GREAT IMPERIALISM RANT

Monday, November 13, 2017

RE DK CURRENT JOURNALISM DECLINE POST 1937 2017

This is a work in progress.......

Let's look instead at 1914-1919, 100 years ago....

The Middle East, Shi'ite Sunni, Saudis and Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Turkey, these were all places that either the West or Russia either confronted or dominated, back in 1914, and should have continued to dominate with protectorates, viceroyalties, vassal regimes, you name it. The West foolishly dismembered Turkey after WWI for siding with the Germans.....stupid.

"The Philippine government is murdering thousands of citizens as part of a drug war." DK 

So what? More importantly, why did we ever give up the Philippines, our first, and quite embarrassing, colony, on the very coast of Asia, along or near critical global sea lanes, and important coastal facilities. 

 Burma, Bangladesh, the Korean peninsula, all African states, Venezuela, South and Central America, etc. should have been kept under the benevolent heel of the Western Powers.

"The Chinese government wants recognition as one of the world's great powers, a status that the United States sill disputes." DK 

This should never have come close to being allowed to happen. What an unmitigated long term disaster. See my remarks citing Kennan on China. 

We have been home towned in our home town by China, just as we had been by Japan.

Speaking of China and Japan, 1937,  "The brutal, bloody Sino-Japanese War was sweeping down the Chinese coast and into the interior..." DK

This was truly a war either to have let happen, or to have sided with the Japanese rather than the Chinese, who had already shown in the Russo Japanese War of 1905 that they should be reckoned with as a counterweight to both China and Russia in Asia. That was not how we did it. In fact the opposite.

"The recovery of 1933-36 had been interrupted by a new, severe worldwide recession." DK

There was not much of a domestic recovery at all really until WWII, on the one hand, and the mere fact of a worldwide recession signals too much economic and political great power interdependence, in any event, even by the early 1930s, on the other.

The recession itself was mainly fallout from WWI in fact, not even mainly from imperialist globalization already well under way.

Further, it was normally falsely claimed that WWI had been caused in part by mercantilist and imperialist rivalries, which could be corrected in the future by ever more abundant, peaceful, even freer, trade, among the powers.

"Hitler had consolidated power in Germany, although his great political offensive of 1938 lay a few months away." DK

Hitler had been allowed and even encouraged by the Western Powers to accrue power in Germany. 

(Americans seem to think that foreign influences in governments is some kind of new thing, with Putin and Trump and Clinton...)

Not only that, but that encouragement itself would been quite enough, and is hardly well known over here at all. 

Quigley discussed it at great length in The Anglo-American Establishment, a book few Americans seem ever to have even heard of.

Hitler was aided, from the other side, against the Weimar Regime, by the relentless antagonism of Stalin's German leftist initiatives, which upended the Weimar government and eventually threw it into Hitler's arms. Kennan discussed this in some places.