The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development.
-Abdullah Ocalan
Russia is really out of control lately, throwing its weight around the neighborhood like a suburban bully with a battle tank instead of a John Deere, crushing any blue-haired busybody who dares to eyeball Putin's azaleas the wrong way, invading sovereign backyards and redrawing the property lines, all to restore the good name of some long dead empire that's never coming back. The only people worse are those goddamn Chinese commies, building their multicontinental New Silk Road and ethnically cleansing any tribe of inconvenient Muslims who stand in the way of construction.
I mean, who does things like this? Who do these Eurasian barbarians think they are, the United States? Just thank White Jesus that we have the Sacred Knights Templar of Western Neoliberal Civilization to put such autocratic beasts back in their place among the squaller we carefully erected for them with our cannons and opium. America may be an insane fucking murder machine but if there is one thing we won't put up with its obnoxious upstarts jacking our playbook to set up new empires of their own. NATO is all about preventing this kind of rude dark-skinned revanchism, except when they're not.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's relatively open dirty little secret. Under his increasingly autocratic rule, Turkey has committed every single crime that Russia and China have been accused of by less than reliable sources and they've done it all with American weapons and the official NATO stamp of approval. As we speak, Turkey is engaged both directly and by proxy in the invasion of no fewer than four sovereign nations depending on the given week as well as the subsequent implementation of what could very quickly escalate into two separate concurrent genocides.
Erdogan has been openly proclaiming his intentions to launch a full-blown ground invasion of Kurdish held territory in both Syria and Iraq since earlier this spring and considering that his forces already hold large swaths of this territory after the last three invasions they've thrown over the last six years, we have every reason to take him at his word. We also have every reason to believe that the next illegal incursion could be part of a final solution to Turkey's long lingering Kurdish question.
As punishment for defeating his friends in ISIS and jumpstarting the greatest experiment in modern-day anarchism since Catalonia, Sultan Erdogan has proclaimed his intentions to dig a thirty kilometer deep "buffer zone" into what is currently the autonomous region of Rojava and what is still internationally recognized as Syria where he will use the millions of Arab Syrian refugees he hosts to ethnically cleanse the region of its millions of ethnic Kurds. Erdogan's multinational jihad against the Kurdish people has already displaced hundreds of thousands, not just from Rojava but the Kurdish region of Iraq as well where just this summer he bombed the tourist village of Perex, killing 9 civilians including two children, one of them a year-old infant.
This isn't exactly an isolated intervention either. It is part of a rapidly expanding international plan for Erdogan's Turkey to reestablish the Ottoman Empire and slaughter every man, woman and child who stands in his way. This includes the revival of the Armenian Genocide with help from Erdogan's Stalinist sock puppet in Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. Together these two Turkic supremacists made the Ottoman great again in 2020 by invading the Armenian autonomous region of Artsakh and emptying it of nearly half of its ancient Christian population.
90,000 of the 150,000 citizens who have occupied those sacred hills centuries before NATO was just a glimmer in Satan's eye have been forced to flee for their lives from the same armies who buried their ancestors by the millions. This international rampage has also included Erdogan's drone war in Libya and his increasingly aggressive Blue Homeland Doctrine which has him jockeying with fellow NATO allies like Greece for control of the Mediterranean.
Of course, the United States and NATO are just incredibly concerned about all of this, offering up threats and protests and even a few sanctions but they show their true colors where the rubber meets the road. In spite of Erdogan's very chic anti-western posturing, his military machine is still largely dependent on Atlantic financing. The United States shills out millions in taxpayer dollars to Turkey every year, nearly every penny of which goes to putting more bullets in Kurdish and Armenian skulls. Joe Biden himself has called for the US to sell the F-16's he hasn't already promised to the Azov Battalion to Turkey. This is not how you treat an openly genocidal pariah unless of course that pariah is secretly doing your bidding.
All in all, Erdogan's neo-Ottoman Reich appears to be a net win for American primacy. We were already finished with the Kurds for another generation and both of Ankara's appalling interventions in Rojava and Artsakh serve to weaken Iran and Russia's influence in the region. Turkey has long served a role similar to Saudi Arabia as a conduit of the kind of chaos America can't afford to be caught stirring up red handed. It was Turkey who helped us provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis by stashing nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles on their soil. It was Turkey who sabotage a neutral Greek democracy by invading and occupying half of Cyprus. And it was Turkey who spearheaded America's plot to overthrow Putin's little bro-bro Bashar al-Assad in Syria by arming a jihadist revolt that would quickly mutate into the Islamic State. So, what if Turkey has its own imperial ambitions. After all, that's how the American Empire got started, isn't it? While this is true, that's also how the English Empire ended.
Once upon a time, the United Kingdom swung the biggest stick on the world stage, fighting fifty wars at a time and lording over an empire that stretched across the globe from Belfast to Bangladesh. But taking over the world is fucking hard. If you don't pace yourself, you could easily end up like that hotdogging amateur Adolf Hitler. The sharper empires find proxies to pick up the slack. The United States began as one of those proxies, just a little backwater slave colony to keep the French and Spanish in line in the killing fields of the New World. Sure, occasionally they went too far with the Indian killing and slavery was becoming a bit of a dated industry once Africa was finally fully under Europe's control, but how much of a threat could a gaggle of grubby proxies like George Wahington and Thomas Jefferson pose to the greatest empire on earth?
Every single empire thinks it can't happen to them until it does. America is on the brink of collapse and Sultan Erdogan has become a master at playing both sides of the field. As we speak, he has his forked tongue jammed deep into Putin's ear, increasing Turkey's trade with Russia even while he sends Bayraktar drones to kill their troops in Ukraine. Erdogan has masterfully managed to establish himself as an indispensable middleman between the oligarchs of Moscow and Kiev. He's already brokered deals to allow Ukrainian grain to leave Russian encircled ports and if he can pull off brokering a peace deal to end a war that America is feverishly invested in making last forever than Erdogan could make his economically unstable upstart of an empire an irreplaceable partner in a Eurasian Century that promises to show America to the door and Turkey isn't alone.
Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are all American funded proxy states who show an increasing taste for geostrategic independence in an age of American decline. Solo, none of these ambitious little shits poses much of a threat to the Atlantic Colossus but together, with alternative streams of income being offered by a multipolar Eurasian conglomeration that just won't die, each one of these cherished and protected allies of American imperium could easily become another dagger in Ceasar's back.
Buck up Uncle Sam and keep in mind as the streetlights fade over the gutter where your blood flows like wine that what goes around comes around. Your Judas proxies will someday join your shattered bones on that same dust heap where you left the Crown, that is if the melting ice caps don't drown them first. This is the way of empire, and the hustle doesn't stop until the poor people of this world join Rojava and Artsakh in thinking small and smashing the state into democracy sized pieces.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes by Soccer Mommy
* Fake Empire by the National
* Territorial Pissing by Nirvana
* Livin' Thing by Electric Light Orchestra
* Evil by Interpol
* See No Evil by Television
* Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction
* Just by Radiohead
* Bulldog Front by Fugazi
* Frankenstein by New York Dolls
* Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome by the Mountain Goats
No comments:
Post a Comment