The other day I read an article about North Korea sending hundreds of balloons carrying trash and animal excrement over to South Korea and dumping them over the country. It is apparently called ‘gifts of sincerity’ by the North Korean authorities, and it is claimed to be in response to numerous balloons that North Korean activists based in South Korea send to their northern homeland full of food, propaganda and western media entertainment!
In other parts of the world you see other politicians with extremist views obtain significant, sometimes winning, votes and then you have this population of populist showmen such as the wonderful Don, and the brazenly libertarian Chainsaw-Javier Milei of Argentina.
The bottom line is that in today’s global geopolitics, we still have all those power struggles, alliances, conspiracies, massacres and wars, but we have also added lots of extra sh*t to the world’s geopolitical miseries.
There is a little game French people play with their children or grandchildren (let’s call it Tapette), and that is they hold each other’s chin, look each other in the eye, and sing something like:
- I hold you, You hold me, By the goatee, The first of us who laughs Will have a slap
Then each side starts making figures to make the other one laugh, and the one who cracks first loses, and the winner gives him/her a little tap on the cheek.
So the bottom line is that after about a 1000 years of killing and destroying, we decided for a few decades that building together, in spite of our differences, is better for all of us. But then, just like a cancer that returns after a few years of remission, our belligerency is coming back more violent and certainly technologically better equipped. While a number of world powers are playing this chess, gambling and the Tapette game, other ones are doing their best to lobby for the Normalization of Sh*t in Geopolitics.
Paris, June 6, 2024,
Zeejay