I think that China could do absolutely untold damage to the American psyche and illusion of invulnerability if it simply instantly obliterated these clowns on Taiwan from hundreds of kilometers away with a cloud of drones dense enough to block out the sun. America treats the navy seals like they are all Master Chief, when in reality they are just guys who can carry a log and swim for a long time or some shit. Maybe that matters when you’re like… raiding a compound of a guy who has been on the run for decades while he’s asleep with Neon Genesis Evangelion playing on the TV, but genuinely what are these guys going to do to actually fight back against China? China will never even let them see a single PLA soldier lmao.
This is a perfect example of the kind of passively fascist mystical thinking that we westerners are trained to engage in, where Great Man Theory meets Triumph of the Will. What’s so special about about these guys? Practically speaking, they’re a hit squad who killed an old man in his house, that’s their military specialty. But because that old man was Osama Bin Laden, AKA the Voldemort of the early 2000s, killing him must have taken something special. After all, he just walked out of the Afghan mountains one day, waved his Great Man Wand, and made 9/11 happen. Such a powerful and mysterious sorcerer of history could only be taken down by an even more powerful group of heroes, like the heckin Avengers. If Seal Team whatever managed to break into his house and shoot him in the face, then they must be those heroes. They killed a powerful named character after all, what chance does a bunch of nameless Chinese missiles have?
You’re absolutely right. The weird and stupid fascistic thought process to rationalize that your guys are superior as not just soldiers, but as human beings to enemy guys never fails to appear in any western discussion of conflict. It’s the same logic that online Rhodesia and IOF freaks (big fanbase overlap, not at all shocking) use all of the time lmao. “My team’s guys are super soldiers who are also cool and epic! Meanwhile my WEAK enemy can’t even compare!” Ok so like… what makes your enemy weak? If your enemies are so weak, why do you seem to obsess over and insist that you have and need the most elite soldiers in history? How do you know they are elite if they only fight weak enemies?
Russia-Ukraine did a decent job at proving these clowns on both sides of the conflict wrong. Every elite soldier or unit or weapon we hear about entering the battle that ”will definitely change the tide” becomes just as likely to end up as worm food as the average soldier, with no visible impact on the conflict.
Dehumanising the enemy, literally talking about them as if they don’t qualify as human, is an absurdly common approach. It’s clearly an effective way of 'other’ing, but it leads to completely unrealistic attitudes like you describe. There’s a line that gets crossed between bigging up your team/talking shit about the enemy, and simply losing grasp of reality.
I do think it’s an inherently fascistic process, and it’s something I still sadly see in the left, including Hexbears, when talking about terrible people and class enemies. Obviously some are speaking in metaphor, but not everyone.
I think you’re right about it being a reactionary tendency. While it’s good for morale in small doses, I think it sort of…anaerobically metabolizes away your ability to engage with reality. Like in the absence of fresh data, fantasy begins to feed on itself and produce ever-stranger ideological metabolites
Remember when all those ex-spec ops idiots volunteered for Ukraine and then either got got or fled home whining about “russian war doctrine” (being able to contest air superiority)
Laughed my ass off about that canadian sniper who died a few days after arriving. Yeah dude you shoot brown kids and think you’re a badass, fuck you
My fav was a western Nazi who tried to stop a couple of Ukrainian conscripts from retreating so they just shot him and kept going.
Once again the Russian blocking units are entirely projection.
Blocking units were real, but didn’t shoot people. They were partially a mobile reserve of veterans to shore up the front line if it was weakened, partially for grabbing lost or deserting troops and pointing them to collection areas that would figure out who they were and get them back to their unit, and partially guarding important stuff from any nazies that managed to get through the lines to do recon or sabotage.
NATO occupiers being on the receiving end of aerial superiority will never stop being funny
Then going home to go on a podcast to talk about how “their expertise better suits the war in an advisory position”
Reddit brigade was peak comedy
When that one dude posted on Reddit with location data and got his whole barracks blown up
The howling and shidding will be as glorious as this Robert F Williams story:
NSFW language
Really a perfect microcosm for the global South resisting imperialism today. The west goes about committing man made horrors beyond our comprehension, but as soon as foreign powers do anything besides role over and die quickly (Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia) or, at the very least, remain in a state of perpetual uneven warfare with little meaningful retaliation, they shit and piss themselves. The west doesn’t even know what to do about peer warfare in Ukraine other than cry about it and mindlessly escalate, and they’re utterly useless in responding to Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and Iran (when they DO actually act). The west can only bully and lash out at those who are unarmed and weak, but as soon as one of their victims displays true intent and capability of self-defense they cry and play victim. Pathetic.
Throwback to the dumbass lemmitor who insisted Ukraine had superior training, it just “wasn’t suited to fighting against the russian military doctrine”. The logic was completely circular.
That was my top voted post on my previous account, early federation was a blast.
An American who spent time stationed in Kenya (they never could tell me why we have a base there, go figure) told me about a group of navy seals that decided to try to put a t-shirt on a baboon once. Apparently they all ended up in the infirmary.
America isn’t sending the brightest.
raiding a compound of a guy who has been on the run for decades while he’s asleep
With the ISI waving you through Pakistan security and you still manage to crash a helicopter
then come home and spin a lie about how he was “brandishing an AK at the top of the stairs” because americans’ only moral lens for violence is through hollywood where the good guys spare the lives of the bad guys, only for the bad guys to suddenly grab a gun & have to be killed in immediate self-defense
Even after killing the guy you still managed to fuck it up by being so undisciplined that you multilate the body of the HVT beyond recognition, thus ruining the entire point of the mission and forcing the body to be quietly dumped into the ocean before it becomes an international embarrassment.
Was suppose to be a victory lap for imperialism but they got too mad and lost their shit mid way through. Seal team six is on the same level as conservative comedians.
1000% their “training” is on how to blow up critical infrastructure like TSMC’s facilities, water production, and power generation in case the PRC does launch an operation on the island.
