Trent Telenko

Belgium — The Failed State in the Heart of Europe

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Today in Europe, in the aftermath of the Brussels terrorist attacks, a dark truth stands reveled about the nature of the Belgian state. Belgium is a failed state at the heart of Europe…and much of the rest of Europe is following.

Belgium quite literally lacks the military means to enforce the sovereignty of the Belgian state in the Muslim neighborhood of Molenbeek in Brussels, the Belgian Capitol.

The following is via John R. Schindler of The UK Observer:

Europe Is Again at War

We should expect more guerrilla-like attacks like Brussels yesterday: moderate in scale, relatively easy to plan and execute against soft targets, and utterly terrifying to the public. At some point, angry Europeans, fed up with their supine politi1cal class, will begin to strike back, and that’s when the really terrifying scenarios come into play. European security services worry deeply about the next Anders Breivik targeting not fellow Europeans, but Muslim migrants. “We’re just one Baruch Goldstein away from all-out war,” explained a senior EU terrorism official, citing the American-born Israeli terrorist, fed up with Palestinian violence, who walked into a Hebron mosque in 1994, guns blazing, and murdered 29 innocent Muslims.

When that violence comes, a practically disarmed Europe will be all but powerless to stop it. To take the case of Belgium, at the Cold War’s end a generation ago, its army had seven brigades with 18 infantry battalions, plus some 30 more battalions in the reserve. Today, Belgium’s army has only two brigades and six infantry battalions, some 3,000 bayonets in all. That tiny force would have trouble exerting control over even one bumptious Brussels neighborhood in the event of serious crisis.

Thanks to Belgium’s sovereignty collapse, Europe is now in the throws of an emerging decade plus Muslim insurgency spreading from Brussels…

…while E.U. Security Forces supporting the Belgians are more concerned with repressing local predominantly white citizens from striking back at terrorist inclined Muslim migrants than dealing with the Muslim problem to begin with.

And it gets worse, with hundreds if not thousands of trained terrorists arriving with the multi-million person Muslim Migrant wave that German Prime Minister Frau Merkel kicked off in 2015. The EU faces a situation where it will see a ‘major’ (Charles Hebdo, Paris, Brussels class) EU terrorist incident every 60 to 180 days for the foreseeable future. This leaves aside the worse than American urban ghetto crime and sexual assault rates these illegal Muslim migrants are now inflicting on EU citizens.

NB: The EU is now no longer tourist friendly, with all the economic fall out that means.

The political corruption — and ethnic tensions between the Dutch speaking Flems and French speaking Walloons — that dominates the Belgian state make it impossible to remedy the Muslim insurgency there.

Nothing short of Belgian territorial partition between France and Germany can bring effective enough military governance to end the Muslim Insurgency in Brussels.

Given that awful reality, Donald Trump’s idea of reducing America’s role in NATO (Or perhaps even getting out of NATO all together?) is the best thing the USA can do.

Both Vietnam’s and Shia Iraq’s lessons for America’s citizens are that it is a futile waste of American lives and treasure to try and protect people who don’t have either the will nor the means to protect themselves.

A Tale of H1B Workers in Dallas‏

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This H1B American worker replacement program for multi-national megacorporations is getting real. It isn’t limited to the IT industry workers and Disney actors training their own H1B visa replacements any more. It is now hitting the American health care industry in the skilled medical technician level, many of whom are college educated American citizen minorities, at least here in Dallas.

I just saw the local CVS pharmacy I use replace several college educated, Black Female, Hispanic female and Hispanic male Pharmacists, with Indian H1B workers last week.

The reason this sticks out in my wife went to pick up a changed 30-to-90 day prescription of mine for which the CVS Pharmacy has insufficient meds. A typical case of Indian “IT help desk hell” occurred with two people with incomplete knowledge of the issues of my meds, with the H1B worker trying to get 90 days of prescription price from my wife for 30 days of meds. No transaction happened.

I can only wonder what a seventy something retired senior trying to get his or her meds are dealing with this corporate H1B visa imposed communication problem?

And I also wonder about all those minority med-techs I see replaced here in Dallas are dealing with this?

The same way white male 40-to-50 something White male electrical engineers have in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years? The corporate versus middle class politics of this are poisonous in this Presidential season.

Consider the implications for the Black vote for Trump in Nov 2016. Trump’s Florida polls show him with _40_%_ of the below $25,000 a year black males over his plan to close the Mexican border with a wall. If Trump gets the same 1-in-5 vote that Richard Nixon got in 1972 with Obama’s 2008 and 2012 turn out percentages, he will take at least 45 states in the electoral college.

This is the electoral power of a real “closed borders” Presidential candidate.

And the corporate K-Street political contributor class behind both political parties still doesn’t see it coming.

Beslan in Paris

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David Brooks’ Beslan column in the New York Times seems appropriate for this Paris Attack:

“Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called “separatists” and “hostage-takers.” Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?
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They’re still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: “It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.”
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This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don’t want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.”


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The morgue filled with the Victims of the Beslan Terrorist Attack..
The morgue filled with the Victims of the Beslan Terrorist Attack..

The Reality of Beslan is here again…and it is not going away.

Happy V-J Day, at 70 Years Plus a Day

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While the time pressures of work and family life prevented me from posting this yesterday, Sept 02, 2015, a commemoration of the official surrender of Japan in WW2 is still in order. Like the commemoration of the atomic bombing of Japan, this post will be about how the events leading to the surrender have been covered in American culture. Specifically, it will be a posting of several C-Span network video links to presentations by the leading historians of the period including Craig Symonds, Richard Frank, D.M. Giangreco, and John Kuehn. Afterwards I will give short reviews of each video.

The following symposia video titles & descriptions, plus links, are from C-Span

1. Pacific War Turning Point
June 8, 2013
http://www.c-span.org/video/?313164-1/pacific-war-turning-point

Historians talked about the turning point in the Pacific theater
during World War II.”‚Craig Symonds argued the Battle of Midway was the
decisive engagement that shifted momentum in the Allies favor, while
Richard Frank asserted that the Guadalcanal campaign thwarted future
Axis plans and resulted in a permanent blow to the Japanese war
machine.”‚A video clip from “Victory at Sea” was played without sound.
After each author made his presentation, they held a discussion and
responded to questions from members of the audience.
 
“Pacific War Turning Point: Midway or Guadalcanal?” was part of The
Bernard and Irene Schwartz Distinguished Speakers Series WWII & NYC of
The New York Historical Society.

2. Fall of the Japanese Empire
July 14, 2015
http://www.c-span.org/video/?327055-1/discussion-fall-japanese-empire

Richard Frank, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire,
spoke about the events leading up to Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II.”‚He talked about American and Japanese strategies and operations in the closing months of the war, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s surrender, and the fall of the Japanese Empire.

3. Strategies for the Invasion and Defense of Japan
August 6, 2015
http://www.c-span.org/video/?327355-5/strategies-invasion-defense-japan

D.M. Giangreco talked about the American offensive directed at Japan’s
northernmost island, Hokkaido.”‚He also spoke about the Soviet Union’s
involvement, including the influence of logistics and diplomatic
relations.
 
“The Hokkaido Myth: U.S., Soviet, and Japanese Plans for Invasion” was a portion of “Endgame: August 1945 in Asia and the Pacific,” a symposium hosted by the Institute for the Study of Strategy and Politics

4. Japan’s Decision to Surrender
August 6, 2015
http://www.c-span.org/video/?327355-7/japans-decision-surrender

John Kuehn talked about Japan’s decision to surrender to Allied forces
in August of 1945.
 
“A Succession of Miracles: Japan’s Decision to Surrender” was a portion of “Endgame: August 1945 in Asia and the Pacific,” a symposium hosted by the Institute for the Study of Strategy and Politics.

Each of the above presentations was hugely informative. In the “Pacific War Turning Point: Midway or Guadalcanal?” argument, I side with Richard Frank on its impact on Japanese military capability. The Guadalcanal campaign hurt the Japanese far more than the “Decisive battle” of Midway. I recently received a Kindle Copy of Phillips Payson O’Brien’s How the War was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge Military Histories) that convinced me of the importance of Guadalcanal over Midway in terms of killing off the best Japanese naval pilots, most of whom survived Midway.

In the second video on July 14, 2015 Richard Frank basically gives a presentation drawn from his coming trilogy on the “Asia-Pacific War” that highlights the Japanese military preparations to defend Japan, including the mobilization of a 20 million strong civilian-militia to back up the military, and how important the A-bomb was as compared to the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria in getting the Japanese to surrender. Frank also speaks to the King-Nimitz efforts to challenge Olympic and the total casualties up to August 1945 and how many more would have died from starvation had the war lasted even a short time longer. Frank tends to be US Navy centric and did not think much of MacArthur’s Olympic plans.

The third video, by D.M. Giangreco of a presentation titled “The Hokkaido Myth: U.S., Soviet, and Japanese Plans for Invasion”, goes very heavily into Japanese, Soviet & American plans to alternately defend or invade the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Short form — The Soviets had enough American provided sealift for a light infantry division, but not enough airpower to protect it, and the available Japanese ground forces and Kamikazes would be able to make any Soviet lodgment a Pacific Anzio.

The final video, by John Kuehn, titled “A Succession of Miracles: Japan’s Decision to Surrender” goes deeply into the Japanese high command, civilian leadership and the Showa Emperor’s maneuvering to achieve a surrender. I found it particularly useful in getting a better understanding of the irrationality that dominated Japanese decision making. And the point that Kuehn made that the “Big-Six” represented the Japanese military “Moderate factions” was chilling.