Make Assyria Great Again

“YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! ”

Remember Planet of the Apes? The scene where Charlton Heston confronts the remains of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand?

Xenophon of Athens had a Planet of the Apes moment some 2,500 years ago without quite realizing it. He and ten thousand Greek mercenaries, having fought on the wrong side of a Persian civil war, were fighting a running rearguard action trying to get the hell back to Greece in one piece. One night they camped close to the river Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul.

They found enormous fortifications abandoned in wrack and ruin.  The ruins were gargantuan by Greek standards of the day.

                “The base of the fortification was made of polished stone, in which were many shells. It was fifty feet broad and fifty feet high. On top of it was built a brick wall fifty feet in breadth and one hundred feet high. The perimeter of the fortification was eighteen miles”.

Xenophon asked the locals who had built them. They shrugged and said probably the Medes (the prior regime of the Persian superpower). The irony was the locals were probably Assyrian, and the ruins were no doubt the remains of Ninevah, the capital city of the Assyrian empire. Ninevah had been laid waste a mere two hundred years before Xenophon’s arrival and was already forgotten.

Hey, those massive walls worked great didn’t they? This is the lesson of what I call Land Power culture. Static solutions to static problems get you 2,500 years of dirt piled on top of you.

The Danes are said to be an island people who happen to own a peninsula. They have retained a maritime culture. They are a Sea Power culture.

The United States can be viewed as a Navy that happens to own a continent. 

Sadly, there are shitheads trying to eradicate this worldview. Much has been written about the advantages of Sea Power culture, the most obvious being Alfred T Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Mahan convinced Teddy Roosevelt to build up the US Navy.

I would argue that a culture need not be near the sea to be a Sea Power culture, any more than Viking is an ethnicity (it’s not, it’s a profession). The usual suspects are Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, the Scandinavian countries, Great Britain, the US of A. 

I would argue that the Mongol Empire, prior to stagnation, was a Sea Power culture, as was Prussia, the Huns,  Islam in the 8^th century, etc. The commonality being vast tracts of land with no physical barriers, thus forcing the inhabitants to face and adapt to powerful enemies via fluid responses (e.g. horses rather than ships).

Which is to say, Sea Power cultures, maritime identities, display openness, inclusivity, and dynamism  (liberalism) compared to the lumbering continental land power identity of closed borders, exclusion and static solutions. 

And so you have dumb static solutions from stumbling slow-witted jumbos that are expected to work forever, as if circumstances never ever change.

Build a Wall. Wall built and the clapping of imaginary dust off tiny manicured hands. “Done and done!” 

Travel bans and immigration restrictions based upon prejudiced views of shithole countries and the illusion of safety. (As if merit based fails to recognize the inherent arrogance of an inherent superiority that does not exist in changing environments. And of course we need more soft fat white people to make us look good).

I am astounded at the reactionary vision that engages in magical New Age thinking, wishing the world back to some fantasy paradise through positive thinking.

Take Steve Bannon back in 2016. Seriously, WTF Steve, a Navy guy supposedly well read in history, espousing a trillion dollar infrastructure plan to rebuild “ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement”. Might as well build steam locomotives while we are at it.

It’s just as well they didn’t get to light that trillion dollar bonfire to dance around like some prancing fag at a Superbowl party. This is some seriously fucked up land power retardation.

Aerospace is the new maritime (except, with robots… and robot farms, unless you can perfect the centrifugal toilet, the next step beyond 2001: A Space Odyssey, and radiation, and the debilitating health effects of low G).

China gets it. That’s why they are building stuff on the side of the Moon we cannot see. (Although my brother argues, how do you know we don’t have that stuff already? Fair point, but we have no long term vision based on lurching from one administration to the next).

Drifted off topic there. 

The only way the USA doesn’t end up all Planet of the Apes is to return to open, inclusive dynamism and take whatever the world will give us. If we continue to act like a land power, we will end up like the Soviet Union: birth rates and life expectancy down, alcoholism, drug use and suicides up, infrastructure and military in decay, a political system  unsteady, corrupt and in chaos, resources, opportunities, and education available to the highest (and/or most dishonest) bidder.

Because right now, the rest of the world really doesn’t want to come to a place that has no balls, so long as we keep on acting like pussy ass bitches that hide behind walls.