by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2024
(Jan. 29, 2023) —
“Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.”
Andrei Tarkovsky
To Marx, history repeats itself; to Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Today, we know history’s a bad pun, one that leaves us not laughing, but agonising over the infamy of it. “History, I’m confused,” we say in our belief that ‘this time it’s different,’ when, in fact, it’s just a new scene in the same old play: “Hi Confused, I’m History.”
On the chill morning of January’s last day, from the guts of Norfolk, Virginia, NATO will roll out its big guns for the world to see. In the largest show of force since the end of the Cold War, the alliance will demonstrate its ability to rapidly deploy forces from North America to secure the borders of Europe.
Dubbed ‘Steadfast Defender 24,’ the exercise will mobilise ninety thousand troops. A fleet of 50 warships will cut through the Atlantic’s blue. The sky will buzz with 80 fighter jets, helicopters, and drones. And on the ground, 1,100 combat vehicles, will testify to the seriousness of this exercise.
NATO officials speak of a “fictitious” Article 5 scenario, triggered by an attack against the alliance launched by a “near-peer” adversary. But the world knows the unspoken truth: the line between fiction and reality is as shifty as the quicksand it is drawn on.
Remember, when you hear ‘NATO,’ it mostly means Uncle Sam wearing a different top hat. And just this week, the British Army chief raised the alarm about NATO’s distant runner-up: their military is “too small” to handle a conflict with Russia, urging a need to “mobilise the nation.” With their forces halved over the last 30 years, whispers of civilian conscription are in the UK’s air tonight, for the first time in 60 years.
I’m not one to bash NATO for flexing its muscles — in fact, I wish they’d flex harder, more often, and with real conviction. I even believe an isolationist approach to NATO is both dilettantish and misinformed. But here’s the head-scratcher: since 2022, 300,000 Russian boots have tramped into Ukraine, uninvited. In the same period, 4 million souls have crossed the U.S. southern border, also uninvited.
Sure, it’s apples and oranges in why they’re coming, but the scale — it makes you think. One border breach calls for such a grand display of power, the other? Hardly a whisper. Ironically, the same hand ordering troops to secure European borders seems ready to undermine the U.S.’s own.
Read the rest here.