this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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It was strategy for industry and government with an international focus. JP Morgan hires Japanese businessmen to acquire equity in Japanese firms and Samsung hires American bankers to negotiate loans with Wall Street. Nigerian oil executives shake hands with African American State Department staffers to negotiate trans-Atlantic trade deals. Korean native speakers in Seoul make sure American military bases don't create political headaches for Korean politicians. Middle Eastern dictators in Egypt and Israel and Saudi Arabia met with counterparts who knew their customs and spoke their language.
The goal remained consolidation of wealth into the hands of a handful of (primarily white, American based) oligarchs. But the scope of global commerce required regional HQs and middle-men who had to navigate a kaleidoscope of local organizations and logistics partners.
Trumpism is pulling all that back and trying to return to the old Colonial model of capitalism. Your hierarchy is primarily predicated on your physical identity - White. Christian. Fuckable. Man. - in that descending order. Now we put Donald Trump and Tony Blair into the chairmanship of the Gaza Peace Plan, because we don't trust any Arabs or Israelis to get the job done. We fuck with India, China, and Mexico on a daily basis, because their heads of state don't meet our definition of Real Person.
The objectives of the current government have shifted substantially from the Nixon to Obama neoliberal era. We are a white nationalist government first and foremost. It isn't that we still have the same problem. It's that we have a totally different set of goals.
the french model of completely banning even the collection of that information, outside of strictly for facilitating medical care, seems like the best way forward imo.
if you have that information, the race supremacists will use it to their own ends if they ever come into power...as we are seeing right now with ICE
You can go back to the 18th century and see it in practice. Also in apartheid systems like the South African junta and the Hinduvista/Tibetan caste systems. The method works so long as the families at the top of the food chain can exert sufficient control downstream, typically via a mix of funding/staffing large occupying armies and pitting native peoples against one another to the benefit of the foreign ruler.
If you get into the history of the French and Indian War, for instance, you had the English and French colonialists backing various American native tribes in what was effectively a coast-wide war. Similarly, Cortez and Pizarro defeated the Aztec and Inca empires respectively in large part by turning insurgent factions within the empire against the chief monarchs and supporting their insurrection with superior European firepower. The end state of the fail of the local empires was foreign governors playing "Kingmaker" among the native peoples. Then they carved out larger and larger settlements for their own migrant populations, while stoking fear of the natives to encourage loyalty to the foreign crowns.
It's made up of distinct languages and cultures, as well as distinct understood identities and accepted hierarchies. The strategy of Divide and Conquer is an ancient and devastatingly effective one. Our post-WW2 neoliberal turn happened as a necessary rebuttal to Internationalist Communism (which was, itself, fumbled early on via the Soviet-Sino split). But it only needed to persist until the threat of Soviet Era support for anti-colonialist native coalitions faded.
Without a Stalin or Khrushchev or even a Castro or Tito willing to put a thousand guys with guns on a boat and send them to support a Marxist revolt in Columbia or Angola or Vietnam or Afghanistan, there's no need to pretend we need a Big NATO Tent. No more need for the EU. No more need for economic alliances in the Pacific Rim. Now its every Colonial Empire for themselves. We can go back to merchantilism and juicing our satraps like a bunch of ripe oranges.
The English Royal Family managed it for centuries. The Spanish and French for nearly as long. The Hapsburg Dynasty dominated European politics for longer still. Get into East Asian dynastic rule or the great empires of Ethiopia and Egypt... FFS, the Caesers reined across the Mediterranean for what? Nearly a millennium?
There's historical continuums that give birth to discrete divisions through geography and social conflict. The Silk Road connects the length of Asia, but the various mountains and deserts and human fortifications form hard divisions between both linguistics and social practices.
Physical and social division over time create a compact social separation between people in the same way it creates distinct speciation at longer distances and time frames.