Lesson Learned: 2023 Not Like 1936. So Far.

Chinese balloons crammed with electronics all over. The US shoots down four in ten days. What’s going on?

US Department of Defense confirmed that on two occasions F-22 jets took off from Anchorage, Alaska and objects were shot down, one with a Sidewinder AIM 9X missile.

Philosopher Nigel Warburton#FreeUkraine@philosophybites asked: What’s going on?

What’s going on is that tyrannies keep pushing, to see how far they can go. A tyranny makes war to its people, inside, and justifies that by claiming it is saving the people from a war, outside… which it self-engineered. As tyrannies get away with some aggressive actions, going further than any before, they feel encouraged, and encourage each other. Thus ever more excited, tyrannies repeat the process. This is what happened in the 1930s, after the invasion of Manchuria by a rogue Japanese army: Mussolonini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and their ilk felt encouraged. It was truly the start of World War Two… because the military reaction, the declaration of war of Britain and France, waited until 1939, when the alliances of the tyrants Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Franco had been made official… And because, as late as 1940 and even 1941, the USA was de facto allied with the Axis powers (for example by fuelling the Japanese army invading China). 

 

What’s going on now is that what’s going on is not like what happened in 1936: instead of letting tyrannies fly from success to success, insolence to insolence, testing new weapons, and tactics, expanding territories, democracies have learned something from the 1930s and thus, woken up this time, and are fighting back, in a timely manner.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/world-wars-are-culminations-of-brutish-processes-wwii-started-when-a-rogue-japanese-armyinvaded-manchuria-in-1931/

F22 high altitude interceptor, balloon killer.

Scott Kelly, US Senator ex International Space Station Commander, wrote February 10 to @elonmusk:

“Ukraine desperately needs your continued support. Please restore the full functionality of your Starlink satellites. Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost. You can help. Thank you.”
Elon Musk replied, with some condescendence: @StationCDRKelly: “You’re smart enough not to swallow media & other propaganda bs. Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed.

But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.“

This is a problem with endowing single individuals with so much power. SpaceX is a sort of second foundation of NASA… As I pointed out long ago, it would not exist without the largesse of the US government. SpaceX was actually saved by US government contracts when it was so close to bankruptcy, around 2009, in spite of injection of funds from Tesla, that Musk had only a few hundred thousand of dollars left, and he had to meet payroll, let alone pay for equipment! Landing rockets was researched and done by NASA, starting in the mid-sixties.  

Musk: elite entrepreneur and engineer. He also has apparently diversified to historian of war, and knows what escalates conflict. How does one escalates when one has been attacked by a bear? Should one defend oneself just so, but not too much? However bear only fears personal injury. Passive defense that doesn’t look as if it were going to hurt doesn’t work.

Zelinskyi has compared in 2023 Putin to a dragon who muster devour. But Putin’s behavior is more reminscent of that of an aggressive bear. Musk has probably never fought a bear. Yours truly actually has had several confrontations with bears, caused by wandering unarmed many times where bears are found in abundance. I had to threaten very aggressive bears both brown and black. Hitting a proximal surface with stones was often enough of a deterrent. But I had to hit a charging bear (who had just attacked a dozen high Sierra campers, and was now interested by the food I was carrying) with a (very large) stone, once… Bears fear stones, because they have been hurt by them and they have respect for those who can muster stones… In any case, that bear fled for dear life. But that bear attacked people again, wounded a grandmother, and three weeks later, rangers executed it.

Putin will not stop. Like a serial killer, one who has killed now more than 200,000 people, for all to see, his only hope to survive, or to justify himself, is to keep on going, as Hitler once did. So he has to be stopped. World War Two would have been aborted if, even as late as 1940, the USA had stood with France and Britain. 

So this time is different. But this time the stakes are also higher…

So it is good that the US is not playing games, this time.

As in the 1930s, though, tyrannies have their agents. In the 1930s, many intellectuals were following either Hitler or his ally Stalin. This had disastrous consequences on the war readiness of France (new planes were not equipped with guns, from fear that workers, aligned with Stalin, thus Hitler, would seize them and make a revolution… As a consequence Nazi Germany was able to acquire air superiority over France where it needed it!) 

Putin knows all of this, and that makes him hope that he will be able to change public opinion. After all, he has just three democracies’ public opinion to work on….

Patrice Ayme  

Tags: Balloons, F22, Musk, WW2, WW3