Monday, December 17, 2018

Another One.

This time it is about Robert Kagan who passes, for some unknown reason, as a "scholar" in the US and here is what stuns me from article in The American Conservative
In a single phrase there are two major symptoms of America's intellectual collapse. 

1. Long ago, the term intellectual in the West turned into a description of somebody who is proficient with manipulating data, facts, knowledge etc. In other words, intellectual has to be "sophisticated" even when he(she) is wrong--a dominant characteristic of present American intellectual field. You see, skillfully crafted narratives suddenly matter more than the truth which is knowable. But look at me, I am skillfully crafting narrative that Robert Kagan is dumb as a stump (as, for the most part, are neoconservatives in general) and I can prove it, that is present it as truth, the thing Kagan, on the other hand, will not be able to do to counter....

2. Because he is dumb and has degree in history "as taught in US universities" he cannot craft strategic assessments since he is neither qualified for doing so, nor has any clue on any basic model of power balance since they contain things of which he never heard about.  

So, basically, he is a person who "can't handle the truth" because the truth starts beyond the limits of Robert Kagan's competencies and this truth is based upon military power as a function of a nation-state, that is its economy and international real weight. Even non-neoconservative American strategic assessments suffer dramatically from ignorance and, as a consequence, exaggerations, in Kagan's case, most what he preaches for is built around a complete delusion of a pretentious mediocre writer who is utterly out of his depth whenever he tries to pretend that he has something of substance to say on the issue of global power shift--he doesn't. People who create narratives usually do not have time for a serious business of geopolitical analysis, Kagan doesn't have this time. In the end, the author of the article about Kagan's latest book states himself:
Instead of a careful consideration of American interests and a tight and specific argument about how certain means meet those ends given today’s threat environment, we get general arguments about the need to be tough, to pay costs to uphold milieu goals, and ominous imagery about a jungle overcoming our nice but unnatural garden.
I think people like the author of the piece, William Ruger, himself a former US naval officer, should learn by now--the price for American folie de grandeur must be paid by anybody but Kagan's cabal of demagogues who concoct their pseudo-academic ideas in the comfort of their offices and restaurants in D.C., far away from battlefields and all misery and suffering American spreading of "democracy" and "liberal order" brings to people.       

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