Serious News For Serious People: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article:
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BREAKING: Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism now that the terrorists are no longer tied up with the task of occupying Afghanistan.
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Welcome back to Serious News Network. For years experts have been trying to understand how dropping military explosives on people could fail to advance humanitarian aims. Here to shed some light on this mystery is an employee of a think tank that's funded by arms manufacturers.
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We will know we are moving toward a healthy society when those who promote war and militarism are not rewarded with esteemed political, media and government careers but chased out of every public area they try to enter and forced to live out their remaining days in lonely misery.
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The fact that the mass media continually seek out expert foreign policy analysis from warmongers who've been consistently wrong about everything for decades is by itself enough reason to fully dismiss them.
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It's clear that the plutocratic media are going to be spinning the narrative that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a terrible mistake in every way possible over the coming months in an attempt to discredit opponents of US interventionism on both sides of the aisle.
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The only time western news media are allowed to criticize US foreign policy and ask government officials critical questions is to press them to be more hawkish and aggressive than they already are. For a hilarious example, watch this clip:
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The US military officially had a $14 billion annual budget for Afghanistan operations in the year 2021. The next official military budget should fall by at least that much. If it doesn't, you've been scammed.
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The answer is the US government needs to stay the fuck out of all other nations. Doesn't matter what the question is.
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The lesson from Afghanistan is not just that any US military interventionism will inflict unfathomable death, devastation and trauma at incomprehensible cost, but that the entire power establishment will resist ending it for decades and paint anyone who finally does as a buffoon.
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Republicans and Democrats are all talking about the Afghanistan withdrawal completely differently than they would be if it had happened in exactly the same way under Trump. The extent to which you are able to recognize this is the extent to which you are unplugged from the partisan puppet show.
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Most of the doofy Afghanistan takes you're seeing from people are the result of the fact that most westerners don't think very hard about exactly what war is and what it means. They're weighing things like "women's rights" against this nebulous, highly compartmentalized thing they've never truly examined. They're just like "Yeah we just put the troops there and we just keep them there and they do whatever it is they do, and then the women get to have rights and go to school! It's wins all around!" They haven't looked at that big empty space in their reasoning where the war goes.
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Imperial narrative managers like to spin war as this super complicated, esoteric thing that nobody but the most elite scholars can understand, and many unfortunately buy into it. Really it's the easiest thing in the world to understand: mass murder for power and profit is wrong.
Many western leftists avoid foreign policy discussions and just focus on domestic policy for precisely this reason: they believe the bullshit spin that it's this super complicated thing they could never hope to understand. When in reality it's the simplest aspect of the empire: a globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple. The rest is just details that you can unpack as you learn about each empire-targeted nation.
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"OH MY GOD think of the people of Afghanistan!! We've got to DO SOMETHING!!"
I mean I guess we could all open our wealthy nations to all the refugees who want to leave.
"Oh. Oh no. Haha! No. I just meant dropping bombs on them or something, I'm not a lunatic."
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Boy I sure hope Afghanistan is a sign the US is rolling back its insane policy of endless military expansionism and-
Oh.
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If you view capitalism as the problem, you will see the increasing inequalities and abuses of the so-called Great Reset as par for course. If you think capitalism is great and just needs less interference from government and central banks, you'll see it as a freakish aberration.
It used to be common to be able to afford to raise a family on a single income. Now it isn't, and the wealthy are wealthier than ever. That didn't happen by accident, it happened because of concerted efforts to manipulate the system which gradually widened the wealth gap to what it is today. The deliberate advancement of agendas like deregulation, globalization, federal ops to sabotage leftist movements, union busting, and the methodical legalization of more and more money in politics have created unjust systems which cause more and more wealth to hemorrhage upward.
What we're seeing in the wealth transfers etc since the Covid outbreak is more of the same, with small businesses collapsing while billionaire megacorporations rake in unprecedented profits. We'll be seeing more such things as capitalism moves to its next infernal iteration.
Most of what rightists are saying when they object to Covid measures funneling more and more wealth and control upward basically boils down to "No! Stop! You're breaking the capitalism!" But they are not breaking the capitalism, they're fulfilling it. The capitalist class is carrying capitalism to the end of the Monopoly game.
This is one reason rightists are (generally speaking) more freaked out about all this than leftists. They'd be happy to see capitalism returned to its 2019 levels of oppression, which in reality would just be rewinding to immediately before another similar kleptocratic move anyway. Leftists would not be content with this; they want to end the entire system which gave rise to this occasion.
So now what we'll probably be seeing is more and more rightists who used to yell "Get a job!" or "Get a better job!" at people who complained about poverty getting screwed over and thrown into poverty themselves by the same system which was screwing over the people they used to yell at. More people will likely come to understand that their businesses closing and their work vanishing was the result of the system screwing them, and hopefully recognize that the same is true for the poor people they used to turn up their noses at.
If that happens, maybe we'll see real movement.
Which is what leftists have wanted all along. Leftists have always wanted a mass-scale uprising against the systems of exploitation, inequality and injustice which gave rise to the situation we now find ourselves in. It's just that other ideologies are now, perhaps, starting to catch up.
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"Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism." No they’re not. First, pundits are not experts. People like Bolton have horrible track records predicting world events. They are more accurately professional prevaricators and provocateurs.
For most my military career and into retirement, whenever I hear people assert that Bush's Foreverwars have saved the USA from global terrorism, my retort is this: "We are safe from terrorism because camels cannot swim." Most people in these backwater Middle East countries a) cannot speak English, b) have never set foot on a commercial airliners, c) would not know how to buy a ticket to the USA or EU, d) even if they do know how to buy a ticket, they lack the funds, e) even if they had the funds and bought a ticket, they have no idea how to navigate once at their destination, nor how to obtain weapons and bombs. Thus, as we have seen over the years, the few who try get caught before they do any harm. A through E have not changed in 20 years.
We also need to remember that Bin Laden was not even in Afghanistan. He met his end in his terrorist command compound (LOL) in Pakistan. The post-Afghanistan torrent of journalism reflects that the War on Terror has been mostly gaslight. Matt Yglesias recently posted an interesting essay [https://www.slowboring.com/p/afghan-war] reminding us how we got into this mess by describing the DOD doctrine driving post-9/11 military action. Afghanistan was basically a smokescreen that opened the door to invading Iraq - the target all along (unfinished Bush family business). Cheney knew all along that WMD was fiction, so his staff isolated the WH from those with knowledge of Iraq's lack of WMD until after their useful idiot had convinced Congress that the WMD threat was real. At least Powell had the integrity to resign once it became obvious that he was a patsy. The US would be better off focusing its war on terror inward - on the rising tide of American fascism.
Try as I might, I can't think of one damn thing of worth that John Bolton could possibly say. That CNN either doesn't realize this or doesn't care is emblematic of all our unwatchable and useless corporate media.
Those gnashing their polished teeth over the poor mistreated masses suffering in Afghanistan, China, and Cuba, puzzle me as to their decades-long disregard for those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank; however, we could expand that to include Detroit and Camden and Richmond as long as we're cranking up the old Faux Concern Meter.
We. Are. Being. Screwed. This is not that hard to understand and fits easily on a bumper sticker for those of us who can still afford cars.
Thank you for your service? Go fuck yourself is more like it.