Quo Vadis USA?
Quo Vadis USA? 5/28/2006
Ed. 8/17/09
Ed. 7/10/10
In a hopeless and threatening situation, otherwise sensible, intelligent, hardworking people will believe almost anybody, when desperate enough and looking for a savior. Someone who appears to be a leader and knows what is required to get them out of their miasma. Think of FDR and our own USA, Hitler and Germany, Churchill and England and de Gaulle and France come to mind.
After America's succesful involvement in World War II, at considerable cost in treasure and sacrifice, it didn’t take but a few years before we listened to Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and their various liberal henchmen of the post-WW II macho environment, that the “good life” was everybody’s right and that the government would provide it. And it sure did. !!!
Unfortunately, during the late 50-ies and 60-ies, no one foresaw the insidious damage this "good life" practice would do to our country. The slow deterioration of our basic moral and cultural principles had far reaching consequences for the country. A growing permissiveness of well established societal rules and disciplines became popular and a sign of individual freedom to do whatever one felt like.
Increasing numbers of people did not realize that these changing moral and educational conditions and a diminished level of patriotism among the young, thais new “good life” was made possible only thanks to the sacrifices of previous generations. Sacrifices willingly made to preserve our unique national culture, warts and all.
Of course, this sacrifice should never be forgotten, it should be a permanent part of school curricula and kept current by editorial writers and authors of history texts to guide the public and the media to keep minds and eyes of our younger generations open to what happened before, and why. Unfortunately, what too many kids have been learning in school about history is a hodgepodge of disjointed historic events that frequently suggest only how badly Americans treated others in foreign lands as well as their own natives in North America. That's really brain-washing.
In my view, all of this has played a role in developing our current, somewhat unprincipled, self-centered and in many ways arrogant youth culture we only know too well. Thank heaven there are still a lot of kids and families who deplore the 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 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 show the great contributions the USA has made to the world while too many other countries 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 intelligent 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 and character that could have disastrous national consequences, sooner rather than later.
In sum, the western world’s loss of ethical behavior, its current 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, 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 little pride in ourselves anymore so we might as well enjoy what we can today. Millions of people believe that the government will provide (communism, socialism) so while it lasts let’s just grab the fruit from the tree and have a ball.
Except, they do not realize that this fruit is poisoned.
Most of the media are generally ready to excuse every bad foreign behavior, except Israel. The USA and Britain created the UN, which is based on Western values. Sadly, over time out-of-their-depth “tribal thinking” third world countries were allowed to take it over. As a result, the organization is basically a sham. It's just a jobs program for thousands, mostly foreigners. Its leadership demonstrates an appalling lack of guts, sense, experience, wisdom or foresight and neither is its organizational talent to be admired and what's left is prone to corruption, good living and avoiding the instructions of the original Charter..
There is little honor among thieves, nor ability or morality. Why did we let this happen?
Because during the creation of the UN, 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, it should have had to be earned !!!.
The idea was based on sophisticated western cultural political principles. Unfortunately, so as not to kick our former Communist partners of necessity during WW II in the shins, the UN Charter became a deceptive 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, remember 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, particularly those who did not live through the decades of their occurrence. So now we have a UN operation that is mostly a constant problem for the US and the Western world . Meanwhile the USA has 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 understand our current confrontation with the war on terror and the consequences for our whole western civilization?
Lesson # 1:
The first thing to do is 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 Islamist inspired terrorists constitute a smallish percentage of all Muslims. They do all the wanton killing and murdering, of their own people (apostates) as well as our soldiers and civilians. They are the fanatics driven by Osama bin Laden’s original call to arms in the 1990-ies
Bin Laden and his followers have stated unequivocally that they consider themselves engaged in a religious war with Christendom and that anything goes in terms of killing westerners as well as their own apostate people if the latter do not follow the strict Sharia 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 a key 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 our enemy that we are, collectively, determined to defeat them sooner rather than later. No holds barred. They declared war on us and not the other way around as some of our unrealistic liberal citizens like to promote, ostensibly because they don’t like our current President, for instance. That's dangerous poppycock.
Lesson # 3:
Most of us do not really know our enemy and history teaches us how dangerously shortsighted we are in that. And contrary to this casual attitude on our part, our enemy has worked hard and is fully conversant with the way the West works politically and in some practical respects also economically. It is making good use of this knowledge by using our own systems, like the Internet for their own inimical purposes. They are also quite aware that significant groups of people in the USA, but also most Europeans, really do not want to fight anybody, for any reason.! We are thus clearly showing our weaknesses and if the terrorists know anything it is how to exploit weakness in an enemy.
While it is completely egotistical, utopian and fatalistic thinking on the part of many of our citizens who feel that way, maybe that could be explained because they consider wars and its associated unpleasantness to be the stuff of uncivilized people. Nevertheless it exists in the West and is being manipulated by the terrorists. You just needed to know how and they figured that out nicely.
More importantly, all this antiterrorism stuff interferes with the routines of many of our own people's daily lives and upsets their golf games and other personal activities. Well, of course it does, and they are right about that, but don’t these people realize that history tells us that it is really dangerous to ignore what is threatening us, possibly fatally?
It is essential that all of us should be willing to make some sacrifices when it is made clear we are in somebody’s gun-sights. How dense can we 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. But once past that point 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 self-declared enemy and 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. Furthermore, we would have impressed upon the fanatic Islamist terrorists persuasively that the USA is not to be trifled with. But we didn't and it was a bad mistake.
Lesson # 5:
Unfortunately and because we demonstrated such political confusion and lack of unanimity at home at the time that most western countries decided not to participate in the actual fighting, 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 kind of 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 to regain control of our future.
Only once this fight is won, if it ever is, may it 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 folly on the part of any thinking American to indulge in this destructive partisan conduct. In an earlier and more soul-searching time this kind of conduct might have been considered treasonous. Now it seems of no consequence, hence we are in many respects again an immature political unit, like 200 plus years ago, but, although still powerful, behaving more like a spoiled and irresponsible pseudo democracy than the resolute, experienced leader of the Western World and the Defender of Western Culture and the Rights of Man that we should be.
I asked the question, at the beginning, where we are going? I do not know the answer to it, but I do know that what we need desperately is another Ronald Reagan for President. So I fervently hope someone will show up in the near future to take our trembling country under his competent wings and set us back on our feet to the future. Nothing less will suffice.
Meanwhile, God help us, because we will need all the critical help we can get.
Ed. 8/17/09
Ed. 7/10/10
In a hopeless and threatening situation, otherwise sensible, intelligent, hardworking people will believe almost anybody, when desperate enough and looking for a savior. Someone who appears to be a leader and knows what is required to get them out of their miasma. Think of FDR and our own USA, Hitler and Germany, Churchill and England and de Gaulle and France come to mind.
After America's succesful involvement in World War II, at considerable cost in treasure and sacrifice, it didn’t take but a few years before we listened to Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and their various liberal henchmen of the post-WW II macho environment, that the “good life” was everybody’s right and that the government would provide it. And it sure did. !!!
Unfortunately, during the late 50-ies and 60-ies, no one foresaw the insidious damage this "good life" practice would do to our country. The slow deterioration of our basic moral and cultural principles had far reaching consequences for the country. A growing permissiveness of well established societal rules and disciplines became popular and a sign of individual freedom to do whatever one felt like.
Increasing numbers of people did not realize that these changing moral and educational conditions and a diminished level of patriotism among the young, thais new “good life” was made possible only thanks to the sacrifices of previous generations. Sacrifices willingly made to preserve our unique national culture, warts and all.
Of course, this sacrifice should never be forgotten, it should be a permanent part of school curricula and kept current by editorial writers and authors of history texts to guide the public and the media to keep minds and eyes of our younger generations open to what happened before, and why. Unfortunately, what too many kids have been learning in school about history is a hodgepodge of disjointed historic events that frequently suggest only how badly Americans treated others in foreign lands as well as their own natives in North America. That's really brain-washing.
In my view, all of this has played a role in developing our current, somewhat unprincipled, self-centered and in many ways arrogant youth culture we only know too well. Thank heaven there are still a lot of kids and families who deplore the 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 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 show the great contributions the USA has made to the world while too many other countries 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 intelligent 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 and character that could have disastrous national consequences, sooner rather than later.
In sum, the western world’s loss of ethical behavior, its current 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, 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 little pride in ourselves anymore so we might as well enjoy what we can today. Millions of people believe that the government will provide (communism, socialism) so while it lasts let’s just grab the fruit from the tree and have a ball.
Except, they do not realize that this fruit is poisoned.
Most of the media are generally ready to excuse every bad foreign behavior, except Israel. The USA and Britain created the UN, which is based on Western values. Sadly, over time out-of-their-depth “tribal thinking” third world countries were allowed to take it over. As a result, the organization is basically a sham. It's just a jobs program for thousands, mostly foreigners. Its leadership demonstrates an appalling lack of guts, sense, experience, wisdom or foresight and neither is its organizational talent to be admired and what's left is prone to corruption, good living and avoiding the instructions of the original Charter..
There is little honor among thieves, nor ability or morality. Why did we let this happen?
Because during the creation of the UN, 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, it should have had to be earned !!!.
The idea was based on sophisticated western cultural political principles. Unfortunately, so as not to kick our former Communist partners of necessity during WW II in the shins, the UN Charter became a deceptive 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, remember 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, particularly those who did not live through the decades of their occurrence. So now we have a UN operation that is mostly a constant problem for the US and the Western world . Meanwhile the USA has 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 understand our current confrontation with the war on terror and the consequences for our whole western civilization?
Lesson # 1:
The first thing to do is 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 Islamist inspired terrorists constitute a smallish percentage of all Muslims. They do all the wanton killing and murdering, of their own people (apostates) as well as our soldiers and civilians. They are the fanatics driven by Osama bin Laden’s original call to arms in the 1990-ies
Bin Laden and his followers have stated unequivocally that they consider themselves engaged in a religious war with Christendom and that anything goes in terms of killing westerners as well as their own apostate people if the latter do not follow the strict Sharia 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 a key 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 our enemy that we are, collectively, determined to defeat them sooner rather than later. No holds barred. They declared war on us and not the other way around as some of our unrealistic liberal citizens like to promote, ostensibly because they don’t like our current President, for instance. That's dangerous poppycock.
Lesson # 3:
Most of us do not really know our enemy and history teaches us how dangerously shortsighted we are in that. And contrary to this casual attitude on our part, our enemy has worked hard and is fully conversant with the way the West works politically and in some practical respects also economically. It is making good use of this knowledge by using our own systems, like the Internet for their own inimical purposes. They are also quite aware that significant groups of people in the USA, but also most Europeans, really do not want to fight anybody, for any reason.! We are thus clearly showing our weaknesses and if the terrorists know anything it is how to exploit weakness in an enemy.
While it is completely egotistical, utopian and fatalistic thinking on the part of many of our citizens who feel that way, maybe that could be explained because they consider wars and its associated unpleasantness to be the stuff of uncivilized people. Nevertheless it exists in the West and is being manipulated by the terrorists. You just needed to know how and they figured that out nicely.
More importantly, all this antiterrorism stuff interferes with the routines of many of our own people's daily lives and upsets their golf games and other personal activities. Well, of course it does, and they are right about that, but don’t these people realize that history tells us that it is really dangerous to ignore what is threatening us, possibly fatally?
It is essential that all of us should be willing to make some sacrifices when it is made clear we are in somebody’s gun-sights. How dense can we 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. But once past that point 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 self-declared enemy and 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. Furthermore, we would have impressed upon the fanatic Islamist terrorists persuasively that the USA is not to be trifled with. But we didn't and it was a bad mistake.
Lesson # 5:
Unfortunately and because we demonstrated such political confusion and lack of unanimity at home at the time that most western countries decided not to participate in the actual fighting, 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 kind of 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 to regain control of our future.
Only once this fight is won, if it ever is, may it 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 folly on the part of any thinking American to indulge in this destructive partisan conduct. In an earlier and more soul-searching time this kind of conduct might have been considered treasonous. Now it seems of no consequence, hence we are in many respects again an immature political unit, like 200 plus years ago, but, although still powerful, behaving more like a spoiled and irresponsible pseudo democracy than the resolute, experienced leader of the Western World and the Defender of Western Culture and the Rights of Man that we should be.
I asked the question, at the beginning, where we are going? I do not know the answer to it, but I do know that what we need desperately is another Ronald Reagan for President. So I fervently hope someone will show up in the near future to take our trembling country under his competent wings and set us back on our feet to the future. Nothing less will suffice.
Meanwhile, God help us, because we will need all the critical help we can get.
posted by Schaesberg at 4:06 AM
