Author Andrei Martyanov lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and he gives readers a perceptive--and brutally candid--take on the slow-motion collapse of the USA.
Martyanov writes with the same partially-repressed astonishment of Slavoj Zizek (see for example Zizek's book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce). It's as if he can hardly believe what a clowning, clownish clownworld we live in, but he nevertheless soldiers on, teaching readers ways to understand and navigate it.
The book could use a bit more editing, a few of the chapters could be tightened, and quite a few sentences could be rewritten: the author has a penchant for long, Germanic sentences with the subject dangling at the end. But these are minor criticisms of a smart and blunt book that helps readers see through the various mirages of today's America.
[The usual friendly warning: read no further. These are just my notes and copy-pastes from the text to help me remember what I've read. Life is too short!]
Notes:
Introduction:
1ff: The author gives an example of allegations printed in the US propaganda network that Russian intelligence was paying bounties to the Taliban for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan; he counters it with a realpolitik discussion of what Russia's national interest actually was at that time: to keep the US bogged down in Afghanistan because that would distract the Taliban from looking northward towards the Muslim-populated Asian republics on Russia's southern flank. Russia wanted to avoid the Talibanization of the entire region.
3: On "America's so-called elites, which have exhibited a level of malfeasance, incompetence, cowardice and betrayal of their own people on such a scale that it beggars belief. Where is the precedent for such a historic occasion where a country, having no external factors pressing it into a geopolitical corner, self-obliterates with such a speed and ferocity that even the collapse of the Soviet Union begins to pale in comparison."
4: "This book is not about predictions of America's possible fates"; instead, it tries to understand the fundamental forces behind America's decline: economic, cultural, military and political. The author believes Americans elites "have become an organic part" of these forces of decline.
5: On exploring the interplay of various forces: American media-intellectual elites, but also other forces like economic and military and moral forces; also the increasing balkanization of the United States, which began 25-30 years ago where we became separated by racial and ethnic loyalties [this of course is an all-too-typical problem of all multicultural societies across history.]
Chapter 1: Consumption
7ff: On American grocery stores as a metaphor for the abundance here which now is beginning to be replaced by increased food insecurity by more Americans; Martyanov argues this is more characteristic of a third world country, "shatter[ing] the image of American affluence which was projected outward for decades." [What he's discussing here is what I've seen elsewhere described as "the United States of Latin America" or "the United States of Asia" meaning we have bifurcated down to elites/haves and have-nots similar to the model that you would find in Latin America or many Asian countries.]
12: The author notes the negatives that happened in 1990s-era Russia right after free market reforms were put in place; also claiming that significant segments of the United States population are experiencing a food situation similar to that of the Great Depression. [I would add that people are getting hammered by inflation, in food and in all other spend categories, this is a huge part of the problem.]
13ff: On Marx and the ideology of Marxism: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" as sort of a modern asceticism, or answering to a higher calling, as opposed to the blatant affluence and consumerism of industrial capitalism; the author ties this into a discussion of what is a good life and how is a good life defined: "Is high consumption a necessary part of a good life and of its definition?" "What would be considered sufficient or satisfactory?"
15: On the biblical phrase co-opted by Marxism in the Soviet-era slogan "who doesn't work, does not eat."
16ff: On Thorstein Veblen and the transition of consumption in the sense of "satisfying human needs" into consumption as a visible indication of wealth (and thus and lack of visible consumption is "a mark of inferiority").
17: A popular saying in the 1970s era USSR: "They tell us that capitalism stinks, but what a delightful smell!"
18ff: Quoting lyrics from the 1980s-era influential Soviet rock band Urfiin Juice and their song "World on the Wall," which illustrates the consumerism and comparisonitis of Russians looking towards the West for all the make-believe over there; [reading these lyrics actually reminds me of Los Prisoneros and their wonderful song "¿Por Qué No Se Van?"] The author goes on to say that the Soviet Union collapsed because the majority of the population wanted the material affluence of Western capitalism; however, this turned out to be a paradox because their culture then caught Western "affluenza."
Chapter 2: Affluenza
22: "Affluenza" defined as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more."
23: On how instead of showing prosperity via actions that actually benefit the world, things like the Marshall Plan for example, in reality the US government (here he quotes Michael Hudson, the dissident economist) accumulated a "growing volume of claims on foreign economies, ultimately securing control over the non-Communist world's political as well as economic processes."
23ff: Discussion here of the "Kitchen Debate" between Nixon and Khrushchev where in the USA housing was affordable, most basic appliances were easily affordable... but then Nixon took the US off the gold standard; this suddenly enabled the USA to (again quoting Hudson here) "tax other nations for however the United States wanted to spend its growing budget deficit." [This is via the Treasury "base layer" money system (PS: see Nik Bhatia's excellent short book Layered Money for nuances here) where everyone in the world essentially had to hold US dollars or US Treasuries. Thus the USA was able to export inflation to the rest of the non-communist world, while keeping things cheap for ourselves; we didn't really have to work or produce much: also there a useful a discussion of more of Michael Hudson's ideas of the FIRE-based economy and the de-industrialization on the United States.
27: The author describes his experience going to the "1969-70 Education USA" exhibition in Baku, as well as the 1976 exhibition "Technology for the American Home," also in Baku: people couldn't conceal their marveling at America's classrooms, their furniture, their homes, "American homes looked futuristic, affluent, and they stirred desires in others... There was no denying that the Americans, as it seemed then, live better, much better, and the average Soviet citizen, and both sides knew it."
28ff: Contrasting this idealized vision from them with various current statistics of the USA's debt-financed economy: worsening economic indicators (and also "bending" economic indicators to fit "the affluence narrative") to the point where "one has to question the US claim to be a first world country... people do notice signs of a dramatic deterioration of life all around them and at some point a consensus begins to emerge."
33: "Even openly biased, if not altogether lying, media such as Seattle's very own KOMO News couldn't ignore the fact of the once beautiful, safe and clean Seattle turning into a mecca for the homeless, drug addicts and criminals." Citing KOMO News' documentary "Seattle Is Dying"; on how the lack of normality was becoming a norm in many places in the United States, not just in Seattle. See also Seattle's infamous CHOP Zone (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest): the author says "the whole area looked like a war zone. It also looked dirt poor."
Chapter 3: Geoeconomics
40: On British Russophobia in the second half of the 19th century, leading to competition with Russia and then open conflict in the Crimean War; this initiated a series of events that contributed to the Russian Revolution and influenced the outcome of World War II, this is basically British imperialism.
41ff: On Karl Haushofer, the German statesman thought of as the brains behind the third Reich; his love-hate relation with Britain and Britain's colonial possessions; the Soviets saw German National Socialism as the highest form of imperialism, or as Marx's Theory phrased it, the highest form of capitalism: economic expansion and the acquisition of new markets often accompanied with extreme violence; "conquest motivated by economic interests."
42ff: The author moves on to America's version of its own geoeconomics, citing a few different works including a book called War By Other Means by Jennifer M. Harris and Robert D. Blackwill, as well as a couple other works, all delusionally citing American economic, political and military power, when in reality we actually are in an economic and political crisis and not competitive, we have little manufacturing, etc., and are "a hologram or an illusion of a nation state... which has lost its ability to compete economically with the rest of the world."
46ff: The American economy "looks good on paper... when in reality it is turning into a third world economy in front of our own eyes." Various statistics follow here of the complete hollowing out of our industrial sector and its implications, not just for the well-being of the country but also for national defense. You cannot have proper military defense if you don't have tremendous manufacturing capacity--along with extra surge capacity on top of manufacturing base.
49ff: Ford as well as other automakers and how their car quality and pricing are not competitive with automakers from other countries. "The time when the world would look at American made products with curiosity and envy has long since passed."
51ff: Commercial shipbuilding, which has shrunk down to almost nothing in the United States, now dwarfed by China, Korea, Japan, and Russia. Our shipbuilding capacity is less than 1% of global capacity, [I knew it was small but had no idea it was that small!] Obviously this is not reasonable for a country that sees itself as economically dominant globally; likewise our steel production is fairly small as well, outproduced by China by a factor of 11, Russia with half or less of the US population produces 81% of US steel output, Japan produces more steel than the United States.
54ff: The author notes the "pathetic state" of America's commercial shipbuilding, its loss of leadership in industrial businesses, also experiencing intellectual collapse; how the USA has less and less to offer economically other than Treasury bills; the author argues that "it is not a far-fetched scenario" to see the United States turning into "a large but regional and even third world nation."
Chapter 4: Energy
59: "Energy is not only the single most consequential economic factor; it is also a massive geopolitical one."
59: Side note here about Baku, where oil has been drilled since 1846 [!] long before the Pennsylvania American oil fields; Azerbaijan was producing more than half the world's oil in the early 20th century.
60ff: Measures of economic dominance based on MTOE (millions of tons oil equivalent): China leads the world with 2,684 MTOE versus the US at 2,303 MTOE, and Russia at 1506; likewise measuring economic development by electricity production from all sources: China dominates with 7,482 terawatts per hour production; the US is a distant second at 4,385, India at 1,614, Russia at 1,122.
61ff: Explanation of what really happened in the OPEC+ meeting in Vienna in 2020 where Russia did not agree to production cuts: the result was the US fracking industry collapsed because it was exposed to "real economics" under a lower oil price. In reality US shale/fracking oil was financially non-viable.
64: Stinging quote here: "As it is always the case with the US mainstream media, they got it all wrong" with regard to what was happening with this Vienna OPEC+ meeting, saying it was to punish the US for the Nordstrom 2 pipeline destruction. The US media started speculating here, falsely, reporting about Russia's gold and currency reserves allegedly running low, even predicting Vladimir Putin would lose power, etc. [Note: I'm not sure I agree with this author's timeline here, the US shale oil industry cratered in 2015-2016, I'm not sure there was much left of it in 2020 that wasn't already in or nearing bankruptcy.]
66ff: Discussion of various incorrect pundits making stupid and ignorant comments about Russia, mostly made up, and not having any context about what's actually going on in Russia, what Russia's motivations are, etc. "The fact that such experts are still given a public tribune in the United States and are treated as 'experts' is a powerful testimony to the decline of professional expertise in the United States, not just in fields inherently susceptible to fraud such as political science and political commentary but in fields which actually do require a good grasp of all the reality 'on the ground' skills to have at least some understanding of the subject matter." [Ouch, but then again, it is like shooting fish in a barrel to mock our solipsistic, overconfident pundit class.]
67: The result here was that Russia became "impervious" to US pressures "and was the only truly energy independent nation on earth."
68: Saudi Arabia turned out to be Russia's proxy in this whole geoeconomic dispute, not the United States' proxy. Also Russia quickly grew its gold and FX reserves to $600 billion; furthermore, China refilled all of her oil storage with cheap oil and founded a massive strategic partnership deal with Iran which has gigantic geopolitical ramifications for the US.
69: The US is even wrong in assuming that Russia is fiscally dependent on hydrocarbons, it's only 29% of the country's budget revenues.
72ff: Discussion of the green movement; on Germany committing "energy suicide" by laying down its industrial economy; Germany's economic output is extremely energy sensitive, it is the highest energy cost of developed industrial economies; this approach is "madness"; "Things will get much worse in Europe and they may never get better."
76: On the US sabotaging European independence and their ability to obtain affordable energy, the author claims this is possibly in order for the US to sell Europe LNG as well as sink the competitiveness of European goods and boost American made products: to "kill two rabbits with one shot." [If this is true then maybe we aren't as hypocognizant as he thinks we are [!] setting aside the fact that this would be an incredibly evil plan to foist on our European "allies." It all reminds me of Kissinger's cynical quote: "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal"].
Chapter 5: Making Things
82: "Michael Hudson is not the only prominent Western economic thinker who is consistently on record warning about the travails and in the end, the inevitable grievous conclusion of finance capitalism." Note also this interesting comment here about Senator Marco Rubio who, while not in denial of Hudson's views but unfortunately is also "an unabashed believer in American exceptionalism--precisely the very disease driving America's precipitous decline."
83ff: Bill Clinton and his presidency, the "outsourcer-in-chief" [ouch!]; opening the US economy to NAFTA and China which completed the de-industrialization of the US; following "abstract economic theories" that led to America committing economic suicide; "China accepted what was offered; what was offered made China the de facto primary consumer goods manufacturing hub of the world." The author quotes the old Marxist joke that "the capitalist will sell the very rope on which he will be hanged."
87ff: Standard discussion here of STEM graduates, on China having far more than the US; also note Russia actually has almost the exact number of STEM graduates as the US but with half the population--not to mention they're almost all Russian citizens unlike US STEM graduates who are more than a third non-US citizens; Martyanov also notes that STEM isn't a key goal of the American education system anyway, it's more interested in self-expression, political correctness and indoctrination; also on the lack of perceived "glamour" of engineering "making things" kinds of jobs.
91: I don't think the author realizes that Tyler Durden is a character from the book Fight Club, which is used as a pseudonymous byline for all Zerohedge articles; he is not an actual reporter at Zerohedge.
91: [Interesting discussion here of intangible assets and how to value a corporation when it does something intangible (in the accounting sense) like writing software or performing services; in a company, the value of the office and the furniture isn't what matters; obviously also services, software, internet companies, etc., are all significantly different industries compared to say an industrial company, where the factory and inventory are tangible assets that can be seen, have a dollar value, etc. This is an interesting problem, and the author reaches a very wrong conclusion saying that the valuation (of intangible assets and companies) is "generally a fraud"--I think accounting always has to be adjusted for a messy reality, this is the job of the securities analyst and the accounting profession to try to "account" for things. And it gets much more difficult the less "physical and tangible" a company is!]
92ff: Various comments and statistics here indicating that China has long passed the US in economic might and likely in GDP; it's only the US essentially making up numbers that blurs the distinction of who's first, as the US (per the author) will value two people shining each other's boots for $10 as $20 of GDP when China makes two and a half times the vehicles the US makes, China makes most of our tech products, toys, key imports etc. The author is quite bombastic in his writing here, claiming the US economy is in "a death spiral" for example. [I'd also push back here and ask: why can't service businesses or software businesses have legitimate value too? Quite honestly they are in many ways "better businesses" than "thing-based" businesses like manufacturing and agriculture; they also tend to be less asset intensive, they tend to have far better cash flow characteristics, etc. Which, then, are higher value? These are all reasonable questions to ask as the US evolves more and more towards a services economy.]
95ff: Boeing as the embodiment of America's industrial "suicide"; its key competitive advantage is lobbying: see how Boeing spent much more on lobbying than Airbus in order to win the Air Force tanker contract with its KC-46 Pegasus, while this jet platform is having a huge number of technical problems. See also problems with the B-737 Max: plane crashes, "long-time circulating rumors of Boeing's growing incompetence and dubious design and manufacturing practices." Note the B-737 problems were due to flight control software, which was incidentally outsourced to India. This was followed by problems with the B-787 Dreamliner,
100ff: The author comments here on American intellectuals claiming that a country like Russia would be incapable of developing her hydrocarbon extraction without access to Western technology; the author condescendingly refers to these "intellectuals" as graduates with degrees in journalism and political science or sociology who have no idea that a country that built space stations and complex industrial technology would see hydrocarbon extraction as a routine process for them; further Russia has successfully counter sanctioned the West with their own extraction and processing technologies, combining with OPEC+, etc.
101ff: Discussion here of Russia's MC-21 single-aisle medium range commercial jet, which is "the most sanctioned aircraft in history" with performance "either superior or vastly superior" to comparable airplanes by Boeing. Also Russia has "a complete enclosed technological cycle" for aircraft, design, R&D, manufacturing, etc.
102: An insight here regarding the US deciding to sanction the export of carbon fiber composites to Russia: this had to do with the MC-21 aircraft which had composite wings; the insight here is that every time we sanction Russia they just develop their own industry and do it themselves, they had the ability and the technology, but what they lacked was the scale that gigantic US companies typically bring. But if we lock them out of a marketplace then they have no choice but to design their own products or use their own technology which they're quite capable of doing. [This is another example of how we are harming ourselves because our elites don't see the second-order consequences of their sanctions decisions.]
103: Geoeconomics, or war by other means, is where "the ability to produce needed tangible things" (something the US is losing the ability to do) becomes "crucial for the survival" of a nation. On watching America's steady decline in manufacturing and seeing the USA make no efforts to reindustrialize, even though we are seeing "explosive industrial development in Eurasia, especially in China and Russia."
104-5: Interesting quotes here: one from Herbert Spencer from his book War: Studies From Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, where he wrongly states that the breaking down of divisions between nations would lead to benefits to the United States; and then from Corelli Barnett from The Collapse of British Power, citing Adam Smith's doctrine of free trade which had a "baneful effect" on Britain, Smith attacked the mercantilist belief that a nation should be self-supporting. [The idea here is that Americans have forgotten how to be self-supporting, and through their stupid sanctioning they're causing other countries like Russia to become totally self-supporting when they used to be much more dependent on US tech and knowhow.]
Chapter 6: Western Elites
110ff: "Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots." Harsh quote from John Neely Kennedy, senator from Louisiana, speaking on the Senate floor in March 2020; on various recognitions of incompetence in the United States, something that began long before the COVID pandemic response, and long before the 2008 financial crisis; On "grandiosity" as an ailment both of the United States as well as of presidents like Bill Clinton; grandiosity is also what the majority of American elites suffer from, "a grandiose misjudgment of their own capabilities."
113: "Today's United States, moreover, is increasingly exposed as being ruled by an oligarchy, or rather by two ruling clans, and de facto is neither a democracy nor a republic."
114ff: On how easy it is to mock American geopolitical thought and geopolitical intellectual leaders; mocking Thomas Friedman's "absurd and now repeatedly falsified" Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention: that two countries with McDonald's franchises had never been to war; see also embarrassingly wrong works like Francis Fukiyama's The End of History or Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations ("despite some interesting insights in the latter" the author faintly praises); "Within ten or so years of those works being published, in 1992 and 1996 respectively, both were proven false in their main points in the most dramatic fashion," to the point where later their ideas appeared "altogether silly." Also Zbigniew Brzezinski's magnum opus The Grand Chessboard was "a collection of cliches."
116: "Historical causality was never a strong point of American geopolitical thought," the US was better at producing self-serving narratives with little understanding of formative geopolitical factors or any real knowledge of their subjects, be they Russia, China etc.
116ff: On "the myth of Henry Kissinger's acumen," who "typified American PR going into overdrive to promote analysts who forwarded an approved agenda but were singularly lacking as outstanding minds." Note also Kissinger's "credibility" argument used to justify the Vietnam War, and the fact that an entire generation of hawks have used the same claim to justify new wars. [See also the note for page 170, below.]
118ff The American intellectual apparatus as made up of "one trick ponies, since they operate on the assumption of America's omnipotence." See this in stark contrast to the dictum of Bismarck that a political act "is the art of the possible, the attainable--the art of the next best." American strategists are not conditioned to think of consequences of their decisions.
120-1: comment here on the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, which lasted just five days, showing the lack of effectiveness of a NATO-trained and equipped Georgian army. [Speaking of my own ignorance I never even heard of this conflict; it certainly gives (very) early indications of the flaws and fragilities of US arms and military might that are increasingly apparent now.]
121: On American exceptionalist-type thinkers "having a level of ideological fervor and detachment from reality that could make the most dedicated Maoists blush." How the US had no idea what they were doing fomenting a civil war and a coup in Ukraine, which instantly instigated Crimea's secession, for example.
122: [Excellent example of a Germanic sentence here, with a subject at the very end of a paragraph-long sentence. "For people who put their faith in the ideas espoused by the court minds of Brzezinski, Fukuyama, Huntington or even the relatively independent Mearsheimer, to say nothing of an army of American and Western military porn purveyors ranging from cadre officers to even comic artists, facing a world in which America is regarded as a big mouth bully that nobody is afraid of, and which economically is primarily smoke and mirrors, is a life-changing experience."]
123: This guy spares no one! On the Council of Foreign Relations: "a rather grossly overrated collection of America's statesman and stateswomen." Also the "obvious intellectual and cultural decline" of the CIA.
125ff: On the incompetence of American Russian studies field practitioners: Brzezinski (Carter's National security advisor and Obama's foreign policy advisor) as "Russophobic" and a "white board theoretician."
130: Interesting blurb here on what the author calls "epistemic closure": he talks about a self-sealing American belief system which "is incapable of accepting empirical evidence because it destroys American exceptionalism's extreme confirmation bias," and intellectuals on both the left and the right cannot deal with it because it's too painful and difficult, thus they simply are not professionally equipped to deal with a fast-moving world with the gigantic changes that are happening. [This idea of epistemic closure is interesting and worth thinking about, it sounds a little bit like the ludic fallacy or at least tangential to it. Maybe another way to think about it would be geopolitical solipsism: you think everyone in the world thinks the way you do, so you literally cannot anticipate anyone taking any action that you didn't already think of; you're hopelessly adrift (and can't evenunderstand it) if someone does something you didn't expect.]
135-6: The American intellectual class as "unteachable": unable to understand the limits of their own expertise, unaware of the limited weight of their own opinions.
142ff: Discussion here of the moral degeneration and perversity of United States elites and intellectuals; discussion of Epstein, of pedophilia, etc., all of this as metaphor for the Western elites' moral and intellectual decay. The West's "self-proclaimed intellectual classes" rejected truth and "betrayed the majority of people they were supposed to serve."
146: "This is no longer an issue of just Marxism, Liberalism, Conservatism or any other isms Western intellectuals so love to produce--it is an issue of the physical survival of the west, which is in a state of clinical extremity."
Chapter 7: Losing the Arms Race
151ff: "...the main American export today is inflation" and maintenance of the myth of American military omnipotence "sustains the dollar printing press." On the idea that economists are either oblivious of this dynamic, or take it as a given, or their view on US military power is shaped by entertainment.
153ff: The so-called tanker war in the Persian Gulf from 1984-1988, a sideshow of the Iran-Iraq War; the US went into the region with their Navy both to defend shipping as well as to repair Arab policy; contrast the gravitas of the USA then with today's era, where the US cannot win wars at all, has weird obsessions like wishing to subdue Iran for some reason; all the US methods of subterfuge like assassination, sanctions, etc.
158ff: The US "has lost the arms race." Examples like the Tomahawk missile, 70% shot down by the Syrians, a tremendously embarrassing story that American citizens are oblivious to; the decline and bankruptcy of the entire American approach to warfare: seeking "swift" victory and staying within the whims of a four year election cycle, an extreme sensitivity to taking casualties, capable of handling only weaker, smaller enemies.
162ff On basing naval power on aircraft carriers that "provide excellent visuals" but won't survive in the modern battlefield; aircraft carriers are merely "prestigious targets" to modern hypersonic missile strikes. "...the arrival of hypersonic missiles has changed warfare forever and made the 100,000 ton displacement mastodons of the US Navy obsolete and very expensive sacrificial lambs in any real war." Note that these missiles exceed sometimes significantly the range of carrier aircraft, including airborne early-warning aircraft. This iteration of missile technology disintermediates the primary (and primarily "visual") tools of American power projection.
165ff: The author cites Iran's retaliatory attacks on US and NATO bases in the region after the US assassinated General Soleimani, using serious weapons over intermediate range, not a single missile was intercepted by US anti-missile technology.
166: See Syria, defended far more effectively with Russian-made air defense systems.
170: The Ledeen Doctrine: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." The author says even this doctrine doesn't work anymore: the United States lost all of its Wars of the 21st century, all those small, "crappy little countries" fought back.
171: "Constant declarations about its own military greatness reveals a long and deeply hidden US inferiority complex when it comes to warfare." The United States is "a culture in which war has become a business... and profiteering and greed remove any considerations of actual national interest and realistic defense requirements."
176ff: On the real risk of the US dramatically underestimating Russian capability, and then stumbling into a kinetic war with Russia, losing terribly, and then escalating to nukes to respond the the political and military humiliation. On the ideological paranoia of today's media regarding Russia: back during the Soviet era we overestimated Russian capabilities, now we grievously underestimate them.
178ff Various intriguing and unsettling thoughts here: the US is suddenly talking about hypersonic missiles but has nothing to deploy, it has no shipyard capacity to add this capability to ships; Russia is already well stocked in this field with a military that gets tremendous bang for the buck; the US military-industrial complex churns out "ridiculously expensive and ineffective weapons that are obsolete before they leave the manufacturing floor."
183ff Disturbing accounts of academic incompetence of students at US military academies , citing public letters from professors.
185: On how the US military exists for the enrichment of globalists rather than for the actual defense of the country.
Chapter 8: Empire Uber Alles--Including Americans
191ff: On American leadership not having any strategy--certainly not a grand strategy--and even being situationally unaware; how the United States gets involved in wars that are conducted contrary to real American national interests, instead these wars support transnational corporations and global financial institutions and their agendas.
195ff: On countries like France, the USA, etc., that are no longer actually nations: on "France descending into the chaos of globalist multicultural orthodoxy" and the US subverted by ethno-religious and corporate interests; on the doctrine of starting profitable wars; see also Steve Sailor's "invade the world invite the world" paradigm where you see no conflict in destroying nations abroad by invading them but then admitting that countries refugees fleeing all the destruction you've wreaked--and then simultaneously destroying your cultural fabric at home with immigration levels that your cultural fabric cannot handle.
199ff: On the paradox of the United States never being one people in the past, even at its founding, but it almost certainly will never be one people in the future, given the racially and politically charged violence rolling over the US in the 2020s. Even the white majority is bifurcating on ideological lines: split between supporters of globalist elites and widely disparaged white "deplorables"; "one is forced to question whether the United States is even capable of formulating any national interest when it already is composed of several nations..." [here he means white, black, latino, Jewish, etc.]
200: On the so-called "Israel lobby" in the United States, which somehow has convinced Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical while we act "primarily albeit not exclusively" in Israel's interest in the Middle East.
200: On the idea that no one is working for the average American citizen, who's being robbed and run into the ground by policies which do not serve the shrinking America middle and working class; middle class and working class Americans slaughtered "on the altar of globalism and multiculturalism whose only beneficiaries are transnational corporations."
Chapter 9: To Be or Not To Be
203: On "the multicultural disaster the United States has become" such that "[t]here is no distinct American identity because whatever that might have been hasn't been allowed to settle."
203ff: On Russia's move to solve this problem by deeming Russian as the language of the state founding people; Russians recognize that living peacefully in a multicultural country is possible only by recognizing the significance of the majority of its people. This is obviously something that would be regarded as racist and unmentionable today in the United States.
207: Various "grotesque" forms of balkanizing and racializing the United States: as an object example the author cites a report from the Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, declaring math "racist" and saying "who gets to say if an answer is right?"
207ff: On the various disintegrative forces of modernism manifested in exhibitionism, self-absorption, attention-span-shrinking social networks, etc. "Modern reality is increasingly ugly, because it lacks truth in multiple sectors, not just political and economic, but cultural and artistic."
209ff: The author gives himself away as a Boomer here with his comment here on Deep Purple and their significance in Western pop art and their "legendary lineup throughout the 1970s" ... and then moves on to articulate his disgust with modern art. :)
212ff: On Americans blacklisting each other, but in a form unlike the 1950s-era blacklists which were at least to accuse people of associating with national enemies. "Now it's about reshaping the United States into a one-party dictatorship."
212-3: "Both American political parties are neoliberal globalist entities tightly connected to different wings of the American oligarchy." [This is a good one-sentence summary of the current American political landscape]
217: On Dimitri Orloff's concept of a "meat generation" in his book of the same name, essentially referring to millennials sacrificed on the altar of the globalist dream, basically like cows butchered because there's nothing left to milk. [What a disturbing and horrifying image.]
217ff: On Jim Jeffery, the envoy for the US ambassador to Syria, who nonchalantly admitted that he lied to the President about US forces in Syria: the author say this marks "a peculiar turn in America's culture, where the institutions of state act entirely out of their own interest, fraudulently informing the commander-in-chief." [Robert Malone would agree in his discussions of the administrative state in his book Lies My Government Told Me, and likewise Sheldon Wolin in Democracy, Inc.]
219: "The overwhelming majority of America's modern political class has no grasp of the extent of social forces it is playing with and the possible outcomes... These are not people who understand the implications of a breakdown of civil society and law and order, which very many of them advocate." See for example Olympia, WA's mayor supporting BLM until someone from BLM vandalized her house, upon which she called it "unfair" and "domestic terrorism."
Conclusion: Not Exceptional, Not Free, Not Prosperous--Not America?
225: On the various ironies of Megyn Kelly taking her son out of private school and moving out of Manhattan in reaction to what she thought was woke indoctrination; on the "baneful effect on America's social cohesion" that woke orthodoxy has, etc.
228: On Russian journalist Irina Alksnis who pointed out that only Russians can understand the American experience of losing its exceptionalist status: "the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic catastrophe which followed taught Russians a lot, and also left an aftertaste of the humiliation of losing power--a process the United States is going through right now... the Russians get it. They, unlike any other people in the world, can relate to what the United States is going through right now. Russians can read the signs extremely well, while the US elite not only has no experience with it but is completely insulated from understanding it. This is America's tragedy unfolding before our very eyes. Not only is America's crisis systemic, but its elites are uncultured, badly educated and mesmerized by decades of their own propaganda, which in the end, they accept as reality."
232ff: The author goes full black pill here with a prediction that, quite honestly, is starting to look more and more plausible with each passing year. "The political tyranny will start with demolishing the US Constitution and transitioning the country to a de jure one-party state with political purges following this transition. Initially these purges will be in the form of firing people from their jobs or preventing them from getting employment, but eventually the social score system will be introduced officially and the 'rehabilitation camps' may become a reality. One may say that this is too dystopian and fantastic to even consider. If it is, it is all for the better. But for a country where half of the population believed that the president of the United States was Russia's Manchurian candidate, with all the media singing in a single voice promoting this fantasy, or where most universities define human nature as a social construct, or where people who have zero background in such fields as physics, mathematics or chemistry are driving the 'green energy' field--in such a country nothing is impossible."
233ff: The author writes about his striking contrast to flying between Russia and the United States in the early to mid 1990s, going from Mafia-controlled Russia to the United States. He describes stepping off the plane in the USA and entering an airport bar where the show "Cheers" was playing on the bar's TV, and he describes the surreal experience of the show compared to his often terrifying Russian life experiences during those days. He then goes on to describe American writer Rod Dreher's visceral response to seeing the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, a Russian Orthodox Church completed in May 2020. Dreher asks, "Could we build anything like this in america? Don't be absurd." Martyanov goes on to comment about how the "cathedrals" being built in this era in America are postmodern, boxy megachurches, "preaching the prosperity gospel." Finally, a minor note of partial optimism as he says that even though Russia went through what it went through, they maintained a nation and a culture, despite the fact that it took them 20 years to emerge from the 1990s experiment with neoliberalism. The question remains whether the United States actually has a nation anymore, or has a people that will regain its spirit.
To Read:
Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Program
John J. Mearsheimer: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
John De Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor: Affluenza
Andrei Martyanov: Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning
Michael Hudson: Super Imperialism: The Origin And Fundamentals of US World Dominance
Herbert Spencer: War: Studies From Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology
***Corelli Barnett: The Collapse of British Power
Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking Of World Order
Peter Huchthausen: America's Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of US Military Engagements:1975-2000
Tim Bakken: The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, And Failure in the US Military
Christopher Caldwell: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
Bronislaw Malinowsky: An Anthropological Analysis of War: War Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology
***Dmitry Orlov: The Meat Generation
Finally, note this striking excerpt from an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski on Afghanistan: It appears the Russians learned from their mistakes in Afghanistan, while American "strategists" keep repeating theirs.