investments. It's relationships. The jokers in Washington has spent so much time playing politics and living in the neocon echo chamber that they are oblivious to the realities outside of it...
They did not realize that war is the last resort action of fools.
China is not the United States. It is a very serious nation that does not mess around. It is run by experts who are in their positions through merit, not popularity.
They tried to implement a “lose – lose” strategy in order to contain China. China wanted a “win – win” the neocons wanted a “lose lose” because they actually believed that it was attainable. Both nations would lose, but China would be far more damaged than the United States would be…
…it’s the alt-Right narrative; “They need us more than we need them.” It’s ridiculously false.
It is mind-blowing off-the-charts false.
It is one of the biggest lies ever made, and yet the dumbed-down alt-Right American population actually believes it.
The Lose – Lose strategy was used by the Trump Negotiation team to resolve trade issues from 2016 to 2020. It’s based on the alt-Right narrative that “China needs the United States more than the United States needs China.” It’s wrong. Terribly wrong. And this move, this calculation based on this failed idea is what brought a weaponized viral agent to America.
The inescapable fact is that the neocon perceptions of what China actually is, and capable of, as well as what American capabilities are wildly divergent from reality.
I blame the belief in the propaganda bubble that surrounds America, but it doesn't really matter now.
Things did not go as planned…
China took drastic measures… going DEFCON ONE, and fully controlled and sealed the outbreak;
Ambitious, agile, and aggressive
The team began in Beijing and then split into two groups that, all told, traveled to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and the hardest hit city, Wuhan. They visited hospitals, laboratories, companies, wet markets selling live animals, train stations, and local government offices. “Everywhere you went, anyone you spoke to, there was a sense of responsibility and collective action, and there’s war footing to get things done,” Aylward says.
The group also reviewed the massive data set that Chinese scientists have compiled. (The country still accounts for more than 90% of the global total of the 90,000 confirmed cases.) They learned that about 80% of infected people had mild to moderate disease, 13.8% had severe symptoms, and 6.1% had life-threatening episodes of respiratory failure, septic shock, or organ failure. The case fatality rate was highest for people over age 80 (21.9%), and people who had heart disease, diabetes, or hypertension. Fever and dry cough were the most common symptoms. Surprisingly, only 4.8% of infected people had runny noses. Children made up a mere 2.4% of the cases, and almost none was severely ill. For the mild and moderate cases, it took 2 weeks on average to recover.
A critical unknown is how many mild or asymptomatic cases occur. If large numbers of infections are below the radar, that complicates attempts to isolate infectious people and slow spread of the virus. But on the positive side, if the virus causes few, if any, symptoms in many infected people, the current estimated case fatality rate is too high. (The report says that rate varies greatly, from 5.8% in Wuhan, whose health system was overwhelmed, to 0.7% in other regions.)
To get at this question, the report notes that so-called fever clinics in Guangdong province screened approximately 320,000 people for COVID-19 and only found 0.14% of them to be positive. “That was really interesting, because we were hoping and maybe expecting to see a large burden of mild and asymptomatic cases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That piece of data suggests that’s not happening, which would imply that the case fatality risk might be more or less as we currently have.” But Guangdong province was not a heavily affected area, so it is not clear whether the same holds in Hubei province, which was the hardest hit, Rivers cautions.
Much of the report focuses on understanding how China achieved what many public health experts thought was impossible: containing the spread of a widely circulating respiratory virus. “China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” the report notes.
The most dramatic—and controversial—measure was the lockdown of Wuhan and nearby cities in Hubei province, which has put at least 50 million people under a mandatory quarantine since 23 January. That has “effectively prevented further exportation of infected individuals to the rest of the country,” the report concludes. In other regions of mainland China, people voluntarily quarantined and were monitored by appointed leaders in neighborhoods.
Chinese authorities also built two dedicated hospitals in Wuhan in just over 1 week. Health care workers from all over China were sent to the outbreak’s center. The government launched an unprecedented effort to trace contacts of confirmed cases. In Wuhan alone, more than 1800 teams of five or more people traced tens of thousands of contacts.
Aggressive “social distancing” measures implemented in the entire country included canceling sporting events and shuttering theaters. Schools extended breaks that began in mid-January for the Lunar New Year. Many businesses closed shop. Anyone who went outdoors had to wear a mask.
Two widely used mobile phone apps, AliPay and WeChat—which in recent years have replaced cash in China—helped enforce the restrictions, because they allow the government to keep track of people’s movements and even stop people with confirmed infections from traveling. “Every person has sort of a traffic light system,” says mission member Gabriel Leung, dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Color codes on mobile phones—in which green, yellow, or red designate a person’s health status—let guards at train stations and other checkpoints know who to let through.
“As a consequence of all of these measures, public life is very reduced,” the report notes. But the measures worked. In the end, infected people rarely spread the virus to anyone but members of their own household, Leung says. Once all the people in an apartment or home were exposed, the virus had nowhere else to go and chains of transmission ended. “That’s how the epidemic truly came under control,” Leung says. In sum, he says, there was a combination of “good old social distancing and quarantining very effectively done because of that on-the-ground machinery at the neighborhood level, facilitated by AI [artificial intelligence] big data.”
Deep commitment to collective action
How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable. “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development:
“No one else in the world really can do what China just did.”
Nor should they, says lawyer Alexandra Phelan, a China specialist at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security.
“Whether it works is not the only measure of whether something is a good public health control measure,” Phelan says. “There are plenty of things that would work to stop an outbreak that we would consider abhorrent in a just and free society.”
-ScienceMag
So China handled this biological weapons event expertly. They did so in a way that surprised the world. And while many find their techniques questionable, they begrudgingly admit that most other nations could not replicate their action.
What matters is that the COVID-19 that was supposed to cause strife in China has boomeranged, mutated, and like the “green slime monster” struck into the soul of America. And America is not ready for it.
American leadership is still, as of 3MAR20, treating it as a race-specific pathogenic organism. Even though all evidence shows otherwise. They are telling everyone over and over that the flu is far worse.
They say that flu is far worse.
Nothing to worry about here. The monsters are only harmless slime. This is a scene from the 1960’s class “B” science fiction movie: “The Green Slime”.
Lord help us all.
Why this matters…
Like I said. Anything can happen.
It could fizzle out to be nothing…
It could be contained like China contained it…
Or it could be a genuine SHTF event.
Let’s look at historical examples of other SHTF events and try to imagine what it must have been like for the participants of these events.
[1] The Massacre of Usipetes and the Tencteri
The Usipetes and the Tencteri were two ancient tribes who were massacred by the legions of Julius Caesar in 55 BC. We have known about their slaughter for thousands of years from ancient texts, including Caesar’s own account from his book on the Gallic Wars. However, we were never sure exactly where it happened, until 2015 when Dutch archaeologists claimed they found the site of the bloodbath near the town of Kessel.
According to ancient sources, the conflict began in the winter of 56 BC when the two tribes (who were referred to as Germanic but may have actually been Celtic) crossed the Rhine into Gaul after being driven away from their homeland by the Suebi.
The Usipetes and the Tencteri asked Caesar for permission to settle in Gaul, which was denied.
After negotiations failed, the Roman legions launched an attack on their camp and killed everyone in sight.
“there was also a great crowd of women and children and these now began to flee in all directions.
I sent the cavalry to hunt them down…
When they reached the confluence of the Meuse and the Rhine, they saw they had no hope of escaping farther.
A large number of them were killed and the rest flung themselves into the river, where they perished overcome by panic, exhaustion, and the force of the current.”
In his personal account, Caesar said there were around 430,000 people and that he slain them all. Modern scholars put the number at around 150,000 to 200,000, and some of them definitely survived as the tribes were still mentioned the following century. They opine that the inflated number was because Caesar wanted to portray them as a great threat and himself a protector of Rome.
In war, everyone is killed. Women, children and innocents are not spared. Later, the victors will write and boast about their success in the destruction.
[2] Genghis Khan Beheaded People For Being Over 90 Centimeters (3′) Tall
When Genghis Khan was 20, he led an army against the tribe that
killed his father and got his revenge. The Tatar army was crushed, and
Genghis Khan set about exterminating the people in an incredibly unusual
way.
Every Tatar man was lined up and measured against “the linchpin of a
wagon,” which is the axle pin in the middle of the wheel. Anyone who was
taller than these pins—which were 90 centimeters (3′) high—was to be
beheaded.
The criteria used to select survivors from the conquered is often arbitrary.
[3] The Severed Hands of Avaris
Severed Hands.
A few years back, archaeologists were excavating the ruins of Avaris and found, for the first time, concrete evidence of an ancient Egyptian practice that had been, up until that point, only read about in texts – cutting off the hands of vanquished enemies.
This evidence came in the form of 16 severed hands, all of them right ones,
buried in four pits throughout the former Egyptian capital. Two of the
pits, each containing a single hand, were found in what was believed to
have been the throne room, indicating that the presentation of the
trophies was part of a much grander ceremony.
The hands were around 3,600 years old
and came from an oft-forgotten part of Egyptian history called the
Second Intermediate Period or the Hyksos Period. It was defined by the
arrival of a new group of people called the Hyksos who conquered Lower
Egypt and installed one of their own as king. Therefore, Salitis of the
Hyksos became the first pharaoh of the 15th dynasty and, in the process,
also moved the capital to the city of Avaris.
Up until this discovery, this custom had only been referenced in ancient art and writing. However, one point that is still being debated is whether this practice was introduced by the Hyksos or was already present in Egyptian society before their arrival.
Once captured, do not assume that you would be sent off to a prison camp. There are other fates that can await you.
[4] Genghis Khan Victims’ Bones Were Mistaken For Mountains
In 1211, Genghis Khan turned his focus to modern-day China and attacked the Jin Empire. It was a reckless decision. The Jin Empire controlled 53 million people, and the Mongols had one million. Still…
… Genghis Khan won.
Within three years, the Mongols had made their way to Zhongdu (now
Beijing). The city walls were 12 meters (39 ft) high and stretched 29
kilometers (18 mi) around the city. It seemed impossible to get in, so
they didn’t try.
Instead, the Mongols starved Zhongdu out.
By summer 1215, the people there were so hungry that cannibalism was running rampant inside its walls. Finally, they surrendered, and the Mongols sacked and burned the city.
The massacre was horrific.
Months later, a passing eyewitness wrote that “the bones of the slaughtered formed white mountains and that the soil was still greasy with human fat.”
No matter how hungry you are, the fate that can occur in the hands of the enemy can be far worse.
[5] Interesting Mongol War Tactics: Cats, Swallows and Human Fat
Real war is based on surprise and the use of unconventional weapons and strategies.
The first large-scale Mongol attack in Xi Xia happened at the mighty fortress at Volohai.
Unable to breach the walls of Volohai, Genghis Khan resorted to a clever trick. He sent a message from his encampment to the Tangut general announcing that he would end his siege in exchange for a gift of one thousand cats and ten thousand swallows.
Astonished by the unusual request, the fortress commander gratefully complied.
After the animals arrived in the Mongol camp, Genghis Khan ordered his men to tie a small cotton-wool tuft to the tail of each creature then set the tuft afire.
When the panicked and frightened animals were turned loose, they made directly for their nests and lairs inside Volohai, igniting hundreds of small fires.
While the panicked defenders were preoccupied with putting out fires, Genghis Khan’s warriors stormed the city in conquest.
Here’s another example…
The Mongol siege against the walled town of Kusong exemplified Koryo’s [Korea’s] heroic resistance.
General Sartai brought the full array of his medieval assault weapons to bear against the city’s defenses. While Mongol troops attempted to undermine the defensive walls by tunneling under them, formidable lines of catapults hurled large boulders and molten metal at the town.
Special assault teams used siege towers and scaling ladders against the earthen walls and pushed flaming carts against the city’s wooden gates.
Perhaps the most grisly tactical weapon used at the siege of Kusong was the catapult-launched fire-bomb. The Mongols boiled down their captives and used liquified human fat to fuel a weapon which produced fires that were practically inextinguishable.
Kusong’s defenders refused to surrender and stubbornly held on for thirty terrifying days and nights.
An old Mongol general, inspecting the ramparts during the siege, commented that,
"...I have never seen [a city] undergo an attack like this which did not, in the end, submit."
In the end Kusong remained in Koryo’s hands.
Unconventional war is a strategy that generally results in victory. Expect the unexpected.
[6] Genghis Khan Exterminated 1.7 Million People To Avenge One Person
The marriages might have been strategic alliances, but that didn’t
mean there wasn’t any love involved. One of Genghis Khan’s daughters
loved her husband, a man name Toquchar. Genghis Khan loved him, too, as
his favorite son-in-law.
Genghis Khan’s troops attacked Nishapur and slaughtered every person there. By some estimates, 1,748,000 people were killed. Other historians dispute that number, but there’s no doubt that his armies killed everyone they found.
Women, children, babies, and even dogs and cats were tracked down and murdered. Then they were beheaded, and their skulls were piled into pyramids—a request by Genghis Khan’s daughter to ensure that no one got away with a simple wounding.
In War decisions can be made for emotional, not strategic reasons.
[7] Ancient “Barbarian” Warfare in Northern Europe
Archaeologists excavated 2,095 human bones and bone fragments—comprising the remains of at least 82 people—across 185 acres of wetland at the site of Alken Enge, on the shore of Lake Mossø on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. Scientific studies indicate that most of the individuals were young male adults, and they all died in a single event in the early first century A.D. (Around the time of Christ.)
Unhealed trauma wounds on the remains, as well as finds of weapons, suggest that the individuals died in battle.
The team didn’t dig up the entire 185 acres, but the researchers extrapolated that more than 380 people may have been interred in boggy waters along the lakeshore some 2,000 years ago, based on the distribution of the remains that were excavated.
In large scale conflicts, very few people will remember your heroism and the battles that you fought. You will be forgotten.
[7] The Mongols Had A Victory Feast On Top Of The Russian Nobility
In 1223, the Mongolian army was making its way through Russia and had
just won the Battle of the Kalka River. The Russian army had
surrendered, their towns had been captured, and the Mongolians decided
to celebrate.
The generals and nobility of the Russian army were forced to lie down
on the ground. Then a heavy wooden gate was thrown on top of them,
chairs and tables were set on top of the gate, and the army sat down for
a feast.
They held their victory celebration on top of the still-living bodies of their enemies, eating and drinking while Russian princes were crushed to death beneath their feet.
Do not expect leniency because you are rich, wealthy or powerful. In fact, you might be singled out for special treatment.
[8] Genghis Khan Diverted A River Through An Enemy’s Birthplace To Erase It Off The Map
When Genghis Khan found the Muslim kingdom of Khwarezmia, he did
something unusual: He took the peaceful route. A group of diplomats were
sent to the city, hoping to establish a trade route and diplomatic
ties.
The governor of Khwarezmia, though, didn’t trust them. He thought the
diplomats were part of a Mongolian conspiracy and had them executed. He
killed the next group they sent, too.
Genghis Khan was furious. He had tried to be nice, and he’d been
repaid with dead diplomats. He set up an army of 200,000 soldiers,
attacked, and completely destroyed Khwarezmia.
Even after he’d won, Khan sent two armies to burn down every castle, town, and farm they found to make sure that no hint of Khwarezmia survived. According to one story, he even diverted a river to run through the emperor’s birthplace, just to make sure it would never appear on a map again.
When the victor wants to erase you, your people, your city, your nation, your society and your culture, they can do it.
[9] Slaughter at the bridge
About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the
Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the
written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000
years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of
warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single
day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that
was then the height of military technology.
Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.
Strong evidence suggests this wasn’t the first battle for these men. Twenty-seven percent of the skeletons show signs of healed traumas from earlier fights, including three skulls with healed fractures. “It’s hard to tell the reason for the injuries, but these don’t look like your typical young farmers,”
Standardized metal weaponry and the remains of the horses, which were found intermingled with the human bones at one spot, suggest that at least some of the combatants were well-equipped and well-trained.
“They weren’t farmer-soldiers who went out every few years to brawl. These are professional fighters.”
Body armor and shields emerged in northern Europe in the centuries just before the Tollense conflict and may have necessitated a warrior class.
“If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move,”
When the fighting was through, hundreds lay dead, littering the swampy valley. Some bodies were stripped of their valuables and left bobbing in shallow ponds; others sank to the bottom, protected from plundering by a meter or two of water. Peat slowly settled over the bones.
Within centuries, the entire battle was forgotten.
Being in possession of the best technology and training might not provide you the advantage that you think it will.
[10] Genghis Khan Nearly Erased A Kingdom From History For Not Sending Troops
When Genghis Khan attacked Khwarezmia, he asked the conquered kingdom of Xi Xia to send him troops. They refused.
Xi Xia tried to take a bold stand against their oppressor, and they quickly regretted it. The Mongolian army swarmed through Xi Xia, destroying everything that they found. They systematically exterminated every member of the population.
They hadn’t written down their own stories, so the only records of their existence came from neighboring countries. Their language wasn’t recovered for more than 700 years. It took until the mid-20th century for archaeologists to unearth stones that had their writing on them. In the meantime, every word they had spoken was forgotten.
Genghis Khan died during the battle, most likely from being thrown from his horse. Still, the Mongolian army carried out his work. They slaughtered every person they found, even after their leader was dead and their enemy had surrendered.
You and your entire culture and society can be erased from history by the mistakes of your leadership.
Conclusion
That last lesson is poinent.
You and your entire culture and society can be erased from history by the mistakes of your leadership.
Scene from the movie “Carriers”. It is a movie about a lethal virus that hits the United States.
What was the Trump administration doing launching biological weapons against China? Did they actually believe that it would eventually bring China to “heel”; a nation much larger than the United States geographically, and with a population four times larger and ruled by merit?
What were they fucking thinking?
Geographically China is larger.
Population wise, China is four times larger.
Education wise, China has far more skilled STEM scientists.
Politically, China is a monolithic conservative culture. America is balkanized into disparate groups.
Chinese leadership are there through merit, America’s through graft & popularity.
China possesses the vast bulk of factories, resources, materials, and a motivated citizenry. America is a service economy dependent upon reputation and the petro-dollar.
For the last ten years, China has won every single military simulation that the United States conducts.
China is allied with Russia militarily, and socially. The USA is allied with Britain, and Australia and hosts a wide range of “client states”.
China is the “factory for the world”, America is the big piggy-bank based on the stability of the petro-dollar.
Jet Li in the Chinese movie “Fearless”.
Meanwhile, by all appearances, China is not doing anything.
They are just taking the hits and smiling.
Scene from the movie “Real Steel”.
They are practicing the well understood technique of using your foe’s weakness against him. This is Kungfu. This is martial arts. This is fundamental to understanding China.
Mosttraditionalorclassicalmartialartsuses the opponents strength againstthem. Thelistwouldbetoolongtogivethemallbutwillinclude: traditionalKarate (anystyle) Kungfu (anystyle) AikidoJudoTKD (traditional-nosportstkd) Mostpeoplehavethewrongideaconcernkarateandothertraditionalmartialarts.
- Martial arts using opponents strength against them
China knew (I surmise) that the virus would mutate. They always do. While there are species-specific viruses in the world, none are race-specific.
It implies that that a race-specific configuration is not stable.
Since it is not stable, that means that it has a “half-life” and soon mutates to fit a wide ranging biological host.
So now the SHTF COVID-19 biological attack has boomeranged back to it’s source.
For the last one hundred years the American government has cultivated the American citizenry into herd-mentality sheep. It’s rule over mobs of people, it serves the oligarchy well. It does not however, serve a crisis SHTF event well.
Americans are not being safe and treating this virus as the biological weapon that it is. They are treating it as if it is a variation of the flu. This is a very dangerous assumption.
How many face masks do you see? America is treating this virus as some variation of the flu and are treating it as such. They expect that it MIGHT hit them, and if so, they MIGHT get sick, and if sick, they MIGHT need to go to the hospital. All of these assumptions are false.
Things will probably go worse in America than what China experienced in January / February 2020.
Be safe.
This COVID-19 outbreak will hit America with the same level of ferocity that it did Wuhan.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
When the first person in China died, China went DEFCON ONE and locked the entire nation down. They built three hospitals (in ten days) and moved medial staff from all over the nation to Wuhan.
So far, as of today 4MAR20, eight people died in America. Test kits are under-supplied and do not work. The President and the media are telling everyone that it is nothing to worry about. To stay calm and wash hands often.
The Wuhan mortality rate was almost 4% a few weeks after DEFCON ONE. Now, the entire nation mortality is 1%.
My guess is that America’s mortality rate will approach the 10% figure as planned by the neocons in the White House. This is horrible. Please everyone… please be safe.
Jet Li in the movie “Fearless”.
Start Chinese-level personal measures now, today. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Avoid people. Sanitize. Inside clothes and outside clothes. Pets inside. Work from home or order things remotely. Isolate and self quarantine yourselves.
And Robitussin will not help you. It’s NOT the flu.
The death rate from seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
The death rate for COVID-19 appears to be higher than that of the flu.
-Livescience.
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 0.1% of those infected, he said.
The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated.
Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.
-WHO
This illness will rock America to it’s core and it will…
Impact the 2020 Presidential elections.
Impact the American economy.
Impact the global economy.
Impact the way the local government and schools and businesses operate.
Impact all the various disparate balkanized sub-groups within America.
Jet Li from the Chinese movie “Fearless”.
"Now we’re facing another kind of war, against the coronavirus. Trump got rid of our pandemic specialist two years ago and has defunded the Centers for Disease Control because he continues to ignore science."
-Variety
End Quotes
The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began.
The rollout of a CDC-designed test kit to state and local labs has become a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent. Labs around the country eager to test more suspected cases—and test them faster—have been unable to do so. No commercial or state labs have the approval to use their own tests.
In what is already an infamous snafu, CDC initially refused a request to test a patient in Northern California who turned out to be the first probable COVID19 case without known links to an infected person.
-ScienceMAg
A Los Alamos National Laboratory analysis of the outbreak in China in December 2019 and January 2020 puts the unrestrained R0 of Covid-19 at between 4.5 and 6.6. (The R-naught figure indicates the contagiousness of a disease in a given environment. If the number is above one, it’s spreading.)
The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated[Excerpts:] Integrating uncertainties in the exponential growth rate estimated from the ‘first arrival’ approach and the uncertainties in the duration of latent and infectious periods, we estimated the values of R0 to be 6.3 and 4.7. The high R0 values we estimated have important implications for disease control.The 2019-nCoV epidemic is still rapidly growing and spread to more than 20 countries as of February 5, 2020. Here, we estimated the growth rate of the early outbreak in Wuhan to be 0.29 per day (a doubling time of 2.4 days), and the reproductive number, R0, to be between 4.7 to 6.6.How contagious the 2019-nCoV is in other countries remains to be seen. If the value of R0 is as high in other countries, our results suggest that active and strong population-wide social distancing efforts, such as closing down transportation system, schools, discouraging travel, etc., might be needed to reduce the overall contacts to contain the spread of the virus.
This shockingly high original Chinese R0 value meant a doubling of the number of cases every few days, and subsequently, regional hospitals were overrun by infected patients. The Chinese experience indicates how it may spread in the West and the 3rd world. Critically, the often-quoted case fatality rate (CFR) of “only” 2% for Covid-19 occurs when severely affected patients have access to first-class medical treatment, with teams of nurses and doctors caring for them in isolation ICUs.
About 15% of people infected with the virus will develop severe symptoms (pneumonia, etc.) requiring intensive individual treatment in order to survive.
Once hospitals are swamped and many of the medical staff become infected, the CFR can swiftly rise to above 15%. This is believed to be the situation inside the Wuhan City quarantine zone.
An infectious disease with an R-naught above five, and the number of cases doubling every two days, is like a biological atomic bomb chain reaction, particularly in the age of jet travel to all points of the globe.
The USA and the West will quickly run out of Chinese-made PPE, medication, and hospital supplies. For example, China has nationalized the U.S.-owned factory that makes our N-95 masks and will, instead, keep them for their own use. The Chinese have seen Trump’s tariffs as outright economic warfare. Now, in my judgment, they are going to repay us by withholding shipments of PPE and medical supplies. China will leverage its present status as “factory to the world” to their best advantage while they still retain it. These critically needed supplies will be kept in China for their own use during the pandemic, and understandably so.
So, now it will be a race to see if America can set up enough factories to manufacture our own PPEs and other medical supplies rapidly enough to meet our soon-to-be exploding needs. China’s providing, or withholding, of required medical supplies will constitute a World War dimension of the pandemic. They will not send infected travelers to Western cities: they don’t need to do this. That ship has sailed; that horse is out of the barn.
Covid-19 will now travel on its own, with asymptomatic “super spreaders” carrying the virus from country to country for as long as unrestricted air travel is permitted. Then it will spread within each country, with every Western and third-world city a potential Wuhan.
China’s recent history teaches us that interpersonal social interaction has to be reduced as much as possible to get the R naught number down to controllable levels, but this radical reduction comes at a heavy price. When people don’t go to work out of fear of infection, or after being ordered by their governments to self-quarantine at home, economies shrink and eventually collapse. After weeks of forced home quarantine, China is now trying to restart critical factories, but this risks boosting their R0 number once again, leading to more hospitals being overrun and another round of chain-reaction contagion.
...
As usual, I just watched the most recent YouTube video by Dr. John Campbell (Covid-19 Thursday monring 27 Feb). Since he has gained global exposure, he’s getting emails from physicians all over the world, including Iran and China.
He typed up an email he received from the city of Chengdu, population 16 million, which relates their mandatory quarantine rules as China struggles to get Covid-19 under control. When the virus runs rampant and hospitals are overrun, as in Wuhan and Hunan Province, the death rate soars to over 15%, according to many accounts.
Under the strict quarantine rules in the image below, the death rate can be kept to below 2%, but at the cost of crippling the economy.
Now, just imagine trying to enforce this level of social control in American cities.
-Americanpartisan
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Think about it. What benefit does the United States Federal Government provide that the State governments cannot?
And, is that benefit worth the extra multiple layers of taxation?
I strongly believe that it is not worth it at all. The United States today is an out of control corrupt empire, and almost everything it does benefits a mere handful of people, while Joe and Suzy Average derives very little benefit. I would like to expound on this, through the lens of history.
The following article; “The Antifederalists Were Eerily Prophetic” is a most excellent article from the Mises Institute. Written 17NOV19. All credit to the author; Gary M. Galles.
The Antifederalists Were Eerily Prophetic
What the Antifederalists predicted would be the results of the 1776 Constitution turned out to be true…
Most school kids are left with the impression that the US
Constitution was the inevitable follow-up to the Declaration of
Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the
exciting debate that took place after the war and before the
Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal
government at all.
The Antifederalist Movement
Everyone knows about the Federalists who pushed the Constitution. But far less known are the Antifederalists who warned with good reason against the creation of a new centralized government, and just after so much blood had been spilled getting rid of one.
The first of the Antifederalist Papers appeared in 1789.
The Antifederalists were opponents of ratifying the US Constitution as (they feared) it would create what would become an overbearing central government.
What the Antifederalists predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.
As the losers in that debate, they are largely overlooked today. But that does not mean they were wrong or that we are not indebted to them.
Those that fight the Deep State are antifederalists.
Confusing nomenclature.
In many ways, the group has been misnamed.
Federalism refers to the system of decentralized government. This group defended states’ rights—the very essence of federalism—against the Federalists, who would have been more accurately described as Nationalists. Nonetheless, what they predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.
The Antifederalists warned us that the cost Americans would bear in both liberty and resources for the government that would evolve under the Constitution would rise sharply.
That is why their objections led to the Bill of Rights, to limit that tendency.
Their Oppositions to the Constitution
Antifederalists opposed the Constitution on the grounds that its checks on federal power would be undermined by expansive interpretations…
… of promoting the “general welfare” (which would eventually be claimed for every law)…
… and the “all laws necessary and proper” clause (which would be used to override limits on delegated federal powers)…
… thus creating a federal government with unwarranted and undelegated powers that were bound to be abused.
One could quibble with the mechanisms the Antifederalists predicted would lead to constitutional tyranny.
For instance, they did not see that the Commerce Clause would come to be called “the everything clause” in law schools...
...justifying almost any conceivable federal intervention...
...because the necessary distortion of its meaning was so great even Antifederalists couldn’t imagine the government could get away with it.
It merits remembering the Antifederalists’
prescient arguments and the virtual absence of modern Americans who
share their concerns.
And they could not have foreseen how the 14th Amendment and its interpretation would extend federal domination over the states after the Civil War.
But despite that, it is very difficult to argue with their conclusions in light of the current reach of our government, which doesn’t just intrude upon, but often overwhelms Americans today.
We need to listen to the Anti-federalist argument.
Therefore, it merits remembering the Antifederalists’ prescient arguments…
… and how unfortunate is the virtual absence of modern Americans who share their concerns.
One of the most insightful of the Antifederalists was Robert Yates, a New York judge who, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, withdrew because the convention was exceeding its instructions.
Yates wrote as Brutus in the debates over the Constitution.
Given his experience as a judge, his claim that the Supreme Court would become a source of almost unlimited federal overreaching was particularly insightful.
Expanded Judicial Power
Brutus asserted that the Supreme Court envisioned under the Constitution would become a source of massive abuse…
… because they were beyond the control “both of the people and the legislature,” …
…and not subject to being “corrected by any power above them.”
When the opportunity arises the corrupt officials will spring into action and restricts the rights of Americans so that they can gain personally.
As a result, he objected to the fact that its provisions justifying the removal of judges didn’t extend to rulings that went beyond their constitutional authority…
…thus, leading to judicial tyranny.
Brutus argued that when constitutional grounds for making rulings were absent…
… the Court would create grounds “by their own decisions.”
He thought that the power it would command would be so irresistible that the judiciary would use it to make law, manipulating the meanings of arguably vague clauses to justify it.
America today.
Expanded judicial power would empower justices to shape the federal government however they desired.
The Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution according to its alleged “spirit”…
… rather than being restricted to just the “letter” of its written words (as the doctrine of enumerated rights, spelled out in the 10th Amendment, would require).
Further, rulings derived from whatever the court decided its spirit was would effectively “have the force of law,”…
… due to the absence of constitutional means to “control their adjudications” and “correct their errors.”
This constitutional failing would compound over time in a “silent and imperceptible manner,” through precedents that build on one another.
Expanded judicial power would empower justices to shape the federal government however they desired…
… because the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations would control the effective power…
…power vested in government and its different branches.
That would hand the Supreme Court ever-increasing power, in direct contradiction to Alexander Hamilton’s argument in Federalist 78 that the Supreme Court would be “the least dangerous branch.”
Judicial Tyranny
Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would adopt “very liberal” principles of interpreting the Constitution.
This is America today.
He argued that there had never in history been a court with such power and with so few checks upon it…
… giving the Supreme Court “immense powers”…
…powers that were not only unprecedented, but perilous for a nation founded on the principle of consent of the governed.
This is America today.
Given the extent to which citizens’ power to effectively withhold their consent from federal actions has been eviscerated, it is hard to argue with Brutus’s conclusion.
Brutus accurately described both [1] the cause (the absence of sufficient enforceable restraints on the size and scope of the federal government) and [2] the consequences (expanding burdens and increasing invasions of liberty) of what would become the expansive federal powers we now see all around us.
We need to understand their arguments and apply them to a NEW Constitution, if there is to be any hope of restraining the government to the powers it was actually granted in the Constitution.
Today
It’s well past time for a change.
But today, Brutus would conclude that he had been far too optimistic.
The federal government has grown exponentially larger than he could ever have imagined…
In part because he was writing when only direct, e.g., excise taxes and the small federal government they could finance were possible before the 16th Amendment opened the way for a federal income tax in 1913.
…far exceeding its constitutionally enumerated powers, despite the Bill of Rights’ constraints against it.
The result burdens citizens beyond his worst nightmare
The rise and fall of America.
Conclusion
The judicial tyranny that was accurately and unambiguously predicted by Brutus and other Antifederalists shows that in essential ways, they were right and that modern Americans still have a lot to learn from them.
We need to understand their arguments and take them seriously now, if there is to be any hope of restraining the federal government. Constraining it precisely to the limited powers it was actually granted in the Constitution. This is absolutely necessary given its current tendency to accelerate its growth well beyond enumerated Constitutional limits.
In my mind, the first step to controlling the out-of-control beast is to reestablish State sovereignty. Then, through concentrated and systematic efforts, starve the beast. Allow it to whither and die on the vine.
If Americans are unable to control this raging nasty beast, the rest of the world will need to call Animal Control to put it down, and that will certainly not be a pleasant event to witness.
This is America today. Look around you. The rest of the world is moving forward, and the enormous American empire remains dark and immovable.
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The USA is in a long and slow death spasm. It began about two hundred years ago when the Republic was turned into a Democracy. But things went really to dog-shit when the oligarchy took control of American finances with the 16th amendment. The last seventy years has been one of a dying Empire. Now, it’s in complete free fall. And everyone is scrambling to get their “little piece of the action” before it’s all gone. That being prefaced, let’s spend some time and talk about what is going on.
The election of Donald Trump was a “last gasp” in a near vain attempt to thwart the up-coming train-wreck. But opposition forces has, for all practical purposes, deprived him of his Presidential powers. His team, has back-stabbed him, thwarted his efforts, and conducted sabotage.
Yet he remains. A shining star for conservatives to lay their hopes upon.
The opposition party is vacillating between hard-core Marxism (with a friendly face) and a totalitarian dictatorship. They are idealistic uni-mind elitists. They are dangerous and they will be lethal if they ever get a chance to regain the formal reins of power again.
Americans like to dismiss this reality as “politics”, but it is more than that. It is battle between rats fighting over a scrap of pizza while the ship that they are on, sinks under the cool, cool icy calmness of the ocean.
America today. The rats are fights for the scraps of a once great nation. It’s every rat for himself.
This is a reprint of the article titled The Empire: Now or Never by Fred Reed it was written almost exactly a year ago, on February 20, 2019. Nothing has changed. Instead, things have gotten worse. All credit to the author.
Many people I talk to seem to think American foreign policy has something to do with democracy, human rights, national security, or maybe terrorism or freedom, or niceness, or something…
It is a curious belief, Washington being interested in all of them. Other people are simply puzzled, seeing no pattern in America’s international behavior.
But, really, the explanation is simple.
The reason of course is Empire.
American Empire
Empire; that desire for which is an ancient and innate part of mankind’s cerebral package. Parthian, Roman, Aztec, Hapsburg, British. It never stops.
America is an Empire. It utilizes all of the resources under it’s control to maintain that Empire. It is run as an Empire, and aside from the stereotypical images of what a ruthless Empire leader might look like, behaves exactly like a nefarious global evil Empire.
When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia.
The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority…
…Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon.
Powerful groups in Washington, such as PNAC, began angling towed aggrandizement, but the real lunge came with the attack on Iraq.
Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet.
American foreign policy is one of an global Empire dominating the planet economically, militarily and socially.
The astonishing thing is that some people don’t notice this.
Oil and Petroleum Dominance
The world runs on oil.
Controlling the supply conveys almost absolute power over those countries that do not have their own. (For example, the Japanese would soon be eating each other if their oil were cut off.) Saudi Arabia is an American protectorate,and, having seen what happened to Iraq, knows that it can be conquered in short order if it gets out of line.
The U. S. Navy could easily block tanker traffic from Hormuz to any or all countries.
From the central control stations within America, talented people within the deep state bureaucracy are working diligently to make sure that the Empire, and it’s objectives are being met.
A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government.
The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve.
It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington.
Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has.
Note that Iraq and Iran, in addition to their oil, are geo-strategically vital to a world empire. Further, the immensely powerful Jewish presence in the US supports the Mid-East wars for its own purposes. So, of course, does the arms industry.
All God’s children love the Empire.
China and Russia are the Threats
For the Greater Empire to prevail, Russia and China, the latter a surprise contender, must be neutralized. Thus the campaign to crush Russia by economic sanctions.
All threats to the American Empire must be neutralized. They must be vanquished by whatever means possible, and secretly. Were an outright and overt war to occur, the United States would not fare well.
At the same time Washington pushes NATO, its deployed militia, ever eastward…
Wants to station US forces in Poland…
Plans a Space Command whose only purpose is to intimidate or bankrupt Russia…
Drops out of the INF Treaty for the same reasons…
And seeks to prevent commercial relations between Russia and the European vassals (e.g., Nordstream II).
China of course is the key obstacle to expanding the Empire.
Thus… the trade war.
America has to stop China’s economic and technological progress, and stop it now, as it will not get another chance.
For the American Empire to remain firmly and fixed in control, China must be stopped by any methods possible. With biological germ warfare being the present preferred method.
The present moment is an Imperial crunch point.
America cannot compete with China commercially or, increasingly, in technology. Washington knows it. Beijing’s advantages are too great:
A huge and growing domestic market…
A far larger population of very bright people…
A for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad…
A stable government that can plan well into the future.
And America’s Strengths…
America?
It’s power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely had competitors.
Today it has deindustrialized…
Runs a trade deficit with almost everybody…
Carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt…
And makes few things that the world can’t get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
Increasingly America’s commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer.
Washington tells other countries;
“If you don’t do as we say, we won’t buy your stuff.”
The indispensable country is an indispensable market.
With few and diminishing (though important) exceptions, if it stopped selling things to China, China would barely notice, but if it stopped buying, the Chinese economy would wither.
Tariffs, please take note, are just a way of not buying China’s stuff.
Since
the profligate American market is vital to other countries, they often
do as ordered. But Asian markets grow. So do Asian industries.
“Strong-Arm” Tactics
As America’s competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics.
It has no choice.
A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei’s founder.
The tide runs against the Empire.
A couple of decades ago, the idea that China could compete technologically with America would have seemed preposterous. Today China advances at startling speed.
It is neck and neck with the US in supercomputers…
Launches moon-landers…
Leads in 5G internet…
Does leading work in genetics…
Designs world-class chipsets (e.g., the Kirin 980 and 920) and smartphones.
Another decade or two of this and America will be at the trailing edge.
The big “elephant in the room” is the American use of biological germ warfare against China. First the destruction of the chicken industry, then the destruction of the pork industry (by using custom made drones) and latest is the attempt to wipe out a significant portion of the Chinese population using the COVID-19 coronavirus at Wuhan.
America’s damage is self-inflicted.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted.
The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence.
American education deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists.
Washington spends on the military instead of infrastructure and the economy.
It is politically chaotic, its policies changing with every new administration.
The first rule of empire is, “Don’t let your enemies unite.” Instead, Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire.
It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China. By imposing sanctions of adversaries and allies alike, Washington promotes de-dollarization and recognition that America is not an ally but a master.
It is now or never.
If America’s great but declining power does not subjugate the rest of the world quickly, the rising powers of Asia will swamp it. Even India grows. Either sanctions subdue the world…
Or Washington starts a world war.
Or America becomes just another country.
To paraphrase a great political thinker, “It’s the Empire, Stupid.”
Conclusion
You do not need to believe me. Just look at how Russia, China and India are handing things today. Turn off the American propaganda bubble, and listen to what other nations think, and how they are handling things.
This COVID-19 coronavirus event is being treated by China as a DEFCON ONE military event against a biological weapons attack.
Just because CNN is not report it, does not mean that it is not happening. It is just that you, and your fellow countrymen, are unaware of it.
The American mainstream, left-ALT, and Alt-Right media are propaganda channels that the American government utilizes to control the population. They do not, and NEVER reflect, the true and real reality.
The United States is pushing, pushing, and pushing. The anti-Russia and the anti-China propaganda war is at a fever pitch. The last time we saw such media pro-war intensity was World War II.
I personally think that the “Genie is out of the bottle”, and unless something radical will happen, American neocons will drive America straight into Nuclear Armageddon. And do not be under the misguided impression that America will win. No one wins with Global Nuclear Annihilation. Especially when it will be full-spectrum with nuclear, germ, biological and chemical war.
No one.
No one wins with Global Nuclear Annihilation.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have many more in my SHTF Index, here…
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This article suggests that of the numerous forces tearing America apart, one such force is an out-of-control legal system. No, we are not talking about the US Prison system that incarcerates a full 25% of the inmates on the planet. Though, yes it is a problem. We are instead going to talk about laws and regulations in the United States and the damage to liberty that they have forged. This article argues that when the laws and regulations have become so numerous and complex, that the entire system devolved into lawlessness.
Now, of course, there are numerous forces that are tearing the United States apart, and eventually (sure as shit) it will crumble and die, and a New America will rise up from the ashes. What it will look like, no one knows.
Though, I have painted some pretty dark and gloomy pictures of what could happen in other posts. Don’t you know.
These forces are numerous and include such things as…
The socialists Marxist movement started 100 years ago by President Wilson.
The greedy oligarchy that is gobbling up everything that they can lay their hands on.
The upper middle class which is following the (winning) strategy of the oligarchy.
A collapsing culture and morals.
A decaying infrastructure.
A collapsed educational system churning out imbecile serfs ready to work on “the plantation”.
And, many more.
Here is an article that was written by Alec Orrell . I think that is is really very good. He mapped out how we devolved into orderly lawlessness. His article is titled Legitocracy in America, and it is worth the time to read.
This article is copied as written without much editing aside from some paragraph formatting and the fonts used in this template.
I added some "pull away" text for highlighting and maybe interjected on or two personal comments along the way (though you will be able to easily see that they are from your's truly.)
I have added my own pictures to help illustrate some of his fine points, but there are a couple of decorative "splash" pictures on his originally posted venue.
After reading the article, I would suggest the reader go to his original article and read some of his other works. This fellow is brilliant and a word-smith. (Though he tends to write on a university level, where I tend to be far more plebeian.)
All credit to the author Alec Orrell writing in Human Events.
The commentariat across the political spectrum have recently reveled
in predicting imminent authoritarianism and the “literal death of
democracy” unless sundry bugbears are stopped.
As Murray sees it, the United States’ hyper-complicated and outrageously voluminous law is much the same as no law at all for the ordinary citizen.
The catastrophizing is quaint.
Perhaps they are too terrified, distracted, or dissembling to utter the truth obvious under closer examination: the United States ceased to operate as a constitutional democratic republic at least 100 years ago. Democracy isn’t “in peril”—it’s dead and buried.
The United States ceased to operate as a constitutional democratic republic at least 100 years ago. Democracy isn’t “in peril”—it’s dead and buried.
How did we get here?
How did we get here? Social scientist Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) penned a fascinating but little-remarked book titled By The People in 2015. There, Murray argued the United States has become, in effect, a lawless society.
His assertion may strike some as odd, because lawless usually calls to mind a breakdown in order, like in Afghanistan or Somalia.
But countries maintain order without righteous law all the time.
Dictators the world over regularly keep the peace using suppression and intimidation. There’s no shooting in the streets, but there’s no sense of justice or predictability, either.
Dictators the world over regularly keep the peace using suppression and intimidation. There’s no shooting in the streets, but there’s no sense of justice or predictability, either.
LAWS, LAWS, AND MORE LAWS
As Murray sees it, the United States’ hyper-complicated and outrageously voluminous law is much the same as no law at all for the ordinary citizen. The oppressor isn’t a dictator but an incomprehensible and unpredictable justice system passed from one set of leaders’ hands to another, from one political party to another.
Murray writes:
[L]et’s talk about the legal system not as it looks from thirty thousand feet to law professors, where everything can be fit together and rationalized, but how it looks at ground level to ordinary law-abiding citizens …
I am reminded of science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
From ground level, our encounters with today’s legal system as it actually functions are often indistinguishable from lawlessness.
Consider that, between federal, state, city, county, and judge-made
law—along with truckloads of regulations and codes by state and federal
agencies which carry the full force of law—an American today lives under something like 100 times as much law as his or her great-great-grandfather. That’s a chilling comparison.
An American today lives under something like 100 times as much law as his or her great-great-grandfather.
Further, consider that the average American thoroughly understands few or none of the laws governing him.
Sure, he possesses a vague sense of the basics and some traffic law, but that’s all.
Should the internal functions of the miraculous device go awry, the average citizen is helpless. He usually cannot afford skillful lawyers to interpret the laws or to defend him when he is forced to confront the legal system. A lawsuit or a criminal prosecution ruins him, regardless of his culpability.
Washington, D.C.; April 29, 2019: A study released today shows that the vast majority of Department of Health and Human Services regulations issued over a recent 17-year period are unconstitutional. The first-of-its-kind study reviewed 2,952 rules issued by HHS and found that 71% of final rules from 2001 through 2017 were issued by low-level officials and career employees who lack constitutional authority to do so.
Such rules are unconstitutional. The Constitution requires that significant government decisions must be made solely by “principal officers” appointed by the president after Senate confirmation. Issuing a regulation with the force of law is one of those actions that only principal officers can perform.
The majority of unconstitutional rules were issued by the Food and Drug Administration. Just 2% of FDA rules were issued by principal officers, while 1,860 rules were finalized and issued by career employees.
“In a democracy, those who make the rules need to be accountable to the people,” report co-author Thomas Berry, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, explained. “That’s why the Framers included the Appointments Clause in the Constitution. Only properly-appointed officers in the executive branch may issue regulations that are binding on the public. This preserves democratic accountability for significant executive branch actions.”
One such rule is the controversial “Deeming Rule,” which classifies tobacco-free vaping products as tobacco products. The rule prohibits Steve Green, a California vape shop owner, from telling his customers his story about using vaping to stop smoking and recover from early signs of emphysema. PLF filed three lawsuits challenging the rule last year.
“Among the hundreds of illegal FDA rules, 25 rules were classified as significant because they had an impact on the American economy of at least $100 million or had other significant economic impacts,” said Angela Erickson, PLF’s strategic research director and co-author of the report. “Congress and the White House should ensure that this practice ends and agencies comply with the law.”
The full report is available at pacificlegal.org/HHSreport.
He usually cannot afford skillful lawyers to interpret the laws or to defend him when he is forced to confront the legal system. A lawsuit or a criminal prosecution ruins him, regardless of his culpability.
The law is like an iPhone: a miraculous device at which he glances all the time and uses for simple tasks without knowing the first thing about how the internal functions perform their magic.
Should the internal functions of the miraculous device go awry, the average citizen is helpless.
He usually cannot afford skillful lawyers to interpret the laws or to defend him when he is forced to confront the legal system. A lawsuit or a criminal prosecution ruins him, regardless of his culpability.
In the United States, Federal drug defendants who won’t plead guilty pay dearly, according to our new report, “An Offer You Can’t Refuse.” Prosecutors use their ability to vary the charges to seek longer mandatory sentences for people who turn down plea bargains. Defendants who go to trial receive sentences that, on average, are three times as long. Not surprisingly, 97 percent of drug defendants are convicted by pleas, not trial.
The wrongfully accused regularly plea bargain to avoid being crushed by the legal process.
The vast majority of criminal cases in the United States end not in courtroom trials but in negotiated agreements between prosecutors and defense lawyers. Plea bargaining dates to the 1800s and has often been controversial. Law-and-order advocates say the practice lets criminals get lower sentences, while some defense lawyers and civil libertarians say it coerces defendants to give up their legal rights. Most prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, however, say the practice helps produce justice while reducing strains on the court system. Defense lawyers last year cheered a court ruling that would have barred prosecutors from offering leniency in exchange for a defendant’s testimony against accomplices. But prosecutors celebrated last month when the ruling was overturned.
The citizen is told that ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it, but he cannot correct his ignorance himself nor pay to have others supplement it.
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.
Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Madison’s sketch of run-amok law bears an uncanny resemblance to the United States today.
He highlights a fundamental truth Americans have forgotten amidst the partisan bickering over which byzantine laws to pass:
Representative lawmaking does not produce democracy when demos (“the people”) cannot grasp the laws, either to express their disagreement with them or to follow them.
In Madison’s view, such edicts aren’t real law, just dressed-up tyranny divorced from the ethos of a constitutional republic.
Taxation of Social Security benefits. The complicated formula and the 20 step worksheet used to determine the percentage of benefits (up to 85%) subject to tax aren’t new, but they are affecting more Americans as the number receiving Social Security grows. Here is the equation as i stood in 1997.
Were Madison alive to witness the present debacle, he might opine:
The United States possesses no authentic law, only enforced order.
A tyrant who inflicts his will with rifles and a legal priesthood who inflict their will with occult laws are functionally equivalent. In both cases, citizens lose all confidence in a coherent moral order of their own design underlying their day-to-day existence.
The United States possesses no authentic law, only enforced order.
RULE BY LAWYERS
The United States today might be better called a legitocracy—a government by the legal priesthood for the legal priesthood.
Judges, lawyers, prosecutors, regulators, law schools, bar associations, and legal-activism conglomerates like the ACLU and GLAAD use their specialized knowledge to function as gatekeepers of society’s rules, politics, and culture.
Nothing is accomplished without the involvement of the legal priesthood.
Judges, lawyers, prosecutors, regulators, law schools, bar associations, and legal-activism conglomerates like the ACLU and GLAAD use their specialized knowledge to function as gatekeepers of society’s rules, politics, and culture. Nothing is accomplished without the involvement of the legal priesthood.
Armies of lawyers draft the bills for elected lawmakers, who enact their recommendations with only a vague understanding of their mandates.
Then lawmakers turn the laws backover to prosecutors, regulators, and jurists for implementation and enforcement. More often than not, lawmakers come from the ranks of the law-schooled themselves.
Representative lawmaking does not produce democracy when demos (“the people”) cannot grasp the laws, either to express their disagreement with them or to follow them.
Thus the legal priesthood operates in a closed system, disconnected from the populace and unaccountable in practice to anyone but themselves.
Thus the legal priesthood operates in a closed system, disconnected from the populace and unaccountable in practice to anyone but themselves.
To be sure, the priesthood declaims with great eloquence about “democracy,” a “nation of laws,” and “the people”; but they amount to an insular social class—the card carriers in a one-party state.
The rest of us are merely along for the ride.
One is reminded of the famous maxim:
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” In this case, one might say: “Those who enact the laws and vote for lawmakers decide nothing. Those who interpret and enforce the laws decide everything.”
Much like the aristocracies and theocracies of bygone days, the chieftains of the legitocratic class have fallen into warlording over which of them gets to make the rules that control the society and the state.
They bicker over bizarre ideologies and disrupt elected government at every turn with nuisance lawsuits and politically-motivated prosecutions. They divert political and cultural issues from legislatures and elections into courtrooms.
They divert issues away from legislatures and elections and into the courtrooms instead.
For example, Americans recently were treated to the groaning spectacle of a federal judge deciding how the President may operate his personal Twitter account, and whether biological men must be allowed in women’s locker rooms when they identify as women.
As in all warlordism, the resulting instability destroys the average citizen’s peace, predictability, and trust.
He may not be able to articulate the government’s devolution into feuding legitocracy; nevertheless, he senses that he lives in a failed state.
He sees no sacred or impartial justice emerging from the legal system anymore. Virtue and common sense have no place and no reward. All he sees are wizards in tailored suits hurling thunderbolts at one another and terrorizing his day-to-day existence with their staggering litigiousness and self-righteous culture crusades.
He senses that he lives in a failed state.
He sees no sacred or impartial justice emerging from the legal system anymore.
Virtue and common sense have no place and no reward.
All he sees are wizards in tailored suits hurling thunderbolts at one another and terrorizing his day-to-day existence with their staggering litigiousness and self-righteous culture crusades.
The average citizen hesitates to publicly speak his mind, defend his person, establish a business, worship openly, or seek redress for real injuries.
Should anyone bother to ask him, the citizen will declare that the words chiseled on the Supreme Court building (“Equal Justice Under Law”) have turned to bitter irony.
He watches with ballooning cynicism as the legal priesthood deploys word games to exonerate one another’s heinous manipulations, then turn and damn ordinary citizens like him to years of legal hell for standing up to their diktats.
He watches with ballooning cynicism as the legal priesthood deploys word games to exonerate one another’s heinous manipulations, then turn and damn ordinary citizens like him to years of legal hell for standing up to their diktats.
Justice is no longer a sacred right grounded in fear of God and His mystery. It is something you hire or receive as a reward for loyalty.
Justice is no longer a sacred right.
The legitocratic class has changed the motto of the United States from “In God, We Trust” to “There Is No God—Trust Us.”
Thus, the average citizen hesitates to publicly speak his mind, defend his person, establish a business, worship openly, or seek redress for real injuries.
He fears to resist the legal system’s incessant cultural bullying, lest he gets sucked into the vortex and land in Oz for years pursued by flying monkey lawyers.
Thus, the average citizen hesitates to publicly speak his mind, defend his person, establish a business, worship openly, or seek redress for real injuries. He fears to resist the legal system’s incessant cultural bullying, lest he gets sucked into the vortex and land in Oz for years pursued by flying monkey lawyers.
He can’t say how it happened, but the citizen knows he dwells at the bottom of a multi-tiered, politically corrupt, unchecked cabal of a legal system that cares nothing for his well-being.
Will the legal priesthood reform themselves?
Will activist judges voluntarily give up their arrogated and unconscionable power of nationwide injunction?
Will the Supreme Court allow voters and lawmakers to address questions of culture and politics through elections and legislation once again, rather than dictating both from the bench?
Will law schools cease to operate as seminaries of progressive social engineering, imperious elitism, state-enforced credentialism, relativism, nihilism, identity politics, and other ever-shifting philosophies?
Will the legal priesthood stop terrorizing the unanointed and favoring their own, demanding with one voice that the law revert to a form comprehensible and accessible to the average citizen?
Of course they will, right after unicorns fly out of Chief Justice John Roberts’ robes.
He can’t say how it happened, but the citizen knows he dwells at the bottom of a multi-tiered, politically corrupt, unchecked cabal of a legal system that cares nothing for his well-being. Happiness has been replaced by trinkets and freedom by tax rebates, and liberty… well, it just doesn’t exist.
Americans live in denial of their rationalized, systemic oppression.
Over the last five or so generations, legalistic authoritarianism has progressively choked the average citizen’s pursuit of happiness, like a slow garroting in a collar of recondite laws.
Americans live in denial of their rationalized, systemic oppression. Over the last five or so generations, legalistic authoritarianism has progressively choked the average citizen’s pursuit of happiness, like a slow garroting in a collar of recondite laws.
If one doubts this, it’s only because he hasn’t experienced the extremities of the legal system’s insanity himself yet—the Kafkaesque horror of an endless, politically motivated IRS audit, or a court telling a father he must call his 6-year-old son a girl. The law and government do not serve the will of the people; it’s the other way around now.
The law and government do not serve the will of the people; it’s the other way around now.
Where does that leave the citizen?
He is reduced to hoping the orderly lawlessness of the legal system remains confined to the courts and the government, that disorderly lawlessness does not erupt in public.
He is right to be concerned.
Americans are quarreling with one another in frustration. A growing number of individuals and groups misidentify the root of the tyranny and endanger public order, blaming vague and simplistic concepts like “white supremacy,” “fascism,” “the patriarchy,” “capitalism,” etc. for the oppression they sense.
Americans are quarreling with one another in frustration. A growing number of individuals and groups misidentify the root of the tyranny and endanger public order, blaming vague and simplistic concepts like “white supremacy,” “fascism,” “the patriarchy,” “capitalism,” etc. for the oppression they sense.
Meanwhile, disturbed young male shooters at the end of their tether scapegoat women and minority groups for the proliferation of politically correct rules under which they feel smothered.
Tracing their anxieties back reveals a common source: alienation from the rules that govern them.
Tracing their anxieties back reveals a common source: alienation from the rules that govern them.
Unsurprisingly, the legal priesthood plays both sides to lengthen their reach and tighten their grasp: The root problem is not that the people toil under mountains of legal minutiae and can’t even breathe without violating at least five laws.
No, according to them the problem is always too much freedom requiring (you guessed it!) more laws.
Laws restricting firearms.
Laws restricting hurtful speech.
Laws restricting plastic straws.
Laws, laws, laws.
A violent response.
Rooftop Koreans taking matters into their own hands when the government failed them.
A militia-like civil defense response from ordinary citizens akin to the Roof Koreans of the L.A. riots seems well within the realm of possibility these days.
Scene from the television series “The Walking Dead”. Americans are getting ready for the conflict that lies ahead. They are “prepping” and make no mistake, it will happen unless drastic action takes place immediately.
American citizens must be brought to understand that the struggle gripping the country does not fundamentally pit liberals against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans.
The struggle pits average citizens who want to live under clear, predictable, and widely understood laws against the legal priesthood’s empire of complication and confusion.
American citizens must be brought to understand that the struggle gripping the country does not fundamentally pit liberals against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans. The struggle pits average citizens who want to live under clear, predictable, and widely understood laws against the legal priesthood’s empire of complication and confusion.
And that is the way it is.
One of the first things that you notice when you move to another nation is just how simple it is.
If there is a tax, it's only one singular tax. There are no regulations, and the things that you can do, from driving without a seat-belt, to having your five year old buying a beer for you is astounding.
Here in communist China, I am afforded so many, many MANY freedoms that Americans haven't a clue to what they have lost. That's a fact Jack. Deal with it.
If the public can grasp that their system of government has slowly
changed without their consent, the legal priesthood’s magical powers
will evaporate and the U.S. legal system will be seen for what it is: a
recondite abomination propped up by platitudes. At that time, rescuing
the democratic republic back from the pit of legitocracy stands a
chance.
Until that time, the wizards will continue to rule, and may God help us all.
SHTF Related Index
This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory)
and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America
is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much
about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things
that really should be said.
Here are the posts.
SHTF and Related Index
Some prepper humor…
Articles & Links
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notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a pretty decent article that I found on the Sign Of The Times network. It pretty much enunciates what I have been observing for some time. It’s well written and as such.
I am reprinting this directly as published. All credit to the author, and I would suggest that the reader click on the link and honor all their effort in writing this article.
It’s got a terrible title, but (shrug) what can you do?
This article discusses how America (and by extension, Americans) hold on to the title and respect that they inherited from their forefathers. America inherited being the world’s leader militarily, socially, economically, culturally, and spiritually.
However, those that took over, during the last 60 years, squandered what they were given. In many cases destroyed what was built up, created, and established. And replaced it with something else. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, look up “culture wars”.)
As America crumbles, people naturally try to hold on to what is no longer healthy and viable. That is what we are witnessing today. With China being the rising competitor.
Thus this article.
Technical note: When the author refers to typical American / UK statements (well known to all us expats), the background is set as light grey. My comments are in raw format.
In the 1980s, American elites feared the rise of economic powerhouse Japan, but managed to contain its competitor because Japan was at root a vassal state occupied by the US military.
Fair enough.
However, China’s rise today is a different story altogether. With 1.4 billion people, the largest economy in the world (by GDP at purchasing power parity – PPP), and an independent foreign policy, China’s rise heralds the beginning of a multi-polar world.
Obvious to most of the world, if not Americans.
The ‘American Century’ is over, but Americans cannot accept the fact that they – 5% of the world’s population – cannot rule the other 95% forever. American entitlement and hubris are causing many to lash out and embark on a path that is perilous both to themselves and the world.
Yes. It's the "Fourth Turning" baby, and it's gonna get nasty.
Incongruent Fear and Loathing
Let’s take a look at some illogical American talking points used in the smear campaign against China:
“China is going to collapse soon!”
If Americans really believed this, they would sit back, smile and ignore China.
“China is going to take over the world!”
This paranoid warning usually follows the delusional, “China will collapse” claim. Make up your mind!
“Our free market is the best and China is communist!”
Americans conveniently forget that the US government subsidizes farmers, Big Pharma and the military-industrial-complex with hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Also, when developing nations subsidize Western corporations, it’s applauded as smart business; but when developing nations help their domestic firms, it’s vilified as socialism or communism.
What’s even more interesting is that China now has more publicly traded companies than the US!
There’s more competition in “communist” China than in the “capitalist” US. For example, the US has only one smartphone company (Apple), while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, ZTE, OnePlus, Transsion, etc.
Finally, comparing the economic growth of the US and China over the last four decades, no one can reasonably say that the US is superior to the China model:
Comparing the economic growth of the US and China over the last four decades, no one can reasonably say that the US is superior to the China model.
“China isn’t open! It discriminates against US corporations!”
This is often accompanied by, “We should decouple from China!” This ‘logic’ hurts the brain.
Also, while demanding that China treat American companies just like Chinese companies, the US has placed 140 Chinese companies under the “entity list,” meaning they can’t do business with US corporations or the government.
“China censors Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.”
This is followed by, “OMG! There are Chinese bots and trolls flooding our social media. Ban them, please!”
“China steals everything”
China has been #1 in both scientific publications and patents for the last few years. Why?
Chinese companies like Huawei, Alibaba and SenseTime are leapfrogging over the US in AI software, AI chips, database software, 5G etc.
And young Chinese people have the “9-9-6” work ethic – they work 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
Well, it’s like sports where partisan supporters are certain that the other team won only by cheating.
“China forced US corporations into technology transfer”
In exchange for technology, China offered generous subsidies and tax cuts that allowed US corporations to make trillions of dollars over the last 40 years.
To put it succinctly: China bought the technology from American, European, Japanese and Korean companies. Americans didn’t mind the technology transfer, because they never thought that China could compete – after all, China merely employs slave labor to make crappy products, right?
“China is a totalitarian government! We are so amazing because we have Democracy!”
Democracy in America is a joke.
As Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank said, “America is of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%.”
The Chinese government is based on meritocracy and has a 90% approval rate. While it’s not perfect, it has done a remarkable job in the last 40 years by lifting 800 million people out of poverty and creating the world’s largest middle class.
Also, note that the US never tries to spread democracy in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, etc.
‘Freedom and democracy’ propaganda is a selective tool, not anchored to any consistent values or principles worthy of being called such.
Atrocity Propaganda
Like “Saddam threw babies out of incubators” or “Assad uses chemical weapons,” the US started the “1 million Chinese Muslims in concentration camps” narrative in early 2018.
While hundreds of diplomats and journalists from all over the world have visited these re-education camps in Xinjiang, the US establishment sticks to its pathetic atrocity propaganda.
It’s not even remotely true. Not in the least.
When that desperate narrative fizzled out, whoever is responsible for conducting psy-ops in Washington DC restarted the “organ-harvesting” fake news with the help of Falun Gong and the World Uyghur Congress, both of which are funded by the US.
No matter how absurd or sensationalist, it’s never a “conspiracy theory” when it’s about China, Russia, Iran or any other geopolitical competitor.
Racism and Yellow Peril
Behind all this anti-China propaganda is deep-seated racism in Americans that cannot accept the Chinese as equals.
If confronted about racism, Americans would say, “I only hate the Chinese government, not the people.”
However, this is clearly disproved by how Americans behave on social media, where any article that’s negative about China instantly goes viral; and positive news about China gets ignored or even down-voted.
‘Yellow Peril syndrome’ is deeper among those in the US establishment.
The right-wing is more blatant and sensational:
"The Chinese aren't smarter. They CHEAT," tweeted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. A US State Department official said, "It's the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian." The FBI Director upped the ante and called China a "whole-of-society threat."
Like George Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate‘, the US media and social media influencers — Kyle Bass, Gordon Chang, Charlie Kirk, General Rob Spalding etc. — spew insane anti-Chinese hatred every day to rile up the mob.
Censorship
As Rania Khalek pointed out, corporate media is filled with spooks and US government officials acting as “analysts.”
Sadly, social media giants are also acting as state propaganda outlets. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Medium etc. are all actively purging pro-China voices, while tolerating what amounts to hate speech.
Nathan Rich – an American living in China – illustrated how YouTube actively worked against him.
For example, his subscriber numbers would go down substantially, people could only dislike his videos but could not like them, his videos wouldn't show up in searches, etc. Twitter also purges pro-China people, but if there's a huge outcry - like when they deleted Carl Zha's account - the thought police would quietly reinstate a handful of the victims.
Anyone who’s remotely pro-China on social media is vilified as a Chinese bot or a “Wumao” – a person who supposedly works for 50 cents/hour to spread Chinese propaganda.
This is where the "fifty-center" meme came from.
On Reddit, there’s a sub-group called “r/China” with 120,000 members. But you won’t find anything positive or neutral about China in that group — it’s a sewer of racism and hatred. And people who post positive news about China also get banned or attacked by online mobs.
As an aside, I (Metallicman) was banned on Free Republic in October 2019 because I posted a positive article reporting on Hong Kong events. That is amazing as I was a long time member (20+ years!) to Free Republic with over 8,000+ posted articles. No warning. No email. No excuse or reasons given. Just erased me and my my history. Zilch!
That is what Jim Robinson has become. Just another Software mogul in the United States.Snubbing his nose at us "little guys" that made FR popular.
From corporate media to social media, only one-sided sensational claims are allowed.
The concept of ‘freedom of speech and expression’ in the US is a farce.
Conclusion
The USA is exhibiting all the symptoms of late-stage capitalism or a dying empire — deep internal divisions, extreme wealth inequality, exploding debt, brainwashed masses, overextended military, and paranoia about geopolitical competition.
Meanwhile, China has a lot of room to grow, since its GDP-per-capita is still only $10,000 overall and $20,000 in big cities. China’s strategy is to keep calm, maintain growth, expand trade, and become technologically independent by 2025 — especially in semiconductors. By 2030, China’s nominal GDP will be larger than that of the US; and Asia will account for 40% of global GDP.
If China can successfully navigate all the proxy and hybrid wars waged by a belligerent America in the next decade, then China and Eurasia will be the shining stars of this century.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
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some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Some Fun Videos
Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While
there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in
Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.
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Here we discuss the women of Mongolia. How strong, tough, and beautiful they are. We also take a look at how they became that way. For they are who they are because of the strengths and guidance of one singular man; Genghis Khan. As such, we study the environment that forged such strong, fierce and beautiful women.
One of the things that I enjoy about history is looking at it in it’s entirety. That is to say, not just the dates, the places, the battles, and the warriors. But rather the tales of bravery and strife of the people who lived at that time. But, yes, it’s even more than that. You need to understand the culture and society at the time to really obtain a full and accurate impression of what was going on then. Here, in this article, we look at life under the brutal emperor Genghis Khan as a woman. After all, it’s a pretty fascinating subject, don’t you know.
Why women? Well, we pretty much know what it was like as a man; you fought and you died in glorious battle. You died for a man who you admired, and who you looked up to. He was your hero.
Even though Genghis Khan is considered as a bad person in the world due to his brutal activities of killing people; in Mongolia, he was considered as a hero. He brought civilization and law in Mongolia. The leadership of women was very appreciated in his native land.
-Genghis Khan Facts
Men also didn’t tend to live long. It’s sort of like it is today, only back then you also had to contend with [1] illnesses without cures, [2] jealous neighbors who will kill you “just because”, [3] accidents without doctors, and [4] the occasional genocide of your entire tribe.
Ah, it was a truly tough life if you were a man.
Not that being a woman was any better, mind you. It’s just that it was a different time with different problems. Women had to deal with the annual baby, while busily keeping the other kids alive. All the time maintaining the household, budgeting the financing, feeding the family and engaging in family-to-family politics that were often at a “Game of Thrones” level.
Genghis Khan was a hero and a leader to his people. Young boys and men followed him and looked up to him. He was everything they ever dreamed of, and the man that they wanted to emulate.
Here we look at the ruler of the largest empire in the world. We look at the man, and the conservative society that he imposed on his people and on the peoples that he conquered.
Traditional Conservative Society
Now one of the things are is often overlooked in the histories of our past is the society from once they were derived. We just “assume” that they were like our present society, only with different clothing, and bad sanitation. Most people assume that it was almost like our present life, just at a different time.
Not true.
These are “traditional” conservative societies. Not “progressive”, modern, and “liberal” societies formed after the industrial revolution to “modernize” it to keep up with changing events and the “scientific method”.
There are two types of societies;
A traditional society. One that has remained constant for thousands of years.
A Progressive and modern society. One that is subject to change and alterations to fit the times. The oldest progressive society in the world is the “American Society”. It is slightly over one hundred years old.
Over 5000 years of mankind, families and evolution has created a world-wide template on what a traditional society is. That template is a global standard. The men folk engage in hunting, foraging and farming activities and the wife engages in domestic duties. It’s known as a “traditional”, and “conservative” family.
So, nope, you won’t see a shared division of labor.
Genghis Khan. In those days a man must provide for his family. If something were to happen to him, then the family might end up destitute. So it was critically important that the father be strong and tough. Scene is from the movie Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure.
The husband won’t go rushing out the door to ride the horse to McMogel Inc. to clock in, while the wife rides her steed to a nearby village to engage in some urban planning activities. You know, go through the drive-through Yurt to get a Starbucks hot yak milk. It’s not like that. That is a progressive “modern” division of labor for families.
A traditional home is one where the man earnings a place in society for his family, and the woman cares for the home and children. It’s a conservative, and traditional , division of labor.
Now, of course, you the reader, might look askance at me.
It’s not only the division of labor that is different from our modern progressive family lifestyle. It is everything. The man MUST represent the family in the community, hold his own; earn his keep and provide for his family. If he fails, he risks banishment, subjugation, possible slavery and death for him and his family. The stakes are always high in a conservative society.
No slackers are permitted to live in a true conservative society.
(Which is perhaps why the progressive liberals are so Hell-bent on disarming them, in order to achieve their progressive utopia. Eh?)
If Genghis Khan would take a look at Americans today, what would he think? Do you believe that he would be proud and happy that Americans are so healthy, intelligent, smart, hard-working and healthy? Or do you believe that the would consider them weak, soft, pampered and “pushovers”? What would Genghis Khan or any of his 500 wives think?
Traditional Conservative Roles
In a traditional conservative society, there are roles. They are strict. They are easy to understand. They are easy to measure the success or failure of.
For the man, this might mean herding cattle, farming, fishing, or fighting with the local kingly leader. It’s ok for the man, as it leverages his strengths. (Though, not all that great on the wear and tear on his body.)
While the wife tends to the house, manages (and teaches) the kids and provides nutritious meals for the family. It’s always been a very comfortable division of labor and responsibilities.
Thus to understand Genghis Khan, and his treatment of women within that society, you need to understand and recognize that it was a different time, and a different place. It in no way resembles life and our societies today.
Modern American progressives having a discussion on the merits of the improved utopia under Socialist Bernie Sanders. They believe that a true utopia on earth can be obtained through application of modern techniques and a modern society where everyone is the same. Everyone is equal, and everyone is happy. In their world view, they would be just as “equal” as the strongest man, the smartest woman, the fastest runner, or the most attractive (or handsome) person. Simply because they intend to legislate it that way. Under Genghis Khan, however, they would be singled out as slackers and killed. (Maybe tortured first, it depends on their mood at the time.)
The modern progressive lifestyle that came into being during the feudal societies of the “middle ages”, as well that their modern manifestation the Wilsonian modern progressive lifestyle had another 600 years before it started to gain in popularity.
The Mongolian culture that we see today, is a result of things that took place many centuries before Wilsonian / Taft, and FDR “progressive modernization” was even conceived.
This all took place at a time when Men were Men, and Women were Women. Everyone had a role. If you did not fit within that role, you were killed. There was no mercy. Abominations were killed.
It’s all pretty straightforward, don’t you know.
Genghis Khan being offered a Twinkie in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. While the comedy made humorous enjoyment of history, the fact remains that being a man (or a woman) in those times was no laughing matter. Death came quickly to those not deserving of life (as judged by your peers.) Yikes!
r/K Reproductive Strategy
To understand why the women of Mongolia are strong, tough and equals with men, you must understand the differences in society survival mechanisms. This is known as the r/K reproductive strategy and it affects everything.
Being equal does not mean a comparative measurement of strength.
Equality is self-contained independence within a role-defined framework.
To study this further, please click on the link below. Don’t worry as it opens up in another tab so that you can safely continue reading this article.
Genghis Khan’s rough childhood.
Let’s talk a little bit about the boss.
Genghis Khan was the Emperor of the Mongol Empire. He ruled the country from 1206 up to 1227. He was born on Delüün Boldog in 1162. He died at the age of 65 years old in 1227. The legend stated that he would be a good leader when he grew up since he was born with a blood clot in his clenched fist.
When Genghis Khan was just a child, his father Yesugei was poisoned by a rival tribe, the Tatars, when they sneakily offered him poisoned food.
Expert Tip: Don't eat food given to you by your enemies.
Young Genghis, who had been away, immediately went back home to claim his position as chief of the tribe. But once he arrived he discovered that things had changed. Once his father was gone, his family was blacklisted in his tribe. They decided to kick them out of the tribe, and thus ended up abandoning Genghis’ family instead.
Mongolia is not the place for “diversity” and “equality”. It’s a harsh life, where people must fit in or suffer the consequences.
Genghis Khan had a very rough childhood. His father was killed by an enemy tribe when Genghis was only nine years old. Later, Genghis tribe expelled his mother, so the poor lady had to raise Genghis and six other children on her own.
Needless to say, Mongolia in the 13th century was not the best place for an unprotected woman with seven children. All of Genghis' family suffered a lot from hunger and cold. That made Genghis a real fighter.
He even killed his half-brother Bekhter for not sharing food. Genghis was ten at the time of this dispute. I understand that siblings might be a pain in the rear end sometimes, but killing them is not what normal people do.
It was a clear sign that one hell of a cold-blooded warrior was growing up. Later, Genghis was enslaved by a rival clan, and it only made him hate everyone more. Of course, Genghis escaped the slavery, and the rest is history.
-The Richest
The troubles still weren’t over for the young Genghis. He also ended up being abducted by an enemy clan as a teenager, and had to make an escape to win his freedom. It was what was expected of him as a Mongol.
So, to clarify. After his father was poisoned, and his family banished from the community. The enemies of the family kidnapped him and used his as a slave. Where, of course, they did not treat him well. So he escaped.
Yeah, I’m sure that kind of background would tend to make anyone a little mean and distrustful.
Warrior Culture
If you were born a Mongol, you were a part of the tribe in every facet of its society. This is evident in the fact that the Mongols did not have a word for soldier, as every member of their society was trained to be a part of their collective war-machine, each of them learning to mobilize instantly.
-Factinate
Mongolia was a tough place with harsh weather, and impossible geography. The people that lived there were strong and fierce.
Genghis Khan as a young leader.
He had to work his way up from rock bottom.
He clawed, fought, betrayed, and horrified his enemies. He used his diplomatic skills to build friendships and alliances, and his knowledge of terror and warfare to vanquish his enemies.
In an environment that bred hard men, Genghis was the hardest of them all. Born in 1162 (according to McLynn; other estimates vary from 1155 to 1167), by the age of 14 he had killed his half-brother (and potential rival) in an argument over a fish and had seized back his family’s horses, stolen in a raid.
He married at 16, and when a competing clan abducted and impregnated his wife Borte he assembled a large army to rescue her.
In 1206 he survived a poisoned arrow in his neck, and as reward for a brutally effective military career, a noble council (quriltai) of the Mongolian clans proclaimed Temujin their leader, or ‘Genghis [Chinggis] Khan’ — often translated as ‘Ruler of the Universe’.
But at that point he was just warming up.
He reformed his army, the instrument of conquest, along Manchurian lines in decimal units: ten in a platoon, 100 in a company, 1,000 in a brigade and 10,000 in a division. Their pay was plunder.
The wily Genghis also created a 10,000-strong imperial guard, making the sons of his generals officers in order to guarantee ‘good behaviour’. He unleashed this vast army of over 100,000 across Asia.
McLynn has subtitled his book ‘The Man Who Conquered the World’, but he might have added ‘and Slaughtered Half of It’.
First Genghis subjugated — later all but annihilated — the Tanguts of north-western China, before invading China’s powerful Jin empire in 1211. ‘Like a shark, the Mongol empire had to be in continuous forward motion’ to sustain itself.
By 1213 he was in Peking. The image of Mongolian warriors as fierce horsemen sweeping across the steppe is accurate, but incomplete. When confronted by the truly formidable defences of Peking, Genghis demonstrated great patience and resolve, starving the city into submission in 1215.
The inevitable resulting sack ‘was one of the most seismic and traumatic events in Chinese history’.
- Was Genghis Khan the cruellest man who ever lived?
He set his self apart by combining skillful leadership in diplomacy and battle. Around 1206, the great assembly of Mongals named him “Genghis Khan” or supreme leader. Khan then proceeded to unite his people together.
The Mongols swift rise to power came from Khan’s dynamic leadership.
Genghis Khan was a leader that demanded excellence from his soldiers, harmony from his families, and obedience from his subjects. He did not accept deviations from the traditions of his society. Nor did he accept any cultural experiments into progressive “modern” society. He ruled firmly with no apologies.
While the Mongol tribes had long renowned as dangerous and troublesome, Khan molded them into a much greater fighting force-disciplined organized, ruthless. He picked his generals from among his sons or trusted allies; he was also an adaptable ruler, and had the ability to learn from other.
Mongol empire expansion over time.
He must have been one of the most ferocious people ever to live on the planet Earth. Genghis marked his reign with blood, feasts, and love of different women. People like Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin look like amateurs when we compare them to Genghis Khan.
The killed people by the armies of Khan are more than the ones killed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. It is estimated that army had killed 40 million people.
-My Interesting Facts
Fierce Leadership.
This fierce Mongol knew how to rule, and he successfully did it for many years in the 13th century. There wasn’t a person back in the day, who would not be scared of Genghis Khan’s power. The Mongol Empire conquered all Asia, and no enemy could withstand Genghis Khan and his bloodthirsty army.
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan killed so many Persians (modern day Iranians), that the population of Persia didn’t return to pre-Mongol numbers until the 1900s, nearly 700 years later.
-Factinate
Using his armies, he pushed outward and forward. He went forth and conquered anything in his path. Many cities and nations fell before his armies.
A map of the Mongol Empire expansion under Genghis Khan.
While the Mongols loved to compromise, they were known for their brutal physical power.
From there his armies moved west and targeted Persia in 1219, where the Sultan had, in an act of extreme foolhardiness, deliberately provoked Genghis by shaving off the beards of two of his ambassadors and killing a third. Samarkand, that glorious city on the Silk Road, fell in 1220, despite the defenders’ super-weapon of two dozen war elephants. McLynn dismisses the oft-quoted figure of 50,000 killed there in a single day (note the limited time span), but admits ‘it is clear that the death toll was terrific and unacceptable’.
- Was Genghis Khan the cruellest man who ever lived?
People believed that one Mongolian man could defeat ten or more warriors of other culture. And that was true.
Genghis Khan proved many times how strong his army was, defeating his enemies against all the odds.
Fighting was part of the Mongol culture. As such, Genghis loved to fight more than anything else.
Most military historians judge that no European force could have stopped the disciplined and innovative Mongolian armies. “Employed against the Mongol invaders of Europe, knightly warfare failed even more disastrously for the Poles at Legnica and the Hungarians at Mohi in 1241”
-Stephen Hicks
That being said, he did a lot of other things in his life as well. It is strange how little we know about Genghis Khan, the greatest Emperor of all time. And he was. His empire was enormous.
A map of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan amassed the largest contiguous empire the world had yet seen. Only the British Empire, when it included both Canada and Australia, would be larger. Unlike Alexander the great, the Caesars or the Persian emperors, Genghis Khan’s idea of conquest was not to occupy and rule another people, but rather to rape, pillage and destroy everything in his path.
Worse was to come in 1221 — ‘a year to live in infamy’. While Genghis’s other armies had been busy in the east, threatening Tbilisi in Georgia and terrifying the Christian world, Tolui, one of Genghis’s equally reprehensible sons, took Merv (in modern-day Turkmenistan), one of the largest cities in the world.
Promised safety, the citizens surrendered and emerged from behind their walls. Tolui ‘surveyed the masses dolefully gathered with their possessions, mounted a golden chair and ordered mass executions to commence’. They took four days and nights to complete. Genghis’s rotten fruit did not fall far from the tree.
Terror — and the certainty of its visitation — was a major weapon in Genghis’s arsenal: decapitated women, children and even cats and dogs were reputedly displayed. But while the butchery was indeed immense, it is worth questioning its extent on occasion: a depopulated city had little economic value, and imported colonisers could make up only so much of the shortfall.
- Was Genghis Khan the cruellest man who ever lived?
Mongolia was a very difficult place to live, and thus the people that lived there become fierce and tough. Those in the West were no match for them became soft, and corrupt. They became easy prey for a tough warrior traditional conservative culture of warriors.
His total disregard for human life led to him being utterly feared throughout virtually the entire Eurasian land mass.
And, aside from that, they also were terrible at keeping promises…
Subutai led an army of 20,000 Mongols against a Russian army 4 times its size.
The Mongol rear guard was defeated early in the battle, and so the rest of the horde was forced to retreat. Mstislav the Bold chased down the retreating Mongols with victory in his eyes. His army spread out as they attempted to catch them, a chase which lasted many days. Mstislav spotted Mongols in formation along the Kalka River, and attacked without waiting for reinforcements. With his army in disarray, Mstislav was forced to retreat back to a fortified camp.
He had fallen for a feigned retreat.
Mstislave surrendered to Subutai with the agreement that neither he, nor any of his men would be harmed. They were all slaughtered upon leaving the camp. Luckily, Mstislav managed to escape. Mstislav the Bold, boldly ran away.
-ESKify
Being a woman under Genghis Khan.
When people think of strong women, their first reaction is (perhaps) some kind of cardboard-cutout out of Hollywood. They think of a woman acting like a man, dressing like a man, taking on manly battles and killing other men.
Maybe something like this…
The Hollywood comic-book model of what a strong woman is. To them it is a woman who acts, dresses and behaves like a man.
If you’ve ever actually stopped to think about it, you probably assumed that life was pretty terrible for women under Genghis Khan. And you’d be forgiven for making that assumption. But it’s not true at all.
Most cultures that existed in the distant past have a not-exactly great reputation for treating women with respect and fairness. Thus, why would you think that a dictator of a traditional conservative nomadic society, and one as brutal as Genghis Khan, would be any different?
You may be cool, but you’ll never be as cool as a Mongolian Shepard with a AK-47 and a pet snow leopard.
Most of what you’re about to read will probably be kind of surprising (it will certainly shake many assumptions that one might have regarding traditional conservatism, the role of women in these cultures and societies, and assumptions written down in school textbooks over the last few decades).
The truth is kind of a mixed bag.
Some women fared very well under Genghis Khan while others suffered terribly. But for the most part, the Mongols had some pretty progressive ideas about women’s rights, at least compared to many of the other cultures that existed at the time — Western culture included.
Mongolian women are known for the strength, beauty and intelligence. They are renowned for being excellent mothers and fine housekeepers.
They still had to fit into neatly outlined roles and meet certain expectations, it’s just that they enjoyed a lot of freedom compared to women in other nations around the world.
So here is the truth about it was really like to be female under the reign of the infamous Mongolian conqueror. More or less.
This was one of the most devastating battles in European history. 25% of Hungary’s population was wiped out by after the Mongol incursions.
Half of all liveable places had crumbled, smashed to bits by hordes of Mongols. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the Europeans suffered most. This was the most major battle of the war between Hungary and the Mongolians.
-ESKify
Strong and beautiful Mongolian woman in traditional clothing.
The husband had to obey his wife.
This will shock many people. As it does not fit the narrative of what a traditional conservative family is like. If you listen to the progressive anti-traditional narrative, you would believe that all conservatives have a lifestyle right out of the Handmaids Tale.
The movie the Handmaid’s Tail is a fiction that describes a most horrible world where gender defines a world divided into a slave and a master caste. To many feminists, they actually believe that this is what a traditional conservative society actually looks like. This fiction is nothing more than that. It is an attractive fiction that supports the views of the radical feminists in a progressive modern society.
But there you have it. One hundred years of progressive Marxism has rewritten the narrative to such a point that people become incredulous when exposed to the truth.
In conservative societies, the woman is the boss of the household. Households are run as matriarchal institutions with a paternal head for sociological hierarchy.
Back under Genghis Khan, the women were actually respected in Mongol society. Not only that, but men were expected to listen to the advice of their wives.
In traditional societies the man gives all of his earnings and all of what he creates to his wife. The wife budgets the resources, and helps steer the man to become a leader in their society. It is the traditional conservative role that a woman takes on. This is not unique to Mongolia. It is typical throughout the world.
Khan believed that the children that he left behind were his strength. Therefore, he had a lot of women in his harem. When he died, he had a lot of children.
-My Interesting Facts
The Mongols were brutal fighters, to be sure, but they weren’t barbarians, well at least not in every aspect of their lives. Mongolian women were respected, often served as leaders, and were highly valued members of society.
Check out the very cool Mongolian headdresses. One of the most colorful and original items of Mongolian national dress is the traditional head wear. The Mongolian headdresses differs in shape and purpose.
In fact according to Amonbe, the Mongols believed that a man ought to marry an older woman, because an older woman would have more wisdom than her husband, and would therefore be able to guide him in not making stupid life decisions.
Well, duh! That’s the way it is today in all the traditional conservative societies around the globe. From Poland, Brazil, to Japan, Korea and China.
A woman needs to be strong in Mongolia. Not only to deal with the weather and the climate, but to deal with the dog-eat-dog nature of the society there. A strong woman can inspire and direct her man to behave and act in ways that will bring success to the household.
In fact, no one respected a man who didn’t listen to his wife — it was a sign of immaturity and unmanliness. So just in case you thought that fierce Mongol warrior must also be a brute to the women in his life, well, you’re mistaken.
Genghis Khan was one of the most deeply feared historical figures in the world for a good reason. Historians estimate that Genghis Khan is responsible for over 40 million deaths, and at that time it was equal to 11 percent of the world's population.
For comparison, we can look at World War II, which has put "only" around three percent of the world's population, 60-80 million people, to the graveyard.
What Genghis Khan did is downright scary when we put it in perspective, right? Actually, Genghis Khan's killings are partially responsible for making the climate colder in the 13th century and removing over 700 million tons of CO2 from the planet Earth.
If Genghis Khan were alive today, we would not have to talk about global warming... but we would have to hide if we were not Mongolians. Good thing that even the most powerful cannot resurrect from the dead.
-The Richest
A portrait of a very beautiful Mongolian woman. Her husband would be a very, very lucky man, I’ll tell you what.
Genghis Khan’s courts could tell your husband to be more romantic
When you imagine those early historical relationships between men and women, you probably think about some unsavory things. After all, we all harbor images of cavemen dragging cavewomen around by the hair. At least this is what we are taught in the common American mainstream media. Hey! Anyone else remember the cartoon “The Flintstones”?
A literal comic of a caveman dragging a woman around by the hair.
Throughout history, an awful lot of women got abused by an awful lot of men. But do not think that the majority of cultures were based on this model. They weren’t. If they were, then we would not have societies like we do today. Instead we would have a caste system.
It would be a caste system defined by gender. Where the strongest physically (the men) would subjugate the weaker sex (the women). This would manifest in numerous ways. One of which would be shared communal families, and roving sexual partners, and a society where the women would be more inclined to look good rather than have babies.
It would be a r-reproductive society.
But we know that is not the case, historically at least. Most of the world operates under a K-survival model. It is only in the progressive modern West, where the r-strategy model has taken root.
Thus I find it interesting that r-strategy progressive modern societies promote the notion of a helpless little-waif female, when in reality women are anything BUT helpless.
I knew a guy who stole a friends' wallet. He carried on and on about how the friend needed the money and that everyone should go looking for the wallet.
It is the people who shout loudest about things are usually the ones that are broadcasting their failings, worries, fears, and socially inept behaviors.
A Mongolian woman at a cultural event celebrating their traditions and history.
Mongol women had a lot of control in the home and in the bedroom, too.
In fact, if you were a Mongol woman and your husband wasn’t up to performing his husbandly bedroom duties (having sex on a regular basis, communicating with the wife, and performing his duties in support of the household) you could actually petition the government to intervene.
Imagine going down to the local courthouse and presenting documented evidence of your husband’s romantic failings. There, a community tribunal of other leaders (cut from the same cloth as Genghis Khan, no doubt) would study the issue and demand the man to perform. If he failed, who knows what nasty consequence might await him.
In Mongolian society, there are reasons why the women smile so much.
Mongolian women tend to be strong, and attractive. They will fight fiercely for their husbands and their families. In fact, you would never find them EVER belittling their husbands as is customary in the Untied States. They are fiercely loyal to their men and their family.
Genghis Khan believed a man’s legacy was measured in the children he left behind. That explains the why of the previous fact, but not the how. Who has that much time? Conquering must be easier than it sounds.
-Factinate
It is a man’s duty to perform. Both inside and outside the house. Anything less than that is an insult to Mongolians everywhere.
No foot binding in Mongolia.
Meanwhile in China, south of the Mongol empire, Neo-Confucianism outlined strict rules for female behavior. For instance, women were supposed to be chaste and obedient. This was often taken to the extreme. Where wives should basically exist only to serve their husbands. Well, except when their husbands die. Then they must exist only to serve their husbands’ families because they weren’t supposed to remarry.
Well, the truth is it’s not nearly as bad as all that.
I can’t imagine any Chinese women that I know tolerating that kind of harsh existence. Though, the point is that the Mongolians were far more accepting of parity of strengths between the two sexes. They felt that both the women and the men were equally strong.
Only in different ways.
Beautiful and strong, Mongolian women were the strength that powered and fueled their husbands to go out and forth-wards. They needed that strength. For the women would accompany their husbands on the Mongolian empire building campaigns. And when there were counterattacks or raids, the women would need to fight alongside with their husbands. The weak were not tolerated.
In China, women in the upper classes had their feet bound starting at age six, because a three-inch foot made them a hot item, a four-inch foot made them a good consolation prize, and a five-inch foot … well, women with five-inch feet might as well start on that collection of cats now because spinsterhood is calling.
In Mongolia, women were not having any of that.
Elaborate Mongolian head attire. They wore this attire whether the weather was hot or freezing cold. They were fierce at a level that is unheard of today. That includes the strongest female characters in your contemporaneous Hollywood movies.
So Mongolian women were basically just super-extra awesome and badass and they did not especially want to have tiny feet. Mongolian women were not thought of as subservient trophy wives, either — they were expected to be strong, fierce, and hard-working.
So Mongolian women were basically just super-extra awesome and badass and they did not especially want to have tiny feet. Mongolian women were not thought of as subservient trophy wives, either — they were expected to be strong, fierce, and hard-working.
And when cultures place those kinds of expectations on women, that tends to inform the family dynamic. Women who are strong and fierce can’t also be complacent and subservient.
You would probably call me crazy if I told you that Temüjin is one of the best-known people in history. However, that is true.
You see, Genghis Khan's real name was actually Temüjin, which means “of iron” or “blacksmith.” It is a cool name, but definitely not for a warlord and emperor. So, Temüjin changed his name to Genghis Khan in 1206.
It is for sure that "Khan" is the title, meaning "ruler," but historians are still puzzled about the meaning of "Genghis." Some believe that it translates to English as "ocean," but the more common version is that "Genghis" is a transformation of the Chinese word "Zhèng," which means "right" and "just."
So, ironically Genghis Khan is translated as “the just ruler." If you ask me, the 13th century was a very dark place to live in if people called Genghis Khan, killer of 40 million innocent souls, a just and right person.
-The Richest
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Beautiful Mongolian lass.
Under Genghis Khan, women were the cartmasters
For a nomadic people, their homes were mobile. They mounted them on wheeled houses.
Incursions into Southeast Asia were largely successful, most factions agreed to pay tribute, and only the Invasions into Vietnam and Java failed.
Europe was devastated by the Mongols. They destroyed near enough every major Russian city, and invaded Volga Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary. If rumours spread that the Mongols were coming, then it would cause a mass panic, and some would run to safety.
There was no guaranteed way to defeat the Mongol hordes, they continuously defeated much larger armies, so numerical strength couldn’t protect you.
Mongol conquests would leave once populous and flourishing areas as wastelands, with little to no people, those remaining would be slaves.
-ESKify
In Mongolia during the time of Genghis Khan, the women were in charge of the carts and the men were strictly not allowed to ride in them, unless they were sick. That probably had more to do with the fact that Mongol men were supposed to be excellent horsemen (so they could be excellent warriors and pillagers) and riding in a cart took precious hours away from equestrian practice, but anyway. The carts were the domain of the women, and no men allowed.
Imagine if you were the person in charge of driving and maintaining the family car and also, you could make all your male family members walk. You are in charge. Well, the Mongols mostly rode horses, but you get the idea.
In Mongolia during the time of Genghis Khan, the women were in charge of the carts and the men were strictly not allowed to ride in them, unless they were sick. And, for a Mongolian, it would have to be a pretty serious illness. I’ll tell you what.
In Mongolia, and it continues to this day, the women have a place and a role in society, and so do the men. A traditional conservative family structure is one where the yoke of life is pulled equally by the two members of the household. It’s not a shared responsibility, but rather the man works his strengths and the woman works and controls hers.
That probably had more to do with the fact that Mongol men were supposed to be excellent horsemen (so they could be excellent warriors and pillagers) and riding in a cart took precious hours away from equestrian practice, but anyway. The carts were the domain of the women, and no men allowed.
Mongolian carts weren’t just a way to go back and forth to the grocery store, either, they were one of the most important components of the nomadic lifestyle.
This is in Tibet. What is very interesting is how the Mongolian culture completely overwhelmed the Tibetan culture and their traditional dress and behaviors reflect this fact over 600 years later.
According to the San Diego Tribune, the carts carried the felt tents that the Mongols lived in, and most of their goods and supplies, too. So if the cart drivers decided to go on strike, well, the whole community was in trouble.
Just another great example of “happy wife, happy life.”
Mongolian women wearing the clothing and hair dresses of their family. Which is, of course, handed down from generation to generation via tradition.
Genghis Khan was the most feared human of the 13th century, who could destroy dynasties just by moving his little finger. He created the Mongol Empire all by himself and earned his eternal spot in the history books.
However, a lot of people had to suffer for Genghis Khan to succeed. Oh yes, the Mongolians were known for their horrendous torturing techniques. One of the most popular was pouring molten silver down the throat and ears of a victim.
Genghis Khan also liked bending his enemy's back until the backbone snapped. If that sounds barbaric, skip this next part. So, the Mongols once celebrated victory over Russians in a very bizarre way. They picked all the Russian survivors, dropped them on the ground and put a heavy wooden gate on top of them.
Then, Genghis Khan and the entire Mongol army had a huge banquet on that wooden gate. They ate, drank, and watched how Russians were dying one by one from the suffocation, pressure, and wounds.
-The Richest
Women were expected to do physically demanding tasks
In a nomadic society, you can’t afford to have slackers. There’s just too much work to be done. So that means it there’s no room for anyone who can’t make him or herself useful, women and children included.
Genghis Khan believed in being rewarded for hard work, and operated on a meritocracy over a nepotistic system. Many of his highest ranking officers and generals had earned their way to those positions, instead of simply being born to a particular family.
-Factinate
According to the University of Victoria, Mongolian women were not only expected to shoulder a lot of the responsibility, they were also expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
It was the womens’ job to take down and put up the tents, and they had to do it quickly and efficiently.
They were also expected to be able to control the tribes’ often vast herds of animals, and do all that stereotypical women stuff, too, like raising the kids and cooking a meal every night.
So women, as well as men, had the responsibility of doing the sort of work that today we’d probably call heavy manual labor.
It’s really not surprising, then, that Mongolian men had so much respect for women — it’s hard to disrespect someone who’s as hard-working and capable as you are, especially if you’re seeing it with your own eyes every single day.
Mongolian women in a historical Chinese painting.
Women often faced hardship and handled it with grace and fortitude, too. Genghis Khan’s own mother was forced to raise her children on game and wild roots because they’d been abandoned by her tribe after the death of her husband.
That upbringing probably had a lot to do with Genghis’ progressive ideas about women.
Genghis Khan created the first international postal service, allowing people to mail parcels and letters to friends and family in other countries without having to hire specialized couriers. The postal service was similar to the American Pony Express.
-Factinate
If Genghis Khan says “marry my daughter,” you should totally do it
“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”
-Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan had four poorly behaved sons, but most of his children were girls. And by most historical accounts, Genghis appears to have valued his daughters just as much as he valued his sons.
In fact, the San Diego Tribune says he once killed a guy who turned down his daughter’s hand in marriage, so yeah. Saying “no” to Genghis Khan was a terrible idea, but it was maybe an even worse idea to say “no” to one of his daughters.
When Genghis Khan tells you to marry his daughter, you had best do it.
Genghis was fond of quoting a proverb at his daughters’ weddings: “If a two-shaft cart breaks the second shaft, the ox cannot pull it. If a two-wheel cart breaks the second wheel, it cannot move.”
If you’re not good at metaphors, understand that Genghis was basically saying that men and women are two essential parts of the cosmic puzzle — without one part, the whole can’t function.
Mongolian father with his fourteen year old daughter going hunting. You see, she hunts using eagles. It’s part of their long running conservative culture.
Of course afterward, he would send the groom off to die on some dangerous military mission in the middle of nowhere, but whatever. It’s what happens to the menfolk. Anyways, it’s a nice thought.
Genghis Khan was tolerant of individual beliefs, encouraging religious freedom amongst his subjects. It didn’t matter who you believed in, because Genghis Khan believed in you.
-Factinate
Marrying one of Genghis Khan’s daughters was maybe a sentence of death
Genghis Khan loved his daughters, but he also pretty clearly loved what they could do for him politically. In fact, he was actually quite clever in arranging marriages for his daughters.
The Mongol were masterful at spreading fear and hate throughout Asia, people feared them, and therefore hated them.
They would rape and pillage entire villages, and torture their victims for fun. Nobles would get it the worst. Spilling noble blood was considered a crime, so they simply crushed them to death, which took many hours.
Mongols would literally dine on top of them, making merry to the sounds of their screams from underneath. The sounds of bodies squelching, and bones snapping didn’t faze them.
But rumours of this execution method struck terror. Fear made them powerful, as people often chose to surrender and pay tribute rather than risk fighting them.
-ESKify
Fourteen year old daughter going hunting with her eagle. Historically, the Mongolians married early and marriages at a (now considered young age) was the norm at the time of the great Genghis Khan. By the time the girl became sixteen she could hunt for herself, care for a full family, give birth and support her man.
Now it’s worth noting that women in Mongol society had the right to refuse marriage if it was to a man they disliked, and that alone was pretty progressive for a society that existed 800 years ago.
Yet for the daughters of Genghis, though, it almost didn’t matter whether or not they disliked their new husband, because they weren’t likely to stay married to him for very long.
According to the Tyee, Genghis would typically choose a royal husband for his daughters, preferably a king from a friendly nation. If the king had other wives, they got the boot, so let's just backpedal a little and say that life was pretty okay for most women living in Genghis Khan's empire but not really for the wives of the kings who actually got along with him.
Anyway, that sucked for the king’s former wives but it kind of actually also sucked for the king, because Genghis would always send his daughters’ new husbands off immediately on some dangerous mission in a Mongol war zone, where he’d almost certainly be killed. Then, Genghis’ daughter would take over the kingdom, thus expanding her father’s already massive empire.
Pretty brilliant, eh?
Here daughter; how would you like France? You’ll need to marry the King, but don’t worry, after a month, I’m going to ship him off to Siberia for a few years to test his loyalty. What do ya say? You want to marry him?
Strong Mongolian women on the move.
Yelu Chucai, one of Genghis Khan’s most trusted advisors, suggested that the Khan tax people instead of just, you know, killing them. This became a cornerstone of Genghis’ conquests.
Genghis Khan was a brutal warlord, but also a generous ruler. He was among the first global leaders to exempt the clergy and the poor from taxation.
-Factinate
Life under Genghis Khan wasn’t great for everyone, though
Living peacefully under Genghis Khan was cool, but what if you were a woman in one of his conquered nations? Well, it wasn’t much different from being a woman in a war zone pretty much anywhere else during that time.
Women, gold, horses, and other objects were considered spoils of war, which meant soldiers got to do pretty much whatever they wanted to do with them, and you don’t have to stretch your imagination too much to figure out what that means.
Genghis Khan had so much power that he could do whatever he wanted. For instance, when Genghis occupied some new area, he would kill or enslave all the men and share all the women amongst his tribe.
Genghis Khan would even make beauty contests of captured women to decide which woman is the most beautiful one. Yeah, he was having his Miss Universe competition before it was cool.
So, the queen of those beauty competitions would win the privilege to become one of many Genghis Khan's women. Rest of the Mongolian army would share all the other contestants.
-The Richest
Contemporaneous Mongolian beauty wearing Western clothing.
On the other hand, if you were lucky enough to be super-extra beautiful, you could be forcibly entered into one of Genghis Khan’s weird beauty pageants.
Girls in Mongolia seem to be a mystery to all but those who have visited these rare lands. These unique girls offer Asian features with larger bodies than most expect.
I was baffled by the women I encountered in Mongolia.
I’d never seen such tall, curvy Asians (well, Indonesian girls are curvy) in all of my travels throughout the region. There was truly something different about the Mongolian girls.
After meeting, greeting, and mating with some of these fine specimens, it finally clicked – these gals were direct descendants of Genghis Khan. I was balls deep in warrior genes, and I can’t lie – the thought of having myself a warrior-blooded baby certainly went through my mind.
-Life around Asia
According to Ancient Origins, once Genghis’ soldiers were done with the pillaging and the abusing, they brought Genghis himself the most beautiful women they’d encountered.
These women alone would be spared from the antics of the conquering army so they could be paraded in front of the man himself. The winner got the honor of becoming one of Genghis Khan’s many wives, which was probably preferable to ending up as the loser, though Ancient Origins doesn’t say what happened to them.
First and foremost, these girls were definitely Asian. Their features were dainty and stunning. However, Mongolian girls did not remind me of Thai girls or Indonesian girls much. They seemed to have a unique mixture to them.
I’d say many of the girls looked maybe 75% Asian with a mixture of Slavic genes, too.
It was incredibly unique and quite sexy. Some guys said they weren’t too into the look, but I loved it! Think a girl who is 2/3rds Asian and a third Russian. How could that not be sexy?!
-Life around Asia
Modern Mongolian beauty.
Evidently, though, women who Genghis deemed not to be up to his standards of beauty were sent off with the soldiers to be abused and then discarded. So yeah, great to be a woman in peacetime Mongolia but when Genghis comes to town you might just want to emigrate to China.
0.5 Percent of all men alive today are believed to have a genetic relation with Genghis Khan. It is estimated that his descendants are 8 percent of men in Asia.
-My Interesting Facts
Genghis Khan liked to romance his enemies’ wives
Genghis Khan wasn’t an especially gracious winner — after he was done with the conquering, he enjoyed abducting his enemies’ wives and either romancing them or brutalizing them, depending on how cool they were with being abducted by Genghis Khan.
Mongolian girls are smart, beautiful, stacked, and feisty. They also can drink you under the table. They are warriors from warrior stock.
In fact in one of his most famous quotes he waxed poetic about the joys of the post-conquering aftermath:
"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."
Nice guy, that Genghis.
He wasn’t always content to romance just one woman at a time, either.
According to Ancient Origins, his army commanders were all super-impressed with his manliness because he frequently spent his evenings with multiple women.
While broad shoulders aren’t exactly a good trait on women, the women in Mongolia didn’t get the short end of the stick in other ways.
In fact, I found some of the biggest Asian tits in the world to be in Mongolia. It was fantastic for me, as I’m a boobs man!
There are a number of rain-thin Mongolian girls that have big, natural racks. I was thoroughly impressed. In fact, outside of Indonesia, I haven’t seen bigger tits in an Asian country. The asses here aren’t as amazing as the boobs, but there still above average for Asia.
-Life around Asia
Mongolian Girls sure are beautiful. They are stunners, and it doesn’t matter what kinds of clothes they wear, traditional, Western or none what so ever. They are amazingly attractive.
He wasn’t that into birth control, either, in fact by modern estimates Genghis Khan has roughly 16 million descendants. Now, the study that put forth this hypothesis can’t actually prove that the individual they identified is Genghis Khan, since no one knows where the Mongol leader is buried and therefore they can’t recover any of his DNA.
But this person lived roughly 1,000 years ago in the Mongol Empire and must have had access to a lot of women, and there really aren’t that many people from history that fit that description, so the assumption is pretty sound.
Modern Mongolian women are quite amazing and if you fall in love with them, be prepared to give them everything. They are traditional and conservative and expect the man to give them 100% of what he has. They will accept no less.
When we look at what Genghis Khan achieved with the Mongol Empire, we cannot help but appreciate his mastermind as a warlord. It surely looks like Genghis Khan had three dragons with him just like Khaleesi.
I cannot find any other explanation of Genghis Khan's success. I mean, he defeated Jin Dynasty's one million troops with only 90,000 Mongolians by his side.
Yes, Genghis Khan managed to win a war with ten times fewer troops than his opponent's army. On top of that, he was invading China, so he had to overcome all the "little" problems such as the Great Wall of China. Genghis Khan with his army had destroyed over 500,000 of Chinese troop before getting control of Northern China and Beijing.
The rest of the Chinese army had to surrender to the power of Genghis Khan. Destroying Jin Dynasty is only one of many examples of how great of a warlord Genghis Khan was. Also, he had some brutal and loyal men by his side, and let’s not rule out the dragon theory.
-The Richest
Mrs. Khan got to have a bunch of sister-wives
There was no such thing as monogamy in Genghis Khan’s Mongolia. Men could have multiple wives, but each one would have her own tent where she’d live with her own children, so it’s not like the wives had to hang out and pretend to like each other or anything.
So a man with four wives would travel with his four wives. Each one driving forth a wagon with their housing “kit” and their kids tagging along. When the boys are three, they might be tied to a horse and ride along. So it would appear like a small caravan was moving forward. The man at the lead, and his numerous families tailing along behind.
This is actress Da Na. She plays in the Chinese television play Jin Chai Ying. She is a stunner, now isn’t she. Eh?
According to History on the Net, though, the whole family usually got along pretty well. The idea of jealousy and a need for monogamy are constructs of a modern progressive society. In those days, where warfare, social strife (killings, murders, poisonings, and accidents) often killed the males in society, it was important to maintain large flexible family units. Ones that can band together if things go South quickly.
There is strength in numbers. In today's modern progressive society where we all stare into our portable electronic devices, we feel that we do not need others. That we can survive alone, with maybe our dog or cat as companions. Maybe so. Though, personally I disagree. We need each other and the larger a family is, the stronger it can be.
A man’s first wife was considered his legal wife, so that made things somewhat less complicated from an inheritance perspective.
The children of the first wife got more of his booty when he died, which is a pretty handy rule for a guy like Genghis who had 500 wives and so many children that he probably couldn’t even remember all of their names.
Imagine what his last will and testament would have looked like if he’d had to divide his fortune up equally among them.
"To that one wife who lives on the corner of Mare and Main, you know, the one with the mole on her left ankle who makes a pretty good Mongolian beef and broccoli stir fry but whose name I can't actually remember, I bequeath this one gold coin which is literally all I can afford to give her considering that I have to divide my fortune up equally between like 15,000 people."
Yeah, that never would have worked.
Mongolian Household. It’s like the television show M.A.S.H. they are mobile and they can set up house in a mere couple of minutes.
Physical force is not enough to achieve something as great as Genghis Khan did. Yes, there is no doubt that he is the greatest and most brutal warlord in history, but he was also a very wise man.
In 1201, during a battle, Genghis Khan was shot by an enemy archer. Needless to say, he was not happy about it.
So, after the Mongolian army won the battle, Genghis Khan spent some time looking for the man that shot him. He even pretended that it was not him who got shot, but his horse, so the enemy archer would have the courage to confront Genghis.
An unbelievable thing happened when the archer finally stepped out of the crowd and confessed shooting Genghis Khan. Instead of killing his enemy, Genghis Khan recognized his talent and asked him to join the Mongolian army.
The archer became a great general and loyally served Genghis for many years. That is one of the reasons why Mongol Empire was such a success back in the 13th century.
-The Richest
After her husband died, she was in charge.
There was no expectation of remarriage after your husband died, and so a lot of women didn’t bother to remarry.
If you were the first wife, you basically inherited everything and became head of the household. After that you got to live pretty much autonomously and independently, which is not something that was especially common around the world during that time period.
Because why would they?
If you were the first wife, you basically inherited everything and became head of the household. After that you got to live pretty much autonomously and independently, which is not something that was especially common around the world during that time period.
By contrast, Chinese women of the time were also not expected to remarry (in fact they were discouraged from remarrying), but they had to move in with their dead husbands’ families and basically serve as slave labor for the rest of their lives. So when you think about it, it’s actually pretty shocking that more of them didn’t go pounding on Genghis’ door in the hope of becoming his five hundred and first wife.
Because being left without an inheritance actually sounds way, way better than having to wait on your former in-laws for the rest of your life. But, then again, that’s just me.
After he was done conquering most of Asia, Genghis Khan decided he needed to write some laws. Because he had a reputation to protect, you know, as a fair and rational dude who was not actually hungry for the blood and wives of his enemies.
According to History on the Net, Mongolian women who remained unmarried after their husbands’ deaths were supposedly acting out of loyalty to their lost spouse. But after all, loyalty can only go so far. In Asia, it’s all about the pragmatic. So, let’s face it, the whole freedom, independence, and power thing was probably enough to make just about anyone feel really danged loyal to that dead guy. Yup. And this would be true whether he was a decent husband or not.
Genghis Khan wrote some pretty pro-woman laws later in life
After he was done conquering most of Asia, Genghis Khan decided he needed to write some laws. Because he had a reputation to protect, you know, as a fair and rational dude who was not actually hungry for the blood and wives of his enemies.
Sure, Genghis, whatever you say.
Mongolian women are true beauties.
Anyway, the document Genghis produced with the assistance of his actually-literate advisor Tatatungo was called Yasak. It was designed to help keep the peace in Genghis’ newly conquered lands.
According to Duhaime.org, there are no surviving copies of the Yasak but it was evidently pretty progressive. Well, at least in some areas. Notable was the Yasak’s moratorium against the kidnapping of wives and the selling of women.
Yup. Night-time raids on other villages and communities for the purposes of obtaining wives, slaves, and concubines is hereby ordered to be stopped.
In traditional conservative societies the husband and the wife have roles. They work together and live a K-strategy of survival. This differs from what is found in the more modern progressive societies in the United States and Europe that utilize the r-reproductive strategy for survival.
The Yasak also forbade child soldiers and slavery (or at the very least the slavery of other Mongols). He also specifically prohibited discrimination based on religion. This was true, even if you were from Tibet, or a Muslim! In fact it was one of the first known legal codes that allowed its citizens religious freedom.
The Mongols had a new Khan, Genghis Khan (also Cinggis Khan), born in 1167 by the more simple name of Temügin.
By 1206, he had defeated all his rivals and when they all attended upon him to pay homage, he had a surprise for them.
Illiterate himself, he wanted a consolidated Mongolian state and he knew that this meant law.
So he asked his advisor Tatatungo to come up with the Yasak, a code of law to maintain the peace and order amongst his citizens.
Also known as the Great Law of Genghis Khan, no copy of the Yasak has survived. Indeed, it was only reluctantly that Genghis Khan even tolerated a basic form of script language, and only to allow for a basic administration of his Mongolian dominions.
The Yasak was unique in that it did not pretend to derive its authority from divine revelation, as has Hammurabi’s Code, as well as Jewish and Islamic law.
It was a pretty remarkable document until you get to the stuff about cutting horse thieves in two with a sword and holding marriage celebrations for dead children. You know, other more contemporaneous punishments and activities.
So much for progressive thought.
Mongolian men and women are both fierce, strong and insanely loyal to each other. They are also independently minded and view their family as supreme. They maintain a traditional conservative lifestyle, and will not permit anyone to come between their family.
Anyways, ol’ Genghis Khan was quite the fellow, and he really wanted to make good in the (now decimated) lands that he conquered. Because of this, and the history of his people, the women of Mongolia are what they are today.
I am an American Structural Engineer and spent approximately 1-1/2 years working in Mongolia, and living in UB. I have since moved on to another project in Cape Town, SA, however wanted to comment on perhaps the most accurate article I have read in relation to Mongolian women.
I have additionally worked in several other Asian counties to include Singapore, Hong Kong, China, etc. I hope that you will agree that you cannot even “basically” compare the contemporary Mongolian woman to any other Asians.
BTW, forget the “Asian Height Charts by Country” seen all over the internet – not even close. For example, China, S. Korean and even Japanese women are calculated taller in stature than Mongolian ladies – Not eve close!
When I strolled through Sukhbaatar Square on warm days, it was not uncommon for me to see several Mongolian women 5′7″, 5′8″ even up to 5′10″. What stands out just as much, is that these ladies have shapes and many pronounced bust-lines; mainly due to diet (meat/dairy).
They appear physically to be much stronger built than other Asians. The best way I can explain it, Mongolian women have physical shapes closer to Russian women than they do other Asians.
Another distinguishing factor, many Chinese, Japanese women have very small hands and feet – not Mongolian women who have larger hands/feet. Consider this, for a country of just over 3 million people, Nearly 50% of all top Asian fashion models are from Mongolia.
Battsetseg Turbat for example has been in many famous American commercials to include Budweiser and Apple. This is what surprised me most when I first stepped off the plane upon my arrival to UB. Mongolian women’s height can be deceiving when viewing online photos – the reason is that they have voluptuous shapes to accompany their height.
An additional quality is personality. Mongolian women have big personalities, laugh loudly and not afraid to approach someone they may wish to meet. Additionally, Mongolian women when affronted, do not shy away as do other Asians, however will meet the confrontation head-on 100%. What I have also noticed, when in other parts of Asia, women will almost always give way when an American woman is walking down the sidewalk toward them.
Not in UB – A Mongolian woman will expect the American woman to step aside most every time.
In relation to toughness, Mongolia are second to none. In fact, Mongolian women have very little respect for American women, thinking them soft and spoiled (their words not mine).
All Mongolian women are excellent horsemen, whether raised in the Ger District or city. They are like the land they inhabit, resilient and everlasting.
I remember taking a walk around Sukhbaatar Square with a Mongolian lady I befriended to just enjoy the day . It was in November last year and nearly freezing. I remember she was wearing heels, barely covered up and seemed fine. I was layered to the hilt, still shivering although looked like the Michelin tire man with all my garb.
She must have noticed I was freezing as suggested we walk to Millie’s Espresso to have lunch, drink something warm and relax. These women impressed me as they were able to balance their hardiness with their femininity.
You are correct, there is a slight mix of Slav in most Mongolian ladies, however, does not distract from their Asian appearance. I do not know if I will ever return to Mongolia, however, the Mongolian ladies will have my respect and admiration for life.
-Life Around Asia
Conclusion
The women who lived under the rule of Genghis Khan were strong, independent women that well understood their role, their niche and their lifestyle. They are who they are because they come from a traditional conservative culture where they must implement K-reproductive strategies. I believe that the success of the Mongol “hordes” wouldn’t be possible were it not for the strong support of the women-folk riding side by side with their husbands.
At that I will conclude this adventure into the women of Mongolia.
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