Turns out LBJ was a total cunt too, at least in terms of foreign policy.

This comes, of course, from that series, The Untold History Of The United States, that I have been watching. It’s been rough going but I persist.

After all, they will eventually get to things which happened in my lifetime.

What I have learned today that I did not know (or at least, understand) is that the whole deal with the escalating war in Vietnam was that the USA thought that, as long as they kept escalating in force of arms and sheer inhumane brutality, the Vietnamese had to eventually reach a “breaking point” where they would lose the will to fight and surrender.

A clearer example of reptile-brain bullshit is hard to imagine. The idea that if you hit the other guy hard enough, he HAS to submit and be your bitch is a pure product of the most primitive brain of our brains polluting our rationality, subverting our sense of self-interest, and suppressing both our compassion and our common sense.

And of course, the very idea that if you brutalize people, they give up is absolutely ludicrous. All brutality does is inspire the enemy to greater resistance. Brutality has never, ever, ever stopped a resistance movement (or “insurgency” as we call them when it’s brown people). Every act of brutality inspires hundreds of civilians to join the resistance and justifies further brutality by those opposing the occupying government.

And what really gets me is that this fact should be blatantly obvious to anyone with a shred of self-awareness. I would love to go back in time to when these testosterone junkies were making these decisions and ask them a simple question :

“What would be America’s breaking point? How much brutal aggression would it take to make America capitulate? ”

They would, of course, huffily reply that there is nothing that can dominate the America spirit and that if the Russians invaded. they would fight to the last man, no matter what the odds, for the old Red White and Blue.

“And why do you think the Vietnamese are any different? What would you do if the Russians invaded and slaughtered a thousand women and children as a show of force? Give in , or fight even harder?”.

And yet, this androgenic folly is repeated over and over and over again, whether it’s the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the USA fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Nazis punishing whole villages for harboring the Resistance.

It doesn’t work. It never works. And it never will. The only real way to counteract a resistance movement is to treat the occupied people extremely well.

Then you get this :

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At the same time, the occupying force should do its best to disappear from public view. Leave as few reminders that the nation is not determining its own fate around as possible. Pull strings from the shadows. Do nothing to challenge their sense of national identity.

Leave them, essentially, with nothing to resist. Most people will be perfectly happy to go about their lives because most people have only a shadowy concept of what happens at the highest levels of power anyhow, so whether or not that is “their” government or another means very little to them, as long as their daily lives are unaffected.

This approach goes against everything our stupid reptile brains tell us – what, be nice to people we have conquered? That won’t make my dick hard! – but it would work.

And of course, the third part of the strategy is to get the hell out of there as soon as you can. Long term occupation is never a good idea. To me, the best idea is to tell the people exactly when you will withdraw and leave them to determine their own fate. Make it very clear that past this point, you will accept no responsibility for what happens afterwards. On that date, responsibility will officially be transferred to the occupied nation, and it will be up to them to make it work.

That doesn’t mean you don’t help them build a democratic government. It just means that you are being extremely clear about the fact that you will not be there forever and that the people will be on their own when you go.

By being so clear from the outset, you take the wind out of the sails of any sort of resistance movement and you force the people to realize that they will not be able to blame all their problems on you forever.

This will not be an easy transition for people who previously lived under the patriarchal tyranny of an authoritarian government. These people are not accustomed to self-determination. They are used to doing what they are told.

The same thing happens on a much smaller scale with authoritarian families. The autocratic parents deny their children any chance to learn to think and grow and learn on their own, and then act surprised when their kids can’t handle a world where they are expected to do all three.

So while the date of withdrawal is fixed, the time between invasion and that date should include the time it will take to teach the population about what it means to be free.

It might even take an entire generation. At least until we perfect the art of it.

But in order to get the result we all want, at least on paper – a happy democratic country free to choose its own fate – we will have to recognize that there is a demon in the minds of men (and women too, presumably) and that this demon lies to people in the language of power, domination, submission, victory, and “glory”.

And it is this exact demon of the mind which has lead to all the brutality and inhumanity in the world, whether it’s the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Rwandan massacre, or Abu Graib. The idea that if we are brutal and horrible enough, the enemy will HAVE to submit (even though we wouldn;t submit if we were them) and the accompanying pursuit of the cock-hardening feeling of dominance is the number one factor in all examples of man’s inhumanity to man.

To me, that is the clear face of evil.

And it is that demon we are to vanquish if we are evolve as a species.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.