The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    The Last Country To Leave Stuff Behind In Afghanistan Dissolved

    By Orion on Tue, 08/17/2021 - 10:44pm |

    Mikhail Gorbachev signed peace accords that led to a withdrawal of Afghanistan in 1989. The Soviet Union collapsed two years later, toward the end of 1991.

    Russia very quickly reverted to a similar system to what it once had and under Putin's leadership, it recreated many of the institutions of the Soviet Union, such as the KGB. However, it has an economy the size of Italy and its capabilities of coercing former Soviet republics are limited to what we saw with attacks on Crimea, Ukraine, or Georgia. It can't recreate the Soviet Union as a union of 15 republics.

    Afghanistan is known as "the graveyard of empires" and has not particularly worked out for anyone from outside who set foot in it, going back to ancient history.

    I have a good friend who said years ago that the years from 2008 until now have been a slow motion repeat of the late 1960s and the 1970s. I'd say this was true but with reversed outcomes. There is no USSR to dissolve at the end of this journey, but there is a United States that no one, right or left, seems to really believe in anymore.

    The toxic brew of cancel culture, wokeness, Alt Right and America First don't particularly have much coherence to them and represent largely a general antipathy towards the United States as an entity. The right storms the United States capitol, having to be reminded by security staff that it's a "sacred place." The left crafts various narratives that the country is racist at its core from the very start and thus flawed beyond any point of redemption.

    With this level of division, all that it would take would be a federal mandate or Supreme Court decision that enough of the country won't participate with to lead to each relative region of the US dissolving from one another.

    Comparisons to the Civil War don't really work because most people would rather just leave than fight, and the people that do want a fight only know how to argue with themselves. Everyone seems to take this dissolution personally, thinking it's about their family, race, gender, occupation, or city/region instead of seeing it as a national struggle, so we all may, just as the Soviets did, wake up one day to find we're now foreigners.

    It's hard to even think about politics or to do political commentary in such a climate, because there is no shared source of investment or community, let alone any shared facts. Division might force people to look at themselves as they try to create whatever replaces the US they no longer revere, instead of endlessly arguing at one another.

    Comments

    As as often the case, you have a well-written succinct essay here, which was preceded by lots of forethought.

    It hits home for me right here on Dag as I just got told I don't care about other people because I just wanted to remind everyone that the same violence going on in Afghanistan is happening right here in the U.S.' s big cities every day and maybe people should think about that before they get obsessed by what's going on in Afghanistan. I post thousands of stories of Americans experiencing pain day in, day out, yet I am apparently the one who doesn't care about people because I won't yell about Republicans enough, or I don't buy the self-deluded spun narrative of one poster on Dag obsessed with black skin, or what?

    I dont want to stress the meta of that, the point is: nobody seems to want to look at big picture! Everything is passion of the moment. It's the distraction thing, anything to distract in the moment from what's really going on.

    Big picture for Soviets is that their Afghanistan experiment was seriously traumatic for their whole project, perhaps more devastating than Vietnam was for the U.S.

    In the end, I am grateful that we have someone with the lifetime of experience of political ambition MISTAKES like Biden, who also knows he's going to meet his maker soon, at the top, trying to corral the mess and return to some kind of common good unity in this nation.

    And again, a reminder that, to me, living 1980 looked just as bleak and toxic as now, but things didn't take long to change. Heck by the mid-80's it really did look like Japan was going to take over the world.Look at them now.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 08/18/2021 - 12:31pm

    just one thing that will could most definitely change this country in your lifetime if not mine is the drop in child poverty from this one program, that's all it takes.Something presidents and parties fought for for decades and couldn't pass just got passed in the midst of the chaos and not many paying attention because they are like arguing over black face or troops in Afghanistan or what Russian trolls know will distract trolls here or whatever

     For good or ill, who knows! I.E. prior to Social Security, extended families had to take care of their elders, there was little of what we now take for granted, being able to go off on your own and make your own way. Social Security allowed for the ushering in of the idea of nuclear family and everything that went along with that...

    BTW, I agree with you that it is important to pay attention to fresh less partisan thinkers like Andrew Yang, you are definitely on the right track there. One thing I am sure of: the woke millennial elite thing won't last, rubs too many constituentcies the wrong way including all the non-elite; I just don't know how long it will take for the script to be flipped.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 08/18/2021 - 12:50pm