How would you rate our “influence and power” concerning the Vietnam War? We were definitely fighting that war as the Department of Prevent Defense. (American Football analogy)
BTW, Football is the greatest sport the world has ever had. It is a model of war enacted for all to see. Strength, speed, agility, strategy, and deception all in a chess like setting: move by move.
It was certainly a fuck up, and did maybe hurt your influence a little. But it was mostly a minor setback, not changing the trend.
US influence was peaking in the 90s. After 2008 (or even slightly before?) it has been in crisis. I think future decades will show if the US or China will play the role of global hegemony. Currently China seems to be winning.
All wars the U.S. was involved in after WWII was all about someone in politics making making millions of dollars
If you want to go that route you could say the same thing about WWII. It certainly made many people rich.
Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket gives a good accounting of war profiteering in WWI.
We were making good art, discovering good ideas, had more or less rejected race-based public policy and you could be as gay or as transgender as you wanted to without any oppression from any level of government, or not and practice a traditional religion. Or not, and be a secular-progressive atheist.
You just couldn’t call yourself a woman and then have the state treat you as though you were in every legal respect, and we weren’t paying to have a regime-change color revolution done to ourselves like we were after Obama’s second term.
That’s where the counter revolution is clearly headed when it comes to the actual government policies. That’s eminently possible to achieve, whereas a majority population becoming a conservative like Ward Cleaver is less so.
Thanks. I’ll check that out.
Yeah. Profiting from wars has always been there. Seeing it only reason for war is usually pretty reductive though.
Yes you could…however, the threat was bigger with Germany and Japan trying to take over the world
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…there was no threat of world domination
This claim is debatable. But they definitely were bigger threat than the ones you listed.
But it doesn’t mean that making money is was only motivation for US to join these wars.
I’ve never heard a good definition of Fascism. In practice it’s basically just one step removed from Communism. We teach kids WW2 was Communism left vs Fascism right, but it was really just Communism left vs Fascism slightly less left but still left. Even the loudest ANTIFA participants can’t agree on a definition. It’s retarded.
I would say it wasn’t…we held off joining until the attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany deciding to declare war on the U.S.
now, that doesn’t mean to say that there were not any money making going on…i just dont think is was a motivator
these clowns actually do everything a fascist would do
It’s close to communist totalitarianism in practice , but not the same ideologically. I’ve actually read couple books about fascism, and Merriam-Webster has a good abstract:
Fascism : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocraticgovernment headed by a dictatorialleader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition
It’s no surprise many describes “far right” (fascism) and “far left” (communism) as different sides of the same coin.
That definition describes the soviet union pretty well.
Like I said. Different sides of the same coin.
Mussolini was not a commie, and Stalin was not a fascist. But the end result was similar.
Other thing is that both relies on utopias. “The great leader/revolution leads to a better future.”
I know the Rothschilds made fortunes financing both sides before. Do you know if there were similar financial factors in any of the recent wars/conflicts? Banks/financiers that made bank from playing both sides?
It’s been somewhat strange to look back and realize the 90s were actually pretty great in many respects. (Yes, I’m also in the 40-45 range). At the same time we were all so hopeful about the future of the new millennium… but we got this.
I don’t know if there’s any truth to this statement, but to me it seemed like “commercialization” sent everything downhill. Radio consolidation with ClearChannel was one of them.
The internet back then was a bunch of people just trying to make their own unique space, all hopeful for the future, expressing their opinions and interests in decentralized spaces. Personal websites on Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod, chat rooms, bands sharing their music, message groups.
Then came MySpace, which provided an easier way, while still letting personality shine through. Then Facebook came along, funneling everyone into a controlled experience. Amazon came along. And the ad industry with DoubleClick. Everything became commercialized and the narratives and experiences became controlled. Not necessarily maliciously, but definitely in ways that were profit-motivated.
I didn’t follow politics much then. But the other stuff, yeah, it was better.
And National Socialists weren’t the same as fascists in Italy. They were racist to the core, for one, and more socialistic overall. One of the surprising things Zitelmann learned was comparing Hitler’s “Table Talks”, which were required listening for his subordinates sometimes lasting into the wee hours of the night, with his public speeches. Hitler’s aim all along was to incorporate more Soviet-style government after they won the war, including nationalizing even more industry. In public, Stalin was the enemy, obviously, but in private Hitler showed great admiration for Stalin and actually forbade his inner circle from speaking poorly of him. He was also fiercely anti-capitalist in both public and private.
The most important common denominator is the total control of the economy, with National Socialism having more control than Italian fascism, which still had a lot compared to the USA, but less control than The Soviet Union. National Socialism redefined property rights immediately after going into power, allowing nationalization to take place of any business that resisted Gleichschaltung (synchronization).
Thanks for summarizing the 13 minute video you shared. I listened to it – not yet the longer one – but it’s helpful to see it in text too.
Oh, absolutely. Remember the no-bid contracts Dick Cheney got for Haliburton? Blow it up, then rebuild it, then everyone profits except the people who got blown up.
War profiteering never went away, it just became far more sophisticated and obfuscated to the public. Mass migration is now a similar scam with the nefarious effect of destabilizing societies as well. That’s what we’ve been doing to ourselves and would have continued doing had Harris won. Lewiston Public Schools, for instance, has 42 languages spoken in our 6000 student population, with about 1/3 of them speaking little to no English at all. It is an impossible problem to solve, and our teachers are literally in tears making public comment and often just leaving the district. This remarkable transformation took place in less than 20 years, with the last 6-7 being extremely transformative. My kid’s graduating class in 2018 was about 30-40 percent Muslim, with most speaking English pretty well, and maybe a dozen or so total languages among a small minority.
It’s a good example of how the whole mass migration pipeline gets spun up. Our original “New Mainers” were Somalians who moved here from Atlanta about 25 years ago, who all fled Somalia when their Marxist government collapsed and war broke out. Ilhan Omar in Minnesota’s father was a member of that regime, as were some families here in Lewiston. More nonprofits get set up to support the population, attracting even more refugees, slowly at first and then numbers that are overwhelming.
Datarepublican explains this better than anyone and she supports her conclusions extremely well. This chart explains the process which is primarily executed by NGO’s operating overseas. This is the machine that was turned on to ourselves, paid for by us.
Great movie and book. Mccarthy is a amazing author.