A little bit of Saturday night Buddhism
Here’s a chart suggesting there isn’t going to be an inclusive Asian Union any time soon:
Just to point out a few key points on the mutual hatred matrix (MHM) –
- If things do get into a China v Japan hot war, its not hard to see who’ll be rooting for the sons of Nippon
- …and that seems to be particularly true of the Vietnamese.
- & 4….and what a fight to the bitter death it’s going to be.
5. On the religious front, as usual the Muslims hate the Sikhs…
6. …but them Commie Vietnamese bastards love those filthy capitalist South Koreans to pretty much the same degree they loathe the Red Chinese assholes. Didn’t history get a little off-message here? And finally
7. being keen on the South Koreans makes the Vietnamese an odd ally for the Japanese, whose general view of those very same South Koreans is that the only thing they might be good for is a casserole.
What would US soldiers who lost limbs in the Vietnam War make of this event-fuelled, cultural victory over ideology? At one time I knew a chap – a Bostonian called John – who had his face blown off just south of the DMZ. When the surgeons miraculously managed to put his face back on again, it wasn’t a great fit.
This is the reason I’m a pacifist these days: the future doesn’t just make fools of us all, it makes all combat death – however ‘glorious’ – futile.
All things must pass
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In lots of other senses as well, mind you, all the certainties of earlier years are being mangled in the Great Change we’ve been undergoing as a species since around 2003.
The Japanese élite, it is reported, has been looking very seriously at Yen/Rouble swaps for future transactions in order to cut out the Dollar while evading America’s trumpeted but largely two-faced drive for sanctions against Russia. The equally insane US belief that it can taper QE and then raise rates is causing so much havoc in Brazil – as predicted here and on a million or more other sites – the country’s debt is now close to be unaffordable. The China boom that was going to make it kingmaker if not king in the 21st century ended up changing the PBOC’s foreign asset holdings to a level beggaring belief:
Everything is in transition
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In 1985, I don’t remember anyone forecasting that the USSR would not exist by 1990. In 1914, there was little media evidence that the Romanov dynasty was imminently doomed. How many commentators in 1940 thought Nazi Germany would lie in ruins by 1945?
But in each of these cases, the doom of the model and lunacy of the key players’ behaviour was there for any insightful person to see. Russian peasants in 1914 went into battle without uniforms or weapons, convinced that the Tsar was a God and would spare their lives. There was no way as 1940 drew to a close that US business was going to surrender its emerging global dominance to German and Japanese imperialism….or that the US Jewish lobby would ignore the already obvious nature of Nazi genocide. And the sheer cost and administrative complexity (in the pre cyber-wars era) of controlling a sprawling empire while maintaining nuclear weapons capability was way, way beyond the output of the at best docile command economy of the USSR.
The same flaws in econo-political and fiscal theories of the West are equally apparent today:
- Without a cap in perpetuity on lending rates, the US National Debt is ruinous
- The UK’s unbalanced financialisation of an economy that neither makes things nor grows food is the equivalent of an exhibitionist Emperor flouncing about in the nude
- The EU’s inflexibility in the face of a dysfunctional currency is exceeded only by the belief that it is worth sacrificing five economies in order to make it functional
- The concept of over-leveraged banks trading pointlessly with each other would be bad enough without their globalist interdependence rendering them little more than top-heavy dominoes.
Perhaps Mario Draghi is Tsar Ncholas II, Merkel his Tsarina, Schäuble the demonic Rasputin, and Fiskalunion their son suffering from incurable haemophilia. The parallels are obvious without any need to give them names. The euro will collapse, the EU in its current form is doomed, rates will rise to ruin America once the QE/NYSE fantasy is fully revealed, the British economy will sink into the quicksand on which it is built, serial bank collapses will make a nonsense of fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, and a ridiculous attempt will then be made to persuade the already screwed citizenry that it must pay.
When the last trouser-arses are worn out and the last belly is rumbling for want of a burrito or a Pizza, then this crazy construct will be gone forever. And as always, when it happens the surprise element will be the speed of collapse.
Nothing lasts forever
Earlier at The Slog: Why even migrant refugees are geopolitical pawns
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