Mastodawn

During the first few weeks of Operation Desert Storm we'd routinely see footage of entire battalions of Iraqi soldiers walking up to the first American GI they could find waving white flags, believing that the worst thing that could happen to them at the hands of the American military was a shower, an MRE and a pack of cigarettes. The mythos of the American a just actor was largely intact then, and that mythos saved a lot of American lives. And then Abu Grahib happened, and that all ended.

Suddenly the prospect of surrendering yourself to American custody meant maybe getting tortured to death and maybe getting sexually humiliated as part of the process; everyone saw it was better to die fighting. In days the entire tide of that conflict in that whole region changed; there was no recovering from it.

We're looking at the long unwinding of that story here today, everywhere. Nobody can or will believe in Americans, or even the idea of America, again. That's over now.

I think the only real question right now is how the rest of the world manages the unwinding of dying empires. What does America make, these days? Obsolete cars, innovative financial instruments, rented software, GPUs, guns and corn. Did I miss anything?

I sometimes wonder what Britain minus London looks like on a spreadsheet. What's the all-money side of the "only then will you realize that you can't eat money" coin?

Alanis Obomsawin. once and often paraphrased, said "When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

I, naively, believe money is useful. But once the last haven is shuttered, once the last rent is sought, once the last hoards of wealth are taxed.... who are you - what is left - when money is not enough to make money?

64 Islands Aroha Cooperative 8h ago

@mhoye hate. hate and fear, important domestic products in usa and certain oil-rich overseas territories, now spilling over into the wider global market

@mhoye this is what I often tell people about living in California is that we can eat the food we grow here.

@mhoye
A lot of Scots want shot of Westminster because of how badly it manages our country so you may get to see partially what a Londonless UK looks like fairly soon.

Chris Siebenmann 6h ago

@mhoye Hot and cynical take: America makes dollars. That may stop mattering¹, but there aren't any great replacements so far AFAIK and there's a lot of inertia in international trade settlement and so on.

¹ and there are some senior Americans who effectively want it to stop doing that. Another word for 'making dollars' is 'a persistent trade deficit'.

Rycochet 3h ago

@mhoye The Uk is what you get when kings and the could be kings of the banking sector control an economy for centuries and regularly exercise the power of veto over every economic policy. There's only the occasional blip where they consider the other bits as they're afraid of being shot in basements by peasants who want to give communism a go.

@mhoye Any country, apparently, can have an atrocity-level international relations fuckup. Canada had its disasters in Somalia, looked around itself, and concluded it should probably not do that a second time. For the most part that decision seems to have held internationally, and while we don't have the same high regard we had in the 80s and 90s today, our reputation is still manageable.

The US... did not do that. The US decided that Abu Grahib was just fine, actually. And the world noticed.

@mhoye Trying to catalogue the instances of the US not just fucking up, but setting up a program to institutionalize the up-fucking and make it repeatable, is exhausting.

@owen @mhoye
I guess it made sense from the US view. They hade done equally evil things to any country that had a) oil and or b) elected a leftist government for decades at that point. Nobody had ever cared.

The word suddenly noticing must have come as such a shock. Suddenly the pictures on the internet became stronger than the movies released by Hollywood.

@mhoye the white hat WAS our most valuable intangible asset.

After that and Syria/Kurds, that hat is in tatters. Lost a few buddies, who were with Kurds, when tRump sold us all out, and US COBs were abandoned to spetsnaz.

Ghostrunner 8h ago

@mhoye what we have lost is truly immeasurable

Quinn Norton 8h ago

@mhoye Abu Ghaib pictures and reporting is when I found out that the thing that happened to me as a child was technically torture. These things always begin at home.

Without the carceral state and the history or institutional torture at home, I do believe we wouldn't have had the instinct to do it abroad.

We haven't dealt with that still and it shows everyday.

NilaJones 8h ago

Brilliant points, both of you

@quinn A friend of mine once said, "what is fascism if not imperialism turned inwards?" the other side of the cycle, to your "what is imperialism, if not dehumanization shipped abroad?"

Eric Likness 8h ago

Yeah just ask USMC about Fallujah,... man what a damned bloody grindy that turned out to be.