this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Not just those under 40. I do feel bad I sorta got a brief taste of "good times" and worry eventually younger folks will think the post 2000's are normal.
It is normal. It's been this way for ± 15 years. Certainly the entirety of my adulthood and I'm nearly 30.
If it's any comfort, 99% of human existence before us was worse. 100 years ago no one cared what you thought if the powers that be wanted to send you to war. Don't even get me started about your life if you were a woman or minority. You don't like it? There must be something wrong with you, off to the insane asylum for shock therapy.
That's not the present yet, but a simple reminder that fascism is lurking and war will come because of food, water and mass migrations.
You're also diabolizing the past. But that's another matter.
46 checking in, and yep, shit is on fire. GenX knows what's up.
Yeah, I'm juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!
All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what's that?
Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today's analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.
Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.
There hasn't been a "good one" since WW2.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn't that interesting?
Long explanation: It's all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It's difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it's certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.
Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn't like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!