The channel has been doing rather well over the past couple weeks! Better than it has been doing for the past five years in fact, thanks to the success of a Peter Zeihan take-down video I did seven months ago. In an attempt to capitalize on this success, and keep it from slipping away. I’ve rushed out a produced video, with a completely new workflow. Rather than laboriously script out the video, I’ve simply taken a decent snippet from a recent conversation, and spent a couple work days whipping it into something produced looking. Let me know what you think!
This one is less about concrete ideas around India and Pakistan than it is a call to arms (or a call against arms) for everybody to learn more about the topic. The gap between the importance of this conflict and the amount of knowledge analysts, let alone the general public, have about it is vast. India and Pakistan are some of the largest countries on the planet, they have nuclear weapons, and they have the sort unsettled borders and over-powerful militaries that make further conflict more likely than not. Today’s video makes the case for making the region the channel’s next big project.
I have thought long and hard about each of the three options in this month’s contest to pick the channel’s next topic. But Israel-Palestine is probably the topic I have thought about the most. As somebody who attempts to cover issues in the Middle East, it is constantly thrown in my face. As someone who used to be an avid follower of conservative media I’ve become familiar with one set of arguments, and as someone who spent 6 years living in Turkey I’ve gotten a good look at the other side as well. It’s a fascinating conversation that I think I can contribute to, which I hope today’s video makes clear.
In some circles in the US today’s video could be seen as a blistering attack on Israel. For many in my old world audience, I imagine it could be seen as so wimpy that it betrays the Palestinian cause… I’m very excited for the comments on this one!
Puerto Rico should not be a partisan political issue in the United States. The Democrats contemplate the idea of Puerto Rican statehood with glee, imagining that the Spanish speaking public will automatically vote for their party. Donald Trump is using Puerto Rico as yet another stage for his performative racist bullshit. Both sides are missing out on how important the island is to US national security.
This is part of a troubling trend in US politics that continues to grow. We’re really in the last couple decades of being able to ignore everything about world politics. Instead of using this time to position ourselves more intelligently, we’re turning more and more of our national security issues into partisan footballs. Iran, Israel, Puerto Rico, and now Ukraine have become partisan issues, making everybody dumber, and making the world a more dangerous place. Today’s video is a small attempt to push back against this wave of stupid.
Winston Churchill is a complicated figure. He’s also a cherished one for the British, and for white dads across the English speaking world. He’s seen completely differently by the Indians, millions of whom starved to death on his watch, and there are very few others in the broader British empire that would have had much good to say about him. These historical arguments are important, and I don’t really have all that much interest in them one way or the other. But Winston Churchill is not just a historical figure. He’s a symbol. That glorious year and a half, between Churchill’s coming to power, and successfully convincing the US to save Britain, are worth emulating and celebrating. But for US politicians, the vital belligerence that made Churchill so valuable for that destroyed world, is something that should constantly be applied to our infinitely safer, happier world. That’s nuts. Which is why I made today’s video.
Honestly, I think this video is the most punk rock thing I’ve ever done. I pride myself on occasionally making videos that nobody agrees with, but I think I may have really outdone myself with this one. In the series so far, I’ve laid out that my vision of what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries doesn’t exactly accord with the standard view, but I’ve been pretty delicate about it. With this one I go ahead and torch a whole bunch of historical pieties in the loudest way possible. Yes, as a title “European Empire is a Myth” is outrageous, and that’s kind of the point. This is YouTube after all, and I’ve got to take shots at virality occasionally.
At the end of the day, though, once you think about it, I hope you’ll agree that the people who will be most offended by this episode are Nazis, white supremacists, British nationalists and possibly an Oxbridge historian or two who doesn’t have a sense of humor. I think the upending of world history I do here serves a purpose. Or perhaps I’m just an asshole. You be the judge!
Foreign Aid is a ridiculously complex topic. I really enjoyed diving into it in today’s video. I’m afraid I probably oversimplified things, but I’m excited to learn more about this topic for future videos. The first thing I noticed about foreign aid, is that contrary to the way we talk about it in US politics, very, very little money goes into this. The exception, from the US perspective, is aid that we give to countries who turn around and use most of the money to buy US weapons. Egypt, Israel, and Jordan, our three largest recipients, are all examples of this. Countries we have destroyed, like Iraq and Afghanistan also get a lot of money, for obvious reasons. As this video illustrates, foreign aid is mostly used for short term political uses, not to pursue larger humanitarian goals.
There certainly are really great things that foreign aid has done. Helping to stamp out AIDS and other diseases in Africa is one great thing we do. But a lot of that is private charity, and all of those efforts combined are chicken feed compared to the military related aid that the US shovels down the throats of multiple countries. The EU structural funds, one of the topics of today’s video, are an example of enlightened self interest. The rich European countries know that the best way to ensure a peaceful continent, and avoid having to have much military spending, is to fire hose money into the poorer countries in the continent. I wish the US did more of this. If the cost of a single aircraft carrier was spent on aid to Tunisia, we could really transform the region, and the world, for the better. It’s a shame we don’t do that.
