Vision Fails

Karzai calls for peace. But it’s not his call to make. Suing for peace is a call for surrender. Karzai is not a leader. Just like the American president, he stands at the mercy of events. War is a constant condition. From birth we learn to fight. We fight for our place at the trough; we fight for attention; we fight for a mate; we fight for resources, for market share; we fight for sympathy. The Left has it right: Competition, the essence of capitalism, produces inequity: For someone to win, somebody must lose. The difference is that on the parlor game battlefield of capitalism, the same players can begin another round right after one side declares checkmate.

Afghanistan is not so advanced. Whereas we use the abstraction of a ‘ball’ in all our various national pastimes, Buzkashi (the Afghan national sport) still uses the headless carcass of a calf or goat to define the action. They determine victory by the measure of blood spilled. And they will not stop until we have either gone or bled dry. And even then it’s unlikely to end as the terms of surrender will never be agreed to by all.

Wars are the milestones of human history. Wars mark beginnings. They also signal ends. As such, they chart our progress from one upheaval to the next. On a concept circle, war and peace are represented by a single point; they are two sides of the same coin. War is not the opposite of peace just as peace is not the opposite of war. Each is merely the (temporary) absence of the other. That is why war and peace can exist simultaneously – in different places; at different times; and within separate chambers of the human heart - each failing to appreciate the other in what essentially amounts to a charade of willful delusion.

It might even be said that peace is a precondition for war; that peace itself foments the poisons that eventually force men into battle; that the simmering chaos underlying outward tranquility allows for inequities to build unseen, until these then must topple under their own weight. The laws of survival during war are far less forgiving, after all.

Some have sought to break the cycle of history by (the) diplomacy (of delay) or by outright appeasement. This has only lead to even greater disasters as evidenced by past horrors. Success or failure in diplomacy eludes objective measurement (such as body counts) and can be manufactured by effective propaganda campaigns. The latest effort centers on a strategy termed containment; allowing conflicts to fester in the hope that they will simply go away. Clearly, so much discontent is currently being stoked the world over – such dearth of leadership; so many hearts aflame - it’s hard to know exactly where the firebreaks we’ve attempted to enforce will be breached first.

In human history one third is given over to war, while two thirds is given to peace (or the absence of war). War continues to be the domain of the young; the virile; the idealists. It is a tool meant to be grasped by those with the courage to pursue (or protect) a vision. Once one’s own vision has failed, the challenge is never far. One must either fight blind or yield. In the Hindu trinity, war is represented by Shiva (the destroyer) who is by far the most popular in the trinity of Hindu gods.

War is a wound that never heals. We are forever tempted to scratch it open for the fascination of watching it bleed. Even in peace, the memory of past wars continues to haunt us. Even in peace, the prospect of the next war is just over the horizon. That’s why we urge our populations to support armies that stand idle two-thirds of the time.

They're not stupid if they don't know.

The legislative process on display in Washington this week seems like an echo of the very same process that elected Barack Hussein Obama over a year ago. The big story here – as then – is the American media which views the whole thing as a horserace between the evil Republicans and the saintly Democrats, refusing to examine the broader issues of viability and consequence. The difference is that between then and now the American people appear to have awakened. They have come to recognize that a Trojan horse sits in the White House, but find themselves powerless to act. Their own soldiers are under siege, held at political gunpoint and forced to commit unspeakable acts of betrayal.

While still too many of us see this as a contest between skins and shirts, there is no doubt that if the current health care tussle on The Hill – now beginning to resemble the Afghan (national) sport of Buzkashi (in which the object is to get a goat carcass across the goal line) – were subjected to a direct popular vote, it would go to the skins by a considerable margin. It is the margin that is troubling here. It ought to be 100% against – not some version of 50 -50.

Still, it would not be fair to call those who support the bill ‘stupid’. You’re not stupid if you don’t know. Access to information has been so bifurcated in our country as to make a bridging of the chasm improbable, if not impossible. Whereas you and I have learned of the outright fraud and misapplication of science in order to affect social engineering, the readers of The New York Times and The Washington Post know none of it. Mainstream broadcast news and print still tout ‘global warming’ as a serious issue. They still tout Obama as a ‘savior’ figure. They still tout Republicans, industry and capitalism as essentially evil. They ignore fiscal debt and deficits. They refuse to delve into the reason for why so many jobs have disappeared from the American scene. They discount the dangers of continued fiscal mismanagement.

Ditto, our schools and universities...

They’re not stupid if they don’t know. How can they know? Listening to talk radio, they’ve been taught, is stupid. It merely represents the rantings of a dying breed of greedy men and earth destroyers. They’ve been assured that theirs is a higher purpose. They’ve been meticulously groomed to pursue ‘social justice’.

Our kids have been commandeered into a kind of jihad. Our schools and universities are madrassahs where they are fed a steady diet of socialist propaganda. Not unlike the Arabs who have been taught to hate Jews, our kids hate us. They hate our jobs, our religions, our way of life. Is it working? Will familial ties snap? Unknown. Will they inform on us when the time comes. Unknown. Will they turn against us when the mob attacks? Unknown.

The latest drive in teaching American history is to start with Woodrow Wilson while ignoring the founders and framers and even the Civil War. The rationale is that an understanding of modern American history is more immediate and pertinent to current times. Coincidentally, Woodrow Wilson’s presidency marks the beginning of progressivism in America. I often hear Wilson and especially FDR lumped in with Obama lately. While it is true that progressives of the past also envisioned global state control (socialism), early progressives differ from Obama as night differs from day. Wilson and FDR were patriots. True, they envisioned a single (benign) authority ruling the world, but they took it for granted that this authority would be American. Obama on the other hand so hates the supposed county of his birth, he would quite happily cede control elsewhere. In fact, I maintain that he undestands his personal mission as sacrificing America and handing its sacrificial scalp to whoever steps forward to accept it.