The Sisyphus of Kabul (Part Four)

 "The West is slowly being strangled by the East with the products of it's own culture..." -- The Overlord

ERRATA: I begin with a mea culpa. In Part Three, when discussing Barack Obama's contribution to the War on Terror clusterfuck, I forgot to mention a very important point: The "Iran Nuclear Deal", the supposed centerpiece of his foreign policy "genius", all but gave the world's biggest supporter and exporter of terrorism a green light to produce nuclear weapons and pallets of cash with which to fund the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and Syria and continuing terrorist attacks on Israel.

But, hey, the photo-ops were "Presidential". The blurb in the history books is assured.

I'm sure another Nobel is waiting for you in the very near future, you piece of shit.

I would like to firstly elaborate on the statement/quote that I've put at the top of this screed.

The eminent historian, Victor Davis Hanson, in his book "An Autumn of War" (a very good read, sez me) makes a devastating point about the differences between Islamic and Western Culture which I'm about to butcher, somewhat.

To simplify it a great deal, it essentially boils down to this:

the 9/11 hijacker's tool kit included intercontinental-range airliners, flight simulation software, laptop computers, cell phones, credit cards, international air travel, immigration visas, airports, rental cars, in-flight meal services and even the goddamned boxcutters used to subdue passengers and aircrew.

All the Islamic World had to add to this formula of destruction was 19 men willing to commit suicide and determined to take as many people with them as possible.

In addition, to help hide the scheme and in some ways facilitate it, they also took advantage of Western systems of tolerance, the general fear of being branded a racist. They moved about freely in a free society, and even their appearance or obvious heritage, were never an obstacle to doing so. Atta and Friends took advantage of the welfare system; they applied for visas to stay in America; the very fruits of taxpayer-funded, consensual government and protections of law and custom were there to aid and shield them. They even took the opportunity to party with booze and strippers before shuffling off their -- and many other's -- mortal coils.

That is to say, all the important stuff that went into 9/11 was created by a dynamic, industrial, scientifically-curious, capitalist society. Even the World Trade Center and Pentagon were the results of billions in capital, billions more in materials, engineering skill, millions of hours of labor, and new techniques in construction. The  hijackers were still able to give the United States a huge black eye by shoving the fruits of its more-advanced civilization right up our collective ass.

And this is true everywhere the terrorist goes, he is sustained and supported by the Westerner: the AK-47, the combat rocket, plastic explosives, the car bomb, the machine-gun-equipped pickup truck, the RPG, radio and internet communications, modern media, satellite telephones, international money transfer systems, and much , much more that his own culture never had a hand in creating, nor produces for itself.

It is a (scary) testament to the efficiency and efficacy of Western scientific endeavor, industrial know-how, and capitalist expansion of markets that even in the far-flung wilds of Helmand Province or the slums of Mogadishu, a poor, pissed-off dirt farmer can manage to obtain a pricey Dell laptop, a cheap Motorola phone, a Range Rover to pack with explosives, and the deadliest and most-efficient Russian killing machine (the AK-47) that is responsible for more death and destruction than the Second World War or nuclear weapons.

And speaking of nuclear weapons, it is almost unfathomable to think that once Einstein came up with E=mc2, the scientific community of the entire planet first understood what he was on to, and secondly, understood the implications of his discovery. Even in what Orwell called "the waste places of the Earth".

The "secret" of the Atomic Bomb was never really the science, so much as it was the engineering that created weapons of mass destruction like that that could be safely handled, stored and transported. All a country needed to produce it's own weapons like this was to find the capital to build the infrastructure to replicate Oppenheimer's achievement.

Eighty years ago, this was a difficult proposition. The financial investment needed was enormous so that only a few countries could afford the effort, even on a small scale. But like everything else, once the genie is out of the bottle, it becomes possible to replicate at lower cost and with less effort. Pakistan became a nuclear power largely by starving it's people and putting tons of foreign aid cash into a weapons program. Iran had vast stores of oil sold on international markets -- for dollars -- to finance the endeavor. Even the educational background and technical skills needed to accomplish these things became easier, as students studied abroad more frequently, many on scholarships provided by Western nations, or in Western universities that opened facilities within their own countries.

Machine tools, computers, materials, were all for sale on international markets, if not officially, then on Black Markets that are even more-capitalistic than IBM or CitiBank, and often much more ruthlessly-efficient.

You can get 5G in Chechnya or Somalia; you can learn to make a simple bomb at an internet cafe in the Hindu Kush; the hand grenade and the semi-automatic rifle are as common as syphilis in Dumbfuckistan; American Express will let you transfer funds from New York, Athens, or Buenos Aires to anywhere in the Islamic World, few -- if any -- questions asked; Facebook is ubiquitous in Yemen, as is Google, which will allow you to buy photos taken by commercial satellites, and in some cases, direct you to where to get such things in real time, sometimes even for free, online. You can get a Toyota, Ford, Range Rover or Volkswagen anywhere on Planet Earth.

In a technological sense, we're all pretty much equal now, the only differences being quantity and ease of access. In this regard, we've done the terrorist's work for him.

As an aside, here's a recent article on how the Taliban used Facebook's What'sApp application to organize and prepare it's take over. I wonder how it was that the NSA, which exists to collect and pillage everyone else's online activity, and the "woke" crowd which will report all sorts of innocuous content to censors, missed this. Actually, I don't wonder at all, because government in the United States ceased being about doing the right thing or the fostering of liberty a very long time ago: it is now the purview of a self-interested, parasitic class. If things go wrong FOR YOU, they don't really care. All that counts is that things went right FOR THEM.

But it isn't just technological diffusion that turned the Taliban into a minor juggernaut. It has been aided, as have others, by other by-products of Western Culture. Primarily, these are patterns of thought.

I've already mentioned the tolerance, generosity and desire to avoid the epithet "racist" that is prevalent in Western, but primarily, American Society. 

Without going into too much detail (we'd be here forever), the Western mindset is the primary problem in our struggles with Terrorism, bad government, and ultimately, poor decision making.

The Western tradition has spawned a great deal of philosophical, political and economic theories in its time. Some have been tested by experience and found wanting, others are still in various stages of Evolution, but all have contributed to the current state of affairs, where the world's greatest superpower can find itself defeated by men who have sex with goats, an election can be jury-rigged to put a puppet with Alzheimer's in power, social and legal norms can be erased overnight, and half the country can see no problem with all of this, in fact, ask for more  of it with each passing day.

Western culture didn't just spawn the anti-tank missile and the landmine, it also spawned Socialism, Communism, Post-Modernism, Capitalism, Cultural Relativism, Managerialism, Progressivism and the bane of the "Multi-Cultural" society, in which, to paraphrase Orwell, in the effort to make everyone equal some pigs must be judged more-equal than others.

There is a miasma of really bad thought in the Western World, most of it the output of very bad French and German "thinkers", who, if one should take a look into their motivations, saw it as their duty NOT to elevate the human spirit or to answer the existential questions, but rather to find myriad, clever-sounding excuses for their own perversions and their own psychoses.

To start with, Post-Modernism and Cultural Relativism owe their origins to a pedophile and a homosexual who sought a means of explaining why their predilections were just hunky-dory and were unjustly criticized and oppressed by conventional society.

Marx turned envy into the most-destructive and efficient killing force the world has ever seen, while hiding behind a veneer of moral righteousness.

These systems of thought and politics overcame the "classical" educational model in Western academia. They have become the foundational blocks of the modern "college education" in which one gets a full dose of Socialism inside an institution that charges hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn out muttonheads on an industrial scale and leave them in debt up to their eyebrows.

The public schools are where in the effort to teach children NOT to be racist, we first have to teach them HOW to be racists, and then, eventually to hate themselves.

The Middle Layer of Government I have been talking about all through this series are products of the Western cultural trashheap and poor educational systems geared towards their feelings rather than their education. It impresses upon them shallow values of virtue signaling, that individualism is a bad thing, that to be part of a group or larger "community" is the primary badge of human-hood. It views human beings as animals in a Darwinian process of unnatural selection. It's primary basis is the idea that people are born rotten and can only be redeemed by exposure to the dictates, thoughts, tastes, activities and beliefs of their "betters".

That "the Betters" are often the truly rotten people goes without saying, because what they are attempting to do is not "equalize" everyone: they're producing carbon copies of themselves so as to maintain a status quo. Privilege does not have to be hereditary: it can be transferred in perpetuity through a social class, and a social class does not have be based upon wealth, but rather ideology.

I've been telling you all through this stuff that the people who really control all aspects of your lives are not seen on TV. They are not elected. They labor anonymously inside the depths of every government agency. Donald Trump called it "The Swamp", but it has existed for a very long time, and has borne many names" "The Military-Industrial Complex", "The Managerial Society", "Crony Capitalism", "Corporatism". It hides it's ulterior motives through party politics, always choosing as it's catspaw the party that appeals to baser emotions and which exudes "caring".

This sort of rationale has deadly effects. A tolerant society is a wonderful thing; a society that tolerates too much is in trouble. A society that decides what it will tolerate depending on what it's "betters" tell it to tolerate, and in which "the betters" suffer no consequence for being wrong or failing, is doomed. The "betters" simply find scapegoats and then double down on stupid, because no blame can attach to individuals when the guilty party is an entire class and an ideological viewpoint.

This middle layer exists in all of our institutions -- the government, law courts, academia, media, big business. It is a natural outgrowth of increasing complexity in society (what James Burnham called "managerialism") and the increasing friction between the products of liberty and the prerogatives of government, or even sometimes, mass will (that's fascism).

The system has gone through several iterations -- the Russian Bolsheviks, Mussolini's Blackshirts, The Nazis, Mao's various "Revolutions", but always, the impetus is the same: Capitalism must be destroyed, Socialism will never replace it, and what arises is a new form of feudalism, with the Lords of the Manor cultivating rigid modes of thought and means of punishment to enforce that thought, while they falsely fly the flags of equality, brotherhood, service and love, which helps to distract from it's primary function, which is to create a world in which there is only government and clients of government.

Afghanistan is a primary example of this function: what begins as a military expedition to enforce a legal prerogative devolves into a complex, multi-faceted tug-of-war between competing managerialist imperatives. The results are obviously the reverse of what is stated.

The military -- an instrument for the destruction of nations -- must be turned into an instrument of "nation building". The cultural relativists who insist that all cultures are equally valid turns it's attention to transforming other cultures (because when they mean "equal" and "valid" they really mean only their cultural beliefs are either). The security apparatus designed to protect us against insipid violence perpetrated by overseas actors instead becomes a means of spying on its own citizens and a weapon of political oppression. the Capitalist system which is often denigrated by these people suddenly becomes a good thing when it's them and their friends that benefit from it. 

THIS IS NOT WHOLLY AN ACCIDENT.

Here I am, twenty years after the most consequential event in my life, wondering what it was all about. I feel emptier this morning than I ever had during the time when I was frightened out of my mind and sick with worry, anger, and despair. I feel as if I have sacrificed much and gained little. And in the grand scheme my own sacrifices pale in comparison to those of others, and I wonder how they must feel.

And the despair grows. I cannot feel much for myself today because I'm too busy feeling for those who went overseas and never returned, or for those that did, their bodies and minds mangled. With that feeling of despair comes a new rage, for I turn on my idiot box and there is an old, feeble, out-of-his-depth man, spewing complete nonsense that is part dementia, part politics, and part the output of a self-interested, destructive and uncaring caste of complete reprobates that was quite willing to let others die, to send others into harm's way, and to pretend it it did so for a noble purpose, or that it opposed it, too, when it was seemingly noble, and in the end, you notice how they've all benefitted from what they have wrought and others have paid the ultimate price for.

And it's STILL someone else's fault.

I no longer give a fig for what happens in Afghanistan. The Taliban can kill half the country, for all I care (we should have killed the entire country when we had the chance to). I don't care about the thousands of Afghans that "helped" us (how many were turncoats?). The government doesn't obviously care about the 10,000 or so "contractors" they sent there, their employers skimming a nice profit off of $2 trillion spent, and the government functionaries who funded it all enjoying continued careers or having left "service" for more-lucrative sinecures with the contractors.

The fundamental problem of Afghanistan is not the defeat. It is the method by which defeat was contrived.

Part One can be read HERE.
Part Two can be read HERE.
Part Three can be read HERE.