Let Me Try

One more note in this series: rulers and empires are always looking back into history, and then looking back at the watermarks of their predecessors and thinking: oh I can do it better, and avoid the various mistakes as elucidated in popular readings of history. History can be learned from, in the sense of a long linear line, in which a past failure is coded as a mistake in a learning process that proceeds in a linear direction, and not simply as the expression of a long interconnected and cyclical process. 

There is a lot to take apart here of course. Tactics and experience are one thing. Napoleon influenced by Alexander the Great and Hannibal of Carthage for example. But then there is also the interacting thermodynamic decay of empire to be considered as well, in which rulers embedded attempt to transcend their historical position by gleaning lessons from history, a form of applying evolving technique and technology to overcome those thermodynamic limits, such as when Hitler and his generals apprehended Napoleon's failure in Russia and sought to build upon and modify that strategy and succeed where Napoleon had failed, failing in turn. 

There is a lot to further elaborate on there, but for now an observation about the Ukraine invasion. Its been observed that Putin and his generals have been taking care to preserve infrastructure such as critical electrical networks, and suffering casualties to avoid excess civilian deaths. And the denazification concept echoes the debaathification efforts in the Iraq war, which in turn echoed denazification in WWII. 

It has been pointed out that the US coming in and indiscriminately smashing infrastructure and economic structures in Iraq played a key role in fomenting an insurgency. Iraqis were fed up with not having adequate water and power, and "nothing working," encouraging hostility to the ongoing occupation. It appears to be the case that with the Russian invasion, the Russian have studied that debacle and are attempting to do it better. 

Worth studying the ongoing mess, as it this will change things. But change is not success, whatever that means anyway. A hostile invasion - however carefully carried out - is still a hostile invasion and is fundamentally another form of turbulence to add to the growing and accelerating pile. But in the short term, one empire doing it better than another empire can really change things.  

Propaganda

Another thing to watch - and this could be folded into the positive blowback dynamic illustrated previously - are the communication-exhausting effects of propaganda. The ruling elite seem to be going all in on the "better propaganda" approach, which is a bad gamble to make if you are at all interested in long term stability. Yes, in many ways that horse has left the barn. We're really in for it in the course of this century. But for the sake of argument, let's take the elite at their hyperinflationary-wheelbarrows-of-useless-currency-converted-into-kindling word and assume they want lasting prosperity and security and - yikes it burns the tongue - freedom. You can't have these things in the midst of a perpetual rolling wildfire of political, economic, and social discord, but that is what we seem to be encouraging. 

The Iraq debacle was an interesting case study, in that you did have an administration that had a documented white-knuckled grip on their propaganda game. Many of the reigning neocons were convinced that the Vietnam War was lost not because of central held premises and perceptions that were just bad and wrong, but because the government and the media were not properly constructing the right narratives and controlling the flow of information well enough, and that there was a collective failure of will and resolve as a result. 

But with Iraq this problem would be addressed: you had a growing bifurcation in which you had an insulated and massaged government control of information and a compliant and cooperative media that manufactured its own reality that, as the war advanced and intensified and the catastrophes racked up and amplified each other, more and more resembled a direct inversion of facts on the ground. At least, until the narrative altogether ran away. 

This sort of heavy-handed application of propaganda in a sense lays out a virtual minefield in the communication sphere, which interacts with the reality that communication sphere interacts with and shapes and is shaped by. When the uncorrected narrative eventually comes into contact with reality, it comes into contact explosively and violently, and destroys functional capacity in its wake. 

The result was a deeply jaded public that had more and more trouble believing in any sort of public or collectively held reality, and these effects of course are global and would generalize. This is of course nothing new, but it is important to stress that this stuff is cumulative. Trust, once broken, is very difficult to restore. And so a new equilibrium forms around this scene of devastation, and the dynamic picks up where it left off in a weakened and more unstable environment. This was true of the subsequent financial crisis and then the pandemic, and it will be continue to be true until the ruling elite further collapse. 

Blowback

I'd like to elaborate on this theme later on, but a quick note for now. One of the central insights of the entertaining Blowback podcast - building on insights of Chalmers Johnson's book, and then Naomi Klein's work, whom they interviewed - is the nature of that concept itself, which is often presented in more superficial foreign policy discussions in a negative sense. Blowback is some bad result that happens when you do something bad somewhere else, which then comes back to bite you, whether overseas or at home.

Well, sure. This negative sense is true and happens of course, but there is a far more insidious positive reading of the concept: in which empire - and the US empire particularly - feeds off of the disruption and catastrophe, helping to deliberately set it off and then exploit its fruits, which produces additional disruption and catastrophe and chaos in turn, which the empire then feeds off in turn. The empire desires this process and this result; it is an integral component of empire, as opposed to some undesirable outcome to be avoided in the course of wise statecraft. We could characterize this as a process of late empire, though the longer arc of empire was leading to this late dynamic. 

This dynamic is emblematic in the Iraq invasion and the subsequent aftershocks that continue to roil the Middle East - and the rest of the industrialized world for that matter - to this day, though the dynamic continues well into the past and could be identified throughout the full course of US foreign policy. Previous turbulent forces created a set of conditions which the US exploited to launch the invasion, which in turn set off a series of catastrophes that defy comprehension, and the changing conditions emerging in the wake of those catastrophes were exploited in turn. It is a well-worn pattern readily observable: the US breaks nations militarily and economically, cracking them open and then seizing on the chaos and calculated debt to pry apart the nation's resources and take them up into itself, which weakens neighboring nations and further on down the globalized line to allies and even into the empire itself, and then those weaknesses are further seized upon and exploited to alienate and concentrate the resources set free by that dissolution and chaos.  

Being a bit facetious here, but someone should tell the ruling elites that it is the fundamental fact of exploitation and destruction itself that produces the insecurity. That is where the energy differential is, and it is cumulative, and it gains a momentum of its own. You can't get rid of the insecurity opened up by those transgressions through further exploitation and destruction, as if learning from previous lessons. You can play the divide and conquer game for a long time, but eventually that train runs away from you. And once it really gets moving, you ain't getting off in one piece. 

Still Alive

I wanted to take a minute to put up another of those occasional "still here" posts. Phew, setting intentions here is risky business: it does help me represent to myself a certain productive direction to continue taking in the analysis, but then life inevitably happens. The past month was basically an unending string of social engagements coupled with increased workload and responsibilities, all of which were great, but which nevertheless do a good job of derailing the writing and even the reading and thinking. That and then feeling under the weather the previous week for whatever reason - its gotten tougher to subjectively suss out what is actually happening in the midst of overexertion, possibly actually picking up a bug while traveling, interactions of wildfire smoke and long covid, and etc. My flailings and stumblings are overdetermined, much like the rest of the industrialized world's; so it goes. 

All of that said, in terms of writing I am still sticking to some of the intentions that I set, let's see, holey moley, over two months ago, and then I'll be peppering in a variety of other observations that have come up over the past couple of weeks as new information continues to come in. More soon.