Afghanistan Is Your Fault
The American public now has what it wanted.
By Tom Nichols
Juan Carlos / Hans Lucas / Redux
6:00 AM ET
About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of the book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy.
Kabul has fallen. Americans will now exercise their usual partisan outrage for a few weeks, and then Afghanistan, like everything else in a nation with an attention span not much longer than a fast-food commercial, will be forgotten. In the meantime, American citizens will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves.
Many Americans will bristle at the idea that this defeat overseas can be laid at their feet. When U.S. forces had to endure the misery of the retreat from North Korea back to the 38th parallel, no one made the argument that it had happened because of the voters. No one turned to the American people during the fall of Saigon and said, “This is on you.”
So why would I do that now?
Much of what happened in Korea and Vietnam—ultimately constituting a tie and a loss, if we are to be accurate—was beyond the control of the American public. Boys were drafted and sent into battle, sometimes in missions never intended to be revealed to the public.
Afghanistan was different. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq.
In post-2001 America, it became fashionable to speak of “war weariness,” but citizens who were not in the military or part of a military family or community did not have to endure even minor inconveniences, much less shoulder major burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. The soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major operations soon felt forgotten. “America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”
Oh fuck this guy
It's the most accurate thing in this entire debacle. And literally what I've said for eons, you can even search this forum.
They're not going to make the mistake of 2015 again. Germany a couple of honour killings a week now, a demographic time bomb of too many young men and not enough females. In Bury last week a woman was doused with petrol and set on fire and we didn't even blink.
Christopher Hitchens did get right that the barbarians would be invited into the citadel. Which we've done an excellent job of bringing north and sub-Saharan African, middle east and Afghan hills type terror into the West.
Good to see that it's not all young men of fighting age. These are likely some of the last one's to get out before the Taliban close the airports.
come on. the rest of america is no better. just have more dumb opinions. who do you think got us into this fucking mess, mall of america shoppers? no it was the think tanks and policy centers of DC. your people.
www.nbcnews.com
www.newsweek.com
So China is equating themselves to the Taliban?china getting in some kidney shots
Chinese State Media Says U.S. Abandoning Afghan Allies a Lesson for Taiwan
"Some historians also point out that abandoning allies to protect U.S. interests is an inherent flaw that has been deeply rooted in the U.S. since the founding of the country," the editorial said.
Setting aside the facts that think tanks are categorically not my people, and definitely aren't the ones who made the decision to go to Afghanistan, the point is everything in this country is our collective fault, not just this clusterfuck.
‘America is unable to win the wars she chooses to fight. She cannot or will not control and defend her borders from a mass migrant invasion. She cannot halt an outbreak of criminality and killing in her great cities. She has not run a trade surplus in four decades. Her dependency upon foreign producers is unprecedented. And her budget deficits continue to break records every year — as does her soaring national debt.
Le Grand Remplacement
...and yet it continues to be incredibly innovative.
Paisley Park has been turned into a Purple Disney for the fans.
I do miss him, that’s for sure
I dont know what this means. Who is getting “remplaced”?
It's a reference to a political idea/conspiracy theory by the French writer Renaud Camus that makes the claim that there is a conspiracy to replace the white population of Europe with non-Europeans.
He was fantastic in the 80s, but then went weird and seemingly destroyed his recording career. His 80s music hasn't aged well though with perhaps the exception of Parade which I've always considered his best album.
One would have thought that a young woman, burnt to death in the road in the UK in 2021 would have made the front page news and been widely discussed but no. We were, however, kept informed of the fate of Geronimo the Alpaca which made the front page and was widely discussed.
That album they've just put out, which was recorded in 2010, has a great title track Welcome 2 America. Some of the other tracks are pretty good, much stronger than his officially released albums from the 2000's.
They can't frame an honour killing to the narrative and nor is open to discussion out of fear that we might question the progressive value of cultural relativism.
www.spiked-online.com
Preach
Grand Potentate
s favorite article as a follow up. 
Fwiffo
, but this article is literally written about him. Every post he has in this thread is one big performative act. This is a person who is having an existential crisis over wearing a piece of cloth over his mouth or not being able to go to a bar. Is there any serious person on the planet that considers these serious impositions? I mean fucking really? There are Afghans so desperate they were trying to ride the outside of a miitary plane and plunged thousands of feet to their deaths to escape what horrors lay for them in their homeland, and you have the temerity to whinge about the slightest inconvenience? Everything you have posted in here is just a performative act. This is what the western middle class has become. They are at the fucking mall, literally and figuratively. I've got a bunch of worthless white moms with no meaningful troubles in life going to school board meetings and mocking children (children!!) who want masks for their safety. And I mean mocking them to their face in public. They are planning protests on the first day of school, inflicting god knows what trauma on the kids then. We have generations of millions of suburbanites starting with the baby boomers who are overgrown teenagers emotionally and can't sacrifice the slightest convenience for the greater good. If WWII broke out now we would absolutely fucking lose.
I meant your people geographically. They didn’t make the decision of course, but they sure did sell it to us.
Absolutely
The problem is your elites, as it is ours, not the 'people'. As for your point about collective responsibility, you're a representative democracy, not a direct one and the views of your representatives may not necessarily be reflective of their voters they may be quite the opposite. Brexit in Britain is an excellent example of this where MPs refused to accept the result of the referendum (in many cases that they personally called for) even when their constituencies overwhelmingly voted to leave.So to expound on this now that I have a minute, this was related to another post I was going to make about
We all love our
So you can blame think tanks, or politicians, or whoever, but this is us. We own this. This is the culture we have created and accepted. As long as we have our iPhones and SUVS and 401k's, fuck the rest. As a people we are useless and becoming more so.
Yeah, no. It's the people. We are a land of cargo short wearing Applebee's eating Target shopping shitheads.
Again, it's your elites (and Britain's) who cannot lead, who have no talent, are obsessed with presentation, who blows in the wind ready to attach to any fashionable nonsense that gets them some media coverage, is unserious, and unfit to govern. Surely Covid has demonstrated that to you?
