Lord Dampnut, Biden and the Taliban: What's goin' on?

 

What's going on? This--via George W. Swinford >>One year ago, the Lord Dampnut released 5000 Taliban fighters in exchange for a cease-fire to help his flailing presidential campaign, despite strenuous objections from both the Pentagon and the Afghan government. President Ashraf Ghani warned that their release would be a "danger to the world." We are finding out, now that many of these fighters entering Kabul, such as Mawlavi Talib, are top Taliban commanders who oversaw the assaults of the key cities this week. And they go up from there.

Worse, the Taliban leader who is set to taking over Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has Trump to thank for his release:

The disaster unfolding in Afghanistan came from the deal that Trump made a year ago, except he wanted it to happen sooner—by Christmas of last year. He postponed it after his loss for Biden to deal with it in May. The Pentagon asked for more time, so Biden pushed it to the end of August. This enraged conservatives for delaying the withdrawal.

Keep in mind that Donald J. Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David the week of September 11 to strike what was essentially a surrender deal, but cancelled after the obvious backlash of hosting the Taliban on 9/11. Instead, he sent Pompeo to Qatar to sign the deal with the Taliban, and announced that he had given the Taliban everything they asked for because "everyone is tired of war."

"[It's] time for someone else to do that work and it will be the Taliban and it could be surrounding countries". Trump even had private discussions with the top Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. I could only imagine what was said and promised. Not only did Trump cave to the Taliban by giving them everything they asked for, but no members of the Afghan government were present. None. Trump completely cut them out of the deal. Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, who was appointed under George W. Bush, blames Trump's "peace" deal with what is happening now because Trump would only work with the Taliban and completely delegitimized the Afghan government.

To be clear, Trump's deal was a complete disgrace that diminished our allies and strengthened the enemy. Trump reinforced the Taliban with their top fighters, and promised a quick retreat of American forces. This essentially would establish the Taliban as the defacto regime once US forces left. Trump is now lying, to no one's surprise, saying that the peace accord he signed was "conditions-based." It wasn't.

To be clear, Biden didn't foresee how weak the Afghan government truly was. No one did. Other than that, I have no problem with leaving Afghanistan. If after 20 freaking years and trillions of dollars spent the Afghan government can't hold up for even a week, what the hell is the point? How many more decades are we supposed to stay? How many more trillions need to be wasted? How many more American soldiers need to be killed?

It turns out the whole Afghan exercise was about military contractors and corporations raking in profits. I suppose we shouldn't have been so surprised (that it predictably failed even the presumptive reason for the attack).

Unless we wanted a permanent occupation, we needed to leave. If not, we should have just petitioned Afghanistan to be the 51st state in the union. That way, when they asked for money, we could tell them that's not the federal government's job and you can't solve problems by throwing money at it. If Trump has been a better president, he would have worked out a withdrawal with the Afghan government. Yet Trump negotiated and got burned by a group of terrorists. Biden was handed a lemon, so he had two choices. He could have backed out of the deal or kept it in place. What he did was delay the withdrawal to August 31st.

I notice that all of the Republican legislators complaining about our troops not staying didn't say crap about Trump's withdrawal plan last year. Now they whine that we should have stayed forever. Of course, none of them have children who serve in the military, because endless wars are fine as long as it's someone else's kid. But let's be honest—Afghanistan is no longer a major threat to our security (if it ever was...Ed.) There's other places our troops need to be. Yes, the Taliban are terrible for the people there, but there are no shortage of nations that oppress their own people. We can't police all of them, nor should we. That certainly isn't an excuse to stay there indefinitely. At the very least, this will replace cancel culture and Critical Race Theory as the Fox News outrage du jour, but it will ring hollow. The GOP loves to start endless wars. They had no problem selling out our Kurdish allies. They didn't care that Trump's hasty exit from Syria, on orders from Putin, forced us to bomb our own bases.

They said nothing when Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David during 9/11, or released thousands of their fighters—including the leaders who took over Afghanistan today. Heck, the GOP had no trouble orchestrating a terrorist attack on our own Capitol. Sam Dem... U.S. AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL: CONTEXT !!

What to Think About

 

This achingly sweet paean to progress is the EXACT principle upon which propaganda is premised. Ellul (1964) called it "the shaping of men's minds." Earlier, Bernays (1928) wrote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)) The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

You don't try to change people's minds. You try to SHAPE them, by suggestion, mis- and disinformation, and eventually the Big Lie, when the "marks" are ready for it,

For example, listen to the repetitive litanies of grievance enunciated now in the wake of Lord Dampnut's traitorous tenure as CEO. It's not a coincidence that they are virtually identical in content and tone of voice from state to conniving state. Those are the words and forms they have been taught by their constant immersion in pathologically repetitive Righturd media like FauxNooz.

If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Propagandists don't worry about what the target audience THINKS, because they control what that audience thinks ABOUT and HOW it thinks about it, down to the very words used and the pragmatic, grammatical and semiotic forms in which they are arranged.

Bernays melded emergent studies in Pavlovian behaviorism, scientific management/group psychology, mass communication and his uncle Sigmund Freud's insights on love and death to create an epistemological system for the corpoRat world in which we are ensnared to this very day. 

Dr. Woody'z Meemz: Ommmmmm

 

Predictable "Failure?"

One of the 'rationales" and "justifications" floated for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan back in 2002 was the claim that it would lead to "nation-building," which would help drag Afghanistan out of the ambit of "radical" Islam.

(Another one, of course, was Afghanistan's vast, untapped wealth of minerals and elements needed for the perpetuation and expansion of the "surveillance state," but we don't talk about such matters in public...)

"Nation-Building" is a particularly obnoxious and odious fraud because the term and the practices associated with it do nothing so much as camouflage neo-colonial imperialism for the purpose of, securing new markets for imperial products, and "assistance." It's no coincidence that nation building seems always require military intervention to "succeed," you may be assured: it's a staple in the cupboards of empire.

It's real, practical "virtues" are several: It 

1) fattens the investor class, 

2) keeps the military occupied and 3) its suppliers profitable, 

4) exploits others' resources, 

5) warns our adversaries, 

6) confuses our allies and 

7) satisfies the domestic warmongers' and militarists' demand for heroes who demonstrate our/"their" exceptionalism.

George W. (the Chimperor) Boosh is the worst war criminal of the Century, so far. But I'd indict and convict all the "conquering" wannabees of the Right who indulged the whims of the ravers of PNAC and succumbed to precisely the conflict into which the Islamists wanted to induce.

The Afghanistan Adventure went no more sour than the imperial impulses that directed it...

The First Time I Saw Paris

 The first time I visited Paris, I was in the USAF, it was 1966, and I took a four-day pass. I could get there in six hours from my base,

The second morning, I had strategically positioned myself in a cafe near the Arc d'Triomphe, drinking coffee and smoking Gauloise when a young woman came around selling the International Herald Tribune. I purchased one and we chit-chatted. She was English and working her way around Europe. 

I went on to the Louvre that day. When I returned to the hostel where I was staying, I saw her in the cafeteria/kitchen. She stayed there, too. We chitchatted some more. She said, if you have a car, I know where there's a great party. 

We went, it was, and one thing led to another: we saw dawn in the car parked around the verge of the Boi du Boulogne.

Dr. Woody'z Meemz: Part Nth

 

Silent Lightning: An Haiku

 Incandescent flash

Soundlessly limns my chamber

Through slumber-glazed lids.