I have to admit that the majority of essays in my world security book are actually quite reasonable. But occasionally they are rife with
the stupid the influence of the dominant post-Cold War historical paradigm.
Just how
fucking stupid esteemed in international studies do you have to be, to assert that the Cold War was an engine for global stability? I mean I suppose if you lived in the West it was, but outside the West the world was a mishmash of proxy wars and covert interference with the governments of sovereign nations.
And did you know that governments are weaker now? Shocked! I am bloody well shocked I tell you. I hadn't noticed this phenom when we decided to invade not one, but two fucking countries. I also totally missed it when our economy collapsed and then entered a jobless recovery.
But the important and difficult question of the day is:
"...How do we account for the accelerating pace of change?"
Seriously?
For the record, it is getting even
fucking dumber more enlightened than before. What smoking immense amounts of pot failed to achieve, I am pretty sure this essay is managing. I think I may actually become a little less clever than before reading this
shit brilliant example of post-Cold War reasoning.
2 comments:
I think that the article is probably referring to the idea that the Cold War balance of power prevented a 3rd World War. Also, one could make a good argument that most of the wars in the "developing" world would have happened with or without the Cold War. It's not like many parts of the world didn't already have long histories of tension and conflict.
That isn't actually what he was referring to - it only got worse as I continued and delved deeper into the context. His underlying thesis is that the Cold War presented a dynamic human system that had an inherently stabilizing effect on global politics.
And while I wouldn't argue that many of the proxy wars would have happened anyways - on some scale or another, there is no question that both the Soviets and the U.S. caused such conflicts in some cases and exacerbated hostilities in a great many others.
The three party civil war in Angola is a perfect example of this. We literally threw our support in, simply because the Soviets had inserted token aid to the MPLA. Even given the little aid that the Soviets threw in, there is no certainty that the MPLA would have won - but even if that had been assumed result, exponentially fewer Angolans would have died. But when the CIA got involved, it escalated things and before it was done we saw 27 years of war and half a million people killed - not including those who died for the problems associated with displacement. We can't know how bad it might have been without Soviet, Cuban and U.S. involvement - what we absolutely know for certain is that between the three nations, we pumped weaponry, mercenaries and human rights abuses into Angola, making things considerably worse than they possibly could have been without Cold War fucking bullshit.
The same is true of conflict after conflict. Would the Vietnam war happened without Cold War interference? Of course it would have. But again, it wouldn't have been what it became.
And there is also our fucking around with the leadership of nation states. We installed dictators all over the place, to ensure that communism was held at bay. We fucked around so badly with Middle Eastern politics that we are directly responsible for the rise of Islamic radicalism and theocracy in the Muslim world. While I can't pretend there weren't plenty of problems before, we escalated the shit exponentially.
Post a Comment