Bulletins and News Discussion from December 9th to December 15th, 2024 - Assad Must Go

BRICS will probably continue dragging their feet as long as the liberals in their respective countries get the final say.

Genuinely frightening how quick the Assad government fell in the end, after all the years of fighting. And now it seems as if everyone wants a piece of Syria like some modern crusade.

I think it is pretty clear that Syria had no leadership and rejected outside help. I do hope it is a sobering lesson for all of the nations on the US naughty list that they must be ready to withstand this type of coordination of asymmetrical warfare. Not sure how much this would tarnish Russia's relationship though, their consistency with support far overshadows this one time when the supported country's leadership bowed out without trying.

At the end of the day, they are scared of getting nuked. Their grand strategy, from Russia to China to Iran, is essentially boiling the frog. They want to slowly turn up the heat so the frog inside the pot doesn't know it's being boiled alive until it's too late. The reason is that if the frog were to know it's being boiled alive, the frog (ie the US) will quickly escalate to nukes and begin nuking their capital cities. They want to quietly and slowly move, hoping that while they make small and incremental gains, the US will not escalate that fast before falling apart due to internal contradictions as a settler-colony hollowed by austerity. I don't blame them for pursuing anti-imperialism (or counter-hegemony if you don't think their motives are pure) in this way. Just going "What is a few hundreds of millions of people dead compared to the defeat of Western imperialism? Just don't be scared of nukes bruh lmao." is deranged armchairism.

But perhaps we're seeing the flaws and limitations of the slowly boiling the frog strategy. If you think about it, if the US had a crystal ball that could predict the future, and the crystal ball guarantees that no country will nuke the US even if the US uses nukes on them, then the US basically won. They don't even have to rely on dollar hegemony anymore since they could pretty much transition to a new mode of production away from capitalism to we'll-nuke-you-if-you-don't-give-us-your-shit-ism. M-C-M' becomes C- -C'.

People have said much about Mao. And I know you're well aware of what Mao thought about the prospect of China getting nuked. People have also commented about why the PRC had it in them to send the PVA into the DPRK. A big part of it was that Mao was willing to risk the prospect of China getting nuked by the US for the sake of anti-imperialism (plus a whole bunch of geopolitical reasons, but it doesn't detract from the broader point). When Truman was threatening that China would be nuked if the PVA crossed the Yalu river, Mao made the correct prediction that if the US wanted to nuke China, they would've done so already, so the fact that they didn't get nuked meant that they weren't going to do shit. And so, Mao called their bluff and the PVA crossed the Yalu river.

We can all praise Mao for being a big-brained commie reincarnation of Liu Bang who can predict how his opponents will act, but at the end of the day, Mao was willing to gamble and risk China getting nuked. It's not like the US was somehow incapable of nuking China. And not only that, China didn't even have nukes until a decade after the Korean War, so there was no MAD. If China got nuked, China got nuked end of story. And Mao was still brave enough to gamble.

Dare to struggle, dare to win. And part of that dare involves risking it all. From what I've seen, the only group today that has that daring, that courage, that guts is Ansarallah and possibly the DPRK. No other country, party, or org has that amount of daring. If every single country, party, and org, even ones not necessarily counter-hegemonic like Turkey and India, had the daring of Mao or Ansarallah, Western imperialism would probably be defeated in less than 3 decades. Of course, part of the defeat of Western imperialism includes the possibility of the US starting a nuclear exchange which triggers MAD and leads to the complete extermination of humanity where not a trance of Western imperialism or any other signs of human life survives. But if everyone had that daring, there will be no Western imperialism by 2050, whether it's through MAD, the replacement of Western imperialism with other forms of imperialism, or the triumph of the international proletariat and socialism.

However, are people willing to spend the next 25+ years with the knowledge that there's a 30% chance the US will just begin a nuclear exchange and end humanity? If not, then they better be emotionally prepared for more disappointments and missed opportunities from Russia, China, and Iran being too passive.