Proxy War Quotes

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

War has changed. It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines. War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine. War has changed. ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities. Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control. War…has changed. The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history. War…has changed. When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.

With that, the hologram did dissolve and PROXY returned to his normal appearance and size. "Ugh," the droid said with a shudder. "I hate being him." The apprentice stood, deep in thought and nodded. "I think he does too.

Amnesia was a soldier's best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do.

For example, the number of patients admitted to our ward declined precipitously during the first days of the Gulf War and during the European soccer championships. People were too absorbed for a time in affairs other than their own – albeit by the proxy of television – to contemplate suicide. The boredom of self-absorption is thus one of the promoters of attempted suicide, and being attached to a cardiac monitor for a time or having an intravenous infusion in one’s arm helps to relieve it. I’m treated, therefore I am. Patterns

As long ago as 1795, in an essay titled Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant worked out what such deterrence ultimately leads to: “A war, therefore, which might cause the destruction of both parties at once … would permit the conclusion of a perpetual peace only upon the vast burial-ground of the human species.”22 (Kant’s book title came from an innkeeper’s sign featuring a cemetery—not the type of perpetual peace most of us strive for.) Deterrence acts as only a temporary solution to the Hobbesian temptation to strike first, allowing both Leviathans to go about their business in relative peace, settling for small proxy wars in swampy Third World countries.

One Twitter user, an architect named René Girard, put it quite eloquently: “ESG is a way for politicians to force ideology on the public without having to go through the electoral process and gaining public support. This power is exercised through the proxy of corporations. It is anything but democratic. It is totalitarian.

They understood what had really held the market together before. Violence. After all, what good was a debt if the creditor couldn't compel it to be paid?

He was a real-life soldier playing soldier from his memories of made up soldiers.

But empathy today is becoming what love was in the 1960s—a sentimental ideal, extolled in catchphrases (what makes the world go round, what the world needs now, all you need) but overrated as a reducer of violence. When the Americans and Soviets stopped rattling nuclear sabers and stoking proxy wars, I don’t think love had much to do with it, or empathy either.

The music on the radio--pop, rock, rap, and country songs which promote class war and celebrate idiocy, sociopathy, immoral wealth accumulation, discrimination, and stultifying social roles--is the thrown voice of Wall Street. All of the broker's values are exemplified in this music. ...The elite seek to program, dupe, hypnotize, control you--who they regard as their property, their 'bitch'--through these proxy singers. ...Don't let them talk to you that way.

He accused republicans in his own party of conducting a “proxy war” against Howard. He threw into the mix Churchill, Pétain, Charles de Gaulle, the failings of the Weimar republic and the rise of Hitler. In the Sydney Morning Herald at that time I set him some homework:   Clearly explain how an Australian head of state with powers as proposed in the referendum could bring to office in Canberra a local equivalent of the most vicious dictator of the century?   He never justified the Hitler slur to anyone.

Fifty years ago, how many foresaw Hiroshima, Dresden, the Blitz, Stalingrad, Auschwitz? A big wall dividing Berlin in two? Television? Decolonisation? China and America fighting a proxy war in Vietnam? Elvis Presley? The Stones? Stockhausen? Jodrell Bank? Plastics? Cures for polio, measles, syphilis? The Space Race? The present is a curtain. Most of us can’t see behind it. Those who do see – via luck or prescience – change what is there by seeing. That’s why it’s unknowable. Fundamentally. Intrinsically. I like adverbs.

Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.

Masculinity is not about being the biggest, the fastest, the strongest, the one who sleeps with the most girls, and the one who has the most money. The one who has the most accomplishments is not the most masculine. In fact, it is often the men who covet these things most who are covering and compensating for the greatest insecurities. Let us revere the one who loves others deeply, loves himself deeply, and has a dream that he is inspired to live with and by and through. He is a man. He does not stand unmoved or untouched in the face of truly moving experiences. He does not judge the totality of his life or anyone else’s life by the totals on the scoreboard as the clock ticks down to zero. He does not use money as a proxy for emotional connection nor material possessions as the measure of his self-worth. He does not define his manhood by the number of women he has conquered. He does not always fight fire with fire; sometimes he doesn’t need to fight at all. He does not meet seriousness with silliness when it is seriousness that is required. He does not take risks for risks’ sake, because he does not hide from his frailty, his mortality, or his humanity. He does not pretend to know everything about anything, nor is he afraid to admit when he knows nothing about something. And perhaps most important of all, he does not walk around thinking he’s The Man. No, the masculine man goes through a journey, a process of self-discovery, and figures out what he needs to do to acquire the tools, knowledge, wisdom, grace, love, passion, and joy to pursue his destiny. His destiny is his dreams. Those may evolve over time, but in their pursuit, he is not breaking down anyone else or hurting anyone else. He is not at war with other people, conquering them. He is the one joining forces, searching for the win-win. He is the one who is lifting others up, inspiring others through his journey and his own process (in which he is finding ways to create value along the way). He is the hero of his own journey. And in so being, he is looking for every way to have the best relationships possible with his family, friends, his romantic partner, his colleagues, or his customers. He’s finding ways to be the best possible version of himself. Masculinity is about discovering yourself and owning what you find. It’s about being kind to others, and pursuing your dreams with all the passion and energy you can muster. It’s about doing something that is meaningful to you that brings value to others. That’s how you build a legacy.

As if to demonstrate the possibilities of socialism, the People's Republic of China not only survived but is prospering just when the productive decrepitude of capitalism is more apparent than ever, its imperial offer unable to obtain submission and its military power unable to compel it, only to rain destruction on societies that are the targets - such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria - or proxies - such as Ukraine today - in vain efforts to do so. Against this background, Chinese and other persisting socialisms demonstrate to increasingly interested publics worldwide, particularly amid the pandemic and the war, that there are saner ways to organise society, material production, politics and culture as well as a society's relations with nature and other societies.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ... McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history. The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed. A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self.

Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west – the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (33 million Saudis as opposed to 81 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbour if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards itself as the champion of its respective version of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf. The American-led deal on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which was concluded in the summer of 2015, has in no way reassured the Gulf States that the threat to them from Iran has diminished, and the increasingly bitter war of words between Saudi Arabia and Iran continues, along with a war sometimes fought by proxy elsewhere most notably in Yemen.

Again, Syd had that feeling, the past as an echo, repeating itself as it faded. The poor had longed for Jubilee to save them from the powerful, and now the one-time patrons longed for the Machine to do the same. Every revolution believes it can return something that had been lost, but nothing is ever the same. The only thing that endures are people. Syd saw that clearly now, and perhaps so too did Marie. You could serve a revolution, an idea that ended up an echo if itself, or you could serve people, with their maddening contradictions. You couldn't serve both. You had to choose.

The Wright-Curtiss feud persists to the present day as a proxy war—historians of early flight tend to deify one and demonize the other. Either the Wrights were brilliant visionaries and honest toilers attempting ward off the incursions of those, particularly Curtiss, who stole their ideas and even perhaps improved on them, but refused to acknowledge their debt in word or banknote; or Wilbur and Orville were rapacious misanthropes who were all too happy to stop progress in its tracks by stifling brilliant innovators, particularly Curtiss, all to stuff their pockets with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

Lebanon, it seems, was almost designed to be the everlasting battleground for others’ political, strategic and ideological conflicts, conflicts which sometimes escalate into their proxy wars.

US Vice President Joe Biden gave the US government’s real view of its regional and Syrian allies with undiplomatic frankness when speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics on October 2. He told his audience that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and UAE were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

David Petraeus, when he became the top US general in Iraq, got to know Suleimani quite well, referring to the master spy as “evil” and mulling whether or not to tell President Bush that “Iran is, in fact, waging war on the United States in Iraq, with all of the US public and governmental responses that could come from that revelation.” For Petraeus, Iran had “gone beyond merely striving for influence in Iraq and could be creating proxies to actively fight us, thinking that they [could] keep us distracted while they [tried] to build WMD and set up [the Mahdi Army] to act like Lebanese Hezbollah in Iraq.

U.S. global sovereignty abroad, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, is widely recognized as buttressed by practices of torture by U.S. officials and their proxies, if not by outright war (covert and overt) that terrorizes a people. The

The only difference between Obama’s and McCain’s foreign policy was that Obama represented that faction of America’s foreign policy establishment which places an emphasis of long term “Soft Power” strategies; saving war as a last resort should their phony NGO “protests”, hunger sanctions and “rebel” proxy wars fail to achieve the intended effect. McCain on the other hand, just like the departing Bush/Cheney, was the candidate of choice for the “Neo-Conservative” faction of America’s ruling class; a group that believes in war as a first choice, second choice and third choice! The argument between these overlapping “schools of thought” is generally over tactics, not over the final result.

Iran, the Syrian regime’s only regional ally, began dispatching military advisers to bolster Assad. (Syria had been the only country to support Iran during its eight-year-long war with Iraq, a conflict that ended in 1988, in which Saddam Hussein liberally used chemical weapons and Iran lost a million young men.) These intrusions transformed the Syrian revolution into a proxy war, where regional powers fought for influence.

Colonial feminists are concerned with ‘liberating’ Other women, not critiquing colonial capitalism and its neoliberal successor. Colonial feminists condemn the burqa, but not the wars waged or fought by proxy in the service of resource accumulation, trade routes and pipelines, enabling and supporting autocratic and fundamentalist regimes.

Dictatorial regimes in Africa and Latin America that aided America or European interests (resource extraction, investment privileges, strategic support in the cold war) and were, in return, propped up by Western protectors have been called “client fascism,” “proxy fascism,” or “colonial fascism.” One thinks here of Chile under General Pinochet (1974–90) or Western protectorates in Africa like Seko-Seso Mobutu’s Congo (1965–97). These client states, however odious, cannot legitimately be called fascist, because they neither rested on popular acclaim nor were free to pursue expansionism. If they permitted the mobilization of public opinion, they risked seeing it turn against their foreign masters and themselves. They are best considered traditional dictatorships or tyrannies supported from outside.

The immigration debate in America today is not really about immigration. Nor is it about national security, the economy or the vagaries of our outdated asylum system. Like much else in our civic life, the immigration debate is mostly a proxy for domestic policies and the culture wars. It just happens to a particularly potent proxy because it tends to elicit strong feelings about the American dream, ethnic identity, class and nationhood. That is to say, immigration is an issue that’s ripe for exploitation and cooption by both the Left and the Right. Each side can easily condemn the other without ever getting down to debating actual US policy on its merits. This is one reason why we still have an immigration system that dates from 1965. Book Review: “They’re not sending their best.” Claremont Review of Books, volume 20, no.3 (summer, 2020). P.45

the fact that there was a thing called apartheid and it was ending and that was a big deal, but I didn’t understand the intricacies of it. What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets. As the apartheid regime fell, we knew that the black man was now going to rule. The question was, which black man? Spates of violence broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, the African National Congress, as they jockeyed for power. The political dynamic between these two groups was very complicated, but the simplest way to understand it is as a proxy war between Zulu and Xhosa. The Inkatha was predominantly Zulu, very militant and very nationalistic. The ANC was a broad coalition encompassing many different tribes, but its leaders at the time were primarily Xhosa. Instead of uniting for peace they turned on one another, committing acts of unbelievable savagery.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as allies battling Soviet occupation forces and their Afghan communist proxies, the CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization, along with weapons and other supplies.

In historical reality, bushido was not a codified set of beliefs, despite Inazo Nitobe’s well-intentioned effort to interpret his own nation’s social background for a Western audience through such a proxy. 2 In fact, the concept could not have existed during the heyday of the samurai, the Warring States Period (roughly 1467–1573 ce), because archipelago-wide, multigenerational warfare was the direct result of a total lack of federated identity. There simply was no Japan and, therefore, no Japanese identity for the samurai to guard.

The CIA found in Laos a country where it already had amassed influence, in the heart of a Cold War battlefield, and which had been largely ignored by the American military. These CIA leaders saw that an inexpensive—in American money and lives, at least—proxy war could be a template for fights in other places around the world, at a time when presidents were looking for ways to continue the Cold War without going through Congress or committing ground troops.

the CCP can influence senior politicians. This ‘corruption by proxy’, in which top leaders keep their hands clean while their family members exploit their association to make fortunes, has been perfected by the ‘red aristocracy’ in Beijing. In the crucial years 2014 and 2015, Beijing was aggressively expanding into the South China Sea while Obama, Kerry and Biden were sitting on their hands. The billionaire businessman and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was a late entrant in the contest to become the 2020 Democratic Party candidate for US president. He is the most Beijing-friendly of all aspirants. With extensive investments in China, he opposes the tariff war and often speaks up for the CCP regime.

Whether these politicians lack understanding of the law or simply seek to circumvent it by using corporate regulations instead is unclear. But in the case of both Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to ask: What is the impact in Palestine and Lebanon, where these groups are powerful players in local politics—local politics that have no shortage of violent actors? Azza El Masri is a media researcher from Lebanon who, for the past several years, has studied content moderation. “Is Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and its participation in the Iran-KSA proxy war tantamount to terrorist activities? Yes,” she told me in a text message. “However, this doesn’t absolve the fact that Hezbollah today is the most powerful political actor in Lebanon.” Lebanon’s political scene is, to the outsider, messy and difficult to parse. After the fifteen-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, the country’s parliament instituted a law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment, allowing the groups that were formerly militias to form political parties. Only Hezbollah—an Iran-sponsored creation to unify the country’s Shia population during the war—was allowed by the postwar Syrian occupation to retain its militia. The United States designated Hezbollah (which translates to “Party of God”) a foreign terrorist organization in 1995, more than a decade after the group bombed US military barracks in Beirut.

I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism. America massacred civilians in No Gun Ri and My Lai, it poisoned fields of crops and buried mines, it left behind machine guns in the wrong hands and let houses turn to rubble. San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.

Sergey Radchenko and David Wolff, ‘To the Summit via Proxy-Summits: New Evidence from Soviet and Chinese Archives on Mao’s Long March to Moscow, 1949’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 16 (Fall 2007/Winter 2008), p. 106.

The Cold War met all the standards of an Infinite Game. Unlike finite warfare, where there are agreed-upon conventions for play, easily identifiable sides and a clear definition of when the war will end (e.g., a land grab or some other easily measurable, finite objective). In stark contrast, the Cold War was often played out with proxy players, there were no ground rules and there was certainly no clearly defined objective that would signal to all sides that the war will end.

The Ukraine war is surprising. Russians killing past Russians in Ukraine. It just seems so bizarre! It is basically a territorial civil war that has been turned into an international proxy war.

Elizabeth conveniently made Drake her proxy in an undeclared war against King Philip

The basics of the Ukraine war is Russia fighting European and USA supplied weapons.

The corporate controlled government engages in a wide range of frauds with the masses.

The Ukrainian and Russian death and injured tolls are high in the Ukraine war due to western supplied weaponry.

Ukraine accepted an international proxy war and now has to take the long term consequences of that.

The USA is at war with Russia. It is called a ‘Proxy War’ and Ukraine is the front man.

In 2023, the USA was in a proxy war with Russia and Space had been weaponized.

We fight to establish fundamental truths. The proxies fight over whether or not meat from a particular species of animal should be eaten, or on which day it should be eaten, or how it should be prepared. But I admit that I do rather admire them. They could certainly teach you a thing or two about revenge.

We stand with Ukraine until it becomes ‘Inconvenient’.

We stand with Ukraine until our own government agenda is achieved.

During the Second World War, Winston Churchill memorably said that ‘in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’. These days, inconvenient truths can also be mobbed by a hit squad of lies, generated and propagated by state media, online trolls and proxies alike.

At the height of the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), France found itself bankrupt, unable to rely on mercenaries and proxy forces, and in possession of a corrupt and moribund army. The government solved this problem through the creation of a modern civil service to administer the army, organize and regulate it, and better support it through regular management and logistics. The result, by the end of the seventeenth century, was the most powerful, professional, and advanced military in Europe.

Koreans’ love–hate relationship with Japan carries on to this day, compounded by their relationship with the superpowers who took over where Japan left off: the United States and the Soviet Union, who together liberated Korea only to carve it up as a proxy for the Cold War.

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

If you take a look at the Cold War in terms of actual actions, not rhetoric, it’s not primarily a Russian-American confrontation, though that was always in the background. On the ground, each of the two major powers, the grand superpower and the lesser superpower, intervened often forcefully in their own domains. For the Russians, Eastern Europe, for the United States, most of the rest of the world. And each used the pretext of the threat of the other as a justification for intervention. So when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956, they were defending free Hungary against the fascist forces supported by the West. And whenever the US intervenes anywhere in the world, whatever the facts may be, it’s defending itself and the Free World from Russian subversion or aggression. Even if there are no Russians anywhere in sight, it’s the Russians or their proxies. Though the two sides are unequal in scale and scope of their violent actions, they have followed rather similar policies. That’s the real structure of the Cold War as long as it lasted, up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s if you look at the actions rather than the rhetoric.

This fourth-generation warfare (4GW) codified the use of guerrilla and terrorist proxies as the primary means of warfare between states, large and small. In Lind et al.’s view, 4GW was a method of warfare that allowed the weak forces to defeat the strong.

He’s changed?” “Yes. He’s started hanging out with a different crowd, a richer crowd. The men are all so arrogant. They don’t doubt themselves for a minute. They go to work and people agree with them all day long. And then they come home and their wives agree with them too. It’s a rarefied group, but—if you hang around with them long enough—it starts to feel like that’s how things should be. Regular working families, families where wives are equals, begin to seem like losers. You know the husband would start bossing the wife around if he made enough money, if he was man enough.” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Man enough?” “Yes. It’s surreal. You’ve got all these nerdy-looking, chubby men who built their fortunes behind desks. And as soon as they get rich, they start using all this macho language, as if they’re gangsters or something. The other day, I heard one of Andrew’s partners talking about a competitor starting a price war. He said, ‘If those bastards screw with us, we’ll take ’em to the mattresses.’” Sarah caught the Godfather reference and smiled. “Yes. I’ve heard that kind of talk before. Bank account becomes a proxy for dick size.” “Exactly!

It is futile to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and hope that it will go away. Yet, absurdly, this has been American policy since the September 11 attacks. U.S. officials seem to believe that if they act as if Islam is a religion of peace and the Koran a book of peace, Muslims will feel themselves compelled to behave accordingly. An extreme example of this bizarre assumption came in President Obama’s heralded speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, 2009.16 Obama was extremely anxious to appear sympathetic and accommodating to Muslim grievances—so much so that he not only quoted the Koran (and did so ham-handedly and out of context, as we have seen), but also signaled in several ways, whether by ignorance or by design, that he was Muslim himself. For example, Obama extended “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum”—that is, peace be upon you. According to Islamic law, however, this is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided”—in other words, “Peace be upon the Muslims.” Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naïve, non-Muslim, Islamophilic presidents offer the greeting to Muslims. Obama also said the words that Muslims traditionally utter after mentioning the names of prophets—“peace upon them”—after mentioning Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Does he, then, accept Muhammad as a prophet? No reporter has asked him, but that was decidedly the impression he gave, intentionally or not, to the Islamic world. Obama spoke of a “relationship between Islam and the West” marked by “centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars.” He then named three sources of present-day tensions between Muslim countries and the United States: the legacy of Western colonialism; “a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations;” and “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization,” which “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Significantly, Obama only listed ways in which the West has allegedly mistreated the Islamic world. He said not a word about the Koran’s doctrines of jihad and religious supremacism. Nothing at all about the Koranic imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that arises from Koranic teachings and which existed long before the ostensibly harmful spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world. Obama did refer to “violent extremists” who have “exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The idea that Islamic jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, born of ignorance of the Koran’s contents. The jihadists may indeed be a minority of Muslims, but there is no solid evidence that the vast majority of Muslims reject in principle what the jihadists do—and indeed, how could they, given the Koran’s explicit mandates for warfare against Infidels?

The Bull-Lion Combat motif was developed by the Aryan Persians to express the theological civil war within the Osirian religion and the disintegration of the ancient Egyptian Mill which the Judeo-Christian is still trying to harmonize the constituents thereof (e.g. Ezekiel 1:10). That motif stems, however, from the Ouroboros symbol denoting the ever cyclically forking Aryan identity. Therefore, despite of the Jew's plagiarism of the Abrahamic sacrifice and the apparent practice of the ritual, the Jew's articulated his Osirian faith (as his mithraic Roman and Persian brethren) by fusing it into the Semitic scripture; after all, the Achaemenid Empire contributed to the emancipation of its Jew proxy where we later on witness the emergence of the main emblem of Persia of the Lion and the Sun signaling yet another attempt of plagiarism after the Jew's failure of accomplishing the Aryan's ultimate goal. Now and after which the Semitic Arab blow shattered the Aryan Christian face into pieces, a new Aryan schism surfaced and followed suit in total disregard to 1 Peter 5:8 forking thereby yet another Aryan identity anew (e.g. UK with its Lion Symbol vs. EU with its Bull Symbol).

policy makers often see the media agenda as a proxy for the public agenda and media content as their best insight into public opinion.

As Noam Chomsky so well explains in his book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants: When his rule was challenged by the Sandinistas [the insurgent group named after Augusto Cesar Sandino] in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza”- that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power. The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out. Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed. The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard -- soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)3 Again, we see Jimmy Carter not really living up to all of his lofty human rights rhetoric.

Fair or no, immigration is considered in the context of economic scarcity, fear of terrorism, wars and geopolitical conflicts, which may be incipient stages of informal proxy wars.

The problem with tastefulness is that it is often posited as definitive and absolute, when in reality it is little more than a proxy for wider socio-economic dynamics.

When power relations are unclear or unstable, process negotiations can become proxy wars for leverage and legitimacy, endangering substantive negotiations.

THE VIETNAM WAR (1955–1975) was ostensibly fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but it is often regarded as having been a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States.

into another proxy battle in the War on Racism.”42