#hws iraq | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rametarin · 27 days ago

Text

Okay. So. Why DID American society vote for George W. in 2000? I'll tell you.

Last night I saw a youtube video I will not repeat that seemed to imply that if we had social media of today back in the late 90s, W. Bush would've never become president, "because facts would've come to light educating the voters."

This is such an incredibly naive and astonishingly ignorant thing to say, and it assumes the only reason people voted for any candidate was because they just didn't know what they stood for or what they believe or what that means for a candidate. That they were just a bunch of clueless bumpkins with no agency nor education nor drive and position of their own in the process, they just voted based on shallow 30-second "candidate good, theirs bad." and nothing else.

I am 40. We've been in a post 2000 George W. Bush presidency for more than half my life, at this point (Jesus Christ....)

Lets remove the hindsight is 20-20 of the Iraq War, Afghanistan, New Orleans and FEMA fiasco of the George W. Bush presidency for a minute. None of that stuff has happened yet.

It's the year 2,000. Bill Clinton is leaving the White House. People have been talking about George W. Bush, son of George HW Bush, since he threw his had in, the summer of 1999. People have known of Bush since his father was president.

American Society in the 90s was.. decompressing. That's worthy of a few paragraphs in and of itself.

First and foremost, American Society from the 40s to 91 raised its children, lived and became mature and grey on the premise that there were two major forces on earth at the time. The Americans embodied The West. New, free of classic imperialisms, dictators, private property owning, personal liberty loving. And, then there were the Soviets, whom followed principles that ideally envisioned a more purist, Marxist idea of law and society, where the state ("Society") owned everything and people lived equally under that.

The Soviets were ready and willing to steamroll over the rest of Europe to "save it" from capitalism, as evidenced by their massive fleet of, "steamroll immediate neighbors before unnamed enemies from afar can even get their boats in the water" tanks and heavily armored vehicles. And their tens of thousands of big, heavy tanks and demolition vehicles. They claimed they needed a massive land army and heavy tanks for "self-defense." And sycophants and sympathizers for the USSR outside of it claimed the Americans were the aggressors, imperialist and militant. Sometimes they would say that in comparison to the Soviets, as if the Soviets were just intellectuals, and sometimes they'd just say it as critique of the US as negative qualities that miraculously disqualified the US, but not the Soviets. Some real "you can't get me for things I haven't said, but there's lots of quiet parts not spoken here" stuff.

The Soviet Union was a shitshow of mismanagement and idealism and a circus of corruption that finally shit itself when its dreams died, after decades of careful propaganda and grassroots guerilla informational war that tried to disparage the American military's capabilities went up in smoke, as the Sadam Houssein regime got absolutely righteously SPANKED in the most photographed and video recorded war to exist at the time. Where the American Abrams and the British Challenger absolutely decimated 3,300 Iraqi T-72s and similar Soviet made tanks, and lost 30 tanks themselves. And even then, most of those were lost to accidents like falling off bridges, or friendly fire. So the Iraqi regime can only count 10 Coalition tanks. That's a KD ratio of about 1:330.

So good job on that one assessing the Soviet war capabilities, experts. Reformists stay winning, I guess. If you're hearing the laughter of children reverb through the battlefields of Ukraine, that's my voice from 33 god damned years ago at the propagandists that declared the US entering Iraq would just be a sandy version of Vietnam, where we do nothing but try and occupy and die by the thousand per year unable to meet any objectives or hold territory in the face of supposed superior Soviet armor.

And after their biggest trump card was exposed as a limp dick, which the Soviets always relied on to feel secure and content that, at the end of the day, even if the Americans and Western Europeans lived easier, more free lives, at least the USSR had the security of military supremacy, the Soviet delusion collapsed under itself and the entire dream just DIED. Matrix rejected, Soviet citizens disillusioned.

That's not hyperbole, after Saddam's thorough SPANKING that didn't even last an entire changing of the seasons before we swept up and went home, the Soviet Union croaked. Was it the final nail in the coffin? The final insult that did it? The disillusion, on top of the economic problems? I'd say it had something to do with it.

And in the west, our Very Progressive People(tm) have always had a kind of crypto-relationship with anticapitalists, open or crypto-Marxists and all of them liked to hide under liberalism. Not Big L Liberals themselves, but predatorily mimicing it. Even if they wanted liberalism to mean opposition to what they saw as the thing permitting racism.. which.. surprise surprise.. was capitalism.

But the thing is, they're pseudo-intellectuals. They did not want the stigma of openly stanning for socialism or communism, most of the time. They instead chose to convey themselves simply and purely as positive things. Like being "anti-racist," or being "anti-sexist." Wink wink. The fact they intrinsically tied these things to capitalism and western society, to where in order to be good and not oppressive you'd have to destroy and replace western society in its current form (its entire legal system and economic system) was kind of a lower rabbithole you had to go through. They'd still tout themselves as being big fans of justice and equality, even if unknown to you those words had MASSIVE asterisks that departed from the encyclopedic definitions of those words. And unless you were in their vibe and indoctrinated and agreed with them, they weren't about to tell you that.

But the trick was, how do you secretly get Americans to more easily agree with you without even knowing what they're agreeing to? How do you control their feelings and effectively put them down a logical and linguistic corridor so the only conclusion they reach is your logic's conclusion?

You rely on some dirty tricks. Peer pressure, gaslighting, cooking books and then braying about what an educated person you are for employing them. This was the world I grew up in. With little girls being oh-so educated by their buzz cut angry aunts and handed textbooks that were too advanced for them, but contained what amounted to proverbs and bible verses for them to throw out as platitudes and things you weren't allowed to argue with them over. ("Where's your PhD? :^)" )

So. What I'm getting at here is US Society had already been dealing with pseudo-intellectual gadflies, propaganda magazines and unscrupulous people joining publications with a political bias.

It got REALLY, REALLY egregious in the 90s. Radical Feminism was ubiquitously TERF-central, but you couldn't even argue against it as a white man, even if many of the points people like me made in the early 90s were true. Because, "you're a white MAN, you don't get to act like you know anything about feminism and what it means to be a GIRL." And they'd reject any opinion, give you no benefit of the doubt, reject any legitimacy anything you said had, because of its source.

And the thing about this is, the more they argued, the more cracks formed in the obfuscation. The less emotional impact having your younger female family turn on you as disingenuous, morally motivated weapons had on you. The more they would try to back up their arguments by citing the sources of the supposed intellectual professors and professionals they were quoting. The more their works could be scrutinized and made to bleed as men, not omnipotent narrators of science and truth.

The supposed anti-racists, supposeldy motivated by a world where no one is disrespected or made lesser by laws or policies that favored or disfavored people on the basis of race, cheering loudly for legislation that didn't discontinue racist policies, but ushered in "minority community protection" entrenchments, allowing "minorities" (almost uniformly just black people) access to free shit not because they were poor, but because they were black. In the same breath as telling white people they should not be permitted anything on the basis of their whiteness, and should, "get over" race. And in doing so, reveal themselves to not care about racism. And reveal their true values to be about treating race as class, and whites designated as oppressors. These are very different dynamics than trying to free a society from race based favoritism/disfavoritism policies.

So the "anti-racist" populists and their fringe viziers openly bragging about how they believed everybody but white people mattered, how national borders should not exist.. for America.. how they were glad millions of illegal immigrants were pouring in and would eventually be voting for their candidates in their own community's self-interests, and they'd happily vote to make sure the people paying taxes here would finance aid and benefits packages that non-Hispanic whites would not be allowed to enjoy the benefits of. Openly bragging about how "the whites have had enough." and that the poor only mattered if they weren't white.

The "Anti-sexists," which in discussions and arguments from angry radfems at the kitchen table had barked weird Gyno-Futurisms where men would be made obsolete and women would inherit society. How men were the cause and source of all wars, and under a feminist future, "society would equally share everything" and be kind and nurturing and some other shit that phased in and out depending on whether Daughter or Niece Dear felt more like being a spiritualist "witch" or an objective empirical scientist secular intellectual, that day. Where they'd demand all male spaces be made gender neutral and open to all, but open more spaces designated specifically and purely for women, with benefits for women just on the basis of being a woman, and tax the whole of society to make those happen. That women should have automatic positions arbitrarily opened up to remove any possibility women WOULDN'T be elected to share power, and loudly declaring all western art and literature featuring women was garbage, because you couldn't have good western literature and art in a society whose sexual values were garbage (this is hilariously circular and amounts to, "it's capitalist and not socialist, therefore, it's inescapably wrong.")

These were all things we learned as we sat by the supposed saccharine-swet "liberal" that hated all things sexist and racist, and beside them were their best buddies whom they shared literature with. They played Good Cop Bad Cop. They were literally being the Motte and Bailey argument of leftism. The general liberal progressive would set up the general platitudes that if you disagreed with, you were branded a reactionary or retro racist and traditionalist example of the white patriarchy, and then the radical would loudly shout you down while testing the waters of your peers for if they'd resist their own brand of spin on the subject and situations and facts they were beating you with.

So people got a taste of exactly what the very much not-liberal Progressive Leftist believed, and had in store, and through the impurity of the liberal tolerating their very not-liberal leftist friend, was going to allow to taint what should have been simple, acceptable policies.

Policies that were against relegating women to second class citizen status, policies that removed race from the equation in society and did not favor anyone or disfavor anyone based on their background, nor enshrine the importance of anyone's ethnic background.. and then promptly promised that everybody's race and background mattered, but white peoples, specifically. And then had the audacity to call people white supremacists and male chauvinists if they opposed this.

That was my childhood. Stumbling through realizing what bullshit was festering in the left, because according to their own propaganda, none of that was true or existed.

But don't get it twisted; I wasn't blind go the fact racists joined the republican party specifically to deny any benefits to people if it meant minorities would benefit too. Or the favoritism of rich people to rich people. Or the religious fundamentalists that believed in "family values" that used those avenues to push the idea of a monogamous marriage and expectation such would dominate exclusively under a Christian (or Jewish, to a lesser but not insignificant extent) lens. That was true, but not to the degree of evil the hard/far Leftist non-liberal was pushing it.

This is why George W. Bush was elected and even given a chance. Because with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Rodney King riots, the initial wide adoption of anti-racism and willingness to change from the propaganda of what they THOUGHT was true and the status quo, what they THOUGHT was the more left position, only to learn much of what they said were wild exaggerations, histrionic delusions and padded stats vilifying history and the status quo just to get people on their side to vote for what they wanted- which was banning guns, opening the borders, making sure people that weren't white had ample tax-payer driven benefits for the purposes of growing those demographics and securing their success at the expense of the majority. And the promise that more of this would come, the more power their fringe had in the left-wing.

This is why younger voters voted for Bush. Because the, "Racism is when white people oppress black people, Asian people and Indigenous people" crowd revealed their real face and said, "this is Leftism, and whether you like it or not, we're a packaged deal with liberals."

And the more general liberal just sat there smiling, not arguing with the radical, not confronting the radical, not disagreeing with the radical. Just playing the role of the enabling mom as the step-dad sexually abuses their child.

The black children from newly integrated suburbs with their first white friends, and their white liberal sisters that were taught from a young age that smart, progressive white girls should make sure their stupid male family members in this "stupid white supremacist patriarchal society" didn't cultivate racism, that they "challenged it' on radical feminist principles. Where at first, Sally seemed like a nice girl that had their back. But then revealed herself to just be a soapbox standing, histrionic mental abuser that would take every opportunity to get one over her male peers and show off how "anti-racist" she was, while toeing a line and trying not to overreach and destroy the delusion.

At the end of the 80s and towards the end of the 90s, those black children had grown up in a place where the white people that were trying to be courteous and respectful and open, just to get treated like shit by girls like Sally, called racist while Sally ran interference for things she didn't need to run interference for.

It's because of girls like the proverbial Sally (Social Justice Sally) that towards the end of the 90s, black people were writing N-word passes hand over fist and so many adopted a mindset (however brief) that we lived in a post-racism world. Because they saw far more accusations of racism than the sorts of racism they recognized or cared about among white people, and were offended on behalf of their white friends and community. It was so irritating and ideologically slanted and intellectually insulting, this is the origin of why the republicans got such a large spike among black people towards the end of the 90s.

Well. That, and how their very far-left peers tended to join with the likes of Farrakhan black supremacists.. And they weren't having that.

It was not because of a lack of information. It was not because we didn't have Twitter and Community Notes, or the algorithm giving us propaganda articles to read to correct misunderstandings or teach us what we didn't already know. Before the digital world and information outlets, we had sources of that information. We had pamphlets, we had reports from the government telling what we had then and what was coming, we had general ideas of where we were, and where we were going.

Put simply, people had the attitude that something was seriously wrong and rotten with the top of the democratic party for enabling and fascillitating the far-leftists, and giving them access to the platform. They were smarter than industrial wealth hogs and racists, and better able to be the +1 in any policy table.

People felt they could more easily police out the religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and financial oligarchs, while still holding policy to reflect gender and racial equality. Bush was not running on a platform of white supremacism, nor beliefs that put women back in the kitchen.

And after we experienced how the federal government handled WACO and Ruby Ridge (look those up), heard the very unflattering rumblings of what they thought of rural white Americans, the willingness to treat them like active militant hate groups and burn down their homes and kill their families over even PERCEIVED violations of federal law, and the promise of more of that to follow, the absurd crusades made to try and make firearms progressively more and more inaccessible to illegal, we figured maybe the illiberal left-wing was a bit too much of a liability to be in power.

George W. Bush was not voted into power because Americans didn't know anything. He was voted into power because Americans had too many bad personal experiences with the hanger-ons of the left, and hoped maybe the right wing could be spruced up a bit going into the new millenium.

And then the Islamic world attacked the west, financed directly and indirectly by limitless oil money and a network of interconnected cultural interests and sacred delusions, among which was the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews, and radical Islamic jyhad. And just by virtue of tackling this problem, with the supposedly anti-conflict bad press of the illiberal left not helping matters (thanks, smearists and propagandists), the right wing had to tackle Islamofascism and take the responsibility of blame for the conflict even existing at all.

As far as the public consensus, reinforced by hard-leftist propaganda goes, it's just white America trying to impose an evangelical death cult on some harmless religious and ethnic minorities in the middle east, based purely on Christian supremacism and white supremacism.

Meanwhile Obama, a democrat, willingly continued the policy of using drones to take out middle eastern Muslim mafioso families and royals, as they thinned the herds and worked to arrange peace across the Islamic world by curtailing crime bosses and radical structures of power that were leading to fundamentalist groups like ISIS and ISIL. And as messy as that looks in hindsight, just based purely on the structure of that religion and the social elements, it was inevitable. It was a question of how that was going to play out, not if it would.

Today, many countries that previously were on board with the Islamic populist belief of bulldozing Israel and getting every Jew out of it, want peace with the west and Israel, and are working to undo decades to centuries of fundamentalist conservatism. Which is the long term foreign policy goal, and has been, since even before the Ayatollah assumed Iran.

Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden all have been party to this Middle Eastern policy that has openly or secretly been dealing with the shadow war of Islamic theocratic expansionism and imperialism and terrorism as a means of physically and conquering the opposition. The idea that George Bush and the republicans just embody some warpigs fueled by manifest destiny and white supremacy is a very uncharitable reading of some very flawed individuals, with uncharitable assumptions of motivations, and the people that voted for him assumed to just be know-nothing morons that just didn't have informed consent, or malicious defenders of what is presumed the status quo, that has never been and will never truly be the modus operandi of the USA, even if some with fringe beliefs think it should.

Bush was voted in not because of ignorance or malice, but because he was an option, and at the time, they thought the opposition could be trusted with a change.

I anticipate to see more absurd takes that disagree with my lived experience. Statistically, it's inevitable. But it doesn't make it any less insulting to witness.

7 notes · View notes