“The neocons / MIC / banksters / mickey mouse fan club is pushing for a war, and they won’t stop until they have one…” we are told.
We are told this by people who do not move in the aforementioned circles, and nor do I, so it is all speculation really.
What I can tell you for a fact is that my life experience tells me that 99%+ of all the violence I have ever seen has had the same root cause.
Party A *perceived* some “wriggle room” into which they could push their influence further into Party B’s territory, while still safely avoiding conflict, but to Party B no such room existed and the Rubicon was crossed.
I personally may, and I say may, have witnessed an exception twice in my life.
Party A always had an innate belief that they themselves, like Party B, had no interest in actually escalating things to the level of violence, and even if that happened it would be gradual and easy enough to pull back from.
Party A also always had some innate belief that unless they were actually squeezing the pips out of Party B, they weren’t pushing hard enough, and of course Party B would complain, that was just Party B doing the same thing in return innit.
As a society we have changed in the past 40 years, a period about which I can speak with some authority, because we have an entirely new lexicon and approach to things, just in time delivery is efficient, therefore everything else is inefficient, maximising profit margins is profitable, therefore maximising quality within the spec is unprofitable….
My small business is at the only level left where there is old school haggling and negotiation face to face, Tim says to me that job you did last week and charged me 40 quid for, I’ll lose money with my customer, can I cut it down, well Tim is a good and regular customer so how does 25 quid grab you, OK good to go says Tim, I still didn’t lose money on the job and Tim is still a good and regular customer.
At every other level it has been replaced with the shit, Fred asks me if I can do this for a small production run of 50 items, I spend some time discussing the details and working it out and tell Fred yes I need more details for a firm quote, but we are looking at around 15 quid a pop, Fred tells me there is no way there is more than 3 quid a pop in the budget, I tell Fred good luck with that and add him to the “asshole” file, if he or any business he is ever associated with ever comes back to me in the future there will be an automatic 25% surcharge, if that falls through he goes into the “super asshole” file and the surcharge is 50%.
I never actually refuse to do his work, I just refuse to do it at his price.
This negotiation or haggling is a lost art, in the western world in 2017 having work tendered and quoting for it is more akin to a hostile corporate takeover, much depends on the definition of “is” in the contract, and no area of the contract is too trivial to be subject to separate skirmishes over such minutiae as who will pay for lading, who will pay for packaging, who will pay for documentation, and of course the precise specifications for all of the above.
I’m tempted to say it all started with HR, because that was my own personal first experiences of it, no longer did the employer hire suitable staff after an advert and interview process, suddenly it is all farmed out to a separate internal department that knows everything about the art of war, and nothing whatsoever about the actual job in question or the skills required to do it.
And of course all these new internal divisions are like metastised brain tumours, once you get them they cannot be surgically removed without killing the patient, and all they ever do is grow…
In the 70’s it was part of british army training and indoctrination that the less you looked like robocop or a mafia thug, and the more you looked like a regular guy who happened to be wearing a uniform, the better and easier and less tension your relations with the civilian population or indeed other local militias would be, much was made of face to face eye contact (no mirrored shades) and talking in ordinary voices and smiling where appropriate, nowadays everyone who isn’t in your own robocop regiment is seen as a potential enemy combatant, even the humble british policeman on the beat looks more robocop than a world war two infantryman, and a world war two infantryman had walked the fucking walk.
In the previous post I stated that nobody who had a mortgage today has ever known anything except a world where the notional value of a house could only ever go up, and a “bad buy” was a house whose notional value did not go up as much as a similar house 5 streets over.
It’s the same in the world of politics and banking and MIC, nobody who is alive today has ever known anything except a world where “military action” was a pretty much one sided affair on foreign soils that could easily be classified as being no more than some more intensive than usual on the job training.
McStain, one of the biggest warhawks in the US was a failed pilot in the vietnam conflict and a failed POW to boot, I remember well an ex britsih army foot soldier who was sent to korea, which was before vietnam, and he said it turned into a shit show the moment the yanks got involved, not that it wasn’t a shit show before then, because from his perspective on the ground in a foreign country he did not want to be in, unlike the brits at the time, the yanks turned up with battle rifles that were capable of fully automatic firing, and in his words the moment they knew the yanks were “supporting” them on their flank, they regrouped to repel an attack from that flank, because what happened every time was the yanks went full auto, then there were calls for more ammo, then there were calls to fall back, because everyone was out of ammo, then the koreans moved in to the exposed flank.
This was all known back up the food chain, but it doesn’t matter, because they are “partners” and “allies” and that is more important than your own men dying.
It was more important because it was the beginning of the management era, where exploiting that wriggle room left between you and your opponent (or partner) was a necessity, and failing to do so was a sign of incompetence or inadequacy, suddenly there are, quite literally, lawyers and managers having direct control over military actions on the ground in vietnam.
We have now moved on to a place where lawyers and managers are all that is left, what was a simple grunt in WW2 who got all the dirty shitty deadly jobs is now a special forces type, a tiny minority, the barracks themselves are full of barrack room lawyers and wimminz and transgender queens posing as an officer corps.
It’s very easy to sit around in peace time and tell everyone you’re a death machine devil dog that drinks the blood of babies (I knew three burma railway survivors, one was 6 foot six and had an especially awful time because of his height, one was a 5 foot 4 wiry little scotsman who was a royal engineer, in 1970 I saw him wearing a tee shirt, which was fairly new fashion then, and it had writing on it, which was totally new fashion then, the text said “yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, because I’m the meanest bastard in the whole fucking valley“) but it is quite another thing to walk the walk.
My own uncle was in signals (navy), and was ordered to stay behind in singapore after it fell to the japanese, and report on their movements “as long as possible” which as military orders go was basically a death sentence. So he did it, until he could do no more, a lone white man bereft of all comms and support abroad in asia in enemy territory, the water was out, japanese boats, so all that was left was to try to walk out of there, while living off the jungle, and walk out of there he did, not the exact route on the map, but 4,000 kilometres all the same, an six months later he made it to the british base in Calcutta, where, since he was already recorded as MIA presumed dead, they would not issue him a ration book or rations, so he had to steal food and clothes from the navy to survive for six weeks until the word came back and his claimed identity was confirmed.
Let me tell you, in 2017 in peacetime, starting in singapore with the clothes you are standing in and nothing else, no money, no comms, and simply avoiding peacetime authorities, and walking 4,000 km to calcutta, and MAKING IT THERE ALIVE, is no mean fucking feat, one that only a vanishingly small percentage of modern devil dogs would even attempt, much less endure and complete.
50% of the norks would do it, even if their true politics is they hate kim jong more than anything and love mickey mouse, because, survival bitch.
Which brings me back to the beginning, that uncle, now dead, was someone who when presented with that “wriggle room between party A and party B” scenario where he was one of the parties, he’d take a step back and sit down.
He knew that what looked like 5 miles of wriggle room from one perspective looked like shit being 1 millimetre from your nose from the other perspective.
He knew that there was a difference between being willing to start something, and being willing to end it at any cost for the bastard that started it.
He knew that what looked like a perfectly reasonable attempt to get another 0.25 cents off the dollar from one perspective looked like being asked to say thanks for pimping your seven year old daughters out from the other.
He knew that when you crossed the Rubicon and looked back, there was no going back, and everything looked very different.
The true danger we face is not that the world is run be people intent on war, it is that the world is run by people who think they know exactly how far they can push the other guy and still get away with it and walk away with a profit, and if they don’t do so, someone else will usurp their place at the trough.