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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2023-323
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Palestine:
Ukraine:
This WSJ journo is staying at interesting places –>
Yaroslav Trofimov @yarotrof – 18:09 UTC · Dec 30, 2023
By now, seven hotels where I stayed and four restaurants where I had eaten in Ukraine have been struck by Russian missiles. Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, Pokrovsk …
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Other issues:
RIP:
2023:
Empire:
Europe:
Russia:
China:
> At the same time, as spending on China at the C.I.A. has doubled since the start of the Biden administration, the United States has sharply stepped up its spying on Chinese companies and their technological advances.
…
Though the U.S. intelligence community has long collected economic intelligence, gathering detailed information on commercial technological advances outside of defense companies was once the kind of espionage the United States avoided.
But information about China’s development of emerging technologies is now considered as important as divining its conventional military might or the machinations of its leaders. <
Use as open (not related to Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Happy new year to all.
Reading RT (a rarity as I rarely visit) this morning I was struck by two items. First an ironic post by IR occupying Iran’s “dignified sex work client” propaganda outlet that “Iran deploys navy to Red Sea”. I can just see Dmitry with a satisfied smile as he typed those words for the head line. (Get it? it is funny, tbh.)
The second one was also indicative of Russian mindset but more generally I would think the gentlemen in West, Sound, and Central Asia can be better understood by the words of this Russian academic:
“ The elites of Western Europe – and especially in Germany – are in a state of historical failure. The main basis of their 500-year domination [of the world] was military superiority, on which the economic, political and cultural dominance of the West was built. But this has been knocked out from under them. With the help of this advantage, they manipulated the world’s resources in their favor. First they plundered their colonies, and later they did the same, but with more sophisticated methods.”
Now, it is a fact and not in dispute that Europeans, having chanced upon a secret formula X (tbd and subject of this wall of words, so be patient) that afforded them mastery over the entire planet, completely changing the civilizational discourse in all continents, whether in harmony or discord, whether as permanent confrontation or gradual or ready embrace, and created the modern world which is instantly familiar to nearly all inhabitants on this planet for the first time ever (ever) in recorded history.
Now the sad fact remains that the sort of person who ends up being a promoted academic in West, South, and Central Asian societies (the cause? tbd+, see above) sees the foundation of this remarkable history of the Western man over the past 500 years as being nothing but superior arms. They “strong armed” their way to the top, sure, but the question professor is how did they get so virile and effective?
The core civilizational problem of the aforementioned areas of Asia (and other parts “south”), speaking as a native of one of the said parts, who was basically forced by the facts of the utterly inexplicable sad and sorry condition of my own people and the rest of Asia to seek an answer as to wtf happened here was and remaiins cultural.
European ruling classes and emerging knowledge workers stumbled upon an alignment of interests that transformed European civilization. The key distinguishing factor of European modern civilization is their system of rule without supreme leaders. A characteristic of European modern history is also the episodic rise and destructive fall of supreme leaders (Napoleon and Hitler).
European elite introduced social mobility into their society. This hugely expanded the human resources, in terms of thought, ambition, innovation, administration, management, planning, executing, available to the system. Naturally, martial technology advanced in tandem, but was not the only sector of society that was so transformed. They all did.
In conjunction with this, West dared to defy “our fathers’ way” mindset prevalent everywhere and broke free from mental shackles to explore new thoughts, ideas, and dreams, The past 500 years of Europe are not note worthy and historic (in the same way Classical Greece or Ancient Egypt or Fabled Persia or amazing China ..) because of arms and military technology and feats.
Social mobility, clearly obvious to the joe the street, motivated a sense of shared stake in the “glory of empire”. Europe of the past 500 years minus the past few decades of nose dive (“for the glory of Zion”) is an amazing chapter in human history in terms of arts, letters, sciences (natural and otherwise), and an a veritable explosion of knowledge and cataloguing of every little critter on earth and every past nation. My own people were educated as to our history by the Western man.
In all of Asia, only the Japanese did the sensible thing when confronted by the pointy end of the Western civilization arriving on their shores. They self reflected, observed the newly arrived barbarians, and they did some think time (with actual intellectuals and not the sort you find in other parts of Asia) and they come up with a 19th century version of a powerpoint with bullet points and the wonder that are the Japanese people read it and acted on it, as a whole society.
Now this mention of Japanese requires a quick note regarding the two tragedies that has happened so far in 2024. I watched 2 clips, one from inside the plane that was on fire, and then another from inside a train in a station shaking violently due to the quake. Remarkably but typically, in both you have perfectly calm Japanese making gasping sounds of what I presume are “oh my, this is awful”, “oh, so scary”, but sitting like perfectly civilized people. Can you just imagine the scene and you can substitute ANY other nation practically here. What a difference. A mark of actual intelligence imho.
What is evident in my reading of the journals of a few intellectuals of Iran and Japan during the early years of being confronted with this this new European man is that what excited them and caused their words of admiration for the West definitely was not arms or military prowess. The near universal expression is that of wonder at the order of the society, how goods and people are transported, how the personages in government are treated by the common man (no groveling on ground, kissing boots, etc. quite common in Asia to this day)
See, the West, before its evident and tragic nose dive into self colonization by parasitical elites, managed to find a way to motivate the state, in its full glory, without the need for a special man. The West conquered because its elites worked in concert. The system functioned century after century, because unlike Asians, the new European society did not require *cults of strong personalities* to make progress. In Asia, with the exception of Japanese, civilization lurches forward, punctuated by energetics bursts of progress centered around a person. Because the elite of Asia can not cooperate unless they are inthrall of a magnate. To this day, Putin, Khamenei, Modi, and Xi.
These systems, antiques that they are, reflect a still under developed tribal mindset underlying these societies. Because of the unnatural structure of having a single individual oversight over the complex matter that is a modern civilization (looking beyond mere statecraft) necessitates suppression of others and demands a sycophantic ‘court’ , the ill effects percolate to all areas of society. Our ignorant learned Russian professor quoted in RT is a specimen of the type of person that succeeds in these Asiatic systems.
So yes, West has definitely gone off course and the direction set by Cabal is not acceptable. However the choice of the alternatives is equally alarming. The mindset that informs the Russian professor is widely held amongst the brute (intellect and otherwise) types that are naturally attracted to the Asiatic power structures. They truly do not understand just what made West change the world in a way that no other civilization has done to date. None.
p.s. “self hating Jew” rebuttals save your breath. others welcome.
Posted by: robinthehood | Jan 2 2024 18:45 utc | 115
@Roger | Jan 4 2024 0:44 utc | 183
You are utterly conflating two completely different things. Firstly the correction of the histories written by the imperial historians designed to enhance the standing of the Europeans as the civilizational supreme project by more recent, less elite genuflecting and careful historians, and “wokeness”.
Of course a more balanced study of history is not “woke”, but oftentimes those who are influenced by woke ideas pretend to pursue a more balanced account of history, when they are not and they are just trying to be edgy and “novel”. On top of that, while European history is obviously written from a European point of view, it is traditionally the main source of world history for a number of good reasons: it is usually abundant, often with multiple accounts of the same facts, it is written by different kinds of people (clerics, merchants, soldiers, diplomatic envoys, historians by profession…), it is written for different purposes and with different mindsets, it is sometimes well written, that is there is a tradition of historiography that offers contexts, explanations and evaluations, non-European histories are as much as biased. Not to mention that, being so abundant, it usually reflects different viewpoints about what is the European civilization and so it is actually biased in different manners toward it: e.g. historians from the Enlightment era usually considered the role of Christianity in the European civilization differently, to put it mildly, than Medieval historians. As a consequence, when those edgy (let’s not call them “woke”, if that’s a problem) historians try to rely more on non-European sources, they rely more often than not on flimsy sources, that, by their context, their purpose, the factual understanding of the author etc., would be taken with a grain of salt if they were European.
Specifically, the author of the above-mentioned article, R. Alan Covey, writes in his own biography: “[b]y the end of the sixteenth century, the region [South America] had been utterly transformed by some of the same forces that shape our world today: epidemic disease, religious intolerance, and race-based inequality”. It was clear from his account of the capture of Atahualpa, that he was covering the uncertanties of the historical fact with “feelings” and “rebalancing”, even though those feelings and rebalancing match badly with the few ascertained facts: Atahualpa won the civil war against Huascar, Huascar was prisoner in Cajamarca, Atahualpa was in Cajamarca with his retinue when he was captured by the Spaniards, and, after that fact, the Incan empire ceased to exist as an organized force able to resist the Spanish conquest.
The fact that 162 Spanish adventurers dared to assault the ruler of an empire and all his dignitaries, while a force of a few thousands natives civil war veterans was around there is remarkable, no matter what you think actually happened. If the native force actually engaged the Spaniards, in what measure, or if they were demoralized and routed just by the fall of their leaders is actually secondary. They were defeated by their enemies’ prowess or boldness, or both. Europeans believed that the Incan forces engaged the Spaniards, at least partially, because that is what Europeans would do, not because they were Western elite-serving fraudsters: to them (Europeans of old) it was unconceivable to stay there and do nothing as the likes of prof. Alan Covey believe. And, frankly, the reasons adduced to justify the revisionist scenario (the retinues stood back, because they feared for the safety of their leaders; they stood back because they were too far away etc.) are quite weak.
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@Lavrov’s Dog | Jan 4 2024 6:02 utc | 196
My gripe with your point is that it sounds like I said that multiculturalism is _always_ the result of some top-down enforced action. My point is that neoliberals/neocons are actively promoting multiculturalism for their own political aims and that without that active and disingenuous promotion it would not happen at the pace and intensity we are witnessing the so called West.
Posted by: SG | Jan 4 2024 10:16 utc | 199
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