20 years ago, George Soros published a book titled 'the bubble of American supremacy' where he argued that Bush's response to 9/11 had created something similar to a 'financial bubble' which was going to burst at any moment.
Soros was obviously wrong. Suddenly, his fellow citizens realized the fellow was a cretin. Soros spent money like crazy buying 'intellectuals' and 'activists' so as to bring about the outcome he had predicted so as not to look a senile cunt with more money than sense. This turned out to be a gift to his ideological enemies. Soros ended up not just being derided, but demonized.
Let us look at his central thesis to work out what his major intellectual malfunction was.
The War on Terror Terrorists pose an enormous threat to our national and personal security, and we must protect ourselves and our country from them.
No. Terrorists are a type of criminal. Killing criminals is a cheap and easy way to reduce crime. States can do this without breaking a sweat even if they are poor and technologically backward.
The suicide bombers of September 11 found us unprepared, and many of the measures we have taken since then are necessary and appropriate. Indeed, it can be argued that not enough has been done to prevent future attacks. But there is something fundamentally wrong with the Bush administration’s war on terror. The war being waged has little to do with ending terrorism or enhancing homeland security; on the contrary, it uses terror as a pretext for waging war.
The plain fact is that the voters wanted a war of revenge. That's what they got. Iraq was targeted because it had the oil which, it was hoped, would make the war profitable. Soros preferred to live in a fantasy world where Americans didn't want to gloat over the heaped corpses of 'rag-head' Muslims. He didn't like Bush and persuaded himself that he would be punished by voters for giving them what they wanted.
Bush was indeed humiliated and laid low by a financial bubble. But it had nothing to do with 'American power'. It had to do with sub-prime mortgages- i.e. the shenanigans of people like Soros.
It is said that in the seventy-two hours following the terrorist attack, the Bush administration became engaged in an intense debate on how to respond to it. Eventually, the war terminology prevailed.
America initially prevailed because it actually went to war and won. The Taliban fled. Had the focus on Osama remained tight, Pakistan and Iran would have had to expel Al Qaeda operatives or just kill them themselves. What failed wasn't the 'war' paradigm. It was the 'building democracy' paradigm.
War is a false and misleading metaphor in the context of combating terrorism.
Killing the enemy is the reality of actual combat.
Treating the attacks of September 11 as crimes against humanity would have been more appropriate.
But this nutter thinks everything he doesn't like is a crime against humanity!
Crimes require police work, not military action.
Detection requires police work. Any gunslinger is welcome to bring in the bad guy 'dead or alive'.
To protect against terrorism, you need
to kill terrorists and smash the networks used to recruit or finance terrorists.
precautionary measures,
screening methods. Otherwise, your caution throws out the baby with the bathwater.
awareness, and intelligence gathering—all of which ultimately depend on the support of the populations among which the terrorists operate.
Populations can be wiped out, dispersed, or permanently occupied and policed. Even otherwise, it is enough to have a countervailing terrorist capacity for there to be a 'Nash equilibrium' in which terrorism is reduced to a persistent nuisance rather an existential threat.
Imagine for a moment that September 11 had been treated as a crime.
It was. Had Afghanistan surrendered the criminals, it wouldn't have been invaded.
We would have pursued Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but we would not have invaded Iraq.
Bush said Saddam tried to kill his daddy. That's a crime right there. Anyway, Al Qaeda had achieved its objective of getting American troops out of Saudi Arabia. Removing the (admittedly non-existent) Ba'athist threat from Iraq could be seen as a favor to an ally. Fucking over the Sunnis in Iraq, however, was a bad idea. It seems the (often ex-Trotskyite) Neo-Cons were as stupid and crazy as Soros and his pals.
Nor would we have our military struggling to perform police work in full combat gear and getting killed in the process.
The American voter believed that their soldiers where killing and raping Muslims. This made them happy. Iraq was a place where young female soldiers could desecrate the Quran and sodomize innocent Muslim men. Maybe all that nice A-rab money and petrol would justify exponentially rising sub-prime housing prices. That way, the American dream of killing sand-niggers before returning home to a McMansion would be fulfilled.
Declaring war on terrorism suited the purposes of the Bush administration better because it invoked our military might. But it is the wrong way to deal with terrorism.
No. It is the right way to deal with aggression of any type- provided you truly can completely destroy the conventional military resources of a territory without fearing any third party intervention. The problem with the War on Terror was that it enriched a narrow coterie of contractors while leaving the tax payer to pick up the tab. But Obama didn't just continue the War against Islam, he extended it to Syria, Libya, etc. The overthrow of Mubarak and the coming to power of the Brotherhood in Egypt may have seemed a bright spot. But Sisi's coup in 2013 put paid to any such notion. Meanwhile, China and Russia had re-established themselves. The tide was beginning to turn against the West.
Military action
like any other type of purposive action
requires an identifiable target,
No. The thing can be a discovery process. Look at Putin's invasion of Ukraine. His goons little guessed the true source of resistance would be from the citizenry itself at the Antonov airport.
preferably a state. As a result, the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states harboring terrorists. Yet terrorists are nonstate actors by definition, even if in many cases they are sponsored by a state.
A territory where 'non state actors' are running amok is a 'terra nullis'. There is no crime of 'aggression' in International Law concerning an invasion or other type of operation in such a place. Soros, poor fellow, didn't have much education. Still, he worked hard and made money. If he had used some of that money to do 'first order good' he would be kindly remembered. Instead he hired nutters to broadcast his own opinionated ignorance.
By turning the hunt for terrorists into a war, we are bound to create some innocent victims.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a war of revenge provided it is not hypocritical and, eventually, a line is drawn and a pragmatic, transactional, approach is taken.
The more innocent victims there are, the greater the resentment and the better the chances that some victims will turn perpetrators. Victims Turning Perpetrators Victims turning perpetrators is a well-known syndrome both in individuals and in groups.
But victims who know they will be killed if they try to become perpetrators soon decide to do deals and rise by pragmatic means.
Repressive rulers often exhibit a similar pattern.
Not if they are killed.
Both Mahathir bin Muhammad of Malaysia
a genius who turned the tables on Soros & Co.
and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
who only turned his country to shit after his gamble on an intervention in Congo turned sour
appeal to the memory of colonial repression while engaging in repressive acts of varying severity.
What Soros represses is the memory of his teachers thinking he was as stupid as shit. He made his money in a field where any virtually illiterate barrow boy could get rich- with a little luck and cunning.
Perhaps the most poignant and difficult case is Israel.
The opposite is the case. Israel succeeded because it found a way to have a citizen-army which eventually could pay for itself. Still, it was Reagan's tough-love which put it on the path to peace with its neighbors. Once Israel was a viable knowledge-economy, Arab regimes ceased to fear it. Now, the Gulf is building synagogues to welcome Israelis. I suppose the Chinese- who always recognized Hamas- will broker Israel's final peace deal with the Palestinians.
Jews were the victims of the holocaust, which can itself be ascribed, in part, to a process of victims turning perpetrators:
Fuck off! Jews were patriots of whichever country they had been citizens. Incidentally, India- which has a microscopic Jewish population- nevertheless has one Jewish war-hero who became a BJP Governor.
Hitler rose to power by capitalizing on a wave of resentment caused by an onerous peace treaty and runaway inflation.
Nonsense! Hitler was brought into politics by the Army. He served as a lieutenant to Ludendorff during the Munich putsch. Ludendorff was a maniac. He was as anti-Catholic as he was anti-Jewish and later founded a religion of his own. Since he refused to go to jail, Hitler got all the glory. Later, General Blomberg preferred Hitler to General Schleicher- whom Hitler killed. Hitler took and held power because the Army came to see him as best placed to push through their maximal program. But most Germans thought that Germany would starve unless it conquered land to its East. After all, that was Keynes's prediction in his foolish 'Economic consequences of the Peace'. The fact is France had twice paid off a bigger reparation demand ahead of time and, on both occasions, its economy had benefitted. Keynes was wrong about reparations as Ohlin showed. Soros, being ignorant of econ, believed ad captum vulgi nonsense which, having become senile and useless, he paid tossers to propagate.
He appealed to the German people’s sense of being victimized.
No. He promised to conquer land which would feed the Germans.
Whether the Germans’ sense of victimization was imaginary or not, there can be no doubt that the Jews were victims in the literal sense.
The idea was to depopulate land to the East though, perhaps, blonde, blue eyed, babies would be brought up as Germans.
In the holocaust, many Jews went to their death helplessly and naively obeying orders, something I witnessed personally as a thirteen-year-old in Budapest.
But others had run away from the time of Bela Kun. Dollar worship- i.e getting to Amrika- and Zionism saved Jewish lives. Soros type bullshitting was useless.
After the war, Jews
notably Menachim Begin, future Nobel Peace Prize winner
resorted to terrorism against the British in Palestine in order to secure a homeland in Israel.
Soros doesn't seem to be aware that the Jews had been given this by the Balfour Declaration. However, it was superior military experience which enabled the Jews to prevail. But Jordan's British led forces gained equally.
Subsequently, after being attacked by Arab nations,
Jordan concentrated on grabbing Palestinian land, not fighting the Jews.
Israel occupied additional territory and expelled many of the inhabitants. Eventually, the Arab victims also turned perpetrators,
Jordan thought it a good idea to let the Palestinians take the initiative after '67. But this led directly to 'Black September'. Since then, lots of Arab countries have expelled Palestinians from time to time. The problem was that there was lots of money available to stupid Palestinians who ended up fucking up their own peeps.
and Israel started suffering terrorist attacks.
Pin-pricks which Israel used to become a big exporter of counter-insurgency tech and training. The plain fact is that Israel has been the beneficiary of too-well-financed Palestinian terrorism. They have made their collective defense a valuable source of export earnings. This means even orthodox Islamic nations have to buy counter-terrorism tech from their erstwhile enemy.
Israel made a habit of retaliating vigorously, enlarging the circle of Arab victims.
No. It caused terrorist nutters to pursue a 'far jihad' approach- i.e. attack Europe and America. The US should have retaliated massively when their Ambassador to Sudan was killed by Palestinians. Scratch that. They should have fucked up Palestinians everywhere after Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy.
Yitzhak Rabin made a valiant attempt to reverse the vicious cycle with the Oslo Accords of 1993,
The Cold War had ended and Israel, like South Africa, was under pressure from the US. Saddam's linking of the Israel issue to his own territorial claims had alarmed Washington.
and he came very close to succeeding,
Fuck off! The truth is that Israel has to yield to its expansionist settlers because they bring in money and increase security. The big surprise is that Arabs started preferring an Israeli to a Palestinian neighbor,
so close that a Jewish extremist found it necessary to murder him in 1995.
he claimed he had a right to do so under the Jewish law of 'din rodef' - on the grounds that Rabin was endangering Jews. The truth is Rabin was a consummate politician who would have back tracked once the pressure on Israel was off. The fact is, the Oslo accord was 'modular'- i.e. unimplementable. Rabin himself had refused to halt new settlements and so settlement actually speeded up thanks to the Oslo process. The thing was a farce. Still, thanks to Rabin's assassination, Israel got to look angelic. It punished its own crazy nutjobs- something the Palestinians couldn't do.
Subsequent attempts at reaching a settlement were rebuffed by Yasir Arafat, who thrived on conflict and recognized that a democratic Palestinian state at peace with Israel would likely mean the end of his days as leader.
Utterly foolish! Plenty of Arab regimes had made peace with Israel. What puts an end to your days as an Arab leader is getting assassinated or the Army turning against you. Soros lives in a fantasy world.
The situation deteriorated until suicide bombings became commonplace.
They already were so in Sri Lanka. The killing of Rajiv Gandhi by the Tamil Tigers had a 'demonstration effect'.
Perpetrators are now in charge on both sides. The current Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has been held responsible for the massacre of Palestinians that took place in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982.
A massacre carried out by Christian Maronites in revenge for the killing of their President Gemayel. The man directly responsible, Elie Hobeika, gained enough popularity to enter Parliament. He was killed by the Shi'as in 2002.
The Palestinians and Israel are locked in a vicious circle of escalating violence.
Nope. Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen- maybe. Israel is doing fine.
The policy of retaliation is not without its own logic.
Do it quickly and then draw a line.
Terrorists need an organization and a source of outside support.
Unless they don't. There are plenty of free-lance nutters.
If you can strike at the source, sometimes you can destroy the organization.
You can destroy shitty organizations. But this reduces competition for the non-shitty ones. What
Israel, with its excellent intelligence and total dedication to self-defense, was
still a lot smaller and weaker than its enemies.
very successful in fending off terrorism for many years and executed many brilliant counterstrikes.
The result was that the terrorists decided to prioritize 'the far jihad'- i.e. killing Americans and Europeans. But that meant Israel could sell anti-terrorism expertise at higher and higher prices. Terrorism is a nuisance. You can make money by getting better and better at curbing that nuisance.
However, Soros type militant stupidity is equally a nuisance. Orbans and Trumps and so forth gain by showing that the tables can be very very profitably turned on virtue signaling shitheads. If they tell stupid paranoid lies, you can beat them at their own game with a mid-night Tweet which doesn't cost you a penny.
Yet terrorism has not been eradicated.
So what? The nuisance had become profitable to Israel. Why eradicate Soros & Co if their malicious assaults always prove wholly counter-productive?
It reappeared whenever more peaceful methods of protest failed to produce positive results.
Protests fails to produce positive results if it is based on fantasy. Mahatma Gandhi led a huge protest which ended up strengthening the hold of the die-hard Tories on the power to dictate the pace and scope of reform in India. Gandhi may not have wanted Pax Brittanica to end because he genuinely liked 'Ahimsa' but ordinary people actually want tangible benefits out of political activity. They don't give a shit about universal justice. They just don't want to be fucked in the ass all the time.
In the Second Intifada, in Jenin, it took nearly six months, during which time some fifty inhabitants were killed, before the first suicide bomber emerged from that town.
Islamic Jihad, and later Hamas, had been doing suicide bombing since 1989. Jenin had a street named after Saddam Hussein. But it was Iraqis, not Israelis, who' martyred' that gangster after the Americans dug him out of his rathole. Obama, on the other hand, didn't take any chances with Osama. The fellow was shot and his body was dumped in the sea.
Under the Bush administration, the United States has also become a victim-turned-perpetrator, although the American public would be loath to recognize it.
America carried out a brutal war of revenge. They shouldn't have stuck around to 'build Democracy' just so crooked contractors could line their pockets. Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson just shot the bad guys and rode off. They didn't insist on sticking around as a shill for Haliburton.
America became the most powerful country in the world in the same way that other countries became rich and powerful- i.e. by pursuing their own interests and telling virtue signalers to fuck off. Americans understood this. Soros had emigrated to a racist, anti-communist, country not because he thought it was 'Open' or 'Liberal' but because he wanted to be rich and secure. Sadly, Americans didn't respect him because he didn't make useful things. He just bought and sold pieces of paper. Also, as subsequently became obvious, he was as stupid as shit.
Consider the following-
The United States is the only country that can take the lead in addressing problems that require collective action:
No. Economic theory explains why 'the dominant firm' should not be the 'market leader'. Norway could take leadership on resolving the Israel-Palestine problem precisely because it was small and, as a wealthy oil producer, not beholden to anybody.
preserving peace, assuring economic progress, protecting the environment, and so on.
Why is this obviously false? The answer is the dominant power would be preserving a status quo favorable only to itself. This is like saying the wolf should take leadership of the sheep.
Fighting terrorism and controlling weapons of mass destruction also fall into this category.
No they don't. America couldn't stop its nuclear secrets ending up not just in London and Paris (and thus Israel) but also Moscow and then Beijing from where they radiated to North Korea and Pakistan. Now Putin is weak he has promised to do nuclear proliferation in Latin America.
The United States cannot do whatever it wants, but nothing much can be done in the way of international cooperation without the leadership or at least active participation of our nation.
Only if nothing can be done with its participation.
The United States has a greater degree of discretion in deciding what shape the world should take than anybody else.
Nonsense! If the US does stupid shit, it either runs out of blood and treasure or everybody sniggers at its peccadillos.
Other countries have to respond to U.S. policy,
which has to change because of that response
but we can choose the policy to which others have to respond.
ultimately the voters choose the policy which benefits them or else there is no fucking policy- just administrative inertia.
This imposes a unique responsibility on the United States:
a responsibility to its own citizens.
Our nation must concern itself with the well-being of the world.
No. It must- as Obama would say later on- 'stop doing stupid shit'.
We will be the greatest beneficiaries if we do so.
The reverse is more likely. We know what benefits us. We don't know what contributes to the 'well-being' of folks who live in far-off places. Cultivate your own garden and tell Panglossian cunts like Soros to go fuck themselves.
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