Real Civilisations Don’t Clash
Western Freedom: I Did It My Way, You’ll Do it My Way
It’s My Disaster, I’ll Replay If I Want To
China Keeps the Market Beasts Under Control
The Bad News Drones
You’ll Do It My Way (Again)
The Faulty Founding Fathers of the USA
Snippets
Inequality from the 1970s? Nixon’s the One!
The Bad Ship ‘Abraham Lincoln’
Real Civilisations Don’t Clash
The new Mecca Defence Pact is bad news for Israel, but not for Western civilisation.
It could end with Israel being forced out of the West Bank and Gaza by a combined force of Turkish and Pakistani troops, probably based in Syria. Safe from Israel’s undeclared atomic weapons, because Pakistan is an openly nuclear state.
I’d warned of something like this might happen as long ago as October 2018 (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/newsnotes-historic/2018-newsnotes/news-blog-october-2018/). And I was told that a common front would be hard, which is true. But hard things do happen. A pro-Turkish and strongly Islamic government in Syria helps. As does Trump’s probable wish to dismantle US global hegemony and allow home-grown bigotry to re-surface.
In 2020, I warned that the ingenious campaign to undermine Corbyn was going to damage Zionism in the long run (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Suicidal-Zionism).
In the 1990s, Yasser Arafat and the bulk of the Palestinian movement agreed to what they should have settled for much earlier – a Palestinian state with self-rule for most of the West Bank and Gaza. But the wording of the Oslo Agreement was ambiguous. Israel found ways to undermine the new Palestinian state, including encouraging the hard-line Islamists that it cannot now cope with.
With luck, it might end with a reduced Israel that would also be safe, and a humiliation for Zionism’s global fan-club. But not the end of the Jewish state: the UN did originally authorise it, and the UN is the only functional international law we have.
Don’t forget that while settlers from Europe and the USA dominate Israeli politics, more than half the population are Jews who were minorities within Islamic countries. As they still are in Iran, but that’s an exception. Most of them would have no place else to go.
We’ll have a One State Solution when we get the land overshadowed by flocks of flying pigs. It’s that silly.
Western Freedom: I Did It My Way, You’ll Do it My Way
Wars happen when independent political units bump into each other, and don’t find ways to stop small disputes getting large. Mostly they are members of the same civilisations. And many states and empires can contain several different versions of civilisation, so long as it is understood by all which of them is in charge.
‘Being in charge’ is generally the issue. It’s not true that it’s just caused by capitalism, or just by religion. These may throw up issues, but often it’s something else. Part of our biology
Chimps, along with the enigmatic bonobos, are our closest relatives. And we are their closest relatives, with gorillas more distant. They are too dangerous to keep in the way most dogs are kept within a human family (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/20-science/chimps-are-never-tame/). And left to themselves, they are violent. Not just in zoos: in the wild they have their own little wars. A recently reported case had 24 killings, including 17 infants. Two factions of what had been a single community (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr71lkzv49po), and there was a similar case reported back in 1976 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War).
For humans, small mostly out-of-sight violence tends to be worse among tribalists than among civilised states. If their battles seem very mild, it’s only because it takes training and harsh discipline to persuade individuals in a crowd of relative strangers to charge head-on at another large crowd that is likely to defend itself fiercely (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Wars-Started-Long-Before-Civilisation).
That’s why I said Real Civilisations Don’t Clash. Humans clash, either as individuals or in combines of various sorts that do some sort of mutual defence. Who may even be proud of saying My Country Right or Wrong, and then cannot figure out why we keep on having wars.
I recently read that famous book, The Clash of Civilisations. Like most of the supposed theoretical work of the New Right, there is virtually nothing in it. What it did was serve as a cover for the West getting aggressive with other civilisations when the Soviet Union stopped being there to keep them modest.
They say ‘world policeman’. Nonsense. Police are there as agents of a civil power that decides what they prevent, what they tolerate and what they are required to defend. Trump is showing that the US military machine can be used without clear controls by whoever gets to be elected by the USA’s outdated and messy political system. If they’d had Presidential elections with two rounds or a single transferrable vote, they’d have elected Bernie Saunders in 2016. The world would be a very different place.
The US attitude – just as strong with Obama and the Clintons as with the two Bushes – was that freedom is best defended by the USA taking it away from anyone who gets out of line. The attitude is, ‘if you were truly free, you’d be doing everything within the range of human behaviours that we find acceptable’. Paying no attention to how this range has expanded within living memory, and much bigger shifts are easily found in history. And never mentioning that the Soviet Union was the first government and state that was an active promoter of many of those values: racial and sexual equality and a reduction of the importance of what you were born into.
The biggest military machine on the planet started running wild when there was no longer a powerful Soviet Union to balance it.
Now we have China providing the balance. That ancient free-market magazine The Economist is appalled by them, and that’s almost always good news.
It’s My Disaster, I’ll Replay If I Want To
The USA are wholly guilty of causing the existing mess in Afghanistan. A home-grown radical movement was serious about giving equality to women, and the USA went to enormous lengths to strengthen a reactionary opposition. Saved it from defeat several times, though the Soviet Union helped by repeating the errors of 1956 and 1968 and thinking that things would be much better if they overrode the sovereignty of a nation that at the time had broadly similar aims.
The Soviet Union is gone: it is US folly that matters. Remember that they did something similar in Iran in the 1950s. Defeated a moderate nationalist government, and advised the Shah not to worry about Islamic Fundamentalists’
Unlike the US ‘fundamentalists’, those people were and are entirely confident in their religion. The US sentiment that Bob Dylan mocked, ‘for you don’t count the cost when you’ve God on your side’, is a genuine belief among them. It’s only US citizens who are increasingly getting Post-Traumatic Stress when they try applying the idea in the real world.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the USA insisted on a parliamentary façade, when an autocrat who got things done would have been very acceptable to those who mostly wanted the same things done. They assume that everyone shares the West European feeling that government is not respectable without a parliament, though originally it need not be democratic and almost always excluded women. A feeling shared by the USA and other places outside Europe grabbed by people of mostly West European origin. But parliaments where rival parties obstruct each other are not necessarily wanted elsewhere.
Most of the world knows that Afghanistan is best accepted as a neighbour that might bemoderate if not threatened by outsiders:
“India, Qatar, China, Iran and several central Asian states all recently welcomed Taliban officials or opened new channels of communication. Russia, which recognised the Taliban government in Kabul just over a year ago, signed a military cooperation agreement last month. In June, the European Union held talks with Taliban officials in Brussels about returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan. Individual European countries have also deepened their own contacts with Kabul.” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/15/concern-grow-global-ties-taliban-afghanistan-human-rights).
China Keeps the Market Beasts Under Control
“The death of Zhu and Jiang, two prominent leaders from the same era, has prompted a wave of nostalgia among many Chinese people for a time when the country looked as if it was going in a different direction – when it appeared that it may open to the world and allow more freedom for its people.” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8dn3rqlyrgo).
That’s the BBC’s spin on the death of Zhu Rongji, the second most powerful leader when Jiang Zemin was in charge. And for Jiang, at least, it’s historic nonsense.
After crushing the Tiananmen protests, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow Party Elders handed the succession to Jiang Zemin. Promoting a man who had peacefully resolved similar small protests as Party Boss of Shanghai.
A man who had also done a much more important task that most people overlook: he talked round a man called Wan Li, holder of the normally-minor post of Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. A man who theoretically had the right to topple the existing system within its own written laws. Doing what happened soon afterwards in the Middle-European countries that Moscow had been dominating since the Red Army took them from Nazi Germany.
I’d assume that Jiang died back in 2022 with great contentment about what he’d done. Middle-European countries got back the right to control their own future, which China already had. Which they always favoured for sovereign states. Back in 1968, Mao thoroughly disapproved of the direction that Czechoslovakia’s Communist leaders were taking the country, but also disapproved of invading them. And Jiang in his own time saw how Russia and Ukraine suffered parasitic corruption and a shrinking economy. That Middle-Europe east of Ukraine and Belarus had to be taken into the European Union to keep them prosperous.
Beijing does not talk freely about power-political issues, but did sum up the economic changes after Mao, and the mistakes made elsewhere:
“Jiang Zemin’s Legacy: What It Means for China
“Previously, under socialism, many people were skeptical of markets, often dismissing them as inherently ‘capitalist.’ But in 1992, that changed, Deng Xiaoping made it clear that the market is a neutral tool. Socialism can harness it, and so can capitalism. Then in 1992, China formally adopted the socialist market economy as its economic system…
“After the Soviet Union fell apart, Russia was influenced by the West and identified with Western ideology. We believe Russia made a mistake then, but at that time Russia genuinely hoped to become a member of the West.
“During Jiang Zemin’s period, the approach was very clear: regardless of what ideology Russia had, we would develop normal friendly and neighborly relations.” (https://thechinaacademy.org/jiang-zemins-legacy-what-it-means-for-china/).
The policies of Deng and then Jiang and Zhu included a tolerance of massive inequality, but it did go along with genuine trickle-down. They copied the example of Singapore, and of Japan before the USA forced it to damage its fast economic growth. Let capitalists try out new things, but hold them responsible. And make sure that everyone is looked after.
It is also true that those countries have done less to give women access to the top jobs, in the way the West has. But the West has also seen most of the ‘Blair Babes’ let the interests of most women be neglected, for as long as there are sufficient female snouts in the trough (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Let-Down-by-the-Parliamentary-Labour-Party).
And business people who play financial games pay for it, such as the founder of collapsed Chinese property giant Evergrande. Sentenced to life in prison (https://share.google/e8ZTyLr7S8rSwFubo).
The Bad News Drones
Trump says harsh things, but seems to have grasped that the USA got a mauling when it attacked Iran. It surprised most people, myself included. I’d expected no more than successful endurance, based on what I said earlier: ‘for you don’t count the cost when you’ve God on your side‘. The Revolutionary Guard think just that, and I’d suppose that most ordinary Iranians are not sure they are wrong. But I’d expected a long endurance, such as North Vietnam managed. Not successful retaliation against US interests.
The Vietnamese Communists avoided aggressive acts outside of Indochina. Correct for the world at the time, whereas Palestinians did their own cause immense harm by flashy and superficially clever deeds like airline hijacking. By their mass killings at the Munich Olympic Games. But the generation that fought Vietnam’s American War passed on mostly cynicism and disappointment. The present generation are much more traumatised by what are mostly much easier wars.
As I said earlier, trying to seek out and destroy an enemy who can hit back on fairly even terms does not come naturally to most humans. Its existence was the oddity, but the USA has not yet adjusted to new reality.
Which also included cheap missiles and drones. Devices that might carry nerve gas. Carry anthrax or other biological weapons. Might hit Israel with them, whereas Saddam Hussein never dared go beyond regular explosives if it were people more highly values by the West than Kurds or Iranians are. He was a Westernised Arab who hoped to survive as a successful inflictor of a nationalist version of Western values on the complex ethnic mix of Iraq.
I’ve no idea if Iranian religious beliefs would permit real ‘weapons of mass destruction’. And I suppose no one else knows either.
You’ll Do It My Way (Again)
My laptop computer smugly told me off for using the wrong finger for secure access, after it failed to recognise the correct finger. Only behaved when I forced it to reboot, and did not mention the possibility of the system letting me down.
All of the people writing stuff for automata to feed to us are certain of their own immense superiority. My Sky box cannot be bothered to check that the internet link is actually fine after a blip and that they can fix it. To get the system back, I have to act as if I am at fault.
I’ve seen many complaints about how software products for ordinary customers have changed. Once you bought a product and you then owned it, at least for personal use. Now you lease it, and have no choice about getting whatever updates they may think good for you. Recently my version of Photoshop chose to impose a fancier system that no longer allows the quick and convenient photo editing I had got used to.
Both the current version of Microsoft Outlook and the global question-and-answer forum Quora mark my UK English spelling as wrong, when it differs from US forms. No room for organise or other forms that the USA discarded in an irritatingly small spelling reform. Had we been given phonetic spelling based on a New York accent, it would have been a coherent system that one could abide by. But most of the absurdities were left intact. You still have rough dough-faced ploughmen wandering through Slough.
After I tried unsubscribing from LinkedIn, I found the number of unwanted e-mails increased. Maybe my action had alerted them that I was at least real and reading them.
The Lords of Software, working in an industry where even footsoldiers may end up with millions, have attitudes that I’d see as ensuring they will not be the people ruling the future. But they seem certain to do more permanent damage before they get what they deserve.
Those people have a self-confidence that vastly exceed their impressive genuine talents. Just as their cash rewards do: the prospect of a few tens of millions would have been enough to incentivise the most successful of them to do their useful work for the wider society. But the top earners think they deserve many billions, and are oppressed if more billions do not follow.
Realms of wealth that go far beyond any possible personal spending. But it translates into power, and they think themselves much the most fit to have it.
The Faulty Founding Fathers of the USA
In a recent dispute on Quora, I noted that the USA’s Founding Fathers believed many things that 90% of today’s US citizens have rejected.
Specifically:
1. None of them believed that women should have the vote, or have authority at any level in the new government. The common view was that for any woman to have authority over any man was wrong, regardless. Even with children and servants it would be delegated authority from some superior male.
2. The White Race was superior, and was entitled to replace the Native Americans. A few of them might be tolerated on the margins of society, and some Native American ancestry was OK.
3. Slavery for Black Africans was acceptable, though best ended in the long run in order to make a pure white society. The former slaves might be sent somewhere else, which Lincoln was seeking to do in his last days.
4. There was no necessity for all white males to have the vote. Property qualifications were fine.
5. Privilege based on inherited wealth was fine, though not aristocratic wealth based on long aristocratic descent.
6. The death penalty was fine, and included for theft as well as murder.
7. Rich men could claim huge tracts of land that they could then sell to people who actually wanted to farm those lands. George Washington did a lot of that, but so did many others.
8. The new USA should not be defined as a Christian country. No religion was to be imposed, and there would be no legal penalties for skepticism or outright atheism. This was well ahead of British laws and of most of the rest of Christian Europe, whereas the Ottoman Empire and most other Muslim states were tolerant of anyone who behaved and paid taxes.
9. Politics and the government should be entirely in English, with no provision for speakers of French or Spanish or Dutch.
This shifted in the 19th and 20th centuries, with pressure from radicals, and later from socialists and communists. I’ve done a blog on how the left redefined ‘The Normal’ https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/998-from-labour-affairs/the-french-revolution-and-its-unstable-politics/against-globalisation/the-left-redefined-the-normal/.
Snippets
Inequality from the 1970s? Nixon’s the One!
Richard Nixon got the US working class voting for him without looking after their economic interests. Started the ‘Feed the Rich’ policies that Ronald Reagan carried through, after a rather empty interlude by the well-meaning Jimmy Carter (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-mixed-economy-won-the-cold-war/).
But Nixon and Reagan were helped when left-wing radicals treated the New Deal compromise as rubbish. When they forgot to mention its merits when demanding radical social change.
Only in the last decade has the left remembered it was an issue. And mostly they do it still without mentioning what the New Deal got right.
It would be worth them saying that on economics, the left are the functional conservatives and traditionalists. Calling for a rolling-back of the failed radical-right policies of the Neo-liberals.
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The Bad Ship ‘Abraham Lincoln’
“The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain.
“The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/us/politics/uss-abraham-lincoln-trump-supplies-diego-garcia.html (pay site)
Nixon and Reagan would have displayed concern, and probably sincerely felt it as well. Trump has said they ought to tough it out: this from a man who avoided service in Vietnam with a claimed medical condition.
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I write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams. I also post a lot on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GwydionMW
Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams. 26th August
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