I am against wars that we do not win. Duh
That’s where I’d stop if I wanted to be gnomic and glib. Or I'd say I was "for the war before I was against it". But it's a sort of important matter. We don’t win wars anymore because we don’t have the will, we don’t have the stomach. Like fools, like teenagers, we get all upset over something and go in to kick some butt. But it’s not about kicking butt, it’s about making changes that result in our benefit, even if in a humanitarian sense -- we have to be true to our humanity.
War, as Bismarck said, or was it Clausewitz, war is politics by other means. Clausewitz -- Bismarck said politics is the art of the possible. Politics is the opposite of dictatorship -- not the imposition of will, but the outworking of compromise. If we cobble all this into a syllogism, the conclusion is that war excludes compromise; corollary, that war is best prosecuted by a dictator. That’s it then: we don’t win our wars because we are a democracy. Odd, how television did that.
There's something wrong here in the logic of course. Democracies can win wars. The kind where it's about damaging foreign infrastructure and killing enemy combatants and changing regimes. Such wars are meant to increase our own safety comfort welfare prosperity, whatever the cost to the enemy.
We don’t do that anymore. We have confused, conflated, war with politics. Because you see we are nice guys. Remember just now when I intimated that we were a democracy? More to the point, we are an incipient, hemi-empire, with the duties but not the privileges, and which fact, of empire, is wholly incompatible with our American ethos of fairplay and generosity and liberty. We have lost our way. We should have propped up, were it possible, the British Empire, let them be the figurehead and world police. Such was not in the card or the stars, sadly, and our success is the poison pill of our downfall.
Don’t get married unless you’re going to be faithful. Don’t have kids unless you’re going to be responsible. Don’t start wars unless victory is top priority.
Case in point, the unbelievable stupidity of biden's war, proxy, Ukraine -- it's meant to be a sustainable war -- self-renewing, like abortionism and its forever-war against babies.
Democratic America in living memory finishes long wars according to variants on one pattern only: airlifting personnel off embassy rooftops. Witness biden's bugout and consequent bountiful baksheesh to the taliban. Say that three times fast.
Democracy and empire are, surely, incompatible. We need either a dictator -- I nominated Obama back in the day, but he's too old and frail-looking, now.
A dictator, or we need to get our own house in order. Ah. I’ve just figured out the solution to the tribulation heading our way. We need to empire, no, Empire our way out of this mess. Since we have so clearly demonstrated a total inability to govern ourselves in a prudent manner, we need to more completely exploit the rest of the world.
We have so far been not an empire, but a patron. Supporting the freedom of Europe for lo these many decades. Propping up dysfunctional Third World pathocracies (I just made up that word -- accent on the second syllable). Our debt of 33.1 trillion smackaroos is chump change, if we take it out of the mineral wealth of Africa and America South the way China is getting up to.
And It’s about time Mexico started to earn its keep. We are currently providing the unremunerated service of housing Mexico's unwanted surplus population, and we should be paid for that valuable consideration. What's the current government stipend. GGL AI tells me that welfare programs cost the "average American household … $9,000" annually. Okay, Mexico, 5.31 million of your unwanted population here, at 9K per head, that's 47.8 billion dollars you owe, payable immediately. I will accept delivery personally.
The future is about empire, as has been the past. We'll get Latin America -- as a combination colony and heGEmony. Ironic chimera.
Europe is so arrogant and has been warlike, but Russia can have it. Asia to the Chinese, obviously, the cathode to our anode -- and we’ll all squabble over Africa. Australia gets a pass, just cuz. It will be the new Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
We will of course have to abandon our former American character. Oh, wait. Done. So now we need to enter truly into the next, misplaced, phase of the Roman pattern. Usually it’s empire first, then decline. We’re already decadent. Now let’s expand. I think this could buy us another hundred years.
Purely by coincidence -- or perhaps it was my subconscious at work, formulating the ideas that now scintillate before your dazzled eyes -- I was walking through Trader Joes today thinking how odd, the convention to wear pants. Left over from horse-riding days. Do we ride horses? Then I pictured myself striding the aisles garbed in a toga. Animal House echoes aside, I think there’s an argument to be made here. I’ll give it some thought and let you know what I decide.
So that’s why I’m against, say, the biden lost war in Afghanistan. I don’t mind war, where theres a good faith need, and ignoring dogmatic quibbles that there's never a need and never a good war. I hate the losing. I hate the comfort such lost wars give to the enemies of America, foreign and domestic. I hate the damage to the soul and psyche that lost wars do to those Americans who still remain. War is ugly and a failure of humanity. But humanity is ugly and a failure, and sometimes execution is just, even on a mass, albeit monstrous and impersonal, scale.
The liberal wants to live free from hardship and failure and threat and risk, and opportunity and success. The conservative wants poverty and unhappiness, and wealth and inequality of outcome, as the result of freedom, logic, and unavoidable reality. What is unavoidable is inevitable. War.
The other day, thinking about the 60 years since the murder of President Kennedy, I was thinking that America is always worse after an assassination. We never get over it, like Rome never got over the butchering of Julius Caesar.
You may be drawing the unfounded inference that just as Caesar’s murder ushered in an imperial age of "Caesars", so an American empire might be brought about by, god forbid, such a presidential death -- a dynasty of, no, not "Obamas" or, a ridiculous joke, not of "bidens" or "Hillaries". No.
It would be a collective empire, a gang of four, or an inner council. Perhaps figurehead. I suppose that's what biden is, at the moment I'm writing this. Who knows what a week will bring. biden is not long for this world, obviously. I'm predicting a vascular issue in his brain. It happened before. And he's too feeble to be clomping up those stairs in front of all those cameras, on a semi weekly basis.
Hopefully the end of our Constitution will be brought about along the electoral, fascist model of Hitler and Mussolini -- rather than a coup. Since the past several generations of Americans are incapable of learning from history, it must be hoped that this time a happier dictator/empire outcome may accrue, despite the pattern of the past.
As Montaigne said, we know only what we know now -- we do not know what we have forgotten, and we do not know what we have not yet learned. What we know now is demonstrated in the outcome of the most recent several national elections. Study this paragraph deeply, for the key to wisdom herein may be found. Nothing
So, in conclusion, I’m against wars because under our current system we lose them, and I’m against assassination because America always becomes more incompetent after them, and I’m expecting a literal or figurative tribulation, and in either case I’m expecting an Empire.
J
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