How I see those running around FB shouting: “The US forgot about Afghanistan, Iran will remind them!”
“Hi, I’m a clown. My great-grandfather ate crap so that the tsar could capture the straits from the Ottomans — well, so that ‘if not us, then at least our children could live’.
My grandfather ate crap so that ‘from Japan to England, my homeland would shine,’ and so we could help poor Spanish boys in shorts.
My dad ate crap while we sent missiles and planes to Vietnam by the thousands, and people were shot in Novocherkassk over pies with crap.
Vietnamese ate crap for 20 years to build communism in the South. And the US shrugged, dropped excess helicopters from carriers, took embassy workers, and sailed away to America — to rot and decay.
While your grandmother ate crap in the kolkhoz for workdays, American unemployed at soup kitchens got cola, mayonnaise, and coffee, and there was a toaster and automatic washing machine with punch card control in the homeless hall. Your grandmother got her first washing machine with manual wringing only in 1980, when she broke the record for milking with her left hand at the “Red Milker” contest.
Around the same time, victorious Vietnam conducted market reforms, privatization and now works 14 hours for 400 dollars sewing sneakers, assembling smartphones and serving global capital. Officially, they’re a Socialist Republic. Everywhere are red flags, pioneers, sickles and hammers, portraits of Grandpa Ho Chi Minh. But these are just textures and lore. The location looks like socialism, but the game engine was long ago replaced.
Leviathan absolutely doesn’t care what color its scales are — ideologically red or democratically blue. It needs resources, kilowatts, and expansion.
If to survive and become stronger means opening Nike, Samsung, and Intel factories, Leviathan puts on a red tie and goes to shake hands with American investors. The same Americans with whom it fought to the death in the jungles under napalm just 50 years ago.
Therefore, when you celebrate that America ‘shamefully fled’ from Afghanistan or fears Iran, you don’t understand the main thing. America doesn’t fight for sacred ties and stones. America is a megacorporation.
If a location stops being profitable, and server maintenance costs too much, they simply close the project, write off losses, and go invest in new technologies.
Just like the projects of the Kuomintang, Karzai’s Afghanistan, and South Vietnam were closed, where local elites couldn’t steal enough for villas at the height of an existential war with communism or people cutting off their wives’ noses.
And you remain sitting on the smoldering ruins, proudly waving the flag, with a mouth full of the same crap your great-grandfather ate.
And in the end, you will still come to them for money and investments. With a big and beautiful clown nose.
