THE TIP-TOE INVASION

 As usual we are all being taunted about our inadequate and pathetic fleet and being shouted at to answer the almost vital question asked by practically nobody outside the USN and US Maritime authorities who really want to know just what we are going to do to prevent, deter or fight back when China reabsorbs China. Now they want us to be excited about something they claim are just like incredible manmade harbors we called Mulberry that were put into place in Normandy waters after our amphibious invasion there on 6 June 1944. These enormous engineering structures that took years to build and days to put in place were subjected to severe battering on the 19th of June and Mulberry A simply disappeared to all intents and purposes. Just how exactly 3 or 5 big barges are anything like a Mulberry harbor are a mystery to me.

Anybody who studies the histories of the War knows or thinks they know that Germany could have done more to defeat the allied invasion at Normandy and it took a great deal of luck, magnificent planning, undaunted courage and a certain amount of destructive stupidity to get the invasion into the success column for the allies. Some would say that the Germans were faced with a cross-channel invasion and had to basically defend and fortify the entire Atlantic coast of Europe from Spain up to Holland. I suppose that could be true but they had 4 years to get the job done and they were fairly dab at building fortifications, guns and ammunition and had plenty of labor battalions keen to help out. The poor Formosans have only had 80 years to prepare invasion fortifications and heaps of weaponry.

If that is the case than I always ask why we in America should be troubled by any prospective turbulence in Taiwan. It isn't ours, we don't actually care about whether one set of Chinese or the other set of Chinese own and operate it since again, history has shown that putative NATO allies were super quick to abandon "their Chinese" in Hong Kong and Macao to the......wait for it......Chinese.

When I think of meaningless wars such as the one now ongoing in Ukraine I would put any war fought over administrative control of Taiwan right up there with dumbest war in history. The people who live there are not some sort of out-CONUS American-Chinese, they are and all see themselves as Chinese. They have all had a chance to see that unification with the PRC is probably not as bad as any war would be and the ones who have a serious heartburn about it have all done the Canadian thing and bought Canadian citizenship and housing in British Columbia.

I've been meaning to try for a better understanding of China and finally got around to getting the translations of The Eight-sided Fortress ( The Eightfold Battle Formation ) and other Poetry of Du Fu. Our recent history is littered with famous people dropping little gems such as, 'know your enemy' into polite conversation and while this is usually sound advice it is also an excellent idea to 'know your allies' and consider where they stand as it relates to where you stand and where you think you stand. Probably 50% of the population of Formosa don't care at all and I'm pretty sure the 2.7 million communist agents in Formosa already almost all support a win for the PRC when the invasion happens or the crumbling finishes and they all end up ................ Chinese.

I think most of the memory of the old Imperial China vanished under the Communist assault and then the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but the poetry and the soul of China is still there unchanged in over a thousand years. The people here who argue for using a vague threat of China taking China with only us to stop the barbarian hordes, is blindly and stupidly pathetic. The war we fought against a rising and militant Communism is long over and we kind of won. It was never anything like what it was sold to us as because in the end it was really just a very long war about Nationalism and anti-colonialism and the barbarians won some and we lost some but those were seldom the same fight.

The current world breakdown is an even more splintering kind of long war that we really better stay out of ourselves since there are no great victories in that war, only endless tragedy like what we're seeing play out on the steppes in Ukraine now. Nationalism will not survive in the places where it never really existed and it will probably fade away in some places that never knew anything except pure nation/state ethnic purity on a scale not even Hitler dreamed of. A lot of places that you thought were inviolate bastions of nationalism are, in case you missed it, tearing themselves apart in every way every day. Who are we to stop it?

Consider the former United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It was the greatest imperial power since Spain and Rome at their height. Now it is ruled by pedophiles and morons and like the rest of the former colonial power it is rapidly extinguishing itself by simply rolling over and getting raped by an endless flood of barbarians who hate every single thing about it and the people that remain there. Any soldier who fought in Normandy back 80 years ago wouldn't recognize anything about the land once known as England and Great Britain. Those who served in the CBI might recognize it and be revolted by seeing in their homeland the painful reflections they got to know working under Wavell in India.

The false states are now breaking up. The Kurds fight on against everybody in Syria, Turkey and Iraq. The Syrians have simply fallen apart with the only thing holding them together a mutual hatred for each other and a complete inability to put business before pleasure and stop killing each other and scrambling to dominate the others. What the palestinians did to Jordan and Lebanon are sad and just a predictor for what they will do everywhere else that lets them inside. The shia and sunni are an endless torment each inflicts on the other and then on all the rest of us. The Persians remember a united empire but they too fell beneath the sway of the green banners and it gutted them just as it has gutted every other islamic society. 

All of Africa is a cauldron of unrequited nationalism where every single tribe dreams of its own nation/state/homeland and maybe being ruler of the whole shebang but still never forgetting that first comes family, then clan, then tribe and nobody even breathes the words, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 

 I think we are settling into a time with little to no interest in the great affairs of the great game and people would really like to just be left alone for awhile. There are no crowned heads and petty jealousies to tear apart whole continents, no great disciples of God or Marx who want to unite everybody under a single God and no significant military religious rebellions ready to stamp out heresies or spread them by the sword. The rapidly declining birth rate and guaranteed turmoil in the most advanced countries seem to point to a more laissez-faire world for perhaps a generation or two and then resource squabbles will drive things back to the course that history usually runs in, the deep channel of war and hatred and change for higher purposes undreamed of now.

I am sure that it will be both fascinating and extremely injurious to the psyche of civilized people because by and large most of the young people today don't really see much worth fighting and dying for and it's hard to blame them because nobody ever undertook to teach them. It will work out in the end because hate is a self-taught course and free to all.