"If at age 20 you are a conservative then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are a liberal then you have no brains."
Sir Winston Churchill
ADVOCATE FOR TERM LIMITS

Obama obviously knows very little about economics, specifically that "Society stagnates when independent productive achievers begin to be socially demonized and even punished for their accomplishments." This dilemma fogs Obama's reality. To him, accepting this truth is a "false choice", his answer to things he doesn't understand. And by the way... where is John Galt?

Saturday, March 8, 2014

HISTORY AND FANTASY: The Road To Ragnarök

"As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! "

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS
RUDYARD KIPLING 1919
All of a sudden, as if it were 1854  and the "Great Game" was  again afoot ...  we find ourselves thrust back into the Crimea where Russia once more ...ad nauseam... acts the bully while playacting the savior.  History once again comes back to bite us on the ass because we still don't get  that human nature as chronicled by history, is replete with nasty and horrendous people.
During the last 14 years we have witnessed the return of an Islamic Jihad bent on world conquest, something which seemed to have died a slow and strangulating death between the siege of Vienna and the demise of the Ottoman Caliphate.  It was as if humankind was exhausted by  a thousand years of fighting over God and decided to take a time out which we then foolishly believed to be the end of something instead of a mere intermission.
The contest between Russia and the west which culminated in the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, we also believed to be a relic of the past.  When the wall in Berlin came down and the "evil" empire with its socialist underpinnings disintegrated into independent nations, some historians proclaimed it to be the "End of History". 
China, a four thousand year old civilization without peer,  began a rapid decline in the 18th and 19th centuries fueled by opium which addicted the masses and destroyed the "Middle Kingdom" all to the benefit of those who brought it to the Chinese people. The internal response to this national disgrace led directly to the the People's Republic, and the end of any semblance of democracy and now  that government's  clear intent to regain its preeminent and predominate position in the affairs of mankind without regard to liberty and justice and  particularly at the expense of the United States.
Out of the cauldron of a violent world history, emerged America over 200 years ago, We were for the first time a great experiment  in individual rights coupled with individual responsibilities thereby making the need for suffocating government and men on horseback almost unnecessary.  We were a nation of laws and not men and that made us ...exceptional before all the peoples of the world.  Our credo was the golden rule and we fought wars with both foreign strangers and   family members in order to make that ideal come true.  We were told by the founders that this thing called freedom would be hard and that we would have to be eternally vigilant because what we had was fragile and far too easy to lose when if we did  not pay attention.
We and the rest of humanity learned the hard way that the only true barrier to war was the ability to prove to those who wanted it, that it would mean their destruction because of our ability and determination,if necessary, to destroy them first, .  We never wanted this duty but history foists the responsibility for peace and justice on those who finally learn that if they don't want chaos then they must guarantee order. 
History also was filled with examples of great nations and empires who provided that order only in the end to grow weary, weak  and diseased from within, as they disappeared from view...some forever.
America is at the crossroads of history today.  We have been here before, but each time it is always very different.  This time we have leaders who want to fundamentally change us.  They want us to become less independent...less free...less exceptional.  They also want us to cease and desist from providing the order and the leadership for a world more dangerous than in any time in our collective and historic memories.  Many of them believe that history began with them and nothing of consequence occurred before the world was fortunate enough to be graced by their presence.
We cannot allow people who know nothing about the past to force us to follow their ignorant and arrogant pathway  to the future.     They have an infantile grasp of reality and human nature because they have rejected all that has come before.  They reject the very concept of evil because they also reject the very concept of good.  In the end they cannot determine if  Putin is a good guy or a bad guy because everything is relative and who are we to judge?  And therein lies the easy road to our demise. 
These are the apostles of fundamental change who know nothing about fundamental human nature.  Worse they do not know what they do not know all the while making policy for... what they do not know.
The predictability of human nature should be our guide  to matters of power and affairs of state.  Our need to understand the human condition is one salient reason we read history and great literature, watch  great drama and study scripture.  Art confirms for us all the admonitions we have been taught about sinners and saints and monsters and angels. 
 No law can legislate bad men to be good.  The law can only give us the tools to contest and control the wicked  and protect and educate the innocent.  When those tools are broken or taken away, then all hell breaks loose.  This is as certain as the rising and setting of the sun.
There is some perverse gene that humanity carries which condemns us to struggle towards goodness while the primal tries to drag us back into the wilderness.  Politics is at its essence the ability to manage the predators in order to allow the prey to survive and even thrive in an always precarious safety.
All of the above is incomprehensible to those in command of the  nation today.  Their naivete as to how the world works puts the entire world in mortal danger.  Today there are no guards in the watchtowers of the Republic.  Only dame fortune and  our history, ironically understood by our adversaries while ignored and derided by our leaders, has kept us, up to now, from the abyss.
Keeping order and the peace requires strength, wisdom and being a bit of an warrior or a hunter.  Only they can fully understand what Shakespeare called "the evil that men do" that "lives after them" .  They know that wild beasts with tortured souls wait in the tall grass to devour us just because they believe they can.  There is no logic here save the logical madness of the jungle.  The self styled civilized don't think this way so they rarely if ever, see the brutes coming for them.
Today we stand on one side of a wall that we have built to keep us safe.  Instead it's function has been distorted to separate us from a world  we are disengaging from. We relinquish our leadership to... we know not who nor do we care.  It is our penance for all the "terrible" things we have had to do in the name of protecting freedom in the world over the last 70 years.  At least that is how the fantasy rationale underpinning our fantasy foreign policy and our fantasy domestic policy explains it.
 Today instead of achieving things ...we wish for them and incredibly, expect like children, that wishing will make it so.  Wishing is a drug that has killed empires and civilizations.  The reality of the world is and always has been that it is only safe to wish when you have the power, knowledge, skills and the will to lawfully make that wish come true. Then and only then can we find some respite for a time before  the cycle of forgetting, ignorance and violence... begins anew.
The Norse myths like many other cultures have a doomsday scenario which is grounded in the fateful nature of both men and their Gods.  The Ragnarök in part says the following about mankind's appetite for ages of self destruction followed by renewal and then another inevitable age of mayhem followed again by rebirth... ad infinitum...

"Brothers will fight and kill each other,sisters' children will defile kinship
It is harsh in the world,
whoredom rife —an axe age, a sword age —shields are riven—
a wind age, a wolf age—before the world goes headlong....No man will have mercy on another. "
 Man's fate is still to perpetually be on guard  in order that "the better angels of our nature" can survive and  prevail in a world that remains only minutes away at any given time from... Ragnarök.
ERLANDSSON

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