Interesting....
[If you read nothing else today, make it
this Malcom Kyeyune essay in UnHerd about why Western populations are not interested in fighting to defend the Global American Empire. He notes the daunting statistics about failure to recruit for militaries, and stated unwillingness of peoples especially young peoples in Western nations to go to war. Excerpts:
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How did this state of affairs come to pass? Most "analysis" starts and ends with a bit of hand-wringing about the moral decay of the youth. But this doesn't explain much. There were countless complaints about the sad state of young people in the late 19th century but that didn't translate into a society-wide lack of patriotism and disinterest in defending one's country.
More useful, perhaps, is the model supplied by British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose life's work mapped the lifecycle of human empires. In particular, one concept is of interest here: the idea of the internal proletariat, a group of people who tend to grow in number as empires begin to stagnate and decline.
It's not a Marxist term, but one coined by the historian Arnold Toynbee to denote, says Kyeyune, "a group of citizens who live inside an empire, but for various structural reasons no longer benefit from it and so are unlikely to rush to its defence."
Look, he goes on, at how justifiably angry the US Right was over the recent Ukraine-Israel aid bill. More:
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Many, let's not forget, believe America is heading for bankruptcy. The deficit is massive, the national debt is exploding, and underneath it all lies the underreported but truly eye-watering figure of $175 billion, which is what the US Treasury projects it will need to actually fund its social safety net. And what is America's political class doing in the face of this looming fiscal disaster? They are quite literally borrowing money to send to Ukraine and Israel instead a move that, in the corporate world, would be considered asset stripping. Ordinary American voters are no doubt starting to feel what the put-upon Romans did: the empire is no longer working for them.
Nobody really believes in the old cant about "freedom" and "democracy," and that we have to make such sacrifices because if not, why, we're nothing but a pack of Neville Chamberlains. After Iraq and Afghanistan, who can believe this anymore? What's more, with life in the US in decline on many fronts, it is harder for more Americans to understand why we should impoverish ourselves to serve Washington's imperial strategies.
Kyeyune:
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What makes this situation so intractable today is that our political elites have more or less made themselves immune to the negative consequences of their own policies. They neither apologise for mistakes nor accept responsibility for them. To take just one example: the war against Ukraine was supposed to be won quickly, and those who warned about the negative economic consequences of introducing sanctions were ridiculed and marginalised. More than two years later, those measures are wreaking havoc on ordinary people, and yet there is seemingly no contrition whatsoever from those who got it wrong just more calls for the plebians to sacrifice more.
Who on Wall Street or anywhere else was punished for the 2008 economic crash?
Who in the military saw their careers ended or damaged by the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters? If you seek one source of the American people's disinterest in supporting the GAE, read the big "Afghanistan Papers" series the Washington Post did a few years back, based on internal Pentagon documents. The documents revealed that the US was spending unfathomable sums to affect an outcome that few people in the military believed was possible. Nobody stood up to say it was wrong. Accountability? What's that? This is a problem that continued across both Republican and Democratic administrations. It seems that Karl Rove's infamous dictum from 2004 "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality" was internalized by the Ruling Class in Washington. More Kyeyune:
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Thus, we find ourselves in a situation that has much in the way of historical precedent: an insulated, out-of-touch ruling class protected from the ill effects of its own policies, and a general population that is sullenly withdrawing from public service and both mentally and physically "checking out". Because it's happened so often before, what happens next is not a great mystery: at some point, yet another crisis will roll along, one that the elites will simply not be able to manage without the active support of the people they rule over, only to find that said support doesn't arrive.
Think about the state of the United States today. The southern border is wide open, and has been for a while. Nobody in Washington cares enough to do anything about it. Yesterday at this conference in Slovakia, I spoke to a Latin American journalist who had been to the Darien Gap to write about migration. He told me that he interviewed Latino migrants who told him they saw plenty of military-age Russian men in the masses moving north. That thousands of military-age Chinese men have been doing this for a while has been documented.
Washington does not care. Similarly in Europe, the migration route out of Africa has been open for a long time, and the influx of illegal migrants is changing the continent. Nobody likes it, and in fact it is destroying life across Europe (Kyeyune's Sweden, which is now the gang-war capital of Europe, is the most pointed example.) But the leadership class does nothing except to seek to punish countries like Hungary, which want no part in this civilizational suicide.
Look to the clownshow America's elites have made of our own country in terms of social norms and policies. I believe that
NYU business professor Scott Galloway was onto something important when he identified a major source of the protest rage as being Israel's "whiteness". Watch the clip he doesn't say it's the only reason, but he does say that the professoriat, of which he is a member, has for a long time educated students to believe that the white race and all its ways is the source of all the world's evil. We therefore should not be surprised when young people, having coded Israel as "white," embrace anti-Semitism and valorize bloodthirsty terrorists like Hamas...]
