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Source: The Greanville Post
America Is On Autopilot
Indrajit
OpEds
indi.ca
Views from the third world. Earth.
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You can't teach old dogs new tricks. Leo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in The Departed (Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros / Still)
In The Departed, a common criminal and a crime boss are sitting in a bar. The criminal says, “You’re seventy fucking years old Frank, I’m just saying. One of your guys is going to pop you. As for running drugs, what the fuck are you doing? You don’t need the money or the pain in the ass, and they will catch you.” The boss distractedly lights the place mat on fire and says, “I haven’t ‘needed the money’ since I took Archie’s milk money in the third grade. Tell you the truth, I don’t need pussy anymore either… but I like it.”
This is the state of American Empire today. America doesn’t need the oil from the Middle East (as much) anymore, nor does it need the pain in the ass of fighting Russia, or Iran, let alone China. But it likes it.
At this age — with an 81-year-old President and War Secretary in the hospital — America has no place stealing oil and bombing/besieging people. They’re a net exporter of energy (for a while at least) and these people would trade with America anyways. At this point America’s problems are voluntary. They’ve been the big dog so long they just can’t stop biting people.
In a historical sense, killing people and taking their shit is all America knows. Since its founding, they’ve been genociding and looting, from the 13 colonies to this globe-spanning empire we know and hate today. Some people are born criminals and some nations are born colonizers. They have to die as they lived, even if it doesn’t make sense anymore.
The War Crime Boss Of America
Take Joe Biden, the current war crime boss of America. This visibly dying Biden has yet to encounter a problem that he doesn’t distractedly light on fire, while young people are trying to warn him. Ukraine? Bomb it. Palestine? Bomb it. Iraq again? Bomb it again. Yemen? What do you think? Biden certainly isn’t thinking. He’s just reacting with the only neuronal loop functioning in his calcified brain. Bomb shit.
Not only corrupt and criminal, but a political mediocrity, as is almost the entirety of the US political class.
And it’s not just Biden. American leadership is effectively brain-dead. They react to any stimulation with pure muscle memory, and pull out the military ‘solution’. Even though it’s solved nothing for generations. As dead war criminal Madeline Albright said, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” That was too much even for the war criminal she was talking to. Colin Powell said, “I thought I would have an aneurysm.” That’s effectively what happened to America’s strategic brain trust. Too much blood on the brain and now they’re brain-dead.
America today is just a spinal cord connected to a trigger, with precious little thinking about it. America just bombs reflexively, they don’t even attempt diplomacy. It’s like a hand that touches a hot stove and — instead of drawing back — just punches it, over and over again.
This has been Joe Biden’s response to every crisis in his crisis-ridden Presidency. Forget diplomacy, forget strategy, forget even thinking about it. Just bomb immediately and, when that doesn’t work, bomb again. When asked whether his latest airstrikes against Yemen were working, he simply did not give a fuck.
Biden replied,“Are the airstrikes in Yemen working? Well… when you say ‘working’, are they stopping the Houthis [Ansar Allah]? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” So the bombings aren’t working, but they’re going to continue anyways. Why? Who knows? Who cares? Again, you’re talking to a spinal cord attached to a trigger, not a brain.
Biden just blew $500 million dollars and years worth of Tomahawk missile production and has what to show for it? Now the Red Sea is even more constipated. The Red Sea was only blocked to ‘Israel’ before, but now the US and UK are on the shit list, and Ansar Allah is hitting them as well. US soldiers are literally dead in the water and they’re calling it ‘accidents’ because they can’t actually respond. As the saying goes, old dogs can’t learn new tricks. But just like his actual dog (who keeps biting Secret Service agents), Biden can’t help himself.
The Military-Industrial Mafia
And this ain’t just Biden. All the dogs of war are barking, despite wearing dentures now. This sclerotic thinking is baked into the US government, by years of warmongers only failing upwards and never facing consequences. Despite losing every war for decades, no one lost their jobs, besides the people that opposed war. From politicians to bureaucrats to the arms dealers to the media, everyone just failed upwards. So they keep starting wars, long after America’s military and industrial might have atrophied. These guys aren’t soldiers or workers, what do they know? They’re professional idiots.
This unified military-media-industrial complex has an inertia of its own. It doesn’t matter who’s on top of the war machine, it’s a war machine, what do you think it does? War brings ‘donations’ for politicians, board seats for bureaucrats, contracts for arms dealers, and advertising rights to the media. They all get paid while some other country is destroyed, and future generations get stuck with the debt. It’s the perfect war crime. American elites (ie, their corporate overlords) have figured out that there’s more money in losing wars than winning them.
So America’s corrupt government starts these over-promised wars, the corrupting arms dealers supply the over-priced weapons, and the craven media over-hypes them to a credulous and mostly irrelevant public. Elites move between these jobs seamlessly. People like Lloyd Austin go from the military to Raytheon (arms dealer) then right back to the Pentagon. It’s a merry-go-round, except the ponies have weapons and incinerate everyone within a 10,000 km radius.
It doesn’t matter who the selected President is, they all preside over the same carnival of carnage. Modern America has one motto, ‘in bombs we trust’ and anyone that doesn’t believe it won’t even make it as an intern. This is across both the government and its privatized functions like propaganda (what they call media)and manufacturing. Biden physically embodies this institutional rot, but it goes much deeper than him. It’s endemic across the whole empire, which is visibly dying along with him.
It’s important to remember that the people who failed in Vietnam, who failed in Afghanistan, who failed in Iraq, those people are still there, and they’re just as old and calcified as Biden. Institutions are just people, and the people running American institutions are professional failures. That’s why the whole edifice is crumbling.
The closest thing to an original policy idea in Washington is attacking someone else. Nobody considers maybe not bombing for a minute, because that would stop the gravy train. Right now, for example, Republicans are holding up ‘lethal aid’ to Ukraine not because they oppose militarizing Russia’s border. They just want to militarize their own border. Demilitarization is never an option. The idea of not killing is anathema in America, and anyone who had such thoughts has been purged long since.
This is the milieu that the milquetoast Biden came up in. He is the leftover candidate for a leftover Empire, digging up old conflicts and putting them in the microwave. Now they’re fighting Russians again, and Arabs, and even threatening China for good measure. All the classic villains from their cinematic subconscious are being trotted out for one last rodeo, before the show packs up for good. Except now they’re losing badly on every front, and all they’re really showing is weakness.
As much as America hypes up Russia as an existential threat, they are too scared to take the field themselves. America can’t muster the troops and they can’t produce enough munitions. They’re a spent force hiding behind proxies, like a pinch-hitter in baseball. They can no longer run the field, let alone dominate it. In the Middle East, also, they are speaking loudly and carrying a limp dick. America has made a big show about supporting ‘Israel’ to destroy Hamas, but the Palestinian Resistance is kicking the IOF’s ass in battle while ‘Israel’ is just committing war crimes against civilians.Meanwhile Yemen cut off shipping for ‘Israel’ and America responded by getting themselves and Britain cut off also. They tried to send a message, but the poorest country in the world is defying them. Forget deterrence, all the region sees is American blood in the water.
Today America obviously can’t win a land war, they can’t win a sea war, and all they have left is air power. That is still effective against hospitals and refugee camps, but peer powers like Russia, Iran, and China would obliterate America’s aircraft carriers with hypersonic missiles (which America doesn’t have!). So there goes air power, against every major opponent they’re provoking. All America has left is its nukes, but even those are literally from another century. As Adm. Charles Richard, head of Strategic Command said about their land-based nukes:
‘“Let me be very clear: You cannot life-extend the Minuteman III [any longer],”he said of the 400 ICBMs that sit in underground silos across five states in the upper Midwest. “We can’t do it at all. … That thing is so old that, in some cases, the drawings don’t exist anymore [to guide upgrades].” Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”’
This is America’s position in a nutshell. They have the power to blow up the world, but not in any strategic manner. They’re just killing on autopilot, like a Boeing 737 MAX, heading straight down into the ocean. Even if the Presidential pilot wanted to change course (which he doesn’t), they couldn’t do it. The controls themselves are corrupted. The ‘software’ fix is in. This thing is going in the ocean.
As our common crook said at the beginning of this thing, America is just too old for this shit. Yet as his uncommon boss said, America simply likes it, and doesn’t know how to do anything else. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks and a (paper) tiger can’t change its stripes. Colonization is America’s constitution and they have to go out the way they came in. Genocidal and ugly, long after it makes sense.
In The Departed, our criminal warns the crime boss that “one of your guys is going to pop you,” and that’s precisely what happens in the end (spoiler alert). The crime boss ends up cornered in a warehouse in front of one of his guys who says, “all that murdering and all that fucking, and no sons.” Then he calls him a ‘rat prick’ and shoots the crime boss dead. Someone’s going to pop America —ultimately from within — and that’s how the war crime boss will finally be killed. The son of the British Empire has no sons, so that’s how the whole wretched White Empire ends. Fighting over oil and spoils, long after they’ve been rotted out from within. America is running on autopilot and fumes now, and the ocean is beckoning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
My name is Indrajit Samarajiva and I'm a writer. People also call me Indi or Jit. I was born in Canada, raised in America, and live in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka.
My name is Indrajit Samarajiva and I'm a writer. People also call me Indi or Jit. I was born in Canada, raised in America, and live in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka.
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