So I saw someone on my wall share and/or like this article and I read it and was distinctly unimpressed and decided some kind of response was in order but a lot of things came up and then my response got very long, longer than I intended or would like but I felt I had to address and explain at least a little all the things that bothered me about it…..which turned out to be a fair bit, so now it’s a post on my wall made late at night rather than just a comment made in more normal hours. https://medium.com/…/history-tells-us-what-will-happen-next…
“History tells us”, “as historians we” “historians will”, “based on history” do you get the impression he’s leveraging his presumed degree for credibility with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and implying both prescience and uniformity of opinion to the mysterious and august order to which he claims membership? nah that’d be silly in any case using it in such a way would demonstrate pretentiousness and insecurity, definitly not true then. on the subject of things that are most definitly probably maybe not true this totally isn’t an exercise in pseudo-intellectual masturbation driven by an ego almost as big as his Cassandra complex.
In any case this is a very poor article it is the subsumation of Europe into the dominance of two world powers whom cheifly avoided war with each other due to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction and from other factors like war’s reduced profitability and the horrors of WW2, the EU probably has little to do with it. The biggest falacy in an article of falacies however is this idea that opponents of Brexit, Trump or Putin have been/are some kind of “few brilliant minds” dismissed as “hysterical, mad, or fools” such people are neither few nor funny enough nor are they usually brilliant (To get past partisan bias here on Putin at least they would include president Bush as well as most senior Republicans as well as legions of newscorp journalists in America, Australia and the UK) the great majority of the political establishment and media in the UK opposed Brexit as well as a large segment of the general population. Opposition to Putin in particular and Russia in general is the default position of government and media in the three countries just mentioned and has been for most of the 20th century and with exceptions of course a good deal longer than that at least in Britain, Trump has been openly opposed by more of the media than any major presidential candidate for a considerable period of time and may very well fail to defeat an extremely unpopular rival in Hilary Clinton. In the UK and here I’m confidant he is still more consistently reviled both by the media and political establishment and the populace then he is in the states.
By contrast it was the political system set up by the elites of Europe that lead to the first world war, not outsiders, not populists but the at the time usual suspects, in 1914 the Kaiser, Austrian emperor Tsar and establishments of the more democratic (at least exempting thier many colonies) British and french were not impotently imploring thier people to reject the siren call of warmongering demagogues. No they were in charge, they collectively constructed the system in Europe that lead to the crisis and they lead thier countries into war following said crisis, this is not even necesarily to say they all made the wrong decision but the first world war was not caused by the impotence of the traditional political class in the face of populist warmongering outsiders, I can’t believe I need to say this but Trump is not responsible for the Somme.
None of this directly addresses the principal point of the article however, that being that Brexit/the election of Donald Drumph and the existence of Putin dramatically increases the danger of WW3/the black death/the end times/ pineapple on pizza because apparently we hate that now and what we need is to reassurt the control and policies of the establishment because in it we (the special clever people) trust. However as mentioned above it was the decisions of the establishment that lead to the first of the wars we are warned we are in danger of repeating, not the Trumps and Brexits of the world but the Victoria’s and tea and biscuits as it were. Now thier are significant and concerning similarities between the current rise in populist nationalist insurgent political parties and the political situation of the 1930’s as he points out, I do not dispute this fact or argue it’s insignificance but in terms of the prospect of war I am more concerned with our business as usual current trajectory than a shakeup caused by America becoming more isolationist and less Russophobic in policy by far.
At this point I should state that Donald Trump is a transparently deplorable human being who would make an awful (and very embarrasing president) in electing him America would effectively be deciding that really when it’s all said and done they really think the best person for the job is a vulgar egomaniac manchild conman whose election would discredit America as the leader of the “civilized” and free world enormously overnight. That said Hilary Clinton is a warmonger utterly committed to the furtherance of present trends in American foreign policy, a foreign policy that has seen nigh on continous escalation with Russia and China over the previous severel years. As secretary of state Hilary was integral in this process but while she frankly made the situation worse she is the establishments pick because her policy has the broad support of the elite and in particular that of the military industrial complex (sorry it does need to be said sheeple) and thus would likely broadly continue under the direction of most establishment candidates.
This policy is an impressive combination of immoral, incompetant and terrifying and is supported by the establishments of Britain and Australia and it is about power and driven by greed and fear, it involves networks of alliance based on the perceived mutual interests of the elites in the countries within said alliances making the deal (note interest of elites, not interest of people)for profit, control and against mutual enemies who are picked because they are threats to these interests (or thier own enemies make a better offer) not out of any sense of ethics or generally for the general betterment of the broader population. As such propaganda campaigns, regime change and proxy wars are the order of the day. Make no mistake though this policy has not proven effective but when it fails Hilary’s instinct is to double down on foreign policy she is more than just unscupulous she is unimaginative and inflexible and as a consequence of her and people who share her approach America has become involved with multiple proxy wars against Russia and Iran in service of Saudi Arabia. The largest of which in Syria they have become extremely involved long after any chance of achieving thier goal of removing Assad had evaporated but the longer they are thier working at cross purposes to the Russians the higher the chance of an incident…….
While continuing to escalate tensions in the South China Sea even after losing the support of one of thier previusly most committed allies in the Phillipines. America has been trying ever since the 90’s to maintain it’s breif and absolute pr-eminence in all corners of the globe, the more threatened this status is the more they double down, it is not enough merely to be the most powerful country in the world you must also be the dominant power in every region. Greater than China in East Asia and then Russia in it’s neck of the woods this is both megalomania and put simply no longer feasible. The 90’s are over and America simply does not have the resources or willpower to maintain the level of military and strategic ascendency to which it feels bizarely entitled and so they feel vulnearable and that makes them dangerous, simply put a Nato under the leadership of a traditional candidate much less the hawkish Clinton would be much more likely to start a war with Russia then stop one. If a Trump presidency leads to a deescalation or even just less escalation with Russia and China and a distancing from allies like the Saudi’s it would not be wholly a bad thing.