Left: The Fall of Kabul, 2021 - Right: The Fall of Saigon, 1975
"Strange Days Ahead"
by Jim Kunstler
“If American Airlines were in charge, they would’ve blamed all the cancellations on weather and then given everyone’s checked luggage to the Taliban.”
– Sean Davis, Editor, "The Federalist", on the action in the Kabul airport.
"I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse - which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years?
Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise - e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse?
Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!
Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers - that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.
Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives - I’m sure you do, too - who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda - and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work?
I doubt it. And the fall of Afghanistan is sure to spark a resentful reaction among the many ex-soldiers who paid a heavy price pulling tours of duty in that hapless venture over twenty years. There’s a lot of them out there in Red America, and they were already pissed-off about the pernicious nonsense being jammed down their throats by the minions of Wokesterism: the race-and-gender hustles, the off-the-charts rise of violent crime, the wide-open border, the off-shoring of jobs, the Covid lockdowns and wrecking of small business, the MMT experiment launching inflation, and the new pussification of the armed forces they served and suffered in. They’ve laid rather low through years of this, just watching the scene in wonder and nausea, but you may see them turn more active now. And consider: they’ve been well-trained in weaponry and tactics.
Unsettling discoveries are in the offing going forward. The Wall Street Journal lately detected signs of life in the John Durham investigation, reporting that matters have gone to a grand jury. That means crimes are being prosecuted. We may soon become reacquainted with names that almost slipped down the memory-hole - the likes of Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Pete Strzok… who else…? This may also lead to a catastrophic discrediting of the mainstream news media - who were fully in on the RussiaGate con - to the degree that some companies end up utterly wrecked and with many careers washed up.
Hard information about what actually went down in the 2020 election is also coming out, and not to the credit of the ruling regime that purportedly triumphed in that contest. Some of that info may redound to the issue of China’s involvement in our affairs, and beyond mere election meddling to the wholesale buying-off of the US political class. The pathetic thing is we already know several very prominent figures on-the-take from China, including Eric Swalwell, Diane Feinstein, and most conspicuously, Hunter Biden (and family), but the ranks of the known-to-be bought-off could swell dramatically.
Finally, there’s the fate of President “Joe Biden.” As Kabul falls this morning, he remains in his Camp David gopher hole. Observers conjecture that he’s had a few “bad days” lately, meaning he is not presentable. There is a rising clamor, even among his own partisans, for him to come out and say something, anything… for Gawdsake… just do more than pretend to be the leader of the free world! It could be curtains for Ol’ White Joe… resignation-time. Never before has a US president faced such a daunting loss of legitimacy, and hardly just on account of Afghanistan. And then consider who’s next-in-line for that position. (Did you shudder?)
Sometimes, Vlad Lenin observed, events take decades, and sometimes years happen in weeks. This looks like one of those times for the USA. Heads will soon be spinning like the little girl’s in The Exorcist, releasing a pea-soup spewage of shocking revelation. The old narratives will fall apart before our eyes. Minds will have to get right. Prepare for a whole lot of strange days rolling out.”
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