Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
“Folly is a child of power.” ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense, and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?” ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
The term “folly” is particularly apt at this stage in the decline of the great American empire. Folly is defined as: criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct; an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking. If ever a word captured the actions of American political leaders in the 21st Century and reflect the tragic downfall of an empire borne out of the ashes of the Second World War, it is the term “folly”.
For the last two decades I’ve been befuddled by the inane foolishness of our leaders, as they have driven the nation into a bottomless pit of debt at an astoundingly ridiculous pace, initiated military conflict across the globe, and in the last three years initiated anti-human policies guaranteed to destroy our economic system, depopulate the planet, increase human suffering, and turn the world into a techno-gulag where we will own nothing, eat bugs, and bow down to the commands of globalist overlords.
None of what is being jammed down our throats is based upon reason, facts, or common sense. Why do governments initiate policies destined to destroy the nations they have been entrusted to administer? Is it purely incompetence and stupidity, or is it purposeful and evil?
When I heard the term folly last week, it triggered a memory of reading Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 book – The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. After reading her Pulitzer Prize winning treatise on the opening days of World War I – The Guns of August – I immediately became a huge fan of her work. She had the ability to bring the boring dry facts of history to life with her vivid descriptions of events and making it interesting for the average person.
Her storytelling acumen was second to none. She made you feel like you were part of the story. I subsequently read her other Pulitzer Prize winning tome – Stillwell and the American Experience in China, along with The Zimmerman Telegram, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War – 1890–1914, and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. But it is her March of Folly book which captures the absurdity of our world at this time in history.
Tuchman addresses four instances throughout history when, paradoxically, governments pursued policies clearly contrary to their own interests. The first three were: the Trojans’ decision to move the Greek horse into their city, the failure of the Renaissance popes to address the factors that would lead to the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century, and England’s policies relating to American colonies under King George III.
But Tuchman spent half of her 1984 book discussing the most recent government folly – the Vietnam War. Vietnam was still an open wound in the mindset of Americans, after the deaths of 58,000 U.S. boys, over 150,000 wounded in action, and the emotional and physical toll on those who came back haunted by what they saw and had to do to survive. This epic folly also resulted in the deaths of over 2 million Vietnamese. It appears the arrogant leaders of all empires fall into the trap of committing foolish acts out of hubris and overestimation of their intellectual and political power.
“The follies that produced the loss of American virtue following Vietnam begin with continuous overreacting, in the invention of endangered national security, the invention of vital interest, the invention of a commitment which rapidly assumed a life of its own.” ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
For an empire which only came into existence in 1946 through the destruction of Europe and Japan, along with agreement by the vanquished and the nearly bankrupt victors to elevate the USD as the currency to rule the world, an avalanche of folly has led us to near ruin. This path towards empire began shortly after Jefferson warned to not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt and Washington warned to not engage in foreign entanglements and costly alliances. Lincoln’s consolidation of Federal power, while pushing the nation further into debt, and setting a precedent of using military might to accomplish political ambitions.
As our industrial strength grew, imperialist tendencies continued to blossom, with the government and media (Randolph Hearst) joining forces to instigate the Spanish American war. After being elected on a platform of not getting the U.S. into World War I, Woodrow Wilson reneged on his promise and sent American troops to fight in a war we had no business entering. This after he had already handed the financial future of our nation over to a private banking cabal and set in motion the perpetual creation of debt and taxation which would eventually create the dynamics of collapse, now on our doorstep.
“The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.” ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
Wilson’s global machinations and involvement in the vengeful Treaty of Versailles laid the groundwork for WW2, where the supremacy of the American Empire began its ascension and power-hungry men put a final nail in the coffin of the idea of an American Republic of the people, by the people, and for the people. America has squandered any claim to being a virtuous and moral light in a darkening world. Instead, those who have degraded and discarded the Constitution over the last several decades have captured the levers of power within government and are inflicting their tragically foolish intrigues upon a world gone mad.
Ever since Bretton Woods insured the USD would reign supreme across the globe, at the point of a gun, the American empire has expanded and bullied the rest of the world into falling in line. When bribery didn’t work, missiles and boots on the ground were employed. Not once in the seventy-eight years since WW2 has our nation faced a threat requiring the use of our military, but somehow our political leaders, at the behest of the military industrial complex, have intervened militarily more than 250 times in countries around the world.
Not one conflict since WW2 has been waged with a formal declaration of war as required by the U.S. Constitution. The Korean War, Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Libya, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine have all been fought under the cover of UN Resolutions. Vietnam, Iraq, and the never-ending War on Terror were all authorized by Congress, without a formal declaration of war. Essentially, the U.S. president can bomb anyone he wants anywhere in the world, with no accountability to anyone.
Tuchman concentrated the majority of her book on the greatest folly of the American empire, until that point, the Vietnam War. The persistent aspects of folly all played a part in the disastrous outcome of that foolish bloody conflict.
“Their three outstanding attitudes – obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status – are persistent aspects of folly”. ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
Lyndon Johnson, an arrogant power-hungry politician, listened to his soulless neocon warmongering Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and bloviating incompetent generals in using the fake Gulf of Tonkin attack as the motivation to broaden the war in Vietnam. Johnson saw the U.S. as the last bastion against the expansion of communism by the Soviet Union and China.
He and the military industrial complex, warned about by Eisenhower, saw themselves as invulnerable and able to defeat any foe. They found it laughable that a mighty military empire could be defeated by lowly peasants in rice paddies. He was so arrogant he thought he could even defy the law of economics which said you had to choose between guns and butter. He chose guns, butter, and his Great Society welfare state. These insane choices set in motion a tsunami of inflation, debt creation, and a never-ending cover-up operation to give the empire the continued appearance of stability and power.
As Johnson dropped tons of bombs, napalmed villages, sprayed agent orange to defoliate jungles while poisoning his own soldiers, and sent 550,000 young men into the swamps of hell on earth, the American public began to realize there was no vital strategic interest in Vietnam. He ignored the violent protests and growing discontent sweeping across the land, led by the youth of the country. McNamara realized the war was unwinnable and resigned in 1968.
Johnson followed by choosing not to run for reelection in 1968. But the nature of a folly once set in motion is to continue in motion. Despite knowing the war was unwinnable in 1967, the politicians, bureaucrats and generals sacrificed the lives of 38,000 American boys between 1968 and 1975, when the war officially ended. These boys were cannon fodder so their leaders could save face and not admit they had made a dreadful decision in fighting that war.
Weak men would rather let the awful murderous momentum carry-on rather than ceasing their folly. A lack of intelligent thought, use of reason, understanding the facts on the ground, a major dose of hubris, cognitive dissonance, and cowardliness in refusing to admit they were wrong, permanently damaged the reputation of the United States as a bastion of righteousness and integrity in the world. As usual, the only lesson learned from history is the leaders of empires never learn the lessons of why previous empires have fallen. As Tuchman noted, persistence in error is the ultimate folly.
“The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.” ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
Since Tuchman wrote her book in 1984, those calling the shots in this empire of debt have committed far more horrendous acts of folly as we approach the denouement and fall of this short-lived military realm. And the rapidity of these foolish ventures has only accelerated as each foolish venture leads to far more foolish responses to try and cover-up the previous acts of foolishness. The lessons of Vietnam were not learned, as we intervened in the Iraq-Iran War on the side of Sadaam, because Iran overthrew the dictator installed by a CIA coup in 1953.
The CIA also armed Osama bin Laden and his Mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War. Then a few years later Sadaam was our mortal enemy because he invaded Kuwait over a border dispute. And Osama’s Al-Qaeda fighters become public enemy #1 after being tagged as the perpetrators of 9/11, launching the War on Terror folly.
Then Bush Jr. and his neo-con puppeteers Cheney and Rumsfeld feigned the threat of Sadaam’s WMDs as an excuse for the disastrous Iraq War, where thousands of American soldiers were killed and wounded for nothing, and generations of new Muslim enemies were created by the mass slaughter of Iraqis. The lesson of the Soviet empire dying in Afghanistan was lost on the egotistical psychopaths who then proceeded to spend the next two decades sacrificing more young men fighting the Taliban, to then withdraw in shameful failure and hand the country back over to the Taliban, who then tortured and killed anyone who collaborated with the U.S. and again took away all the rights of women. Mission Accomplished, as Bush Jr. would say.
But it was during Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s reign of error where acts of folly ratcheted up to a new level of deceitfulness and chaos creation. Both Syria and Libya were run by dictators who marched to their own drumbeat and did not bow to the imperial American empire. They had oil revenue, modern cities, and fairly secular societies, with little terrorism or radical Islamist influences. Obama, his neo-con advisors, and the military industrial complex needed chaos and war to keep their racket going.
A flailing empire faced with intractable economic decline needs foreign enemies to distract the masses and fill the coffers of the Deep State, as the nation circles the drain. Obama and his despicably evil Secretary of State Clinton created ISIS from the ashes of the Iraq War as the means to deposing Assad. He also funded the forces whose job was to overthrow and kill Muammar Gaddafi, along with pretending the humanitarian crisis in Yemen didn’t exist. These foolish actions have resulted in the inevitable blowback, a diminishing trust of the U.S. among nations, the deaths of millions, and the destruction of once thriving countries, leaving nothing but destruction and suffering in the wake of its imperial misadventures.
The greatest act of folly during the Obama administration was the CIA and Victoria (“Fuck the EU”) Nuland initiated Maidan coup in the Ukraine in 2014, toppling the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and replacing him with a U.S. puppet Petro Poroshenko and his neo-Nazi allies. This coup was purposely conducted to diminish Putin’s influence in Ukraine, but set the stage for the tragedy still unfolding today and possibly leading to World War 3.
Putin’s response to the coup was to annex Crimea, so the Russian navy retained its Black Sea port, and support the Russian speaking rebels in the Donbas. Obama revealed his yellow streak by avoiding direct confrontation with Putin, but used the old toothless sanctions card to pretend he was hurting Russia.
The propaganda war has never ceased, with the Ukraine nazis shooting down an airliner and attempting to pin the blame on the Russians. For eight years the nazis had bombed and slaughtered Russian speaking civilians in Eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Biden crime family took advantage of the most corrupt country on earth by milking it like a dairy cow. Zelensky, a two-bit sitcom actor, was installed in 2019 by corrupt Ukrainian billionaire oligarchs and was given the task of provoking war with Russia by unleashing his nazi Azov legions in Donbas, slaughtering women, children, and other non-combatants. It worked. Putin’s invasion in February 2022 was meant to free the eastern provinces from the senseless slaughter and establish a new border between the Ukraine and Russia.
Both sides were at the negotiating table in March 2022 when in an act of supreme folly, the US instructed their UK lackey – Boris Johnson – to threaten/bribe Zelensky into turning hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into cannon fodder in order to further enrich the imperial empire’s military industrial complex and try to provoke Putin into a broader war, with the goal of deposing him. Of course, Putin is playing chess, while our pedo dementia patient in chief is playing checkers, but just wants some ice cream and his diaper changed.
There is one thing for certain. Foolish acts, foolish interventions, and foolish policies are enacted by fools and supported by fools. The history of government folly makes perfect sense when you realize mediocre men with small minds and a lust for power are drawn to politics and passionately inflict their idiocy on the masses who were too stupid or too apathetic to care about who they chose to lead them. The quotes below perfectly describe what has occurred since 2020.
A basement dwelling dementia patient with anger issues, who likes to touch children, collect his 10%, and eat ice cream was installed by the Deep State in a rigged election, as a means to destroy what remains of our society as part of a globalist Great Reset agenda. The same strategy was used to get a brain damaged galoot, whose IQ before the stroke was sub-100, elected as a senator from PA, despite his inability to speak a coherent sentence or comprehend a basic question. These are little minds running a “great” empire. We deserve what we get and we’re gonna get it really hard.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ― H.L. Mencken
“A great empire and little minds go ill together.” – Edmund Burke
The nearly insane actions, decisions, illegal mandates, and squandering of taxpayer funds to enrich pharmaceutical mega-corporations and arms dealers to fight the annual flu and an undeclared war against Russia are either the acts of a madman or someone who has been captured by malevolent mercenaries and is doing their bidding for fear of the consequences to himself and his family.
Biden has been an incompetent, lying, gaffe machine during his entire 40 years in politics, but his dementia has made him the perfect patsy for the Deep State and globalist banking interests. Going back to the definition of folly – criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct – Biden’s actions and conduct most certainly meet the criteria. It seems no amount of failure and disastrous outcomes can shake Biden and his cronies from their senseless path of destroying the economy and cultural fabric of the nation, while provoking a global conflagration against two nuclear powers simultaneously.
Do they really believe the ridiculous Great Reset agenda based on climate change falsehoods, depopulation, global rule over the peasants by a few billionaire oligarchs, and artificial intelligence programs running the world? Has their ideology blinded them to facts, reason and a course which would be most beneficial to mankind? Or are these the desperate acts of people trapped by the folly of their predecessors, who feel obligated to keep marching the world off a cliff and into the abyss because they have no answers?
We know for a fact the national debt is $31.5 trillion and unfunded liabilities total in excess of $200 trillion and can never be honored. But the whole world is in the same boat, with total global debt exceeding $300 trillion and debt to GDP at 350%, up from 278% just prior to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The “China Century” narrative will also prove false, as they owe one-third of that global debt figure.
There is no escape from this tsunami of unpayable debt. Central banks, trying to fend off hyper-inflation, have raised rates by 2% to 4%, which has increased interest expense on the debt by $3 trillion, on a path to $8 trillion. Facing this dire situation, politicians across the globe have insanely ramped up government spending, accelerating towards the cliff, disregarding the horrible consequences awaiting the citizens they are supposed to represent.
Are the covid scam, vaccine mandates, foreign interventions, UFO distractions, gender absurdity, wokeness tripe, and fake climate crisis all just engineered distractions to allow the perpetrators of this engineered demolition to continue their wealth pillaging operation until the last moment? In reality, no one will survive this debt induced folly if they trigger nuclear Armageddon because their psychopathic level of hubris blinds them to where they are driving this world.
As anyone awakened to the scam of political parties and media propaganda designed to distract and create fear knows, you won’t be able to vote yourself out of this predicament, put into motion 110 years ago. The options are few, as some sort of collapse is inevitable. The globalist Great Reset crowd want a collapse where they retain their wealth, power and control and you own nothing, eat bugs, live in a pod, and obey your masters.
Once the collapse is initiated no one knows how it will proceed. They will lose control of the narrative and the path of events. This is where groups of rational thinking patriots will have an opportunity to reverse some of the follies inflicted upon them during this century and regain some of the liberties and freedoms taken from them, while inflicting punishment upon those guilty of treason. Serious men will need to take serious measures to triumph during the coming crisis.
The choices will be between disastrous and unpalatable. There are no good choices left. A future of little or no government, with local communities of like minded people working together to live a purposeful life should be the goal. But, as Plato noted over two thousand years ago, the masses will remain ignorant and distracted by their technological gadgets, unable to see beyond the shadows and lies of a culture manipulated to keep them from thinking or comprehending how badly they have been exploited and oppressed by their foolish government leaders.
The march of folly is perpetual.
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/21/2023 – 16:20
