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It’s Time to Ask: Are We the Baddies?
I don’t mean “we” average Americans out here in flyover country. That’s always the way, isn’t it? It’s not the people of a nation we’re averse to. It’s their ruling authorities. In particular, the longtime foreign policy establishment — at least since the Reagan administration — or those whom Benjamin Braddock refers to as The Architects of Our Present Disaster.
The linked article is a semi-long read by my standards, but I simply “couldn’t put it down.” It’s packed with more information than I’ve ever had about American intervention and malfeasance in foreign affairs. It particularly calls out the color revolutions sponsored by the US in Ukraine, Belarus, and Libya, for starters. There have been 50-some attempts by the “smart set” in our foreign policy enterprise according to Braddock.
Here’s the (correct) angry outburst highlight:
These are people who think they’re clever enough to deal with powerful foreign countries run by sane people. They’re not, and those foreign powers have taken note of that fact. The kind of Americans the world fears or respects have been put out of government and military leadership and replaced by a menagerie of nursing home patients, human resources ladies, affirmative action hires, sexual degenerates, and obese four-star generals angling for board seats on the next Theranos start-up. The day of reckoning has arrived. Leaders like Putin, Xi, and Mohammed bin Salman are no longer amenable to being pushed around and morally browbeaten by the circus freaks that constitute the United States Government.
But, the rest is a must-read to understand the “present disaster.”
Published in General
I knew that. /facepalm
Clear as mud.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice overly complicated and questionable alliances…
And Germany was broken up into bits by the treaty, weren’t they? All of Bismarck’s uniting of the land of petty kings was undone by that treaty, wasn’t it?
“No” Means we are not the baddies.
And
Historically we conduct poor foreign policy.
Serbian, not Siberian, nationalist. Austro-Hungarian, not just Hungarian. Archduke rather than prince, technically, though the important part was that he was heir to the imperial throne.
I think that Germany was blamed by the Western allies (France-UK-US) because of heavy anti-German wartime propaganda, and because these three countries mostly fought Germans.
My own conclusion is that Russia was more to blame than any other country. You can blame Austria-Hungary for attacking Serbia, but they had a pretty good reason. Russia had little good reason to intervene. Russia mobilized against both A-H and Germany, and that brought Germany into the war.
Germany’s response may seem strange. In response to a Russian attack on Germany, Germany’s principal effort was an immediate offensive against France. This was sensible from the German point of view, as the Germans feared that France would side with Russia, and the Germans feared a two-front war. France had a defensive alliance with Russia, which technically didn’t apply to Russian aggression, but Germany had reason to be concerned that France would not simply allow Russia, its principal ally, to be defeated.
Then to get to France, the Germans went through neutral Belgium, which was a good propaganda point on the French/British side.
There was a noted German historian named Fritz Fischer, who departed from the prior German view in a 1961 book, and blamed the German leadership. This became the established narrative for quite some time. I think that more recent scholarship has taken a more complex view — I’m thinking principally of Christopher Clark and Michael Neiberg in recent years.
Propoganda?
I have never been against the People of Russia, ever. Or even Iran.
Most people, historically have not. That is not propaganda, it has been fact in the ground.
Germany lost some territory, but it wasn’t broken up, and losing some territory was par for the course when a country lost a war over a century ago. There was nothing unusual about that.
However, since the Germans had overthrown their monarchy and formed a republic with a democratic parliament they sorta kinda figured they wouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of the previous government. On the other hand, the winners sorta kinda figured that they were already letting the new German republic largely off the hook by not dissolving it as a sovereign state in the way that Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were dissolved.
I figured the archduke position was a title reserved for the crown prince or heir, similar to how Britain declares their heirs by naming them Duke of Cambridge (is it?)
Forgive my shorthand.
In 1915 a view (propaganda or otherwise) was that the whole cascade of war was planned and carried out by Germany.
Yeah… I don’t square that.
It makes sense for Germany to be concerned about the military power at their back before going after the military power with substantial territory in between.
Maybe if they’d just let France attack Belgium on their way to Germany, we would have had to deal with French National Socialists…
This is part of what I consider a bizarre set of moral positions wrt war – Germany was doomed either way. Expose their back and lose or go straight at France and be the baddies.
I think that this attitude is based on the notion from that Stevie Wonder/Paul McCartney song, something like “people are the same wherever you go.” I don’t think that’s true. I think that people disagree quite a bit. Americans tend to assume that everyone is just like us, or wants to be just like us, or would be just like us if they weren’t somehow misguided. I just don’t think that this is true.
I am concerned about where this attitude leads, because I think that it is often used to promote the utopian vision of Woodrow Wilson — an idea that says we’re not the enemies of the people of other countries, they’re just badly led or deceived, so we’re going to free them — at the point of a gun, usually — and then they’ll happily be just like us. This doesn’t seem to have worked well, in my view.
Sobering reading
Totally different than it being propaganda
And since you pick at words, I am picking at this one . You might think Americans are mistaken, but that is because what we see if that is what people who come here tend to want.
Not because the government tells us to think that way. It is being American, not propaganda.
I think we’re in agreement that people with ideologies incompatible with our Judeo-Christian western values and who actually might aim to take down the West are not just opposition — but real enemies. I put Islamists (and, really, most strictly adherent Muslims — their treatment of women and minorities is unacceptable) in this category and it’s why I didn’t find Trump’s travel ban to be “Islamophobic.” It’s not “phobia” to recognize your enemies, but it is naïve to pretend we’re all just the same and want the same things.
Unfortunately, there’s a significant portion of our own population with ideologies incompatible with our Judeo-Christian western values who aim to take down the West and our hands are tied as to “banning” them. Part of me would like to export them to some of these s–thole countries and see how they do. Is that mean? /she asks with some sarcasm
I think the assumption that people in other nations, especially those who don’t have the same Judeo-Christian roots, will just happily embrace American-style Democracy* is self-delusion. I really tire of nation-building overseas particularly while our nation is falling apart at home. I’m not alone.
* which, to be fair, no longer exists here anyway.
WC, what do you make of the article’s final paragraph? I would like his prediction to be true and he may be right but it is not supported in the article itself and I thought it came out of the blue. Was he trying to keep the reader (and himself?) from complete despair? If so he failed with me.
Oh, I think we’re in for a world of hurt and he’s right that suffering is a form of purification and struggles tend to make us stronger — if we persevere. I don’t read it as exactly optimistic. But, I think he’s right that the only way out of this desert is to go through it.
That’s a relief.
Searching for the meaning of the word baddie, probably the two best examples I find would be Snidely Whiplash, the main antagonist of Dudley Do-Right, and Felonious Gru, the Minion keeper who was voiced by Steve Carell.
Which one do you think is closer to Putin?
I’d really like to ask the dead bodies in Ukraine this very important question, but they bloody seem to have fallen silent.
Congratulations @westernchauvinist on getting linked by Instapundit.
Welcome to all Instapundit readers!
The original Schlieffen Plan called for invading both Belgium and the Netherlands. If I recall correctly, the Dutch were left alone only because the German government felt that their usefulness for international trade was more vital than having a wider invasion pathway to France.
Regardless, the brutality of the German occupation of Belgium, justified by Social Darwinist ideas which pervaded the German universities and intellectual classes, were a small harbinger of what Germany was to do in World War II.
What matters is what people thought – not the so-called “reality.”
“Reality” is subjective. The Reality is that Germans felt wronged. And their feelings led to the rise of Hitler.
How dare this guy criticize the proud tradition of successes like the removal of Mohammed Mosaddeq, Ngo Dinh Diem, Patrice Lumumba, Norodom Sihanouk, and Muammar Gaddafi making the world a more wonderful place each time.
And would the United States be as loved as we are across Latin America if not for our constructive involvement to remove unhelpful governments in central and south American nations? Not every intervention can be as successful as the Bay of Pigs but the important thing is that we keep policy in the hands of those who can prove that they are impervious to the lessons of history and can thus stay the course.
I get the sense you didn’t read the article. Not one jot or tittle. That’s too bad. Because it doesn’t excuse Putin, but it does help explain him.
Evil doesn’t need explaining, WC. I learned that many years ago from Florence King.
It’s only the Left that constantly tries to explain and excuse evil.
Evil is evil.
A conservative understands that evil exists and will always exist and moves on.
I would say that all post-Reagan presidents have failed to understand how Russia has been entangled with evil, starting with President George H. W. Bush’s 1991 Chicken Kiev speech which was apparently written by Moscow State University attendee and future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Bill Clinton caught a bit of a break as he was dealing with Yeltsin, not Putin. According to wikipedia, the Yeltsin government might have assassinated about 7 Chechen commanders, but some or most of those might have bled into the Putin regime. What is Putin assassination count since 1999, according to wikipedia? About 114.
Ronald Reagan was really just a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat who understood the nature of evil in a way which future presidents did not understand. President Reagan pushed back on human rights in a way that today’s human right activists who only worship utopia temperatures, abolishing the death penalty and guns, and access to lots of drugs and sexual stuff would fail to comprehend.
Fine. Now, has the US committed evil in our foreign policy and war making? Read the article.
“Everything about him is wrong.”
What matters is common sources so we don’t square the circle: