Foreign Affairs: Gideon Rose: 'Iraq in Retrospect'
SourceForeign Affairs– welcome to Iraq, also known as Hell on Earth.
Source:FRS FreeState
“Ten years ago this week, the United States and a few of its allies invaded Iraq, writing the final chapter in Washington’s checkered decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Thanks to problems of both conception and execution, the Iraq war ended up becoming the most egregious failure in half a century…
Carnegie Council International Student Essay Contest 2019
Carnegie Council International Student Essay Contest 2019
Deadline: October 16, 2019
Applications are open for the Carnegie Council International Student Essay Contest 2019. Students of all nationalities are invited to write on the essay topic: Is there an ethical responsibility to regulate the Internet? If so, why and to what extent? If not, why not?
Please include in your analysis an explanation (in your own words) of “responsibility” and what it…
Some really wonderful things are happening. Of course, they always are, but I’m referring to the specific category of state decline and the rise of real liberty. Although an arguably perverse practice, to truly understand the state, we should analyze and assess the varied excreta produced by the state’s parasympathetic nervous system.
Of all the ways of understanding the “deep state,” this system, responsible for the tears, sweat, noctural emissions and diarrhea of the complex network comprising the state organism, is one of the best and most revealing.
The modern American is no longer shocked at national discussions and routine public examinations of bum wiping, sexual activities of all types, and the odiferous human body and what to do about it. Boobus Americanus is downright fascinated by the subject and seeks ever more detail. This fact alone bodes well for the ongoing examination of the very demented US body politic and is Reason Number 1 for optimism going into 2019.
I’m more interested in the parasympathetic state system and a great example of it arrived in my inbox today. It came from the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. One immediately realizes that this is a US think tank, advising US Government policy, revolving doors and all, over the past 100 years. Founded in 1914, its mission was to make war obsolete. Conveniently, this occurred shortly after the creation of the Federal Reserve, with a mission to make cash available to the federal government for wars that couldn’t be funded, or sold to the American people, in any other way. Perhaps I exaggerate, but certainly Rothbard did not.
This newsletter from the Carnegie Council featured an article about the collapse of “the narrative” on global engagement. Much like the difference between consensual sex and rape, the use of the term “engagement” here may have different meaning to different people. Many on the receiving end of typical USG engagement in the past century saw their countries, and sometimes their wives and children, horrifically raped and stolen from rather than offered a diamond ring and a promise of true love. Participants in US military activities over the past 100 years concur.
The Carnegie Report, entitled “Misconnecting with the US Public: Narrative Collapse and US Foreign Policy” is fascinating reading for those interested in the dripping snot of state. To sum it up, the Council reveals that all of a sudden, the 2016 election cycle, in both primaries and the election itself, revealed a strange fact. Average people don’t like war, they don’t like their money being taken by force and wasted on war, and when their politicians screw them over and over again by repeatedly giving them war and waste despite promising not to, they eventually, like good herd animals, begin to move away, become less conciliatory to their masters, fail to listen as attentively, and ultimately fail to obey.
This I believe is Reason Number 2 for optimism going into 2019. Not so much that the dank, daft, dense Carnegie Council has discovered the obvious, but that they were stupidly willing to publish their discovery as some sort of “one if by land and two if by sea” warning to the rest of the parasympathetic system.
If only the brainiacs and government bosses would acknowledge the recent mistakes that have led to skepticism on the part of the U.S. public towards American global engagement and propose reform rather than rejection, things would get better. And they should try to listen more, and to engage the polity in a more interactive way, so that it may see the benefits of continued US foreign policy choices.
More people get their news from the Babylon Bee than the Carnegie Council for Ethics – but the result may be the same. The literal language is so obviously betrayed by known and observed reality it becomes chuckle-worthy, even hilarious. Laughing at the state – whether at its reptilian self or its more conscious systems – can be risky. My Reason Number 3 for optimism? 2019 will be a year filled with a growing number of people who smile at daily state self-deception, frustration, and hypocrisy, share memes and jokes about its ever-steaming pile of excreta, and laugh out loud at its public “feed and breed” gyrations. Can’t wait!
Deterrence or Disarmament?: The Ethics of Nuclear Warfare
STUDENT VOICES On July 16, 1945 at 5:29 a.m., a 30,000 foot mass of smoke rose in New Mexico’s desert: the first atomic bomb had just been successfully tested. At the time, most people were unaware that the course of warfare and ultimately the world was about to change irrevocably. Since that eerie summer morning, nine nations have developed the intelligence to create and possess nuclear weapons (Granoff, 2000, p. 1414). The United States is one of these nuclear superpowers, making the ethical issues associated with these weapons critical and relevant. CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE
Peter Singer, famous ethics philosopher, recently spoke at the Carnegie Council. I wasn’t there, but I listened to the podcast. In it, he stated the case for acting now on climate change in a very simple and clear way.
In a way, this book came as a result of a very long period of my life in which when I was asked "What are you doing?" I would say, "I'm a psychoanalyst of states." So at the end of it I wrote the book.
Dominique Moisi's Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs talk: The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World
