Was Santayana right?
Sometimes, in what may seem to be a hopeless and threatening situation, otherwise sensible, intelligent, hardworking people will believe almost anything and anybody, if desperate enough and looking for a savior. Someone who looks like a leader and seems to know what is needed to get them out of their dilemma. Think of FDR and our own USA, Hitler and Germany, Churchill and England and Napoleon and France come to mind.
After we successfully disengaged ourselves from World War II combat, at considerable cost in treasure and sacrifice, it didn’t take long before we listened to Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and all their liberal henchmen thrown up by the post-WW II macho environment that the “good life” was everybody’s right and that the government would provide it. And it did. !!!
Except that no one foresaw, during the late fifties and sixties, the insidious damage this would do and eventually would result in the slow deterioration of our basic moral, societal and political principles. Because we abandoned the rules and disciplines of thought, work and decent behavior. Changing moral and educational conditions, coupled with a diminished level of patriotism among the young eventually resulted in the failure to understand that the “good life” was based on the sacrifices of previous generations, willingly made to preserve our unique national culture, warts and all. This sacrifice should never be forgotten. Instead it should be a permanent part of school curricula and kept current by editorial writers to guide public media and history teachers to open minds and eyes of our younger generations. Unfortunately, what kids have been learning in school about history is a farcical hodgepodge of disjointed historic events that frequently suggest only how badly westerners treated others in foreign lands as well as their own natives in North America.
All of this has infused our society with a large dose of somewhat unprincipled, self-centered, egotistical and in many ways arrogant cultural aspects we only know too well. Thank heaven there are still a lot of kids and families who deplore these current conditions as much as any sane American does, but it is difficult to defend oneself against this tsunami of bad taste in advertising, national self-flagellation by the media together with the worship of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, political correctness and “anything goes have a good time” dogmas of most of the educational establishment.
The fact that it is impossible today, politically incorrect as they say, to lay out the historic facts that many countries in the world still have dreadful cultural and political systems, is an indictment both of our current ignorance as well as proof that maintaining a civilized society, in the western sense of the word, requires constant work and dedication to its principles. By slowly abandoning the careful preparation of young minds during the past 50 years or so, we are reaping a potential hurricane of confusion and loss of pride and purpose that could have disastrous national consequences, sooner rather than later.
The western world’s loss of ethical behavior, its failure to “educate” its own children, the disgusting public presence of pornography in all its forms together with other corrupting influences has created generations of Americans who have no clue about the historic struggles of the western world with itself as well as with other political and religious entities during the process of trying to find a way to live humanely, decently and constructively.
It seems to be totally unclear to many contemporaries why we now have huge immigration problems, educational problems, moral controversies and political disunity in a time of war.
By all indications we are unaware, if not collectively, certainly many of our political leaders and followers are, unaware of the painful lessons of history. We are just trying to live better, play more, let everyone do whatever he or she wants because there are few rules left, we are all the same bad Americans, with our unsavory culture which every foreigner supposedly hates, yet many of them wish to emulate (immigration!!!)!We have no pride in ourselves anymore so we might as well enjoy what we can today. Too many people believe the government will provide so let’s just grab the fruit from the trees and have a ball.
Except, they do not realize that the fruit is poisoned.
We are always excusing every bad foreign behavior. We created the UN based on Western values but then allowed out-of-their-depth “tribal thinking” third world people to gradually take it over. As a result, the organization is basically a sham, a jobs program for thousands. Its leadership demonstrates an appalling lack of guts, foresight and organizational talent and what there is is prone to corruption, good tax-free living but no action that counts.
There is little honor among thieves, little ability or morality. Why did we let this happen?
Because during the creation of the institute, good but somewhat utopian American thinking led to an organization where any country, good bad or indifferent could become a member. That was a fatal mistake. Membership should have been qualified.
The idea was based on western cultural and sophisticated political principles but so as not to kick the communists in the shins, who were partners of necessity during thw war but were soon to be enemies, and because Roosevelt naively believed he could deal with “Uncle Joe Stalin”, the UN Charter became a free cloak of legitimacy for every rogue regime in the world. Since we were then about to deploy our first A-bomb over Japan we might well have been able to control the USSR, although treachery here at home soon put paid to that, viz: the Rosenberg trial. Hence with the cat out of the nuclear bag and the Soviets in the UN with separate seats for some of their communist satrapies, they made the UN a forum of effective anti-American agitation, corruption and intelligence gathering. The USSR obviously did not reciprocate in the spirit for which the UN was created. We should actually not have expected them to do any differently, being the rogue regime they were for 30 years already.
Lessons like these have been forgotten by most people who did not live through the decades of their occurrence. But now we have a UN operation that, apart from a few of their humanitarian activities, is a constant problem for the US in that some of its more antipathetic members have been using it to continue to claim the mantle of world legitimacy whenever it would seem advantageous to them and difficult for the USA. Meanwhile we have to pull chestnuts out of many fires, at huge expense to the US treasury, for which even many of our traditional allies rarely express any thanks.
How can these lessons of history help us to understand our current confrontation with the war on terror and its consequences for our whole western civilization?
Lesson # 1:
The first thing to realize is the necessity to look at the available facts pertinent to what President Bush carefully calls the “war on terror”. And he is right to do so, because the fanatic Islam inspired terrorists constitute a small but fanatic percentage of Muslims. Those who do all the wanton killing and murdering, of their own people as well as our soldiers and civilians, are zealots driven by Osama bin Laden’s original call to arms in February 1998.
Since 1996 Bin Laden and his followers have stated unequivocally that they consider themselves to be in a religious war with Christendom and that anything goes in terms of killing westerners as well as their own people if the latter do not follow the strict religious rules insisted upon by bin Laden. Many western authors have touched upon this aspect of our confrontation, but we must not be in any doubt that they are deadly serious about it and have demonstrated this many times already. We are indeed at war and should conduct ourselves accordingly.
Lesson # 2:
Consequently, as a country and as the leading member of our large western cultural area we cannot afford to fight amongst ourselves, certainly not in the public arenas of Washington politics and media opinionating.
We must demonstrate unity of purpose in order to convince the enemy that we are, collectively, determined to defeat them sooner rather than later. No holds barred. They declared war on us, not the other way around as some of our unrealistic liberal citizens are telling us.
Lesson # 3:
Most of us do not really know our enemy, which is dangerously shortsighted.
But our enemy is fully conversant with the way the west works politically and
economically, they know our weak spots. They are fully aware that significant groups of people, including most Europeans, really do not want to fight anybody for any reason. On our side, this is completely utopian and fatalistic thinking, as well as narrow minded and egotistic on the part of those who profess wars and other unpleasantness to be the stuff of uncivilized people. And even more ambiguous, it interferes with their daily lives and upsets their golf games and other personal activities. Of course it does, but don’t these people realize that history tells us it is dangerous to ignore what is threatening us, possibly mortally?
So all of us should be willing to make some sacrifices when it becomes clear we are in somebody’s gun-sights, at our peril! How dense can one be?
Lesson # 4:
History will undoubtedly verify that President Bush fundamentally understood the nature of the threat better than most of us after 9/11. The proximity and horror of it managed to galvanize the country for about 3 months after which time most liberal politicians considered further cooperation with a much detested President to be more distasteful and unnecessary than maintaining a unified political front in the eyes of the world. If we had conducted ourselves wisely, we would have done justice to our responsibility as the free world’s undisputed leader and gained enormous credibility. In addition we would have impressed upon the fanatic Islamist terrorists persuasively that the USA is not to be trifled with. We failed in this.
Lesson # 5:
Unfortunately, we demonstrated such political confusion and lack of unanimity at the time that most western countries decided not to participate, instead adopting the same anti-Bush attitudes as our partisan Democratic politicians and liberal voters. This sorry performance on our part was not lost on the terrorists and resulted in very few countries joining us in this critical, dangerous and costly struggle to put the Islamist genie back in the bottle.
A divided nation will find it very hard to win this struggle, because the enemy knows us well, knows our weaknesses and exploits them daily, whereas a critical number of Americans really couldn’t care less and prefers abusing our current President and his administration rather than putting their shoulders to the common wheel.
Once this fight is won, if it is, it will be soon enough to start bickering and carving up those who have the elected responsibility to defend our country, but in the current case it is the height of extreme folly on the part of any thinking real American to indulge in this destructive partisan conduct. It might be considered treasonous if we weren’t such a spoiled and irresponsible democracy in many ways. God help us, because we need all the critical help we can get.
In the end, we should admit to ourselves that we have allowed the foibles of human nature to get in the way of moral and intelligent behavior during the past 60 years. It should be no surprise therefore that we are faced with a darkening future. Unless we come to our senses collectively we will prove Santayana right. It would also dishonor all those Americans who came before us and who gave us the tools and the historic experience to avoid sliding further into this unworthy, shameful future of self-indulgence, political immaturity and irresponsibility thereby putting Western civilization at risk of annihilation.
Santayana would cry.
After we successfully disengaged ourselves from World War II combat, at considerable cost in treasure and sacrifice, it didn’t take long before we listened to Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and all their liberal henchmen thrown up by the post-WW II macho environment that the “good life” was everybody’s right and that the government would provide it. And it did. !!!
Except that no one foresaw, during the late fifties and sixties, the insidious damage this would do and eventually would result in the slow deterioration of our basic moral, societal and political principles. Because we abandoned the rules and disciplines of thought, work and decent behavior. Changing moral and educational conditions, coupled with a diminished level of patriotism among the young eventually resulted in the failure to understand that the “good life” was based on the sacrifices of previous generations, willingly made to preserve our unique national culture, warts and all. This sacrifice should never be forgotten. Instead it should be a permanent part of school curricula and kept current by editorial writers to guide public media and history teachers to open minds and eyes of our younger generations. Unfortunately, what kids have been learning in school about history is a farcical hodgepodge of disjointed historic events that frequently suggest only how badly westerners treated others in foreign lands as well as their own natives in North America.
All of this has infused our society with a large dose of somewhat unprincipled, self-centered, egotistical and in many ways arrogant cultural aspects we only know too well. Thank heaven there are still a lot of kids and families who deplore these current conditions as much as any sane American does, but it is difficult to defend oneself against this tsunami of bad taste in advertising, national self-flagellation by the media together with the worship of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, political correctness and “anything goes have a good time” dogmas of most of the educational establishment.
The fact that it is impossible today, politically incorrect as they say, to lay out the historic facts that many countries in the world still have dreadful cultural and political systems, is an indictment both of our current ignorance as well as proof that maintaining a civilized society, in the western sense of the word, requires constant work and dedication to its principles. By slowly abandoning the careful preparation of young minds during the past 50 years or so, we are reaping a potential hurricane of confusion and loss of pride and purpose that could have disastrous national consequences, sooner rather than later.
The western world’s loss of ethical behavior, its failure to “educate” its own children, the disgusting public presence of pornography in all its forms together with other corrupting influences has created generations of Americans who have no clue about the historic struggles of the western world with itself as well as with other political and religious entities during the process of trying to find a way to live humanely, decently and constructively.
It seems to be totally unclear to many contemporaries why we now have huge immigration problems, educational problems, moral controversies and political disunity in a time of war.
By all indications we are unaware, if not collectively, certainly many of our political leaders and followers are, unaware of the painful lessons of history. We are just trying to live better, play more, let everyone do whatever he or she wants because there are few rules left, we are all the same bad Americans, with our unsavory culture which every foreigner supposedly hates, yet many of them wish to emulate (immigration!!!)!We have no pride in ourselves anymore so we might as well enjoy what we can today. Too many people believe the government will provide so let’s just grab the fruit from the trees and have a ball.
Except, they do not realize that the fruit is poisoned.
We are always excusing every bad foreign behavior. We created the UN based on Western values but then allowed out-of-their-depth “tribal thinking” third world people to gradually take it over. As a result, the organization is basically a sham, a jobs program for thousands. Its leadership demonstrates an appalling lack of guts, foresight and organizational talent and what there is is prone to corruption, good tax-free living but no action that counts.
There is little honor among thieves, little ability or morality. Why did we let this happen?
Because during the creation of the institute, good but somewhat utopian American thinking led to an organization where any country, good bad or indifferent could become a member. That was a fatal mistake. Membership should have been qualified.
The idea was based on western cultural and sophisticated political principles but so as not to kick the communists in the shins, who were partners of necessity during thw war but were soon to be enemies, and because Roosevelt naively believed he could deal with “Uncle Joe Stalin”, the UN Charter became a free cloak of legitimacy for every rogue regime in the world. Since we were then about to deploy our first A-bomb over Japan we might well have been able to control the USSR, although treachery here at home soon put paid to that, viz: the Rosenberg trial. Hence with the cat out of the nuclear bag and the Soviets in the UN with separate seats for some of their communist satrapies, they made the UN a forum of effective anti-American agitation, corruption and intelligence gathering. The USSR obviously did not reciprocate in the spirit for which the UN was created. We should actually not have expected them to do any differently, being the rogue regime they were for 30 years already.
Lessons like these have been forgotten by most people who did not live through the decades of their occurrence. But now we have a UN operation that, apart from a few of their humanitarian activities, is a constant problem for the US in that some of its more antipathetic members have been using it to continue to claim the mantle of world legitimacy whenever it would seem advantageous to them and difficult for the USA. Meanwhile we have to pull chestnuts out of many fires, at huge expense to the US treasury, for which even many of our traditional allies rarely express any thanks.
How can these lessons of history help us to understand our current confrontation with the war on terror and its consequences for our whole western civilization?
Lesson # 1:
The first thing to realize is the necessity to look at the available facts pertinent to what President Bush carefully calls the “war on terror”. And he is right to do so, because the fanatic Islam inspired terrorists constitute a small but fanatic percentage of Muslims. Those who do all the wanton killing and murdering, of their own people as well as our soldiers and civilians, are zealots driven by Osama bin Laden’s original call to arms in February 1998.
Since 1996 Bin Laden and his followers have stated unequivocally that they consider themselves to be in a religious war with Christendom and that anything goes in terms of killing westerners as well as their own people if the latter do not follow the strict religious rules insisted upon by bin Laden. Many western authors have touched upon this aspect of our confrontation, but we must not be in any doubt that they are deadly serious about it and have demonstrated this many times already. We are indeed at war and should conduct ourselves accordingly.
Lesson # 2:
Consequently, as a country and as the leading member of our large western cultural area we cannot afford to fight amongst ourselves, certainly not in the public arenas of Washington politics and media opinionating.
We must demonstrate unity of purpose in order to convince the enemy that we are, collectively, determined to defeat them sooner rather than later. No holds barred. They declared war on us, not the other way around as some of our unrealistic liberal citizens are telling us.
Lesson # 3:
Most of us do not really know our enemy, which is dangerously shortsighted.
But our enemy is fully conversant with the way the west works politically and
economically, they know our weak spots. They are fully aware that significant groups of people, including most Europeans, really do not want to fight anybody for any reason. On our side, this is completely utopian and fatalistic thinking, as well as narrow minded and egotistic on the part of those who profess wars and other unpleasantness to be the stuff of uncivilized people. And even more ambiguous, it interferes with their daily lives and upsets their golf games and other personal activities. Of course it does, but don’t these people realize that history tells us it is dangerous to ignore what is threatening us, possibly mortally?
So all of us should be willing to make some sacrifices when it becomes clear we are in somebody’s gun-sights, at our peril! How dense can one be?
Lesson # 4:
History will undoubtedly verify that President Bush fundamentally understood the nature of the threat better than most of us after 9/11. The proximity and horror of it managed to galvanize the country for about 3 months after which time most liberal politicians considered further cooperation with a much detested President to be more distasteful and unnecessary than maintaining a unified political front in the eyes of the world. If we had conducted ourselves wisely, we would have done justice to our responsibility as the free world’s undisputed leader and gained enormous credibility. In addition we would have impressed upon the fanatic Islamist terrorists persuasively that the USA is not to be trifled with. We failed in this.
Lesson # 5:
Unfortunately, we demonstrated such political confusion and lack of unanimity at the time that most western countries decided not to participate, instead adopting the same anti-Bush attitudes as our partisan Democratic politicians and liberal voters. This sorry performance on our part was not lost on the terrorists and resulted in very few countries joining us in this critical, dangerous and costly struggle to put the Islamist genie back in the bottle.
A divided nation will find it very hard to win this struggle, because the enemy knows us well, knows our weaknesses and exploits them daily, whereas a critical number of Americans really couldn’t care less and prefers abusing our current President and his administration rather than putting their shoulders to the common wheel.
Once this fight is won, if it is, it will be soon enough to start bickering and carving up those who have the elected responsibility to defend our country, but in the current case it is the height of extreme folly on the part of any thinking real American to indulge in this destructive partisan conduct. It might be considered treasonous if we weren’t such a spoiled and irresponsible democracy in many ways. God help us, because we need all the critical help we can get.
In the end, we should admit to ourselves that we have allowed the foibles of human nature to get in the way of moral and intelligent behavior during the past 60 years. It should be no surprise therefore that we are faced with a darkening future. Unless we come to our senses collectively we will prove Santayana right. It would also dishonor all those Americans who came before us and who gave us the tools and the historic experience to avoid sliding further into this unworthy, shameful future of self-indulgence, political immaturity and irresponsibility thereby putting Western civilization at risk of annihilation.
Santayana would cry.
posted by Schaesberg at 6:13 AM
