/lit/ - Literature

>>19173239
>Overall, the main takeaway I got was that UXO/mine removal is a major industry worldwide. If you don't mind the high risk of death, it's a fantastically well-paid job for the uneducated in most of central Europe, Africa and parts of Asia.
My dad actually knew a guy who did this in Europe. Professional UXO guy. Apparently one time a mine exploded in his face while disarming it and blew his jaw off. He had to get reconstructive surgery. I think he might've lost a hand, too. It was apparently some kind of booby trap within the bomb, but I can't remember.

>>19176547
>And this is for the better, this means big countries won’t be able to bully small countries anymore. Fuck geopolitics.
I think China's leaders see what they're doing it returning the world to a kind of Westphalian form of geopolitics which traces back to the Peace of Westphalia set up after the end of the Thirty Years War, which then saw a modern reboot with the United Nations (the culmination of Westphalian logic set up after World War II; it's literally enshrined in the U.N. charter). From the Chinese perspective, it's the United States which abrogated that system after the Cold War for what American leaders call a "rules-based international order" but the catch is that the U.S. sets the rules -- and that is sometimes called "unipolar hegemony" or "the U.S.-led international order" and so on. This is why both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists or "liberal hawks" like Hillary Clinton probably have more in common with each other than they do Henry Kissinger, a realist and a Westphalian thinker.

So it's ironic that the strongest defenders of Westphalianism today are non-western countries.

This is where the American nationalists and ultranationalists get mixed up. The MAGA types who dread ChiCom troops in blue helmets springing out of underground tunnels dug underneath Walmarts are wrong, but they're somewhat closer to the truth than the far-right white nationalist types who envision China (for some strange reason) as like a Chinese version of their own politics -- i.e. opposed to an international system. I saw this neo-Nazi clown Andrew Anglin the other day talk about how China is resisting the United Nations! It's the opposite. It's the United States which has done more to undermine the U.N. than any country. This is also why the MAGA types are at their core ultra-imperialists, because they don't believe that the U.S. should be subject to international law or subordinate to international institutions whatsoever, which is what would be the consequence of the United States degrading from a global empire into a national state accountable to those institutions.

Also my book recommendation is "Beware of Small States" by David Hirst, which is about the Lebanese Civil War and Middle Eastern politics more broadly since everyone had their hand in it.