President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast –AP photo Evan Vucci
This past week, we saw the passing of one the world’s great historians. Sir Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, and author of many meticulously researched historical tomes including the histories of WWI, WWII, the Twentieth Century, and Judaism and the Holocaust, succumbed to the ravages of disease and age. Sir Martin, was a traditional historian who saw history as a device not by which to judge, but to illuminate. He did not see value in fitting the facts to a preexisting narrative. Accuracy, detail and exhaustive care with the precision of facts were his watchwords. With such individuals, the looseness with facts and the lack of depth of understanding so prevalent in today’s soundbite culture was anathema to him.
History, the bedrock intellectual pursuit that brings human perspective to all current events and passions, and that provides the means by which tragedy and missteps can be avoided by understanding what came before, has been dying as a discipline for some time. The modern citizen, asked to recall the components of his own citizenship, progressively fails to remember the simplest reasons for why he is a citizen and not a primeval schlub. When asked questions on the critical components of a civilized society, routinely the answer is a ludicrous guess or blank stare. A slim minority can name the founding American documents that secures their rights as citizens, the President who secured the end of slavery as an accepted form of economic servitude in the United States, the correct century in which World War II was fought, or basic events that led to the great mass murderers, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
The virus that has affected the average citizen was at least at one time resisted by the collective intellectual braintrust of the country, who had to determine the careful steps a country must take in a dangerous world, and where history might reveal the avoidable pitfalls . No longer. The President’s woeful depth of knowledge of history progressively shows itself to be not only ignorant, but aggressive and dangerous. At The National Prayer Breakfast this week, the President built upon his philosophical belief as to the moral equality of all religious cultural movements a superficial, nonsensical, and tortured historical rationalization for how the world about us became the world about us. At past times, the President’s gaffe filled memory of history and geography, the ‘fifty-seven states’ of the US, the lack of knowledge as to the chronology of the civil rights movement, and the clunky recall of his supposed specialty, constitutional law, seemed to be a simple reflection of the times. The self centered historical reflection without any attention to the actual details Obama exhibited in his recent speech, shows the premeditation of time honored principles of propagandists to sprinkle a few haphazard ‘facts’ into a predetermined meme of opinion that promotes the big lie. The specifics of the speech are torn apart by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, who recognizes the nonsense for what it is. But what does it say about how Obama’s own shamhistory is affecting his decisions as leader of the most powerful country on earth? The preening nonsense, so effortlessly and confidently emoted, promotes a darker and much more dangerous ignorance that could eventually get a lot of people killed.
Mixing up history and mythology, fact and fiction, memory and reality is a progressive plague upon how so much of our current important decision making and opinions are formed. The President’s moral equivalence and misrepresentation of hundreds of years old events such as the Crusades or the Inquisition and their place in history with today’s Islamic savagery, borders on cartoon. But he is not alone. The news anchor Brian Williams, who sees himself as the ‘one people trust” in objectively presenting the news, can not manage to present events without confabulating his role in them, to somehow make himself more authentic by telling tales that make him less so. Hillary Clinton, our potential next president, assumes people can absorb a big lie regarding a pathetic video no one watched making fun of Mohammed rather than own up to her own inaction and lack of preparation in the Benghazi debacle. John Kerry, our Secretary of State, made his mark in the military confabulating his Swift boat exploits in Vietnam, destroying others reputation to build his own. The President of Russia concocts a history regarding Ukraine that permits him to absorb it.
Embellishing or confabulating history is nothing new, but it often had a more innocent objective of promoting positive principles that reflected innate truths. George Washington could not tell a lie. Abraham Lincoln could split rails with one hand. Nelson Mandela was a scion of liberty and democracy. History can bring light onto the dirtiest of reflected mirrors of the past. In the current world however there isn’t even shame any longer on the process of embellishing or misrepresenting the way things came to be. We don’t even have enough pride in ourselves to demand of our leaders an objective hashing out of the truth. And that how you get the speech the President gave. And that is how we get the President, and history, we deserve.
Western Leaders Show ‘Solidarity’ in response to Paris massacre
“I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air”
Margaret Thatcher
“Engagement is not appeasement. Engagement is not surrender”
Chuck Hagel
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history, is the most important of all the lessons of history”
Aldous Huxley
The stark sequelae of the practice of appeasement leading up to the cataclysm that was the second world war has made the word appeasement a central focus of every consideration to determine how to confront tyranny since. The crystal clear lessons of Prime Minister of Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain’s decision to allow the Nazi gangster regime to devour Czechoslovakia in trade for a temporary etherial peace has remained the example for all time of the legacy of appeasement. Since the events of 1938-39, western democracies have been more sensitive to the risk of the label of appeaser being applied to them, to avoid the stigma of their actions being interpreted as ignorance or weakness. The consequences, however, of ignoring history’s painfully learned lessons are no less dire in today’s modern world than they were in the simple fascism of the 1930s when state driven fascists bluntly developed their capabilities in easily recognizable uniformed, organized military forces.
The basic structural elements of weakness in recognition, preparation and confrontation native to appeasement remain every bit as trenchant in the need for understanding in today’s world as it did in the seeds of destruction planted by inaction prior to world War II. The power of last week’s march in Paris, where a common defense of the principles of free speech was trumpeted by many world leaders (sans America) and millions of citizens was visually stunning, but vacuous. It crumbled the minute the French President Hollande left the synagogue where the Israeli Prime Minister was about to speak, afraid to be associated with any expression of opinion that did not fit the meme of political correctness on the just the subject he had marched to defend earlier. To the tyrannists, no better signal of the hollow nature of the “outrage” could possibly have been sent. They could see that Hollande did not equate terrorism that Israel lives with on a daily basis with that of the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre, though the terror cells responsible for both hold nearly identical credos and objectives.
What are the common foundational elements of ignorance and weakness that form the perverted logic resulting in appeasement, and are we once again heading down the road so presciently defined by Winston Churchill in 1938 with the current islamofascist threat?Ramparts takes a look at the science of Appeaseology.
The Falsehoods of Grievance :
The need to appease on the basis of perceived grievance is a common element put forth by all appeasers. The Nazi gangsters were forgiven their neanderthal tactics on the consideration that they had been aggrieved by the world. The territories they sought were, after all, filled with German speaking and germanic ancestral peoples forced to live under the unnatural flag of oppressive foreigners like the government of Czechoslovakia. Much the same, today’s Palestinians are forced to ceed their natural rights to the land to the occupationist Israelis, the once seamless islamic caliphate to the usurping Christians and Yazhidis of Syria and Iraq, and the arab nation to the vestiges of French and British colonial abuse. If only the rightful heirs to the land would be restored, the need to be belligerent would rapidly dissipate. Modern western European liberal thought particularly remains inextricably linked to this form of Appeaseology.
Engagement and the path of Least Resistance:
The belligerent character of aggressors is a sign of their immaturity in the realm of diplomatic give and take. Belligerents simply want to be respected and taken seriously. By constructively engaging them and showing your willingness to be reasonable and non-obstructive, you will show them the benefits of mature human behavior and the sincerity of your good will. Such behavior builds progressively trust and peaceful compromise. Though the risk of nuclear weaponry in the hands of Iran may seem volatile, their self respect and pride from being able to have the technical capacity to create such weapons and the national will to develop them is understandable, and willingness to deny them such capacity reactionary. They will appreciate the good will and recognize their role in needing to maintain stability. Nazi impulses were similarly seen as a temporary aberration of a civilized nation, that once engaged, would respond with the innate tempered civilized outlook of the great german nation evolved over hundreds of years. Putting up roadblocks to “evolution” would simply delay that behavior from the German nation.
Universal truths are relative and potentially insulting:
The tremendous rallies in the support of free speech last week in France are pledges only to the concept, not the reality of individual rights. Sarcasm or provocative expression anathema to another culture is the ultimate instigation to belligerence and hostile actions, as viewed by the politically correct modern appeasers. President Obama expressed this view best when he stated at the United Nations : “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Of the insult to every other culture that Islamofascism insists upon, subjugation of all other religions, enslavement and prostituting of their young, destruction of their religious symbols, erasing of their cultures, and elimination of their representative voice, Obama is ignorantly incapable of appreciating such realities as counterintuitive to his argument.
The actions of the extreme are a perversion of the culture, not a reflection of it:
The “lone wolfs” and terrorist cells that plague the world are outliers and perversions to the base message of Islam. Whether it is the monsters of Nigeria, Boko Harum, the absolutionists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda Wahhabism, or the murderers of the ISIL caliphate, the Jew slayers of Hamas or Hezbollah, or individual “lone wolf” Soldiers for Allah such as the Boston Marathon Bombers or Major Hassan, the appeasement mantra is that this is no way reflects the base tenets of Islam, a supposed peaceful and tolerant religion. No different were the SS Waffen or the Jew beaters of the SA, obvious aberrations of the German nation to the appeasers who wanted to envision a Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Leibniz. Appeasers are capable of ignoring example after example of hostile actions because of the comfort they feel in the illusion of their contrived and fantastical image of their appeased subject.
The fires of extremism burn themselves out with the careful and steady management of appeasement:
Passions are the undirected energies of a rudderless culture, and as the culture is progressively brought into the family of nations, the passions will positively re-direct. Somehow by the West being patient and non-confrontational, willing to absorb a few spasms of violence, the progressive growth achieved by engagement will calm the instability. This irrational assumption that passion is not fed by fundamental belief flies in the face of all credible evidence In both the form of fascism of the late 30s in Germany and Japan, and the modern version in Islamofacism , the fundamental belief is that of a superior people denied its rightful place at the head of all peoples. The belief is not burdened by guilt, ethics, or any form of self controlled behavior. Each event that shows a lack of willingness to confront, reinforces the sense of that superiority. The fires are not burned out, but rather fed with the oxygen of each incitement without retribution.
It was briefly inspiring to see some blowback from the millions of French citizens who risked their anonymity to say “je suis Charlie Hebdo”. The proof however is in action, not intention. The modern governments of the West are filled with leaders who calculate and appease, rather than assess and confront. They are more offended and outraged by fantastical enemies such as climate change and lifestyle victimization then the ominous and fundamental threats to their civilization. We cannot count on our leaders, who are in love with their ability to socially experiment and control behavior, and willing to risk all that we have achieved. We need brave muslim leaders like General Al-Sisi of Egypt to continue to step forward and say no more. We need to have the average citizen of the civilized world stand up and say “Je suis Civilisation, J’aime Civilisation” – and let all know the appetite for appeasement is now at end. To the Islamofascists, our patience is at end. And with it, the unprovoked expansion of their perverted gangster world is at end. Its the end of our world or the end of their world, and we all know to preserve what is good in this world – its their world that must go.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand
What is freedom? Why did the United States for over 23o years declare the elevation of one’s individual capacity to determine his destiny without oppressive interference of others the primary definition? What is lost when the essential force for individual freedom sees itself as flawed for not recognizing another country’s capacity to set its on destiny regardless of personal freedom? What does it mean to the inhabitants of this country and those that exist under different definitions?
We are about to find out.
President Obama this past week overturned the settled philosophy of the 8 prior American Presidents regarding relations with the nation of Cuba by releasing three Cuban spies imprisoned for felonies such as murder and acknowledging the process for achieving formal relations with the government of Cuba. Having recognized in 1961 of the true political leanings of the young ‘revolutionary’ Fidel Castro, the United States attempted to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Castro retaliated by his willingness to bring the world to the brink of nuclear destruction in the October 1962 Missile Crisis instigated by young Castro accepting nuclear weapons from Russia aimed at the United States. The successive American governments have applied the concept of containment with variable success to the aggressive tactics of the Castro government, blockading it from formal trade, and encouraging the cuban exile population to work progressively toward the liberation of the island from the Castro regime. The fifty subsequent years have been essentially a cold war between Cuba and the United States, with Cuba progressively trading economic support from the Soviet Union to maintain its marxist totalitarian grip on the Cuba economy and people, and its willingness to act as a military proxy for Soviet communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s in places as diverse as Nicaragua, Granada, and Angola.
From 1959 onward, tens of thousands of Cuban refugees have attempted to escape the totalitarian government, risking life and limb on rickety boats to try and secure a meaningful existence in the United States, the passage to freedom a tempting mere 90 nautical miles away from the American coast. Many have made it. Many more have been drowned, eaten by sharks, sunk by Cuban gunboats, and turned around by American Coast Guard vessels.
What were they escaping? To the liberal Washington elites and Hollywood celebrities they were leaving a utopian paradise of free health care and societal equality, ruled by a leader in Castro charismatic in his affect, perpetually revolutionary in his appearance in military fatigues, and ultimately concerned only for his Cuban people being able to steer their own course without the oppressive domination of a whorish American capitalist caste. The level of cultural coolness and forever youngness was even secured on t-shirts and posters immortalizing the great leader Castro, and his right hand revolutionary, Che Guevara, the enthusiastic judge and executioner for revolutionary firing squads that purified Cuba from dissidents who didn’t recognizing the righteousness of the revolution. It is the personification of this idolatry that propelled the current President to the office of Presidency and the subsequent comfort with the ideals of the winds of change fomented by the Cuban revolutionaries.
If the process of attempting to secure individual freedom for the Cuban people over 53 years of consistent foreign policy through containment proved to achieving no identifiable changes in the Cuban government’s relationship with its people what possible risk is involved in accepting the Cuban revolution at face value, and recognizing it as the legitimate aspiration of an entire people? What could be possibly at stake in similar efforts to restore relationships with similar minded governments currently hostile in position against the United States such as North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela?
Maybe one could ask men such as Rafael Ibarra Roque, imprisoned since 1994 by the Cuban government without trial for ‘sabotage against the regime” for speaking out against things he had seen as a Cuban soldier and citizen through a nonviolent group he formed called Frank Pais effecting to restore democracy to Cuba. One could ask Human Rights Watch, which has documented a systemic oppression resulting in thousands of executions, arrests without trial, formation of forced labor camps (UMAP’s), suppression of independent media and opposition political movements, government drug cartels, and prostitution. One could ask the Cuban exiles in Miami who labored for decades to restore the most basic of personal freedoms in Cuba for the family members they left behind.
And now it is gone, as the citadel of personal freedom and institutional democracy determines that respectful relationships with such tyrants will serve both countries better over the long run. We are left with the question with each of these over-turnings of our own principles what is lost in ourselves as we deny the fundamental importance of such principles? Will a President who cares more how we look to others than how we act among ourselves lead us to our own loss of freedoms? That depends obviously as to what it means to be free and our willingness to prevent those who would sell such hard earned freedoms for the veneer of acceptance recognizes once gone, they wont be easily if ever brought back.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. Ronald Reagan
Perhaps the freedom we lose, will be forever Cuba’s gain. Raul Castro, Cuba’s current leader and brother of Fidel thinks not. He is looking to the economic support of the Cuban Revolution, to cement its gains and prevent any change in the relationships with its people. Perhaps it will change Cuba’s belligerency. Then again, it was just last year that Cuba attempted to gain tactical missiles from North Korea to position against the United States, learning nothing in the intervening 50 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Cuba is not looking for change, but it will be hoping for change in the United States. As probably will Iran and Venezuela. It turns out when it comes to slowly dissolving the light of freedom, the Man of Hope and Change was ultimately the Man of totalitarians’ Hope , and our Change.
One hundred years ago this week, the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew aboard the schooner Endurance left the port of the Grytviken whaling station on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic to the continent of Antartica. The goal was a never before achieved transcontinental traverse across one of the remotest places on earth. It would be their last touch with civilization for the next one and half years, and it would be an utter failure. The extent of the failure, and the spectacular story of survival, courage, leadership and outright moxie required to bring the participants back to civilization is the basis of one of the most uplifting stories of human achievement and one hundred years later, remains a riveting example of meeting your own flaws and mortality head on and overcoming to inspire us all.
One has to put into the perspective the age that men were living in, and that it was the age of men. Ernest Shackleton was a man of his age. He sought to test himself and others to expand the limits of what was known and did not terribly worry about the consequences or risks of such traits. He had participated in a previous Antarctic expeditions including one with the famous explorer Robert Scott who later lost his life in the return voyage from achieving the South Pole, in a mission that Shackleton had planned to be his own. Having had to except the reality that the glory of first to the pole rested in the hands of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who beat Scott to the pole by three weeks, Shackleton wanted to establish a British success that would be of import, the transcontinental voyage that would require more spectacular planning and logistics, in keeping with his sense of being a man of the Empire. He did it in the old empire sense of understatement, not asking for public support but rather going to a few rich brokers with similar sense of empire to fund the expected costs of such a complex expedition, approaching 5 million in today’s dollars. For crew, he called on a few loyal men of extraordinary talents who had served with him previously, and for other parts of the crew, a simple understated call to adventure advertisement in the local paper.
The Endurance Expedition advertisement
The genius of Shackleton’s leadership did not present with the planning of the voyage. Limited by the primitive communication of the day, the difficult logistics relied on the almost perfect and thereby implausible timing of events and cooperative weather that very soon showed the flaws in Shackleton’s expeditionary capabilities. The Endurance sailed across the Weddell Sea to the Ronne Ice Shelf in sight of continental land but hampered by a progressively treacherous current pushed ice pack which eventually locked the ship in from the open sea on February 14th, 1915. Tremendous efforts by the crew to free the Endurance from the ice proved fruitless, and Shackleton realized the boat would have to wait out the ferocious Antarctic winter in the ice, hopefully to be freed by the next spring and summer’s melt off.
He had been locked in the ice before on the Scott expedition , but had been able to free himself, so he assumed with patience the same could occur for the Endurance. He was wrong, horribly wrong, and by the intense winter of June through August the pack progressively thickened and began to put massive pressures on the boat’s structure. By September, the boat was in dire straights, crushed against massive heaving flows of millions of tons of ice, and the inevitable occurred on October 27,1915 – the ship was abandoned and slowing sinking began.
And so really begins the story out of utter failure. The depths of imagination and courage needed to survive are beautifully told in Alfred Lansing’s book the Endurance , and can not be done justice in a few paragraphs in this blog. What Shackleton showed in the face of crisis is the basis for this blog, however, and the key moments are forever inspirational. What does one do in the face of complete collapse and frank threat to your leadership? Shackleton’s decision was to show even greater leadership. He announced to the crew that the purpose of the expedition was now fully to achieve the survival of the participants and he was confident through shared sacrifice this could be accomplished. A score of men alone with limited food and poor survival gear floating on an ice flow over a hundred miles from land and a thousand miles from civilization seemed an impossible task and the men felt it, but Shackleton never let them see that he felt it. He would lead them to safety. The road to safety was the open sea, and therefore the three rescue boats on the Endurance would have to be the means of escape. Men would have to physically drag them over ice flows and knee deep snow over uncountable miles until free water was seen. Day after day the harsh realities were documented by the mission photographer, Frank Hurley, who brought visual confirmation to the incredible facts of the escape effort. Through maps and reckoning, the distance to shelter was felt to be three hundred miles-the highest speed of cross ice transit was seven miles a day. It became eventually clear the men’s incredible effort would come for nought unless luck would intervene, and luck came in the form of fracturing of the ice pack on April 9th, and Shackleton’s decision to man the ice boats and attempt to make Elephant Island, the last outpost of Antarctica before the open sea, and certain death. Five days in the ocean led them to a landing on Elephant Island and land.
Land was a generous term as the island was essentially inhospitable and the weather still atrocious. Shackleton had gotten them this far, and announced that the majority of the crew could take refuge, and he, Shackleton, would take the 22 foot rescue boat across the open Weddell Sea to civilization and help.
That would be 800 miles across what was uniformly known as some of the worst sailing sea in the world in a 22 foot boat to hopefully reach South Georgia Island and civilization – the equivalent of being a cork in the ocean that actually found itself back into its original bottle. To Shackleton however, it was doable, and as he had gotten them into this mess, he would do whatever was necessary to get them out. On April 24, 1916, Shackleton launched the James Caird with his chief navigator, Frank Worsley who had only a chronometer and dead reckoning to guide him across the difficult ocean, and four sailors. The twenty or so crewmen of the Endurance who stayed behind on Elephant Island, waved him goodbye, and assumed that they were waving goodbye to their commander, and their own hopes for survival.
The Elephant Island survivors wave goodbye to the Shackleton and the James Caird crew on April 24, 1916.
England by the spring of 1916 had been in brutal war for a year and a half, and having heard nothing from Shackleton and the Endurance crew, assumed them dead. The forlorn men on Elephant Island knew they were as good as dead as no one knew they were there but Shackleton, and he was attempting the impossible. For Shackleton, the impossible was only present through the release of death from responsibility, and as such, still, alive, he trudged across the Weddell Sea in his little boat through impossibly rough seas approaching thirty feet, gales that would have sunk a boat hundreds of feet larger, and nothing to prevent him from floating to death into the vast Atlantic Ocean other than the indefensible luck of successfully navigating to little South Georgia Island.
After 800 miles of vicious open sea, in a navigating achievement that no modern sailor with the most sophisticated gear would want to attempt, the James Caird reached South Georgia Island on May 10th, 1916.
The exhausted men of the James Caird found themselves on the opposite side of the island from the small whaling station and rescue. All that stood in the way were mountain peaks thousands of feet high covered with treacherous ice and glaciers.
South Georgia Island mountain range conquered by Shackleton
The men had soggy woolen clothes and a few ropes. As if the travail across the sea was not challenge enough, the men tackled the climbs with desperation, finding themselves finally within site of the station but separated by a sheer three thousand foot drop. No residual strength was present so they took one last chance, improvised a rope sleigh and through themselves off. Minutes later, whaling station inhabitants looked up to see four other worldly bedraggled men impossibly appearing from the impenetrable mountain side.
One of the four was Ernest Shackleton.
Shackleton fulfilled his promise to his men, eventually achieving a successful rescue mission to Elephant Island, and his stranded men, on August 30th,1916. The shock and joy that the impossible rescue had been achieved was for the men alone. Upon returning to England, the men found a nation distracted and immersed in war, and the immensity of their survival achievement took years to absorb. This was a generation of service, not plaudits, however, and most went on to serve in World War I, some dying in battle, after cheating death in Antarctica.
Ernest Shackleton remained somewhat of a celebrity, and even somewhat of an explorer, dying of a heart attack in 1921, in all places, South Georgia Island intent upon leading yet another expedition to the icy continent. It took several generations to fully absorb what he accomplished in failure, progressively appreciated as the technology improved and recognized what he had accomplished. What he had done was be the best kind of leader, a leader that does everything he can to share in the sacrifice and find a way out of chaos, in a way that the men and women being led are willing to be led, no matter what the consequences. Shackleton took responsibility, showed his followers that you try until you die, and you use what you have to succeed at whatever odds and challenges, Through meeting a challenge no matter how harsh the consequence, the capacity to succeed revolves around the willingness to risk failure, and be content, with the idea you tried your very,very best.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
The United States nationally participates every two years in perpetual rebirth as defined by the founding fathers. The securing of a representative legislature for governance occupies the first article of the Constitution, laid out in means by which renewal and stability can co-exist. The house of representatives allied most closely to local expressions is positioned to reflect the feelings of the electorate as to their sense of representation and influence over the nation’s direction. The election of senators, adjusted by amendment to the constitution remains positioned at six years in the post to be more immune to the day to day emotional shifts of the electorate. As the senate elections are however staggered such that a number of senators are nationally exposed to assessment at every election, there remains the potential that if the local district ,the statewide electorate, and the national zen are emotionally confluent in the interpretation of the country’s direction, a wave election is possible.
Wave elections are not necessarily about substantial increases in a party’s representation in Congress. They speak more toward a fundamental shift in the electorate’s sense of the country needing to change direction, and the effects typically extend beyond the current election and may influence several election cycles. Maybe no sea change in electoral philosophy expressed through a wave election will fundamentally top the epic wave of the 1930-32 elections. For almost 70 years since the Civil War, the country had maintained a confident sense of destiny through self actualization and growth that resisted intermittent economic downturns and for the majority of elections left a Republican bias in place. In the depths of the depression, however, the country demanded a hard tack to the left that has influenced the nation’s course ever since. The 1930 Congress was composed of a house of 267 republicans and 163 democrats, a senate of 56 republicans 39 democrats and a republican President. Just two years later, the electorate converted the house to 313 democrats and 117 republicans, the senate to 59 democrats and 36 republicans, and the Presidency to FDR. This dramatic change was not simply a “throw the bums out” reflex. It reflected the country’s conversion from a self reliant, libertarian concept of life to a community driven, safety net philosophy that has never left. With minor ebbs and flows, the Democrat wave secured the House of Representatives for the next 31 of 33 elections, the Senate for the next 25 of 27 elections, and the Presidency for the next 7-9 elections.
Now that’s a wave.
With the increasing influence of money and the immediacy of social media, it seems that the ability for the country to digest the effectiveness of governance and the re-orientation of priorities has been fundamentally effected. Waves have steadily turned to ripples as the effects of the wave are often cut off by the manipulative influences of media driven by money. With billions now spent on elections, most of it to the prosperity of those that deliver the message, there is an industry developing to convert elections into mini-waves, increasing the hostility and inaccuracy of the discourse, and guaranteeing the progressive expenditure of money to adjust. The waves have progressively shortened almost to the extent of each election cycle, driven by the media’s need to create conflict, and deflect the momentum of a philosophic governmental change. The shorter attention spans of the electorate, driven by the more emotional immediacy of the message, contributes to this, and plays into the hands of those who wish to control the country’s direction.
A pattern of back and forth waves, with more radical peaks and troughs, has settled in. The “Reagan Revolution” flowed for a decade, until the 1992 election re-oriented the country back towards collective economic security with the end of the Cold War and the election of Clinton. Almost immediately, the Clinton in your face style with the push toward universal healthcare, led to pushback, with the unexpected Republican takeover of Congress with republican “wave” of 64 seats in 1994, leading to the ultimate politician Clinton shifting to the right, abandoning his wife’s healthcare initiative, cooperating with welfare reform and declaring “the era of big government is over”. Not so fast. The overreach of the congress with the Clinton impeachment drove a schizophrenic election of 2000 that hung on a couple ballot chads, and within two years led to a republican President driving a massive governmental infusion into healthcare with the formation of Medicare Part D, covering for the first time prescriptions. The cataclysm of 9/11 briefly aligned the country’s vision on the international stage, only to lead to the democrat wave of 2006, which wrenched a sharp escalation in the concept of debt investment and government influence, resulting in the election of the most liberal President in history, comfortable with doubling the size the nation’s debt accumulated in over 230 years, in just five, with the enthusiastic support of the democrat majority in congress. This budget busting philosophy and a back room push of government take over of healthcare, the liberal uberweapon to control populations, led to the Republican “wave” of 2010, in which the president himself declared his party to have absorbed a “shellacking”.
The apparent”shellacking” delivered by the electorate in 2010 this time, however, led to no perceptive changes in governance, as the presence of enormous money and the shorter attention spans was maximized by the president in collapsing the wave with his re-election of 2012. The power of the election to influence government policy proved progressively powerless against the use of media to propagate distortions and out and out lies through the power of social media. “If you want to keep your health insurance, you will keep it. Period”. ” The massive stimulus plan of 2009-2010, will create hundreds of thousands of “shovel ready jobs”. The IRS political motivated suppression of free speech to reduce influence of conservative discourse in elections contained “not a smidgen of corruption.” The Benghazi terrorist attack was a “response to a Youtube video.” One could go on and on and on.
The 2012 election secured the undoing of the 2010 election. What should we therefore make of 2014? The polls suggest the country is again deliberating on a potentially massive “wave” response to the lack of influence of the 2010 election to change anything. History suggests that the result will have less influence on the government’s tactics than one would suppose. The President already is describing a massive extra-legislative process to change the country’s demographics through the executive edicts to achieve immigration “reform”, feeling himself immune to both election results and potential extra-constitutional actions. Have we reached a point where the democratic process has lost its capacity to influence government, that responds instead to the flow of money and the real time manipulation of the social media emotions through propagandistic distortion?
Like all defenders of the ramparts of civilized society, I remain wistful about the potential ability of a democracy to stop internal decay, restore fiscal sanity, secure its borders and principles of citizenship, defend against external enemies, and providentially commit to its future. A 2014 “wave” to restrain the collapse of these ideals so influencing our current administration is the least we can hope for. Recent history is not comforting.
On November 4th, outcome aside, it behooves us as defenders of the Ramparts to attend the barricades and vote for change one more time, and fight, fight against the dying the light.
Maybe this time, we can hold the potential of renewal beyond the satisfaction of winning an election night.
It is always a remarkable event when something you assume you know and understand reveals itself once again to be beyond understanding. I have been to the grandest of canyons several times, but the thrill it elicits with the first sighting from the edge of the Colorado Plateau through which it has carved itself over eons remains bordering on euphoric. It is not the rocks, or the depths, or the ribbon of the river of creation, but rather the glimpse it provides of Creation itself that comes over you. It happens to you every time, no matter what your level of preparation.
The stillness of time transcends. The lava and ash base rock of the canyon , the Vishnu Schist, thrust in a tectonic convulsion some 1.7 billion years ago against the continental plate, lays exposed by the river that began to reveal it to our eye only some six million years ago. Rock, that several billion years ago was not even half again as old as the planet upon which it was created. Through volcanos and inland seas, sediments and pressures, protozoans and dinosaurs, the layered geologic beauty of the canyon lay waiting for visual birth through the erosive force of a mighty river. The entirety of a fulfilled human lifetime is but a fleeting wisp of wind in the immensity that is the measurement of such time. To admit to oneself that reality, is to feel very small, yet very privileged to have it revealed.
The canyon divulged itself to no one that left any record prior to the time of Christ yet existed through innumerable sunrises and sunsets in its current state, with the only appreciation, that of its animal inhabitants. The scale of the canyon such that the same species of squirrel has evolved into two distinct visages, the black chested whited tailed Kaibab of the North Rim, and his genetically identical cousin the Abert with his white chest and grey tail, long separated by the chasm. The original settlers along the rim and cliffs left records of attachment but were unable to sustain their existence through the cycles of plenty and drought typical of the region, and fled near silently out of history. The initial caucasians exploring the canyon found it vast and devoid of people, and viewed it as an obstacle to be avoided. It remained to the few who saw it as a potential site of habitation, empty and trackless.
Then, in 1869, perspective was provided. An explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, hardened to challenge by his military experiences in the recent Civil War and bereft of an arm from the damage of a minnie ball at Shiloh, found himself after the intensity of the war unable to return to the everyday experience of an academic career in Illinois. Powell determined to experience the Grand Canyon from the bottom up as part of an expedition down the length of the mighty Colorado River, and his exploits through the canyon in 1869 and a second expedition in 1871 were for the first time channeled as a shared experience to an enraptured audience through the power of real time mass media, connected by reported stories as serial adventure. To describe the voyage as hazardous is insufficient, but is perhaps preserved in the visual of a one armed, rail thin man manning the rudder of flat boat down level six rapids of an entirely untamed river. The 750 mile voyage of the expedition of ten men from the origin of the Green River in Wyoming through the canyon lands of the Colorado is the stuff of legend. More importantly, it presented America with a new kind of hero, the Naturist, as Powell along with fellow explorer, the Wisconsinite John Muir, presented the American West as more than obstacle, but rather a paradise of magnificent cultures, vistas, and geology best appreciated when preserved, rather then overcome.
The final linking of the concept of America’s image of itself linked fundamentally to its land came in the personhood of President Theodore Roosevelt, who established the core of America’s heritage preserved through its concept of national parks. He saw in particular the Grand Canyon critical in leaving the natural scape as untouched as possible to better absorb its eternal grandeur:
“In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
The eventual hold on the American consciousness progressed through the first half of the twentieth century as the canyon vistas and campsites became increasingly available to the average American. Starting with the development of the railroad to the rim, the gradual concept of individual travel and exploration as the country became more mobile through the automobile made the concept of taking in the beauty of the natural landscape of America a national obsession. The country’s population increasing looked to the West as a potential place of permanent attraction and residence. Yet, predictably, the diverging view of ‘progress’ proved a powerful enemy of President Roosevelt’s vision. As hard as it is to imagine, the vistas of the Grand Canyon could have been forever marred as had its sister magnificent creation, the Glen Canyon. In 1963, the special place that was Glen Canyon was tragically drowned in the development of the manmade inland sea of Lake Powell created by the Glen Canyon Dam.
Glen Canyon prior to the formation of Lake Powell by the Glen Canyon DamGlen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell – mitch tobin photo
The presence of a series of dams to tame the Colorado River for water resource, flood prevention, hydroelectric power, and recreation secured with the Boulder and Glen Canyon dams was actually contemplated for the stretch that is the Grand Canyon through the Bridge and Marble Canyon dam projects. The conversion of portions of the Grand Canyon National Monument into a lake for water skiers came too close to contemplate, with only a final securing of public outcry as groups such as the Sierra Club, recognizing their error in not standing tall with the Glen Canyon project finally marshaling the collapse of the political will for Congress to pass funding for the Bridge and Marble dam projects in 1966. It probably as much as anything led to the formation of the political environmental movement, with the eventual formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the idea of environmental impact statements becoming a dominant influence with any construction project, big or small.
Sierra Club ad campaign to block the Grand Canyon dam projects – 1966
Of course the Grand Canyon is constantly evolving, and in the saga of time may possibly be effected by nature such as to no longer be grand, flooded again by inland seas or eroded through wind and time into unrecognizable patterns. It is however, in our brief window of time, human time, that the canyonland exists for us to understand our on part in the story, small as it may be. We must balance our need to be, to forever demand increasing amounts of electricity and water in isolated tracts of the world with our need to be a part of that world, and pass it along to our children, and children’s children.
To be in canyonland is to walk the road of time from all that is before and to all that will be as a traveler, not as a conqueror. At the edge of the canyon lies the home of our own Creation through mists of time and stars, wind and water, death and rebirth. At the edge of the canyon, in the land of the canyon, for every traveler on every journey, there is the discovery of one’s self and the universe beyond.
In 1707, with the passage of the Acts of Union, the parliaments of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland determined to secure a Parliament of Great Britain forming a political union so successful that, at its height, presided over an empire that encompassed nearly 20% of the people and a quarter of the land mass of the globe. On September 18th, 2014, the people of Scotland will vote in a referendum that seeks to dissolve that union. For more than three hundred years the contributions of Scotsman and Englishmen to the enormous influence the presence of a Great Britain has meant to the world as a military, political, cultural and democratic force has been inestimable. What looked like a quixotic quest for separateness by a smallish force of malcontents just a few months ago however has suddenly become a very real potential outcome of the referendum. A yes vote could mean some unalterable changes for centuries of communal considerations between kingdoms of the island of Albion and the kickstart of a number of similar actions around the world.
The Union Jack, the flag of Great Britain combines the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in an overlapped blend of the Crosses of St. George, St Andrew, and St Patrick. If the September 18th referendum separates Scotland, the blue background and oblique white cross of St Andrew will wash out of the flag and Great Britain will be considerably less – great.
The Blending of the Crosses
Certainly the careful blending of the crosses on the flag has tended to obscure a fairly rocky history of relations between the inhabitants of the islands off the continent of Europe. In particular, the Picts of the northern part of the island known as Albion, with genetics, language and culture considerably different from their southern neighbors, developed a necessary defensive posture for nearly a thousand years to resist the encroachment of a progressively more aggressive south. First, the border of the northern reaches of the Roman Empire pushed against the native Caledonians and Pict tribes resulting in hostilities and the establishment of Hadrian’s wall as the boundary between civilizations. Later it was the encroachment of raiding parties of Saxons and Vikings, the militaristic push of the powerful Normans, and eventually the hostility of the English Kings, that belied any sense of shared destiny. But the island known as Albion also had at its core the antethical force of unique coalescing visions on the island such as the concepts of property, individual freedom, and the capacity of individual merit and industry. This led to the flowering of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and progressively the sharing of a unique blend of character to change world history.
The current forces at work are not necessarily the hostility of cultural dissonance, as much as it is the political schisms that have wreaked havoc with the natural commonalities that have held the island together for so long. Scotland leans toward a more socialist construct, heavily supportive of public burdens for free health and education more in tune with the anti-democratic thrust of the bureaucrats in Belgium fronting the European Union. They object to the growing movement in England to protect the island against European mandates for immigration and trade, its love affair with the pound sterling, and the english tendency to see foreign policy more in line with their American cousins then modern Europe. They see their capacity to affect law suppressed by the higher representation of the English in parliament, and the natural resources abundant in the north sea oil fields off their coast as insufficiently benefiting them. They look to an independent Scotland as righting a mistake made when the Scottish King James was usurped on the throne by the outlander William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, securing the primacy of English Protestantism at the cost of Scottish Catholics in the combined kingdom.
The forces attempting to hold the United Kingdom together have missed badly on gauging the mood of the Scottish populous. It has been assumed that the economic pain of separation would be too great for Scotlanders to be willing to take the risk of a yes vote, but the emotions are overwhelming any measured consideration of the risk. As has happened in America, the realities of economics are failing to sway the emotions of ‘hope and change’, and the price to be paid seems somehow avoidable. Yet realities are just that-realities- and the effects of a separation are considered to be dire for Scotland.
What Scottish independence says for the rest of Great Britain and the world may be as great. The Quebec province in Canada, the Catalonians in Spain, the old city states of northern Italy, the Walloons of Belgium, and others will be watching closely and taking measure. Even within England, the massive effect on political roles of the previously dominant Labour and Tory parties would be thrown asunder and likely make the upstart UKIP party the dominant force, upending hundreds of years of relative political tradition and definition.
The United States, which fought a war to secure the supremacy of the Constitution as the common force binding a diverse people, has progressively fallen away from democratic process to adjudicate differences, with the federal government taking more dominant roles every day in transcending the legislation process and regulating livelihood and personhood.
Wiiliam Wallace – Scottish Hero
There is a significant Scot Irish genetics that runs through the founding documents of this country. One wonders if a William Wallace type is out there to stir a call to question as to whether the United States suffers from the same sclerosis of national leadership that has befallen its United Kingdom cousin.
It is after all, in a time like this devoid of leaders that drives the people to determine, more and more, to lead themselves.
In today’s culture of dependency, it is hard to remember a time not so long ago when a visionary idea no matter how difficult, time consuming, or potentially immensely risky, was seen as a genetic characteristic of our civilization. For thousands of years until the nineteenth century, the progressively discoverable world was available at the speed by which a man could walk or run, or horse could be ridden, or a sail could push a boat by a fickle wind or current. A world so vast, that a day’s voyage could be arduous simply within the limits of a man’s sight, and the idea that one could know the world through personal experience seemed beyond the scope of a man’s lifetime.
Yet, there seemed to be no shortage of individuals that would take on seemingly impossible and dangerous journeys to somehow reduce the globe to human conceptualization. The ancient Polynesians using rafts to turn the Pacific Ocean into a highway between settlements. Marco Polo traveling for twenty-four years and 15000 miles along the Silk Road to the Forbidden Kingdom and back, to document a civilization superior to his own and open up a trade revolution that changed his home forever. And 500 years ago, Ferdinand Magellan pointing his ships west rather than east to develop a sea route for trade that ended three years later as a 24000 mile voyage that circumnavigated the globe.
Especially poignant is Magellan, for he did not live to see the fruits of his great achievement, having died two-thirds upon the way of his massive voyage, massacred on a remote Philippine Island at the hands of an angry chieftain’s warriors who took umbrage at his desire to play favorites and Christianize those he preferentially selected. In fact, of the 230 or so intrepid voyagers who accompanied Magellan on his epic journey, only 18 managed to circumnavigate and three years later return safely to their point of departure in Spain. These explorers were however to make Magellan immortally famous in their careful records they took of the voyage, so meticulous that they determined they landed one day younger than the number of sunrises and sunsets that had been catalogued since they had left, the first humans to document time travel, associated with traveling against the world’s rotation.
Magellan achieved many identified firsts, but it was certainly not his intension to take the longest possible route to East Asia. He rather hoped for a shorter rout traveling west to east then was at that time required to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean. His desire for potentially shortened sea routes led him to avoid the rumored foul weather and dangerous waters of Cape Horn, at the southernmost tip of South America, instead navigating and ultimately discovering the Straits of Magellan, at the northern most aspect of the Tierra del Fuego, thus cutting several hundred miles off the voyage compared to around the Cape Horn. Through the straights he named the new ocean he encountered the Pacific, or ‘peaceful’, for it’s apparently placid waters as compared to the tumultuous Atlantic. The short cut was nice, but the travel west from Atlantic to Pacific around south America still required an 8000 mile journey, and certainly represented no bargain for traders in regard to time or risk who wished to go to the East Indies or China.
You might wonder how all this Magellan business leads us to the Panama Canal. Well, I’m getting there. You see, Magellan was not the first to recognize the new ocean, the Pacific. That honor went to Vasco Balboa, who in 1513 crossed the Isthmus of Panama and became the first European to view the western Pacific, suggesting a path thousands of miles shorter than Magellan’s circuitous route. But nobody got efficiently rich transporting goods across scores of miles of mountainous jungle (at least until the Conquistadores discovered native slave labor) simply to reload then in a boat. No, fortunes were made filling the massive cargo hulls of sailing ships and bring the goods home in one watery trip, making even the thousands of extra miles of the Cape Horn trip more viable than cross country.
Balboa’s vision of a shortcut across the Isthmus travelled the centuries unrequited until the machine power of the nineteenth century began to make the idea of a canal more than a pipe dream. The Europeans were still the initial visionary force behind the dream of a canal and the French got the farthest, developing a canal company that beginning in 1881 spent the next nine years on a tragic and fruitless effort to tame the 48 miles of mountainous jungle that separated the two bodies of water. Nine years later, having lost 22,000 workers to tropical diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, and having sunk the investments of 800,000 French investors, the effort was abandoned.
The canal idea was not too big, however, for the bountiful new world republic to the north. Despite having connected the continent by rail in an equally spectacular engineering achievement, goods and services were infinitely too expensive to travel by rail from New York to San Francisco, taking instead the ultimately cheaper, but daunting sea trip around the Cape Horn that would take months. The United States, in the midst of a boundless can do spirit occasioned by becoming the world’s biggest economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, saw the opportunity of the canal, and the power that would go to the country who ran it, too valuable to not take up the epic challenge. The United States engaged in some very dubious politics, positioned itself as the overlord of the vision and never doubted for a minute its ability to get the job completed.
The final vision came in the form of Theodore Roosevelt, a president who saw the future of the United States as a world power, and focused the immense energy and economy of his country on the huge project. From 1904 to 1914, the United States through its Army Corps of Engineers ,spent some 8.6 billion dollars in today’s money, used some of the world’s
The Earthmovers of the Big Ditch 1904-14
first bulldozers and earth movers to blast and sculpt its way through the Panama wilderness, moving over a 152 million cubic meters of excavated earth, losing 5600 workers to the same diseases that plagued the French, and creating the world’s most spectacular set of locks and dams that continue to function today in magnificent fashion. The locks still make possible for some of the biggest ships in the world to traverse huge quantities of goods from sea level up over the
The Locks Solution to the elevations of Panama
mountains and back to sea level without ever unloading a crate off a ship. The 48 miles of beautiful locks and transporting tug trains make possible the movement of billions of dollars of goods across the Isthmus each year and reduced the epic path of Magellan from 800o miles to 48 miles and the time from months around South America to just 20 hours.
The Path Between the Seas- PANAMA’s CANAL
The nefarious politics that ultimately gave the United States the rights to build the canal and ultimately run the Canal Zone, and the just as uncomfortable politics that lead to the canal hesitatingly being turned over to Panama ultimately in 1999, can not take away from the incredible achievement that incredibly connected two oceans. The 150,000 dollar fee for traversing the canal is worth every penny for the ships filled with the hugely profitable trade goods that magnify Magellan’s dream a million times over.
August 14, 2014 was the 100 year anniversary of the opening of the canal, and the world has benefited greatly from the daring of a young nation that naively felt that it was chosen to do great things, and somehow got them done. It would do us well to remember the civilization we are so quick to blame for every inequity was once the natural spring of visionaries that conquered the Silk Road, circumnavigated the globe, made distance our servant, and took the impossible, and made it happen.
ISIS deals with prisoner of war issues in Iraq – AFP Photo
To comprehend events, one must be willing to descend into the faint mists of time and history to possibly understand the here and now. The boundaries that define the modern country of Iraq are artificial drawings on a map that simplify a maelstrom of historical peoples, events, and passions that are the basest contributors to the whole known human story. The fertile crescent of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has been the birthplace of great empires and religions, and perhaps the most contested real estate on the planet. At the northern edge is noted to be the birthplace of man as a creature of record. Some three thousand years before Christ the tribes of the region founded the worlds first recognized governmental structure, the Semitic kingdom of Semites and Sumerians known as Akkadia, soon divided into Assyria and Babylonia. It is said that the Assyrian Semite Abraham traveled out of Assyria around 1800 BC to eventually become the father to the Hebrew peoples. By the tenth century BC, Assyria may have comprised the largest empire in then known world and provided the legacy of one of the great core language structures, Aramaic, influencing people from northeast Africa to central Asia. The Assyrian people became important contributors to the expansionist Greek empire culture and subsequently were influenced to assume many of the philosophic constants of the Greeks, in many cases becoming early Christians as did their Greek counterparts in the first through third centuries AD.
With the arab Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia in the seventh century, the centuries long process of this ancient culture having to subordinate and assimilate while trying to preserve its identity began. Through Islamic pogroms and Mongol invasions, Ottoman overseers, British protectorates and Baathist dictators, the identity of the ancient Assyrian culture managed to survive.
Until now.
The city of Bakhdida, also known as Qaraqosh, is the home of the Assyrian Christian population of Iraq and the gateway to Kurdistan. With a population of 50,000, it represents one of the last congregations of Christian influence in Mesopotamia and its existence as such is an anathema to a virulent strain of Islamic puritans known as ISIS. On friday, August 8th, Bakhdida became the latest city to be overrun by the ISIS horde and the consequences to an entire people who profess a different fate are dire. With tens of thousands of Christians fleeing the genocidal sickness that is the ISIS modus operandi, President Obama finally determined to take action in some form to address his administration’s developing Rwanda event. It was not the fate of the Christians or their Kurdish or Shia muslim brethren that stirred him so much as the plight of the Yazidis, a small sect connected to the ancient Zoroastrian faith of monotheism that precedes Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. ISIS forces have forced them into the mountains with the intent of starving them to death, or killing them in place, whatever opportunity presents. For the ISIS adherents, this is the holy work that should have been done centuries ago.
The western world has always struggled to get too upset about genocidal outrages against Jews and Yazidis, but Christians? That used to be another matter. There is no Richard the Lionheart to lead a Crusade, likely not even a George Bush the Earnest. The post-Christian western world does not connect well with the outrages committed by Islamic extremists, whether it is the lunatic fringe Boko Haram in Nigeria slaughtering entire villages of Christians and trafficking in human slavery, or ISIS with its religious cleansing fury in Iraq. Christian outrage and responding to attacks is so Seventeenth century.
But ISIS is working in the seventh century and doesn’t give a flip to modern mores. Having stunned most of Iraq, conquering oil fields and water supplies, drowning in money from bank robberies and sympathetic fat cat Wahabiast poseurs from the Arabian peninsula, and in possession of millions of dollars of sophisticated weapons abandoned by the Potemkin Village Iraqi national army as it fled, ISIS is a Tamerlane disciple of the twenty-first century, with the will to kill who doesn’t submit. The map shows an effective reality on the ground that suggests they are succeeding in their vision:
ISIS in Mesopotamia – CNN maps
So the President of the United States finally acted. Not to save Christians or Iraqis. That would have required previous strategic thinkings and actions. No, the action is to prevent current genocide against the Yazidis, certainly deserving, but no more deserving than any of the other hundreds of thousands already crushed under the foot of the marauding 7th century jihadists. President Obama thinks he can pick and choose his genocides he determines to intervene upon. I suspect ISIS and Boko Haram will give him plenty of choices from which to choose.
What is there to do in this inevitable world calamity approaching? It is frankly too late to recognize what would have been the easiest solution in Iraq. President Obama’s political trump card was the withdrawal from Iraq no matter what the consequences, when twenty-thousand in country troops would have likely prevented this travesty. Imagine you are the warden of a prison filled with 500 dangerous characters and innocents alike. With just 20 guards providing organized control, you can maintain the security of the prison and keep the most dangerous inmates from killing you, or each other. The previous warden gave you after much effort a stable place, with effective control. But you are a much smarter warden, who believes the previous warden was a doofus, and should not have been allowed to have made warden decisions in the first place that did not sit with your world gestalt. You therefore instead announce you are pulling all the guards, opening all the prison cell doors, and putting the kitchen staff in charge of negotiating with the prisoners. Its pretty easy to predict what will happen, unless apparently you are President Obama. Now, if you want to contain the violence, restore the security, and protect the innocent, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than twenty guards to achieve a renewed stability and civility. And a lot of people are going to pay a very grave penalty for your naiveté.
What to do with a modern world that would like to believe we have grown beyond the barbarians that defined our human past-the Tamerlanes, Attilas, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers – that would create a single vision of humanity on the slaughter of nonbelievers? The Assyrians of Bakhdida would like to know soon, and hope its more than a few food packages and pinpricks. But if the western world cannot decide this is serious business, don’t worry. We may soon get first hand knowledge of what the Assyrians of Bakhdida are up against, at a location much closer to home.
Our nation’s 238th birthday took place on the 4th of July and corresponded with Ramparts of Civilization’s 4th birthday, also born on the Fourth of July as a celebration of and defender for the accomplishments of that great day so many years ago, and the many other examples of similar greatness throughout the long and compelling story of western civilization. July 4th, 1776 held one of the most treasured places in the pantheon of western civilization’s accomplishments, in its bold recognition of the individual as primary to the story, rulers as a servant to the people, and not the other way around. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men as a right of their birth, are created equal and by their existence as equal men, maintain unalienable rights, that of life, liberty, and their individual pursuit of happiness. It declared that government existed to preserve these rights and was instituted among people, deriving its powers from the consent of the governed.
The revolutionary words stimulated the passions of an extraordinary generation of people, and by 1789, had achieved the miracle of a constitution designed on those principles, and a series of carefully lain limitations and balances to maintain them. Through the wrenching pain of a civil war, the sins toward an indigenous culture, the stain of a hypocritical enslavement of a race of people born under the same protections, the calamitous world of market crashes and the impact of two massive world wars, the founding documents preserved a means of governance that led to the freeist, most prosperous society on earth. The United States was a beacon to those who came from environments with less or no respect for those unalienable rights, and flourished as the singular example of what was possible when a person’s talents are freed and left to their own devices. The United States became not only the most desired, but the most powerful country on earth, an accomplishment achieved through the power of words and a people’s respect for their meaning.
It devised a council of elective representatives that would create a nation of laws, a judiciary that would ejudicate them and an executive that would see the laws were faithfully executed. The Chief Executive was asked to swear a specific oath:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States
The key concept of the Chief Executive was that of the defender of the Constitution, that he would seek election to that critical post to help lead the nation towards a future in the Constitution’s image, not his own image.
On November 4th, 2008, the nation elected someone who presented themselves as a Constitutional scholar, and on January 20th, 2009, swore the very oath above as the 44th President of the United States.
And that was pretty much the last time the Constitution was basis for any consideration of this particular man, Barack Obama. The first hint of this individual’s determination to not to uphold, but overturn the carefully constructed checks and balances that had brought the country such prosperity, was illuminated five days before his first election as President in October 2008:
And he meant it. To him transformation meant the necessary destruction of that which came before him. Facing a recession caused by a fiscal crisis, he ignored the multiple previous examples of successful resolution of recessions by removing the hand of government upon the economy through tax cuts and relief from regulation, and went instead for a boundless stimulus spending process, that significantly lengthened the recession and injected into government a massive increase in size that all but doomed any future ability to achieve budgetary control. When budgets were suggested to control the out of control spending, he ignored the concept of presenting a budget altogether. In the 232 years of governance and 43 Presidents before him the nation had incurred a 10.6 trillion dollar deficit. In the six years he has been in office he has almost doubled the deficit and will have expanded it 2 1/2 times, to 22 Trillion dollars when he leaves office. He achieved the largest grab of governmental control over the private economy in history when Obamacare was enacted in 2011 without a single opposition vote of support, then rather than enforce it as law of the land, has amended it without any legal basis over twenty times to fit his purposes.
When he was unable to persuade the opposition or even at times his own party in regard to so called immigration reform or global warning legislation, he simply went over their heads by injecting regulations not based on any law, and ignored laws that were already there. If the voting population could not be persuaded his ideas were sufficiently mainstream, he determined to change the make-up of the voting population, allowing hundreds of thousands to illegally enter the country, ignoring the laws of border security he had sworn to uphold, precariously putting his country’s whole southern border at risk to calamity, disease, and crime, as well as forever changing the voting demographics to something more of his liking.
He entered people’s private property through increased power of the NSA, the corruption of the IRS, and awesome power of his regulatory commissions to reek havoc. He turned the power of the IRS on citizens who had differing views then his and sought to destroy them, He sent his minions from ACORN to corrupt voting processes and secure voting assurance for his desire to transform. He promoted class warfare to hide his failures, and promote the innate power achieved in securing a dependent population to the whims of government control.
He purposefully undercut the painfully won strategy to secure Iraq for the simple concept of proving his notion that the previous administrations’ policy were wrong, and he was willing to waste the sacrifice of over 4000 American deaths and countless casualties to prove it by withdrawing all military support from the shakiest of new democracies, surrounded by ravenous neighbors. He may have illegally supplied weapons to the most dangerous of opponents to the Assad regime in Syria, sacrificing the life of his Libyan ambassador to prevent exposure of the arms process, ultimately arming the very insurgents who have declared a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and threaten to destabilize the entire middle east. He destabilized governments in Libya and Egypt, supported long term sworn enemies of American policy in the Middle East. He slashed the military at the very time when the nation’s position and influence was growing more perilous by his actions, securing for Russia and China more aggressive policies toward their neighbors, and in Russia’s case, allowing the largest baldfaced land grab since World War II, in Russia’s consumption of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
Obama institutionalized a pattern of behavior more fitting of a despot than an elected leader in his desire to “transform”. He envisions a certain utopia from his actions, an America radically transformed into a socialist democracy fundamentally ruled by one party, with a bounty secured to a progressively dependent population obtained from a steadily diminishing group of producers, the majority fed by continuous immigration with promises of access to the bounty, a financial indebtedness that will remove America forever as the securer of the world’s free trade and markets, and an emasculated military that will prevent any influence on the more dangerous developments in world events, leaving her vulnerable within her own borders. The concept of a series of checks and balances that would prevent this utopia are anathema to him, and he is gambling on the country’s unwillingness to call him to account for his actions, until they are irreversible. To him its all so obvious, and reasonable. If the checks and balances of the system require him to persuade, and he can not, he will need to simply do “something” – He will do what he wants – its Economic Patriotism:
When we look up in 2016, we will see the ruins of a republic and lament its passing. Like all great national efforts before it, America’s own hubris brought to the position of power its own poison pill, and we swallowed it in 2008.
‘Preserve, Protect, Defend the Constitution’ will be actually our own epitaph, for by standing by passively helpless while this individual remade the country, whose founding principles he hates, in his own image, we cemented our own demise.
