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Until recently, Poland was viewed in America as largely a passive victim of history. But Poland produced many talented and energetic people who tried to come up with solutions for Poland’s strategic problems.
For example, one interesting diplomatic offensive of interwar Poland was Prometheism: an attempt to draw together an alliance of the odd assortment of countries bordering the Soviet Union in Europe and Asia to encourage rebellions among their cousin peoples over the borders within the Muscovite Empire.
Perhaps, therefore, it isn’t surprising that the Warsaw-born aristocrat Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928-2017), Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, was quick to see the advantages of encouraging anti-Communist rebels in Afghanistan. Indeed, Brzeziński didn’t wait for the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in Christmas 1979, but was getting the U.S. involved in fighting the indigenous pro-Soviet government by mid-1979.
From the website of U. of Arizona professor David N. Gibbs:
Translated from the French by William Blum and David N. Gibbs. This translation was published in Gibbs, “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,” International Politics 37, no. 2, 2000, pp. 241-242. For article full text, click here.
Original French version appeared in “Les Révélations d’un Ancien Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes…’” Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21, 1998, p. 76. Click here for original French text.
Note that all ellipses appeared in the original transcript, as published in Le Nouvel Observateur.
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.
One thing to keep in mind is that this covert U.S. aid to Afghan rebels that was approved more than five months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was minor: I think $500,000.
And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention [emphasis added throughout].
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q : “Some agitated Moslems”? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today…
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West has a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid: There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia , moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries…
Did the US helping Afghan guerrillas make the Soviet Union collapse a day earlier than it would have otherwise? I know we did it to get revenge on them for Vietnam, but in hindsight, it looks like all we did was help kill thousands of Ivan Dragos for the most ungrateful religious group in the world.
Blowback.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb
Does that religion exist to satisfy beastly CIA, drugged stupidest citizen ,serve as cannon fodder for liberal interventionists ? No it doesn't . Jihadist ,even those created by CIA knew how pervert the western regime was and is.
Never heard of the Jews then?Replies: @Gunner
In fact, the numbers suggest the Sov leadership were more willing to pull the plug than American leadership, in part due to economic considerations, but more likely owing to a sense by those calling the shots that their one-party rule leaves them precariously in the lurch with respect to having legitimacy. Elections are a wonderful fig leaf. You get the leadership you tolerate.
A book from a couple of decades ago, “The Bear Trap”, says the same thing. One of the co-authors was a Pakistani ISI guy.
One has to laugh. What are we to think of this? Did our little interference in Afghanistan, promoted by the father of renowned geopolitical genius Mika Brzezinski, function like our little interference in Ukraine, giving Russia no choice as a sovereign nation but to push back against meddling in its back yard?
Does the cycle go round-and-round, as we are now stuck in Afghanistan, and the Brzezinskis of the world continue to have a reason for their existence?
Is terrorism a viable consequence to hang on Zbig, or it just a big joke used to justify still more expensive entanglements that do nothing for the American people?
Let’s ask Mika…
Hell no. That is Zbig justifying his existence.
Steve:
Don’t you see that this is essentially why POC are pushing for immigration into Europe and the Anglosphere–to create the conditions for little rebellions against the White majorities.
Of course, what that really means is the violent, agonizing deaths of about 2 million people (according to Wikipedia, who knows what the real death toll was). Hundreds of thousands of people shot, maimed, dismembered, tortured, blown to bits, burned alive.
Regret what?
“In early times, it was easier to control a million people than to kill a million. Today, it is infinitely easier to to kill a million people than to control a million.”
— Zbigniew Brzezinski
Why do people keep saying this? It is not the leading religion in the world.
Love this dude!
(as a brutal reality-based source of information)
Read this Z guy and even the sheep begin to understand how false flags, hoaxes, gas lighting, conspiracy theories etc……. it’s all just the way global chessboard business is done!
EVERY OUTRAGEOUS EVIL CONSPIRACY THEORY IS MOSTLY TRUE!!!
Deal with it, sheeple.
Bad for Afghanistan, good for Poland.
The Soviet Union, as it was in the 1970 and 80s, kept Poland poor and enslaved. However, my impression is that it was not nearly as destructive to Polish culture as the EU will ultimately prove to be.Replies: @anon
And in any event, wasn't Brzeszinski supposed to be representing the interests of the American people?Replies: @Anonym, @Chris Mallory
Logical follow-up questions left unasked: was American support for the Muhajadeen needed for their insurgency to continue, and was it critical for their success?
Also, was the Muhajadeen insurgent victory worse for Afghanistan than becoming a colony of the Soviet Union?
I'm of the mind that we make much less difference than we think and that we generally pick the better side in any conflict.
Have people always assumed that they, and their group, are the arbiters of practically everything? Or, if not, and this serves the same need, that a secret enemy that only a select few can identify are those same arbiters? It seems a bit like being a football fan and deciding that wearing your lucky socks is what will make your team win - not the players, referee, coaches, conditions or even the superstition of the other tens of millions of people watching, just your socks. It's a crutch for dealing with complicated stressful situations you have zero control over. Also, it is somewhat similar to human sacrifice to alleviate a drought, and, of course, often leads to people doing similarly horrific stuff.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Anonym
So we actually intervened in Afghanistan 5 months prior to the invasion. I had no idea. We used that invasion, which we apparently helped foment, as justification to boycott the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow.
What are we going to learn next? Maybe that our spy planes used the KAL 747 airliner as a decoy which resulted in getting it shot down?
I suspect that's exactly what happened . The US intelligence agencies had overflown Russian airspace as a regular practice in order to get them to turn on their various electronic sensors for EW and recon purposes . The Russians shot down more than 40 US aircraft between 1946 and 1960 with the loss of aircrews as well . I suppose the people in charge figured the Russians wouldn't shoot down a civilian airliner .Replies: @Simply Simon
That is one sick mind at work.
A sidebar here that I find extremely fascinating is that Soviet (now Russian) intelligence always seemed to know exactly what the West was up to and they weren’t shy about telling everyone on the world stage all about it. Contrast this with Western intelligence, which willingly deludes itself about election interference, the Skripals, Ukraine, etc.; which utterly failed to discover, disrupt, or develop effective countermeasures against devastating new Russian weapons platforms; which was completely outclassed in Georgia, Crimea, and now Syria; so forth and so on.
The Russian state security services and their intel personnel seem grounded in a level of reality that the West abandoned some time ago. Whatever their other faults may be, they know how to get at the facts. That they continue to expect the rest of the world to respect objective reality is, for the time being, their only blind spot.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1081053136809312256?s=21Replies: @Lot, @Thea
Yes, by the 1960's both the West and the former East Bloc ended up being run run by technocrats of one sort or another. Their managerial class crashed spectacularly with the fall of the Soviet Union while ours drifted off into magical thinking. "Perception is reality" and "the personal is political" pretty much covers the whole of their credo.
Until Trump and "populism" came along, the ruling class of the West thought they could create their own reality simply by meeting at their G7 Séances (oops, Summits), holding hands, presenting a "united front" and reality would conform to their wishes. Assad would go, Libya would do whatever the hell it was they wanted it to do, Europeans would accept the migrant invasion, Donetsk would have its Pride Parade. It turns out their egregore is not as mighty as they believed.
What’s the Pashto or Dari for “Because we live here”? Maybe the Russians should have learned that.
Hmm… Didn’t Britain once do something that was “good for Poland”?
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by... nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler's generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west--as would follow from a declaration of war--the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain's treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK "did for Poland," that 20 per cent of Poland's population was destroyed, while it is "the blitz", a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain's bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland's). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it's disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler's Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let's have that argument straight out.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @AndrewR, @Anonymous, @J.Ross, @YetAnotherAnon
Maybe. Let’s wait and see how many muslim refugees the EU forces Poland to swallow.
The Soviet Union, as it was in the 1970 and 80s, kept Poland poor and enslaved. However, my impression is that it was not nearly as destructive to Polish culture as the EU will ultimately prove to be.
It also kept Muslims and Africans out.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Quite sound, that. Islam only creates problems for us because we allow Muslims to enter the West. Clamp down on the borders, and they’re irrelevant. Of course, our traitorous leaders will never allow that….
Also, just because modern tech wasn't invented in Islam doesn't mean that Islam won't use it.
Brzeziński is being a little disingenuous here:They're workin' on it, Zbig, they're working on it. And with our tech and insane policies, we're helping them.Replies: @syonredux, @istevefan
Sadly the End of the Cold War is over. And the agitated Moslems are VERY agitated. What will come?
There is a long history of co-operation between the Poles and Muslims to fight Russia.
During the Crimean War, Polish officers were organized by the British to command Muslim troops fighting the Russians.
I think that you needed to be there. I was once chatting with some historians who were in their late 60s, asking them about the Western geopolitical mood in the late 1970s. They recalled it as one of quiet despair. The feeling was that the Soviets were winning, and that the West was in a state of advanced decay……
We could have come together as a united force after 9/11 with good border security and the Bushes screwed us by following this same garbage policy. Now if any foreign power attacks half our citizens will aid them.If Russia , the right will help if Islamic or Mestizo, then the left will.Replies: @Counterinsurgency
A sidebar here that I find extremely fascinating is that Soviet (now Russian) intelligence always seemed to know exactly what the West was up to and they weren't shy about telling everyone on the world stage all about it. Contrast this with Western intelligence, which willingly deludes itself about election interference, the Skripals, Ukraine, etc.; which utterly failed to discover, disrupt, or develop effective countermeasures against devastating new Russian weapons platforms; which was completely outclassed in Georgia, Crimea, and now Syria; so forth and so on.
The Russian state security services and their intel personnel seem grounded in a level of reality that the West abandoned some time ago. Whatever their other faults may be, they know how to get at the facts. That they continue to expect the rest of the world to respect objective reality is, for the time being, their only blind spot.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Cagey Beast
Maybe the job of American-British-Israeli “intelligence” is to propagandize their own citizenry into believing fantasies.
A sidebar here that I find extremely fascinating is that Soviet (now Russian) intelligence always seemed to know exactly what the West was up to and they weren't shy about telling everyone on the world stage all about it. Contrast this with Western intelligence, which willingly deludes itself about election interference, the Skripals, Ukraine, etc.; which utterly failed to discover, disrupt, or develop effective countermeasures against devastating new Russian weapons platforms; which was completely outclassed in Georgia, Crimea, and now Syria; so forth and so on.
The Russian state security services and their intel personnel seem grounded in a level of reality that the West abandoned some time ago. Whatever their other faults may be, they know how to get at the facts. That they continue to expect the rest of the world to respect objective reality is, for the time being, their only blind spot.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Cagey Beast
Dunno. His job was to make things tough for the Soviets….
How do you figure that? According to Brzeziński , they got suckered into intervening in Afghanistan….
But was it necessary for Poland?
And in any event, wasn’t Brzeszinski supposed to be representing the interests of the American people?
A gentile European embedded in the US govt using the power of the US war machine for petty national struggles? The horror...
Zbigniew Brzeziński, just another example of why we should have closed the borders in 1800.
Maybe the Americans and the Zionists should have learned that.
A sidebar here that I find extremely fascinating is that Soviet (now Russian) intelligence always seemed to know exactly what the West was up to and they weren't shy about telling everyone on the world stage all about it. Contrast this with Western intelligence, which willingly deludes itself about election interference, the Skripals, Ukraine, etc.; which utterly failed to discover, disrupt, or develop effective countermeasures against devastating new Russian weapons platforms; which was completely outclassed in Georgia, Crimea, and now Syria; so forth and so on.
The Russian state security services and their intel personnel seem grounded in a level of reality that the West abandoned some time ago. Whatever their other faults may be, they know how to get at the facts. That they continue to expect the rest of the world to respect objective reality is, for the time being, their only blind spot.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Cagey Beast
Some of our CIA alumni seem pretty naive.
https://twitter.com/BryanDeanWright/status/1080872578577825792
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/son-half-breed-indian-squaw-quotation
This.
Bet you all dollars to donuts that the Soviets had “advisers”, weapons and actual military personnel in Afghanistan years before the official invasion started (which means tanks rolling across the border). That’s what “pro-Soviet regime” usually means.
I thought his job was to promote the national security of the United States.
Mind you, things are completely different now. Putin's Russia poses no real threat to the USA.....but lotsa people in elite circles are acting as though the USSR never fell....Trump, of course, is the significant exception. He seems to be the one guy in power who has figured out that the Russia of 2019 is not the USSR of 1979....Replies: @Neil Templeton
Who has been using this kind of neo-prometheism against the US?
1979-80 USA: We wish an Afghan war on our worst enemy.
2003-2019 USA: We must fight in Afghanistan forever.
The MILFs of Military Industrial Complex (MILFMICs) completely approve!
I made $20,179,000 last year. How about you suckas?
As you pointed out, we thought ourselves quite clever for suckering the Russians into getting bogged down in Afghanistan, but we've now been there ourselves almost twice as long. Of course, we aren't using a conscript army, and we're paying for it with money that we conjure out of thin air.Replies: @anonymous
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1081053136809312256?s=21Replies: @Lot, @Thea
Dave, that guy’s next tweet repeats a silly myth, bungling into an attack on John Adams.
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/son-half-breed-indian-squaw-quotation
Hubris, meet Nemesis.
2003-2019 USA: We must fight in Afghanistan forever.
The MILFs of Military Industrial Complex (MILFMICs) completely approve!
https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/0c2vd3EaPK5WX/0x600.jpg?fit=scale&background=000000
I made $20,179,000 last year. How about you suckas?Replies: @Mr. Anon
2001 – 2019 (or later). Our war in Afghanistan is now longer than all the wars America waged against sovereign countries in the 125 years from the battle of Lexington-Concord through the end of the Spanish-American War. Or longer than our direct military involvement in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
As you pointed out, we thought ourselves quite clever for suckering the Russians into getting bogged down in Afghanistan, but we’ve now been there ourselves almost twice as long. Of course, we aren’t using a conscript army, and we’re paying for it with money that we conjure out of thin air.
Remember the USS Stark. My then girlfriend’s brother was killed and we were told it was Iran’s fault. I forget now how long it was before the truth came out that it was Iraq. Government inaction.
I suppose looking back it also serves as one of those incidents that didn't fit the narrative. We were hostile towards Iran and put our ships in the Gulf to protect oil tankers. But it was Iraq that hit the Stark. And we didn't have much of a reaction towards the Iraqis. My guess is had it been Iran, we'd have bombed them severely. But we didn't do much if anything against Saddam for this.
It is no longer fashionable to finish one’s thoughts when judging the effect of a Western country on a non-Western one.
Logical follow-up questions left unasked: was American support for the Muhajadeen needed for their insurgency to continue, and was it critical for their success?
Also, was the Muhajadeen insurgent victory worse for Afghanistan than becoming a colony of the Soviet Union?
I’m of the mind that we make much less difference than we think and that we generally pick the better side in any conflict.
Have people always assumed that they, and their group, are the arbiters of practically everything? Or, if not, and this serves the same need, that a secret enemy that only a select few can identify are those same arbiters? It seems a bit like being a football fan and deciding that wearing your lucky socks is what will make your team win – not the players, referee, coaches, conditions or even the superstition of the other tens of millions of people watching, just your socks. It’s a crutch for dealing with complicated stressful situations you have zero control over. Also, it is somewhat similar to human sacrifice to alleviate a drought, and, of course, often leads to people doing similarly horrific stuff.
Stinger missiles are hard for goat herder to invent, no?
I suppose a 50cal can do the same thing in a pinch.
https://youtu.be/vX8djun3DKQReplies: @Tyrion 2, @TomSchmidt
By the way, Steve, here’s an old letter from Crick regarding IQ differences.
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBNM.pdf
He was reacting against the moves on Shockley being done at that time, but stated plainly that he agreed with Jensen and called for more research.
A lot of the failure of our interventions can be explained by the fact that we see social liberalism and multiculturalism as inarguably good things rather than luxury products with large costs.
This means that the countries which we try to bring these two sets of norms to are put into a state of constant social capital deficit, which leads to them falling into social capital bankruptcy and civil war.
We have sort of accepted that social liberalism might be a luxury, now, but diversity and multiculturalism are unquestionable. What’s particularly annoying is that recognising that these things have a cost that Afghanistan cannot bear is not the same thing as saying they are bad for us. Yet, in order to have the strongest hand to play domestically, the proponents of these norms have to hold to the most extreme position.
In practical terms, acting on the above would mean splitting Afghanistan into Pastunstan, Hazarastan etc. From there, good borders would eventually mean good neighbours. But then, that might undermine the fashionable domestic agenda…so instead we have eternal war and bizarre conspiracy theories for why the interventions don’t work and why we did them.
Yeah, right. i.e., factual things you don't want to admit.Replies: @Tyrion 2
Who is this we?
I certainly don't.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Tyrion 2
I'd only add that "diversity and multicultalism"--as well as social liberalism in it's modern form--are a disaster everywhere. We're simply rich enough in the West that we've been paying this tab and limping by--though the trend lines are pretty damn appalling all across the West.
What actually works--the great socio-political organizational breakthrough--is nationalism; "one-people" nations where everyone feels like they are--whatever smaller (regional) variations--"on the same team". And with of course the traditional playbook of every successful civilization--patriarchy, with monogamous, one-per-customer, marriage.Replies: @Neil Templeton
Logical follow-up questions left unasked: was American support for the Muhajadeen needed for their insurgency to continue, and was it critical for their success?
Also, was the Muhajadeen insurgent victory worse for Afghanistan than becoming a colony of the Soviet Union?
I'm of the mind that we make much less difference than we think and that we generally pick the better side in any conflict.
Have people always assumed that they, and their group, are the arbiters of practically everything? Or, if not, and this serves the same need, that a secret enemy that only a select few can identify are those same arbiters? It seems a bit like being a football fan and deciding that wearing your lucky socks is what will make your team win - not the players, referee, coaches, conditions or even the superstition of the other tens of millions of people watching, just your socks. It's a crutch for dealing with complicated stressful situations you have zero control over. Also, it is somewhat similar to human sacrifice to alleviate a drought, and, of course, often leads to people doing similarly horrific stuff.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Anonym
It’s apparently not fashionable for you to finish your own thoughts. Because you didn’t.
Do you have a point, or do you get paid by the word?
More seriously, I admire his sober and detached analysis of the situation and the reality of U.S. interests. Is there anybody in the State Department capable of making this kind of candid, self-interested case about, say, Syria? Yemen? Not to mention our own current Afghan quagmire.
See, I was much more willing to support an aggressive U.S. foreign policy when I thought the American establishment was staffed by guys like this — ruthless, cold-blooded professionals who talk like Mafia consiglieres about U.S. power and interests behind closed doors.
My growing isolationism is fed by the fact that few such people now exist, if they ever did. I wonder if Brzezinski himself was, in the moment, actually as fiendishly clever as he boasts he was, or if that’s just a retroactive justification for what was actually just a lucky call.
Quagmire. The neo-cons howled with derision against the journalist R.W. Apple when he used that word in reference to our early days in Afghanistan. A week or two later the U.S. Army/Air Force unleashed a massive air blitz against entrenched Taliban positions, killing many, sending the survivors scurrying into the canyons, ravines and mountains. Shortly after the war was all but declared won. Over. Mission accomplished. Oh, boy did the new-cons howl and mock Mr. Apple.
Well, Mr. Apple is in his grave, but who gets mocked now?
This means that the countries which we try to bring these two sets of norms to are put into a state of constant social capital deficit, which leads to them falling into social capital bankruptcy and civil war.
We have sort of accepted that social liberalism might be a luxury, now, but diversity and multiculturalism are unquestionable. What's particularly annoying is that recognising that these things have a cost that Afghanistan cannot bear is not the same thing as saying they are bad for us. Yet, in order to have the strongest hand to play domestically, the proponents of these norms have to hold to the most extreme position.
In practical terms, acting on the above would mean splitting Afghanistan into Pastunstan, Hazarastan etc. From there, good borders would eventually mean good neighbours. But then, that might undermine the fashionable domestic agenda...so instead we have eternal war and bizarre conspiracy theories for why the interventions don't work and why we did them.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Bill Jones, @AnotherDad
“bizarre conspiracy theories”
Yeah, right. i.e., factual things you don’t want to admit.
But we built an extraordinary amount of infrastructure and spent billions upon billions training the government's security forces, so instead you're as clueless as you are stupid.
Indeed, we've spent hundreds of billions and years trying to stabilise the two countries, not destabilise them.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Everybody on the left forgets Reagan won the 1980 election for reasons other than TV ads. Of course, these people are trying to hide their behavior in those days by worrying about RUSSIA! now.
And in any event, wasn't Brzeszinski supposed to be representing the interests of the American people?Replies: @Anonym, @Chris Mallory
And in any event, wasn’t Brzeszinski supposed to be representing the interests of the American people?
A gentile European embedded in the US govt using the power of the US war machine for petty national struggles? The horror…
Afghanistan was always a secret thorn in the Soviet’s paw because a lot of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks live in Afghanistan, and were able to interact with their co-ethnics in the neighboring Soviet Republics with far more freedom than the Soviets liked. For the most part it was basic smuggling and drugs, but the danger of “ideological contamination” was always one the Soviets took seriously. The USSR always felt compelled to have some measure of control and influence in Afghanistan.
Brzezinski is probably exaggerating his role. British intelligence services certainly were well aware from history of the usefulness of Afghanistan as a buffer-zone in the Great Game against Russia.
Logical follow-up questions left unasked: was American support for the Muhajadeen needed for their insurgency to continue, and was it critical for their success?
Also, was the Muhajadeen insurgent victory worse for Afghanistan than becoming a colony of the Soviet Union?
I'm of the mind that we make much less difference than we think and that we generally pick the better side in any conflict.
Have people always assumed that they, and their group, are the arbiters of practically everything? Or, if not, and this serves the same need, that a secret enemy that only a select few can identify are those same arbiters? It seems a bit like being a football fan and deciding that wearing your lucky socks is what will make your team win - not the players, referee, coaches, conditions or even the superstition of the other tens of millions of people watching, just your socks. It's a crutch for dealing with complicated stressful situations you have zero control over. Also, it is somewhat similar to human sacrifice to alleviate a drought, and, of course, often leads to people doing similarly horrific stuff.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Anonym
Logical follow-up questions left unasked: was American support for the Muhajadeen needed for their insurgency to continue, and was it critical for their success?
Stinger missiles are hard for goat herder to invent, no?
I suppose a 50cal can do the same thing in a pinch.
Of course, it should have been Rambo 2, or First Blood, Part 3.
Don't you see that this is essentially why POC are pushing for immigration into Europe and the Anglosphere--to create the conditions for little rebellions against the White majorities.Replies: @TTSSYF, @Cagey Beast
And how about the Chinese coming to America? Where will their loyalties be a few decades from now? With America, or China?
It’s obviously the leading one; it may not be the biggest one.
Stinger missiles are hard for goat herder to invent, no?
I suppose a 50cal can do the same thing in a pinch.
https://youtu.be/vX8djun3DKQReplies: @Tyrion 2, @TomSchmidt
17 years on from the West not supporting the insurgency and with the technological gap being much, much bigger, we still haven’t “won”.
http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Mi-24
Consider that 5600 helicopters were shot down in VN. In VN -> Afghan vs Soviet -> Afghan vs USA an order of magnitude reduction in helicopter losses took place. Not sure why exactly. Latter less than OoM but over longer period.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_aircraft_losses_during_the_Soviet–Afghan_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan
Yeah, right. i.e., factual things you don't want to admit.Replies: @Tyrion 2
Had we destroyed all of their infrastructure and spent billions training all sorts of opposing insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Iraq then you could make a plausible case.
But we built an extraordinary amount of infrastructure and spent billions upon billions training the government’s security forces, so instead you’re as clueless as you are stupid.
Indeed, we’ve spent hundreds of billions and years trying to stabilise the two countries, not destabilise them.
2.) America spent a ridiculous amount of money because we spent it ridiculously. Truck drivers paid $200,000 a year, gas at $200 a gallon, etc. The amount of money spent "rebuilding" Afghanistan and Iraq has more to do with war profiteering than with any actual accomplishments.
Nitwit.
Your post makes me think of a monkey banging around a flashlight unable to happen upon the button and concluding it is a bad excuse for a stick.
A good read on this from the Soviet perspective is The Bear Went Over The Mountain:Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan by Lester Grau, translated from actual Russian after action reports. The Russians were as surprised that the Afghanis would reject the dictatorship of the proletariat as the Neocons were that they would reject becoming California.
He is Polish, and his bugaboo always was Russia – not the USSR – but the Russia that swallowed most of the old Polish-Lithuanian Empire that destroyed itself with stupidity, greed, envy, and reckless disregard for what various Islamic groups did to non-Polish Slavs. I do not think he is lying about the threat of globalist Islamic terrorism. His ideology cannot allow him to see it.
Poland was simply the first country to show the world that multiculturalism
didn’t work. 140-50 years later, in the wake of World War I, the same fate befell
the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the German Empire.Replies: @Cagey Beast
Economics would have brought down the USSR without the USSR in Afghanistan, a few years later than it imploded. So what we did cost many lives needlessly and indeed created globalist Islamic terrorism.
Blowback.
It would also help if we started dealing with Muslims based upon American interests rather than the interests of Israel.
What is it that Britain did that was “good for Poland”? It has been Britain’s historical policy to prevent a hegemon from arising to control the European landmass (Spain, France, Germany), so that Britain’s defense treaty with Poland follows in a long historical tradition of Britain’s self-interest (as does withdrawal from the EU).
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by… nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler’s generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west–as would follow from a declaration of war–the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain’s treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK “did for Poland,” that 20 per cent of Poland’s population was destroyed, while it is “the blitz”, a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain’s bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland’s). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it’s disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler’s Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let’s have that argument straight out.
But the current Brit elite are detached from that position, and a hegemon (Germany) controls the European landmass.
"Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by… nothing"
Churchill noted at the time that it was obvious from the map the UK could do little to protect Poland from German attack - the entire point was deterrence - to make it plain to Germany that a repeat of Munich was not on the table and that an attack on Poland would 100% mean war with the UK. I get tired of having to point this out at least once a year on Unz.
Britain's diplomatic failure was in not getting the Russians onside. Stalin decided in the end to join with Germany in partitioning Poland. No military in the world could have taken on both Germany and Russia simultaneously from distance - not Britain and certainly not the US.
"US intervened to save Britain’s bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland’s)"
See above. You might as well criticise the US for not saving the Nationalist Chinese.
Don't you see that this is essentially why POC are pushing for immigration into Europe and the Anglosphere--to create the conditions for little rebellions against the White majorities.Replies: @TTSSYF, @Cagey Beast
This is a comment about the style of your comment, rather than its substance, which I agree with. Why do you choose to present your case starting with “Steve: Don’t you see that…”? I see this tone all the time online. Anonymous guys (likely nerds of some sort) outraged at how stupid someone else is for not having stated precisely what Anonymous guy 257 has simmering between his ears at that precise moment. We’re not all morons simply because we’re not thinking the same things you are when you hit your keyboard.
Also, Communism was very, very bad. Some terribly malignant ideologies nest in Washington, Brussels, and Riyadh today, but the one headquartered in Moscow in 1979 was arguably much worse. Whatever the faults or merits of the Cold War, it was actually about something important (unlike Cold War 2.0, which is totally pointless and stupid).
Their loyalties will be with China. That’s why Canada and the United Sates are going to have their own versions of Singapore on this continent. These Chinese enclaves will be lost in the mix of other “special economic zones” or “autonomous cultural areas” or whatever name they come up with for them. In effect, they’ll be the 21st century version of the grand duchies, principalities and electorates of the old Holy Roman Empire.
A sidebar here that I find extremely fascinating is that Soviet (now Russian) intelligence always seemed to know exactly what the West was up to and they weren't shy about telling everyone on the world stage all about it. Contrast this with Western intelligence, which willingly deludes itself about election interference, the Skripals, Ukraine, etc.; which utterly failed to discover, disrupt, or develop effective countermeasures against devastating new Russian weapons platforms; which was completely outclassed in Georgia, Crimea, and now Syria; so forth and so on.
The Russian state security services and their intel personnel seem grounded in a level of reality that the West abandoned some time ago. Whatever their other faults may be, they know how to get at the facts. That they continue to expect the rest of the world to respect objective reality is, for the time being, their only blind spot.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Cagey Beast
The Russian state security services and their intel personnel seem grounded in a level of reality that the West abandoned some time ago.
Yes, by the 1960’s both the West and the former East Bloc ended up being run run by technocrats of one sort or another. Their managerial class crashed spectacularly with the fall of the Soviet Union while ours drifted off into magical thinking. “Perception is reality” and “the personal is political” pretty much covers the whole of their credo.
Until Trump and “populism” came along, the ruling class of the West thought they could create their own reality simply by meeting at their G7 Séances (oops, Summits), holding hands, presenting a “united front” and reality would conform to their wishes. Assad would go, Libya would do whatever the hell it was they wanted it to do, Europeans would accept the migrant invasion, Donetsk would have its Pride Parade. It turns out their egregore is not as mighty as they believed.
Brzezinski’s fingerprints are all over the mess of an American policy in the middles east. His mishandling of the Islamabad embassy attack and arson in 1979 is particularly vexing.
Has anyone here read about Roman Dmowski? I’m curious what he thought of Promethism.
So far fighting this regional group, that have nothing in common other than a religion, has cost the US literally trillions of dollars. What’s more important to a guy who is supposed to be a member of the US government, doing what is right for the United States, or what is good for Poland?
But if these same policy makers back in the late 1970’s made a list of all the things they would have to see before declaring victory over the Warsaw Pact and disbanding NATO, you’d see they’ve nearly all been achieved. Even so, the Cold War must go on apparently.
Agree.
Also, just because modern tech wasn’t invented in Islam doesn’t mean that Islam won’t use it.
Brzeziński is being a little disingenuous here:
They’re workin’ on it, Zbig, they’re working on it. And with our tech and insane policies, we’re helping them.
Ungrateful religious group?
Does that religion exist to satisfy beastly CIA, drugged stupidest citizen ,serve as cannon fodder for liberal interventionists ? No it doesn’t . Jihadist ,even those created by CIA knew how pervert the western regime was and is.
People in jobs like Mika.
Of course! Russia didn’t want to invade Afghanistan, we made them do it!
Just like FDR made the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
Just like Lincoln made the South attack Fort Sumter.
Man, I remember when conservatives used to hate liberals who always blamed America first!
I think if you found 1,000 Americans who even heard of Fort Sumter at all, 995 of them would think it was some fort in New Jersey or somewhere in the North that the South attacked. Imagine the situation in reverse -- say a fort in New Jersey that was manned by Southern soldiers, who wouldn't leave, and then who were attempting to resupply the fort. It can't be allowed to stand.
Sumter was an early version of a sock puppet, used by Lincoln to foment a war that nobody needed.Replies: @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
Yes except in Kosovo. We have to appreciate the ethnic and religious distinction in that case.
A country of less than a million people and nothing to offer that cannot defend itself has no business existing, in the Balkans of all places, yet there it is with the US military behind it.
Brzezinski is probably exaggerating his role. British intelligence services certainly were well aware from history of the usefulness of Afghanistan as a buffer-zone in the Great Game against Russia.Replies: @utu
For good reason. CIA via Pakistan and Turkey were engaged in smuggling and disseminating religious materials in Muslim Soviet republics. Religion was used against the USSR. Catholicism on the western border of USSR in Poland and Islam in the East.
Stinger missiles are hard for goat herder to invent, no?
I suppose a 50cal can do the same thing in a pinch.
https://youtu.be/vX8djun3DKQReplies: @Tyrion 2, @TomSchmidt
I had forgotten about that movie. It shows the Imperialist monsters using high technology to kill mountain tribesmen. Then the heroic defenders of the people were Americans… sigh.
Of course, it should have been Rambo 2, or First Blood, Part 3.
Afghanistan had a secular regime that was friendly with the USSR and the US helped to destroy it by flaming up Islamic radicalism.
Pictures of women in Kabul in mini skirts are from that period.
Old Photo of Afghan Women in Miniskirts May Have Convinced Trump to Commit More Troops
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/did-this-photo-convince-trump-to-send-more-troops-to-afghanistan-1.5445204
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1081053136809312256?s=21Replies: @Lot, @Thea
Forget about what they say publicly, that’s just smoke and mirrors. Worry about the CIA’s bumbling ineptitude behind closed doors.
Or that other Frenchman's "It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder!"Replies: @J.Ross
If only they could have foreseen the existential despair of 2018. The Democratic Party is in outright rebellion against traditional Americans and seeking revenge. Our current congress contains many who hate and seek to destroy us. If only the leaders of the 1960s & 70s had let Generals Atlantic & Pacific do their jobs.
We could have come together as a united force after 9/11 with good border security and the Bushes screwed us by following this same garbage policy. Now if any foreign power attacks half our citizens will aid them.
If Russia , the right will help if Islamic or Mestizo, then the left will.
That's the theory, bare bones version. Sometimes the insurgency works, sometimes not.
The irony is that the Democrats think they're waging an insurgency ("march through the institutions", "control of the narrative") against the historic American population. In fact, they're repeating the history of the NAACP (founded by the Jewish establishment, which was ejected in the 1960s), or the Bolsheviks (supported largely by Jewish interests, staffed largely by believers in Judaism, most of whom appeared to have been killed during Stalin's purges). In both cases, group A founded an organization that relied on group B for staffing. The Bolsheviks could not run Russia. There just weren't enough of them (fewer because of internal feuding). They had to recruit Russians. Get enough Russians, the Russians take over, and group A (which was doing what looked like madness to the Russians) is out. Eventually, things calm down, but group A is still out for a few generations.
Same with the current Democrats. They thought they were organizing the overthrow of Anglo Saxon America, and to an extent they were. They even formed an alliance with the Yankees. They also brought in foreigners to staff their effort. Height of cleverness, no? Now it turns out that the groups they brought in are waging their own insurgencies (as in my two examples), have their own shadow governments, and don't much like the Democrats who brought them in. In addition to having an target population that wasn't as controlled as it pretended to be. What a surprise! These guys must be astounded every time they drop a rock and it hits their foot.
The only thing we learn from history is that people are idiots. Us, too, unfortunately.
CounterinsurgencyReplies: @Thea
Will we learn next that behind the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power was CIA and other western security agencies? The deposed Shah of Iran supposedly mad some indications about it. The destruction of secular modernizing and fast growing Iran and on top of it being on friendly terms with the West did not fit the vision for the Middle East of people who few years later came up with the Yinon plan.
“all we did was help kill thousands of Ivan Dragos for the most ungrateful religious group in the world”
Never heard of the Jews then?
Yes, I don’t think it was really a secret. The invasion wasn’t even an invasion in the absolute sense of the word. Just an increase in the number of Soviet forces in the country.
I ain’t no Polish genius like that Zbigniew Brzeziński, but I got this one figured out pretty good!
I wonder if Zbiggy had any English ancestry? I doubt it.
In 2015 I spent minutes cooking up the Pewitt Doctrine regarding the American Empire’s foreign misadventure in Afghanistan.
Pewitt Afghanistan Doctrine(2015):
I’m sorry about the Afghans, but I don’t miss the threat of a nuclear winter. Brzeziński was looking at the big picture
Millions of dead, disabled and displaced Afghans are the result of this long running, cynical policy of exploiting them as tools against others. Wonderful people, these Brzezinski types. Nobody really cares about the misery imposed upon the little folks around the world, they’re too busy congratulating each other on how clever they are. Brzezinski was a foreign infiltrator who influenced American policy to go the way he wanted it to for his own personal anti-Russian animus rather than looking to what was best for the US.
Zbigniew Brzeziński, huh? According to this movie, it was Julia Roberts/Joanna and her sexy bikini and cunningly sleeping with congressmen that did it! We’ve been lied again by Hollywood!
The Dennis Hastert Faction in the Republican Party wants the American Empire to stay in Afghanistan forever.
I say get the Hell out of Afghanistan now!
I ain’t too happy with the American Empire moron dopes who want to drag some of these Muslim Afghanistan mutants back to the United States because they did this or that for the American Empire while it was mired in the muck of Afghanistan.
No Special Immigrant Visas for any Afghanistani of whatever kind.
Get the American Empire troops out, and don’t let one Afghanistani cling to the boots of one US soldier. Not one, dammit!
Any Republican Party politician whore who doesn’t want to get the Hell out of Afghanistan is a traitor or a moron or both!
Tweet from 2015:
What is the leading religion in the World? Globalism, open borders, multi-culturism, diversity?
Ye shall be as gods.
They’re places where western tourists have recently been killed by Muslim hotheads? (Ok, not Saudi Arabia; tourism is banned there.)
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by... nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler's generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west--as would follow from a declaration of war--the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain's treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK "did for Poland," that 20 per cent of Poland's population was destroyed, while it is "the blitz", a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain's bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland's). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it's disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler's Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let's have that argument straight out.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @AndrewR, @Anonymous, @J.Ross, @YetAnotherAnon
End result: Stalin takes half of Europe. The people there live in a gray hell for half a century. Not so good for Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Britain caused WWII and placed millions of innocent people into the chains of communist dictatorships.
And Germany eventually came to dominate the continent anyway.
As my father-in-law in Romania now says, “The West fought two world wars to keep Germany from dominating Europe, and now Germany dominates Europe.” He also told me, when I first met him and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, “We waited fifty years to join you.”
Better to have let Hitler and Stalin go to war with each other. It could not have been any worse.
Britain changed a regional war — Germany fighting to take space around itself and the Soviet Union doing the same — into the Second World War, and lost its empire in the process. That’s a stupid way to prevent a competing power from taking you down a peg. By doing its dirty Empire business as usual, and by manipulating the United States to get into the war, Britain took itself down more than that, and condemned my wife’s people to Hell.
It seems that the political systems most vulnerable to subversion by Jews are democracies with franchises broadened to anyone with a pulse, which is why the (((media))) loves them so much.
The casual observer might note that there are no expansionist Christians attempting to forcibly convert or kill non-believers in-country, in lands adjacent thereto, and around the world. Whereas, what is common in the cited Muslim countries and regions is the welcome desire to martyr oneself in the pursuit of the conversion and killing.
A few years ago, I went on a kick reading Eastern European history. It’s fascinating precisely because it is so outside the Western (and especially American) historical consciousness. One thing I was surprised to learn was how incredibly aggressive Poland was during the inter-war period.
It’s one thing for a superpower to meddle from a safe distance in its opponent’s sphere of influence with proxy forces, covert operations and plausible deniability.
But Poland went right at the Great Power on its border. They actually invaded the Soviet Union and tried to conquer the Ukraine for themselves in the early 1920s (and came pretty close to winning). When the tide turned against them, they saved themselves and humiliated Trosky’s Red Army with a miraculous win at the Battle of Warsaw in 1921.
Later, they took over-aggressive foolhardy positions against Germany. For example, according to Pat Buchanan in The Unnecessary War (an excellent semi-contrarian history), Poland could have avoided war with Germany by merely surrendering Danzig (which was, after all, a German city). Instead, they drew a line in the sand and practically forced Hitler to cut a deal with Stalin to carve them up.
In Buchanan’s (pretty persuasive) view, Hitler always wanted to invade Russia first, not the West. But Poland’s intransigence combined with Britain’s totally gratuitous, unilateral (and unenforceable) guarantee to Poland meant that France got the Blitzkrieg instead. That’s not the way they teach it in schools, however.
It’s funny how Americans — even history-minded ones — seem to have a real aversion to East European history. That’s probably because it’s convoluted, multi-ethnic and not at all idealistic. Its a non-stop tragedy that doesn’t fit easily with our preferred good guy/bad guy narrative. But it’s a lot more informative about how the world really works.
This seems like something the government would want to remain a secret. Why did he spill the beans?
The problem is that Brezinski never lost 1% of his hatred for Russia, even after communism fell. In 2015, he was indistinguishable from John McCain and Hillary Clinton on “confronting Russia” and “upholding American credibility” in Syria. He wanted to start WW3 over a patch of sand in the Middle East and probably would have, if still in government. The guy was smart but should have been kept very far away from a book of matches.
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by... nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler's generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west--as would follow from a declaration of war--the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain's treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK "did for Poland," that 20 per cent of Poland's population was destroyed, while it is "the blitz", a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain's bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland's). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it's disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler's Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let's have that argument straight out.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @AndrewR, @Anonymous, @J.Ross, @YetAnotherAnon
Thatcher was pretty much grown by the time the US entered the war, and, even if Germany had won the war, English would have obviously remained the national language of England, although certainly German would have become far more popular as a second language.
And I’ll give you that the Blitz was a relatively trivial part of the war overall, but it was a very significant part of the war from a British perspective. However hegemonic the British narrative of the war may be outside the UK, the Blitz was not trivial to its victims. Even the king and his consort almost were killed by it.
Probably because, exactly as with the Neocons, the Afghans they talked to before the invasion told them exactly what they wanted to hear.
Selfishness, greed, lust.
Ye shall be as gods.
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by... nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler's generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west--as would follow from a declaration of war--the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain's treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK "did for Poland," that 20 per cent of Poland's population was destroyed, while it is "the blitz", a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain's bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland's). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it's disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler's Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let's have that argument straight out.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @AndrewR, @Anonymous, @J.Ross, @YetAnotherAnon
Britain’s treaty guarantees deterred Poland from coming to a reasonable compromise with Germany over Germany’s claims to Poland-held territory.
Never heard of the Jews then?Replies: @Gunner
Israel is one of the few countries that likes Trump. The American Orthodox Jews also support him, so Judaism isn’t the reason for the ungratefulness. Liberal Jews mirror their liberal Christian neighbors in Trump Hate and White Hate.
Modest clothes big families no vulgar light porn entertainment private religious schools does not make a republican voter.Replies: @Gunner, @Moshe
It was an entertaining movie, but the scene where they implicitly blame everything that happens later on the lack of civil aid given to Afghanistan was nonsense. The Soviet retreat inspired Bin Laden to attack the U.S., which he thought was weaker.
What are we going to learn next? Maybe that our spy planes used the KAL 747 airliner as a decoy which resulted in getting it shot down?Replies: @donut
“What are we going to learn next? Maybe that our spy planes used the KAL 747 airliner as a decoy which resulted in getting it shot down?”
I suspect that’s exactly what happened . The US intelligence agencies had overflown Russian airspace as a regular practice in order to get them to turn on their various electronic sensors for EW and recon purposes . The Russians shot down more than 40 US aircraft between 1946 and 1960 with the loss of aircrews as well . I suppose the people in charge figured the Russians wouldn’t shoot down a civilian airliner .
Just like FDR made the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
Just like Lincoln made the South attack Fort Sumter.
Man, I remember when conservatives used to hate liberals who always blamed America first!Replies: @peterike, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
You do understand, don’t you, that Fort Sumter was IN the South, and Lincoln refused to relinquish it (on purpose to start the conflict)? Though he was asked quite nicely, multiple times over, by the South? The fighting started when Lincoln attempted to resupply it.
I think if you found 1,000 Americans who even heard of Fort Sumter at all, 995 of them would think it was some fort in New Jersey or somewhere in the North that the South attacked. Imagine the situation in reverse — say a fort in New Jersey that was manned by Southern soldiers, who wouldn’t leave, and then who were attempting to resupply the fort. It can’t be allowed to stand.
Sumter was an early version of a sock puppet, used by Lincoln to foment a war that nobody needed.
I remember reading about how the USSR sent men into Vietnam to kill Americans to test out their new SVD sniper rifles. And let’s not forget USSR MiG pilots in the Korean War battling UN forces.
I have an older friend who fought in Vietnam. To this day he still hates Russians. And even when I try to explain the shift, such as some Russians becoming Christian again and how Russia is not for globo-homo which he does hate, he still can't forgive them for supplying the NVA that he fought against. He can't separate Russian from communist. And even when I point out how not all communists were ethnic Russians, he just won't listen. To him Stalin was Russian, period. And no, I have not tried to go further than that. I figure if he can't understand Stalin wasn't Russian, what's the point of further explanations?
Later he later told me his hatred of Russians was similar to how his father, who had fought the Japanese in WW2, continued to hate the Japanese for the rest of his life. So much so that he gave my friend shit for buying Japanese products.
Back to Afghanistan. Removing for a moment the vengeance factor which was real and visceral, wouldn't Afghanistan have been better off if the Soviet-backed government of the 1970's remained? We always see the photos from the early 1970's showing Afghan girls in Western dress attending school. Would Afghanistan be a better place today if that socialist government would have remained?Replies: @Simply Simon, @Mark G., @Lurker
Major religious groups in the world.
Also, just because modern tech wasn't invented in Islam doesn't mean that Islam won't use it.
Brzeziński is being a little disingenuous here:They're workin' on it, Zbig, they're working on it. And with our tech and insane policies, we're helping them.Replies: @syonredux, @istevefan
Which, again, indicates that our policies create the problem. Isolate Islam, and the problem is solved.
I remember. I recall mostly being amazed that the USS Stark did not sink after being hit with two Exocet missiles. The Falklands War had taken place 5 years earlier and the HMS Sheffield was severely damaged after being hit by one of those missiles. It later sank in the rough waters as the British were trying to tow the ship to a harbor.
I suppose looking back it also serves as one of those incidents that didn’t fit the narrative. We were hostile towards Iran and put our ships in the Gulf to protect oil tankers. But it was Iraq that hit the Stark. And we didn’t have much of a reaction towards the Iraqis. My guess is had it been Iran, we’d have bombed them severely. But we didn’t do much if anything against Saddam for this.
U.S. complicity with Zionism is what inspired Bin Laden to attack the United States.
Which, in the 1970s, meant making things tough for the USSR…..
Mind you, things are completely different now. Putin’s Russia poses no real threat to the USA…..but lotsa people in elite circles are acting as though the USSR never fell….Trump, of course, is the significant exception. He seems to be the one guy in power who has figured out that the Russia of 2019 is not the USSR of 1979….
Nonsense. “Secret” aid my ass. There are no “conspiracies.” Next you’ll be quoting Alex Jones.
““But what is there in common among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia , moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia?”
Um, how about “under constant attack by Anglo-Zionism’?
To some degree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxAPIcSTOhEReplies: @istevefan, @donut, @Corn
As much as guys like me want to like Russia today, we have to remember that when they were the USSR they were pricks. And so I can see the notion of payback in Afghanistan as being justified for what they had done to us in Korea and Vietnam.
I have an older friend who fought in Vietnam. To this day he still hates Russians. And even when I try to explain the shift, such as some Russians becoming Christian again and how Russia is not for globo-homo which he does hate, he still can’t forgive them for supplying the NVA that he fought against. He can’t separate Russian from communist. And even when I point out how not all communists were ethnic Russians, he just won’t listen. To him Stalin was Russian, period. And no, I have not tried to go further than that. I figure if he can’t understand Stalin wasn’t Russian, what’s the point of further explanations?
Later he later told me his hatred of Russians was similar to how his father, who had fought the Japanese in WW2, continued to hate the Japanese for the rest of his life. So much so that he gave my friend shit for buying Japanese products.
Back to Afghanistan. Removing for a moment the vengeance factor which was real and visceral, wouldn’t Afghanistan have been better off if the Soviet-backed government of the 1970’s remained? We always see the photos from the early 1970’s showing Afghan girls in Western dress attending school. Would Afghanistan be a better place today if that socialist government would have remained?
I had a friend who was on the Bataan Death March and spent three years as a POW working in Japanese coal mines. (Yes, I'm an old guy) He said they were on starvation rations and were given a little food by Japanese women who also worked along side in the mines. I knew he too hated the Japanese and would not purchase Japanese products. I always remember him as having a haunted look in his eyes.Replies: @istevefan, @SunBakedSuburb, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
Also, just because modern tech wasn't invented in Islam doesn't mean that Islam won't use it.
Brzeziński is being a little disingenuous here:They're workin' on it, Zbig, they're working on it. And with our tech and insane policies, we're helping them.Replies: @syonredux, @istevefan
I imagine moving to and colonizing Europe, North America and Australia is probably something all muslims have in common. And Zbig and his fellow masters of the universe have paved the way for them to do so.
Really, Neocons are the worst of the worst. Despicable low-risk/ high reward weasels. At least Genghis Khan put his own life on the line while slaughtering and plundering millions. But these people are plain cowards.
Come the day of reckoning, they should be tried and hanged, Nuremberg - style.Replies: @Parbes
But we built an extraordinary amount of infrastructure and spent billions upon billions training the government's security forces, so instead you're as clueless as you are stupid.
Indeed, we've spent hundreds of billions and years trying to stabilise the two countries, not destabilise them.Replies: @Mr. Anon
We have trained insurgent groups. Who do you think has mostly been killing American soldiers in Afghanistan recently? Jihadists in the Army and Police that we ourselves “trained”.
1.) Again with this “we”. You are not an American. Your country (whatever that is) did not expend the lion’s share of funds on these foolish wars. Or are you now claiming to be an American?
2.) America spent a ridiculous amount of money because we spent it ridiculously. Truck drivers paid $200,000 a year, gas at $200 a gallon, etc. The amount of money spent “rebuilding” Afghanistan and Iraq has more to do with war profiteering than with any actual accomplishments.
Nitwit.
Well, at least that was to the point, troll.
I wonder what would have happened had Britain declined to declare war on Germany for its invasion of Belgium in WWI.
Multiply by a million.
This means that the countries which we try to bring these two sets of norms to are put into a state of constant social capital deficit, which leads to them falling into social capital bankruptcy and civil war.
We have sort of accepted that social liberalism might be a luxury, now, but diversity and multiculturalism are unquestionable. What's particularly annoying is that recognising that these things have a cost that Afghanistan cannot bear is not the same thing as saying they are bad for us. Yet, in order to have the strongest hand to play domestically, the proponents of these norms have to hold to the most extreme position.
In practical terms, acting on the above would mean splitting Afghanistan into Pastunstan, Hazarastan etc. From there, good borders would eventually mean good neighbours. But then, that might undermine the fashionable domestic agenda...so instead we have eternal war and bizarre conspiracy theories for why the interventions don't work and why we did them.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Bill Jones, @AnotherDad
“the fact that we see social liberalism and multiculturalism as inarguably good things”
Who is this we?
I certainly don’t.
I believe ONE, just ONE Brooklyn ultra precinct voted for Trump. Los Angeles has even more chabad Hasid ultra precincts than NYC and they all vote solid Democrat.
Modest clothes big families no vulgar light porn entertainment private religious schools does not make a republican voter.
After the election, I saw some poll that said Jewish men were practically 50/50 on Clinton and Trump, but Jewish women were weighing down the percentage by being 90% Clinton. That seems reasonable based on my observations. It's terrible the way crazy single Jewish women are scaring Holocaust-era Jews by pretending we are living in 1943 Poland.
I'm not sure why I should have to though. Before you write a post that makes your point in ALL CAPS maybe you should do a single Google Search?
Here is Brooklyn.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html#10.76/40.678/-73.969
The Red is where the Orthodox Jews live.
There are very very few Orthodox Jewish enclaves on the planet (which is why when I wear a yarmulka it's basically a high voltage magnet for sniffing out anyone with any knowledge of anything Jewish - yesterday a Moroccan guy in a smalll town in a country that isn't Morocco) and New York City has most of them. You plainly don't understand either chabad or Los Angeles so advising you to guess where on the map above in New Jersey you would find the Lakewoood Yeshiva would be a waste (you really and truly understand Jews - and the demographics of LA - less than you think you do) but even you can hack playing "Find The Red in Brooklyn".
That’s certainly one plausible scenario among several. I think the Chinese in Canada and the US would prefer to be loyal to themselves rather than to either the US or China, but it will take Chinese military force to create and protect such enclaves and homeland Chinese regard racial Chinese anywhere in the world as being still Chinese first and last, so the inhabitants of those enclaves will perforce need to be loyal to the Fatherland.
There are far too many of our so-called elites who are educated beyond their intelligence and wisdom. Either that, or they lack any kind of scruples to ruin millions of lives in order to play Monopoly or Risk in real life.
Really, Neocons are the worst of the worst. Despicable low-risk/ high reward weasels. At least Genghis Khan put his own life on the line while slaughtering and plundering millions. But these people are plain cowards.
Come the day of reckoning, they should be tried and hanged, Nuremberg – style.
Seems like you are correct. I found this article about the helicopter most shot down in Afghanistan to be interesting. Especially in the role of Mandatory Matrosov. 1/3 of MI 24 shot down were by Stingers.
http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Mi-24
Consider that 5600 helicopters were shot down in VN. In VN -> Afghan vs Soviet -> Afghan vs USA an order of magnitude reduction in helicopter losses took place. Not sure why exactly. Latter less than OoM but over longer period.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_aircraft_losses_during_the_Soviet–Afghan_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan
Britain changed a regional war — Germany fighting to take space around itself and the Soviet Union doing the same — into the Second World War, and lost its empire in the process. That’s a stupid way to prevent a competing power from taking you down a peg. By doing its dirty Empire business as usual, and by manipulating the United States to get into the war, Britain took itself down more than that, and condemned my wife’s people to Hell.
It seems that the political systems most vulnerable to subversion by Jews are democracies with franchises broadened to anyone with a pulse, which is why the (((media))) loves them so much.
Who is this we?
I certainly don't.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Tyrion 2
He often claims to be part of some nebulous “we” that he is not part of.
The USSR was never going to touch the US, not with our nuclear arsenal. Western Europe was as populous and was richer than the USSR. Add in Japan and it is not even close. We should have cut them all loose in the 60s and said, “You are all on your own. We will trade with you but if you are not willing to stand up for your own freedom, I don’t see why we should.” As for whether or not the Soviets should control Afghanistan, there is not a question that I could care any less about. Afghanistan – just like Switzerland only instead of calm bankers, watches and chocolate, psycho maniacs, stinger missiles and heroin. Who cares who controls it?
Also, another threat the USSR poised was through subversion inside the US. As it turns out there really was something to the subversion angle.A couple of observations here. First, keep in mind that the USSR in 1945 was the largest, strongest land force in history. Add to that the Warsaw Pact nations and you had the largest armored force in history that could have overrun Western Europe if not for the USA and its nuclear umbrella.
Second, part of the reason the US wanted to stay in Western Europe and Japan was to prevent them from going communist. There was a very real chance that, left on their own, communism could have taken root via the ballot box. That's why we had to use the Marshall Plan to build up Western Europe so quickly. People in poverty are more apt to vote for the communists. And unlike 2016, where Russian meddling in our elections was a joke, the Soviets were more than willing and able to assist those communist parties in the West to come to power. Even with our presence and aid, communist parties were not insignificant in post WW2 Western Europe. Who knows if they would have come to power in our absence.
The US likes to believe that we saved Europe and Japan post WW2. But the reality is we did it for our own purposes. We could not afford to let all of Europe and Japan become communist.Replies: @The Alarmist
OT: A homemaker in France put out a mini hit song in support of the Yellow Vests. Bernard-Henri Lévy and Daniel Cohn-Bendit says is smells of ….. anti-Semitism! I did not see that coming!
She wrote under her YouTube video: “fifty years after May ’68, the winds have changed. Here’s my first lyrics, done to a tune by Michel Fugain (”
Here’s a story in Le Parisien that can be translated if people wish:
http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/les-gentils-les-mechants-marguerite-depassee-par-le-buzz-de-sa-chanson-sur-les-gilets-jaunes-03-01-2019-7980477.php
Comments on Twitter and under the site are mocking the “boy who cried wolf” stuff from BHL and Cohn-Bendit
“A song that reminds us of theDarkestHours of our history”. A joke on the tiresome phrase used to describe France under the Occupation.
This is too funny.
This is why you’re scraping up Sheckles on obscure websites and not writing comedy and banging those dirty Shiksas in Hollywood . You’re the local eccentric , like a recruiter for Scientology in Ely, Nevada . An amusing but harmless character . Thought of as a mascot by the locals .
It’s Prometheism. With an E.
Mika doesn’t have an accent, does she? I wonder what Zbig would have thought of her unaristocratic language in calling Mike Pompeo a “butt boy”.
And later apologizing.
But not to Pompeo.
Well, okay… on a technicality she did:
Aristocracy ain’t what it used to be!
And in any event, wasn't Brzeszinski supposed to be representing the interests of the American people?Replies: @Anonym, @Chris Mallory
Why would you expect a Fake American to do anything to the benefit of the traditional American people?
Zbigniew Brzeziński, just another example of why we should have closed the borders in 1800.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxAPIcSTOhEReplies: @istevefan, @donut, @Corn
So what ?
I suspect that's exactly what happened . The US intelligence agencies had overflown Russian airspace as a regular practice in order to get them to turn on their various electronic sensors for EW and recon purposes . The Russians shot down more than 40 US aircraft between 1946 and 1960 with the loss of aircrews as well . I suppose the people in charge figured the Russians wouldn't shoot down a civilian airliner .Replies: @Simply Simon
“The Russians shot down more than 40 US aircraft between 1946 and 1960….” Are you including the number of US aircraft shot down by Russian MIG pilots during the Korean War?
I see you subscribe to the Frenchman’s dictum never to attribute to duplicity what can be explained by mere stupidity.
Or that other Frenchman’s “It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder!”
Are you telling me that the lyingpress-celebrated Hollywood montage of agreeable cliches starring reigning top stars (Charlie Wilson’s War) was not historically serious? Next you’ll tell me that Cop Rock does a very sloppy job of representing early nineties LA policing issues.
Or that other Frenchman's "It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder!"Replies: @J.Ross
But in the CIA we face stupidity freed from any consequence, punishment, or criticism, and normally even reporting, which makes it something worse.
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by... nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler's generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west--as would follow from a declaration of war--the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain's treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK "did for Poland," that 20 per cent of Poland's population was destroyed, while it is "the blitz", a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain's bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland's). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it's disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler's Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let's have that argument straight out.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @AndrewR, @Anonymous, @J.Ross, @YetAnotherAnon
Indeed, the popular notion of French cowardice comes from France surrendering a force superior by several measures to that of the Germans right after much smaller Poland fought an impossible fight against two invasions.
The threat was not that the USSR was going to invade the USA militarily. The threat was they were going to extend their influence and control over an increasingly larger area of the world which would have isolated us from trade and other contact. At one point I think communism in the late 1970s was installed in 1/3rd of the world’s nations and appeared to be the future trend.
Also, another threat the USSR poised was through subversion inside the US. As it turns out there really was something to the subversion angle.
A couple of observations here. First, keep in mind that the USSR in 1945 was the largest, strongest land force in history. Add to that the Warsaw Pact nations and you had the largest armored force in history that could have overrun Western Europe if not for the USA and its nuclear umbrella.
Second, part of the reason the US wanted to stay in Western Europe and Japan was to prevent them from going communist. There was a very real chance that, left on their own, communism could have taken root via the ballot box. That’s why we had to use the Marshall Plan to build up Western Europe so quickly. People in poverty are more apt to vote for the communists. And unlike 2016, where Russian meddling in our elections was a joke, the Soviets were more than willing and able to assist those communist parties in the West to come to power. Even with our presence and aid, communist parties were not insignificant in post WW2 Western Europe. Who knows if they would have come to power in our absence.
The US likes to believe that we saved Europe and Japan post WW2. But the reality is we did it for our own purposes. We could not afford to let all of Europe and Japan become communist.
No , only military aircraft shot down on illegal over flights of Russian airspace . Gary Powers and the U-2 incident ended that covert program .
BTW Gary Powers died in a helicopter crash in 1977 from wikipedia :
Powers was piloting a helicopter for KNBC Channel 4 over West Los Angeles on August 1, 1977 when the aircraft crashed, killing him and his cameraman George Spears.[3]:251,289–290,324 They had been recording video tape following brush fires in Santa Barbara County in the KNBC helicopter and were heading back from them.
His Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed at the Sepulveda Dam recreational area in Encino, California, several miles short of its intended landing site at Burbank Airport. The National Transportation Safety Board report attributed the probable cause of the crash to pilot error.[26] According to Powers’s son, an aviation mechanic had repaired a faulty fuel gauge without informing Powers, who subsequently misread it.[27]
At the last moment, he noticed children playing in the area and directed the helicopter elsewhere to avoid landing on them.[26] He might have landed safely if not for the last-second deviation, which compromised his autorotative descent.[27]
Powers was survived by his wife, children Claudia Dee and Francis Gary Powers Jr., and five sisters. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery as an Air Force veteran.[26][28]
I have an older friend who fought in Vietnam. To this day he still hates Russians. And even when I try to explain the shift, such as some Russians becoming Christian again and how Russia is not for globo-homo which he does hate, he still can't forgive them for supplying the NVA that he fought against. He can't separate Russian from communist. And even when I point out how not all communists were ethnic Russians, he just won't listen. To him Stalin was Russian, period. And no, I have not tried to go further than that. I figure if he can't understand Stalin wasn't Russian, what's the point of further explanations?
Later he later told me his hatred of Russians was similar to how his father, who had fought the Japanese in WW2, continued to hate the Japanese for the rest of his life. So much so that he gave my friend shit for buying Japanese products.
Back to Afghanistan. Removing for a moment the vengeance factor which was real and visceral, wouldn't Afghanistan have been better off if the Soviet-backed government of the 1970's remained? We always see the photos from the early 1970's showing Afghan girls in Western dress attending school. Would Afghanistan be a better place today if that socialist government would have remained?Replies: @Simply Simon, @Mark G., @Lurker
I don’t think the Russians had much of a role in the US losing the Vietnam War. That war was basically lost not longer after it started because we never pursued the policies to win it.
I had a friend who was on the Bataan Death March and spent three years as a POW working in Japanese coal mines. (Yes, I’m an old guy) He said they were on starvation rations and were given a little food by Japanese women who also worked along side in the mines. I knew he too hated the Japanese and would not purchase Japanese products. I always remember him as having a haunted look in his eyes.
Who is this we?
I certainly don't.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Tyrion 2
The majority of people in the West, it’s a fact, what are you going to do? Ignoring it doesn’t change it.
Every major German political party except the standalone opposition AfD has been hacked, with personal information and credit cards released. There is no good information available yet (AfD may have been exempted merely because of timing, having recently become much stronger), and it may be a Sony-style fake hack for sympathy. The lyingpress is already setting up the idea that the AfD colludifered with The Evil Russians to hack the dominant CDU.
At least the manufacturers of consent have moved on from thirty year old not-sex that never happened as a manipulation.
It is my understanding that Britain declared was against Germany only after it attacked Poland. Some kind of mutual defense agreement.
Instead, Britain and France had a "phony war" and left Poland to fight Germany alone. Later on the Soviets joined in too, once it was obvious Poland was a goner (Soviets had been leery due to the spanking Poland gave them in the 1920s).
>>….. Not to mention our own current Afghan quagmire.
Quagmire. The neo-cons howled with derision against the journalist R.W. Apple when he used that word in reference to our early days in Afghanistan. A week or two later the U.S. Army/Air Force unleashed a massive air blitz against entrenched Taliban positions, killing many, sending the survivors scurrying into the canyons, ravines and mountains. Shortly after the war was all but declared won. Over. Mission accomplished. Oh, boy did the new-cons howl and mock Mr. Apple.
Well, Mr. Apple is in his grave, but who gets mocked now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxAPIcSTOhEReplies: @istevefan, @donut, @Corn
I’ve never heard of the Soviets sending snipers into South Vietnam but Soviet SAM crews were sent to North Vietnam to operate Surface to Air Missile batteries. Some were even killed in American bombing and SAM busting raids.
The elite and a reliable segment of uninformed normies are not a majority. Also, it is not easy or in some cases possible to properly criticize this “consensus” in most of the world — liberal values means censorship. And this majority is still losing despite billions in their war chest and full mass media support. You could argue it’s been good for business but not that a single person honestly believes in and sincerely supports this suicidal trash. You stop anybody on the street and talk vaguely, of course they’ll nod along to it. Make it apply to the elites too and watch them run from it.
The Hitler apologists who think they're popular because Orban succeeds are cretinously deluded. One might as well think America is going to adopt the pre-war Japanese imperial political system because anime is quite popular.
These people need to get a grip.
As an aside, who better fits the term "social liberal" - Marine Le Pen or Hillary Clinton? I'd say Marine. She's much more likely to leave people be.
My students of chinese descent but born in tye us often refer to tyemsrlves as chinese. Not chinese-american but straight chinese. And its the same ethno-superior way chinese born chinese speak of chinese
Yes, probably by a decade. Just like 60k dead American bodies and several hundred thousand wounded Americans returned from Vietnam over roughly a decade could hardly go unnoticed in middle America, roughly 20k Soviet dead and 50k wounded could not go unnoticed.
In fact, the numbers suggest the Sov leadership were more willing to pull the plug than American leadership, in part due to economic considerations, but more likely owing to a sense by those calling the shots that their one-party rule leaves them precariously in the lurch with respect to having legitimacy. Elections are a wonderful fig leaf. You get the leadership you tolerate.
My great uncle may have lived past 27.
Multiply by a million.
I believe he meant the First World War.
I had a friend who was on the Bataan Death March and spent three years as a POW working in Japanese coal mines. (Yes, I'm an old guy) He said they were on starvation rations and were given a little food by Japanese women who also worked along side in the mines. I knew he too hated the Japanese and would not purchase Japanese products. I always remember him as having a haunted look in his eyes.Replies: @istevefan, @SunBakedSuburb, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
There are two different, but related, aspects to consider about the Vietnam War. The first was the fight against the VietCong guerillas inside South Vietnam. The second was the war being waged by North Vietnam against South Vietnam.
Our policies might not have won the civil war inside South Vietnam. But we could have prevented much of North Vietnam’s aggression against South Vietnam save for the huge arm supplies the North was getting from the Soviets and Chinese. Just in the Christmas bombing campaign of 1972, we lost 16 B-52 bombers to Soviet made missiles. It’s hard to imagine today the US having so many aircraft shot down. But the Soviets enabled the North Vietnamese to defend themselves against us while supplying the VietCong in the South to help overthrow the South Vietnam.
Additionally we increasingly had to fight actual North Vietnamese Army units in South Vietnam as they invaded and were supplied with Soviet and Chinese goods. So without the Soviets, the North Vietnamese would not have been able to invade the South and support the Viet Cong. Now, there is no guarantee that the South would have survived given some of their leaders were very corrupt. But it would have helped the South much if the North was not able to enter their territory and aid the guerrillas.
I don’t blame our decision-makers at the time—most of us would have made their same arguments but in retrospect we just have to move on and learn hard lessons about human nature and national nature.
jack Broughton's books, "Going Downtown" and "Thud Ridge" are essential reading in this matter.Replies: @Joe Stalin
Blowback.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb
In the late 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the most dreadful and interesting war in human history, American anti-Soviet hardliners like George Kennan, James Forrestal, and the Dulles brothers advocated for containment of the Russkies along with some direct action using espionage and paramilitary units. What Mika Brzezinski’s dad did in the Carter-era was radical: weaponizing a religion with legions of adherents against a foe of his homeland. It set a precedent for future political-bureaucrat monsters like Dick Cheney and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Also, another threat the USSR poised was through subversion inside the US. As it turns out there really was something to the subversion angle.A couple of observations here. First, keep in mind that the USSR in 1945 was the largest, strongest land force in history. Add to that the Warsaw Pact nations and you had the largest armored force in history that could have overrun Western Europe if not for the USA and its nuclear umbrella.
Second, part of the reason the US wanted to stay in Western Europe and Japan was to prevent them from going communist. There was a very real chance that, left on their own, communism could have taken root via the ballot box. That's why we had to use the Marshall Plan to build up Western Europe so quickly. People in poverty are more apt to vote for the communists. And unlike 2016, where Russian meddling in our elections was a joke, the Soviets were more than willing and able to assist those communist parties in the West to come to power. Even with our presence and aid, communist parties were not insignificant in post WW2 Western Europe. Who knows if they would have come to power in our absence.
The US likes to believe that we saved Europe and Japan post WW2. But the reality is we did it for our own purposes. We could not afford to let all of Europe and Japan become communist.Replies: @The Alarmist
Communism re-branded itself as the Climate Movement, and is now comfortably ensconced in more than 190 countries. It owns the future.
The USA has a vital interest in maintaining bases, troops, armored vehicles and planes in Europe. After Yalta, the URSS and the USA basically divided Europe up between themselves. Those European countries are still USA semi-colonies. It’s not hard to understand.
The Zionist troika you mention has weaponized enchantment.
Jesus H. Christ on across !
I had a friend who was on the Bataan Death March and spent three years as a POW working in Japanese coal mines. (Yes, I'm an old guy) He said they were on starvation rations and were given a little food by Japanese women who also worked along side in the mines. I knew he too hated the Japanese and would not purchase Japanese products. I always remember him as having a haunted look in his eyes.Replies: @istevefan, @SunBakedSuburb, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
One thought stream out there in the ether proposes that the false-flag Gulf of Tonkin incident was engineered not just for the sake of anti-communism or DOD contractors, but also for the CIA who wanted to take over the French Golden Triangle franchise. All of that heroin flowing into major American urban centers in the late 60s and early 70s generated a huge cash flow into the agency’s black budget accounts.
Old chestnut probably familiar to many here:
Haven’t had time to read through the comments but I trust someone has pointed out the Russians are engaging in their own version of Promethianism here in the States.
Bill Clinton’s mentor, Georgetown Professor Carol Quigley, covers this in his book “Tragedy and Hope.” England spent years leading up to WWII actively coercing Germany under the cover of Chamberlain’s weakness and gullibility.
“Remember the Maine”
Modest clothes big families no vulgar light porn entertainment private religious schools does not make a republican voter.Replies: @Gunner, @Moshe
I have a hard time believing that they would vote as solidly Democrat as socially liberal non-Jewish New Yorkers, but I dont know.
After the election, I saw some poll that said Jewish men were practically 50/50 on Clinton and Trump, but Jewish women were weighing down the percentage by being 90% Clinton. That seems reasonable based on my observations. It’s terrible the way crazy single Jewish women are scaring Holocaust-era Jews by pretending we are living in 1943 Poland.
Poles have a tendency to claim they are aristocrats.
Brzeziński seems to have thought of China as just one of those countries. But he and Carter created a greater menace to the West than the Soviets ever could have been.
It was China in Korea and China in Vietnam mainly . Vietnam had to be fought without bringing in the Chinese in the same way as happened in Korea. Afghanistan was not a Vietnam for that reason. What Carter did do was issue a presidential order for US officials to help trade with China any way they could.
Now the former third world country is on the dark side of the Moon, like bloody Transformers. Great strategic thinking from Zbig and Jimmy.
I have an older friend who fought in Vietnam. To this day he still hates Russians. And even when I try to explain the shift, such as some Russians becoming Christian again and how Russia is not for globo-homo which he does hate, he still can't forgive them for supplying the NVA that he fought against. He can't separate Russian from communist. And even when I point out how not all communists were ethnic Russians, he just won't listen. To him Stalin was Russian, period. And no, I have not tried to go further than that. I figure if he can't understand Stalin wasn't Russian, what's the point of further explanations?
Later he later told me his hatred of Russians was similar to how his father, who had fought the Japanese in WW2, continued to hate the Japanese for the rest of his life. So much so that he gave my friend shit for buying Japanese products.
Back to Afghanistan. Removing for a moment the vengeance factor which was real and visceral, wouldn't Afghanistan have been better off if the Soviet-backed government of the 1970's remained? We always see the photos from the early 1970's showing Afghan girls in Western dress attending school. Would Afghanistan be a better place today if that socialist government would have remained?Replies: @Simply Simon, @Mark G., @Lurker
Afghanistan probably would have been better off if both the Russians and Americans had stayed out. If just the Americans had stayed out, I think the Soviet empire would still have collapsed because Russia had an unworkable economic system. When it did collapse, then Afghanistan would have fallen out of its orbit like the other satellite states and would be similar to them today. It would be no paradise but not as bad off as it is now. The U.S. certainly has no vital interest in being there now, won’t be able to continue to afford the level of military spending it currently has, and should start pulling back from its overseas commitments in places like Afghanistan now.
What was the cost of living outside of Kabul in 1979? If nubile young boys were cheap, what wasn’t?
Rexit left Afghanistan naked!
Wistful Birchite theories about how we could have won in Vietnam are off the mark. Hindsight is 20/20 but we fought in Vietnam based on the gravely mistaken domino theory. Better to have let these tinpot nations alone, let them work out their own internal class contradictions like expurgatory enemas and treat them as fellow rational actors when they reemerge from civil strife as the genuinely nationalist entities they are and were at heart.
I don’t blame our decision-makers at the time—most of us would have made their same arguments but in retrospect we just have to move on and learn hard lessons about human nature and national nature.
I think if you found 1,000 Americans who even heard of Fort Sumter at all, 995 of them would think it was some fort in New Jersey or somewhere in the North that the South attacked. Imagine the situation in reverse -- say a fort in New Jersey that was manned by Southern soldiers, who wouldn't leave, and then who were attempting to resupply the fort. It can't be allowed to stand.
Sumter was an early version of a sock puppet, used by Lincoln to foment a war that nobody needed.Replies: @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
I’m guessing you haven’t read primary sources from the period. Check out ‘Allegiance’ by David Detzer. That book isn’t polemical, it’s straight history about the Fort Sumter crisis. Detzer has a good reliance upon the primary sources, mostly the communications between leaders.
First of all, as it was federal property, Lincoln had no moral or legal obligation to surrender the fort. So get any other notion out of your head. It doesn’t matter that it was “in the South.” Besides, what the heck does that really mean anyway? The commander of the fort, Major Robert Anderson, was from a slaveholding background in a Southern state, Kentucky. The location of the fort in a loosely defined region has precisely zero to do with its legal status. Just ask Robert Anderson!
Moreover, are you aware of the fact that Lincoln ceased all federal activity in the rebellious 7 states aside from the delivery of the mail? He made no effort to reclaim federal property that had been taken under Buchanan’s watch. Some aggression, that.
Anyway, when Lincoln told the South Carolinians that he was going to resupply Fort Sumter, the letters immediately flew back and forth among the Southern leaders to the effect that they should fire upon Fort Sumter before the U.S. Navy resupplied. It was a cut and dry decision for war. They made it, and it wasn’t remotely “forced upon them.”
You’re absolutely full of crap if you dare suggest that Jefferson Davis, South Carolina, et al, didn’t want the war to begin right then and there. One could argue that Lincoln wanted to maneuver them into firing the first shots. But in that case one must still blame the Southerners for being stereotypically hot-headed.
South Carolina’s firing upon that fort is only a “conservative” political action if you’re either 1) Ignorant and dumb like Thomas DiLorenzo or 2) Clouded by loyalty to Confederate ancestors. As two of my ancestors (well, relatives) were Confederate veterans, I really don’t respect either of these.
Just like FDR made the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
Just like Lincoln made the South attack Fort Sumter.
Man, I remember when conservatives used to hate liberals who always blamed America first!Replies: @peterike, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
God help you if you can’t figure out the differences between the Fort Sumter crisis and Pearl Harbor.
I had a friend who was on the Bataan Death March and spent three years as a POW working in Japanese coal mines. (Yes, I'm an old guy) He said they were on starvation rations and were given a little food by Japanese women who also worked along side in the mines. I knew he too hated the Japanese and would not purchase Japanese products. I always remember him as having a haunted look in his eyes.Replies: @istevefan, @SunBakedSuburb, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
As far as I know, the Communist Chinese had a more direct role in supporting the North Vietnamese
There were several thousand Chinese soldiers in North Vietnam on anti-aircraft duty. A huge amount – maybe even the majority – of NV AA fire was actually coming from Chinese forces.
“Between August 1965 and March 1969, sixteen Chinese anti-aircraft divisions, amounting to 150 000 personnel, operated in North Vietnam. The total strength of Chinese troops in the DRV reached a peak of 170 000 in 1967.”
That quote is from McNeill, Ian, and Ashley Ekins, ‘On the Offensive: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War January 1967-June 1968.’
Also, as an anecdote, in his wonderful book WE WERE SOLDIERS, Hal Moore related how his men found the bodies of Han Chinese in the Ia Drang area. But American generals specifically told Moore to STOP reporting that fact to them. The Pentagon wanted nothing to do with admitting Chinese presence in Vietnam.
With all that said, I would agree that the war was probably unwinnable from its inception, not unless we wanted to invade the Chinese land too.
H.R. McMaster’s book ‘Dereliction of Duty’ was great. Can’t believe he’s so mediocre otherwise.
https://twitter.com/vnbateman/status/1063067320476680192Replies: @Cagey Beast
Yet again, “the personal is political” ends up meaning “pay attention to my body!”. This seems to be what it gets down to with women, again and again.
As far as nude protests go, it's rather cute and saucy. I don't agree with her message, but she gets some points for good humour.
I had a friend who was on the Bataan Death March and spent three years as a POW working in Japanese coal mines. (Yes, I'm an old guy) He said they were on starvation rations and were given a little food by Japanese women who also worked along side in the mines. I knew he too hated the Japanese and would not purchase Japanese products. I always remember him as having a haunted look in his eyes.Replies: @istevefan, @SunBakedSuburb, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
This is from Hal Moore’s book We Were Soldiers. He’s discussing a moment when General Westmoreland met with Moore’s officers and soldiers.
Speaking of advisers, during the famous Son Tay raid in 1970 IIRC some of the Green Berets reported shooting at (and possibly killing) two or three white men. It’s widely assumed they were advisers from Russia or some Warsaw Pact nation.
From wiki:
This is all before the July 1979 aid under discussion by Zbig in the interview.
The CIA figured out they were requesting Soviet aid and getting it, so moved a piece ahead on the chess board.
Inflation adjusted to 2019 dollars, approximately $1.75 million.
For scale comparison: taxpayer-funded, formal military aid to Washington’s Islamic protectorate of Kosovo in 2018 was $5 million.
Granted,
– 1979 Afghanistan population: 13.2 million*
– 2018 Kosovo population: 1.8 million.
__
* – Note: As of 2018, stands at 31 million; 5+ million more in diaspora, some of whom were among the Merkel-Treason-Wave of ’15-’16.
OT: Japan not for Japanese
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-the-us-avoid-japans-demographic-disaster/2018/12/31/1f29ba66-0d3f-11e9-8938-5898adc28fa2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ab584b4e6197
With bonus specious argument that baby bust due to not enough low skill service industry jobs that Japanese just won’t do…
Really, Neocons are the worst of the worst. Despicable low-risk/ high reward weasels. At least Genghis Khan put his own life on the line while slaughtering and plundering millions. But these people are plain cowards.
Come the day of reckoning, they should be tried and hanged, Nuremberg - style.Replies: @Parbes
Even mentioning today’s Western neocon scumbags in the same breath as Genghis Khan, is a blasphemy.
Re: Breakup of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic during 1772-95
Poland was simply the first country to show the world that multiculturalism
didn’t work. 140-50 years later, in the wake of World War I, the same fate befell
the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the German Empire.
Would you mind explaining what you mean?
Anybody got links to any discussions of how much of a part Russia’s played in making their failed former economic system all the rage in our universities?Replies: @BB753
OT but very iSteve —
A jewish reporter interviews a jewish college professor about her book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege In a Racially Divided America.
In the interview we learn valuable nuggets like this:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-kids-racism-way-privileged-parenting-props-unjust-system-ncna953951
This means that the countries which we try to bring these two sets of norms to are put into a state of constant social capital deficit, which leads to them falling into social capital bankruptcy and civil war.
We have sort of accepted that social liberalism might be a luxury, now, but diversity and multiculturalism are unquestionable. What's particularly annoying is that recognising that these things have a cost that Afghanistan cannot bear is not the same thing as saying they are bad for us. Yet, in order to have the strongest hand to play domestically, the proponents of these norms have to hold to the most extreme position.
In practical terms, acting on the above would mean splitting Afghanistan into Pastunstan, Hazarastan etc. From there, good borders would eventually mean good neighbours. But then, that might undermine the fashionable domestic agenda...so instead we have eternal war and bizarre conspiracy theories for why the interventions don't work and why we did them.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Bill Jones, @AnotherDad
Quality comment Tyrion–a good argument in there, that is not often put as clearly and concisely.
I’d only add that “diversity and multicultalism”–as well as social liberalism in it’s modern form–are a disaster everywhere. We’re simply rich enough in the West that we’ve been paying this tab and limping by–though the trend lines are pretty damn appalling all across the West.
What actually works–the great socio-political organizational breakthrough–is nationalism; “one-people” nations where everyone feels like they are–whatever smaller (regional) variations–“on the same team”. And with of course the traditional playbook of every successful civilization–patriarchy, with monogamous, one-per-customer, marriage.
Liberal women hopped on board the crazy train during W’s Administration, and they haven’t hopped off since. I think they’ve torn the brakes off the damn train.
Great excerpt. I’d heard of Chinese troops being posted in the North but knew little of them in the South.
Speaking of advisers, during the famous Son Tay raid in 1970 IIRC some of the Green Berets reported shooting at (and possibly killing) two or three white men. It’s widely assumed they were advisers from Russia or some Warsaw Pact nation.
The Soviet Union was doomed when the Suadis “opened the spigots” in late 85, It takes a long time for a huge beast to die, starvation works best and is safest.
Were they really bankrupted? Can a non-capitalist entity be bankrupt? I ask because their system did not operate on a profit motive. They even created a system of trade among their satellites and allies that was largely based upon barter, not cash. The term 'The Second World' referred to these communist nations.
Was Western media with its depictions of consumer goods galore more of a factor in getting a large chunk of the people in Eastern Europe and the USSR to demand change?
I don't know the answers. I'd love to hear from someone who was of age in the USSR thirty years ago with their first hand knowledge.
Moscow has been nuked?
The Z plan in Afghanistan would have worked perfectly if we had banned all moslems from living in the USA. Z. did not think far enough ahead.
The reason that “Kosovo” exists is solely to justify & host Camp Bondsteel. Do a little research & you will see what I am driving at here. Protecting the largely fictive nation of”Kosovo” is merely the cloth to cover the nakedness of the aggression involved in the Balkan War. Again, do a little research on the complete bullshit of the efforts to “stop” that war by giving the Serbs an ultimatum that they could not accept instead of any effort to act as an honest broker. Islamic terrorists were again employed quite explicitly as they were in Afghanistan.
Re: Was Poland a passive victim of history?
At 314,673 sq mi the Polish-Lithuanian Republic (Rzeczpospolita) was,
for over 200 years, the largest country in Europe. At its highest extent, in
fact, it was so large that its eastern border lay 50 miles from Moscow.
In addition to central Poland, it comprised in today’s terms Lithuania, parts
of Latvia, Belarus, and western Ukraine (e.g., Kiev was under Polish control
for 100 years). Poland-Lithuania’s area was about 50% larger than the area
of the German Empire in 1914. Hence for the first 800 years of its history
Poland was hardly a passive victim of history.
I sometimes joke with my Jewish friends that after 3,000 years of history all
they have to show for it is a country which is about 1/15 the size of Poland, and
not in the best part of western Asia either.
One effect of Russia’s annexation of Crimea was that it pushed Lithuania and
Latvia (and even Estonia to some extent) back into the arms of Poland. For
example, the relationship between Lithuania and Poland is better than it has
been in decades. With 2-3 million Ukrainians working and studying in Poland,
Ukraine is now much closer to Poland than it would’ve been otherwise. Even
Belarus is these days rather wary of Russia and its designs. So in a sense
Pilsudski has been vindicated, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
is coming back to life, at least in the sense that all these countries see it in
their self-interest to get closer to Poland as Poland is viewed in the region
as a very stable and increasingly powerful country.
I don’t know about that. Most Singaporean Chinese I know do not identify themselves with their ancestral motherland, making a point to say that they are of Chinese descent but Singaporean by loyalty.
White people are to America what Russians were to the Soviet Union – the dominant group that held everything together, resented by everyone else. Prometheanism in America means encouraging the Left’s anti-white instincts, using social media. Obviously, they’re not leading the movement any more than the Poles led Central Asia’s anti-soviet movements, but they can stoke the flames. We know they do the same on our side as well.
Anybody got links to any discussions of how much of a part Russia’s played in making their failed former economic system all the rage in our universities?
One reading of what you wrote is that we’ll all be subject to a layer of Chinese rule. Direct colonies (Chinatown city states) plus Chinese-induced (?) dissolution of the USA into thousands of weakly sovereign ‘duchies.’
I am not going to disagree with you because I am not well versed enough to know. But I have some questions about how and why the USSR ceased to exist.
Were they really bankrupted? Can a non-capitalist entity be bankrupt? I ask because their system did not operate on a profit motive. They even created a system of trade among their satellites and allies that was largely based upon barter, not cash. The term ‘The Second World’ referred to these communist nations.
Was Western media with its depictions of consumer goods galore more of a factor in getting a large chunk of the people in Eastern Europe and the USSR to demand change?
I don’t know the answers. I’d love to hear from someone who was of age in the USSR thirty years ago with their first hand knowledge.
Mind you, things are completely different now. Putin's Russia poses no real threat to the USA.....but lotsa people in elite circles are acting as though the USSR never fell....Trump, of course, is the significant exception. He seems to be the one guy in power who has figured out that the Russia of 2019 is not the USSR of 1979....Replies: @Neil Templeton
It’s a classic tragedy. The United States had it all. Yet, beginning with WWI, maybe the Civil War, she became entranced with becoming a world power. Her natural beauty and talent lit up the stage. Thousands of suitors, some from home, many from abroad, courted and curried her. She resists, shy and coy, but finally, she is caught in the trap. Snared by pride, vanity and her faith in her own selfless beauty. She twists and turns, gnaws off her dead leg of deplorables, but in the end, she loses everything and burns all around her. All that remains are ashes and scattered molding leaves on a January day.
Or maybe his speech stopped shy of the frontier that he was thinking.
From a guy who killed a million people himself, and oughta know. It is frightening to me how evil these people are. I’m no pacifist and I know there will always be war and you have to make tough choices. But our leaders today are psychopaths, cell mates in hell with Stalin.
I'd only add that "diversity and multicultalism"--as well as social liberalism in it's modern form--are a disaster everywhere. We're simply rich enough in the West that we've been paying this tab and limping by--though the trend lines are pretty damn appalling all across the West.
What actually works--the great socio-political organizational breakthrough--is nationalism; "one-people" nations where everyone feels like they are--whatever smaller (regional) variations--"on the same team". And with of course the traditional playbook of every successful civilization--patriarchy, with monogamous, one-per-customer, marriage.Replies: @Neil Templeton
Luxury goods are rarely wise purchases.
I agree with what you say. The USSR would have imploded anyways. The war cost it 27 million dead and totally and permanently retarded its economy. Like a guy who is shot by a bullet and died years or decades later from it, it was Hitler who actually killed the USSR.
It's one thing for a superpower to meddle from a safe distance in its opponent's sphere of influence with proxy forces, covert operations and plausible deniability.
But Poland went right at the Great Power on its border. They actually invaded the Soviet Union and tried to conquer the Ukraine for themselves in the early 1920s (and came pretty close to winning). When the tide turned against them, they saved themselves and humiliated Trosky's Red Army with a miraculous win at the Battle of Warsaw in 1921.
Later, they took over-aggressive foolhardy positions against Germany. For example, according to Pat Buchanan in The Unnecessary War (an excellent semi-contrarian history), Poland could have avoided war with Germany by merely surrendering Danzig (which was, after all, a German city). Instead, they drew a line in the sand and practically forced Hitler to cut a deal with Stalin to carve them up.
In Buchanan's (pretty persuasive) view, Hitler always wanted to invade Russia first, not the West. But Poland's intransigence combined with Britain's totally gratuitous, unilateral (and unenforceable) guarantee to Poland meant that France got the Blitzkrieg instead. That's not the way they teach it in schools, however.
It's funny how Americans -- even history-minded ones -- seem to have a real aversion to East European history. That's probably because it's convoluted, multi-ethnic and not at all idealistic. Its a non-stop tragedy that doesn't fit easily with our preferred good guy/bad guy narrative. But it's a lot more informative about how the world really works.Replies: @AP
There was a Ukrainian government in Kiev that was allied to Poland. The Ukrainian people weren’t crazy about Poland (Poland hoped for 100,00 Ukrainian volunteers but got about 15,000) but were not pro-Soviet either (there was no resistance from Ukrainians to this “invasion”).
Correct. However, Poland proposed to France to invade Germany in 1934, before Germany had rebuilt its military much, and while Poland’s military was not yet obsolete. When I was in once-German Silesia I saw the hastily-built defenses Germany had put up against a possible Polish invasion. France declined, and both countries were destroyed a few years later.
Speaking of Prometheism. Here is the Muslim-free zone in Europe. It’s like the Prometheism project:
Of course those events didn't happen in isolation but then few wars do.
With China, naturally, since everything nowadays is made there.
China.
Britain and France were supposed to both attack Germany if Germany attacked Poland. Poland was supposed to hold out for a few weeks while the western attack got rolling. Based on this agreed-upon plan, Poland did not surrender its territory to Germany (although Poles might not have done so anyways – they are not Czechs).
Instead, Britain and France had a “phony war” and left Poland to fight Germany alone. Later on the Soviets joined in too, once it was obvious Poland was a goner (Soviets had been leery due to the spanking Poland gave them in the 1920s).
The INSANE pledge to Poland was not good for Poland or Britain.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lW0BPsurHfM/WiEX6DMRQ0I/AAAAAAAAFXw/EqxQgCZGbYIhyXrt0K54VJjV1Ywd2WqfgCLcBGAs/s1600/EU%2Bmuslim%2Bscenarios.pngReplies: @Thea
The Soviet Union, as it was in the 1970 and 80s, kept Poland poor and enslaved. However, my impression is that it was not nearly as destructive to Polish culture as the EU will ultimately prove to be.Replies: @anon
The day may very well come when Poles will look back fondly on the Soviet control of their country. The Iron curtain kept Poles in.
It also kept Muslims and Africans out.
There was nothing in the treaty that actually required it. The “great War” would have ended in 1914 and would have been far less destructive for everyone.
Current wisdom is that Germany attacking USSR was obviously insane in 1941. Yet Poland had given the Soviets a good hiding in the 1920s and Germany/Austria had defeated Russia in WW1.
Of course those events didn’t happen in isolation but then few wars do.
In discussing the change from the USSR to modern Russia, this web page at the Russian military’s official website will illustrate this change.
Apparently they are building an Orthodox Cathedral dedicated to the Russian armed forces. It is being done with donations, not government funds. But can you imagine something like this on any dot mil website in the US?
If interested, here is the page with the description in English and architect’s renditions.
No. But if a temple were built for all three dozen Wiccans in the service no doubt it’d be trumpeted high and low on .mil
Celebrate diversity
In many cases, yes. But this particular bird is a committed nudist. And the whole point of nudism is that your nudity is ignored.
As far as nude protests go, it’s rather cute and saucy. I don’t agree with her message, but she gets some points for good humour.
I had picked up the impression that Vietnam-China relations were not great and that most support came from the USSR.
Even if true, that position could have altered over time.
It also kept Muslims and Africans out.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Well, Africans anyway. (Except for many students.) The USSR had millions of Mohammedans, some of them as crazy as any. Ever heard of Chechnya?
In 1979, China had their “Vietnam” and lost 20K soldiers in a border skirmish with their erstwhile ally. Mind you this took place in about 1 month! Huge casualties for such a short conflict.
I'm sure the Vietnamese got the message though.
They stayed put however. At least they didn’t migrate to the satellite countries.
I have an older friend who fought in Vietnam. To this day he still hates Russians. And even when I try to explain the shift, such as some Russians becoming Christian again and how Russia is not for globo-homo which he does hate, he still can't forgive them for supplying the NVA that he fought against. He can't separate Russian from communist. And even when I point out how not all communists were ethnic Russians, he just won't listen. To him Stalin was Russian, period. And no, I have not tried to go further than that. I figure if he can't understand Stalin wasn't Russian, what's the point of further explanations?
Later he later told me his hatred of Russians was similar to how his father, who had fought the Japanese in WW2, continued to hate the Japanese for the rest of his life. So much so that he gave my friend shit for buying Japanese products.
Back to Afghanistan. Removing for a moment the vengeance factor which was real and visceral, wouldn't Afghanistan have been better off if the Soviet-backed government of the 1970's remained? We always see the photos from the early 1970's showing Afghan girls in Western dress attending school. Would Afghanistan be a better place today if that socialist government would have remained?Replies: @Simply Simon, @Mark G., @Lurker
I can remember a 1980s documentary about the fighting in Afghanistan and ended up with a nagging suspicion that the Soviet presence was not quite the stereotypical Bad Guy operation we were being warned about.
I agree, but there’s a universe of space between the progressive cancer and the commenter “Bill Jones”.
The Hitler apologists who think they’re popular because Orban succeeds are cretinously deluded. One might as well think America is going to adopt the pre-war Japanese imperial political system because anime is quite popular.
These people need to get a grip.
As an aside, who better fits the term “social liberal” – Marine Le Pen or Hillary Clinton? I’d say Marine. She’s much more likely to leave people be.
Yes, didn’t they call it a punishment operation or something? A response to the Vietnamese defeat of Cambodia. It looked like only one side had got punished though! After all, the Vietnamese contained many men with decades of military/combat experience, what with near continuous warfare from WW2 onward.
I’m sure the Vietnamese got the message though.
Not so fast. Remember those surprised by the return of the Snake, “Plisken, I thought you were dead!”
Might also consider that the inoculated zone, with consideration for transmission (Baltics, Finland, et. al.) and the 1990’s Balkan Policy Experiment Zone.
No, they migrated to Moscow!
And later apologizing.But not to Pompeo.
Well, okay... on a technicality she did:Aristocracy ain't what it used to be!Replies: @Steve Sailer
Neo-Promethism
It’s Prometheism. With an E.
Thanks.
Brzeziński is blowing smoke. Note that his last reply is rhetorical, an attack justified by expressions of outrage, rather than informational. He knows full well that he made a classic blunder (poking the hornet’s nest), but he’s half proud of it because he hurt an enemy. He doesn’t care on way or the other about his employers / country getting hurt in consequence. Think of him as a 10 year old talking to other 10 year olds.
Counterinsurgency
We could have come together as a united force after 9/11 with good border security and the Bushes screwed us by following this same garbage policy. Now if any foreign power attacks half our citizens will aid them.If Russia , the right will help if Islamic or Mestizo, then the left will.Replies: @Counterinsurgency
An insurgency gains enough influence/credibility among the general population to weaken support for the current regime (French Revolution: the Encyclopedists, popular music (Mozart, “Marriage of Figaro”, Voltaire, many others). It emplaces a “shadow government”, an alternative system of government with judicial, military, and executive functions (but no representative legislative functions, although these may be simulated). It next tries to take areas that it can defend (Paris), displacing the shadow government by its own government. Then it tries to take the rest if the country. There may be a combat side to it (the Bastille, the march on the Palace), but that’s a distraction. The essential goal is displacement of the existing government by the shadow government through population control.
That’s the theory, bare bones version. Sometimes the insurgency works, sometimes not.
The irony is that the Democrats think they’re waging an insurgency (“march through the institutions”, “control of the narrative”) against the historic American population. In fact, they’re repeating the history of the NAACP (founded by the Jewish establishment, which was ejected in the 1960s), or the Bolsheviks (supported largely by Jewish interests, staffed largely by believers in Judaism, most of whom appeared to have been killed during Stalin’s purges). In both cases, group A founded an organization that relied on group B for staffing. The Bolsheviks could not run Russia. There just weren’t enough of them (fewer because of internal feuding). They had to recruit Russians. Get enough Russians, the Russians take over, and group A (which was doing what looked like madness to the Russians) is out. Eventually, things calm down, but group A is still out for a few generations.
Same with the current Democrats. They thought they were organizing the overthrow of Anglo Saxon America, and to an extent they were. They even formed an alliance with the Yankees. They also brought in foreigners to staff their effort. Height of cleverness, no? Now it turns out that the groups they brought in are waging their own insurgencies (as in my two examples), have their own shadow governments, and don’t much like the Democrats who brought them in. In addition to having an target population that wasn’t as controlled as it pretended to be. What a surprise! These guys must be astounded every time they drop a rock and it hits their foot.
The only thing we learn from history is that people are idiots. Us, too, unfortunately.
Counterinsurgency
Poland was simply the first country to show the world that multiculturalism
didn’t work. 140-50 years later, in the wake of World War I, the same fate befell
the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the German Empire.Replies: @Cagey Beast
The Austro-Hungarian Empire worked better than what came after it, Hitler’s regime included.
Apparently they are building an Orthodox Cathedral dedicated to the Russian armed forces. It is being done with donations, not government funds. But can you imagine something like this on any dot mil website in the US?
If interested, here is the page with the description in English and architect's renditions.Replies: @Corn
“But can you imagine something like this on any dot mil website in the US?”
No. But if a temple were built for all three dozen Wiccans in the service no doubt it’d be trumpeted high and low on .mil
Celebrate diversity
But is being Singaporean another way of being Chinese? I mean they can fully be themselves as overseas, tropical Chinese without having a Malay majority population questioning their loyalties. The Chinese of Vancouver or San Francisco might end up in the same position decades from now.
No I think the US and likely Canada will end up redrawing their boundaries to match the cultural changes that have taken place. In short, people will decide they don’t have enough in common with one another to continue sharing a government. This will likely happen, with or without Chinese pressure.
Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by... nothing, as the Germans had expected and hoped for. Most of the German military was engaged in Poland, and on the later testimony of Hitler's generals, if the UK and France had launched a punitive attack on Germany from the west--as would follow from a declaration of war--the Germans would have had to fold. The war would have been done with in 1940.
The obsessive preoccupation of Paul Johnson in Modern Times with Britain's treaty guarantees to Poland, deleterious to the UK in his view, is sadly provincial. The final result for Britan was the same, treaties with Poland or not.
It is regrettable that, despite whatever it is the UK "did for Poland," that 20 per cent of Poland's population was destroyed, while it is "the blitz", a trivial episode in the war, that is a part of the Western European cultural consciousness. Makes one regret that America intervened to save Britain's bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland's). If not for America, Thatcher would have grown up speaking German, nicht war?
I know all about post WW I trauma, Chamberlain, etc., but it's disgusting to see attempts to make that into a virtue. And if someone wishes that Hitler's Germany had won the war, perhaps in some arrangement with Britain (Hitler did have hopes for that), let's have that argument straight out.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @AndrewR, @Anonymous, @J.Ross, @YetAnotherAnon
“It has been Britain’s historical policy to prevent a hegemon from arising to control the European landmass (Spain, France, Germany), so that Britain’s defense treaty with Poland follows in a long historical tradition of Britain’s self-interest “
But the current Brit elite are detached from that position, and a hegemon (Germany) controls the European landmass.
“Now for the historical facts. Together with France, Britain declared war on Germany, following treaty protocols that these nations signed, after Germany invaded Poland. These declarations of war were followed by… nothing”
Churchill noted at the time that it was obvious from the map the UK could do little to protect Poland from German attack – the entire point was deterrence – to make it plain to Germany that a repeat of Munich was not on the table and that an attack on Poland would 100% mean war with the UK. I get tired of having to point this out at least once a year on Unz.
Britain’s diplomatic failure was in not getting the Russians onside. Stalin decided in the end to join with Germany in partitioning Poland. No military in the world could have taken on both Germany and Russia simultaneously from distance – not Britain and certainly not the US.
“US intervened to save Britain’s bacon (in the way that Britain did not do so to save Poland’s)”
See above. You might as well criticise the US for not saving the Nationalist Chinese.
Very eloquent
Can you say Ram-Boo-Lay? How about Brown and Root? How about Halliburton?
Modest clothes big families no vulgar light porn entertainment private religious schools does not make a republican voter.Replies: @Gunner, @Moshe
Not that I care but I guess I have a dog in the fight so I’ll correct you.
I’m not sure why I should have to though. Before you write a post that makes your point in ALL CAPS maybe you should do a single Google Search?
Here is Brooklyn.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html#10.76/40.678/-73.969
The Red is where the Orthodox Jews live.
There are very very few Orthodox Jewish enclaves on the planet (which is why when I wear a yarmulka it’s basically a high voltage magnet for sniffing out anyone with any knowledge of anything Jewish – yesterday a Moroccan guy in a smalll town in a country that isn’t Morocco) and New York City has most of them. You plainly don’t understand either chabad or Los Angeles so advising you to guess where on the map above in New Jersey you would find the Lakewoood Yeshiva would be a waste (you really and truly understand Jews – and the demographics of LA – less than you think you do) but even you can hack playing “Find The Red in Brooklyn”.
Uh, and HOW exactly are we going to effectively “isolate Islam”? If you mean from the US, one relativ ely simple start in the right direction would be to ban all immigrants from widely known Islamic majority countries (e.g. the Middle East, parts of Central Asia, and Afghanistan).
Another step might be to pull US troops out of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. Period.
Does anyone else find it interesting that Ziggy’s comments about goading the USSR into its own Vietnam quagmire with Afghanistan, and yet apparently the Russians learned quicker than the US. Russia is no longer in Afghanistan, and yet the US is coming up on nearly 20 YEARS in Afghanistan. We have already spent longer time in Afghanistan than the USSR ever did. By that measure, this is double the time US forces spent in Vietnam. What was Ziggy’s response to that? Should we stay another twenty years in Afghanistan, and that will really show the Russians? Or no one bothered to ask him?
Question to all: Is there any connection showing that the US opioid epidemic has been largely fueled by opioids coming in by way of Afghanistan? Any direct connection to the epidemic and US Afghanistan involvement over last few decades?
Pull out of Afghanistan, and just maybe the opioid epidemic may start to level off. Or perhaps not at this late date.
To paraphrase the line from John Wayne’s The Green Berrets “Why are we in Afghanistan?”
Why indeed.
That's the theory, bare bones version. Sometimes the insurgency works, sometimes not.
The irony is that the Democrats think they're waging an insurgency ("march through the institutions", "control of the narrative") against the historic American population. In fact, they're repeating the history of the NAACP (founded by the Jewish establishment, which was ejected in the 1960s), or the Bolsheviks (supported largely by Jewish interests, staffed largely by believers in Judaism, most of whom appeared to have been killed during Stalin's purges). In both cases, group A founded an organization that relied on group B for staffing. The Bolsheviks could not run Russia. There just weren't enough of them (fewer because of internal feuding). They had to recruit Russians. Get enough Russians, the Russians take over, and group A (which was doing what looked like madness to the Russians) is out. Eventually, things calm down, but group A is still out for a few generations.
Same with the current Democrats. They thought they were organizing the overthrow of Anglo Saxon America, and to an extent they were. They even formed an alliance with the Yankees. They also brought in foreigners to staff their effort. Height of cleverness, no? Now it turns out that the groups they brought in are waging their own insurgencies (as in my two examples), have their own shadow governments, and don't much like the Democrats who brought them in. In addition to having an target population that wasn't as controlled as it pretended to be. What a surprise! These guys must be astounded every time they drop a rock and it hits their foot.
The only thing we learn from history is that people are idiots. Us, too, unfortunately.
CounterinsurgencyReplies: @Thea
Very informative, thanks
Was Danzig in 1939 worth 75 million Muslims in Europe a century later?
Steve, do you think that our involvement in this conflict directly led to nine eleven happening. would nine eleven have happened had we not ignited this flame? Now that we live in a post nine eleven world how do we prevent it from happening. We are unable to extinguish the taliban. The taliban obviously exists in the hearts and minds of the afghan people. I am shocked, shocked that a culture of big macs, air jordans, and slueth walking young women has failed to win over the conservative types among afghan culture. After 17 years, there is no defeating the taliban on their turf. It is a massive waste of blood and treasure to continue trying to do so. So how do we prevent the next nine evelven? We do this by applying Dick Cheynes one percent doctrine to travel restrictions. Ban entry into the united states to anyone coming from afghanistan, or any country where radical islam has a foothold in political discourse. If one person coming from afghanistan has even a 1% chance of killing 3,000 people in a terrorist attack, then banning their entry will effectively save the lives of 3 americans. Obviously these aren’t exact figures. But arguing me on the exact figures misses the point. The point is that we should try to prevent low probability, high casualty terrorits attacks by any means necessary. And the only way to effectively do this without colonizing and oppressing the entire muslim world, is to effectively control who enters our own country. minimizing risk is the name of the game. This is what israel does. It isnt perfect, but it is the best we can do.
Anybody got links to any discussions of how much of a part Russia’s played in making their failed former economic system all the rage in our universities?Replies: @BB753
Of course, the URSS played a role in undermining Western culture during the Cold War. As for today, I don’t know. If I were Putin I would support Hillary, Black Lives Matter, crazy feminists and assorted SJWs to bring down America. The idea that Putin would support Trump is ridiculous on its face. Though I think Russians need a strong America to counterbalance China’s might.
Longtime Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko once claimed that Brezhnev’s decision to invade Afghanistan was made in a drunken stupor:
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-04/news/mn-958_1_brezhnev-a-problem
Much of the B-52 losses are directly attributable to decisions made at the highest level and enforced down the line on the actual sorties flown. They were required to come in at the same altitude and heading at predictable times, making the gunner’s and missileer’s jobs a lot simpler. Other idiotic rules were applied to F-105 and F-4 crews, resulting in relatively poor effectiveness and high losses.
jack Broughton’s books, “Going Downtown” and “Thud Ridge” are essential reading in this matter.
Russia and Putin supported all serious US candidates EXCEPT Hillary for good reason: they were afraid that that idiot Hillary would get them in a nuclear conflict, which they did and do not want. Shaving the US down a notch would be okay, but a nuclear war is something no one needs or wants.
A relative said an electrical engineer he used to work with in the 1970s used to date Harold Brown’s daughter.
jack Broughton's books, "Going Downtown" and "Thud Ridge" are essential reading in this matter.Replies: @Joe Stalin
At the time of the Christmas B-52 losses, the USAF sent people to contact the Electronic Warfare industry to develop special pulse measuring equipment (rush direct from workbench to battlefield) to ascertain if the Fan Song SAM control signals to the SA-2 Guidelines were being used to derive targeting data over North Vietnam.
As you pointed out, we thought ourselves quite clever for suckering the Russians into getting bogged down in Afghanistan, but we've now been there ourselves almost twice as long. Of course, we aren't using a conscript army, and we're paying for it with money that we conjure out of thin air.Replies: @anonymous
It’s not the expense of keeping 20,000 troops in Afghanistan that is unbearable. Is it even more than $10 billion a year? It’s the helpless feeling of being stuck. If we stay, it’s a forever war. If we leave, it’s humiliating. And there is the possibility of coming back or forever airstrikes against Afghanistan after retreating on land. I don’t doubt the Taliban hates America and if it were victorious, it could provide support to anti-US terrorists. At the very least the Taliban will need to be bombed to be kept in line.
Harold Brown’s sister, not daughter.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lW0BPsurHfM/WiEX6DMRQ0I/AAAAAAAAFXw/EqxQgCZGbYIhyXrt0K54VJjV1Ywd2WqfgCLcBGAs/s1600/EU%2Bmuslim%2Bscenarios.pngReplies: @Thea
Hitler admired muslims, Merkel invited them. Coincidence ?
How is that vital for americans?