The narcissism of the left-wing elite is at the root of the world’s chaos.
Washington, D.C. is the American equivalent of Central in Hong Kong, a stratosphere of interests and knowledge. Once you become a “Centralite,” as in the colonial era, you almost become a winner in life. The colonial-era Centralsiders merely put into practice the decisions made by the British at the Governor’s Mansion and the big bosses at HSBC. The Centralsiders of the “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” era have proven over the past two decades that they cannot make effective decisions, but they are narcissistic and self-assured. The bubble world ended up with a string of Michelin restaurants and a connoisseurship of French wine.
The “Centralization” of Washington has brought the narcissism of the intellectual elite, led by Barack Obama, to its peak. Once a Washingtonian, he can tell the world what to do. For example, Obama can make lightning decisions to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. But the elite, a Chicago lawyer and his think tank, wouldn’t know the details of the country: its tribal feudal traditions, its mountainous terrain, and the ease with which guerrillas and terrorists could hide. Until 1978, Afghanistan had been ruled by a prominent Pashtun tribal chieftain as king for two hundred years, and had been fine until the communist group, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), overthrew the government and pledged allegiance to the Soviet Union, transforming the economy and society along socialist lines until the Afghan people rose up to overthrow it. When the Soviet Union saw the collapse of the satellite countries that it had sent up automatically, it sent troops to invade and set up a puppet regime.
Because the economy was in ruins, poverty became a hotbed of terrorism. The Taliban assembled young men from many declining Pashtun families, studied basic Islamic doctrine with Arab funding, received Pakistani intelligence and logistical support, and then followed the example of the communist forces that seized power in Afghanistan. The Afghan story is a mini-encyclopedia of terroir and culture. But the stratosphere of Wall Street’s elite, with its financial experts, economic experts, and a little bit of historian, does not have the experts who had a deep understanding of Third World terroir in the countries of Asia and Africa during the nineteenth-century British and French imperialism.
Nineteenth-century British imperial administration, the world was in good order because the British had a large number of traveling adventurers from the bottom up, first familiar with the environment, such as Lawrence of Arabia, who united the tribes in Arabia on his own, directing a war by himself, rather than relying on Washington from the top down, the Pentagon and the CIA bureaucrats to make decisions and execute them.
Gradually it was felt that it did not matter if there was a mess everywhere, because the Middle East world was killing itself with or without the United States. The White House elite gradually focused on making money wherever they could in the world. Four years and a new term, and it has become what it is today.
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