“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy” – Elon Musk 2025

An interesting quirk about the Americans is this penchant for defining benchmarks……

For excellence in governance, Americans of every stripe pray to this one God named Ronald Reagan. Remember the “Shiny city on the hill guy” guy? This is the dude.

Ronald Reagan was nothing more than an actor of forgettable B-movies, with great networking skills who was very convincing, with his smooth, reassuring olive oil voice. He became more known for being a crooked political operator who thought nothing of selling arms to the very same Iranians who had just a few years prior held 52 of his fellow countrymen hostage inside the US’s Tehran Embassy for 444 days.

There is even a theory called “1980 October surprise” that posits that when it became apparent that the hostages were about to be released, Reagan, through intermediaries, begged the Iranians to delay their release till after he was sworn in as President.

What lends that theory some credence is the fact that only minutes after Reagan was sworn in as President, on 20 Jan 1981, all 52 hostages were suddenly released.

Lo and fucking behold!!

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There is another benchmark, but let me give you the background first….

Two decades immediately after the Second World War, here was America, in a security cocoon created by nature, between the world’s two largest oceans on the east and the west and two very friendly nations in the north and the south. With such buffers all around, no single nation has even tried to mount an invasion, ever.

America remained virtually unscathed and untouched by the devastation of the Second World War. I’ll correct that statement – America is virtually unscathed from any war, period. This is in spite of the fact that it has been the main participant in most of them, fought thousands of miles from its own shores.

After the Second World War, American industrial output and exports skyrocketed. That is understandable, since all the others – Europe, Japan, Korea, the USSR – had been decimated.

After the war, there remained a single unchallenged source of supply for everything, even toilet paper – America.

“America was exceptional,” they crowed.

The folks who lived through those two decades of incredible prosperity immediately following WW2 are the second benchmark – a demographic that Americans call The Greatest Generation. These are white Americans born between 1901 and 1927.

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According to 99.99% of all white Americans alive today, the “Greatest Generation” is the generation that “built America”. It makes them nostalgic and misty-eyed. What they conveniently forget is that the phenomenal economic growth happened over the devastation of others, not because of some kind of spectacular resourcefulness on part of Americans. When you are the last guy standing it is easy to prosper.

American economic supremacy and technological prowess in the immediate post war period was so total that it wasn’t bothered by free trade and competition. With the rest of the industrialized world razed to the ground, who was going to compete anyway?

Ordinary white Americans began believing that the prosperity of the Greatest Generation was actually the normal, the expected, the inevitable – the result of something intangible that is superior about white American folks over others.

Competition could not touch them. How could it? After the war, there was no one left to compete with.

Note : I have stressed on the race (white) of the members of the Greatest Generation. I am hoping you will not embarrass yourself by asking why.

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Overconfident and cocky, fully expecting to keep building on the technological and economic edge, America embarked on an eventually self-defeating process that we now know as globalization. We all know how that has panned out – every demographic segment has prospered, except the bottom half, as jobs have fled.

All those annual vacations in Hawaii, those garrulous, rude American tourists, they are gone. Those manicured suburban lawns and chrome-plated Impalas, they have all moved to Asia. Every time an American buys an Iphone, it adds $200 to the already blooming deficit.

It is a Chinese or an Indian who plans his next annual vacation in – not Hawaii or Yellowstone, thank you, but Switzerland, Thailand, Machu Pichu, anywhere but America where chances are good they might get shot and told to “go back to where they came from” or demeaned by a customs or immigration official.

Not that Americans fare any better when they plan a vacation outside America. It is a grim, sometimes life-threatening experience, given the amount of hatred that citizens of many nations, including western nations, feel toward America and Americans.

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Speaking from experience, I remember meeting up in the early 1970s with an American couple in an Indian seaside town called Panjim, known for attracting white foreigners in hordes.  These were two genuinely decent human beings, there to have a holiday, who found themselves cornered by some locals. I was there on a hitchhiking trip with a classmate from engineering school and had it not been for us, I shudder to think what might have happened to the two innocents. (My classmate’s dad being a high-ranking police officer there, we had two burly cops looking out for us).

Boy, it certainly turned out to be a holiday they would rather forget they ever had. Let me give you a background….

The Bangladesh war of independence had just ended with Pakistan’s complete capitulation, thanks to my nation of birth, India’s active support to the rebels. India didn’t start it, neither did they grab territory or gloat over their win. Rather, the rebellion was homegrown, against a corrupt Pakistani leadership. 

Earlier, at the peak of the hostilities, Pakistan’s sponsors, the ‘mighty’ US, had sent in the 7th Fleet dangerously close to Indian waters in the Bay of Bengal. America was trying to frighten the Indians into backing off. The parentheses around the the word mighty denotes scorn. 

Why not the scorn? Wasn’t America getting its ass kicked in Vietnam right about the time India was kicking Pakistani butt? 

Thousands of barely literate innocent American foot soldiers from rural farming families, with no power to conjure up “bone spurs” and be “disqualified” from military service, no chances of decent alternative employment, had been coerced into the war and had landed in Vietnam. 

Those soldiers, aptly called “grunts”, had been told they were “fighting for the security of their homeland”, a place that just happened to be 9000 miles away and completely untouched. They fought with rapidly flagging morale when they realized the scam perpetrated on them by the US establishment.

Therefore, just as in Vietnam, America had no right to be there in the Bay of Bengal. It was a fight between India and Pakistan. Alas, that criminal asshole named Richard Nixon thought otherwise. It was only when the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, directly threatened Nixon with all-out war on India’s side, that Nixon shat in his pants and the 7th Fleet backed away.

All this is history. To all Americans, go read about it. Want to know what really started the Vietnam War? Read ‘The Pentagon Papers’. Don’t worry whether it is a fake. It is not. It was written by your own Department of Defense, no kidding. Read about how treacherous your “shining city on the hill” can really get.

The word “scorn” above wasn’t used lightly.

To anyone who has even one little neuron rattling around inside his brain, it should be obvious that the whole Bangladesh affair left a darkly negative impression of America on Indians and directly led to the ‘situation’ that the innocent American couple found themselves in, one that my classmate and I and our two hefty minders in uniform saved them from, in the nick of time, exactly 50 years back.

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Every time ordinary blue collar Americans, descendants of the Greatest Generation hear their Grand dads tell them stories of life in the 1950s, they seethe with anger. They believe that their current situation is the abnormal, the unexpected, the avoidable. They heap the blame on their leaders, whom they have clubbed together as a reviled demographic called “the deep state”.

The reality however is that this is the normal and not the era of the Greatest Generation – that was the abnormal.

Finally……..

“Independence Day”……. to those Americans for whom the study of history has never been a strong skill, they want these two words to conjure up an image of a people in a centuries-long struggle against cruelty, torture, dehumanization and ethnic cleansing where millions have suffered and died. They want you to celebrate it with military parades and flag hoistings. They want to repeat meaningless inane words such as, “thank you for your service” over and over.

It is nearly 250 years, so why not ask a black American what the two words really mean to him?

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Elon Musk has said, “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is – empathy”. Today, USAID shut down completely. Apparently it was too empathetic for Musk.

The US Military must feel proud to jump from the world’s largest killer to the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. And Americans must be thrilled to have the world’s most morally corrupt Supreme Court judges.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO THE WORLD’S RICHEST BANANA REPUBLIC!!!