It took an election of a President who started his political career in the 1970s to bring back all the gifts of that wonderful decade for a whole new generation of Americans to experience. The list in the four short months President Biden has been in office affecting history is eerily familiar . Gas shortages. Inflation. Poor job growth. Race tension. Drugs poring over the border. Middle East on fire. Communist dictatorships on the ascendance. American withdrawal from an overseas military debacle. Cratering American confidence in its institutions. The difference this time is all of this was on purpose. What would possess a country with the natural abundance of materials, talent , and freedoms of America to willingly subvert its own innate proclivity for success? The simple answer is leadership exhaustion, requesting we simply learn to accept that maintaining exceptionalism is too daunting. It appears it has taken a leader in obvious personal decline to show the rest of us how we can find happiness in a national decline. As the left sagely informs us with its post modern weariness for personal initiative, Buck up comrades. Soon it will be curtains, and no one will feel left behind.
The malaise of the 1970s, was officially named by President Carter as the country’s pathologic diagnosis towards the end of the decade. It appeared the American experiment was out of ideas and out of energy. This was not an entirely unpredictable outcome of the awesome responsibility the conclusion of World War II forced upon the United States, to have a traditionally isolationist people take on the mantle of leadership of the free world. This uncomfortable responsibility was as a consequence of exiting the war with the country’s massive manufacturing infrastructure intact, fully 50% of the the world’s economic capacity. The cold war for dominance between the Soviet Union and the United States forced a perpetual state of proxy wars as a direct confrontation in the nuclear age was simply unthinkable. The constant pressure to address external challenges left the US vulnerable to internal restlessness and contradictions given its own long standing inequities in civil rights, environment, and infrastructure. The solitary injection of self esteem coming from the spectacular accomplishment of the national crusade of landing a man on the moon and returning the crew safely within a single decade of the sixties, left the nation surprisedly bereft of energy for the next technological leap forward. Assassinations of political leaders and an excruciating political debacle in Watergate that took down a President and left the assumed Constitutional stability wobbly and bruised, was followed by ignominious loss of Indochina despite the painful investment tens of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars. The country seemed lost from its moorings, friendless, and feeble against an ascendant Soviet empire.
Gas prices soared along with interest and jobless rates. Cities became dens of uncontrolled crime and pollution. A generation of young people had seen the American promise of a better life with each succeeding generation a hollow facade. The President of the United States in his frustration stated the obvious. The problem was with people and their malaise, and his only advice was to …hunker down.
The amazing, recurring characteristic of America since its 1776 has always been its stubborn counterintuitive resiliency at times of apparent mortal peril and despondency. The winter of 1777-78 found the American army in frozen taters at a point of virtual collapse at Valley Forge while the greatest military power in the world inhabited all the major cities. 1781 saw the spectacular reversal of Yorktown with Cornwallis surrendering his entire army and with it the last tendrils of hope of maintaining the British dominance of the colonies. The British took their revenge on a helpless United States in 1812 burning the White House down humiliating the fleeing US President Madison. 1814 cumulated in the obliteration of the British at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and the removal of British influence forever between Mexico and Canada. By 1861, an irreconcilable view of the country’s reason for being and the core rationality the founding documents led to a horribly violent schism and the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans. Massive loss and destruction, and the martyrdom of a President proved insufficient to prevent the eventual hard one reconciliation and the inexorable forces that finally corrected America’s great flaw a century later. The spectacularly horrific thirty years of two brutal world wars bracketing a world wide depression seemed to risk the very existence of the American experiment against massive economic and totalitarian forces. Yet by 1948, the American Colossus stood economically unique in the world, and opportunity for every American seemed to have finally attained the wildest dreams of the genius founders.
The culmination of the events of the 1970s were similarly felt by the elites to have finally positioned America in a post modern position of having its destiny determined by others, and many of the elite felt America deserved its fate. Yet, once again, from an entirely unexpected source, a so-called second rate film actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan, an American renaissance was borne so great that it was to last almost 40 years, the tide incredibly bringing down the Soviet empire, freeing hundreds of millions of people, and restoring the American capacity for risk and innovation, birthing and developing the Information Revolution.
The past ten years seem to reflect how this tendency for American rebirth sticks in the craw of the American elite. President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” struck at the heart of America’s seeming providential awakenings. For socialist ideology, a history of repeated massive failure on the world stage only deepens the resolve of the leftist need to destroy American exceptionalism, for as long as it exists, the narrative to simply accept the delivered justice to the masses by the terminally educated who know better about the appropriate societal strata. The flaming orange comet that was Donald Trump only incited a great desperation to destroy American resilience once and for all, and get it line with the other countries that had left striving for greatness behind for simple co- existence. Trump had to go, and with each unbound, irrational success he had in somehow restoring Americans taste for the hard work of recovery, the elites task became more determined, and more deadly in targeting.
Succeed they did, and now the Presidency is in the hands of a shell of a husk of a carton of a man who in his prime was sub-prime, and in his deteriorated state, simply a blank canvas upon which the agenda can be painted and the narrative to be guided. This time, they hope, it really is over. Gas lines, exploding interest rates, unbounded debt, existential crises, and a floundering flounder of a leader.
This time, they got us beat, don’t they?
Could America achieve one more Awakening from this debacle?
The news this morning February 17, 2021, of the passing of Rush Limbaugh was a gut punch but not a surprise to his many millions of fans. With his brave announcement last year acknowledging a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, the inevitable denouement of a terminal disease was ordained, and Rush knew it and faced it without ambiguity. He spent the last year doing what he had done for thirty years, projecting the voice of a great unrepresented populous into the national discourse, making it impossible to ignore by the elites, who yearned for the day when he, and they, would go away. The day has come. Most obvious is not the great emptiness of his passing, but of a great silence, because into the breach there was only one spiritual voice, the Great MahaRushi, reaching out to millions who felt somebody stood up for them and their quant, old fashion values of liberty, individualism, and patriotism. It is now gone.
The magic elixir that was Rush Limbaugh was never really understood by the elites, even those who stood to make millions from the popularity of his program. Limbaugh was Twitter before there was Twitter, the Internet before there was Internet, connecting people in a shared experience three hours a day, year after year. With Rush coming to the national stage in 1988 from a short run as a talk jockey in Sacramento, California to a small but national platform in New York on the ABC network, the idea of an opinionated point of view projected over the duration of three hours maintaining audience interest was unheard of. Opinion was something left to the back pages of newspapers, informing people the “correct” way to think on issues and was considered unseemly and definitely unprofitable in public discourse. Conservative opinion was treated like a zoo animal, to be viewed from a safe distance as absurd esoterica on programs such as William Buckley’s Firing Line. The assumption I suspect of the producers at ABC hiring the Missouri born rock and roll deejay was that it would fill a couple months of air time creating publicity, until they could think of something else. The rapidly developing truth of the matter was that no one foresaw the pent up demand, because no one had really wanted to know it was there. Ronald Reagan had been an enigma to them, appealing to a massive group of people that crossed party lines and therefore identified as “uncontrollable”. With Reagan gone, the assumption was this transient cultural anomaly “died” with the end of his Presidency. Limbaugh perceptively interpreted Reagan’s special connection with average Americans and converted it into a daily revival meeting.
The syndicated show started as a few score of syndicated stations, and rapidly grew into the behemoth of over 600 stations in 50 states reaching over twenty million people daily. Five days a week, every week, the middle of the day was tied to a spot on the dial of an assumed defunct technology, radio, over the previously archaic radio AM frequency in nearly every town in America. People listened at work – in their cars, in trucks, down highways, at construction sites, on tractors – fulfilling their good feelings for the day with a complete dose of Limbaugh’s unique mix of unfettered opinion, biting satire, and out and out entertainment. A phenomena in the 1990’s were the development of “Rush” rooms – places in restaurants or work cafeterias where people could eat and drink and in a communal fashion share exclusively Rush. The most liberal of cities had to face the reality of talk radio breaching the liberal consensus, for the simple reason it made money, and if the station had Rush, it made massive money, and a bunch of careers. Alternative media was born, and Limbaugh invented it. Limbaugh opened the revival all those years with the stirring opening notes of the Pretenders’ anthem “My City Was Gone” and a statement he was reaching out “across the fruited plain” to all of the millions who sought him out, the first telling recognition and smack back at the developing elite snobbery regarding that ‘backward’ land mass between the coasts they derided as “Fly Over Country”. The elites could not possibly stand him, because progressively they could not stand being restrained by those who would not submit to the post-history world of globalism, special interest groups, and international consumerism.
The undeniable impact of Limbaugh was his singular effect on trumpeting the 1994 “Contract with America”, Newt Gingrich’s multi-point take down of Washington elitism as a strategy for nationalizing congressional elections. Limbaugh’s incessant mantra for support for the radical conservative idea brought untold political power to bear, and what had been casually derided as a blustering, buffoonish “shock jock” schtick, became revolutionary political science, with the Democrats losing what had been over 40 years of uninterrupted congressional supremacy – the stunning outcome of over 60 seats turning republican and Gingrich vaulted into the Speaker’s chair. Limbaugh was greeted by the incoming representatives with thunderous applause and ‘honorary” membership in the class. He was credited by most with being the difference maker, the revolutionary. From that point onward, no political national campaign to could hope to progress without securing their “Limbaugh” flank.
Limbaugh grated at the misconception that he was a Republican front; he saw himself as a conservative and saw no rational alternative from the democrat side of the aisle. The ever more progressive fracture of the common sense middle left him labelled as a party insider to the media and frequently he felt stuck supporting candidates he felt had abandoned his conservatism. He tolerated Bush, grated at McCain, and overlooked the formless Romney to support the fiscal conservative Ryan. He began to see real heat from Washington elites when he stated that if their anointed messianic figure, the new President Obama, was to govern on a socialist agenda, he hoped he would fail. Obama had already been re-invented as a uniting figure, having cracked the invisible race barrier to power, and Limbaugh’s alternative opposition was something that could not be tolerated. The attacks regarding Limbaugh’s frailties became personal, and incessant. A rehab stay for opioid addiction resulting from his multiple back surgeries made his private medical history somehow fair game for a “crusading”district attorney. His sudden deafness left his unique gift- the art of communication, in maximal peril. He soldiered on, performing the almost impossible task of doing a talk show for three months unable to hear his own voice, until the technology of cochlear implants saved his gift, and our access to it, for another decade. He became an elite outcast, but his loyal audience never buckled and continued to grow.
Limbaugh kept his one of a kind cultural bonafides thirty years into his career, when he recognized, before almost all others the phenomena that was Trump. In 2015, confronted with a packed slate of Republican candidates that dominated the establishment conversation, Limbaugh instead listened to his audience and realized that the irregular newbie politician Trump connected with the “fly overs” like no other candidate. To the amazement of many, Limbaugh started promoting the Trumpian movement long before there was any semblance of documented electoral support. As with Gingrich’s revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Party of 2010, Limbaugh saw through his audience a yearning and loyalty to the brash Trump that no other establishment candidate could hope to achieve,. Limbaugh presciently saw in Trump a real chance at defeating his arch nemesis Hillary Clinton, and her drive to install the permanent marriage of crony capitalism and the eternal government ruling class. November, 2016, Limbaugh was once again right regarding the American pulse, and the pundits left breathless at the stunning Trump win.
The Trump years for all their achievements left Limbaugh having to defend the combustible Trump with a diminishing set of rhetorical weapons through vicious counter attacks led by the marriage of political opposition and a media no longer hiding their uniform bias against all the Limbaugh principles of a successful American society. Two impeachments, a devastating pandemic, and Limbaugh’s ominous diagnosis left both Limbaugh and Trump terminally wounded. Trump spasmed into post-electoral incoherence and was washed from the scene not by the millions who supported him, but a ludicrous clinging to a “rigged” election and the pathetic band of capitol interlopers that thought they were somehow protesting an injustice. Limbaugh fought the ever more devastating effects of radical chemotherapy, sapping his strength, and eventually succumbing to the irresistible force of the malignancy. February 2nd proved to be the last on air time for the great one.
And now he belongs to the ages. El Rushbo has led his last revival and we have been allowed into the great radio tent of liberty, attending the “Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” for the last time. The ever present three hour conversation lead by El Rushbo and his Excellence in Broadcasting Network across the American fruited plain with millions of us Americans who harbored the quant notion that the founders had been on to something great, is no more. The great heart of liberty, individualism, and optimism for America’s future through its original calling, has been silenced. Somehow, we at the Ramparts, absent our great captain, will carry on. Thank you Rush , for all the hours and laughs, restored convictions, and pride in this great country we shared – together. God Bless.
I have no idea who will win the election for the Presidency of the United States 2020. The polls in the last week would suggest some tightening but the key swing states remain in the Biden column, or too close to call. In a truly bizarre, unprecedented strategy to an election, the Democrat party determined that the “hate” for the persona of Donald J Trump was so great that, the best election would be Trump against generic democrat, or more specifically, Trump versus Not Trump. Any democrat candidate with a core value would open the discussion to an actual in depth analysis of their position on issues. A “generic” democrat would have a marshmallow core, absent of any formed opinion other than “build back better”. In Joseph Biden,they found a 47 year political caricature of the ‘experienced’ Washington insider, absent of achievement, enmeshed in the process of the deep state, desperate for one last grasp for the ring and willing to represent any opinion necessary to be generic. The supreme contrast with an over opinionated Trump could not be more stark. At this point, Trump is holding rallies before thousands of enthusiastic supporters who see him as the holy crusader for their personal sacrifice and ignored contribution to the fabric of American success. Biden is holding rallies before tens of people who work for the campaign, as enormous work has gone into removing any semblance of a Biden directed future, in favor of his cloaked deep state minders that will actually reorient the future. It is just what the Democrats and jilted insider republicans have been working tirelessly for four years. If you see what we have done to Trump, you will be careful to stay out of the way of what we are about to do to you.
It just might work, and the money and polls are betting that the public just wants to make the constant turmoil stop.The tactic may have created a Stockholm syndrome among the voting electorate. Just tell me what to do, to make it all go away.
But after all, this remains the national election of the most powerful, and freest nation upon the earth. If the decision is to divest from the current leader to an unknown future, an in-depth review of what has transpired with this leader, and what would be given up, is the mark of a sophisticated electorate. What is objectively clear and indisputable after perceptive analysis, is that Donald J Trump has been …. a very consequential President. I’m not kidding. Despite all the bluster of how chaotic and dysfunctional the Trump administerial style has been reported as, the results objectively reviewed are impressive, cross all the facets of judgement in both domestic and foreign policy achievements, and perhaps most amazing of all, align with candidate Trump’s 2016 promises to an unprecedented extent. If you voted for Trump in 2016 based upon what he proposed to accomplish, you saw fruition in spades. In four short years, under assault from almost the first day that would have dislodged and defeated a lesser man, the President has gotten it done. It is said that Trump’s personality fundamentally is the gasoline that drives the hatred that could lose him in 2020 election. If so, it says more of us as an electorate that can not discern the simple, telling truth, that a democracy works best on holding a politician accountable for what they do, not what they say. Take the pugnacious Trump persona out of the equation and what is left is, one of the best four year stretches of accomplishments in decades.
America is Back : For 20 years since the dot.com bust, the consensus by several administrations was that America was in a period of progressive economic decline and obsolescence. America, beset with a mythic past that “covered over” foundational sins, was inherently unfair, and coolly dismissive of inequities, was best served by accepting the decline and turning inward toward a ‘many out of one’ future – the antithesis of E Pluribus Unum. President Obama stated the inherent contradictions would require ‘getting used to’ a moribund economy with growth of one percent or less as far as the eye could see. Despite doubling the national debt, Obama clamped down on any economic tools that would potentially fuel an American entrepreneurial driven economic response , the only means to conceivably finance the growing burden demanded of the productive American. Convinced of the need of America to be a global cooperator rather than a leader, any unique American advantages based upon its specific principles of free will and incentive would have to be suppressed.
Trump immediately drove a stake in that corruptive thinking through two massive philosophical conversions away from the mindset that strangulated business and innovation. First, a revolutionary removal of the regulatory choke hold of government bureaucrats on business, and second, reduction of business capital gains taxes more in line with America’s competitors. Within 18 months of attaining office, a historic American driven economic recovery was spectacularly under way, with a unique combination of growth across all economic sectors and profound reduction in unemployment in minority populations that had heretofore been unable to share in the middle class bounty available to others. President Trump’s unyielding instruction to his negotiating teams to put America First reoriented strategy in trade agreements such as NAFTA, the Pacific Rim agreement and relations with America’s chief competitor and economic advisary, China. The underlying goal of restoring America’s manufacturing prowess, returning supply lines for crucial supplies such as pharmaceuticals, and bringing home factories has begun to finally swing the trade pendulum back toward the US, to the benefit of the long suffering American middle class. Then, despite a self induced sudden catastrophic contracture of the economy by greater than 30 percent overnight as a consequence of the pandemic, the media driven, unfairly derided Trump management of the crisis upon closer objective inspection stands tall,with nearly overnight creation of logistics and restoration of resources to address the virus, emergency underwriting of individuals, small business and healthcare to prevent economic collapse, and shepherding of a manhattan-style project to formulate a vaccine through private enterprise in a previously inconceivably short period of time. Trump has managed in two quarters, despite daunting odds, a V shaped recovery that is the envy of the rest of the world.
America is Free: America is free to make decisions in its own interest because it is energy independent for the first time since the 1960’s. President Trump released the Keystone pipeline for building, removed America from ludicrously unbalanced shackles of the Kyoto Agreement, unharnessed the fracking revolution from artificial suppression, and in three short years created an America that is the leading energy producer in the world and, incredibly, a net exporter of oil and natural gas. This spectacular turnaround has had untold positives beyond the expansion of a multi-million employment industry. Most critically, it has released America from the choke chain of Middle Eastern despots, removing the responsibility of America to defend the oil lanes and be subservient to local toxic entanglements. Suddenly a way forward out of endless spillage of American blood and treasure to mitigate Middle East conflict and Palestinian intransigence has presented itself in huge opportunities for stability in the region for the first time in decades. And of that Kyoto Agreement? Well, America has managed through conversion to natural gas to meet all the expectations of being a signee in regard to carbon reduction, without having its hands tied like so many of its European partners, as signees, consigned to the impossible mandates of an agreement that leaves the largest carbon emitters, China and India, off the hook.
America is Restoring its Founding Principles: The revolution of the enlightenment was embodied in the principles of the crafted document known as the American Constitution. America’s unique self corrective tendencies to orient towards justice and protect the rights of individuals to self actualization was fortified by this profound document and its carefully constructed individual rights and delineated limitation of government power. Despite the derision of the elites regarding President Trump’s supposed superficial understanding of constitutional law and pugnacious personality, compared to many of his predecessors, he has acted with far better Constitutional instincts. Despite demands by many opponents to act as dictator in the pandemic crisis, Trump respected the limits of federal power and allowed individual states to orient their own unique responses to the crisis. Faced within days of entering office with a special prosecutor investigating a concocted treasonous claim devised by his corrupt election opponent and her deep state collaborators, Trump, without claiming executive privilege as so many previous administrations had, fully cooperated in unprecedented fashion with the investigation, until progressive facts identified the nefarious goals and conspiratorial actions of his accusers. Trump has in four short years re-oriented the entire judicial branch of government back toward constitutional principles, bringing three originalists to the supreme court, and hundreds of lower level judges, in line to return the interpretation of law back to the principles of justice rather than attempting to divine intent or ‘balance the scales’ with a hand towards personal feelings. The rights of every individual to get a fair trial based upon the presumption of objective understanding of the rule of law has received a dramatic injection.
America is a Nation again: No promise resonated with the voting population of 2016 as did Trump’s assertion to “build the Wall” on the southern border. The underlying reality was that a porous border with Mexico had created innumerable pathologies. America’s generous proclivity to accept with open arms those who yearned for a better life had over the decades had deteriorated into an intolerable influx of uncontrolled invasion of masses of illegals circumventing the requirement to accept not only American residence but American responsibilities of citizen-hood, rule of law, and community responsibility. Border states and progressively non-border states became inundated with millions of people using services in education and health care, ignoring laws and collapsing local authority. Big Business and Big Farming loved the influx, allowing extremely cheap labor through illegals without having to provide the other means of benefit support associated with employment of a citizen. Jobs were either exported, or lost by citizens who had entered the legal way. The porous border allowed massive increases in dangerous human, and especially child, trafficking, influx of drugs , and the crime upon innocents associated with it. Trump’s derided solution was to simply build a wall, and realize all the secondary benefits of simply returning rationality and control to immigration. Despite massive efforts through congressional obstruction and litigation to derail the wall, 400 miles have now been built of the 700 miles recommended to restore control. The effect has been dramatic with over 90 % reduction in illegal transit through effected communities behind the new wall. The overall effect of course, is the increasing value of a legitimate immigration process, and the increased dignity and recognition of American values by the recipient, and markedly increased accountability to the worker by the employer The elites who condescendingly assume that hispanics have come to America with a different set of inspirations from that driving all previous immigrants, will be progressively shocked at how popular the re-orientation of the immigrant experience toward American freedoms and responsibilities is among the Hispanic community like all previously driven to immigrate. Freedom accepted with an earned place in the American Dream is a bedrock of the American story. The entire political class, Republican and Democrat alike, was paralyzed to act, until Trump came along and through sheer will, got it done.
America is a Respected Power again: America faced an existential foreign policy crisis at the beginning of the Trump Administration. Despite having an unrivaled military projection and prowess, American power was under siege and threat from multiple missteps and miscalculations. The previous 16 years had left President Trump a set of profoundly weak positions. The entirely understandable push of the Bush administration to respond to the threat of Islamic terrorism had morphed uncontrollably into a series of endless military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan based upon a woefully mis-guided desire to reorient the cultures of both cultures toward modern western democracies and values. Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives had not improved the circumstances on the ground beyond the removal of a tyrant in Saddam Hussein. The Obama administration naively assumed the failure was in America’s lack of apology for perceived slights, determined to restrict America’s influence through apology, and reorient control of the region to Iran, the advisary of the Sunni Arab nations and a mortal enemy of America’s own ally, Israel. The result of Obama’s ludicrous Iran agreement was increased belligerence of Iran despite a treaty designed to give it markedly increased hegemony, unimpeded development of ballistic missile capacity and an avenue to a nuclear weapon within ten years. The distain in the region was palpable and led to the pathologic rise and expansion of ISIS, the re- entry of Russian influence in the region through Syria, and a revolutionary expansion of radical Iranian influence in the person of the Revolutionary Guards led by Qasem Soleimani.
In three short years Trump has completely reversed the losing hand. ISIS was driven back, and crushed, and its genocidal leader Al-Baghdadi killed. Syria risked return to chemical warfare and Trump responded with a destruction of their airfield designed for delivery; Russia had mercenaries threaten American troops and Trump immediately eliminated the threat. The disastrous Iranian deal was abrogated by Trump and sanctions returned ; Soleimani ignored Trump’s warning to stay out of Iraq and when he ignored the warning, he was eliminated, with massive loss of face to Iran in the region Their desperate, pathetic response was to accidentally shoot done one of their own commercial aircraft.
Trump determined to completely upend the traditional diplomacy of the middle east to demand concessions from Israel in order to get Palestinian cooperation; he simply informed the Palestinians that the world had moved on, and encouraged them to improve their position rather than demand Israel’s contrition. The Palestinians, assuming the usual American eagerness to be seen as conciliatory, refused. Rather than accepting the traditional view that the Palestinian question remained the lodestone of any peace initiative, Trump simply pivoted directly to the Arab nations progressively aligned against the threat of Iran, and worked with them to see that their self interests in a modern world would be most bountiful orienting toward a positive relationship with the economic powerhouse Israel, rather than staying with tactics that had failed for decades. The result is stunning – direct recognition and bilateral business relationships between three Arab states and Israel, and counting – the first substantial movement toward regional peace in three decades.
Europe, positioned to despise Trump, has been forced by him to reexamine their relationship with America and Russia. NATO had increasingly become a paper tiger defense with nations completely abrogating their responsibility to adequately support, much less upgrade, their defense capacity. Russia convinced Germany to become beholden to the Russians for energy needs with the Baltic Sea pipeline. Trump demanded that Europe meet its 2% GDP commitment to NATO, or risk ending the seventy year American commitment. He hectored the Germans into ending their commitment to the pipeline. He ended the laconic support of Ukraine with blankets provided by Obama in response to the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and provided real defensive weapons, stopping Russia’s threat to Ukraine’s survival and demanded the Europeans do their part as well to sanction bad Russian behavior. Russia is not about to roll over in their own neighborhood but they now realize the American push has restored the European backbone.
On the Pacific rim, China for decades had sold the world on the idea that economic bounty would eventually calm its radical communist core and allow a progressively modern attitude in international relations. Instead, for two decades China took advantage of its favorite nation trading status to steal intellectual property, maintain unequal trade deficits, ignore environmental responsibilities, decimate their Hong Kong, Uyghur and Tibetan communities, threaten Taiwan, militarily intimidate its neighbors in the South China Sea, and corrupt American academia and politicians. This has showed itself blatantly in their Covid deception, releasing onto the unknowing world a global pandemic, and working to gain monetary access influencing the potential next American President Joe Biden. Trump has for decades demanded a more balanced trading relationship with China, improved behaviors, and has been engaged in a trade war. The result is the first time in decades that anyone has stood up to the Chinese. The Pacific Rim countries have been the most thankful, and Trump’s contrarian approach has gotten people from both parties (excepting Biden) to take a new look. The outcome will clearly extend beyond four years.
Trump has achieved the amazing outcome of projecting power and achieving American goals without starting a single new conflict, and closing the door on a few old ones. For that alone, he deserves the laurels of greater Presidents.
The Cleanest President Ever: There can be no argument against Donald Trump being the most investigated President ever. The effort to investigate every pore of his being began even before he was President and continued every day of his Presidency. His business relationships, international actions, taxes, personal relationships, and actions with the deep state were dissected by the opposition candidate, a special prosecutor, 10 opposition prosecutors, an impeachment committee, the FBI, the CIA, and the entire weight of the American media – and they found….Nothing. Not a thing. After all the viciousness and character assassination, the history books will show an opposition candidate participated in her own dirty tricks to hide her corruption, an attempted coup from deep state ne’er do wells’, a 40 million dollar prosecutory disaster that only ended the reputation of the special prosecutor, and an impeachment attempt that ended up uncovering the actual corruption in Biden that they tried to find in Trump. You want a President who has been vetted beyond any doubt as to his motives? You got it in Donald J Trump.
Donald J Trump, flaws and all, has proven to be one of the more consequential Presidents in history. He deserves, more than most, another swing at the plate. I don’t know what the outcome of November 3rd(or beyond) will be, but if performance not personality is the gauge of American leadership, then Donald J Trump should win in a landslide. He has completely surprised me, and something I would never have said four years ago, I will say now. I will vote for him unreservedly.
If you relied on mainstream media projections of the world today, you would only know a pandemic world of shut down, economic malaise, chaos, and violence. The leading foil for this calamitous vision is certainly the lizard king himself, President Donald John Trump. Four years of projection of the president as a bully, ignoramus, naive tool of dictators, and incompetent has been critical to the effort to remove him from office, first, through deep state insurrection, innuendo, and then, impeachment. Somehow the President had managed to withstand the onslaught. only to have the coup de grace, the Covid pandemic, demolish the hard won domestic victories of the first three years, and put him at the mercy of an entirely unpredictable opponent, a virus . The promoted image of the President has been one of only superficial animal instincts and cunning – entirely devoid of a plan, a vision, a stable direction.
The reality on the world stage is quietly one of the more effective stewardships of American foreign policy of any president in my lifetime. The lizard king has managed on multiple fronts to create momentum that would, under any other leader of acceptable presentation to the media image makers, be seen as historic in scope. Under assault from a huge southern border migration begun in the previous administration, threatening to permanently make the border disappear and criminal trafficking to explode, propagated by enormous media pressure based upon a narrative of Trump as hater, the President achieved implausibly instead an almost complete stoppage in cross border illegal traffic that had evaded two previous presidents , negotiating a “Remain in Mexico” accord with Mexico itself to halt the flow. Trump harangued successfully NATO partners in providing more financial support for the common defense, likely saving NATO from a self induced dissolution based on largesse and detachment, and pivoting to more engaged mutual defense partnerships with Poland, India, Australia, and Japan. Trump dramatically re-ordered the unholy marriage of climatology and globalist socialist ambitions with U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord, and removed almost overnight American energy vulnerability with support of fracking. The President stopped a western decades long subservience to Chinese economic malfeasance of trade imbalances and intellectual theft threatening to enucleate western economic strength and resolve. Most impressively in the Middle East, Trump in three short years succeeded at successfully moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, reversing the calamitous Iran agreement, smashing ISIS, and eliminating the two most implacable monsters of terror to the region, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani. Most effectively, he has managed all these achievements with a dramatic lack of commitment of military forces to new American military adventures, a first since World War II.
The above achievements alone would be an impressive foreign policy record for any President, much less one who is roundly derided as absent any intellectual depth or patience. Now, August 13, 2020, brought an even more unexpected and spectacular achievement. The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab nation in nearly 30 years to enter into mutual recognition with the state of Israel. The “Abraham” accord, negotiated with the assistance of Trump’s Middle East team led by his son in law Jared Kushner, managed to go where even the previous Egyptian and Jordanian pacts decades ago failed to go – complete bilateral recognition across diplomatic, economic, tourism and trade sectors. The agreement has completely upended long standing notions of supposed diplomatic expertise, and opened a long closed door to real progress and peace in the region.
For decades, US and global diplomacy leaned almost entirely on Israel to concede on multiple fronts to hostile Palestinian demands in order to “affect’ an environment suitable to solving the implacable Israeli-Palestinian “problem”. The Palestinians were viewed by the Arab and external world as the aggrieved party, with constant pressure on Israel through sanctions, UN resolutions, terrorist actions, and border wars to trade survival for etherial “recognition”. It was considered gospel – no progress without Palestinian agreement, and no Palestinian agreement without abject Israeli surrender. Israeli doves bought into the charade – at one point Israeli Prime Minister Olmert offering to the Palestinians 95% of the West Bank, a physical connection between Gaza and the West Bank, negotiations toward some sort of refugee return to Israel Proper, and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. This nearly complete capitulation was rejected by Palestinian leader Abbas, as the underlying goal of the Palestinians was eventually restoration of all of “Palestine”. As has become the sage saying in the across the Middle East, “the Palestinians never waste an opportunity, to waste an opportunity”.
The Trump administration saw something that had eluded the Obama Administration – the Iran threat had flipped over long standing rationalities among Arab states to shun Israel. Iran’s revolutionary Shia desire to rout long standing Sunni dominance in the region had led to severe destabilization of the Levant from Lebanon through Syria to Iraq, and the southern Saudi peninsula in Yemen. With the acknowledgement by Arab states that their economic global leverage on the single resource of oil was rapidly diminishing and the need to convert their economies onto 21st century platforms to survive , the 13th century basis of Iranian theocracy and radical Sunni extremism was identified as an existential threat. Progressively the example as the way forward to the 21st century was their formerly implacable foe, Israel. Israel had proved itself the resilient nation of the region, powerful militarily, first world in technology and economic diversity, and a worthy advisory to Iranian belligerence. The US superpower could no longer be relied upon to be the military policeman, and Russia and China too flawed in power projection to provide any counterbalance.
The United Arab Emirates are the logical first signees to the Abraham accords. The Emirates have presciently prepared for the post oil world by investing in a modern future. The port at Dubai has become a world financial and trade center, a tourist mecca, and the pride of gulf development. The spectacular achievement of the Birj Khalifa, completed in 2010 as the tallest skyscraper in the world by far, announced to the world that the Emirates were going to be players on the world stage. Led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates have presented a challenge to their more powerful and richer neighbor Saudi Arabia and its ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that being mired in a single resource economy and rigidly tied to the past perceptions is a recipe for obsolescence and regime vulnerability. Real earth shaking shifts in the tectonic plates of the Middle East are possible, and the UAE is unlikely to be the only Arab state that recognizes the opportunity that presents in an effective relationship with powerhouse Israel.
The Trump Administration was elected by voters who felt Washington had become sclerotic and incapable of seizing initiative in a changing world, and asked Trump to become the unbounded revolutionary for change. He has done that and more, both domestically and internationally, and in normal times would be seen as a pivotal and historical figure. Certainly, a Nobel Laureate for Peace. The elites will never be able to admit they were wrong about their rigid interpretation of a changing world, or the abilities of that labile ball of energy and initiative we call President.
For the first time in many years since the martyrdom of Anwar Sadat, one can look at the most unstable corner of the world, and say, There’s a Chance…
Hopefully the American electorate is more prescient than the elites on November 3rd, and gives this amazing story an opportunity to develop a real and lasting epilogue .
The current crisis and its restrictions on day to day mundane activities permits a silver lining, consistent time for reading and thinking. The coordinated marriage of the two, concerted reading that leads to thinking about what you have read, is perhaps a neglected skill that deserves reinvigoration. For those of us who love the study of history as a window and perspective into present turmoils, a deep dive into the struggle for independence of the American colonies from the British Empire is just such a marriage. Personal freedom, the right to pursuit of life, liberty, and personal happiness, is up front in the current conflict between the juxtaposed goals of safety and security and personal freedoms delineated in my previous essay. Superficial feelings of safety give one initially a sense of comfort, but riskier personal actions that ultimately preserve liberties give long term awareness and recognition of the ultimate meaning of life as something more than a simple state of being. Rick Atkinson, a multi-Pulitzer Prize winning author of military history , has begun spectacularly on another American trilogy, a narrative on the American War for Independence 1775-1783, the first volume currently published, that looks ultimately into the concept of risky personal actions under incredible hardships, individual sacrifice, and daunting odds, that were taken by Americans to win that most immeasurable of gifts, freedom to live one’s own destiny.
War is the violent rejection of the possible compromises of politics. Limited war seeks improved political advantage; all out war presents as the clash of outcomes – as Lincoln stated in his House Divided speech regarding the union of states, “I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” Atkinson relates a narrative that suggests the power of the concept of personal freedom guiding one’s destiny, from the individual soldier to the highest of Generals, made incalculable individual sacrifices for an ideal an acceptable determination. The initial sense by the British of a minority rabble led local insurrection ballooned rapidly into a transcontinental conflagration fought by hundreds of thousands over 8 years of conflict, linked by the single philosophical sense that a life worth living could only exist under one unalterable outcome, freedom from living under a dictated destiny. There is little else to explain the willingness of average people to give up all thoughts of security, family, and property, and advance headlong into an unpredictable, extremely ruthless, and unlimited sacrifice against daunting odds of survival, on the minuscule chance that the birth of an idea would survive to the next generation. As he did so brilliantly in his previous war trilogy, the Allied armies battle for Europe in World War II, Atkinson brings a modern intimacy to individual participants , as they ride through the whirlwind of events and actions that are fatefully decided for them, and by which they have no control or perception of outcome.
The first book in the trilogy centers on the first three years of organized aggression, from the events leading to the first stand at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on April 18th, 1775 to the spectacular Christmas time mobile attack orchestrated by George Washington against Trenton and Princeton, December 1776- January 1777 that salvaged an almost inexorable sense of impending defeat permeating the colonies. The events and personalities are stitched into the fragment of the American birth saga – Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Quebec, New York and Trenton; Paul Revere, Charles Putnam and Henry Knox, Benedict Arnold, and George Washington himself. Equally vivid in Atkinson’s tale are the formidable British opponents, The Howe brothers, Guy Carleton, Henry Clinton, George Cornwallis, and King George III. Interwoven are the colors of detail that make the distant conflict come to life – particularly the insufferable effects of weather and disease that brought conditions for the average combatant. The ravages of Small Pox a particularly catastrophic enemy of men in bivouac, a virus with a 15-60%mortality rate did more to destroy the American effort against royal Canada than the bullets of the defenders – poor nutrition, miserable camp hygiene, and the close quarters against the cold – made the men particularly susceptible to the human to human transmission of the virus. A hundred thousand deaths from small pox across the colonies from 1775 to 1781 would severely impede the fighting spirit and contribution of the colonies populations to the war. Another equally stark discovery in Atkinson’s book is the rapid acceleration of ruthless “total war actions” by both sides as the seriousness and extent of the conflict became obvious. As Atkinson so poetically states, ” The wolf had risen in the heart.” Thousands of Continental troops died in captivity in naval prison vessels in the most appalling conditions with little concern from their former British countrymen. Violence and ruthlessness traditionally reserved for troops extended quickly out to innocents in towns and villages across the continent. Atkinson describes in detail such an example of inhumanity in the actions of British and mercenary Hessian soldiers through the New Jersey countryside:
In the Raritan valley, 650 houses- the homes of about a third of the families in Middlesex County- would be ransacked or burned, along with mills, churches, and other structures. A Presbyterian minister wrote that Newark ‘looked more like a scene of ruin then a pleasant well-cultivated village….Their plundering is so universal, their robberies so atrocious, I cannot fully describe their conduct.’ Other testimonials accumulated as county justices, clergymen, and the governors of New Jersey and New York investigated further, identifying victims as young as ten and as old as seventy, in what the historian David Hackett Fischer described as ‘an epidemic of rape’.”
The deadly intensity and costs of the struggle no doubt surprised greatly the British leaders. Bunker Hill , the famous battle for Boston fought June 17, 1775, stunned both King and Parliament when the news of the outcome reached London. Atkinson frames the epic conflict that made it clear to Britain that a simple expression of might by the greatest military force in the world at that time would not be sufficient to cower the rebellious Americans:
The rebels waited, now killing mad…A stupendous volley ripped into the British ranks blowing the fusiliers from their feet. Gun smoke rolled down a beach upholstered with dying regulars as their comrades stepped over them only to also be shot down. ..’It was like pushing a wax candle against a red-hot plate’ historian Christopher Ward would write. ” the head of the column simply melted away.’ ….
Gage’s army had regained roughly a square mile of territory at the expense of over a thousand casualties…Over 40% of the stacking force had been killed or wounded, including 226 dead; … Nineteen officers had also been killed. Of all the king’s officers who would die in battle during the long battle war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in the four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.
The extent of the ferocity never wavered over the years of the war. The British Empire swollen to a position of world dominance by their victory in the world war with France culminating with the winning of the near entire expanse of the North American continent, was led by King George III , a highly intelligent monarch who nonetheless could not fathom tolerating the loss of such a huge colonial expanse only 12 short years after securing it, nor the implied threat to his sovereignty. The British effort to retain the colonies and subdue and destroy the rebellion was enormous, and enormously costly. The extent of the commitment was highlighted in the battle for New York July-August of 1776, almost immediately following the declaration of independence of the colonies on July 4th. Britain amassed the largest amphibious force in the history of warfare prior to Normandy transporting 35000 fighting soldiers and over 200 naval ships the 3000 miles across the ocean to take the critical city from the rebels and nearly entirely decimate Washington’s Continental army in one epic battle. They came within an eye-blink of success, routing Washington and forcing him out of the city and on the run across New Jersey. The victory set the stage for one of the more amazing turnabouts in military history, when the dominant British forces and their Hessian allies suffered two calamitous defeats from Washington’s supposedly destroyed army assumed to be harboring in Pennsylvania and left in the cold to disappear. A spectacular return across the Delaware River on Christmas Day, 1776 of Washington’s nearly entire force stunned the Hessian troops at Trenton and subsequently the British troops at Princeton, ending forever the British hope that conquering and securing the large cities would be sufficient to finally starve the rebellion. Washington managed the impossible from his bedraggled and starving troops by appealing to the core foundation of their sacrifice. It was tactic he had used previously at times of great risk:
The hour is fast approaching on which the honor and success of this army and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember, officers and soldiers, that you are freemen, fighting for the blessings of liberty
George Washington, General Orders, August 23, 1776
The stories of heroism and sacrifice, cowardice and treachery abound across the fantastic scape of Atkinson’s prose as the book positions the reader for long turmoil to come. At the conclusion of the first book of the trilogy, the Americans have pushed back at the periphery, but the general state of the effort for independence is hanging by a thread. The overwhelming British presence and military capacity has recaptured Canada and is positioning to drive down the Hudson and split the new country in half. A massive second British army dominates America’s most important supply port at New York, and a third army is positioning to drive the American southern colonies out of the war. There is little to suggest that the brief American experiment to create a new world predicated on liberty and individual destiny has any hope of survival. We know the twists and turns to come, but Atkinson’s prose reads as intensely as a mystery novel packed with surprises.
I can hardly wait for the second act.
Recently, the Governor of New Jersey , when confronted with the concern that restrictions he was mandating in response to the Covid pandemic violated the Bill of Rights, was quoted as saying “That’s above my pay grade. I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this.” As one considers those decisions currently considered to roll back freedoms in the guise of protecting us against ourselves, one must remind one selves of a time when the very thought of liberty drove men to suffer and risk death to preserve those principles.
Rick Atkinson’s wonderful book tells us that, to a man in revolutionary America, inalienable rights were at the very forefront of their pay grade.
Great Britain House of Commons Election 2019 photo collage attrib. news.sky .com
For the third time since 2015, the electorate of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain came together on Thursday December 12, 2019 to form a governing legislative body. A process of parliament formation normally designed essentially to occur on five year intervals, the populous staggered toward this premature repeat performance based on a wrenchingly conflicted public perception as to whether a House of Commons still determined the destiny of the nation, or sensing the concept of nation having grown tired to the point of making the formation of a House of Commons a quant relic of the past, passively adjusting to a future decided ultimately by others. Parliamentary systems allow for individuals to identify with others who hold in common very specific views of life and destiny, ultimately leading to much fragmentation and the need for unstable coalitions for governance.
As in much of the rest of the world the issue became one of basically two life views, one which seeks security and outcome equality, and one which favors personal freedom and equal opportunity. Poorly defined as Left or Right, Progressive or Conservative, the democratic electorates of the world have aligned themselves in one camp or the other, and thus the outcomes of elections have become ever more polar. It becomes increasingly harder to imagine oneself in the universe of the other party, influenced or compromising with it, or reflecting a conversion of one’s ideals by actually voting for the opposite view.
Then, an idea like Brexit comes into being and the traditional boundaries are awash on the shoals. The British public found themselves in 2016 voting across party lines in a referendum vigorously unsupported by the party leadership of both the left and the right, in a stunning win for the concept of national destiny over supranational security. This fundamental issue subsumed all others to the point where arguing about taxes, health care, immigration, education and other polar issues of the left and right had become subservient to the destiny issue. The result was a schism in almost all parties along the Leave or Remain fault line, to the horror of the all the standard politicians who have lived in the realm pandering to like minded people who once loyally shared their universe. Suddenly, the Progressives were finding support in the landed gentry, and the Conservatives were sifting through the Midlands, Wales, and Scotland to seek industrial laboring commoners who would not normally give them the time of day.
BBC graphic regarding electoral issues
The night of December 12th brought clarity to this schism, at least as defined by the voting public of Great Britain, if not attaching broader implications to other democracies. The left in Britain, found itself calamitously anchored on the seizing electoral deck to Jeremy Corbyn, a caricature of a sixties counterculture communista, promoting failed socialism of the 1970s and tolerating vailed anti-Semitic threats from the darker radical elements of his party, and counting on a supposed burgeoning emotional vote of youthful victimaholics and virtue signalers. Corbyn, like his party, remained paralyzed by the Brexit impulse. Traditional socialism would require release from many of the state capitalism tenets of the European Union, but the very youth he was counting on to drive his vote were generationally opposed to standing athwart the collective global impulses of a European superstate that sought to make obsolete quant national notions of unfettered destiny and individual freedom of action.
The Conservative Tories were equally conflicted. The Tory elite had assumed the attachment to the superstate a permanent reality, and stunned by the initial 2016 vote they had overconfidently reasoned would remove any notions that the nation would go its own path, were left in shambolic hypocrisy of delaying and deferring the Brexit date as many times as possible, in hopes the public would simply become exhausted by it and relent to staying. The David Camerons, Theresa Mays, and cadre of front bencher elites always saw themselves diminished by not being included in the EU club of elites, and couldn’t imagine an alternative world where the hobnobbing would have to be limited to crass Australians, Indians, or worse, Americans.
To this dysfunctional party came one Boris Johnson. A politician labelled as grossly undisciplined, disconnected to traditions of party, and borderline randy-ish, Johnson had almost uniquely positioned himself to be Prime Minister after the Brexit referendum of 2016 by being the solitary Brexiteer of the 2016 party establishment, only to clumsily flub his opportunity and provide the stunned elite to recover their senses and wedge their way back into the driver’s seat. This time however, Johnson showed the capacity to learn from his lack of discipline and took two massive risks that initially appearing foolhardy paid off as an electoral quinella. First, he declared for an immediate winter election that risked his fragile coalition and his position as prime minister while removing standing for all MPs that were anti-Brexit, and stated unequivocally that the primary impact of a Tory victory would be an immediate Brexit undertaking – no more delays come what may. Johnson saw intuitively that his clarity would confound the other parties, so afraid of the Brexit mentality straining the party base support on all other societal issues, while equally unwilling to come out as supporters of the EU, which they secretly and most assuredly were.
December 12th, 2019 brought clarity all right. It brought a smashing victory for Boris Johnson’ instincts and final vindication for the twenty five year struggle of Nigel Farage, the patron saint of Brexit. Farage’s self sacrificing gambit to “trust” Johnson’s commitment to Brexit, avoid safe Tory seats, and concentrate on Labour strongholds where Brexit wistfulness was high, was a dramatic contributor to Labour losing a spectacular 59 seats and Tory MP’s sweeping in to pick up the collateral. Almost alone over 25 years, Farage had brazenly driven the Brexit concept when it was laughed at by all elites and media sages – one can suggest now it is Farage who can have the last laugh.
attrib. to ABCNEWS.Go.Com
Now the political leaderships on both sides of the pond are led by raffish, and sometimes buffoonish ubercharacters that seem to have an animal instinct as to the core impulses of their nations. We have been told for years that the science is settled, that new generations are interested only in their self reflection and their global need to blend in to truly feel secure. We have been fed this line by a compliant media that wishes it were true, and will do whatever it can to establish the ideal as a reality. Yet, time after time, the outcomes don’t fit the narrative, and free people keep upsetting the idea of inevitability. Boris Johnson now has his triumph. We will see if he can close the deal. In America, his doppelgänger is under massive attack by his own elite and media, that seeks to overturn what they are convinced was an immature spasm of the voting public in 2016 that brought the contrarian political Trump to stunning life. They are furious that in democracies, the clarity of righteousness is not always appreciated by a public that doesn’t always seem to understand the arc of history as they do.
If Trump survives, I suspect we will see a similar electoral thumping of the elites very well may be in the cards. Then, between Johnson and Trump, and the nascent Johnsons and Trumps watching with great interest in other democracies, things could really get interesting. Maybe freedom and its twin destiny are not quant relics of the past after all.
Once more into the breach, my friends, once more into the breach.
On a cold night in February, 1989, a twenty year old waiter at a local restaurant in East Berlin determined with a friend of his to engage a hasty plan to try and change their lives for good. They considered their odds somewhat better than the hundreds who had come before them, though there had been no particularly strong reason for their optimism. Since 1961, a progressively fortified barrier to any such motivations had loomed over the dividing line of East and West Berlin separating the Communist East from the free West, and a ruthless regiment of armed guards, vehicle obstacles, and razor sharp wire secured the bizarro world of a wall designed to keep the people in, like a prison, rather than constructed to hold people out. The waiter, Chris Gueffroy, and his friend, Christian Guadian, could no longer stand the stultifying life of oppression facing them on the east side of the wall, and telling no one, just before midnight february 5th, 1989, made their attempt at freedom. They successfully scaled the initial 10 foot high Hinterlandmauer and had crossed the open zone to the signal fence. It was here that their luck ran out. One of the two set off a motion alarm and the zone was flooded in lights. Desparately they sought to climb the final barrier to freedom, when border guards took aim and fired. Christian took several shots and was seriously injured.
Chris Gueffroy never found his freedom, as a bullet found his heart and struck it, killing him instantly. In an irony that often defies explanation, his failed effort at anonymous escape led a type of immortality. Chris Gueffroy became the last known victim, the final mortality, of the Berlin Wall.
We are now thirty years from the series of events that irreparably cracked the iron wall that separated conquered peoples of Eastern Europe lorded by the Russian empire from the free peoples of Western Europe. With collapse of the German war machine at the end of World War II, a ruthless but rational dividing line was agreed to by allied powers to prevent the massive armies of the Russian East and the Allied West from contacting violently and setting into motion the seeds of a new world conflict out of the disaster of the old. With conquered Berlin itself entirely within the Soviet Zone of occupation, the allies insisted upon a microcosm of the the division of Europe within the city itself, allowing the Russians to secure the eastern half of the city, and the allied English, American and French, the western remnant. The dividing line was at the Brandenburg Gate, and transport both into Berlin from the West, and West Berlin to East Berlin almost immediately became difficult and progressively restricted. The victorious Soviet dictator Stalin had no intention to cede any of the conquered territory that would provide an impenetrable buttress between the west and the Soviet Union, which had suffered most catastrophically from the German Nazi military onslaught. Additionally firm in his conviction as a Communist, of the inevitable victory of the proletariat, he determined to secure in all of the conquered territory a rigid adherence to Communist principles and unquestioned fealty to the overlords from Moscow.
The prescient Winston Churchill had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Americans of a harder line at the end of the war, and strongly spoke out against the ever coiling and strengthening grip of the Soviet domination as the post war realities descended. At a Fulton College speech in 1946 he coined the dark dilemma and dangerous challenge for a generation:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.“
One by one the ancient kingdoms and republics behind the Iron Curtain were subjugated to the will of the Communist elite. From Poland to Hungary, from Czechoslovakia to Romania, the Baltic Republics to Bulgaria – all fell under the dark oppressive shadow of a unified Soviet communist empire. To little surprise, the most oppressive and reactionary government was reserved for the remnant of Germany that formed the East German “Democratic Republic”. Here the severest orthodoxy was injected, and the secret police, the Stazi, resembled closely their antecedents the Gestapo.
Over the decades, a battle of wills took place between the subjugated peoples and the overwhelming might of the communist dictators, with occasional brief cracks, such as the German workers revolt of 1953, the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, and the Czech Spring of 1968, ruthlessly put down. Untold numbers of political objectors and common people were harassed, imprisoned, or murdered. The occasional uprisings only seemed to speak to the permanency of the dark world that had unfolded.
It would prove to be the unlikely cooperation of a President, a Prime Minister, and a Pope that would uncover the secret sauce that achieved the inconceivable outcome of a essentially violence free destruction of the Communist empire. The slowly growing torrents that quietly but steadily undermined the Communist behemoth started with the new lines of protest opened up by the Helsinki Accords of 1975, the formation of the worker’s movement in Poland in 1980 fronted by a nondescript Gdansk dock worker named Lech Walesa and fueled by the intellectual and spiritual power of the first Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, the writings of the Czech political prisoner Vaclav Havel, and the indominable will of the twin towers of anti-communist western leadership, Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan. All came to bear on a seemingly impervious Russian communist Soviet state, secretly more corroded and weakened than anyone had the temerity to hope. Suddenly, by 1985, the Soviets were forced to confront their collapsing economic infrastructure and put forth Mikhail Gorbachev, who as a modern Communist, could neither support the continuing failures of the traditional collective economy nor throw communist dogma away in favor of free markets. The ineffectual twin programs of Glasnost and Perestroika only underscored the emptiness of answers under communism for the crumbling empire.
The cracks, initially so minuscule, were indisputably foundational, and once the propagations started, proved impossible to suppress. The signal for toppling the whole rotten edifice was ignited by the speech in 1987 President Reagan gave at the the very epicenter of the iron curtain, the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate:
The cracks suddenly propagated in 1989 with such force that the decrepit Soviet overlords found the momentum, and the multiple cracks, impossible to stop, or simply lost the will to slaughter their own people. The Elections in Poland swept out the Communist party from the sham legislature in the spring of 1989, leaving the weakened President to realize his own ability to influence events markedly diminished, and eventually impossible. This was rapidly followed by Hungary, who outmaneuvered East Germany by opening their border with Austria, resulting in a massive flow of desperate East Germans out of the Soviet state to the West, without having to deal with the terrible wall. In a short time, hundreds of thousands moved to get into the west through Hungary, and East Germany was in danger of literally emptying out. East Germany had been the ground zero of the entire Cold War, and it was assumed its dictator Eric Honecker, an old time Stalinist, would not go down without a fight. Crowds, however, started swelling in Leipzig, Berlin, and other East German cities and Honecker, looking for permission to crack down from his Soviet overlord Gorbachev, found Gorbachev distracted by his own burgeoning crisis at home. There would be no crack down. On October 17, 1989, Honnecker lost control of his own Politburo, who voted unanimously that he resign. He was replaced by Egon Krenz, who found himself helpless to effect any action by his security forces. At 10:45 pm November 9th, 1989, the border guards on Bornholmerstrasse gate opened the gates and allowed people to pass without permits. And the Wall forever came down.
For those of you who might be too young to remember this unbelievable event in real time, its hard to express the surge of emotions that went through tens of millions of people that day and the days that followed. The epic tragedy of World War II for tens of millions of people was to have the ultimate victory wrenched from their psyche by the almost immediate oppression of the Soviet superstate and the tremendous threat it posed to free will and individual freedom. The Cold War had dominated everyone for the next forty years and no one, except perhaps Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan , could possibly imagine such an spectacular, peaceful, and abrupt outcome of the fall of the communist hegemony.
Yet there it was . The impervious Wall, both physical and psychological, that had stood as the ultimate symbol of the permanence of the communist version of humanity, in a single night collapsed under the weight of the millions who wanted freedom, and could wait no longer to breathe it.
We are now thirty years from the epic moments of the world celebrating on the wall, tearing it down, cheering in unison, crying to the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth witnessed by millions at the wall and hundreds of millions on television. The years that passed saw the unification of Germany, the maturing of democracies in eastern Europe, and within two years, the ultimate, the collapse of the seventy year experiment in communist oppression with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of that night in November, 1989 however remain seared in my memory as the greatest shared moment of human achievement and ultimate expression of humanity in my own life.
We are far from that time, and pulled down by our own crises of freedom given away by those who have no real memory of a time when people like Chris Gueffroy died at the wall, so desperate to breath freedom that he was willing to risk it all on the infinitesimal chance that he would be one of the the very few who could experience an individual triumph over the oppressor.
Freedom so precious that the release of death was preferable to a life of oppression and despair. Thirty years along, Chris Gueffroy reaches across the mists of time to ask us to ever remember, and never give in. Long live freedom.
It always seems the end for the worst of humanity comes with a pathetic irony. Those who would waste the lives of hundreds of thousands, promoting themselves as steely icons of irresistible strength and ruthless ideologic will, often find their end in the pathetic circumstance of cowardly trying avoid their fate rather than facing their justice – by hiding in a hole (Saddam), behind the bodies of their women (Bin Laden), or in the most recent iteration, the ISIS thug Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi- hiding behind his children. No matter – the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends inevitably toward justice.
President Trump announced today the successful conclusion of a years long effort to corner and eliminate the self proclaimed leader of the ISIS caliphate – a hellishly cartoonish but murderously serious attempt to create a medieval autocracy along the lines of a perverted interpretation of Islam. Baghdadi, literally too radicalized and impatient even for the thugs of Al Qaeda, broke out to form a competitive cell of terrorists recruited among the most vicious and sociopathic of islamic outcasts, determining the sophisticated mass murders and patient revolution of Bin Laden and his followers were insufficient to their rage and determination to see their caliphate in their lifetimes. Preying on the calamity of Syria and the post Saddam weakness of Iraq, Baghdadi for a brief time achieved stunning success across the wastes of Syria and western Iraq, at one time swallowing tens of thousands of square miles of territory, the massive city of Mosul, and threatening the very edge of Baghdad itself.
Derided as “junior varsity” by imperious and distracted President Obama, Baghdadi triumphantly proclaimed the existence of the caliphate from the holy mosque of Mosul, and set about to live out the cartoon hell he had envisioned for those in the grasp of the caliphate. The innumerable tragedies played themselves out through the leering clarity of the internet, as Baghdadi’s perverse vision of islamic rule was baldly projected for all to see, and fear. The throwing of gays off roofs, the raping and enslavement of thousands of yazidi women, the burning alive of ISIS captives, the wanton destruction of thousands of years old relics of great civilizations in Iraq and Palmyra, Syria, and the outright thievery, extortion, murder and thuggery extreme even for the most extreme of the world’s criminal element were the calling cards of Baghdadi’s caliphate.
Fueled by the money they stole and the oil fields they captured, briefly the caliphate seemed to exude a permanence that entranced thousands of deviants from across the globe hoping to live out their fantasy of being a lord and executioner to the helpless other thousands who ISIS had swept up. The king thug Baghdadi attempted to place himself in the role of ultimate Caliph, accruing wealth and a harem of enslaved young women he could rape and dominate.
That is of course where the tragic arc of the life of Kayla Mueller was drawn into the barbarous arc of the king thug Baghdadi. As I reviewed at length in Ramparts in 2016 – Ramparts People We Should Know – Kayla Mueller – Kayla was martyred in the unholy clutches of Baghdadi, but her story of incredible fortitude and human decency under the most awful and agonizing of personal distress, was in many ways the trigger to the inevitable end of the thug king. Her indomitable faith moved Kayla to withstand the most intolerable of human perversion , and the circumstances of her calling in life – “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal” – transcended her 2015 death in the manner of sainthood.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice and the ultimate judgement of the Devine. President Trump, who had made the centerpiece of his administration the destruction and elimination of ISIS, was notified by the long arm of intelligence that Baghdadi had been identified hiding in the small village of Brisha, Syria, along the Turkish Syrian border. It was determined secretly last week to organize and inject a Special Forces Task Force with the solitary purpose of bringing the man responsible for the deaths of Ms. Mueller and so many thousands of others unto final justice. The mission was named “Kayla” – as no one had forgotten, and the justice to be served was to be her ultimate triumph over the thug king. The firm and final blow found its mark and delivered its sentence to the mass murderer and tyrannical dictator of innocents, in the coward’s way out using a suicide vest, miserably taking 3 of his innocent children with him, when his escape down a tunnel was blocked.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi has met the ignominious end so often associated with the worst of us, but like others of his ilk, not before he has ruined tens of thousands of lives. His name should disappear into the trash bin of history,
Hopefully, when the history of this particularly ugly chapter of humanity is behind us, the resonance of goodness that was imbued in the life of Kayla Mueller will outlive the sordid confinement she was forced to endure under the heel of the likes of Baghdadi. The region needs it. Humanity needs it.
Somewhere in Prescott, Arizona, Kayla’s parents have been notified by the President that the mission achieved justice for Kayla and that her personal human triumph over calamity was the ultimate inspiration to provide the final blow to the monster reign of the thug king Baghdadi. It won’t probably be enough to assuage all the pain, but hopefully it will bring closure. That would be, after all the evil that has befallen the world, a small injection of godliness we so desperately need.
Boris Johnson ascends to No. 10 Downing St . attrib. news.sky.com
The ever forward arc of ‘progress’ assumed by globalist elites was shaken cataclysmically by the unexpected earthquake win of outsider Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States in November, 2016. But the real tremblers began earlier that year across the pond in Britain on June 23, 2016 when the British population stunned all experts by coming out in droves to defend sovereignty with a vote to leave the European Union. As has happened on multiple occasions, the influence of the Mother country on the United States, and vice versa was evidenced in full flower. The casual assumption by elites in both countries that, the concept of ‘citizen’ had evolved irreversibly beyond the national boundaries and unique formative events that had formed the world’s two oldest continuing representative democracies, was abruptly derailed.
Never say die, never give in, when you are sure that you are right, though, is a foundational tenet of the liberal elite. The attacks, delays, and obfuscations began almost immediately in both countries. In the U.S., a cadre of deep state elites put into motion a crippling and potentially death dealing plan to dismantle the Trump Administration at birth, with the Russian Collusion hysteria and orchestrated ‘investigation’. The two year non-stop attack from both internal government coordinators and the media obsessed with removing the blot of Trumpism from their determined narrative as to the acceptable direction of the country, paralyzed most initiatives and required Trump to swing from the heels in pugilist fashion, at times his own worst enemy. In Britain a faux march towards Brexit with the Article 50 vote in the House of Commons covered a leadership elite impassioned to stall and obstruct any development of an agreement with the European Union that would actually significantly change Britain’s relationship. The goal was, with each passing month, a “do over” that would ignore the clear will of the British populous with the first plebiscite, and manipulate a second vote to overturn the first, locking Great Britain permanently in the grip of the continental overlords of the European Union. When you are defending the ever forward arc of progress, you can’t let democratic minions who think they want to control their own future stand in your way.
The fascinating lesson, however, learned over and over is the stubborn strength of the mechanisms of democracy set up hundreds of years ago in both countries, resistant to the manipulations of false and misleading narratives. The edifice of the Trump Collusion narrative has crumbled into dissolution against facts and overreach, exposing the righteous attack as closer to the ‘witch-hunt’ defined by the President. The final blow may have come when the Chief Investigator Mueller, held up as indomitable and impartial, revealed finally in Congressional hearings designed to devastate Trump, that he barely comprehended what had been the details or the legal foundations of his own investigation. In Britain, the multiple delays of the multiple deadlines for leaving came up against the full fury of the British electorate when they voted overwhelmingly for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in European Parliament elections, crushing the establishment parties, in a victory by a party that had not even existed six weeks prior to the vote.
The most recent indication that the tumult between the global elites and the contrarian people they rule was not going away, was the internal election of Boris Johnson displacing Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and ascension to the Prime Ministership of the House of Commons. A leaver from the start, Johnson has been painted as a clownish, lightweight figure by the establishment, much along the lines of his American counterpart, Donald Trump. Johnson started his premiership with his own version of “draining the swamp”, removing all semblance of Theresa May’s bumbling EU appeasement cabinet and replacing them with hardline leavers. He set a standard for leaving on October 31st, with or without an agreement with the EU, and pledged firmly no more moving of the line in the sand.
The strange result is, once again, a historical coalescence of the special influences and relationships between Great Britain and the United States that defies the demands of others to abrogate the relationship once and for all. One thinks back to the last time such a convocation led to immense progress, the quirky relationship of a bookish middle class chemist and an American actor, who found themselves uncommonly bound on common ideology and purpose.
President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher attrib. national review.com
The possibilities of a restoration of a special relationship between Johnson and Trump along the lines of Thatcher and Reagan can seem a stretch when the labile personalities and elastic ideological convictions of the current duo seem impossible to pin down. Their ‘can do’ spirit’ and the basis of what they believe regarding the earned greatness of achievement of their respective countries however shine brightly against any perceived lack of intellectualized ideological underpinning. The two men are part of a crusade to reverse the tide of decay that permeates western civilized culture, and have the strange current convergence of an aligned electorate in both countries that want the great experiment of individual freedom, to go on, just a bit longer.
Audacity is a peculiarly American trait. On May 5th, 1961, the United States of America succeeded in launching a Redstone rocket propelling Freedom 7, a Mercury space capsule inhabited by first astronaut, Alan Shepard a distance of 101 nautical miles into space in a 15 minute sub-orbital flight, and successfully recovering both the capsule and the astronaut in the Atlantic Ocean. An American first, but not nearly a world first. The Soviet Union three weeks before had launched Yuri Gagarin not only into space, but into successful orbit, indicating a generational lead in launch capacity, lift power, and sophistication. One might think the perspective would have brought humility to American expectations in the face of the Soviet prowess. Instead, a mere 20 days after the Freedom 7 flight, President John F Kennedy before a joint session of Congress declared:
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, ormolu important in the long range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Audacity personified.
The idea that America could in the space of eight years go from the concept of a single stage rocket sub-orbital flight to the as of yet barely perceived spectacular technical challenges of escaping Earth orbit, coordinating a flight to an extraterrestrial body, land on it, escape from it, return successfully to Earth, and do so with the enormously added complexity of doing so while sustaining fragile humans on board approached ridiculous. The President of course was little interested in the engineering; he was entirely focused on what he saw as an existential threat created by failing to beat the Soviet Union to the accomplishment.
The National Air and Space Administration, led by James E Webb, knew accomplishing reality was an entirely different matter to the idealistic vision. The number of necessary inventions and engineering feats that would have to follow in coordinated sequence without fail, most of which had yet to be conceived, much less tested, was beyond comprehension. A staged rocket capable of thrust propelling not a few thousand, but tens of thousands of pounds of machinery beyond orbit, escaping earth’s gravity, was barely on engineering concept boards. A craft transporting humans and accurately navigating across the expanse of space would have to be developed. The space craft would have to somehow secure a means of returning safely to earth, but not before delivering a secondary manned craft, not yet conceived, to the Moon’s surface, capable of independent flight, landing and takeoff, as well performing an in space linkup for the return home. It would require environments safe for humans in deep space, spacesuits capable of ludicrous airless environments. It would require sophisticated computation and associated miniaturization on a scale not in existence, through sciences yet to be invented. Every facet, every step, would likely occur as a first of its kind, with almost no mechanism for testing before use, and no room for failure on such a timetable and the totally unforgiving environment of space. And successful or not, it would require a ton of money.
Audacious to the extreme.
The story tells itself, in that on July 20th, 2019, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the successful culmination of this audacious vision. The anniversary of man’s first flight to another terrestrial body and safe return is the epic story of Apollo 11 and the heroic accomplishment of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and hundreds of thousands of nameless contributors that made it possible. The story tells itself, but as we get farther away from the accomplishment, and fifty years later, trying to find a way to return to the Moon, the glory of every chapter becomes more and more brilliant and sparkling.
The eight year sprint from Shepard’s Mercury craft to the spectacular success of the Apollo 11 mission of July 16- 24, 1969 required incredible vision, engineering brains and construction competence rarely achieved in the history of man. Webb, the NASA administrator had to orchestrate an in calculable number of science firsts to even position for a possible attempt at the moon. Chief among this was to create a rocket of exceptional lifting power beyond all comprehension of the first rocket crafts. The Redstone rocket lifting the Mercury craft had the capacity for creating 78000 pounds force of thrust to lift the Mercury capsule into space. The spectacular three stage Saturn V rocket created for the Apollo mission, standing 363 feet high, would create over 7,8 million pounds force of thrust and capable of lifting greater than 150000 lbs of vehicle to the moon. Despite the enormous explosive force and the highly volatile fuel concoctions, Saturn V eventually performed 13 consecutive flawless launches and never lost a crew.
Saturn V
Initial Mercury orbits required calculations with slide rules; the Apollo crafts would develop the first integrated circuits or computer chips in history to drive the first navigation computers. So new was the technology that the calculations were often cross checked by Astronauts using slide rules and astrolabes to assess star positions. So revolutionary was the miniturization that it spawned the digital revolution that dominates the world today.
The suits worn by the astronauts required otherworldly technology. Over 20 layers were hand woven to provide the unique characteristics of flexibility sufficient to move in space or walk on the moon performing tasks, yet critically sealing the astronaut against the absolute vacuum and extreme temperatures of space, as well as the bombardment of radiation and microparticles. The manufacturing genius for such as living cocoon was left to the creative intellects who had designed the Living Bra – Playtex. Go figure.
The multiple crafts and critical maneuvers were tested in real time with no room or time for failure. Mercury developed the technical aspects of multi-orbit flight. Gemini, a larger two person craft flown from 1965 to 1967 developed the many maneuvers potentially required for a deep space mission. Critical firsts in Extra Vehicular (Space Walk ) Activity and learning how to safely perform the maneuvers for space craft rendezvous and docking were achieved, as well as extended stays in space, by astronauts who later would represent the bulk of the Apollo astronaut corps that would seek and explore the moon.
Apollo, the three astronaut craft, made its debut in devastating fashion that would have normally ended any other less politically driven program. On February 21 1967, Apollo 1, performing a prelaunch test, sustained a catastrophic fire with astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee trapped in the vehicle, brutally killing all three. The program returned to uncrewed flight while a full NASA and Congressional investigation determined the cause of the fire and identified safety enhancements to prevent any recurrence of the horrific event. By 1968, a manned Apollo 7 was launched into orbit to show the capability of the Apollo craft in space. December , 1968 brought Apollo 8 to the moon and back, A few months later Apollo 9 secured the docking process needed to secure the lunar vehicle in position for landing and return rendezvous . May 1969 brough the lunar module within 9 miles of a lunar landing as a dress rehearsal for the epic voyage of July 16, 1969, of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins to the Moon for the purpose of landing on another world.
All this spectacular spending ,creativity and achievement in eight years led to magnificent day of July 20th, 1969, when the fragile LEM craft was landed on the Sea of Tranquility with the deft flying of Armstrong and the rapid calculations of Aldrin. Half the world was watching breathlessly as an American astronaut gently glided down from the final stair, some 3.5 feet of the moon surface and placed his foot for the first time on an extraterrestrial body. Seen as a shady fragile shadow on the television screens simultaneously viewed around the world, the awed audience could little contemplate another revolutionary first achieved by sending the picture 250,000 miles across space to be viewed in real time at home.
Neil Armstrong first stepping on the Moon July 20th,1969 “That’s one small step for a Man, one giant leap for all Mankind”
The incredible achievements of eight short years, the equivalent of 250 billion dollars in investment, the work of hundreds of thousands of scientists, technicians and construction workers came together in a flawless eight day mission of undeniable American exceptionalism. So undeniable, that there has been no attempt by any country since the final mission of Apollo 17 in 1973 to come remotely close to replicate the achievement. Glory in all the documentaries that present the many angles of this incredible mission on its 50th anniversary, and absorb what this nation of free citizens accomplished. Maybe the you are there intensity is best captured by the National Geographics documentary :Missions to the Moon that provides the sites and voices of the time without narration. No matter, the ride will be thrilling whichever you choose. A once in a life time adventure is brought to life for us once more, and maybe, gives the seed of inspiration that encourages a new generation, to try to do it all over again.
