Simon has been reading my BRICS posts from 2023 & 2024 - 
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>”Companies & countries are concepts, they don't actually exist outside of our minds. Sure, they command real people & resources but they're psuedo entities that we've created & permitted to exist in our realm.”
Very prescient.
Both very right and in some sense, very wrong.
If you had a time machine and went back 160 years to any city in what we call Germany and asked a random person what they were - none would have called themselves German. They’d be Bavarians or Prussians etc. Today they’d all be Germans first, Bavarians etc second.
And yet the whole Prussian identity has been erased since then; they were the leading entity in unification, the dominant force in Germany for decades, and today 98% of people would think it’s a typo of Russia.
They don’t understand that they were themselves a “nation”, they were as different from the Bavarians as Aussies are from the Welsh. These were Lutherans and Calvinists with a warrior-led bureaucratic system. The Bavarians were Catholics with an 800-year monarchy, they saw Vienna and the Holy Roman Empire as the centre of civilisation, they were entirely different to the Prussians.
Das Deutsche Reich melded Bavarians and Prussians into one system, one country - Germany. This wasn’t done so puppets could be put in and out of power, there’s hundreds of years of geopolitical backdrop I can’t explain here with the Holy Roman Empire and the Hanseatic League and Napoleon and and and; THAT’S why Germany came into being. That today’s leaders are might be puppets is an altogether different story and misses the whole run up of how we got here.
Yes in some sense, countries are very much made up. The map doesn’t make sense to any student of history - I’ll DM you separately on this point.
In some sense; they’re the realest thing humans know. They are what stands between you and the barbarians razing your city and raping your wife and daughters. They are what drags your sons into war because some inbred royals have beef and want to measure their dicks against each other.
Dismissing this as Simon does isn’t correct. He’s right about many things, most even, but just seeing things purely as factions isn’t 100% right either. I won’t say he’s wrong because he doesn’t claim these are all isolated well-defined entities and his labels are kind of catch-alls, but i heard his Xitter space with Ryan Dawson re Israel and I think that particularly showed his shortcomings where his factional view not properly accounting for nation states and the power in this mythos.
55 years ago; Vietnam was 2 countries. In fact it used to be multiple, the Cham people were basically genocided and barely exist today.. Nobody denies it’s 1 country today despite the differences internally.
And nobody will fuck with them now because that 1 country has like 450k active duty military and 5 million reservists even though amongst them they’re as different as Prussians and Bavarians were, but they have a nation state “faction” in Simon’s terms that unites them.
The MIC and FIC can’t sell them out; that was tried in the US-Vietnam war and look what happened..
Simplifying down purely to monetarily-aligned factions isn’t quite right. It denies humans their humanity, and humans are gonna human. They’re going to align with kin, and kin of kin, and they’re going to fight for their founding myths and the continuity of their people regardless of what some stock market number says.
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