Remarks on the Decline of American Empire
infoproc.blogspot.com
infoproc.blogspot.com
I'd also disagree with the passage at the end of the article. George Washington was about as mercenary and capitalistic as they come. The revolution against Britain was started by the wealthy merchant class who calculated the npv of continued relations with Britain vs independence and found that independence was more profitable. Rockefeller was obsessed with money (recorded every penny he ever spent). The Bay Area economy was created as a result of ambitious young people literally taking part in a gold rush. It is disappointing that the romantic, politicized and intellectually lazy notions put forth in that final passage get any credence
I thought historians abandoned "moral decline" arguments with the 19th century.
What I find funny about them is they're always characterized as a decline in morals particularly important to the observing historian. And of course, no empirical measure of moral decline is ever given or even suggested.
So what arguments like this really amount to are a feeling. A feeling felt by curmudgeonly historians throughout time. Nostalgia. And most likely, nostaligia for a time they themselves never inhabited. All the better because there are no negative memories to sour the nostalgia.
America in my opinion is not in moral decline. We are reaching for a moral high point actually (but just barely). But that's just my feeling, so it's about as valuable as the ideas on offer here.
It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its greatest extent.
It takes one election or world event to turn things around.
The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones. They just represent the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and 1980s.
We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.
Germany recovered from that within 40 years. The Iraq war was a disaster, but there's nothing especially trying about recovering from that given time.
And no matter how much progress has been made between 1950 and 2017, there's so little comfort in drawing a parallel between our present situation and the trajectory Germany from 1910 to 1945.
I'm asking for a response from someone who knows the players and can give convincing evidence for their motivations.
I mention Wolfowitz because as I remember it he was one of the chief writers of the PNAC policy pieces[1] that were urging for a ground war in Iraq during Clinton's second term.
I'd be interested in reading more from an expert on the chief movers and shakers in buildup to the Iraq War, especially since almost all of those neo-cons involved have done a lot to distance themselves from it over the last decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
It's talking about genocide. If internal strife gets to the point of extreme hatred, then you don't need guns to kill each other. Not saying I agree that would happen in the U.S., but that's what they're talking about. Not Vegas.
To reiterate: See Rwanda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
If you don’t have an illness and just want to read random stuff, instead of some other leisure activity, I guess it doesn’t matter.
Generally, and purely anecdotally, I find HN content to be both interesting and either a) from a reputable source, generally for opinion pieces such as this or b) supported by facts, with sources, or with broadly-accepted knowledge held by the audience (such as with technical posts). Either a) or b), establish for me at least, some metric of reputability of the arguments presented.
I found this particular post to be interesting, but neither a) from a reputable source in the field (not trying to put down the author of the blog, just don't think based on his bio that this is more than one dude's opinion or he's just summarizing the content of the video) b) backed up by facts to support his opinions and assertions.
There's no authority granted by being on the front page. You should feel free to question any ideas presented, no matter who they are from (including from people with actual authority... since even smart people are still just people).
Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing.
And there is more:
>>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us...
Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...
I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.
Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.
Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.
That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.
Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?
By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996.
Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this.
The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire.
Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.
"The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire." I do not know the situation in Bulgaria, but in the Czech Republic, the enterprises which were bought by the elites and foreign interests were not failing, and several ex-communists have become USD billionaires by having "purchased" them.
I dunno, seemed to last well into Obama's tenure in practice if not in rhetoric, from what I can tell, and Syria may well be a bigger disaster than Afghanistan and Iraq combined by any measure, including realpolitik (see: its effects on European politics, maybe also on the situation in Turkey though I'm less certain on that one). Yes, yes, the war in Iraq contributed to it in certain important ways, but didn't dictate our response to it, which was about as wrong as it could have been, unless there were some serious poker chips in play with Russia that we mere observers couldn't see, i.e. aside from the obvious ones. There's been no widespread condemnation of that action or even common recognition that we're the reason it's such a big mess, as there eventually was in the case of Iraq at least, and incidentally we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, so neoconservatism seems to be alive and well in some sense.
Mind, I protested the war in Iraq, was overall a fan of Obama's domestic policies, so I'm not a partisan looking for reasons to bash Obama or try to rescue Bush's incredibly poor legacy or anything like that.
Domestically their policies differed a little bit and also Obama was more charismatic, more like B Clinton, in that respect. GW was seen as a buffoon and tool of industry.
[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-apology-dwb-1.3261009
Most of the U.S. response has been to ISIS in Iraq, which is winding down but can be seen more as more fallout from the Iraq war than anything else.
The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.
> Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives
...and american lives as well: I'm always surprised at how in some cultures it's considered acceptable mixing money and human lives in the same sentence as if they were somewhat comparable items.
On top of that, human lives are often listed after money, yet nobody seems to take notice of this.
"oh it's just semantics"...
China has alot going for it economically, and that's a good thing overall, but it has its own issues to reckon with. Also, it's actually harder for its neighbors to deal with China, and vice versa, because of distance and shared borders. The U.S. may come across as a noisy policeman at times, but that's less of a worry that a pushy neighbor that keeps trying to move the fence line.
https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...
Do you point out that the BBC is owned/paid by the British government when someone posts BBC? (or NPR for that matter)
Radio liberty was forbidden from transmitting in the US by Congress.
Must be nice to worry about the messenger. I’ll worry about the toxins DuPont dumped in the local water or the lead leeching from my tap.
But hey, I can afford to boil pasta with bottled water, so who cares?
The russkies are pricks. So are we.