DONBAS AND DUMBER

Badass in the Donbas: one of your buttons has just been pushed.

by Colin Liddell

America's "Shit Happens" Foreign Policy adopted by the 'Solaris State'

When the present problems between Russia and the West, centring on the Ukraine, first started to come to prominence earlier this year, the first thing I noticed was the increasing partisan pitch and self-delusion among all parties concerned.

The "pro-democracy" advocates had their KoolAid poured fresh from cartons courtesy of Kolor-Яevolutions-Я-Us, the Ukrainians Nats were all dewy-eyed about some alternative universe where "Great Ukraine" had always existed, and the more extreme Duginists had their Polandball-like doctrine "because Octopus" and Manichean intolerance for all who would not prostrate themselves before Putin the Great.

THE 'SHIT HAPPENS' FOREIGN POLICY

America's answer to Polandball.

by Colin Liddell

"The West is the best and we'll do the rest," sang Jim Morrison on that damning 1967 indictment of poor parenting and pharmacological excess, The End. Despite it's intended irony, the lyric nevertheless reflected the realities underlying US foreign policy at the time, which consisted of believing in the Western way, stepping up to the mark when challenged, taking responsibility for what happened on one's watch, and trying to win in the cold light of day and with the world's media watching. Heck, America still gets it in the neck for that famous photo of one gook shooting another gook in the head.

With the Soviet Union doing such a good job of being a shining beacon of progress in those days with its cheap shots against neo-colonialism, inequalities of wealth, and mean differences in height and body mass, America had to do its best to fight the good fight and to go down with the ship when holed below the waterline, as it did in the 1970s, a decade which can be likened to one enormous session of navel gazing: cue Apocalypse Now.