CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
ChapotraphouseAmerica hasn't met the final boss at the top of the Millennium Tower for a shirtless fist fight thus the war has not yet been decided
My wife pointed out an amazing contradiction in the American hegemony. Our entire mythic past is built up on the idea of tiny rebels going up against the big overseas tyrannical, overreaching government. We were able to beat them because we had the home field advantage.
But those insert colonist slur of choosing can't possibly beat the might of the mighty American government as it reaches across the ocean in it's might and smashes all these puny tiny groups in it's path. What's a tunnel?
The mythic American past is also about how the the supposedly superior whites took the land from the natives. It's just that, again. It's a belief that our foes are technologically and culturally inferior and thus can't actually resist in a meaningful way. Also there's something to be said about how Americans will still claim to this day that we actually won in both Korea and Vietnam because we had higher kill counts than they did.
Americans/chuds/westerners in general crave death and destruction. They are cruel, twisted beings.
only because it happens "over there". sure we have school shootings and killer cops and all that, but that's nothing compared to actual war at home
Just wait until our military takes off its shirt and throws it on the ground.
hold me back bro, hold me back
"This berserker mode I'm warning you about? You have never seen anything like that".
USians do not understand yet that the world has changed and the countries that it held such extreme advantages over in the past have closed the gap in a variety of ways. They imagine a world in which they would always hold a giant technology lead.
could you imagine America actually committing to the WW2-style total war economy that would be needed to defeat a near-peer adversary in 2026? I'm not convinced that the American government currently has the capacity to whip its own capitalist class into necessary shape, although i do think we could probably send out vans of masked men to kidnap draft card holders.
Legit question: What consequences would murikkka or its cancer in Levant face if they do use nuclear bombs on Tehran? None of its vassals is going to care and I don't see China nor Russia doing justice against them.
The direct consequences would be Iran itself launching everything at the entity, I think
the entity and all compradors. This isn't the end of ww2, iran doesn't wave the white flag because a massive atrocity is inflicted upon it
I mean, that’s not why Japan waved it anyway.
yes yes the soviet union. Even more backing towards the conclusion that nukes, while horrifying, are not the end of this conflict.
Exactly. Nukes have never been anything but war crimes.
Agree that nobody will do shit about it. The eurolibs will be outraged. They'll look deep into their hearts, and then keep doing what they've been doing anyway, licking American boot.
Fascist parties will use this hypocrisy (only the latest among many liberal hypocrisies) against them and unequivocally sweep the continent. Not so secretly itching to do it themselves.
France will wind up using them in Africa. Maybe after the fascist sweep, but probably before.
Then the lid will be well and truly off and we're in the cool zone.
Iran would raze Israel to the ground.
Do they really have the arsenal to do so?
Israel is pretty small
I'm sure they could do an impressive number on occupied jaffa
We usually destroy all major infrastructure and power plants after we take out the military targets.
We place tremendous value on the lives of our troops
"We haven't won in Iran yet because we've been holding back on our most effective strategy: crimes against humanity"
And they gleefully committed crimes against humanity in Vietnam and still left in defeat. They've been coping ever since with the "we would win if we nuked them all" option, as if the US is impervious to missiles itself.
as if the very first target of the war wasn't a girl's school
Yeah, there's a lot of competing internal inconsistencies.
We wanted to show them that we are not so different, us and them. Maybe some other time, maybe some other place... we'all always have Radda.
We haven’t even begun to commit sex crimes, are you stupid?
if they have some weapon or whatever and don't use it, then guess what? they don't have the weapon for all intents and purposes. there tends to be a reason why the generals "hold back" and if they end up, as has occurred, being reliable in their reluctance, no matter what administration it is, then they are in fact unable to use the some weapon or whatever and they may as well be said to be without it
The people saying this believe that there's only one reason they don't go berserker mode and it's out of the kindness of their hearts, and they think if they simply elect cruel people who aren't held back by morals or niceties, they can unlock the full power of berserker mode.
It's basically the same line of thought the Nazis used. In their worldview, the reason the Jews were able to control the world despite being "inferior" to white people was that white people were simply "too nice" to go berserker mode, and the Jews had tricked them into being that way by promoting ideologies that called for racial tolerance, like communism, and their solution was to be completely unreserved in their cruelty because it would unlock "berserker mode" that would carry them to victory.
Turned out, material conditions and logistics and shit are what actually matter, and that being wantonly cruel and aggressive had the minor side effect of causing virtually the entire rest of the world to put aside vast ideological differences to stomp them into the ground... But it might work for us!
"Don't siege Tehran, just take it"
Where's this from?
According to google and reddit: irl
https://www.reddit.com/r/Instantregret/comments/8748pg/on_the_bus_to_boot_camp/
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He's spinning the ball on his finger! JUST TAKE IT!
Unlike the vile Moslems who don't care about their people we only send our troops to safe places like the burger king in Abu Dhabi
I've had multiple arguments on hexbear where a whole bunch of AmeriKKKans got really offended because i pointed out that the US hasn't won a war since the end of WW2, angrily informing me that Iraq and Afghanistan totally count as wins because fucking shit up and causing chaos in the region is already sufficient for US interests, completely ignoring that the US was unable to ever gain full control over either country and originally went in with the intention of turning both of them into reliable client states like Germany or Japan, which they had openly stated before the invasions. It was as if i was suddenly back on reddit, where such things also happened every time i dared to trash talk the track record of the empire's troops. Even being an anti-imperialist doesn't stop AmeriKKKans from believing in the supposed might of their shit-ass third tier useless overpriced military, they just can't help being good little patriotic chauvinists inside.
All this confusion is because of thinking in terms of nations instead of class. Of course the US lost all those wars, but the international capitalist class won (at least short term) It's the difference between thinking like a lib like Chomsky (inept empire theory) vs thinking like a marxist like Parenti.
Yeah, i get that, but if i wanted to say "the capitalist class has derived a net benefit from these wars", which is obviously true, i would have said that. I would not use a wording explicityl referring to the military of a nation state, which is what is being discussed here. Understanding the purpose of war within a dialectic materialist framework and recognizing that this frequently supersedes what Clausewitz or Sun Tzu or whatever ancient strategist dork yoou want to drag out would consider a win condition does not mean that we can't look at geopolitics on the level of nation states' armies and conventional military objectives as well as long as we are aware of the wider class politics framework they are situated within, in fact if we want to fully grasp geopolitics we have to be able to alternate between both perspectives and understand when which one is the aplicable one. And given that we are talking the performance of the US armed forces here, it's kind of obvious that when i say "US military", i mean just that and not "the interests of international capital".
Yes, well said, thank you.
it's kind of obvious that when i say "US military", i mean just that and not "the interests of international capital".
Yes, and it's also kind of obvious, that I agree with everything you said. I liked your comment and wasn't trying to argue. Though, I wanted to add an important point: in my experience, people do confuse those things constantly in almost every second comment on the hexbear news thread.
in fact if we want to fully grasp geopolitics we have to be able to alternate between both perspectives and understand when which one is the aplicable one
Sure we do. It's just that we already constantly over emphasize the "nation state perspective" because that's what liberal news do and it takes effort to do an analysis and situate an event in the class struggle. Just posting an article and unquestioningly adopting it's ready made perspective takes less effort. Thats why the class perspective is often way under represented, even among marxists eg when talking about the US war on Iran.
Centering class means people in the US need to take responsibility and do their part to make capital feel the pain. Capital needs to be prevented from shifting the consequences of the lost war on the workers or they won't think twice about starting the next doomed war. It's an active perspective aimed at organizing.
On the other hand, the "nation state perspective", while absolutely necessary, without class analysis tends to devolve into something very much like sports commentary. Arguing about which side is winning without any intention of taking part in the struggle. This is objectifying to the fighters of the resistance. Cheering on the resistance overseas is not enough. We have to become part of it.
Fair points, i really have nothing to add here.
I think it is valuable to recontextualize the parties. US victory does not require an outright military victory at all, just achieving strategic goals for itself as the primary seat of global capital. As global hegemon under neoliberalism, positioning in this way is less about conquering and annexing or explicitly colonizing a country and is more about ensuring the order itself remains in place and opening up new profit sources. If a state steps outside that order, a win is forcing them back into it, ideally in a way that does a new round of primitive accumulation, turning nationalized industries into imperialist profit centers.
I think we can say that Iraq and Afghanistan are not outright victories for this neoliberal order, though. But I think most other "interventions" have been.
sorry to tell you but Iraq was in many ways a victory because the US continues to control all Iraqi oil revenue and they did destroy a functional anti-imperialist state and force it into underdevelopment
Sadaam was in many ways, already a US puppet.
But he tried to switch the dollar for the Euro. This was unacceptable to the US, and the spineless servile Europeans helped the US stomp Iraq into the ground.
He was a puppet that tried to navigate the dynamics between himself and his masters.
Yep, the "inept and stumbling empire" is a dangerous trope. American ruling-class won a lot in those wars.
The troops are absolute losers tho stacking Ls.
And ofc somebody barges in to prove my point by telling me that it was "in many ways a victory", a pentagon spokesperson couldn't have come up with a better wording for "losing is actually winning." That the sheer economic and military reach of the empire makes even its defeats bearable, that just fucking shit up without achieving much is enough to further its ends somehow, doesn't change that it has not been able to actually conquer an enemy since 1945.
If Iraq won the war, it's hard to imagine how much worse defeat could be than what they got. Did they give the New York Federal Reserve Bank total control of oil reserves as a consolation prize? What would the conditions of US victory have been that weren't met?
on hexbear or lemmy? because that is very different from the conversations I've seen here
On hexbear, lemmy at large would've also told me that the US won Vietnam.
seems like a semantic mismatch over what constitutes victory and for whom exactly
“We haven’t used nuclear weapons [which would guarantee our own destruction and The End of Treats], so we’re actually fighting this war with our hands tied because we enjoy being publicly humiliated.”
The US also used nuclear weapons in the Algerian War of Independence, paying the French 100% of the cost of that war. Some nukes were “tested” by France in the Algerian desert during that time and people there still have health issues because of that to this day. But the nukes didn’t stop Algeria.
paying the French 100% of the cost of that war
this is the only part that surprises me, how much money was this
Same fantasy as the reveal that Goku’s been fighting the entire time with weighted clothes
I do love when people forget that the Iran/Iraq war happened and Iran, despite being the smaller military, fought Iraq to a standstill because it is extremely difficult to invade Iran, and they have only had 40 years since then to learn from the invasion by Iraq.
Iran, despite being the smaller military
Iran had larger military.
got into a hilarious argument in youtube comments with someone that was coping about how Trump is the reason why their army sucks now.
"No, you don't get it, Trump lost the berserker mode button!"
Common fascist rhetoric, the only thing they need to do to win a war is triumph their will harder and kill more civilians, if they are losing a war you should be grateful that they're choosing to be merciful by only targeting the civilians outside of the range of enemy air defences.
Fascists are all that guy who thinks he can win any fight if he goes sicko mode.
Wir wollen den totalen Krieg!
you dont understand, we chose to lose those wars
Guys you don't understand we just have to zerg rush their command center and destroy all their harvesters in order to get that victory condition!
Americans had a multiyear breakdown over having to wear a mask, they will not be able to handle the war economy going berserk requires.
The pretty minimal social reorganizating we did for covid felt great, if we weren't going to be on the wrong side of WWIII, I'd almost be looking forward to seeing the entire economy mobilized.
Joke’s on . Even if this shithole was in ww3 under the new axis, porky would rather die than have more workers.
War economies are bad, actually.
You can enjoy bad things.
This is what I say every time I explain to someone that I unironically liked Shadow the Hedgehog
I see no, hear no evil, Black writings on the wall
Unleashed a million faces, And one by one they fall
“Shadow….it’s me! The devil!”
(genuine) I'll give it to ya, you got me there.
Enormous value on the lives of their troops??
Okay, whatever you need to believe to keep feeding your babies to the imperialism machine I guess.
Imagine seeing all the living veterans with untreated PTSD, physical disabilities, and all sorts of other issues and then still believing this shit lol (of course they don't see them, they're unhoused or otherwise abandoned). That doesn't even count the dead ones.
They're all 100% disposable to
Improvement to armour and battlefield medicine has been a major inconvenience.
As can clearly be seen here though, it's not a secret. It's just what americans will say out loud
