So, now that some time has actually passed since Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down, by Russian-backed separatists using Russian-supplied weapons, have we actually learned anything new?
Putin is a bastard. Well, no shit. Good thing he got the Winter Olympics this year, and the 2018 World Cup. Sanctions are one way to hit this prick, another is to delegitimize his prestige goals. So we'll see how many of these outraged countries boycott the World Cup in 2018. But that's a pretty effective way to take the piss out of the guy.
Despite what armchair tough-guys Poor Ol' Straight Talk and Huckleberry Closetcase are braying every Sunday morning on the network circle-jerk, we aren't going to war with Russia. Here is where The Googul, or a history book, or even a decent memory, is helpful. Despite being in some sort of conflict or other since World War 2 ended, almost none of those military actions have been against countries that can actually fight back. Oh, your Iraqs and Vietnams and such like can muster enough guerrilla insurgency to wear us down and make us leave, but I'm talking about countries who can strike back in the US. That hasn't happened, and it ain't gonna happen.
Russia may be something of a Third World despotate (albeit an enormous one), in terms of laws and life expectancy and such, but they aren't in the same league as the banana stands and oil cans we're used to knocking over with our swinging dick.
What we're seeing in Ukraine is a civil war, pure and simple, and it's one that at least in part could have been avoided by more prudent action on the part of the US and Europe. Continuous instigation to get Ukraine into NATO and/or the EU, or to get them on the IMF debt hook, was always going to be unacceptable to Russia, just as Soviet incursions and overtures into (for starters) Cuba and Nicaragua were completely unacceptable to us. Do these people not recall the Saint Reagan years, or was it all just a collective coke-fueled dream?
"So what?", you might say, and not without some justification. "Fuck the Russkies, we run this popsicle stand, baby! USA! USA! Dee-fence, unh-unh! Dee-fence! We're the hegemon, we run the show, we call the shots."
Well, ah, yes and no. This is a classic case of "we got the guns, but they got the numbers"; yes, we have 11 aircraft carriers where no other nation has any, and we have state-of-the-art machinery in every phase of war -- land, sea, air. Hell, our killbot roboplanes are more sophisticated than all but a few conventional manned air forces.
But this has all come at a cost. Fat, drunk, and stupid, as Dean Wormer acidly observed so long ago, is no way to go through life, son. Militarists can jabber on about how the defense budget is at or near an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, but that is meaningless in the context of banana-republic levels of economic inequality and mobility. It is a zero-sum game; all those aircraft carriers and killbots come at the price of something else along the line -- a school, a road, a bridge, an educational grant, something to give someone in the lower dalit strata of 'murkin life an opportunity besides working multiple shit jobs just to survive, or worse yet, becoming a Juggalo.
In the meantime, they attempt to whip the maroons into a jingoist frenzy about Russia, or Syria, or whoever. Ambrose Beirce famously said that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography, but he would be disappointed to know that that is no longer even true, as in order to teach someone something the other party has to be willing to learn. And Americans just don't give a shit about where any of the multifarious objects of this or that week's Two Minutes of Hate are, or what the history or context might mean.
(Or that, uh, it ain't just Ukrusky separatists that shoot down passenger jets. There's your inconvenient truth, podna.)
The thing is, you're supposed to completely ignore the fact that the owners are screwing you over, every day in every way, that quite literally the more people they fuck over, the wealthier they get. Instead, you get bombarded with either a barrage of "the world is going up in flames" stories, again devoid of meaningful context or analysis, or completely meaningless features on the comings and going of "royals", or how some imperceptible change in yet another interchangeable comic-book movie franchise is, like, rilly rilly important.
When 1% of the people control more assets than the bottom 90%, it's a recipe for destabilizing levels of inequality. An increased level of anxiety and fear becomes systemic, and must be, via the corporate propaganda machine, projected onto The Other as much as possible. Whether it's assholes in a country you can't find on a map, or teeming hordes of Central American maras coming to steal your flat-screen teevees and virgin daughters, it's always someone else's fault. Pay no attention to the leveraged-buyout specialists behind the curtain.
Not to fear, though, gentle reader -- though your job has been outsourced to Bangalore, you will still be able to purchase the item you once manufactured for less money, so long as it doesn't exceed your gubmint assistance allowance. But hey, those Apaches are swell, aren't they?
The 1% needn't worry about any of this, mind you -- they can and have put millions of their countrymen out in the street without a care in the world, because increased capital mobility. And if there's one thing they know, it's that large groups of people will literally go live in tents before they'll mobilize and at least try to do something, anything about the fuckers that put them there.
And on the off chance we actually were to send any sort of ground force into Russia, or Ukraine, or anywhere else for that matter, there won't be any one-percenters' kids in the action. There is never any rich skin in this game.
Also, too.
Putin is a bastard. Well, no shit. Good thing he got the Winter Olympics this year, and the 2018 World Cup. Sanctions are one way to hit this prick, another is to delegitimize his prestige goals. So we'll see how many of these outraged countries boycott the World Cup in 2018. But that's a pretty effective way to take the piss out of the guy.
Despite what armchair tough-guys Poor Ol' Straight Talk and Huckleberry Closetcase are braying every Sunday morning on the network circle-jerk, we aren't going to war with Russia. Here is where The Googul, or a history book, or even a decent memory, is helpful. Despite being in some sort of conflict or other since World War 2 ended, almost none of those military actions have been against countries that can actually fight back. Oh, your Iraqs and Vietnams and such like can muster enough guerrilla insurgency to wear us down and make us leave, but I'm talking about countries who can strike back in the US. That hasn't happened, and it ain't gonna happen.
Russia may be something of a Third World despotate (albeit an enormous one), in terms of laws and life expectancy and such, but they aren't in the same league as the banana stands and oil cans we're used to knocking over with our swinging dick.
What we're seeing in Ukraine is a civil war, pure and simple, and it's one that at least in part could have been avoided by more prudent action on the part of the US and Europe. Continuous instigation to get Ukraine into NATO and/or the EU, or to get them on the IMF debt hook, was always going to be unacceptable to Russia, just as Soviet incursions and overtures into (for starters) Cuba and Nicaragua were completely unacceptable to us. Do these people not recall the Saint Reagan years, or was it all just a collective coke-fueled dream?
"So what?", you might say, and not without some justification. "Fuck the Russkies, we run this popsicle stand, baby! USA! USA! Dee-fence, unh-unh! Dee-fence! We're the hegemon, we run the show, we call the shots."
Well, ah, yes and no. This is a classic case of "we got the guns, but they got the numbers"; yes, we have 11 aircraft carriers where no other nation has any, and we have state-of-the-art machinery in every phase of war -- land, sea, air. Hell, our killbot roboplanes are more sophisticated than all but a few conventional manned air forces.
But this has all come at a cost. Fat, drunk, and stupid, as Dean Wormer acidly observed so long ago, is no way to go through life, son. Militarists can jabber on about how the defense budget is at or near an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, but that is meaningless in the context of banana-republic levels of economic inequality and mobility. It is a zero-sum game; all those aircraft carriers and killbots come at the price of something else along the line -- a school, a road, a bridge, an educational grant, something to give someone in the lower dalit strata of 'murkin life an opportunity besides working multiple shit jobs just to survive, or worse yet, becoming a Juggalo.
In the meantime, they attempt to whip the maroons into a jingoist frenzy about Russia, or Syria, or whoever. Ambrose Beirce famously said that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography, but he would be disappointed to know that that is no longer even true, as in order to teach someone something the other party has to be willing to learn. And Americans just don't give a shit about where any of the multifarious objects of this or that week's Two Minutes of Hate are, or what the history or context might mean.
(Or that, uh, it ain't just Ukrusky separatists that shoot down passenger jets. There's your inconvenient truth, podna.)
The thing is, you're supposed to completely ignore the fact that the owners are screwing you over, every day in every way, that quite literally the more people they fuck over, the wealthier they get. Instead, you get bombarded with either a barrage of "the world is going up in flames" stories, again devoid of meaningful context or analysis, or completely meaningless features on the comings and going of "royals", or how some imperceptible change in yet another interchangeable comic-book movie franchise is, like, rilly rilly important.
When 1% of the people control more assets than the bottom 90%, it's a recipe for destabilizing levels of inequality. An increased level of anxiety and fear becomes systemic, and must be, via the corporate propaganda machine, projected onto The Other as much as possible. Whether it's assholes in a country you can't find on a map, or teeming hordes of Central American maras coming to steal your flat-screen teevees and virgin daughters, it's always someone else's fault. Pay no attention to the leveraged-buyout specialists behind the curtain.
Not to fear, though, gentle reader -- though your job has been outsourced to Bangalore, you will still be able to purchase the item you once manufactured for less money, so long as it doesn't exceed your gubmint assistance allowance. But hey, those Apaches are swell, aren't they?
The 1% needn't worry about any of this, mind you -- they can and have put millions of their countrymen out in the street without a care in the world, because increased capital mobility. And if there's one thing they know, it's that large groups of people will literally go live in tents before they'll mobilize and at least try to do something, anything about the fuckers that put them there.
And on the off chance we actually were to send any sort of ground force into Russia, or Ukraine, or anywhere else for that matter, there won't be any one-percenters' kids in the action. There is never any rich skin in this game.
Also, too.
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