The world is going backward, fast. The “new” Cold War is basically the same as the previous. General ignorance of the past is doing regressionism a lot of favors. What’s the difference between now and the 1950s? Not a lot, politically. The useless, destructive political fractures in humanity are older and dumber, and that’s about all.
In the 1950s, being a political psychopath was a thing. Stalin and Mao ruled in Russia and China. Senator Joe McCarthy and his persecutions and false narratives wound up the paranoia in the US to a critical level. Rhetoric took over from reality, at least according to the rhetoric. Much the same as now.
The global reality, of course, didn’t go away. (It never does, in case you were wondering. Reality tends to be a bit tactless.) Much of Europe, Russia, Japan and China were disaster areas, roughly the size of the continental United States. Over 120 million people had died. Millions more were maimed, homeless and/or in poverty. Apart from the Marshall Plan, or occasionally the rebuilding of Japan, you don’t hear a lot about that.
Within a decade of the Second World War, politics made things a lot worse. The unnecessary, pointless, expensive, murderous Cold War began entirely on the basis of politics. It was bizarre. The Soviet Union and China were both truly mangled and utterly devastated by the war. Winners in name only in so many ways, their politics created a couple of hells for their people. They went all-out for military equality with the West at the expense of all else.
The main lesson is that ultra-political measures like Nationwide gulags and ultra-repression in the USSR, and the Cultural Revolution in China achieved total self-defeat. Tens of millions died, and try finding that as a “lesson from history” in any current perspective.
The West, spurred on by McCarthy’s handlers and conservative mindsets, invented a convenient new threat, “the left”, which became synonymous with communism. Everyone who disagreed, from Vietnam War protesters to people wanting public services for their taxes, was a communist.
Sound familiar? It should. You see it every day on every news site. The idea that anyone living in Western democracies is hardly likely to want to become a communist, a jihadi or any other kind of obsessive nutcase was, and still is, completely ignored.
Charming ideas like species suicide, aka Mutual Assured Destruction, (it’s an actual thing) became the working option. It was all for nothing. Reality won the argument. The Soviet Union collapsed. China became a sort of communist ideal of capitalism. The ideologies failed, miserably and utterly, but they live on, arguably worse than ever, in total denial.
The West, meanwhile, went straight backward. It fell fast into the necrotic paralysis of corrupt crony capitalism, mindless “wealth” as an ideology and almost total social irresponsibility. This happened on a mindboggling scale, as evidenced in the ever-regressing ultra-conservative US. The right went so far right that everything and everyone else was “left” by default. Hence the current political madness.
The West didn’t just drop the ball; it forgot the ball existed. The Free World became the Expensive World, almost overnight. “Progress and a better world” became finance and fraud. Capitalism became the playground of criminals and money-grubbers, at the expense of all else.
The superficiality of the post-Cold War matched the smug mindsets. Greed wasn’t just good, it was now essential. “Dress for excess” became the norm. Everything was just fine. There were no problems in this non-existent pseudo-Utopia.
The disappearance of a huge chunk of the US population in a decades-long highly destructive social meltdown barely rated a mention. Gang wars, crack, mass shootings, Mexico becoming a war zone, businesses going nuts like Enron, everything was great.
The culture was as superficial as possible. “Did you see the game?” If so, you probably didn’t see anything else. For about 30 years. That sort of thing.
The “present” is a rerun of the past
To this day, human beings are at the absolute bottom of the list of political priorities, worldwide. Politics causes more human misery every day than just about anything else. Politicians, like pandemics, come and go, but the hyper-neglect remains.
The rhetoric is identical to the Cold War era. Names may change. Nothing else does. This resulting pole-to-pole, polarized, necrotizing stagnant sewer of a “civilization” is the result. Progress in human terms has effectively stopped, thanks to politics. It’s nominal at best and effectively going backwards to the Middle Ages at worst.
Poverty is raging worldwide and out of control. The conservative economic solution is as usual to make everything unaffordable. The progressive solution is endless talk and no action. Also absolutely normal.
Human misery is just a political target range. The last thing on anyone’s political mind is to help people in trouble. Millions of people are displaced by poverty and politics every year. it’s not like they want to be displaced or spend so much money to take all those risks to go elsewhere. Their living environments, much like the global macro environment, are impossible.
Cold War v2.0; the sequel to stupidity is psychosis
The Cold War is back like a zombie Twinkie, this time with sprinkles and some true insanity to go with it. China is acting like an even less appealing 1930s Nazi Germany, demanding territory and threatening its neighbors.
The only material result is the formation of the Quad, a somewhat nominal but geographically vast grouping of Japan, India, the US, and Australia as a strategic counterweight. The Chinese reaction was pure Cold War. Every issue is now propagandized by the increasingly Trump-like Global Times/Volkischer Beobachter into a war scenario. Everything is a threat to China, it seems, unless the Global Times says it isn’t.
Just read a selection of Global Times headlines here to see what’s being said. In one of the current headlines, the Global Times says the Quad isn’t a significant risk to China. In another from last week, it says the AUKUS nuclear subs are likely to cause nuclear escalation worldwide. Facts? Try finding any.
Conservatism is a fossilization process. The far left and far right are both conservative, and effectively identical. The political models and behaviors remain the same and never change. This is pure Orwellian 1984 in theory; the external threat is the all-purpose excuse for anything.
This Cold War, however, might be different. China is talking itself into ridiculous situations. Instead of simply shutting up and buying whoever or whatever they need, they’re talking war. They’re risking a massive trade backlash that could derail just about all Chinese business, imports, and exports, outside China. It’d be a train wreck for China.
Instead of ignoring the West as they should and easily could, they’ve decided to fight over any and all trivial issues. Even Taiwan needn’t be an issue; until they created the new crisis, the world was studiously ignoring Taiwan. This wasn’t 1949 until now. Taiwan was totally irrelevant until China made it an issue again.
This is the true irrationalism of psychopathic politics. Facts must fit the rhetoric. Reality must agree with whatever grotesque scenarios the rhetoric creates. It’s a world of non-existent things, trying to become real.
The world got lucky with the original Cold War. Maybe not this time; the ultimate stupidity of these situations is that there aren’t as many easy outs for anyone. There aren’t enough Off switches to cover these constant conflicts.
The trouble with history is that one is required to participate. This time, that might not be such a great idea.
The post Op-Ed: Political psychopaths, Cold War 2.0, and the regressionism running the world appeared first on Digital Journal.
