Category: Gangster Government

What we replaced our Constitutional republic with

A culture of faith and force

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When it clashes—as it inevitably must—with a culture bereft of either and wildly, reflexively averse to both, guess who comes out the winner every time?

Here’s a story about CENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie meeting with the heads of the bloody subhumans comprising Taliban, at Doha, in order to beg permission to scuttle out of Kabul without, at best, his people getting their asses chewed off by AAA-fire before the landing gear is in the wells.

That’s where that all is, now.

The second video clip on the page is among the most harrowing that I’ve seen in the whole catastrophe, so far. I can see everything implicit in a scene of illiterate Southwest Asian peasants running alongside and climbing, where they can, onto a C-117 heavy-lift jet airplane, cheering it along a taxiway like some uncanny burden-beast in an appearance in the village festival parade.

We’re talking about the pre-scientific mind. Their leaders have for generations suppressed and overthrown every approach to modern life, all of which is born and borne in the West. Everything they have that’s modern, came from the minds and work of people the like of which they have never raised.

Now, they have fallen to the ravages of this murderously anti-human scourge, the Taliban, among whose stated intents is to bring the whole world under their blade. It’s awful to see anyone driven to such abject mortal terror. Among the recurring attractions of my eye in watching various Kabul videos is the children, almost always holding tightly to an adult hand, illustrating the last shred of trust that someone is going to do something to make everyone stop running and screaming.

This is a very old culture of faith and force, virtually untouched by the attributes of reason which are an essential characteristic of the Western mind, except in various expedient mimicries: they can machine an AK-47 right there in front of their hut, but they’re not interested to work-up what it takes to invent something like that and everything that goes into genuine industry of anything on a national scale.

Their sketch of “government” is Victorian, at best, foggily-lensed as a sort-of cargo-cult apprehension of form and baksheesh in practice — at worst, it’s plainly medieval and it’s about to get medievaler.

For now, the world is just going to have to suffer this one. This; on top of twenty years of America doing its own suffering at just living with a constant state of war so sublime that it takes something like the past forty-eight hours of Afghanistan for even CENTCOM to finally take it seriously as it really is. The imaginable horrors awaiting that place harrow up the soul.

Just imagine the horrors awaiting US, once we’ve upped the importation of these primordials to, say, Merkelian standards.

It’s Billy Beck talking, so you know what you must do, Glasshoppa.

1

It could NEVER happen here

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It already is, of course. Oz is about fifteen-twenty minutes ahead of us on this, that’s all.

Travelers visiting or returning to Australia will have to quarantine for 14 days at their own expense. Quarantine camps are going up around Australia and to little surprise. Australia has seen massive riots, protesting draconian lockdown measures. The Australian military has been brought in and is going door-to-door to make sure people are obeying lockdown orders.

Follows, a Tweet featuring a 12 year old child being pepper-sprayed by Australian Stasi goons. A dangerous White Supremacist revolutionary insurgent, no doubt. Then, another with New South Wales Gestapo head David Elliott declaring it every “patriotic” Aussie’s duty to rat out any of their family, friends, neighbors, or casual acquaintances who might be considering committing a Crime Against the Reich by attending a protest of any sort. And then we down to to the meat, potatoes, and curdled gravy.

Australia has begun construction on their second COVID-19 quarantine camp, deceptively called “Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience.” It’s down the road from Melbourne Airport, known locally as Tullamarine Airport, which serves the city of Melbourne, and is Australia’s second-busiest airport.

Fear-O-Rama! New Zealand recently locked down after one suspected case of COVID.

The 1,000-bed quarantine facility will be finished by the end of the year but will be operational as soon as it can accommodate 500 beds. It will have the ability to add room for an additional 3,000 beds if needed.

The holding pen is being modeled on the Howard Springs Centre for National Resilience. Australian authorities have found that quarantine camps are more successful than hotels, many of which were found to have substandard ventilation. Australian authorities claim high viral loads have caused “COVID leakage,” which resulted in the government declaring a stage-four lockdown of 6 million people in the Australian state of Victoria. Only three of 19 hotels considered as possible quarantine quarters were equipped with the necessary ventilation.

Local residents called for and were granted a community briefing session, which was held last week. Discussion topics included how such a facility will affect real-estate prices and the fear of COVID escaping into the community. The camp is roughly half a mile from the closest neighborhood.

The locals were assured the camp would follow the highest infection-control standards, set by the Howard Springs facility, and that the staff will be fully vaccinated. The workers will also be unable to work second jobs.

When asked why locals weren’t informed there was a camp being built in their community, the Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews (the Aussie equivalent of a state governor) responded by saying, “We want the community to know what’s going on there, we want the community to be part of that program and that process, but we’ve got to get this built.

“There’s much greater risk to people across Victoria, Mickleham included, by having thousands of people in hotels that are not built to quarantine them,” he added. “That’s the site that’s been chosen and everyone, including locals, will be better off because of that.”

In other words, he dodged the question.

Of course. But what he also did was remind the serfs of their proper place in the grand scheme of things:

  • Know your role
  • Shut your hole
  • Do NOT question Authority
  • Submit and Obey

    • Hey, remember the days before tyranny took root and spread like a toxic weed, when the people of the West threw around now-phantasmagorical terms like “the Free World” and such with great pride? Nah, me neither.

    6

    “The Afghanistan Exit Debacle: Incompetence, Distraction Or Something More Sinister?”

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    At this point, after seeing all we’ve seen, I gotta go with “sinister.”

    My first instinct has been to ignore the circus surrounding Biden’s apparent bungle of the troop exit from Afghanistan, primarily because I think it distracts from the much bigger danger of despotic covid mandates and vaccine passports that Biden and his handlers are trying to push forward right now on our home soil. That said, I have received numerous requests from readers to discuss the situation and I’ve found certain aspects of the pull-out rather suspicious. The basic assumption here is that Biden is senile and his handling of the exit is tainted by his stupidity, but maybe there is more to this than meets the eye…

    First, I think it’s important to dispel a propaganda narrative being circulated by the media that conservatives are somehow calling for troops to stay in Afghanistan by criticizing Biden’s exit strategy. This is typical leftist gaslighting. One can be in favor of a troop draw-down and still be critical of Biden’s handling of it. Frankly, the US should have been out of Afghanistan several years ago; I don’t think that it’s too much to ask that there be a concrete plan in place to mitigate damage to those people who relied on our presence to protect them from the Taliban.

    It was Barack Obama who first promised an exit from Afghanistan by 2014 while claiming that the “combat mission was over.” This of course never happened and the political left ignored Obama’s deception in favor of the progressive savior narrative.

    To be fair, the Trump Administration did the same exact thing, platforming the idea of a major draw-down or a full exit and then instituting troop surges instead, but at least conservatives were far more critical of his backpedaling. Trump finally committed to troop reductions in 2020, with most of the assets relocated AFTER the November election, leaving 2500 military personnel in Afghanistan along with 17,000 private contractors.

    The real shock has been the speed of Biden’s exit agenda after Trump had already removed the bulk of US troops. This rapid draw-down has included cutting almost all US troops and cutting private contractor numbers by at least 60%, and all of this has been undertaken in the span of a few months. This has allowed the Taliban to overrun the last secure provinces surrounding the capital of Kabul and then overrun Kabul itself. A panic has ensued among Afghan citizens with anti-Taliban sentiments, and it’s hitting a fever pitch with hundreds of thousands looking for any way to escape.

    It has been the common practice of multiple US administrations to pay lip service to public concerns over the endless war in Afghanistan, telling people an exit is imminent, then shrugging their shoulders when they are caught lying. It has become so formulaic that I think Americans have been conditioned to expect we would never actually leave the country; that the false promises would go on perpetually. Perhaps that’s why Biden’s rushed and haphazard removal of troops from the region over the span of mere months feels so bizarre.

    Biden apologists would make the argument that the gibbering commander-in-chief has given us exactly what we wanted, so we should be applauding him. However, the chaotic manner in which Biden is executing the troop draw-down is increasingly suspect. It feels more like a desperate retreat in the face of an overwhelming attack, rather than a controlled exit with a defensive plan in the face of a limited insurgency. Or, even more disturbing, it feels like Biden needs those troops and resources elsewhere and in a hurry – but where are the troops needed and why?

    Three guesses, first two etc.

    It needs to be understood that the US was NEVER going to “win” the war in Afghanistan. An orthodox military strategy is rarely going to succeed against a long term insurgency using asymmetric tactics. It does not matter how technologically advanced that military might be; it does not matter how many planes, tanks, and drones they might have. Eventually over time they WILL lose by pure attrition in the face of a guerrilla resistance.

    It needs to be remembered, too. It will be on the test later. So to speak.

    I’m not buying the “Biden is incompetent” story because it is too simplistic and it doesn’t take the bigger picture into account. Biden is a muppet, a mascot, a front-man for the public to love or hate, and that’s all he is. Yes, he can barely read from a teleprompter, but it’s his puppeteers that make the big decisions, not Biden. They are evil people, but not incompetent.

    So we have to ask some important questions: Why now? And, who benefits? After decades of presidents lying to us about “mission accomplished” and impending troop exits, why is Biden suddenly committing to an exit strategy in the most hysterical way possible?

    Why did the Biden Admin choose September 11th as the end date for the troop exit? It’s certainly symbolic of further US failure and defeat, but is it also symbolic of a new phase in the establishment’s plans for the US as a whole? Is there another major event like 9/11 or larger on the way, and is the sudden exit from Afghanistan in preparation for that event?

    As I mentioned, there are scenes here that remind me of Vietnam, but I am also reminded of Benghazi – There is a rotten smell to this event, as if the goal is to deliberately spark an inferno to hide another motive in smoke.

    To be sure, the insanity in Afghanistan is quite a distraction away from the implementation of vaccine passports and other illegal mandates in the US, with an increasing number of corporations and city and state governments trying to enforce them. The DHS has just released a statement indicating that anyone who refuses to submit to restrictions and the experimental mRNA vaccines “might” be a potential terrorist. They are even entertaining the idea of interstate restrictions on travel for unvaccinated people, which is something I have been predicting for the past year and it is an action that’s on the top of my list of items that will trigger civil war.

    Everything those of us in the alternative media have warned about over the past 18 months in terms of medical tyranny is coming true. It’s not “conspiracy theory”, it’s conspiracy reality.

    The Biden Admin will certainly try to announce vaccine passport requirements at the federal level in the near future. Is the plan to bring US troops and maybe even private contractors home to the US to help enforce illegal directives through martial law? There is a high probability of a soft secession of red states and counties if the mandate farce continues. With US troops being majority conservative there is the hope that they will not comply and that they have no interest in fighting yet another insurgency made up of their own people. We will have to wait and see.

    The nice thing about that is, what with however many grim-faced warfighters may still be left in our New LGBTQZRXPIALIDOCIOUS Army now driven to purple-faced rage by the Biden Betrayal, the idea of those troops coming over to the side of American Righteousness en masse in such a conflict is nowhere near as far-fetched as it might have been only a couple-three weeks ago. As I’ve always maintained, Leftism always carries the seeds of its own destruction within itself, awaiting the chance to take root and blossom. By so stupidly alienating the very force they must rely on to suppress Team Liberty, the Moron Left could very well end up providing the real-world proof of concept for that idea.

    1

    The truth gets loose

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    Look, over there! A SQUIRREL!

    25,687,041 Total population of Australia as of 30th June, 2020

    COVID & VACCINE STATS AS OF AUGUST 18th FROM GOVERNMENT SOURCES:
    40,774 total Covid cases
970 total Covid deaths
    10,195,842 individuals with at least one dose of vaccine.
    ADVERSE REACTION REPORTING AS OF AUGUST 4th

    28,487 Astrazeneca Adverse Reactions
254 Astrazeneca Deaths
16,816 Comirnaty Adverse Reactions
166 Comirnaty Deaths

    Vox unpacks it:

    The first thing that leaps out is 420 reported vaccine deaths compared to 970 total Covid deaths. Even if we leave out the assumption that adverse reactions are under-reported, assume that all of the Covid deaths are actually OF Covid rather than WITH Covid and are of the unvaccinated, and ignore the natural mutation of the virus to more contagious, less lethal variants, the relative risk factors make it clear that it is riskier for the average Australian to become a vaccine recipient than to remain unvaccinated.

    • Chance of unvaccinated individual contracting and dying of Covid = one in 26,481
    • Chance of vaccinated individual dying of an adverse vaccine reaction = one in 24,275

    So, even in the most favorable possible case for the vaccines, the average individual’s risk of death is essentially the same. And once you begin factoring in comorbidities, age, the decreased lethality of the Delta variant, the number of vaccinated deaths, the possibility that the patient died of something else while Covid-positive, and the mounting evidence that the ADE scenario is in effect, it is clear that the vaccines pose a greater threat to human life than does the virus.

    There’s more, of course. These days, when isn’t there?

    2

    The Blame Game continues

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    Gotta admit, here’s a culprit I hadn’t really thought of before. But after reading this, I can’t really say it’s all that much of a stretch.

    So who is to blame for the current Afghanistan fiasco?

    There is plenty of blame to go around. President Biden, for sure. President Obama, yes. And the second President Bush, yes, for the insane mission of nation-building, trying to install a Western-style democracy in a land that was wholly unsuited for it.

    But here is a name nobody is mentioning but should. That name is…Ronald Reagan.

    Yeah, I know, I know. Just slow your roll a little, and hear this guy out.

    I hate saying that. I supported the sainted Reagan rabidly back in the day, and I still do in many ways. But now, in retrospect, I see Reagan as the ultimate culprit for the current fiasco. History may yet look to Ronald Reagan’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan as his biggest mistake.

    But, gee, Reagan’s decision sure seemed like the right decision at the time. I certainly supported it.

    The Russian war in Afghanistan consisted of three phases. Phase 1: The Russians invaded with a classical WWII army — and promptly got their backsides handed to them. The USSR lost Phase 1.

    But the Russians learned their lessons and for the next phase used a modern strategy of helicopters and other air assets to obliterate the Mujaheddin. It worked. The USSR won Phase 2 and, as a result, completely controlled the country. The Mujaheddin were exiled across the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, licking their wounds.

    Phase 3 can be summed up in one word: Stinger, as in Stinger missiles. With Stinger missiles, which Uncle Ronnie gave them, the Mujaheddin took air control away from the Russians, drove them out, and the rest is — not only history, but now current events, too.

    For a short time, the USSR had built a classical Marxist state in Afghanistan. So what are the hallmarks of such a regime?

    A police state — yes. Brutal suppression of dissent — yes. Lots of suppression of human rights, lots of imprisonment, lots of executions, lots of corruption — yes, yes, yes.

    But now think of what else it means.

    Suppression of organized religion. In this case, this isn’t gentle, harmless Christianity we’re talking about. Rather, this is jihadist Islam. This would have been suppressed savagely, not least because, unlike Christianity, such an Islam really is a threat to a secular, atheistic state.

    So, inside this classical, secular, atheist Marxist state, there’d have been no room at all for al-Qaeda or the Taliban or ISIS. Afghanistan would never have become a world base for Islamic terror. There never would have been an attack on 9/11.

    Here are other hallmarks of Marxism, and these are positive, at least in the context of a medieval Islamic nation: universal health. Universal education, and for girls as well as for boys.

    If Marxism had been allowed to prevail in Afghanistan, its women would have been immensely better off than what actually happened to them.

    It might sound ugly and cruel, but at this stage of things I can’t honestly say I give much of a shit about what might happen to women in ANY Moslem shithole. And while we’re being brutally honest here, I also can’t say I care much more about the fate of the thousands of American State Dept personnel who are stuck there, either. Same goes for “our Afghani allies”—translators, ANA soldiers, etc.

    Yes, I do agree that they’ve been stabbed in the back—betrayed and ruthlessly abandoned by a faithless, heartless “ally.” So stipulated. But see, those poor, hapless Afghanis made the same mistake a goodly number of Normal Americans here at home still make: their conception of what the USA—specifically, the US government—is and what it actually is are, shall we say, at variance. WIDE variance.

    Tens of thousands will die horribly at the hands of some of the most vicious, barbaric monsters the race is capable of producing because of all this. I’m sorry for that. I wish it wasn’t happening. But there’s also not one damned thing I can do about it. For those doomed souls who acted on their misplaced faith that the wholly-evil US government would have their backs and honor its promise to protect them, the sad fact is this:



    There is a silver lining to this whole clusterfuck, however tarnished. If nothing else, after Biden’s Big Afghan Adventure, there can be NO excuse for not recognizing the true nature of the US federal government—what it is; what it does; what its intentions are; what it actually gives a shit about, and what it doesn’t. The mask has been ripped away for good; there’s no longer any way to conceal the ugly truth. The more people awakened by the revelations of this past week, the more likely that corrective action will be taken, and the sooner it will happen. If so, we’ll all be better off for it.

    1
    1

    Post-mort

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    Another real no-shitter, this one quite comprehensive and in-depth.

    I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.

    I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.

    We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.

    However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.

    Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.

    The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.

    It SHOULD be, sure. It won’t.

    General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.

    Won’t happen, and we all know it won’t. I suspect the only people who seriously think it might are the self-same purblind Pollyannas who blibber on and on about the vitally vital importance of “taking back Congress in 2022.”

    Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.

    Won’t happen.

    Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists.

    Won’t happen.

    The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs.

    Hey, what better way to exhaust said military; demoralize the warriors at the pointy end; erode the support for said military among its natural base of same; reinforce the paramount urgency of the fundamentally anti-American idea that participation in multinational forces (as no more than “one among equals,” even though the contribution demanded of the US will always and forever exceed that of all other “coalition partners” combined, by orders of magnitude) and submission to the authority of globalist organizations—in short, to invalidate and demolish the very concept of national sovereignty and independence, thereby achieving the eternal Leftist dream of One World Government: omnipotent, unchallengeable, eternal. Why, one might almost imagine the whole thing had been planned in advance or something.

    Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war.

    Clearly, it couldn’t even win a minor one.

    Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds.

    More importantly, it will take a clear-eyed, stout-hearted populace whose will to victory hasn’t been broken by seeing the lives of friends, family members, and neighbors who are in the military squandered for no discernible purpose or gain by an entirely loathsome and corrupt political/military complex, in pointless conflicts half-heartedly fought in farflung shitholes all over the world—places in which there there is no national interest to be found.

    Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.

    Done.

    Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.

    Agreed, wholeheartedly. Won’t happen.

    And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.

    Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.

    Okay, I’m gonna just lay off the “won’t happen” schtick—do I really even need to say it again? No, I do not—so we can get to the last crucial bit.

    Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

    Actually, we’ll never know for sure whether “success was possible” or not…because it was never actively, vigorously pursued. In reality, it was barely ever even discussed—certainly, it was never defined, after the original goal of “find and kill bin Laden” shifted to “remove the Taliban, destroy their ability to provide a base for the projection of jihadi power a la 9/11,” morphing from there into “Make Afghanistan Georgetown Again.”

    Once again, The Power and its Grand Scheme has been undone by its own arrogance, incompetence, and witless disregard for the harsher realities. If it weren’t for the way the horrific consequences of their folly always crash down onto the heads of the hapless wretches so uncaringly used and manipulated by them, watching the serial pratfalls of our grotesquely-misnomered “Elite” would be funny as all hell to watch.

    8

    A real no-shitter of an AAR

    Posted on      by     

    STRONG message follows.

    Some of you Afghan Veterans out there are hurting, trying to make sense of what this all means. Including some of my peers, who are not immune to the feel bads coming out of this clusterfuck. So allow me to give you a different perspective, one that will perhaps sooth the pain a bit. I shoot straight, and this isn’t all sunshine and roses. There is going to be some Grim Dark up front. But it does have a silver lining, hear me out.

    Was this a foolish mission to start with? Yes. The only way to decisively win in Afghanistan was full scale genocide, which we knew from about 2003 forward. We don’t have the stomach for that, and that is probably a good thing.

    Nah, not so much. All’s we ever had to do—ever SHOULD have done—is hew closely to LeMay’s Maxim, a man who very much knew whereof he spoke when it came to waging war: If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.

    Did we lose? Yeah, goddamn right we lost. Let’s just get that out of the way now, like ripping off a band aid. Do not get out the “ We were winning when I left” hats and slap a Ghan flag on them. Face the facts, and then act. If the goal 20 years ago was to remove the Taliban, and now the Taliban is back 100% in control without even requiring a name change, then the objective was not met.

    Is it your fault? No. The failure here, while stunning, rests on the political class and the Generals. So like I said, the political class. Who, exactly, do you think lost this war? You, out slogging the mountains, and mowing down Taliban fighters with a machine gun, and surviving on fish sticks and MRE crackers at the firebase, and winning EVERY tactical level engagement for 20 years? Or the spineless General who didn’t hear a gun shot despite 9 tours, who was the architect of the grand strategy, and spent his time quite literally getting his dick sucked by his biographer in his office at Bagram instead of trying to win?

    We can safely say at this point that the real goal in Afghanistan was a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) and the politicians they bought with the profits. $88 billion dollars ( for the ANA alone) is a staggering figure. For that much money, you could have paid half of Afghanistan to kill the other half. You could have paid China or India or even Pakistan to do it for you. That money was wasted, and we all knew that well over a decade ago.

    Afghanistan should never have been anything except a punitive expedition. We should have left in 2004, 2006, 2007, or ten minutes after Osama Bin Laden died. Any one of those would have been a leave with honor type situation. Instead, we opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and look like incompetent boobs to the entire planet. I should say, our Generals and Politicians opted for that. Almost like that was the goal………

    The idea of spending 2.2 trillion dollars to “export our way of life” to cavemen is retarded, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that. I often said that giving the Ghans a Jeffersonian Democracy was a fool’s errand, since we could barely keep one functioning ourselves. Post Nov 4th, 2020, we know that “barely functioning” wasn’t true either. The idea of the US Government fighting corruption is laughable in our own country. So no shit we laundered 2.2 trillion into bribes and fake projects, what did you think was going to happen?

    How many Company Grade Officers were relieved of command or run up on charges over 20 years? A lot. Hundreds, if not thousands. How many Generals faced the same fate, or resigned in disgrace over their incompetence? None. Stan McCrystal resigned for saying not nice things about Obumer to a Rolling Stone reporter, but that doesn’t count. In fact, perhaps it is telling that General JSOC himself was played in such a manner. If ole Stanley is too much of a fucking idiot not to effectively give his enemy kryptonite and ask him nice not to use it, what does that say about the rest of the Officer Caste? For that matter, how many children did the CEO of Ratheyon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin lose to the meat grinder?

    Yeah, it hurts. I feel you. We all lost friends. Had our brothers return home mangled and broken. Was it worth it? No. But those are sunk costs, so we might as well look at what we gained from the experience.

    He goes on to list a few of those silver-lining items before laying down some 24-karat-gold, capital-t Truth:

    We lost this war the minute Code Pink was taken seriously. The minute Bradly Manning and Bo Berghdale weren’t hung. The first time we charged one of our warfighters with murder or using excessive force. The first time we denied a element in contact air support. Our people, 49% of them at least, are weak and stupid. The great sifting has just begun, and it will get worse. That is the price you pay for allowing weakness to take root in your society.

    All of us, I promise, will be needed once again. And soon. And not in some Bureaucrat, Blue Blood , Skull and Bones created debacle on the edge of the Empire. I mean needed as in needed like the Spartans at Thermopylae. The weakness on display right now by the Government of the United States will not go unnoticed by the world at large. We can expect now to be poked in the chest, because we have shown that we will take it.

    Seems to me it ain’t really the rest of the world that we need to be concerning ourselves with now. As I keep saying, the war has been brought home to us, right to our very doorsteps. The primary threat to American liberty, American prosperity and security, and Americans themselves, no longer comes from enemies abroad. As in the classic old horror-movie line: The calls are coming from inside the house.

    (Via WRSA)

    6

    “America’s Elites are trash”

    Posted on      by     

    NAILED. IT.

    Former US intelligence colleagues are angry and deeply worried at what has happened in Afghanistan. Here’s what I’m hearing, and why there’s nearly universal belief that America and the world are in for one of the most dangerous, unpredictable times in modern history.

    Afghanistan has shown the world — enemies & allies alike — that our military & intel assets are largely irrelevant because we can’t deploy them successfully. The blame lays at the feet of multiple Presidents. The Generals. The Spies. The Congress.

    America’s Elites are trash. China knows it. They will become emboldened, covertly & overtly. War over Taiwan and contested islands in the S. China Sea and E. China Sea is now more likely. Russia will consider similar covert & overt moves, focused on Crimea, & former Soviet satellites. The fear is that China & Russia will act in concert.

    Why? America was whipped by a tiny rebel force and couldn’t even retreat properly. Meanwhile, the American people are angry, COVID weary, & divided. If there were ever a time to push American hegemony aside, this is it. If Cold War III grows hot, America will need to quickly build up & work with foreign counterparts. But who will trust America after Afghanistan? Who believes we have the leadership to use our military might well? Who will trust us when we say “We Will Stand With You”?

    Nobody with half a lick of sense, on every one of those questions. Including me.

    Beyond China/Russia, others will take gambles too. Terror orgs like al-Qa’ida & ISIS are degraded but not dead. Their ideology is very much alive. Iran’s Hizballah — with terror cells throughout the US — may see an opening to create chaos too.

    Meanwhile, the disaster inside Afghanistan is only just beginning. The Taliban will launch a terror campaign against American collaborators. The pictures will shock the conscience of the world, further degrading American moral authority. Biden & Co will struggle to respond.

    There’s also the nightmare of tactical weaponry now awash in Afghanistan, in the hands of the Taliban and — soon — on the global black market. These arms will fuel chaos around the world for decades. The Pentagon has no idea where this stuff is and no plans to destroy it.

    Finally, if Afghani refugees pour into the US, there are profound implications for security, culture, the economy, & politics. Are they properly vetted? Do they hold Western/tolerant values re: women, gays? Do they bring skills/education? Which party will they support?

    More questions for which sentient beings already have the answers: no, RUFKM, HELL no, and three guesses, DUH. Expect to see much more splodeydopery, head-choppery, and sidewalk-murder-trucks driven into crowds up close and personal-like all across the too-feckless-to-bother-saving-itself Woke West, as the victorious Taliban expands its power and reach to put all those new war-toys abandoned by the fleeing Uncle Sam to best use.

    The existential problem is that America needs good leadership to right its ship but there is none. Our federal bench is weak. Biden is a corrupt old man. Impeachment is a long shot; VP Harris is an unpopular paperweight. The Legislature is a feckless cabal of empty suits. Leadership could come from a state Governor, it’s true, but not soon enough. The above threats by China, Russia, & Co will metastasize well before the 2024 elections, and even a heroic new President will need years to clean things up.

    Hate to be the one to hip ya, buddy, but the problem is even more existential than you may realize. NO President—however heroic, over whatever span of time he’s given—can or will clean this up. The mess is simply too big, the rot too deep, the national fabric too tattered and torn. This Augean stable is beyond hope of restoration; even the mighty Hercules himself would only throw up his hands in despair and just walk away from the job, shaking his head and muttering under his breath about what a total dick that damned King Eurystheus was for assigning it to him in the first place. Which, as it turned out in the end, he really was a dick. Anyhoo.

    Again, our enemies and allies know this. Upshot: There is fear and outrage streaming through former intel officers over the Afghanistan debacle. America is rudderless. And the world now knows it. Grave dangers lie ahead, some predictable, others unimaginable.

    ‘Fraid so. The closing plea to “vote for change” is risible and pathetic, of course, in enforced accord with Beck’s First Law of TINVOWOOT™. But the rest is pretty much spot on, I’d say. Makes one wonder, since Wright is identified as a “former CIA ops officer,” whether there might not actually be a few white hats in the US spook community after all. Or might have been in the past, shall we say.

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    6

    The weakness of Wokeness

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    He’s dead, Jim, and doesn’t even seem to realize it.

    The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

    America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

    State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

    The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

    Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

    Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

    Wrong, asshole. If Amerika v2.0 was a “great power,” you goat-humping, dress-clad lower primates would never have defeated it. America That Was, on the other hand, would have exterminated every last Muzzrat in the Hindu Kush and reduced the flatter areas of your cesspool “nation” to so much steaming glass in the first fucking month. Then Our Boys would have loaded up the gear and headed on home with, as Billy Beck once put it, the last US soldier pausing his trot up the troop-transport ramp to nail up a sign warning DON’T MAKE US COME BACK HERE AGAIN.

    And know what? I bet you wouldn’t have, either. You mouthbreathers would have been very, very careful to make sure it didn’t happen, your bowels instantly going gooey at the mere thought of giving us a reason to, what with the unpleasant memory of your asses having been kicked up between your shoulder blades fresh in mind and all. No, don’t y’all be breaking any arms patting yourselves on the back for “defeating America.” You weren’t fighting America; America no longer exists, not as anything other than a fond memory. It hasn’t for many years.

    Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality.

    Wokeness is weakness, and diversity is where nations go to die. Contrast our spokesmen with theirs: in the White House, Jen Psaki picked the weekend to take a vacation, possibly to film her scenes in another hilariously viral Mr Non-Binary Goes To Washington video; at Foggy Bottom, Buffoon McStriped Pants III issued a stern warning on the need for the firebreathing mullahs to include more female deputy-assistant-undersecretaries; and, at the Potemtagon, Kabul Kirby stood there doing his usual anguished-eyebrows Saddy Sadcakes routine.

    All these images project global impotence: none of these people would be a serious and prudent power’s projection of itself to the world.

    Meanwhile, back at the palace in Kabul, the Taliban commander giving a victory speech is Gholam Ruhani, released from Gitmo (under Bush) because he said his “only wish” was to return to Afghanistan to (per the Department of Defense documents published, natch, in a London newspaper) “assist his father, who is sick, in operating the family appliance store in Kabul”.

    I don’t know what appliances they sell at Ruhani & Son over at 237b Sword of the Infidel Slayer Street, but evidently they’re enough to take out the global superpower. On social media, the wags are having great sport with Joe Biden’s recent taunt that no American needs an AR-15, because, if you want to defeat the mighty US government, you’re gonna need fighter jets and nukes.

    Well, the Taliban just took out Joe as Leader of the Free World with no nukes, no F-15s, just a big bunch of AR-15s.

    That could actually be taken as an encouraging thing, were it not for the sure and certain knowledge that The Power in Mordor on the Potomac would be FAR less hesitant about waging full-on, no-holds-barred warfare against Real Americans than against anybody else. Balancing that, though, is the equally sorry truth that America’s military might has atrophied so badly by now that really, the only army in the world that the FUSA stands any chance at all of defeating would have to be the “largely disintegrated” Afghan National Army that just downed weapons and surrendered to the Taliban. So we got that going for us, at least.

    Steyn uncorks a painful-but-funny at the close:

    If you saw my long-form interview by Tucker Carlson yesterday, you’ll know he asked me about writing obituaries. And I replied that it was very difficult to do obits for people for whom you had total contempt; you had to have some basic human sympathy even for the most unlovely types. And yet, as the world dances on the grave of Washington’s “elites”, I cannot muster a jot or tittle of human connection with the likes of Milley and Austin, Kirby and Psaki and Biden: They will all die richer than you, and with half the citizenry convinced of their virtue.

    Steyn Clubber Eric Dale from Iowa appended this somewhat mordant comment to my Sunday column:

    Do you think there’s any chance of getting Taliban commanders to teach at West Point? It might be a nice change of pace for cadets to learn from someone who actually won a war.

    We all laugh…but it’s actually a very fair point: Would you rather hear first-hand from a mullah about how they took out the hyperpower in a week? Or from a corrupt toad like Milley who can only express bewilderment at how showering billions on other corrupt toads from Herat to Jalalabad didn’t pan out?

    Myself, I wonder how many more shiny additions to his chestful of fruit-salad Milley will award himself for Heroic Leadership Above And Beyond The Call etc in the Afghanistan fiasco. Oh, and in case you aren’t angry enough to explode a ventricle quite yet:

    Taliban Leader Obama/Biden Released from GITMO in Swap for Deserter Bergdahl Just Resurfaced
    It was one of the worst trades in history, even worse than Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi or Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac: Back in 2014, Barack Obama traded five Taliban commanders for one American who, we were led to believe, had been captured by the Taliban. Obama did all he could to make the swap seem noble: He said at the time that the recovery of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield,” and the five Taliban jihadis were sent to Qatar, where they would ostensibly be kept out of trouble. Seven years later, Bergdahl is known as a deserter, not a hero: In 2017, he pleaded guilty to desertion and was given a dishonorable discharge. And now Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the jihadis Obama traded for Bergdahl, is among the Taliban leadership that just took Kabul.

    Obama’s deal was fishy from the start. Bergdahl was known as a deserter even at the time the deal was made. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bergdahl in Afghanistan, wrote in the Daily Beast that Bergdahl was “a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

    Three days before he deserted, Bergdahl wrote to his parents: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”

    The Obama/Biden administration ignored all this, made the lopsided deal, and treated Bergdahl as a returning hero at a Rose Garden ceremony featuring the deserter’s parents.

    Meanwhile, Obama’s own intelligence team warned him that four of the five jihadis he traded for Bergdahl were almost certain to return to the jihad. He ignored this. And so Khairullah Khairkhwa was free to join other Taliban representatives in Qatar in 2019, negotiating the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. During those protracted, fruitless, and foredoomed negotiations, Khairkhwa declared in March 2021: “I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement.” Or, as things turned out, until Old Joe Biden leaves Afghanistan without bothering to have his military, which was too preoccupied with making sure to enforce woke orthodoxy anyway, prepare a coherent exit strategy that would protect our personnel and get them and our weaponry out of the country safely.

    “The horror that is America is disgusting.” I must confess that I’m finding it awfully tough to disagree with Berghdahl’s assessment at the moment.

    Screwed, blued, tattooed

    Posted on      by     

    The always-wise and eloquent Claire Wolfe is wondering about a few important things.

    We hardly need Arnold Schwartzenegger to tell us our freedom is screwed.

    As determined as we freedomistas may be to uphold our mental and philosophical freedoms, our political freedoms and economic freedoms are gone-gone-gone. They’ve been going for decades of course. But we now live under a regime that in eight months has ruled via a combination of ever-shifting whim, diktat, incompetence, and a complete disregard for reason, principle, or constitutional law.

    When you’re ruled by capricious madmen, your external freedoms are moot. Here today, gone tomorrow, partially restored for a few moments the day after that, made illegal and punishable by heaven knows what the following day.

    Knowing we’re headed for some sort of revolution, I’ve surrounded myself with history books. Seeking parallels. Seeking key differences. Seeking advice from the past. Seeking useful blog fodder.

    What can we learn not to do from the French? How are we like, and different from, the Americans of 1774? Must we expect the Russian revolution or might we be smart, luck out and get the kind they had more recently in Estonia or East Germany or Hungary? What can the fall of the Roman empire and its long aftermath tell us? How about the Irish, with their centuries of failure followed finally by a “success” that tears them apart to this day?

    I’m telling you, though, I read and read and read and got nada.

    While history does at times conveniently rhyme — or echo; we can hear the echoes of several civilizations now — our circumstances are so different they’re like discordant, meterless, meaningless nonsense verse, conveying nothing coherent.

    I called up a friend with whom I often brainstorm.

    “Give me some insights, preferably with a dose of optimism,” I requested.

    For half an hour he ranted about…how screwed we are.

    Yes, we’re like the French in 1789 or the American colonists in 1774 or the Irish in 1916. But we’re much more like Germany in 1933.

    I have no hope for us; we are such a nation of cowards. We have no backbone.

    Even after decades of being lied to, we’re watching Americans not only bow down to every bit of nonsense uttered by the establishment, but seeing those of us who question the nonsense demonized as vermin, to be exterminated.

    It’s the kind of self-righteousness that goes along with absolute spinelessness.

    Well. That was cheery.

    Oddly ironic, ain’t it, how we’ve suddenly found ourselves tossed about on the stormy seas of all-too-familiar history, and yet are in completely uncharted territory simultaneously. But since Claire brought up the French and all, Dave Renegade reviews a little French history that might well contain a useful lesson or three for us.

    History once again repeats itself as Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban in a matter of days. Or should we acknowledge this as a surrender since the American puppet army did not give any resistance to their conquerors. I doubt the Afghanistan government installed by the United States was popular except with the opium traders. I also doubt that this was an intelligence failure: the CIA knew what was going to happen. They found greener pastures to rape under the illegal Biden administration.

    The analogy of Napoleon’s return to power from Elba should also be considered. Napoleon landed back in France on March 1, 1815. He regained power in Paris on March 20, 1815 without any resistance.

    Napoleon was recognized by the military and the people as their rightful leader:

    [Napoleon] landed at Cannes on March 1st, intending to travel to the city of Grasse, however the road he wanted to travel did not exist for the Bourbons had given up on expensive works in order to have money. It was known that Grasse was in favour of Royalist cause at the time, yet Napoleon’s sudden appearance led to submission towards the Emperor. After this display of loyalty to the Emperor, Napoleon began to march confidently to Paris as the population were in favour of his cause. There was zero opposition until they reached a battalion on the road the fifth day after landing at Cannes. The commanding officer of said battalion refused to talk to Napoleon. Hearing this, The Emperor took matters into his own hands and walked straight at the battalion with his 100 soldiers treading behind slowly, ripped open his jacket, exposed his chest to the entire battalion and shouted “Let him that has the heart kill the Emperor”. Upon seeing this, the soldiers threw down their arms, tears in their eyes, and shouted “Vive l’Empereur!”

    How about another repeat to replace an illegal and unpopular government?

    Dave goes on to roll out a scenario involving a reclamation of power by the rightful POTUS (Trump) which parallels Napoleon’s. It has its appeal, I guess, but is unlikely in the extreme to happen. He includes several useful suggestions for what should happen after that, all of which are good.

    Honestly, though, I’m pretty much all done with Trump, and I’m by no means alone in that. He had his contribution to make; if nothing else, Trump pulled off the lid to expose what a great big box of pure, undiluted nasty the US government has become. But now—love him or hate him, for better or for worse—his time has passed. From what I’m seeing, he’s lost a significant chunk of his core support at this point—so much of it, in fact, that I have to wonder if he’d even be re-elected in an honest election today. I seriously doubt he would, frankly.

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    Echoes

    Posted on      by     

    This isn’t a rerun of Saigon. It’s way, way worse.

    The impact of America’s failure, of the slow, tragic journey from Operation Enduring Freedom to those images today of desperate Afghans clinging to the undercarriage of the last US military airplanes to leave Afghanistan, will be dire and long-lasting. Most immediately the US has shown itself to be an untrustworthy ally. Which nation or people in need of help would align with this supposedly freedom-loving superpower that abandons its allies to their fate when the enemy comes knocking? Who now will trust the US to assist in the building of new institutions given the rotten fruits of its multi-billion-dollar, 20-year ‘nation-building’ project in Afghanistan – a calamitously weak Potemkin government that capitulated instantly when the Taliban hit the streets of Kabul?

    This geopolitical disaster for the US will also strengthen the hand of its opponents, most notably China. China is already moving to consolidate its relationship with the Taliban and to assert its authoritative influence in the new Afghanistan. Islamist forces will take succour from the victory of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, too. Both regionally and among aspiring jihadists in the West, the victory of the Islamist side in the ‘war on terror’, the return to power of the movement that was hosting al-Qaeda when it visited its barbarism upon the infidels of New York City and Washington, DC, in 2001, will inspire confidence and action. Israel must be incredibly worried right now, knowing that Islamic extremists are again in the ascendant, and that its one-time chief supporter walks away from wars on terror.

    Yeah, well, I’d say Israel will have to look after itself for the foreseeable future, as will the rest of the once-free world. We have knitting of our own to tend to at the moment, and plenty of it.

    The Afghan humiliation is not only a military failure – it’s a political and moral one, too. Extraordinarily bad political decisions have been taken by the US, including its willingness to trust the Taliban and its belief that this brutal, misanthropic, misogynistic movement could be a player in the ‘international community’. Even now, Washington seems completely out of touch with events on the ground in Afghanistan. Its intelligence officers said the Taliban could take Kabul within 90 days. That was four days ago. They know nothing. One gets the impression of a confused, decaying empire looking with bamboozlement upon even those parts of the earth it rules.

    “Impression”?

    But above all of that, above even the political and military incoherence of the American empire, there is the corrosive cultural dynamic. This might just be the most important factor in the Afghan humiliation – the fact that the US, and the West more broadly, clearly lacks the cultural resources necessary for a clash of civilisations. This wasn’t just a territorial battle, a fight over the land of Afghanistan. It was also a cultural clash. It was a war between one side that has very strong beliefs and is more than willing to die for them, and another side that doesn’t know what it stands for anymore and would rather avoid risk and self-sacrifice if at all possible. I’ll leave you to decide which of these is the Taliban, and which the US.

    This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.

    Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves. The Taliban will have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory and the problem of ‘white rage’. They will have clocked the British army’s recruitment drive that was aimed at ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’ – for real – on the basis that such people have the ‘compassion’ necessary for the touchy-feely wars of the 21st century. They will know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as being the opposite to all of this. They know this was a cultural clash as well as a military fight, and that they were by far the stronger side on this front.

    Nailed it, clean and tight. I’ve said over and over again: Amerika v2.0 has absolutely, positively NO business involving itself in any conflict, major or minor, that can’t be resolved by pimple-faced doughboys sitting at keyboards in an air-conditioned trailer somewhere in Arizona, launching missiles from drones at high altitude. If that won’t fix it, we need to mind our own business from here on out.

    The point about Amerika v2.0 being a wholly unreliable and faithless ally is an apt one, too. But as with so many of our other current woes, that hardly began this past week either.

    In 1972, Church and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey were able to push through the Senate an amendment to foreign-aid legislation that would end funding for all U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia except for withdrawal (subject to the release of all prisoners of war). Senate passage of the legislation, with the amendment, marked the first time that either chamber had passed a provision establishing a cutoff of funds for continuing the war. Though House and Senate conferees failed to reach an agreement on the measure, the support for the amendment was seen by the administration as another sign that antiwar forces were gaining strength. The McGovern-Hatfield amendment was enormously popular with the public. A January 1971 Gallup poll showed that public support for the amendment stood at 73 percent.

    During the final negotiations with the Vietnamese over ending the war, culminating with the 1972 Christmas Bombings and the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the president knew that he only had a limited amount of time before Congress finally used the power of the purse to bring the war to an end — regardless of what the administration wanted. Indeed, to make certain that the president could not reverse course, in June 1973 Congress passed legislation that included an amendment sponsored by Church and Case to prohibit the use of more funds in Southeast Asia after August 15. Sixty-four senators voted in favor. When the House assented, its vote marked the first time that chamber had agreed to cut off funds, too.

    Most importantly, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973 over Nixon’s veto. The legislation imposed a series of restrictions on the executive branch to ensure that the president would have to consult with the House and Senate before authorizing the troops for long periods of time.

    For the remainder of the decade, congress continued to legislate its ideas about U.S. conduct in the Cold War and to restrict the authority of the executive branch. In 1975, Congress refused President Gerald Ford’s last-minute request to increase aid to South Vietnam by $300 million, just weeks before it fell to communist control. Few legislators had taken the request seriously; many conservative Republicans and hawkish Democrats agreed by then that Vietnam was lost and that the expenditure would have been a waste.

    Congress also tackled the important national security issues of covert operations and intelligence. Hearings by Church pressured Ford into issuing an executive order that imposed restrictions on the CIA, including a ban on assassinations. Ford agreed to issue the order, rather than waiting for inevitable congressional reforms, after then–Chief of Staff Dick Cheney told him such action would protect the CIA from “irresponsible attack” and protect presidential authority. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required court-supervised monitoring of domestic surveillance operations by the federal government. The reforms were a response to revelations that the government had rampantly abused its power throughout the Cold War.

    In sum, Congress played a very important role in building opposition to an unpopular and failed Cold War intervention. Legislators emerged as major voices of skepticism, criticism, and outright opposition to Vietnam. They checked the hawks in the administration who refused to believe the facts on the ground. Congress was ultimately pivotal to placing pressure on the Nixon administration to end a conflict that cost approximately 58,000 American lives.

    Today, members from both parties would benefit by looking back at the history of Congress in the Vietnam era. 

    Wouldn’t they just, though; in fact, the American people as a whole would. It’s the intentional failure of the government school system to expose the impressionable young minds in their charge to proper, truthful and complete history and civics instruction that’s the primary cause of the catastrophe we’re seeing unfold all around us now.

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    Living in interesting times

    Posted on      by     

    Could there possibly be a more perfect day to run something from a fellow blog-site yclept Clusterfuck Nation?

    I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse — which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years?

    Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse?

    Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!

    Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers — that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.

    Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives — I’m sure you do, too — who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda — and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work?

    I doubt it. And the fall of Afghanistan is sure to spark a resentful reaction among the many ex-soldiers who paid a heavy price pulling tours of duty in that hapless venture over twenty years. There’s a lot of them out there in Red America, and they were already pissed-off about the pernicious nonsense being jammed down their throats by the minions of Wokesterism: the race-and-gender hustles, the off-the-charts rise of violent crime, the wide-open border, the off-shoring of jobs, the Covid lockdowns and wrecking of small business, the MMT experiment launching inflation, and the new pussification of the armed forces they served and suffered in. They’ve laid rather low through years of this, just watching the scene in wonder and nausea, but you may see them turn more active now. And consider: they’ve been well-trained in weaponry and tactics.

    Sometimes, Vlad Lenin observed, events take decades, and sometimes years happen in weeks. This looks like one of those times for the USA. Heads will soon be spinning like the little girl’s in The Exorcist, releasing a pea-soup spewage of shocking revelation. The old narratives will fall apart before our eyes. Minds will have to get right. Prepare for a whole lot of strange days rolling out.

    Kinda like the well-known Hemingway line about going broke: Gradually at first, then all at once. Yes, I know that’s actually a misquote. But I like that version better, so I’m sticking with it.

    2

    Gun grabbers are the same the world over

    Posted on      by     

    Who the hell cares about the doin’s in a totally unsalvageable, Neolithic shithole when we have our very own Taliban right here at home to be dealt with?

    The situation for Afghan civilians continues to devolve. Now, Taliban operatives have begun confiscating people’s personal weapons, promising that they “can now feel safe” and that they no longer need firearms.

    The terrorist group declared victory on Sunday as they took over the presidential palace and re-established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. In a Twitter video, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar celebrated the organization’s triumph. He said:

    We have achieved an unexpected victory. Now is the time to test, to show how we serve our people and ensure their future in the best possible way.

    A spokesman for the Taliban stated that its jihadis have been seizing firearms in Kabul. He acknowledged that while the organization understands “people kept weapons for personal safety,” they “are not here to harm innocent civilians.”

    No, no, of course not. Why, what reasonable, intelligent person could possibly even imagine that you might be? Herschel provides the always-pertinent reminder:

    ISIS did it too.

    “ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

    Guns were confiscated prior to the Armenian genocide in Turkey, prior to the Nazi reign in Germany, prior to Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda, and on the list could go.

    And to repeat, gun control is never about confiscation of all guns, the usual rejoinder to these instances by the left. In fact, claiming so undermines the main point.

    Gun control is always about leaving them in the hands of state-sanctioned actors and outlawing gun ownership by those not approved by the state.

    Yup, that’s about the size of it. The one way, the ONLY way, you should ever allow a tyrant to get his hands on your gun is bullets first. Always remember that lesson, lest forgetfulness cost you absolutely everything.

    5

    Fecal Fascist Fauci drops another pantload

    Posted on      by     

    Astoundingly, Herr Doktor doubles down.

    Fauci: ‘Put Aside All of These Issues of Concern About Liberties’
    “You have to get the overwhelming proportion of people vaccinated, but you also have to do mitigation, and that gets to the controversial issue of mask wearing, and the mandating of things. Mandating vaccines, for example, for teachers and…personnel in the school,” Fauci said during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

    Fauci went on to say that, while vaccinated individuals have become infected with the coronavirus, the unvaccinated are the ones with more severe cases. He also took the stance that personal liberties should be put on the back burner in favor of mitigating the spread of the virus.

    “It’s the unvaccinated that are doing that, so we have a lot of tasks,” Fauci said. “We’ve got to do mitigation. Put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal liberties and realize we have a common enemy and that common enemy is the virus. And we really have to go together to get on top of this. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to suffer as we’re seeing right now.”

    Oh, there’s a common enemy here right enough, although it assuredly is NOT some overhyped virus. The real problem here is, it’s Real Americans who have been doing all the suffering to date. Herr Doktor shouldn’t be cherishing any illusions, though, that that situation can’t be corrected, with a quickness. Or that, just because it hasn’t yet, it never will be.

    “Put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties,” you say? I’d suggest instead, with utmost urgency and vehemence, that you rethink your own patent lack of concern about them, you officious, mouthy, snot-nosed little prick. Trust me, it would be to your own benefit. A little more in the way of humility and reticence would do you one hell of a lot of good at this point, and your goobermint colleagues as well, assuming it ain’t too late for y’all to collectively pull your withered chestnuts out of the coming conflagration already.

    2

    People, for some inexplicable reason, must like to have their silly little “individual freedom,” the deluded fools

    Posted on      by     

    Thoughts from a man who grasps the basic concept one hell of a lot better than a toxic gnome like Herr Doktor Fauci ever will.

    This Western idea was the founding concept and intellectual motive of America, and no matter how badly it was ever treated since it first dawned, it is nonetheless the finest and most productive way of life ever abstracted in human history. It should be the aim of everyone who loves human life, “the people,” “the American People,” or any other presumptive grouping beloved by the advocate.

    The plainly-grasped idea of freedom is well-enough understood by tens of millions of Americans who also understand that government is its opposite. It’s no mere “conversation” to people who know that the root element of government is force. More and more, they take the principle to heart and mind: if they cannot reason their way to freedom, and if force is the ruling principle of dealing with each-other, then, in the ringing admonition of Nancy Pelosi, “People are going to do what they’re going to do.”

    So, the real question isn’t so much whether people will fight, but whether anyone should, and why. It wouldn’t occur to me to compare American politics with “the modern Middle East” (a crashing non sequitur) for the reasons outlined above. The vast cultural differences in basic philosophy make it a pointless diversion. An honest concern with America must take up the irreconcilable conflict of individualism (the basic American idea) vs. collectivism.

    Individualism is politically manifest as freedom. Without a great deal of honest and effective philosophical guidance (certainly not as much as it requires or deserves), the very idea of freedom yet survives as a sort of gut-level apprehension in enough Americans that it frightens people who are not opposed to violence in principle. It’s just that their own offensive violence (by the state) is rationalized by presuming other people’s values (e.g.; “the common good”).

    They don’t mind using force for what they want, and it outrages them when they’re threatened with opposition on that principle. (They don’t consider whether it would come to any of this if only they would leave people to their own lives on their own powers.)

    Americans, being convinced that freedom is the best way for all humans to live, must necessarily by basic nature and their ethics deny all socialist authority over anyone’s life. In a politics more evidently resorting to force at every turn, all serious discussions of violence must account for the essential values at stake that would even bring the matter to such attention.

    It’s Billy Beck’s latest, so you’re going to want to read it all. Because, I mean, of course you will.

    7

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