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