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April 20, 2015

Now He Belongs to the Ages…

President Abraham Lincoln March, 1865 — President Abraham Lincoln
March, 1865

To reach beyond the mists of time and bring immediacy to the events that gripped a nation one hundred fifty years ago is an extremely difficult proposition. The war that cleaved across the breath of the American land mass and struck into the life blood of nearly every American family is at best a distant recollection and for most has little emotional relevance. The modern society struggles to understand the passion and commitment individual Americans brought to the concepts of union, liberty, individual rights, and the relationship of a governed people to its government that so stirred the nation to the cataclysmic conflict. From Sharpsburg, Maryland to Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, the remnants of titanic battle scattered among fields, cemeteries, memorials and roads the strategic value of which are known to few and passed by millions without a glint of recognition of what lies beneath the traveled path.

It has not always been so. The intense emotions that built over 30 years and exploded in the war that cost over 600,000 lives and immense destruction were for decades an acute sensation in the hearts of both north and south. The events at Appomattox that culminated in the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9th, 1865 were documented in the previous Ramparts, but the final act of the tragedy that forever secured the sacristy of the conflict was the murder of the national leader five days later on April 14, 1865. In a conflict that demanded the loss of so many, it was the almost Christ like death of Abraham Lincoln that seemed to stop the process of destruction forever in its tracks, as if a provision for washing the sins away for a wayward people had been pre-ordained. The stolen life of a single man seemed to bring a closure not possible through any other contemplated outcome.

On April 14th, 1865, the President of a United States that had fought an epic battle with itself for its very unity, was reported by many observers that day to be in an especially ebullient mood. He participated in a productive cabinet meeting in which he laid out his determination to steer a magnanimous course for the nation’s reconstruction, and for the first time in many nights planned a strictly social outing that evening to attend a popular play currently playing at the Ford’s theater in Washington ,Our American Cousin. He had invited his victorious general of the armies, U.S. Grant, to accompany the President and his wife, but due to a relative lack of comfort the two wives had for each other, Grant deferred. The President looking forward to the life affirming experience of laughter after so many years of crushing responsibility and tragedy, determined to go anyway.

It was Lincoln’s fate that the leading actor of the playhouse, John Wilkes Booth, saw himself as an actor on a far greater stage than that of the local theater, and had for months determined to play a defining role in history. The headmaster of a particularly bizarre gaggle of malcontents and miscreant Southern sympathizers, Booth self-identified as the avenger to reverse the fortunes of a conflict that the South had for months progressively pointed toward defeat. With the South’s defeat assured with its army’s collapse at Appomattox, Booth somehow convinced himself that with an epic sacrifice, the tide would be reversed. The cleansing act would be the decapitation of the Union leadership, with the violent deaths of the President, leading General, Vice President and Secretary of State to so shock the North that it would sue for peace and give the South the breathing room it needed. The cockamamie plan required the simultaneous actions of multiple conspirators, but Booth gave himself the honor of removing the hated victorious President .

It was a sign of the innocence of the times that Booth and his fellow conspirators came as close as they did to accomplishing the calamitous plan. As the President sat in the Presidential box at Ford’s to enjoy the play, Booth’s fellow conspirators fanned across Washington to remove the other stalwarts of government. The conspirator Lewis Powell showed the most malevolent commitment, entering the house of the Secretary of State William Seward, viciously attacking Seward’s son nearly killing him, then cascading up the stairs of the residence to enter the bedroom of the prostrate Seward, who had been severely injured in a recent carriage accident and was recovering. Slashing with a knife, Powell nearly killed the Secretary of State before being incapacitated by the Secretary’s other sons and household servants. The conspirator Atzerodt was positioned at the Willard Hotel, the residence of the Vice President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, but lost his nerve to attack and went off to get drunk, thus saving the Vice President for the honor of replacing the irreplaceable.

The penultimate act was left to Booth himself. The President resided at the theater in a box accompanied by an army major, Henry Rathbone, Rathbone’s fiancé, and the President’s wife. The President’s security detail was, stunningly given the emotions of the times, a single police officer, John Frederick Parker, who determined to be across the street at a tavern during the play’s intermission and never returned, leaving the President accessible to anyone who determined to enter the box. Booth, as a celebrity, had no problem entering the Presidential box, and waited for an acknowledged line in the play that never failed to bring laughter across the house. With the comedic line delivered, the President leaned back and with his last conscious act enjoyed a final moment of relaxed joy, as Booth positioned himself directly behind the president, placed a revolver against the President’s head – and fired.

A single bullet from close range entered President Lincoln’s brain from the left and lodged behind his right eye, and for all intent he joined the hundreds of thousands who passed in the war’s previous days and years, as the final sacrifice of a country’s death spasm. The laughing crowd did not immediately interpret the muffled shot as apart from the play as the terminally wounded President slumped forward, then back, but the experienced Major Rathbone recognized the sound and scent of gunpowder and sprung into the assassin. Booth struck him with a knife and managed to free himself from Rathbone’s grasp, then leapt from the box only to catch his boot on the patriotic bunting and awkwardly fell the twelve feet to the stage , breaking his ankle. The 1700 attendants to the nation’s first presidential assassination slowly grasped the reality, and turned their gaze to the box, then to Booth as he exclaimed an oath, eventually codified in legend as “sic semper tyrannis” – “thus always, to tyrants!”, though the actual words were heard differently be every shocked person close enough to hear them. Booth ran off the stage and into history as devil incarnate, destroying any chance the nation had at a measured and wise reconciliation.

The unconscious President was brought across the street to the Peterson House, where military surgeons quickly determined the wound to be fatal. So began the vigil of the President’s family, government leaders, and the nation, with President Lincoln drawing his last breath at 7:22 am on April 15th, 1865. As word spread of the events of the night and the President’s death, the stunned realization that the President who had somehow shepherded the country through four years of incalculable horror, had at the very moment of triumph and peace, been sacrificed at the altar of a sinful nation, progressively took hold. Lincoln, in life, who had been viewed variably by the many touched by the conflict, began to assume in such a senseless death, a sanctification that seemed almost inevitable. A man who had come from the simplest of roots, had grown to lead a people with an almost devine sense of the way forward when many around him felt lost. The careful and gracefully beautiful language, the context of the words, the steady and careful hand of leadership, the bottomless well of humanity inherent in this man came to represent the whole of the goodness of those who endeavored to leave their homes and safety and risk all for the concept of a just cause.

The funereal journey seized the national consciousness, as did the furious manhunt for the conspirators. The murderer Booth met his end 9 days later in a shootout at a Virginia barn; the other conspirators were hunted down and eventually met their fate at the end of a hangman’s noose. The vengeance though complete, seemed so unequal to the loss.

With the passing of the years, Lincoln’s stature has grown to where he is seen as the equal of the greatest of leaders in human history. As Secretary Stanton preciently stated upon witnessing the moment of the great man’s death, “Now he belongs to the Ages..” A man so much of his own time, Lincoln spoke of the potential of mankind as God’s vehicle for a better time, to be touched, as he so beautifully expressed, by the better angels of our nature. In our current day, where horrors once again abound, Lincoln’s profound humanity soars above his moment on earth, and truly belongs to our age every bit as all the others. In such ageless humanity, lies for us the slightest glimmer of hope.

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015

The Final Acts of a Calamity

Post Battle Ruins of Richmond, Virginia April, 1965

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
William Tecumseh Sherman

April 2015 is the 150th anniversary of the denouement of the American Civil War, the calamity that defined the nation and whose tendrils still refine the consciousness of its people. As history recedes as an area of interest for the average American, the fundamental and inexorable causes leading to the war and the intensity and sacrifice of millions of people to the concept of a cause seems a trite and faded memory of a long ago time. The America that saw ideals as concepts to be defended with life as necessary doesn’t seem real to the current generation, who see the nation as a means of dispensing resources, and not a standard to uphold. To the American of 1861-1865, however, ideals were very real things and were equally real to the farmer from Wisconsin, the plantation owner from Mississippi, the news editor from New York, or the slave laborer in Alabama. For each the ideals were different, but the stakes in losing, total.How to persuade someone to whom losing is not an option, that they have indeed lost, is the centerpiece of any calamitous conflict, and the story of the last 14 days of the civil war are as eventful as any before.

Ramparts has addressed the unique circumstances of the final day of surrender of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia before, but of equal historical interest is the final acts that led to the concluding day. As we enter the story 150 years later, a cursory reminder of the tactics leading to the final chapter is appropriate for perspective. Although the Civil War may on the surface seem archaic for its fixed set-piece battles and agonal use of men as expendable targets of attrition, the tactics by both sides following the elevation of General Grant to supreme commander of the Union forces following the victories of July , 1863 at Vicksburg and Gettysburg were extremely modern and innovative. For the Union north, with superior resources and population, the plan outlined by Grant to President Lincoln was continental in scope and consistent with the modern concept that the morale and comfort of the population supporting the enemy army was the true target to weaken and destroy the army. Grant’s comprehensive plan was for General Meade’s Army of the Potomac to find, pin down and decimate Lee’s Army of Virginia while the Army groups of Sherman, Braggs, and Butler were to wreak havoc in the South’s interior, destroying communications, railways, and supplies, bringing the war to the doorstep of the population of the South, and carving up the residual Confederate armies into more and more isolated and digestible units. General Lee’s plans were equally modern. Lee sought to maintain superior ground, interior lines of communication, and bleed the opponent white to such an extent that the never ending war would be too expensive for the northern population to tolerate any longer.

The initial experiences of 1864 suggested Lee would be right as Grant was aggressively drawn in to bloodbath after blood bath in Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and finally into a miserable trench warfare at Petersburg on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. In the first thirty days of the Overland campaign, Grant stunningly lost over 54,000 men and was perceived as a ‘butcher’ in the northern press. But the the Army of Northern Virginia was now pinned down, and the rest of Grant’s plan began to play out, with Sherman eventually laying devastation to the deep south through Atlanta, through Georgia to the coast at Savannah, then brutally through the Carolinas. By the end of March, 1865, it was Lee who was reactive and desperate for materials and men, and Grant who was reinforced and aggressive.

Yet, the conflict was fought by men to whom death was preferable to loss of ideal, and despite the staggering differences by this time in both men and material, the end was not one of timid collapse but rather one of a contest of inch by bitter inch. It is often inconceivable to imagine the ability to fight tenaciously when all odds are against you and surrender would allow self preservation, but the sense of hopelessness seems to somehow instill tenacity beyond all sense. A weakened southern army remained a bunch of badgers led by a lion, and Grant still sought the means to somehow crack the will of the committed.

After nine months of battles and siege at Petersburg, the Southern trench lines had finally been stretched to the point of cracking, and Grant determined that if a crack were to be developed, a tsunami would follow. Lee felt the pressure first and attempted a breakout on Grant’s right at Fort Steadman on March 25th,1865, with initial success in puncturing the edge of the northern line only to be crushed by a furious Union counterattack. The southern forces retreated to their trenches but severe damage had been done to Southern infantry strength with over 4000 casualties and no means of reinforcing. Grant seized

The envelopment of Petersburg April 1-2, 1865

the opportunity and on March 29, a crack was finally developed in the impenetrable southern defenses and Grant’s VIth Corp lanced inward and forced the South to contract and support. General Sheridan’s Cavalry force, by this time as feared as any the South had developed swung around the union left to attempt the severing of Lee’s supply lifeline at Five Forks on April 1st, 1865, and the result was catastrophic for the South with envelopment of over 8000 troops of general Pickett and collapse of Lee’s right flank. On April 2nd, Grant found the final crack on the right and the crack became a deluge as two Union Army Corps poured through the decimated defenses. Lee found himself now surrounded on three sides and had to evacuate the trenches of Petersburg and the Confederate capital city of Richmond.

The Army of Northern Virginia was now on the run, and unlike every other time in the war with similar circumstance, such as McClellan after Antietam and Meade after Gettysburg, Grant recognized the opportunity for a final kill and performed a perfect pursuit and destruction. Lee had one chance remaining, to achieve supply support at Appomattox and attempt to rejoin the Southern Army of the Carolinas, now fighting off Sherman’s crushing attacks.

The Final Acts at Appomattox April 4th-9th, 1865

Grant assumed the role of anaconda and pursued, pinned, and cut off fragments of Lee’s support until the envelopment was total on April 9th, 1865 and Lee was forced to acknowledge he was the fox surrounded by hounds, and the end was inevitable. To assume that such considerations led men to becoming self-preserving is to deny that the final 14 day struggle took over ten thousand lives, with neither army letting up an ounce. For both sides, the end justified the sacrifice, and the overwhelming superiority of the Union capacities assured that inexorable force would win out over any desperate heroism. This was a time of heroes however, who drew their own conclusions and inspiration from loyalty to their cause, and fought tooth and nail to the very end.

We are left with the famous stillness at Appomattox, where the overwhelming recognition of finality struck both sides simultaneously. Lee, to whom losing was anathema, and Grant, who saw winning completely the only means to peace, found a way to achieve the peaceful stillness that allowed a reconciliation thought impossible only hours before. One hundred and fifty years later, the victory stands tall as the means of preserving the original principles of the nation, that all men are created equal, and that individuals can have a full say in their destiny. The price that both sides paid to achieve such laudable ideals is incalculable in the extent of the calamity or the effect on the families. It was cruel, but it was necessary and it was purifying, though it took decades to fully wash out the stains.

On this 150th anniversary, we could use a reminder as to the closure we achieved as Americans, and what it required to achieve it. In today’s superficial understanding by most as to the benefits of this great nation, a moment of stillness is in order.

March 20, 2015March 20, 2015

Mr. Transformation

The President of the United States of America

Mr. Obama announced on the night of his epical election in 2008 to the presidency of the United States that he felt he was called to fundamentally transform the United States of America. It wasn’t perhaps noticed by that remark that he intended to do the same to the world.

Well now, everybody’s listening.

Six years of Obama foreign policy and the world has definitely been transformed. Libya and Syria have descended into total anarchy. Russia, its relations with the United States “reset”, forcibly annexed 10,400 square miles of its neighboring country the Ukraine in taking Crimea and paid no price. Iraq is in the throws of an invasion of the Islamic caliphate and the United States supports Iranian ground troops in the country to support the Shia dominated government. The United States works to improve relations with the communist mafia of Cuba and thumbs its nose at its closest ally, Canada, who desires to share its oil bounty with the Unites States in the largest job project in years, the Keystone pipeline. And in the zenith of transformations, the United States is seeking to assure the islamic revolutionists of Iran a lifting of sanctions accompanying a long term path to nuclear weaponry, bypass the United States Congress in achieving this goal, and looking to break its long treasured shared vision with Israel and allow the U.N. to instead sanction Israel. And he’s just getting started.

Those who would consider this to be a man who, based on results, hasn’t a clue as to what he is doing, are under a false assumption. President Obama knows very well what he is doing. He is transforming the world. From his standpoint the world was in desperate need of transformation. To Mr. Obama, and the ‘intellectual’ apologists of the far left, history has been for far too long unfairly tilted to the domination of the western world. The western ideals of individual initiative, technological advantage, exploitation of natural resources and suppression of the collective impulses of less developed nations has led to an unnatural superiority. The outward projection of this western advantage has been to subjugate, colonize, and otherwise globalize the natural regional advantages of various peoples to their detriment. This has led to unnatural circumstances. The hegemony of the United States in policing the world. The presence of Euro-Judean government in the home of the arab nation, propped up there by Western force. The inability of African and other third world nations to get past their post colonial births. All influenced by the casual consumer decadent culture of the Anglo-European perception of cultural superiority.

The ultimate test for the president’s re-working of the world is the need to crack the code of the Middle East and in particular, the forty year need for the United States to be the policeman in order to prop up Israel, suppress Iran, and cap terrorist impulses. The Unified Field Theory connects Israel and Iran inextricably. Iran, the primary exporter and underwriter of terrorism can potentially be mollified if its natural regional hegemony is recognized for the 2500 year history it has been the region’s dominant player. By accepting Iran into a world leadership position, it would naturally look to prosper in other ways other than Armageddon theories, and would build its economy while reducing its role in instability through terrorism. The need for aggressive nuclear ambitions would be reduced by the eventual political neutering of its abject foe Israel, eventually sublimated by the achievement of a porous border policy that has been so effective in changing the dynamic of the US. The risk that Iran would not play nice would be reduced by the obvious capacities of the US, China, and Russia to maintain their own spheres of influence. The Europeans, long past any inclinations of cultural identity and immersed in their own population contraction with the resultant consequences, would be more than willing to trade a difficult moral dilemma in Israel for a period of peace and stability.

And that’s what’s so irritating about the Cotton Letter from the United States Senate and the inconceivable outcome of the Israeli election in re-electing Benjamin Netanyahu. The constant threat of having to compromise the grand vision is what is so irritating to this man. After all, he intends to show the world why he was deserving of that Nobel Peace Prize. In the end, when the world is back in its natural balance, the world is going to thank him. Wait and see…

March 11, 2015March 11, 2015

Not Exactly Camelot

New York Post front page March 11, 2015 — New York Post front page
March 11, 2015

“The rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.”
Niall Ferguson

In 1215, on a meadow field known as Runnymede outside the environs of present day London, England’s barons determined to secure once and for all the relationship of a ruler and his people. They secured King John’s signature to the document known as the Magna Carta, a charter that secured various freedoms, but more fundamentally, the principle that the rule of law was ultimately the final adjudicator of all citizens, whether they be king, or commoner. The concept of arbitrary rule was thus consigned to the dustbin of history, in all lands where free men were found.

800 years later, a copy of the Magna Carta lies in the National Archives next to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to remind one of how much is owed to this basic concept of freedom, and the common thread of principles that protect our liberties.

Unfortunately, the number of people who understand and want to protect the concept has dwindled to a pitiful few.

And one of them is definitely NOT the suggested potential anointed leader of the free world, one Hillary Rodham Clinton. In a press conference yesterday the former Secretary of State of the United States and potential future President of the United States reminded all that if rule of law is your ideal, you might want to look for a leader elsewhere. Not that this is new information. The anointed one has been a rogue regarding the rule of law since she stepped onto the national stage some forty years ago as an assistant council on the Watergate committee , and flashed all the characteristics of her royal roguedum for the modern audience in case anyone forgot.

The press conference like all staged Clinton events was supposed to be a means by which Mrs. Clinton could bury any further conversations regarding her recently exposed use of a private e-mail service for both official and unofficial correspondence as Secretary of State, but her performance assured the issues wouldn’t go away anytime soon. The brazen insistence that she had effectively addressed all concerns with her release of a portion of the email stream reminded us what this lawyer seems to be genetically missing – the idea that laws and the rules they engender are for everyone, and the rules for those who would govern particularly sensitivized to reduce the risk of corruption. The Clintons, however, have always held the unique position that laws are arbitrarily interpretable, and that they were always the best positioned as to which ones they would follow and which ones they would skirt. The former President Clinton at least brought his formidable personality and political skill to the game. Poor Hillary has always been the edgier and more adversarially corrupt lawyer to the simplest of ethics, from the lying that led to her expulsion from the Watergate committee, to her role at the Rose Law firm regarding billing and the stonewalling on the subpoenaed records, the dark flailing about with the seamy Whitewater real estate affair as a victim of a far flung conspiracy, the cattle futures nonsensical explanation, and the hypocritical hatchet-job attacks on those that would dare fall under her husband’s lecherous influence all the while proclaiming her role as the Feminist in Chief.

The last 12 years have been a rehearsal for the job she has assumed hers, the Presidency. She carpet bagged a residency in New York State to allow her to be handed the Moynihan Senate seat, ran for President in 2008 only to be swallowed by another more clever actor in Barrack Obama, then took the Foreign Policy role absent from her CV as Secretary of State under President Obama. Having left the various messes behind for her successor John Kerry to deal with, she felt she had managed to position herself as inevitable for the top job.

The old Hillary problem however, her inability to do anything for a reason other than being self serving, simply could not be suppressed even when endowed with the most compliant and willing press. The cracks were finally exposed with the tragedy of Benghazi and top came off with greedy need to make money the only way she has ever understood, having other people set her riches up. The combination of incompetence and shady money deals needed a special capacity to control information and Mrs. Clinton found the perfect solution in likely becoming the first senior government executive to maintain all her interactions on a personal server despite her obvious role as a historical government figure. This ludicrous arrangement allowed her to erase any interactions she felt questionable or averse to the narrative of the most prepared public servant in history. It made any conflicts of interest regarding her actions and the governments and people willing to give the Clintons millions through their foundation difficult if not impossible to trace, All it would take would be for everyone to acquiesce to the idea that Mrs. Clinton could be trusted to protect the people’s business and separate the professional from the personal by her own rules of behavior.

And thus the press conference where she declared public records as the nation’s chief foreign policy representative to be the first in history held privately hostage, secure behind client attorney privilege. She announced that no security breach on a private server was possible because it was physically guarded by the Secret Service, that 30,000 e-mails were destroyed as they related to her yoga schedule or daughter Chelsea’s weeding, or personally intimate interactions with her husband( who unfortunately denied having ever sent more than two e-mails in his life). She declared there were no emails regarding her decisions leading to the Benghazi debacle and she could be trusted on that fact. And she topped it all off, by saying as ‘ I am so forthcoming’, there would be no more access to her records or her server. If you need to have your head explode, I recommend you watch the whole thing. The cliff-notes version however is here, and I suspect that will likely still be enough to have your head explode.

Now the watch begins. I have always predicted that it was very likely Mrs. Clinton would not run for President because of the enormous baggage that would be exposed if she did so, and if she brazenly ran anyway, would show thee same fatal flaws that took her down in 2008. That was before any of this mess.

In the end it always goes back to the rule of law. You pay your taxes because its the law. You don’t discriminate because it’s the law. You don’t steal because it’s the law. You don’t enter a country illegally because it’s the law. You don’t destroy evidence because it’s the law. And it’s the law whether you’re the President the Secretary of State, or just another nondescript schlub. And because the law deals with everyone on equal terms, it is as protective of your rights, as it is the most exalted leader of the land.

Are we going to throw that all away by electing a person that has never had a smidgen of understanding what I am talking about, or why that would even matter? As Mrs. Clinton put so bluntly, “At this point, what difference would it make?”

All the difference in the world.

March 4, 2015

Martyrs and Absolute Rulers

Boris Nemtsov sight of martyrdom in front of the Kremlin

I have returned from a brief sabbatical from Ramparts to find a world progressively in disarray. Acknowledging the responsibility that comes with Ramparts of Civilization being the currently ranked #8, 785,839 busiest internet site in the world based on on-site traffic, I felt my loyal audience would probably be able to stand a short respite from my point of view. For you few decerning readers though, the absence of commentary on the fascinating events of the last few days without the specific purview as to how it will effect the future of western civilization probably left you a little wanting and directionless. I will therefore try to do my best in my own humble way to once again try to tie it progressively together.

We start in the year 1170 with Thomas Becket, of course. Henry II of England had definitely had enough of Thomas’s irritating desire to point out his flaws, and did what absolute rulers are prone to do – make a spectacle so others might learn. Making sure the appropriate command was sent in a way that would absolve him of the need for direct action, Henry proclaimed to his court, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Noting Thomas’s proclivity as archbishop in hanging near the nation’s grandest shrine, the Canterbury Cathedral, Henry’s most professional knight assassins traveled to Britain’s most sacred ground, to make sure Thomas would no longer be a thorn in Henry’s side, and that everybody would know it. The assassins made short work of Thomas at the altar and left him for public display. With this monstrous event, Thomas had been made martyr, and Henry made his point. Like all absolute rulers committing public sin Henry thrashed about looking for Becket’s killers, but didn’t look very hard. Henry even did an appropriate amount of public penance in front of Becket’s tomb, to show his subjects his recognition of the extent of sin committed, but their king was still king in complete charge, and Becket’s influence in effecting change lost to the mists of time.

And so we lived 845 years later with another display of martyrdom of an opposition leader paying the price for irritating the absolute ruler. In a very public display reminiscent of Becket, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated by professionals in front of Russia’s most sacred church and the Kremlin, for the crime of pointing out the flaws of today’s absolute ruler, Putin. This Putin knew his Henry II role well, already “taking over” the search for his killers, and lamenting the action so brazen at Russia’s sacred ground. He has publicly apologized to Nemtsov’s mother. Well, as Shakespeare said, He “doth protest too much”. The chances of Putin finding Nemtsov’s murderer is excellent, given the number of mirrors in the Kremlin. The chances of Russia finding justice with this increasingly malevolent dictator is considerably less likely, and the message is clear to all. You defy the boss, and the boss will act.

Henry II and Putin have something else in common. Neither had any concern that the alleged leader of their world would do anything significant. Henry had his Pope Alexander, who had appointed Becket bishop in the first place, but Henry knew the Church of England was progressively his church and Pope Alexander made a Becket a religious martyr, not a political one, and nothing was done. So too does Putin have his Obama, who despite insult after challenge after provocation after crime, has stood silently as Putin has recognized his adversary for the foil that he is.

Russia is becoming a very dark place. There is no place for brave patriots like Boris Nemtsov or, in absentia, Gary Kasparov. The idea of liberty that so briefly shone when Boris Yeltsin rose onto the tank so many years ago and declared the dictatorship police state gone is a faint and withered memory. In one of the most interesting twists of history, Boris Yeltsin, as his power was waning in 2000, determined to select his successor. His assumed successor, his right hand man, a libertarian named Boris Nemtsov, was at the last moment set aside for an obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin, and Russia was changed forever. Nemtsov’s Russia is now a Russia we will never know, and Vladimir Putin made sure of that.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Vice Premier Boris Nemtsov

February 14, 2015February 15, 2015

The Grand Secret of the Whole Machine

The newtonian contemporary Scottish mathematician John Arbuthnot, an intellect in his own right, and a man who would become famous as the individual who introduced the characature ‘John Bull’ to the world as the symbol of Great Britain, looked upon the creation that was Isaac Newton in awe. Reviewing Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Arbuthnot declared that Newton had done no less than reveal “the grand secret of the whole Machine”. So quotes James Gleick in his wonderful biography of Isaac Newton as he helps put in perspective a genius that may never have come before or since.

Isaac Newton is one of those incomparable and unrepeatable creations in the human story that defy all explanation. Newton came from dust, and dust he would become, but it was indeed cosmic dust that was not the stuff of normal men. Born in 1642 in the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe Manor in County Lincolnshire, far from the center of any environment that would possibly be expected to be formative to his colossal genius, Newton somehow found his way in forty short years to the center of adulation among the greatest of men. With his father having died before his birth, and his mother abandoning him to relatives, young Isaac was a stranger to human kindness and learned to internalize his thoughts from his very first years. Exposed to relatives who assumed he at best would be a farmer, he was given the rudimentary school education of farming, including some simple math that would occasion a farmer. Newton hated the very idea of farming and in his intense isolation began a lifelong habit of recording his every thought on paper provided by the school. This was one lonely, lonely twelve year old boy. He wrote in his private torment, recording the scorn of others –” what imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?” and his own lonely sadness – “I will make and end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to doe.” Not exactly the confidence of a king philosopher.

The family, noting the isolated nature of the boy and recognizing at least this was no farmer, arranged for Newton to take the education of the clergy. An appointment to the College of the Trinity at Cambridge was achieved to have Newton enter as a sizar, a position at the college whereby a person with no means could obtain an education by being a servant to the other collegians at Cambridge of greater means or nobility. His family gave him little money, but did gave the obsessive Newton a greater gift – the gift of 140 blank pieces of paper and the ink to fill them. And fill them he did, soon with ballooning observations questions and data tables well beyond any expected to link to his classic education. The library at Cambridge became Newton’s brain, the notebooks he so meticulously recorded his laboratory for a science he was beginning to invent – nothing less than the meaning of everything. Newton questioned everything, and at a time when he was preparing for the clergy in the College based on the concept of the undivided Trinity, a fair amount of heresy. The legend of the mental capacity of the obsessive student grew and Newton was eventually accepted into the college, passed examinations in mathematics and eventually made a scholar. He read Euclid, Aristotle, Descartes, studied Kepler and Galileo – the philosophers that only a spec of humanity would be exposed to due to the rare concept of the book and the printed word. But Newton did not read them to emulate them, but to see beyond them.

The notebooks grew and grew, and through the 1660s and 1670s Newton was literally inventing an entire philosophy of observation and experimentation that would change the world and man’s place in it forever. And almost no one knew. The brilliant thinking and experimentation that would become epochal treatises on Optics, Fluids, Calculus, and the very basic truths of the universe were intermingled with other thoughts on Alchemy and Religion that Newton valued equally, but wanted no one to see, and no one to criticize. It would take one of the venial sins, vanity , to bring Newton out in the open and unleash upon the world the elements of incomprehensible genius.

In 1675, Newton joined the Royal Society, and began to divulge the extent of what he had been keeping from others. The first tentative organized thoughts on paper, a treatise on Hypothesis of Light and Color, and he came up against his first real politic. The Society was filled with other men that felt they were eminent philosophers, men like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, who were concerned the upstart Newton was impossibly knowledgeable and had to be piggybacking on more educated men’s work, particularly their own. To a sensitive isolate like Newton, who knew the extent of his experimentation, observation, and logic, the words stung like acid. He reacted by withdrawing contact with the Society and the other philosophers.

It would take Halley’s Comet to bring him back for good. In 1681, the comet described by Halley and the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed were communicating with Newton their thoughts on the natural explanations of what had always thought to have been a Devine occurrence, the transient glory of the celestial phenomena of the comet. Newton cagily let Halley know that he thought he had the answers they had been looking for, but was not about to expose himself to the intense ridicule that his earlier, less in depth musings had ensnarled him. Halley and others encouraged Newton to be definitive, and the world has never been the same.

In 1684, Isaac Newton published a definitive series of observations, the Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, that sought to explain the actions of the comet of Halley and with it, every object on earth, the moon, the sun and stars. In short the laws that governed everything. Newton’s laws, as they became known , defined the influence of every physical object in existence upon every other, and the incredibly mysterious force that explained their mutual influence, that of gravity. In Newton’s olympian treatise, the answer to Galileo’s observations and Kepler’s measurements, the tides, celestial bodies, and the very presence or absence of matter was explained – and it was natural, and predictable. The incredible bomb that was unleashed on the learned world was nothing less than a supernova. The very private hermitic man newton was now the most public of men. As the world progressively was learning that knowledge meant power, Great Britain was the possessor additionally of maybe the most powerful of men. A French philosopher made aware of all consuming knowledge of Principia stated in awe of Newton, “Does he eat, and drink, and sleep? Is he like other men?’ Halley called it the “splendid ornament of our time” and “incomparable”.

The ideas that were created in the mind of Newton were so far ahead of their measurable existence in science, that he began to become progressively both legend and target. And the brilliant man became venal as the attacks surged. What of this Gravity that requires Infinite Space and Infinite Time? How can something just Be, and work in a vacuum? From across the channel came a new ferocious and formidable antagonist, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Newtonian principles appalled him – “the fundamental principle of reasoning is, nothing is without cause!”, Leibniz thundered. Even more adversarial, Newtonian proofs were stated utilizing a new mathematical technique Newton described as Fluxions which bore striking resemblance to Leibniz’s own calculus he had recently described. Newton was again accused of being a sophisticated plagiarist. This time, he came out with all barrels blazing, and declared his model of calculus proceeded Leibniz by decades, and it was instead Leibniz who was the usurper of Newton’s creative genius. The fight raged and became international as the newly outward looking Britain was willing to support its hero against continental reactionaries like Leibniz. The truth was imperically that in a world of extremely poor communication, the two geniuses likely came up with calculus simultaneously, and independently. The new Newton however never again retreated to his isolation. He took on the persona of the premier intellect in the world, became President of the Royal Society, and fought off others as he once was offended to be treated.

The death of Newton in 1726 was treated as no event to that time in the history of Britain. For the first time a commoner was buried among the royal elite in Westminster Abbey. Newton the Legend grew and grew over time as his laws held up to three hundred years of progressively more accurate scientific investigation. It was not until a genius of equal vision, Einstein, secured the gaps of reality that Newton could not explain, the actions of the very largest and smallest bodies that would not respond to the perfect nature of gravity, instead influenced by the very nature of time and space effected by visible light. In a time of extremely limited tools of discovery, Newton had taken thought journeys with the limiting feature only the vast capacity of his visionary mind. He saw himself as recognizing the smooth pebble from the many rough, on the shores of a vast ocean of untapped knowledge. He is quoted as humbly seeing his advances as the natural progression of human thought – “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. But Newton knew what he had conceived, and what he had achieved, and knew himself to be every bit one of the true giants. Newton’s clergical soul saw himself as revealing the infinite and bountiless beauty of the Creator Himself. He knew with gift of Devine inspiration, he had discovered the Grand Secret of the Whole Machine.

February 7, 2015February 8, 2015

Hating History

President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast –*AP photo Evan Vucci*

This past week, we saw the passing of one the world’s great historians. Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, and author of many meticulously researched historical tomes including the histories of WWI, WWII, the Twentieth Century, and Judaism and the Holocaust, succumbed to the ravages of disease and age. Sir Martin, was a traditional historian who saw history as a device not by which to judge, but to illuminate. He did not see value in fitting the facts to a preexisting narrative. Accuracy, detail and exhaustive care with the precision of facts were his watchwords. With such individuals, the looseness with facts and the lack of depth of understanding so prevalent in today’s soundbite culture was anathema to him.

History, the bedrock intellectual pursuit that brings human perspective to all current events and passions, and that provides the means by which tragedy and missteps can be avoided by understanding what came before, has been dying as a discipline for some time. The modern citizen, asked to recall the components of his own citizenship, progressively fails to remember the simplest reasons for why he is a citizen and not a primeval schlub. When asked questions on the critical components of a civilized society, routinely the answer is a ludicrous guess or blank stare. A slim minority can name the founding American documents that secures their rights as citizens, the President who secured the end of slavery as an accepted form of economic servitude in the United States, the correct century in which World War II was fought, or basic events that led to the great mass murderers, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

The virus that has affected the average citizen was at least at one time resisted by the collective intellectual braintrust of the country, who had to determine the careful steps a country must take in a dangerous world, and where history might reveal the avoidable pitfalls . No longer. The President’s woeful depth of knowledge of history progressively shows itself to be not only ignorant, but aggressive and dangerous. At The National Prayer Breakfast this week, the President built upon his philosophical belief as to the moral equality of all religious cultural movements a superficial, nonsensical, and tortured historical rationalization for how the world about us became the world about us. At past times, the President’s gaffe filled memory of history and geography, the ‘fifty-seven states’ of the US, the lack of knowledge as to the chronology of the civil rights movement, and the clunky recall of his supposed specialty, constitutional law, seemed to be a simple reflection of the times. The self centered historical reflection without any attention to the actual details Obama exhibited in his recent speech, shows the premeditation of time honored principles of propagandists to sprinkle a few haphazard ‘facts’ into a predetermined meme of opinion that promotes the big lie. The specifics of the speech are torn apart by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, who recognizes the nonsense for what it is. But what does it say about how Obama’s own shamhistory is affecting his decisions as leader of the most powerful country on earth? The preening nonsense, so effortlessly and confidently emoted, promotes a darker and much more dangerous ignorance that could eventually get a lot of people killed.

Mixing up history and mythology, fact and fiction, memory and reality is a progressive plague upon how so much of our current important decision making and opinions are formed. The President’s moral equivalence and misrepresentation of hundreds of years old events such as the Crusades or the Inquisition and their place in history with today’s Islamic savagery, borders on cartoon. But he is not alone. The news anchor Brian Williams, who sees himself as the ‘one people trust” in objectively presenting the news, can not manage to present events without confabulating his role in them, to somehow make himself more authentic by telling tales that make him less so. Hillary Clinton, our potential next president, assumes people can absorb a big lie regarding a pathetic video no one watched making fun of Mohammed rather than own up to her own inaction and lack of preparation in the Benghazi debacle. John Kerry, our Secretary of State, made his mark in the military confabulating his Swift boat exploits in Vietnam, destroying others reputation to build his own. The President of Russia concocts a history regarding Ukraine that permits him to absorb it.

Embellishing or confabulating history is nothing new, but it often had a more innocent objective of promoting positive principles that reflected innate truths. George Washington could not tell a lie. Abraham Lincoln could split rails with one hand. Nelson Mandela was a scion of liberty and democracy. History can bring light onto the dirtiest of reflected mirrors of the past. In the current world however there isn’t even shame any longer on the process of embellishing or misrepresenting the way things came to be. We don’t even have enough pride in ourselves to demand of our leaders an objective hashing out of the truth. And that how you get the speech the President gave. And that is how we get the President, and history, we deserve.

February 1, 2015

A Brief Treatise on the Clash of Cultures

The idea that the bending of cultural “truths” have exceeded the capacity of a civilization to absorb them is not new. For the cultured Roman citizen such as Cato the Elder, the progressive influence of the Greeks in Roman culture, particularly the Bacchanalian festivals with their sordid lack of inhibitions, horrified him, Cato seeing the Greeks as a “worthless and unruly tribe.” The concepts of the universal catholic culture was felt to border on idolatry by northern European thinkers in the 15th and 16th century, leading to the rise of Protestantism. Exemplified at its cultural extreme by Puritans and Quakers, and its aggressive eversion to the papist influence, the reformers led to several hundred years of bitter wars, capped by the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, destroying a third of Europe’s population in the most cataclysmic cultural clash until World War II. The current western world continues to evolve from the countercultural revolution of the 1960’s , in which the accepted norms were rejected by a generation that eventually injected itself into every aspect of cultural life, from education to government, from concepts of individual freedom to collective security, and from religion to sexuality.

Yet the extremes of cultural deviation are always about who owns the center. In western culture, the center has fundamentally been based since the Age of Enlightenment on acknowledged truths of rational science, and the idea that progression of civilization is based on building on the foundations of the previous one. In America, the marriage of these two ideas was put forth in the concepts of the articles of civilization, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the individuals who codified them, known as the Founders. For several hundred years, the reverence for these creators and their expressions of rational structure to manage the various expressions of a society formed the center of the civilization. The immense accomplishment of these founders proved resilient to the enormous strains applied to the ‘center’ concept by dangerous cultural anachronisms such as slavery, nativist racism, economic depression, and world wars.

Today’s culture however no longer accepts the adjudication of the center. The sexual revolution demands that concept of family, developed over tens of thousands of years, be overthrown for the particular desires of the individual. Islamic radicals seek the destruction of all who will not submit to their cultural version, and the annihilation of an entire people, the Jews, who as a religious culture, are fundamentally in sync with their monotheistic vision. Environmentalists see human beings themselves as the destructive element that must be made subservient to the more important concept of the Mother Earth, to the extent that individuals must be forced into lifestyles that revert to times when the concept of individual had little meaning. Politically correct speech determines who can be offended without an acknowledgement of their virtues, and which group’s virtues stand above any accepted discussion of their virtuousness.

The schism affects every facet of our societal interactions now. A movie that examines the character of an individual who sees himself as defending the center against barbarism, “The American Sniper,” is considered heresy by many who have not even seen it. The main character is a “coward,” a “racist,” “a hate filled killer,” those who have interpreted the center as a defense for the many “crimes and abuses” put forth by western civilization. Yet, the movie about to become the most successful movie regarding the concept of warrior of all time, and, to the incredulousness of those who see it as a homage to white western racism, a popular movie even in Iraq. To those who see the center as the enemy based on its immunity to the extremes of behavior and cultural mores, the movie has instead stirred the discussion regarding central themes of civilization independent of victim groups, such as good versus evil, civilization versus barbarianism, defense of society versus anarchy.

The modern culture is devoid of any formative basis for discussion of virtue, having thrown out the central philosophical tenets of religion, individual rights, and governance out with the peripheral strains that our more diverse society and scientific discoveries have placed on the core beliefs. Ask the modern western citizen as to elements that underrides their core freedoms, and a blank unknowing stare envelops their face. This citizen will deny the presence of a Supreme Being, without understanding the need philosophically for such a Being to explain the actions of an irrational existence, and the necessity of defining fundamental, universal good and evil. They will demand rights that don’t exist, while casually giving up those rights that exist to support their freedom to demand. They reflexively state that all ‘men’ are equal, without understanding that the carefully understood philosophy is that All Men are Created Equal, thereby making possibility the equality of opportunity, and the free will to accept or reject the opportunity.

It is not clear whether our current need to define all lifestyles, actions, and thoughts as having equal weight and import will overthrow the carefully tendered considerations and hard won concepts of thousands of years of human development. If they do, they will succeed at destroying the rational and positive impulses of cultural evolution that led to our current world that respects but does not deify individuals, balances progress against the gold standards of tradition, and has elevated the process of each individual’s life to most stress free, secure, and personally expressive in human history.

The center is a good place to return our civilization, founded on principles of multiple avenues of peaceful resolution, but active defense of the rights of man. As a culture in free fall, the safety net not available to the many cultural expressions that proceeded us is the template of both rights and responsibilities so carefully cultivated by our ancestral founders. In the chaos and entropy of our modern fractured society, the way to enlightenment has been with us all along. It is our duty to use our measured intellect again, to rediscover our abandoned center, where the soul of our civilization resides.

January 25, 2015

Can Anybody Here Play this Game?

American Leadership - Boehner Obama Mitchell — American Leadership – Boehner Obama Mitchell

“You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?'”

Casey Stengel

Toward the end of Casey Stengel’s managerial contributions to major league baseball, the manager that had led the New York Yankees to 10 American League pennants and 7 World Series titles, was saddled with the responsibility of attempting to shepherd the expansion New York Metropolitans (Mets) through their inaugural 1962 campaign. The result was a major league record of futility of 120 losses against 40 wins. Thus the quote.

The ‘Old Perfessor’ as Stengel was referred to, didn’t grow up with much personal education, but his vast experience innately told him what worked and didn’t work, and he was able to recognize when he was simply not putting a competitive team on the field. He further stated, “ Been in this game one hundred years, but I see new ways to lose’em I didn’t know existed before.”

What would the Old Perfessor say about America’s current team? Has the United States, for decades the undisputed champion of freedom and personal initiative, progressively become the New York Mets of 1962? Is there anything about the leadership team pictured above that provides one with the sense that real devoted professionals are at work? Stengel said of his first baseman on the Mets, ‘Marvelous’ Marv Thornberry, on the occasion of his birthday, ” We was going to get you a birthday cake, but we figured you would drop it.” What indication do we have that current team, facing so many enormous current challenges, wont simply ‘drop it’?

One might argue that Boehner and Mitchell have been outliers in the horrific record of the last six years, as President Obama had complete control with Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid for two years, and four more years with Reid blocking any contrary corrective actions to the Obama wayward drift for the past four. A tweet graph circulating the internet puts into perspective the domestic performance statistics of the so called professionals on the Democrat team:

How will Boehner and Mitchell respond to a President that is actually proud of such a record? Well, Stengel shifted players on the 1963 and 1964 teams and they did improve, losing ‘only’ 111 and 109 games respectively the next two years. Are Boehner and Mitchell, the Tim Harkness of today? Harkness was the successor to Marvelous Marv Thornberry at first base on the inept 1963 and 1964 Met teams, achieving a lifetime .235 average in his brief major league career. A step up, but not much.

What can we expect of these guys who have been participants in increasing the debt of the nation by 70% in just six years, initiated a pathetically conceptualized government takeover of healthcare of one sixth of the economy, struggled to define any form of a recognizable immigration policy that preserves the integrity of the nation’s borders, not to mention tipping over hard won stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, or identifiable security in Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Ukraine? What can we expect of people who have participated in defense contraction at a time of significant hostile expansion?

Okay – Lets assume its spring training and hope springs eternal for this team. Let’s ignore the bombastic state of the union speech as a lagging, out of date indicator of what we can really expect in the coming season. Maybe these guys will recognize that we can not possibly afford another losing season. We can give them a chance – but I say, the leash is short. If it looks like the same old, same old come the start of the regular season, its time to fire the whole bunch.

January 17, 2015January 17, 2015

Appeaseology

Western Leaders Show 'Solidarity' in response to Paris massacre — Western Leaders Show ‘Solidarity’ in response to Paris massacre

“I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air”

Margaret Thatcher

“Engagement is not appeasement. Engagement is not surrender”

Chuck Hagel

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history, is the most important of all the lessons of history”

Aldous Huxley

The stark sequelae of the practice of appeasement leading up to the cataclysm that was the second world war has made the word appeasement a central focus of every consideration to determine how to confront tyranny since. The crystal clear lessons of Prime Minister of Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain’s decision to allow the Nazi gangster regime to devour Czechoslovakia in trade for a temporary etherial peace has remained the example for all time of the legacy of appeasement. Since the events of 1938-39, western democracies have been more sensitive to the risk of the label of appeaser being applied to them, to avoid the stigma of their actions being interpreted as ignorance or weakness. The consequences, however, of ignoring history’s painfully learned lessons are no less dire in today’s modern world than they were in the simple fascism of the 1930s when state driven fascists bluntly developed their capabilities in easily recognizable uniformed, organized military forces.

The basic structural elements of weakness in recognition, preparation and confrontation native to appeasement remain every bit as trenchant in the need for understanding in today’s world as it did in the seeds of destruction planted by inaction prior to world War II. The power of last week’s march in Paris, where a common defense of the principles of free speech was trumpeted by many world leaders (sans America) and millions of citizens was visually stunning, but vacuous. It crumbled the minute the French President Hollande left the synagogue where the Israeli Prime Minister was about to speak, afraid to be associated with any expression of opinion that did not fit the meme of political correctness on the just the subject he had marched to defend earlier. To the tyrannists, no better signal of the hollow nature of the “outrage” could possibly have been sent. They could see that Hollande did not equate terrorism that Israel lives with on a daily basis with that of the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre, though the terror cells responsible for both hold nearly identical credos and objectives.

What are the common foundational elements of ignorance and weakness that form the perverted logic resulting in appeasement, and are we once again heading down the road so presciently defined by Winston Churchill in 1938 with the current islamofascist threat? Ramparts takes a look at the science of Appeaseology.

The Falsehoods of Grievance :

The need to appease on the basis of perceived grievance is a common element put forth by all appeasers. The Nazi gangsters were forgiven their neanderthal tactics on the consideration that they had been aggrieved by the world. The territories they sought were, after all, filled with German speaking and germanic ancestral peoples forced to live under the unnatural flag of oppressive foreigners like the government of Czechoslovakia. Much the same, today’s Palestinians are forced to ceed their natural rights to the land to the occupationist Israelis, the once seamless islamic caliphate to the usurping Christians and Yazhidis of Syria and Iraq, and the arab nation to the vestiges of French and British colonial abuse. If only the rightful heirs to the land would be restored, the need to be belligerent would rapidly dissipate. Modern western European liberal thought particularly remains inextricably linked to this form of Appeaseology.

Engagement and the path of Least Resistance:

The belligerent character of aggressors is a sign of their immaturity in the realm of diplomatic give and take. Belligerents simply want to be respected and taken seriously. By constructively engaging them and showing your willingness to be reasonable and non-obstructive, you will show them the benefits of mature human behavior and the sincerity of your good will. Such behavior builds progressively trust and peaceful compromise. Though the risk of nuclear weaponry in the hands of Iran may seem volatile, their self respect and pride from being able to have the technical capacity to create such weapons and the national will to develop them is understandable, and willingness to deny them such capacity reactionary. They will appreciate the good will and recognize their role in needing to maintain stability. Nazi impulses were similarly seen as a temporary aberration of a civilized nation, that once engaged, would respond with the innate tempered civilized outlook of the great german nation evolved over hundreds of years. Putting up roadblocks to “evolution” would simply delay that behavior from the German nation.

Universal truths are relative and potentially insulting:

The tremendous rallies in the support of free speech last week in France are pledges only to the concept, not the reality of individual rights. Sarcasm or provocative expression anathema to another culture is the ultimate instigation to belligerence and hostile actions, as viewed by the politically correct modern appeasers. President Obama expressed this view best when he stated at the United Nations : “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Of the insult to every other culture that Islamofascism insists upon, subjugation of all other religions, enslavement and prostituting of their young, destruction of their religious symbols, erasing of their cultures, and elimination of their representative voice, Obama is ignorantly incapable of appreciating such realities as counterintuitive to his argument.

The actions of the extreme are a perversion of the culture, not a reflection of it:

The “lone wolfs” and terrorist cells that plague the world are outliers and perversions to the base message of Islam. Whether it is the monsters of Nigeria, Boko Harum, the absolutionists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda Wahhabism, or the murderers of the ISIL caliphate, the Jew slayers of Hamas or Hezbollah, or individual “lone wolf” Soldiers for Allah such as the Boston Marathon Bombers or Major Hassan, the appeasement mantra is that this is no way reflects the base tenets of Islam, a supposed peaceful and tolerant religion. No different were the SS Waffen or the Jew beaters of the SA, obvious aberrations of the German nation to the appeasers who wanted to envision a Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Leibniz. Appeasers are capable of ignoring example after example of hostile actions because of the comfort they feel in the illusion of their contrived and fantastical image of their appeased subject.

The fires of extremism burn themselves out with the careful and steady management of appeasement:

Passions are the undirected energies of a rudderless culture, and as the culture is progressively brought into the family of nations, the passions will positively re-direct. Somehow by the West being patient and non-confrontational, willing to absorb a few spasms of violence, the progressive growth achieved by engagement will calm the instability. This irrational assumption that passion is not fed by fundamental belief flies in the face of all credible evidence In both the form of fascism of the late 30s in Germany and Japan, and the modern version in Islamofacism , the fundamental belief is that of a superior people denied its rightful place at the head of all peoples. The belief is not burdened by guilt, ethics, or any form of self controlled behavior. Each event that shows a lack of willingness to confront, reinforces the sense of that superiority. The fires are not burned out, but rather fed with the oxygen of each incitement without retribution.

It was briefly inspiring to see some blowback from the millions of French citizens who risked their anonymity to say “je suis Charlie Hebdo”. The proof however is in action, not intention. The modern governments of the West are filled with leaders who calculate and appease, rather than assess and confront. They are more offended and outraged by fantastical enemies such as climate change and lifestyle victimization then the ominous and fundamental threats to their civilization. We cannot count on our leaders, who are in love with their ability to socially experiment and control behavior, and willing to risk all that we have achieved. We need brave muslim leaders like General Al-Sisi of Egypt to continue to step forward and say no more. We need to have the average citizen of the civilized world stand up and say “Je suis Civilisation, J’aime Civilisation” – and let all know the appetite for appeasement is now at end. To the Islamofascists, our patience is at end. And with it, the unprovoked expansion of their perverted gangster world is at end. Its the end of our world or the end of their world, and we all know to preserve what is good in this world – its their world that must go.

Je suis civilsation — Je suis civilisation