Rev Left Radio - Peter Zeihan's Anti-China Fairy Tales & Lullabies

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

PATREON TEASER: Breht responds to geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan's Anti-China rantings and predictions. Note also that the major disagreements articulated in this episode will be decided objectively in time. Is Peter right that China is an incompetent, flailing, and doomed country bound for total collapse and probable balkanization, or is Breht correct that Peter's knowledge of China is severely limited, his predictions are wildly over-confident, and no such collapse of China is imminent or likely at all: one of them will be proven correct in the coming years... To get more content like this, and to listen to the full episode, join the Rev Left Radio Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Now, the next thing I want to cover is The Rise of Peter Zahan. So Peter Zahan, let me pull up his credentials here. Let me see what they say about him. I've actually read, unfortunately, all of his books. Well, I have Audible, and I listen to his books. He's like a geo, he's, okay, let me see. Peter Zihan is an expert in geopolitics, the study of how place impacts financial, economic, cultural, political, and military development.

So he's kind of passed off as this geopolitical analyst, this expert in geopolitics, and he offers geopolitical analysis to investors or to corporations, maybe to governments, to help them get a better idea of the lay of the geopolitical land, where it is safe to invest, where it is not safe to invest. But as of late in the last year, he's really, really blown up, and he's everywhere. Podcasts, you know, all the radical centrist bro. out there having him on his podcast. I know Sagar and Jetty from the breaking points with Crystal Ball.

I've had him on many, many times. And I've, like I said, I'm not just talking from ignorance here. I've read all of his books except maybe one. But his three most recent books, at least, I have fully read. And there is some interesting stuff. I mean, I'm not saying everything he says is completely wrong. He kind of has ways of thinking about geopolitics that are just different than what I've come across and you know I read books from people I adamantly disagree with and I can always

take a few things of value from them but he's really blown up in the last year and one of the things he does with this sheen of hyper respectability and expertise is constantly and confidently tell us over and over again and whoever will have them on will hear this that China is going to collapse that China there's no way China is not going to collapse it is a hellish dictatorship. Xi has completely scared everybody in the Communist Party and everybody around him so that nobody can tell Xi any of the truth. If Xi doesn't like it, that person is done. And so because of this terrible information chain based on Xi's dictatorial personality, China is not getting good information. It's fucking up and it's eventually going to utterly collapse

and there's literally no way around it. And it's not even going to take a push from the United states to create it or to make it happen and i i just want and so this is a person that's highly respected goes on you know mainstream shows as well as those uh sort of non mainstream on the fringe of the mainstream quote unquote dissident shows that are kind of getting big as of late um and he is he goes around and he says this stuff with extreme confidence and is promoted by people um you know all across the spectrum to continue this sort of analysis so What I'm going to do, I'm going to play a clip from him on, I don't even know this fucking guy, but I guess this guy, Jack Carr, I assume he's a right winger or some variation of center-right,

libertarian douchebag from my approximation. But he's obviously completely naive when it comes this topic. After Zahan will say some just absolutely insane shit, this guy will be like, hmm, wow, wow, okay. Yeah, no, that's, that is deep. That's interesting. That's fat. It's like, you know nothing about what the fuck you're talking about. You have no idea what the fuck he's talking about.

But you're acting like your mind getting fucking blown off seven grams of mushrooms every time the guy says the stupidest shit about China. So I'm going to play a rather prolonged clip and maybe a couple of smaller clips throughout this episode. Just back to back to back right here. So you can get a sense of this guy. Now, I want you to think as you go into this clip. I don't care what you think about China. I don't care if you're one of my listeners who, you know,

thinks it is anathema that anybody calls it socialist, you know, that it's a complete neoliberal facade presenting itself as socialism but nothing more than the most grotesque capitalism to people that say they are the vanguard of the socialist revolution. They're the most advanced socialist state in the world right now, and there are best bet of achieving something like socialism and at least significant portions of the world by the end of the century, and every opinion that falls.

The point here is I do not care what your opinion on China is, but you're all listening to this. You're all, I would bet money more informed than the average American on these issues, especially on China. And just ask yourself, as he's talking, does any of this comport or dovetail with, anything you know or think about China. Regardless of how you feel about it,

just objectively understanding the situation that China is in or not, ask yourself as he talks, does this make any fucking sense to the huge spider web of other facts that I know about China, about East Asia, about global hegemony, about inter-country rivalries and imperialism, and all the stuff that, this background knowledge that most of us have, you know, built over years and years of study and research,

Let me, in your head, ask yourself, does this comport at all with what I know to be reasonably true about China? Because for my opinion, you know, China is incredibly strategic, incredibly intelligent, is able to act effectively, quickly, build hospitals, you know, very quickly to deal with COVID, save the lives of countless Chinese people. They're, you know, rising in an unprecedented amount of time to global superpower status. And, you know, they are much more strategic than the United States. They're much less belligerent than the United States. They think long-term. They have five-year plans and ten-year plans, and they follow them through, and they execute them. The U.S. can't do shit anymore.

And China is eating our lunch on every fucking front. And then this guy's going to come and say their collapse is just around the corner. Now, this collapse narrative is everywhere. People love to say it. They've been saying it for the last 20 years. that China is going to collapse any day now and all China does is get stronger and stronger lifts its people out of more and more poverty

and presents itself on the global stage as not only an important actor but a reasonable and mature one the last thing I've heard about China is that Xi might be going to Zelensky and Putin to try to mediate as a third party mediate a negotiation and a peace deal which would be absolutely amazing

if China is able to accomplish that, while the U.S. has done nothing but aggravate and push Ukraine into this hopeless war so they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to knock down the door of Russia, to militarily degrade Russia, and to make Russia overall a weaker, less stable country. So among many other things, it's less likely to be able to help China when the Taiwan situation eventually pops off, you know, just on down the line. so for me everything zahan is about to say about china is objectively untrue but he says it with such confidence to such an obviously ignorant person that it is stunning and this is not just some fringe figure this is somebody who has real sway amongst a certain section of the ruling elite and the intelligentsia that has real sway amongst people from the center right and the libertarian right to the center left to the new right and is somebody that, you know, matters intellectually to the people that have actual influence in this country. So, with all of that in mind, let me go ahead and play this protracted clip, perhaps, a few minutes, of Peter's I-Han on Jack Carr, whoever the fuck that is, is a podcast. So let's get into it. Let me just kind of dial back and give you an idea of how this happened on the Chinese side, because it really is happening. So Sheriff and Xi has now consolidated more power unto his person than any human in history.

And as part of that purge, he has removed everyone from any position of decision-making within the Chinese system who is competent. And so it really is a one-man show. I mean, we can look at Russia and talk about he really only has a half a dozen advisors anymore. And we can talk about Obama and how he locked himself into the White House. But Xi has no one. No one will bring him any information because they don't know how he will react. And he often reacts violently. And that's, you know, shooting the messenger is not good for information flow.

In this sort of environment, China has made a series of catastrophic mistakes over the course of the last couple of years. Wolf Warrior diplomacy destroyed his relations with most of the world because now people, they're literally proud of their genocides in China now. And that does not resonate with anyone. We've got relations with the United States, which are their security guarantor for their trade and their prime. consumer base and the country that allows them to import all their food and their energy that's just cheezed off at them completely. And they're even ruining relations with the Europeans over the Ukraine war. So one way or another, it has finally percolated up to Xi of just how deep in the shit they

really are. So he sends out these peace feelers saying that, okay, we won't be quite so crazy. And Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, was on his way to the airport to get on a plane to come to China. But because there's no information exchange within the Chinese system at all, some dumbass in their intelligence operation said, hey, hey, I got an idea. Because we're in a cult of personality and the great leader hates all things the United States, I am going to float a 350 foot across balloon over the United States that you don't even need binoculars to see. And I'm going to dangle a chunk of apparatus. It's as big as an embryo jet.

Now, if you've ever been to a regional airport, you know those well. the ones with two seats on one side and one on the other. Okay. They're very, very small. They're very, very cramped unless you're dangling it from a balloon. Okay. And then it's going to spend seven days going across the United States. We're not going to get any intelligence from this because the things, I'm going to send it over, the missile bases.

I don't know if you knew this, but unless you're actually launching the nukes, the missile silos are closed. And so there's no information that could be gathered from a balloon that you couldn't get from a satellite. Even better, the Americans are going to have a YouTube jocels. jet above it and a spy helicopter below it all seven days with whisper sensors recording every bit of transmission it does, looking at what it does, learning the echinarchar. It will be the intelligence coup of the decade for the Americans. And at the end of the day, they're going to shoot it down and get the hardware too. So they're going to get the codes and the sequencing and routing information, all of it. It is arguably the dumbest thing that I have seen any country

do in the last 20 years. And the Chinese government, for the most part, didn't even know what was happening. Their Defense Department didn't know. Their foreign ministry didn't know. It's pretty obvious from the calls that Xi didn't know. There's just some idiot and the intelligence services. That is the degree of decision-making breakdown we are seeing in China today, that someone would think that this is a good idea and then not be able to stop

because the information exchange up and down the system is now. so destroyed that you can't even have a basic conversation. Do you think that person, it's off with their head right now that? Oh, I'm sure. If they're not dead already, they wish they were. Oh, my gosh. How many people are around, gee? Is it, uh, there's no one?

There's no one. So who comes to, who has to knock on that door and go in and be like, uh, sir, we just lost a, uh, a spy balloon over. Yeah. Oh, exactly. Who's that guy? Do you want to be that guy? Yeah.

I don't know. You definitely don't want to be the messenger. No. Is there something similar to the, what is it, the Russian Security Council, where they have the semi newly appointed deputy chairman and then the chairman, which is the president of Russia and then heads of intelligence agencies and then it kind of filters down to some regional district representatives and other people in the government or something like that. She spent his first five years purging the country of all of his political opponents. And then he spent his next five years purging the country of all theoretical opponents, which meant anyone who could think. There's nobody left.

So yes, those institutions do exist to a degree, but they're either staffed by people who are utterly. incompetent or Patsies who got their job because their personal loyalty, even in Russia, which is not what we would call an information-free society, there are still a handful of people at the top that will talk to Putin and tell him uncomfortable truths. Now, three of them are competent. Three of them are not. So he is getting a steady spread of, I'm sorry, a steady stream of misinformation and propaganda, but there are three people who will tell him the truth. She has nothing like that. Well, interesting.

Because we think it things from our perspective, we think of, okay, what are our top geopolitical issues of the day? Is it, is it China? Is it Russia, energy, whatever it might be for us? Do they have a list like that, do you think, that they look at? And they're thinking, like, okay, we have Taiwan. We have maybe some chips and semiconductor type infrastructure out there that we might want, that might help us if we had it.

We have, what do we have as far as mining goes? and are they look at those sorts of things? I'm sure that they used to. But so if you want to go back a little bit, if you remember Deng Xiaoping, he was the second generation leader, the guy after Mao. He was probably the best leader that China has ever had

because he realized what the strengths and the weaknesses of the Chinese system were. And he worked assiduously internationally to address the weaknesses and leverage the strength. So he is the guy who met with Nixon and was brought into the American post-World World War II Cold War international globalization structures. And that set the stage for the industrial expansion to create the China that we now know. And he wanted to make sure that they never had a repeat of Mao. So he personally selected not just his successor, but the following guy too. And that's Zhang Zemin and Huzintown.

Between the two of them, they ruled China for 20 years. And that has been the golden age of China. But he knew that he was not smart enough to figure out who should run the country 30 years on. And so he left it to those two factions to come up with a compromise candidate. And the compromise candidate was Xi Jinping. Unfortunately for Zhang and Hu, Xi spent his first five years out maneuvering them and gutting both factions. And then the second five year period, getting rid of anyone who might theoretically form a new faction. And so if you remember when he crowned himself president for life about a year ago, who,

and Tao was up on the one of the desks on stage when it all went on and they publicly escorted them out to underscore to the country just how there was no opposing power center anywhere even theoretically in China

anymore. It's just she. All right. Wow. There's a lot there. The first thing is this idea very orientalist in its structure that there's no sense of meritocracy. There's no sense of communal input in the communist party you know the people that rise to the top are just the most ruthless

plotters and schemers not those with the most merit who've actually worked their way up through the party showed through actions and their ability to be an executive at more local or regional levels that they're competent and move up to up the ranks to be able to get the support of the full party right all of that is completely obliterated for this one dimensional Mao 2.0 Orientalist's idea that over there the people over there are just crazy

plotters and schemers. There's no meritocracy in the Communist Party. Every, you know, Xi is this brutal dictator that just destroys Indian all competition so that he can rise to the top and claim all the power for himself. So already, it's just not an understanding of the nuances and complexities of the Chinese system, it plays into these orientalist, you know, Asian dictator mythologies and tropes that, I mean, Americans and Westerners just slop up.

I mean, they fucking love this stuff. And that's what you get here. And Jack certainly eats up the slop throughout this entire discussion. Everything Peter says is taken as not only fact, but revelation. Prophetic, how insightful this fucking guy is. Maybe you should read a few books on the topic. or fucking watch a documentary or two about the things you're going to be interviewing somebody on.

I'm not saying that I know everything about every topic that I have a guest on, but there should be some room for healthy skepticism. But if you could see the video, Jack just has all of Peter's books stacked up. He's read all the books and just tells everybody to read these books. So he's obviously more of a fanboy than anything critical here. And I'm not necessarily judging that. My style on Rev Left is not to be overly critical, is not to make the guest feel uncomfortable,

or to push back on all of the things that they say, but just the complete obvious ignorance on Jack's part and just the insane hyperbole on Peter's part and the way that the two feet off each other is wild. I mean, Peter also does this hyperbole thing about the balloon, as if this balloon is just the stupidest thing ever done, and it has all these fascinating secrets, and now the Americans have access to this balloon

and all of the secrets of China, so isn't this a big stupid move by the Chinese? And that's just hyperbole. It's a dumb fucking balloon, and I guarantee that if they found and recovered the stuff from it, nothing monumental is going to be revealed. It is not some secret black box of Chinese secrets that the U.S. can now tap into because the Chinese are too dumb not to know that they shouldn't send it over American airspace for seven days. So lots of hyperbole on the balloon thing.

Nothing of any real substance is going to come out of the U.S. downing the balloon and finding anything meaningful or secret. about the Chinese and how they do things. Then he makes his claim that, you know, China just has terrible relations with everybody. Not a fucking country on earth trusts China or wants to do business with China. That is just objectively and abjectly false on every fucking level. Throughout the global South, China is broadening its alliances, its treaties, its deals,

its cooperation with countries around the world. Of course, we're not pretending that China, China does these things out of some charitable part of their heart that just wants to help the world. I do think there's some of that. But they're operating in the interest of the national interest of the Chinese people. So every country operates in the national interest of the country that they represent. They're trying to negotiate deals that give them a good deal as well as the other person.

You know, this is how trade works. And what you'll notice is that almost everything Peter criticizes the Russians and the Chinese for, we could point to a trillion examples where that's true about the United States and I'm going to show another clip that really drives that point home and watch how Peter acts in the face of a tepid fucking question

about American imperialism abroad in a second here. So according to Peter though, China has terrible relations with everyone and everybody's losing trust in China around the world. China is becoming more and more isolated by everybody not trusting China not working with China, not wanting to work,

with China and so I bet if you let him talk a little bit longer he would say something that isn't so far as anybody is working with China it's out of this big bully and little victim mentality where China comes in and is just plotting and scheming and trying to you know soak up everything that they can get out of these other countries and out of these other people there's no sense of agency on the other side which I think plays into I mean obviously racist tropes about the global south and knowing that the American audience especially an audience of this sort of podcast is going to know fucking nothing about the global south and its politics, you can say anything. And that's exactly what I think Peter Zahan does with extreme confidence.

I would be more open to it if he just had a different point of view, but it was imbued with some humility. It was imbued with, you know, giving some credence to some facts on the other side. It was put into a less hyperbolic structure where he's actually curious about the Chinese state and how it actually operates. But no. Just saying the stupid anti-Chinese. things with extreme confidence is enough to get you on shows it's enough to sell books and zahan

is taking full advantage of that another thing that he said there that just fucking who he said china is proud of their genocide china is proud of their genocide they're not even hiding in anymore they they celebrate it what in the fuck are you talking about do you know what genocide means understand what the word genocide means? Can you please tell us, show us, point us out objectively, factually, where this horrific fucking genocide is happening inside China? Because as an American, I know a little something about our history, which means I know a little something about genocide. It's when you fucking slaughter and eradicate an entire culture, countless language, countless cultures, countless nations, men, women, and children alike,

smashed over the head, baby's skulls, cracked open with rocks, plagues burning through tribes brought over by colonizers, treaties being fucking broken, language being completely obliterated, bringing indigenous people into Western-controlled schools so you can ideologically capture them from a young age, disconnect them from their culture, their heritage, their language, their way of life and living and relating to their own existence, and turn it into a Western way of viewing things.

And that is a process by which these assholes civilize these barbarians and these savages. That is genocide. And for a flag waiver, a U.S. patriot to talk about genocide in some other country with no Evan, not even the slightest effort to gesture in the general direction of where some evidence might be. But just to say, not only is a horrific genocide. happening in China, but the Chinese are proud about it. I mean, there's just no tethering to reality here. And this is a huge platform, and he writes the stuff in his books that are best-selling books,

and he goes on breaking points with Sagar and Jetty, and they treat him, and Crystal Ball, and they treat him like he's some motherfucking oracle, you know? And this is the fucking short of shit that he vomits up. Now, again, in other areas, I think it's more interesting when he talks about Europe's relationship to the United States, about Bretton Woods era coming to, and there's some stuff there that I think is valuable. But when he gets to start talking about America's enemies, it is fairy tale la-la land bullshit. And people eat it up. Now let me show you another chunk of this interview very quickly, not as long as the other one, but just to kind of put into

perspective how he thinks about the United States. Because certainly if you're going to make these critiques of China, that they're this, you know, imperialist hegemon in the region that just bullies people into alliances that has terrible, you know, predatory relationships with all other countries that is committing a genocide that doesn't actually have meritocracy, but is just, you know, privileged people climbing to the top of a broken system to amass for themselves, more and more power, without caring about what the people of that country, if you're going to say all that stuff, well, then we have a conversation to have about the United States. States of America. So what happens when that gets brought up? Let's see. So not only are the Chinese

now getting oil from twice as far away as they normally did, which was already the most risky energy transport route in history. They're now getting it from a supply system that is eminently unstable and it is going to break down sooner or later. And they're still picking a fight with the United States, which controls the security of this route. So it doesn't matter really at this point which piece of the system breaks. The Chinese are the ones that lose all of it. Jeez. And then if you throw Japan, China into the mix and China's Hail Mary, what does that look like? When I say hell Mary, it's not that I think they can win. But one of the things to remember about the Ukraine war is that the Russians get what they're after, which is a more secureable

exterior, crustal defense, they actually do buy themselves some more time. There's nowhere that the Chinese can conquer, they buy some time. So the only reason that the Chinese would launch a war is to try to preemptively remove Japan and Japan and Taiwan from the equation, maybe Vietnam too, or if they're like me and they believe that they're facing economic and agriculture and financial and political and demographic breakdown. And they know that the end is nigh anyway. Picking the time and the place of the fight so that at home you can write the narrative of the national defeat, that might be enough for the CCP to retain control as the country collapses.

Maybe. So, you know, basically fight a war. And for the low, low price of 500 million dead countrymen, you're still in charge. You don't miscalculate much, but maybe it's because we needed a number. other war. We're out of Iraq. We're out of Afghanistan. What are we going to do? We have a lot of defense industry. I don't know anyone in the army. She's like, oh, yeah, let's go back to work. Oh, not the army. I'm talking more of the politicians. And I wonder if we were still in Iraq and Afghanistan in those same numbers. What would our support for Ukraine look different if we were

Oh, yeah. That's what I mean. Because we were dependent upon the Russians to supply our forces in Afghanistan. So, I mean, we would have had, we would have had a risk of having our entire military force in Afghanistan gutted. Well, because we're coming through the stands. We're coming through K2. Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting. That's wild. Okay. So, wow. A few just amazing things happened in that little clip there. So one thing, just how he frames shit. It's just so wild. He says, the Chinese are, his words, keep picking a fight with the United States.

Now, your understanding, dear listener, who I love so much, your understanding of U.S. imperialism, how the U.S. carries itself on the international stage, the tensions rising between the Chinese and the American states, is any of your knowledge about that situation, does any of that dovetail with this idea that it is China who is picking the fight? Because from everything that I can gather with my small little Midwestern brain is that it really, really seems to me that 100% of the saber rattling, the threats, the fucking trying to decouple, the aggression, the building of bases, the building of alliances to box China. And it's all coming from the United States. China repeatedly says we respect national sovereignty. We are not trying to get into a military conflict with anybody, obviously because the U.S. is hell-bent on having the entire world is their playground and they get to dictate what happens around the entire world through peer military force. You know, we have to play it easy here, but, you know, we don't want a fight.

We don't want a war. It's not good for us. It's not good for our economy. We made all these advances for our people to lift millions and millions and millions of people out of poverty, to industrialize and develop our country, to bring it to a super, level a superpower status you know and and the last thing we want to do is roll the dice in world war motherfucking three against the united states it's the u.s that is picking the fight that has been picking the fight for numerous reasons mostly around the issues of political economy and the military u.s.

hegemony and empire abroad and it is in the military industrial complex which of course is always looking to start more wars always looking to sell more weapons always looking to de-state more regions that they don't like it is the united states that is picking the fight with china china has not invaded a country china has not bombed a country china has not been at war with multiple countries at once in the last 20 30 40 years what is china doing other than developing itself making u.s and western capitalists pissed and through and just by developing and being themselves threatening this idea that the u.s can control the entire world with its military and nobody can do shit about it. It is the U.S. that is in China's backyard. China is not in the U.S.'s

backyard. China does not have bases in Canada and Mexico and forming alliances with countries all around us so that they can box us in and create military alliances to prevent our rise, to try to sabotage our economy from continuing to develop, having rhetoric back at home about these racist tropes of the Chinese virus, and it's the Chinese who caused all this suffering and Yeah, America let a million of its own people die, but it's really the Chinese fault because, you know, they created this monster and they unleashed it on the world as a bioterrorist attack, right? Like all of this insane orientalist, racist, saber-rattling garbage is coming from one direction. While China simply endures, simply pushes back rhetorically, you know, simply goes about its business, is not looking for a fight, is not trying to crawl up the U.S.'s ass or. to dehumanize the U.S. population to its citizens constantly day in and day out.

I mean, from both the liberal mainstream and the conservative mainstream media, there is one shared hatred of China. I think the liberal media emphasizes their hatred of Russia a little more, and the conservative media emphasizes their hatred of China a little more, but ultimately they're both serving the same purpose from two different ends. There's just nothing quite like that in China. And, you know, China has its problems. China is far from perfect,

an aggressor state like the U.S. is. It is not a rogue terroristic state like the U.S. is. The U.S. has toppled countless countries. From Libya to being a co-belligerent in Yemen with Saudi Arabia to the Iraq and Afghanistan War. You know this stuff. We can go down the list to Ukraine, the Medan coup, what is doing with Russia right now, NATO expansion. America is the belligerent rogue fucking bully on the block of world geopolitics. And China is just saying, can you give us some fucking

room. We're not going to bomb you. We're not going to invade you. We have no desire to tank your economy and destroy your civilization. We're not hysterically writing op-eds in our major newspapers about how the U.S. is on the verge of collapse, and we're glad that they're about to collapse. Its only question is, what are we going to do in the ruins? That is coming from one fucking direction. He completely ignores it and says, China is picking a fight with the United States. I mean, wildly insane stuff. And this is not from some guy shouting on the corner. of a busy intersection. This is a guy who is a expert and brought on top shows to talk about his expert analysis of

geopolitics and countries like China. It is, I mean, I was going to say baffling. It's not baffling. It serves a perfect ideological function. It is completely sensical. But it is amazing that people eat this slop up, and there's not a shred of critical thought that goes into anybody when they interview him pushing back on this absolute garbage nonsense. He literally says, quote,

The end is nigh. China knows, demographically, politically, agriculturally, socially, on every single level. His claim is that the end is nigh, quote unquote, China is collapsing. Xi finally understands that. And so what they might do is some last ditch effort to save face by what, a preemptive attack on Japan to take it out of the equation so then it can move aggressively and take Taiwan. I mean, China does not show. any signs of wanting to attack Japan. The U.S. is

showing every sign that it intends on attacking China in the not so distant future. So again everything is inverted. It is a fun house mirror of geopolitical analysis where America is the good guy and America's enemies are the rotten bad guys on the verge

of collapse. Keep picking a fight with the good old U.S. of A and they're going to destroy themselves by trying to do that. They need to stop being this dictatorship, this tyranny, you know, this insanity and it's their fault and they're all going to fucking collapse and he says yeah you know for the chinese communist party

500 dead 500 million dead Chinese people is the price they're willing to pay to save face what in the fuck are you talking about but the hilarious part is when jack car rubbing two neurons together just to get a little steam going

I don't know jack car I have no idea this guy is but you know he rubs his two neurons together and a little steam comes out and this question falls out of his mouth and the question is what about the military industrial complex right isn't there an internet he doesn't say like this this fully but basically he's implying you know isn't there like an obvious interest in war in the military industrial complex amongst the bought and paid for politicians who are bought out by the military industrial complex to push for these never-ending wars you notice how america is always in a war iraq afghanistan ukraine and then now it's looking

over to Taiwan. It's always destabilizing countries, overthrowing places like Libya, helping Saudi Arabia bomb and destroy Yemen and slaughter fucking babies and children there indiscriminately for Saudi Arabian interest. Woo! You know, I mean, he doesn't say all of this, but he's basically bringing up this question, what about America, sir? And Peter Zahan is just, nah, that's literally what he says. You know, Jack is talking about, like, politicians being bought out, the military industrial complex, how America is always going to war, and Peter says there's not a single person in the army that I've ever talked to that wants more war, and then just handwaves away this idea that there's anything at all of relevance to the military industrial complex and

its constant war-mongering, war-making, how big corporations in the military industrial complex fund politicians from both sides of the aisle so that no matter who's in office, their interests fundamentally get met. And that is why we've been at war, one way or another, or funding wars, propping up wars, making wars happen one way or other since the fucking day I've been born. In 1989, almost continuously, America has been at war. Not true for China. That's not true for China.

It is true for the United States. We know for a goddamn fact the role that the military industrial complex plays. We know how corrupt our political system is. We know how the interests of the American people are always put on the back burner. while the interest of international and multinational corporations, particularly the war-making corporations, get front and center. They make all the decisions.

They can sabotage an entire presidency if they want to, if they're not as militaristic as the U.S. military industrial complex wants it to be. We understand that the U.S. military is made to go to war, that these people, these generals, people in the army, you know, they'll pay lip service to war is a terrible thing. We don't want to do it. Their entire lives, their entire careers are about going, going to war and preparing themselves to go to war.

They're going to fucking war. They've always been at war. And Peter says, nah, nah, nah, that's crazy. That's kooky conspiracy stuff. America has no negative implications. They have no desires to hurt anybody or do anything. You know, America, and his books catch this out

because his books are about geopolitical predictions down the line. And basically all his predictions center down to America's going to be fine. In fact, America, after this rough patch in the 20s, is going to be, once again, the sort of powerhouse is going to pull back its empire a bit. The Bretton Woods system where America uses its military to defend international trading routes so that individual countries don't have to do that. That's going to come to an end. There's going to be a period of isolationism where the U.S. withdraws from his empire. But the whole rest of the world is going to be collapsing.

Russia is going to collapse. China is going to collapse. All these other countries, save for a few, like Argentina and maybe France. most countries are going to go through a hellish period of decay and decrepitude while the U.S. pulls back its benevolent forces from around the world, lets the exterior world go to shit so it can consolidate and enter a new period of prosperity here in the United States. And countries that are close to the United States, like Mexico and Canada,

they're going to be really well positioned to benefit from this new arrangement. And that's basically the thrust and theme of his latest books. and that's going to require the utter collapse of China and Russia any day now, any day now, they're going to go into the ash heap of history. So that's that. I think I've exhausted this point. But it just is fascinating how these people that are presented as experts and certainly a knowledgeable person. This is not somebody who just skimmed a Wikipedia page and then is pretending to be.

I mean, this is somebody whose life is more or less dedicated to this and still rotted out by U.S. imperial ideology and orientalism and treating the enemies of America as if they're always terrible. All their motivations are horrendous. They're going to fucking die and collapse and America is going to enter a new period of robust renewal

and regeneration and it will last through the end of the century more or less. So it's a beautiful fairy tale. People love to hear it especially in a time of chaos and uncertainty. Americans love to hear that things are all going to be fine for you and everybody that we hate. They're all going to go

to the dust heap of history. They're all going to collapse any day now. But we'll be fine. That is a bedtime story for Americans to, you know, be able to slow down their heart rate a little bit, close their eyes and get some good sleep while things are changing all around them in ways that they can't fully comprehend. And that's where a person like Peter's Eyehand can step in and give you that lullaby and send you off to sleep.