The Latest Spectacle in the Globalist War Against All
A wise man once wrote, “American politics (and most democratic politics, really) cannot be properly understood without a working knowledge of professional wrestling.” Among the arts and entertainments our country has visited upon the world, it stands preeminent in my mind as the truest reflection of what America is. One man steps inside a 20X20 squared circle to pit himself against another in pursuit of glory and a belt of gold; the match itself being a culmination of years of work and pain and sacrifice to hone a craft revolving around telling a story through a contest of violence.
However, it’s a trick.
Professional wrestling is a business. It was born in the circus. Promoters and talent would seek to entice the public with the promise of a violent spectacle in the hopes of “putting an ass in every eighteen inches of seat.” The business changed over the years as it adapted to technology like the rest of the world, growing from local carnival acts to territories to global franchises; however, the core of it remains the same. Through the use of a persona or ‘gimmick’ establishing The Good Guy (or ‘Babyface’) and The Bad Guy (the ‘Heel’), the two engage in a simulated fight. The wrestling itself is merely the medium. What matters is the story, and the more personal it is, the better their chances of seducing the ‘marks’ to come and pay to watch it play out.
Ain’t that America.
Here we stand poised for war yet again with the last one barely even cold. Like the announcers calling a pro-wrestling match, those charged with manufacturing consent have supplied us with a story in which the beleaguered Babyface must face a dastardly Heel, and by God how we’ve come out for it.
I am a proud Oklahoman. Yesterday I saw that the Legislature of my state, in its infinite wisdom, rallied to issue a Joint Resolution condemning the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, as if the Great Powers of the world sit with bated breath waiting to see where the Okies come down on the issue. Last summer our Senator Warren Hamilton called for the Governor to issue a Special Session to end the Covid Mandates here and was rebuffed; The Powers That Be offer a faraway conflict though with an opportunity to swagger and talk tough (and maybe get some of that sweet defense pork for donors no doubt) and suddenly they’re full of piss-and-vinegar. From what I have heard, some here had been making strides along with those from other Red States to attack on fronts ranging from protections for people refusing the Covid “vaccines” to fighting CRT to strengthening what remains of election integrity, and yet, as soon as the very people who have brought these problems upon us beat the drums of war, all is forgotten and our glorious leaders stand ready to offer up their states’ sons on the altar of Mars. Nevermind that most of us would have a hard time finding Ukraine on a map. Someone even worked the Nazis and the Holocaust into the Resolution. Just in case the media hadn’t done enough to try to establish who the Heel is in this farce. There’s some old-school ‘booking’ for you.
It was like this in the beginning of ‘The War on Terror’. (Good Lord, what a silly name.) 9/11 was still fresh, and my unit didn’t know where we would be deploying. U.S. and Allied forces had been massing near Iraq and America was divided. Afghanistan we could understand; word was that was where the enemy was headquartered, but Iraq? Invading a sovereign country without clear provocation struck many of us as wrong or at least left us ambivalent. President Bush came out to give us a pep talk to gin up support and I was in the crowd. I will never forget him saying, “I don’t know why our enemy doesn’t fear us. We have high-tech apparati.” I shit you not, the man said apparati like it was Latin class. One guy in the crowd next to me yelled “WE OUGHTA GO AFTER SADDAM!” The crowd popped and the President laughed. Vince McMahon eat your heart out.
Well they got their war. They even lied to get it, not that it seems to have mattered. (Consequences are just for Proles.) My unit went there after Afghanistan, and among the thousands who died, theirs and ours, one was a Cherry from the first fire-team I led. His nickname was “Van.” He deployed to Iraq, and I’m told my old squad leader had to climb up a tree to fetch Van’s body down after the IED took his life and threw what was left into the sky. Van left behind a newlywed wife and an infant daughter. Another one of my buddies, whom I’d seen go from a scrappy Private to a tough squad leader (“Decicho” in my book), killed himself last year, leaving behind a young son as well. Of those thousands who were lost or marked by that war, those were some of mine. They and the rest of the men in my unit were brave and it was an honor to serve with them, yet I cannot forget that our actions downrange were in service to policies built upon a great deal of lies and treachery. We were betrayed then. And we are being betrayed again.
I recall how vehemently anti-war the Left was then, and how the Jon Stewarts and other court eunuchs used the issue as a means to attack my people and reveal their master’s pivot from pretending to give a damn about the working class and what remains of small-town and rural folk to displaying their true contempt for us as Kulaks. The indisputable fact of their recent conversion to brute hawkishness reveals the truth of something David Reaboi noted, riffing on Lee Smith: “The Democratic Party doesn’t have foreign enemies. They have foreigners who remind them of domestic enemies.”
I’d say that’s about right. There’s a bloodlust running like a current through those identifying with the party that was clearly stoked in them by the Managerial Class. I swear, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting three freshly activated Manchurian Candidates ready to put their war-boner on the world. I am convinced it is demonic. Yesterday at my Normie-Job I heard an 80-something year old woman read aloud an article about how a cruise line would no longer offer stops in St. Petersberg, and would cost the Russian people there millions of dollars in lost revenue. She was almost gloating about the prospect of the impoverishment of those affected. A week ago she was deathly afraid of Covid and lamenting a friend’s refusal to take the ‘vaccine’. From what I understand, she was a former school teacher.
As bad as that is, it troubles me even more to see it from officials ostensibly on our side of the aisle. A schizophrenic coalition representing the Grift-Industrial Complex with a crooked-ass elderly dementia patient for a spokesman has been rolling into a midterm election season with low approval ratings due to their sheer incompetence and corruption, and no sooner than they call for blood against foreigners, RINOs fall in line with them, ready to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory like the Jobronis they are.
The fools can’t seem to grasp that the Globalist-Left is not only on the brink of starting a war in which Red State sons would disproportionately be paying America’s butcher’s bill, but the tools developed in GWOT and refined in the plot against President Trump, the Canadian Trucker Protest, and now Russia will be directed against people like us who object to living under the diktats of GloboHomo. They will run headlong to secure the borders of Ukraine or Taiwan (or rather, send others to do so), yet when it comes to doing something about those who have declared war on us here at home, suddenly their martial vigor fails them and they sit like good little school boys awaiting instruction from their teacher. They let their enemies tell them who they should fight, then wonder why they always seem to lose. Charlie Brown had more self-awareness. In a way, I suspect it must be a bit of a relief for some. Having a faraway spectacle elsewhere offers a distraction from just how corrupt the ruling class is here and dulls the messy responsibility of having to do something about it.
I guess this really shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the U.S. has an all-volunteer force and only a small portion of the citizenry has seen military service let alone done some time on “the two-way shooting range.” America by and large hasn’t had to live in the midst of armed conflict since the Indian Wars, or perhaps the Civil War in some places. In this peace, we have been subverted into a decadent stupor by an indifferent if not hostile elite, and as such have little grasp of the tragic aspects of the human experience or the patience, humility, or wisdom required to contend with the intractable problems of a fallen world. It’s far easier to sit back and vicariously live out a simplistic Heels-Versus-Babyface fantasy all-too-eagerly supplied to us by the people on the other side of the screen who are hell-bent on breaking the world and remaking it in their image.
I have seen enough of this life to know that in the real world, things are complicated. To humanity’s credit, there are almost always good men on all sides of any conflict. Upon returning once on Convalescent Leave, my old squad leader gave me a string of prayer beads he took from the body of the man who shot me. I wear some of the beads to this day in honor of those two men and what they taught me. I often think about that man and my squad leader and the rest of my buddies and Haji and the war we found ourselves in, be it ever so humble. While I’m glad I survived the encounter with Mr. Nahr, I respect his folk too much to hate him. I like to think he was doing what he thought was right and fighting an enemy seeking dominion over his home.
Likewise, I’ve known people from Russia and the Ukraine. The Russians, in their patience, tried to teach me a bit of their language. The Ukrainian was a buddy who was big into permaculture and was eager to share tips on growing things. From what I remember of them and what I have seen and read of their respective homes, it was very clear to me they were from worlds that are in many ways different than my own, and to see the ham-fisted manner in which this current farce is paraded about robs all in it of their dignity. If anything, I can sympathize with both. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to have gone from decades under the boot heel of Communism only to see it collapse into chaos, and then attempt the Herculean task of trying to rebuild your nation into something strong enough to stand on its own among the Great Powers of the world. Likewise, I imagine it must be difficult to be from the Ukraine, perpetually at the mercy of forces greater than your own and surrounded by those who would seek to absorb you into their ledger as just another asset. My own people fought for the South in our Civil War and lost, so I like to think I can appreciate the desire to be free of a Leviathan with all too great a reach. From where I stand, all sides seem to have cause and are worthy of respect, and I am ashamed at how we are so easily made to play the voyeur or interloper and render absolute judgment over the affairs of strangers and interfere in things we don’t really understand.
In considering the peoples of the Ukraine and Russia, and seeing the way their very real historical, cultural, and political issues with tangled roots going back God-knows-how-long are being reduced to a damn Capeshit movie and exacerbated until there is blood in the gutters for fun and profit is almost as embarrassing as the fact this madness was birthed by a class of criminals operating in offices established in our names. They have been trying to loot Russia since the fall of Communism and have made a corrupt playground out of the Ukraine in the age-old American game of “poke the dog until it bites and then shoot it,” in much the same way we’ve seen play out over the years from ‘Arab Spring’ to the myriad Color Revolutions they’ve sponsored in Eastern Bloc nations.
The more I’ve looked into this conflict, the more I’ve found I don’t know a fraction of all the nuances running wild in it. Most of what I have to go on is the word of a class of people who have lied to me my whole life, and I wouldn’t trust them to scratch a dog’s ass. They can piss up a rope. What I do know is that however bad the toll of dead and wounded are and could be with the current combatants, it pales in comparison to what will happen if this regime manages to deploy forces in earnest. Should that happen, I have no doubt the old infantry adage will prove itself true in that “the best laid plan goes to shit once the first boot hits the ground,” and by the end, their cute little ‘humanitarian intervention’ will look like just another grisly shitshow of a war and that’s the Red Hot Gospel.
Those with hearts now bleeding over Ukraine lament the suffering there, and rightfully so. However, the world is filled with such suffering. My friend James LaFond lived in Baltimore most of his life and over the years watched it descend into the status of a war-torn third-world shithole in places. Where is the outcry to ‘do something’ and save the people there from the lawless who prey upon them? We can only surmise it’s not the scheduled match and doesn’t benefit the promotion.
It is my hope that serious men with cooler heads can reason together and come to an understanding that can grant both sides an honorable peace. God knows that part of the world could use it. It’ll have to come from them though, because I cannot imagine any in power on our side with wisdom sufficient to foster such an accord. Those jackals are fit for nothing but the gallows. Regardless, for those in the contested areas, it is my prayer that this ends soon and with as little blood spilled as possible. However, it ain’t my war. My war is here.
In response to my Okie compatriots in the State Legislature and others across the country, I would remind you it wasn’t Vladimir Putin who has been conducting a scorched-earth culture war upon our beliefs, history, and identity, and degraded our social fabric to the point we now have to fight against the normalization of transsexualism. It wasn’t the Russians who outsourced our productive capacity while sending us upon one misbegotten war after another and flooding the country with drugs. It wasn’t ‘Ivan’ who caused the biggest wealth transfer in human history with the Covid scandal, fomented riots across the country, or “fortified” the election. Most of the ills I’ve seen metastasize over the course of my life, with increasing speed over recent years, were not the result of some foreign plot, but were born right here. Rattle your sabers against foreigners on the other side of the planet if it makes you feel better, but don’t confuse that with bravery. It just makes you a mark. If you truly wish to show your quality, summon the courage to attack the very real patronage networks who guide our course. Bring your powers to bear against those who shape the opinions and policies by which we live and die.
There is a retired Southern pro-wrestling manager named Jim Cornett who I like to hear talk about “The Business.” Nobody laments the loss of old-school pro-wrestling like he does. In one such interview he was discussing ‘kayfabe’ or the illusion that once masked their business and caused people to believe what they saw was real. He remarked something to the tune of “once you’ve broken kayfabe, it’s over.” I take comfort in that. I hope as this deadly farce plays out, more and more Americans will come to grips with the fact we are being lied to, and have been for a very long time. And while the loss of that illusion we’ve known and identified with for so long is painful, once free of it, there remains the possibility of building something better. Something real.
Samuel Finlay is a writer from Oklahoma who served in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He’s the author of “Breakfast with the Dirt Cult“.
Related reading:
Requiem for The ‘Stan, by Samuel Finlay
Breakfast with the Dirt Cult: A Review, by Benjamin Braddock
Fubar, by Michael Anton
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