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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Inspired by a comment from Twitter;

Everyone is talking about the US relative decline, but they are really flexing his power in a way that we have not seen from Iraq

In one year they;

  • Destroyed every possible reconciliation between Europe and Russia

  • Became a next exporter of natural resources and the ones from who a lot of allies depend

  • They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding

  • They strongly limited the military of power of Russia with few money.

  • China is slowing her growth, and they created a ring of allies in the Pacific

  • The cultural grip on the West is becoming stronger, and the US successfully fused Neoliberalism and Leftism in a zombie ideology who is, against all odds, successfully working

  • The pro-Atlantist view have never been so strong.

I doubt that these strategies will work or be healthy in the long term, but it is incredible to see how an ill and polarized country can still do whatever it wants without any reaction.

If America really did blow up that pipeline, then the German “deep state” (if you will) is probably drafting a decade-long plan for a permanent shift away from America and toward Russia. I don’t think the German reaction will be one of a dog that obeys the master who administers punishment. This would be construed as an attack on the sovereignty of a nation, the health of the nation, and the future of the nation. 140 IQ German intelligence officers are surely going to see the event as an unforgivable attack — again, implying it was America — and not as just a short-term just punishment that they will humiliatingly endure. The economic downfall can be compared to 9/11, can it not?

Why is the assumption that Germany was taken by surprise, conditional on the US being responsible?

The German Deep State is non existent, and if it exist, it is pro-american

Germany is more of a giant factory firm who needs to sell cars than a nation. In front of challenges their èlites will back down.

The German deep state is the entrenched commitment to progressive values by most of the German bureaucracy and political establishment and media, isn't it?

then the German “deep state” (if you will)

German deep state is a phone line to Washington on hot dial. These things take generations of sovereignty to build, to grow, you need not so much 140 IQ intelligence officers but 80 year old national intelligentsia with unblemished reputation. Neither Germany nor Russia or Ukraine have anything like an American deep state. Those are shallow nations of confused linear workers.

Moreover, if Germans are all that smart, they can understand their place and the future of Russia.

America cannot prevent a German deep state, intelligence community or military intelligence community. They do not have the manpower, the boots on the ground, the ability to influence etc. especially not since the spying debacle which saw Germany revamp their intelligence communications. This is how you get things like the most prestigious special units team in Germany being filled with far right members. In that case, Germany had to change the unit because of publicity, but the fact that such a thing can happen is clear evidence that America doesn’t have such magical ability to completely control Germany’s leadership.

And if they had such control over Germany, they wouldn’t need to blow up the pipeline!

We may differ in our understanding of the term. For me, Deep State is unelected self-governed bureaucracy that steers the state policy in accordance with its own values, insular culture and long-term vision; basically a self-perpetuating fraternity entrenched in the official power structure, and it takes a whole ecology of think tanks, and decades of stability and obscurity for this fraternity to mature. You seem to believe it's some concrete institutional factor, like intelligence services. This is as queer to me as Marxist materialist analysis that explains all political processes in terms of economic relations. Spooks run Russia, maybe Israel to some extent, but in all other countries they're not the decision-making caste.

In the US, one angle of the Deep State is epitomized in Council on Foreign Relations (or rather, an informal network of people many of whom have at some point participated in the CFR). In Germany, that's structures like Konrad Adenauer Foundation, maybe? But no German structure has sovereignty comparable to the CFR; it's just a logistically convenient form to coordinate the Zeitgeist already present in the society. Likewise, the CIA is not sovereign, it's furthering ideas that the Deep State has endorsed, out of those the culture of the nation has produced. In this sense, Germans may have intelligence agencies (of course penetrated by 5eyes agents) but lack the DS; just as their culture lacks independence from the US and capacity to produce ideas.

How could they do what you're talking about? Any bureaucratic German group that attempts to move against the US and towards Russia will be ratted out as Nazis instantly, and in this fails they'll be condemned by the populace as they try to implement any policy of consequence; if they pass the policy, Americans can retaliate so catastrophically it'll deter any German with half a brain from trying in advance. In fact what you're seeing now is the cleanup of one such group, nurtured by Putin and Russian fossil industry – Gerhard Schroder and others. They're discredited and out of power now. That lobbyist club was as close to German Deep State as can be. Putin had his chance, and he blew it by attacking Ukraine.

This is how you get things like the most prestigious special units team in Germany being filled with far right members.

Remind me how it ended for them.

And if they had such control over Germany, they wouldn’t need to blow up the pipeline!

Germans have economic elites. In matters of war, economic elites have little impact (as evidenced by success of American trade war with China, that has caught the cynical, mercantile Chinese with their pants down, uselessly begging their Wall Street partners to «do something»); but they can make noise and sow division, increasing friction in the war process. Blowing up the pipeline takes care of that.

We may differ in our understanding of the term. For me, Deep State is unelected self-governed bureaucracy that steers the state policy in accordance with its own values, insular culture and long-term vision; basically a self-perpetuating fraternity entrenched in the official power structure, and it takes a whole ecology of think tanks, and decades of stability and obscurity for this fraternity to mature. You seem to believe it's some concrete institutional factor, like intelligence services. This is as queer to me as Marxist materialist analysis that explains all political processes in terms of economic relations. Spooks run Russia, maybe Israel to some extent, but in all other countries they're not the decision-making caste.

The Deep State is a social network which has penetrated the permanent government sufficiently deeply that it can manipulate the elected government into doing what it wants. In other words, the Deep State is Georgetown and Manhattan cocktail parties and the CFR matters because it is run by people who are invited to those cocktail parties, not the other way round. Germany is run by industrialists so the German deep state prefer to speak through the IFO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ifo_Institute_for_Economic_Research).

When I worked at Deutsche Bank, there was an occasional hint of the German Deep State in action. It is real, but it is narrowly mercenary in outlook and doesn't waste time thinking about national security. FWIW, the German Deep State is more closely tied to the Gnomes of Zurich than the US Deep State, but in an age where all Rhodes (scholarships) lead to Davos, this probably doesn't matter.

The French Deep State, incidentally, is also real, and is able to act independently of the US. From a Moldbuggian perspective, this is because Harvard does not control the ENA.

I imagine 140 IQ German intelligence officers, if they exist, will either be comfortably insulated from any financial hardships Germany encounters or offered a comfortable placement in the sprawling Beltway apparatus across the pond if the insulation fails. I'm not convinced that Germany has the sort of people who would go to metaphorical or literal war for their country and actually have the intellectual firepower to in its state apparatus (which in recent decades has been rather notorious in its inability to attract and retain any sort of talent), and anyhow patriotism is much more (the German version of red)-coded than it is in the US and most people would sooner freeze than being caught wearing the moral fashions of the outgroup.

Germany is a nation filled with Germans and German history. Globohomo can only penetrate so far. The idea that they will do what is not in their nation’s interest because they have a salary or a fictitious job offer with another Intel service is unevidenced.

Germany is a bag of money and globohomo succeeded in opening it up not only for every beggar country in Europe but also for every African, Afghan and Arab. Germany is a historical specter associated with all the sins of the 20th century and everyone with some social sense knows to reject it. Germany is not a place of honor for most of the people who inhabit it, but a place that needs to become a postnational cosmopolitan anywhere as quickly as possible. The actual hold that German identity has on most ethnic Germans is weak, and ethnic Germans are not even going to remain the majority for long anymore.

I wish you were right, but I fear that 4bpp is closer to the truth.

All the Germans students I met voted Greens and considered racism the greatest European crisis.

Yeah, that's the usual. German youth live in one giant bubble, and the establishment plays very nice with that bubble.

European sovereignty and self-determination were discredited as racist concepts when America won World War II. The ability to draft such plans requires a level of independence that no European nation possesses. If America wants half of Germany to freeze to death, half of Germany will freeze to death and the German government will quietly accept it.

I'm quite ready to call out our politicians as spineless grifters, with perhaps a few exceptions, but the idea that they consider themselves vassals of Washington out of a need to avoid racism is, how do you say it, cringe? Low-effort? They, like most progressives, will indeed go far to avoid accusations of racism, but this is one thing where I see no connection.

I don’t think the German reaction will be one of a dog that obeys the master who administers punishment.

And given that they've done exactly that with Americans ever since 1945, pray tell, what makes you think that?

If Germany took orders from the US, they wouldn't have built the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the first place.

Do you see the end of WWII where 40 million died, for a war that Germany started, and where considerations were drafted to solve the “German question” by deindustrializing (resulting in 20 million Germans starving to death), as comparable to this event?

If America has the guts to genocide Germans for disobeying them, as they nearly considered at the end of WWII, I think you would be right. But we don’t. And we certainly wouldn’t if Germany signed agreements with Russia amounting to a defensive pact.

But we don’t.

Genocide usually implies murder the US thus didn't commit, but ethnic cleansing of Germans was something the US supported and helped with.

As only a minute fraction (.5 million to 2.5 million) died, I rate the statement "America doesn't have the guts to genocide Germans." mostly true.

At the end of ww2 the us considered implementing the morgenthau deindustrialization plan which would have starved 20 million Germans, that is what I am referring to in order to highlight the unique case of Germany’s post-ww2 submission to the allies

Because in 1945 the US openly threw money at the Germans, while now in 2022 they are a bad ally at best, and a polite enemy at worst.

We're a wonderful ally! Just don't expect us to, you know, participate in wars. We outgrew such barbarous practices.

No, I'm talking about the US. With Russia being the wreck it is, I don't know what the Americans really get to offer Germany.

Ah, in that case the answer is on everyone's lips lately: Gas.

Yep. Right convenient, too.

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