I'm not a "prepper", and frankly I tend to find preppers a bit amusing. But when European governments that are a lot more sane than the gerontocracy running the United States right now start issuing war warnings and commence telling their populations how to prepare for war, well, it's at least taking some noted of.
Both Germany and the UK, both of which are not afflicted by wackadoodle administrations like ours currently is, have done so:
By the way, in the fever dream of Republican Washington D.C. right now, while Trump dreams of tariffs in his sleep solving all the nations ills, while the GOP also is about to pass a renewal of the Trump tax reductions, thereby guaranteeing, in the real world, a massively increased deficit, there's a plan to pass a $1Trillion defense budget.
$1Trillion.
Trump preached peace in his campaign like a flower child in 1968.
But he's proposing a defense budget like it's 1964.
What gives?
It's hard to know what Trump really things about anything. What is clear is that we've been headed towards war with China for at least half a decade and the Trump administration is pushing us much closer. Somebody in the Administration is preparing for that war.
20th Kansaas at Caloocan, 1899. They're carrying obsolete trapdoor Springfield rifles and wearing obsolescent blue wool shirts.
By the way, when McKinley, Trump's hero, who ended up regretting his tariff policy, was President the size of the U.S. Army was 25,000 men, many of whom were poor immigrants, and a lot of whom were poorly equipped. In spite of McKinley being forced into the Spanish American War against his instincts and desires, the US didn't really expect to be fighting any wars in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and so it relied upon a tiny Army, a more substantial and much more well equipped Navy, and state militias, which had not quite become the modern National Guard. The thought was that if any big emergency came up, the states could always fill the manpower gaps, which is exactly what occurred during the Spanish American War. It's also what occured in the Philippine Insurrection which is in part what made the effort in the Philippines extreme unpopular with the public as it drug on. Think Vietnam. . . but if Vietnam had been fought with a lot of National Guardsmen instead of just a few.
Itt was those wars, in fact, which ended the era in which the US could get buy with a tiny budget, and one that ran a surplus. The Spanish American War changed the US from a regional power into a global one, and there's really no going back. We shouldn't even want to go back. When Kipling wrote his horribly racist The White Man's Burden, in a certain way, that's what he meant existentially, if you strip the racism, which is difficult. Still, the concluding lines are worth reading:
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgement of your peers.
Trump, in real terms, seeks to take us back to the childhood of the nation, which he didn't experience, as he golfs on in his dotage.
We're all suffering as a result, and it'll get worse. Much worse.
Last edition:
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