The Fierce Circle of Power

Power in the modern State/Nation/Union runs around in a big circle.

As in a big atom-smasher, where charged-up sub-atomic particles race to oblivion, or to wherever it is that electrons and protons and quarks and neutrinos and cheerios go when they manifest at the speed of light transforming between energy and matter . . . between things falling apart and things hanging together. . .

Power in the modern State cycles around, and is transformed, into greater and greater levels of constructivity. And, unfortunately, destructivity.

On one side of the Circle is Left, and on the other is Right.

The two sides meet at top and bottom.  At these two polarities—top and bottom—Left and Right merge together in a region  where Left and Right are indistinguishable, for instance . . .

A Government in which Democrat and Republican allow neutrally pragmatic institutions for the sake of productivity and increase.

A State in which Socialist and Capitalist tolerate similar policies that do not violate  their diverging identities.

A Regime where  Left and Right achieve tolerance, mimicking each other in their tactics.

Now looking back, a lifetime ago . . .

At the top, leaders and their agents at the peak of diplomacy met with the other side to do business, but unknowingly made arrangements that passively allow harm to all the citizens of the world who would soon get caught in the crossfire.

And a few years later. . .

An Agreement in which Communist and Fascist coexisted, militarily, for about two years, by means of a sham treaty . . .

A Treaty in which, 80 years ago, a Communist and a Nazi tyranny attacked and plundered the Polish nation that lay between them.

Then, years after that initial double-sided invasion . . .

Allied  armies later penetrated the morass of Power, bringing to light of day the deplorable bottom where Nazi concentration camps were found,  and later, Communist gulags. These hellhole prisons were established by both sides, for purposes of controlling both their peoples by means of the same criminally cruel imprisonments and executions.

Because Left and Right made no difference in their tortuous abuses of mankind.

At that low point, persecution, torture, imprisonment, pain and death are the same whether they’re inflicted by a damn Communist or a damn Nazi.

More generally, however. . .

These days, at the Top

of our hypothetical circle we catch sight of moderate players who manage to do their moderating thing  in spite of the treacherous slippery slope curvature of the two sides.

And at the Bottom—in the pit of both sides’ dubious or even despicable practices, the tactical crimes common to both extremities are occasionally uncovered, identifiable as the same  atrocities.

Because Left and Right make no difference, at their extremities, in their manipulations and abuses of mankind.

At what is perhaps our present High point, everybody seems to be chugging along in a globalized quasi-peace.

But at some future a Low point, persecution, torture, imprisonment, pain and death will be the same whether they’re inflicted by a Socialist or a Fascist, a Democrat or a Republican,  by a whacko shootist or a jihadist terrorist.

At some other low point of history, armies representing Truth and Justice—if there is such a thing in this circle— will be required again, to blast their way into the cycle of hellish human history, and liberate those prisoners who are caught in the crossfire.

Even now, the widening gyre,  the next circle, gathers speed to ramp up to dizzying velocity, delivering at some dismal low point of human depravity a new deposit of deplorable arrests and atrocities, accumulating in the pit where innocent souls get caught in the crossfire, deprived of justice and mercy.

Beware. On the last go-round, the pit could be bottomless.

Get ready to meet your maker. If you don't acknowledge the Maker . . .well,  good luck with that. May the bird of paradise fly up your nose until it all hits the fan. 

King of Soul

Could be a problem

Our nation slides toward oblivion in unredeemable debt.

But who cares? It’s only money.

The national debt will never be repaid. We all know it, but nobody talks about it because we’re lost and we’ve never been here before.

We’ve never been at a juncture in history where money doesn’t matter.

In ages past, money mattered, but it doesn’t any more.

If you’re one of the inequality lackeys you’ve got a meal-ticket on a card, or so I’m told.

If you’re one of the equality beneficiaries you’ve got an expense account on a chip in your billfold.

The real movers and shakers are all just electrons streaming around in netspace, racking up virtual debits and credits in a webbish world that strains to retain some ideal standard that hasn’t really existed since grampa died and gramma went to the nursing home.

We pretend that the national debt matters while our brave new worldview slips into blahblah debit card oblivia, along a slow slide of credita magnifica.

But we're in a long, sluggish slide.

The leftish cadres analyze and strategize to death our slow slog into postcapitalist egality mediocrity.

Meanwhile back at the suburban ranch conservatives dream of pie-in-the-sky return to days gone by in which every man or woman set a course toward their own comfort and prosperity. Good luck with that.

All along the watchtower, our planet bleeds, while civilization recedes.

Our manifest destiny bleeds out as welfare mediocrity. We’re all on welfare, just haven’t admitted it yet.  We’re all leaning on the largesse of a depleting State. When someone trips the alarm we'll be racing to the exits.

Common sense poses now as tweets, while common decency slowly but surely retreats.

Maybe it’s always been this way, but never before on such electronified magnitude as we have now.

What began in human history as sword-swinging  contention stealthily slashes through our sedated society as a hi-tek tirade of weaponized malcontent.

The imminent ideology showdown will not likely roll in as some entertaining video event. Rather, it may be a bloody mess, a severe letdown, or, as we used to say in the old country, a pain in the ass.

Might be a good time to get saved.

Turn or burn.   Travelers’ Rest.

Smoke

Give a hoot, y'all!

Here’s what I heard Joe Blow say the other day while I was trying to stay awake during the Super Bowl.

All this trouble in the world--it aint just gonna go away by itself. You know, it goes back a long ways.

For one thing, Catholic Church dominated European life and culture for over a thousand years. And for the most part they meant well (I know; I used to be one of ‘em)

But after a thousand years they (we) needed some corrections.

Long about the 1700’s, some new Reason-cultivating fellers came along—the so-called Enlightenment—and they ushered in a new way of thinking about everything . . . and they brought to the forefront a lot of profound questions, like . . .

Who should be in charge of things, what’s wrong or right about the way things are working out for everybody, what needs to be changed, why hasn’t God straightened everything out, who or what is God anyway? Maybe we’d be better off just to do without Him for awhile and figure this stuff out on our own.

By ’n by and moving right along . . .modern life in the so-called “West” began to be constructed on the ruins of Catholic Europe, as thinking people attempted to reconstruct society according to a reconstructed humanistic ole Greek/Roman way of analysis and ponderation.

And then came along science, duh, let’s not forget the rise to prominence of modern science . . .

analytical thinking with hypothetical testing to determine what is true or not true, what works or does not work.

And humanizing ethics . . . who gets fed and who doesn’t, who’s fat ’n happy and who ain’t . . .

Who’s in charge of this mess, anyway?

Well, must not be God. If there was any validity to that theory, those religious potentates and their blue-blooded partners in mime have pretty well got everything messed up, and how the hell can we fix everything. . . how can we get things turned around so that everybody gets an appropriate piece of the pie, piece of the action, their fifteen minutes of fame blah blah blah

Long about 1830, a couple of German guys, Marx and Engels figured out that what needed to happen was the folks who were actually cranking up all the factories, turning the nuts and bolts, churning out all them goods . . . those proletarians needed to take unto themselves control of the means of production and rearrange everything so that everybody would get pretty much the same, or at least something more like the same amount of life’s essential necessities  and let’s all get together and toss the rich folks on their asses and get this thing turned around.

Then, lo and behold, a  certain cadre of them revolutionaries managed to get a hold of a country—and a pretty damn big one at that—Russia, and start the work of getting the world turned around to their way of thinkin’ …

and now we know how all that turned out . . . between the Bolsheviks running the Czar out of town in 1917 and the Wall going down in 1989, there were a hell of a lot of water under the bridge, blood under the ground, and underground gulags and criminations that got imposed on millions of world citizens and it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t right and its a good damn thing them Soviets finally came to their senses, and even the Maoists even got eclipsed when Deng started to get the middle kingdom turned around and all that mess is still being worked out, even up to the present-day shaking off of Chavez and now the world is finally learning its lesson about all that totalitarian nonsense—

and that goes for you alt-right fascists and nazis too! Don’t you get any ideas about takin’ over, cuz we learned that lesson the damned hard way when that demonic fool with the weird little moustache dragged us into hell on earth for four years.

It took us many millions killed and a whole damn world war to get all that straightened out. And then another half-century of frigidity before all them spies from both sides came in from the Cold etcetera etcetera.

But nothin’s ever simple. It all just keeps going on and on and who knows how will end?

Maybe apocalypse; I don’t know. Could happen though.

Now in the 21st-century horizon arises this new ideology surrounding the notion that we humans should all get together and nullify our 200-year-old carbon-spewing habits real quick like in the blinkin of an eye so to speak according to the pronouncements of technocratic experts who take unto themselves the means of production, so to speak, (well shut my mouth! as we used to say down south) so’s we don’t carbonize ourself and our homo sapiens selves into obliteration!

Don’t get me wrong. Give a hoot, I say I say: Don’t pollute!

Let’s all pitch in and get this planet cleaned up, y’all. Truly. I’m not making this up.

But we don’t need to be jerking everybody’s human rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of mobility) to do it. I think we can undertake this climate change conundrum with a little common sense and maybe even some democratized republicized consensus on what needs to be done.

Like I said before: Give a hoot; Don’t pollute, y’all!

And hey, good luck with that! More power (but not too much) to ya. Just shut my mouth! if I’ve stayed stepped on anybody’s toes.

Not really. Freedom of Speech and all that . . .

Glass Chimera

Religion Relapse

How odd it is—as a 21st-century scenario sets itself up—
we see the world gone mad preparing again to erupt.
So unforeseen it was that our great Argument of the Ages,
the dogmatic contentions of cadres and sages
should abandon the trappings of intelligent delusion
and revert to jihadic religious intrusion.

Europa intelligentsia had decided that God was indeed dead,
and they talked for a few generations of what to do instead:
whether a capitalist path or the communist wrath,
then a communist road or a big fascist goad—
And in the midst of all that
polarizing ideological spat—
we waged two world-class wars to settle the matter
of who should wield power and who should be scattered.

You know the drill;
it persists among us still:
Who should be in charge?
a strong-arm few or the people at large—
a fascist state or some proletarian rabble,
by authoritarian edict or sectarian babble? 

After all the holocaust horror and gulag gangrene
we plummet again to mucky slog of humanic bad dream.
Obsessive jihadi encircle the world;
believing their fanatic flag will fully unfurl.
Back at the hub the elite are perplexed,
while their technocrat cadres compute the complex
as the widening gyre of the jihadi fire
leaps higher and higher and higher and higher.  

Perhaps the privileged, enlightened elite
should renew communion with the (wo)man on the street
whose faith in a sacrificial, Prince of Peace deity

brings resurrection instead of  jihad enmity.
Could it be that the God who was tossed aside
by the godless secular bureaucratizing tide
is actually the same eternal entity
who spoke our world out of chaos infinity?
Oh, let us recover some providential indemnity,
and by this testament regain our serenity.
After the Enlightenment, the Ideology, the Decline and the Fall,
Think about it the repentative way: Selah, y’all.

King of Soul

What People Dotoeachother

Seems like folks these days are gettin all wound up about politics and stupid stuff like that. Democrats v. Republicans. Progressives v. Conservatives. Extremists v. Moderates, blah blah blah.
And to make it worse, with the intensifying effects of cellphones and pads and pods and whatnot and so-called social media blather, what we are barreling toward is a vast dumbing-down, barbarizing of all public discourse.
What was called debate in earlier times now has degenerated to knee-jerk bluster hubris yada yada blahblah hatred the-loudest-loudmouth-wins trouble. 
People take sides on every little controversy that rears its ugly little head in the public domain. Seems to me more like, as William Faulkner or William Shakespeare might have called it, sound and fury signifying nothing.
My studies of human history indicate some recurring characteristics of the tactics employed by extremist diehard yahoos: Such people want to push public discourse farther and farther toward extremist tactics so they can impose their great radical-fringe remedies on the rest of us who want only to live in peace and security with a little justice, mercy and neighborly good will toward our fellow-man thrown in.
I was born in the middle of the 20th-century, 1951. Looking back on all that happened during that century, I’ve noticed a few alarming things, such as:
The two worst 20th-century assholes who ever came along the pike and pretended to be great leaders—Hitler and Stalin—both of them manipulated evolving political institutions, and the idiot people within them— to make a grand bloody mess of their two nations and the whole damn world at large.
Both dictators, Hitler and Stalin, were idealogues. Historians call Hitler a Nazi, which is a type of Fascist. They call Stalin a Communist.
What’s more important, however, in the historical classification game is this:
Both Hitler and Stalin were mass-murderers. They did not do justice to the people they claimed to govern.


This factual identification is more important than the ideological label by which each of these two demagogues manipulated their bloody way into absolute power.
And they weren’t the only ones. In the 20th-century, there were others: Pol Pot, Idi Amin. Some would say Mao. And onn a small scale. . . Jim Jones, Charles Manson?
This scenario to which I make reference— this human behavior attribute of folks being swept up into murderous behavior by a maniacal leader driven by ideological or religious frenzy that results in mass murder—it could be right around a historical corner now.
If people do not allow the practice of mercy, decency, compassion, reason— and most of all forgiveness— to overpower imminent institutionalized manipulations of bloody power-mongers, then we’ll have another terrible round of mass murder on this planet.
Religion (old-school) and Ideology (new school) are both, when carried to extremes, cut from the same extremist cloth, and can drive people to endorse mass murder.
Don’t go there.
Ideology is a big circle. On one half of the circle is the arc of conservatism, which in its extremism leads to fascism; on the other half is the arc progressivism, which in its extremism leads to communism. They both start their movements at the top of the circle going in opposite directions. But at the bottom where they collide, we find extremism so lethal that it requires mass-murder as a so-called final solution.
You know what I’m talking about: “Somebody needs to kill them bastards!”
Religion, same thing. “Somebody needs to kill them _____” (fill in the blank)
Which is why we must harken to the greatest clarion call of all, the one spoken by the man from Galilee who stood on a mountainside and taught us:
“Whatever you would want done to you—do that for everybody else.”
This is the most important principle of all. Far greater  than communism or fascism, far more effectual than Democratic or Republican power-mongering, far more spiritually effective that the Church or the Caliphate.
Peace on this planet ultimately comes down to what people are willing to do--or refuse to do-- to each other in the name of _______.
You fill in the blank.
 
King of Soul

Communism

It was an idea whose time had come
or so they thought.
First there was the original, the Marx
version.
It seemed to be a great idea, everybody equal
pulling their own weight in a
great society. You might say it was the French
philosophers who started the whole damn thing
when they sliced off the king’s head
in the Place de la Revolution, 1789
to, you know, get him and his royal legions
out of the way
so Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite could
rule the day
instead of the divine right of fuddy-duddy
kings
which was an old disproven
notion. It had fallen, like the guillotine upon the king,
by the wayside. Later,
When the Bolsheviks got a hold of it
it became something else, and so
there evolved the Russian
version
which morphed into the Lenin
version
and eventually degenerated into the bloody Stalin
purge version
Then of course there was the Chinese
version
which, when Mao got a hold of it became
some great bloody leap backward and
a cultural revolution the likes of which the world
had never seen
since Pharoah, or whoever the hell it was that collected
all those sweating men out in the desert to stack
stone upon Ozymandian stone
up to the sky
but who knows why.
But I digress. It was the Ho Chi Minh
version
that really tripped us Americans up because
that great idea whose time had come had
proven to be not such a great idea
or so we thought.
And the whole damned ideological notion of
Communism
had become a terrible bogey man, an ogre in
the furtive minds of Capitalist men that
eventually got mired in the bogs of
Vietnam
And what a helluva thing that was.
Oh, and while all that was going down
along came the Che
version
and then the Castro
version
but the jury’s still out on all that or
so it seems,
‘though things are never as they
seem.
Maybe it was all just a bad
dream.

Smoke

in the event of a World War. . .

First, the bad news:

World War I was the excruciating death-seizure of 19th-century imperialism.

World War II was an agonizing replay of WWI, with 20th-century ideologies replacing old-world imperialist dynasties.

World War III will be a torturous replay of the medieval Crusades, with 20th-century ideologies reverting to ancient religious hegemonies.

World War I was fought in trenched battlefields, mostly in Europe, by soldiers disciplined in classic military tactics.

World War II was fought in Europe, north Africa, and the Asian rim of the Pacific, which qualified the conflagration as an actual "World" war, in the global expanse of land, sea, and air. Combatants were highly-trained soldiers, organized in in mega-armies.

World War III will be incinerated by terrorists, against constitutional law 'n order governments. The Worldwide death-struggle will pit electronically-networked ad hoc jihadists against hyper-securitized anti-terrorist specialized military teams. The battlefields of World War III will be the cities of this world.

World War I was fought with rifles, artillery, primitive tanks and primitive airplanes.

World War II was fought with rifles, artillery, advanced airplanes, destroyer ships, intelligence, aircraft carriers and two H-bombs.

World War III will be fought with fatwas, improvised explosive devices, shocking media executions, surgical air-campaigns, automatic weapons, drones, weaponized missiles, suicide bombs, media-hyped propaganda misinformation, frenzied media-wars in which news companies are scooping each other for shock'n'awe digital imagery, cartoons, hyped-up hate speech, video-games converted to actual weaponry, torture, manipulated scarcities, manipulated bounties, false intelligence, hacking, digital hijacking, chemical weapons, dirty bombs, tactical nuclear weapons (or the threat of them) and the god of forces masquerading as religion (on both "sides").

World War I pitted European Central Powers against Entente Allies.

World War II pitted Nazi/Fascist Axis against Capitalist/Communist Allies.

World War III pits IslamoFascists against Everybody else in the World.

World War I was, until it ended.

World War II was, until it ended.

World War III is already here, and now.

World War I produced a lot of collateral damage.

World War II produced more collateral damage.

World War III will be all about collateral damage.

And we will all die in it, or in some time thereafter.

That's the bad news. The good news is:

there is life after death. Here's the big picture:

"The entire vision will be to you like the words of a sealed book, which when they give it to the one who is literate, saying, 'Please read this,' he will say, 'I cannot, for it is sealed.'

Then the book will be given to the one who is illiterate, saying, 'Please read this.' And he will say, 'I cannot read.' "

The best strategy for dealing with World War III is: learn to "read", and act accordingly. That way, you won't have to depend on cartoons for your intelligence.

Until next time. . .

Smoke

Denying Climate Change

The critical question about climate change is not whether it is happening or not. The point is: what should be done about it, and perhaps more importantly--what can be done about it?

The earth and its biospheres have always been changing. There is no doubt about that. Scientific research and exploration have provided ample evidence of that truth, geologically and biologically. Miles and miles of extruded, eroded, sedimented, metamorphated, conglomerated rocks and minerals have convinced most of us who are paying attention that the world was, is, and will always be in flux.

In our present age, are emissions from human activity inflicting destructive effects on the earth and its inhabitants?

Yes.

Undoubtedly, aye, but here's the rub: As far as general mankind is concerned, "climate change" will never be anything but a perpetually unproven scientific hypothesis, which is apparently morphing, as the earth itself is, into a political movement that is misunderstood by the masses.

The political movement, which claims to be acting on behalf of mother Earth herself and her inhabitants--that political movement-- is founded upon unquantifiable theoretical snapshots of a gigantic moving target, and hypothetical random samplings of constantly shifting sands.

The resulting politics and ideology of the climate change believers will become increasingly restrictive, and ultimately repressive. These believers are starting to get zealously mad and revolutionary, similar to the Marxists/Bolsheviks about a hundred years ago.

And look what happened with that. Marx had figured out a few things about human commerce and wealth accumulation, but his proposals yielded a new eschatological layer of ideas for humans to argue, fight about, and wage wars over.

Like Marxism, the political/economic outcome of climate change agitprop will become as oppressive as the big bad wolf himself--carbon-spewing Capitalism. And in the long run, the end-game is the same: who is going to take control of the means of production?

To XL-pipeline, or not--that is the question. But it's only the next point of many contentions yet to come.

However all this homosapiens tragicomedy plays out, some people will come out on top of the imposed carbon-squelching or carbon-permitting policies; others will be ground down beneath the weight of it all. Some will lose; some will win.

Speaking of win, think of it this way: WIN. WIN was the acronym touted by President Gerald Ford, long about 1975. It stands for: Whip Inflation Now.

The Climate Change idea is like that. Everybody knows, or will know because they've been taught about it, that human-caused climate change is destructive. And everybody knows that something should be done about it. But most people don't really understand it. It's like trying to understand inflation.

And now, by the way, in Keynsian-speak, inflation has morphed into a thing that is not so bad after all. Because, when properly bridled, it protects us from being gobbled by the new big bad wolf of economic tectonics--deflation. We have now a theoretical target of 2% inflation, just as we probably have somewhere in a Kyoto or Copenhagen consensus, a target of ----kg/day carbon emissions.

My theory is that the general body of mankind will never truly understand the dynamics of climate change, just as we heartland flyover dweebs will never fully comprehend the economic forces that push our meager assets and never-ending liabilities around like toys. We never will grok it.

The concept of climate change itself will probably always be misunderstood, mis-applied, miscommunicated, and probably--dare I say it--mistaken, just like the rapaciously exploitive practices of capitalism have been, and just as the revolutionary, anarchic thrusts of Maxism have been.

But if people ever do comprehend the immense implications of climate change and its proposed remedies, they will achieve that understanding through education, not political deprivations and repression.

So all ye climate change believers out there--get busy educating us deniers out here, because that's the only way we'll ever understand it. Teach on.

Don't try to choke us with regulations and treaties.

Forty years ago, when I was graduating from LSU, I was an environmentalist of sorts, and antiwar also (my draft number was #349). And I really did believe, as I still do, that we humans should not pollute the earth.

Now there's a good idea: do not pollute. Which reminds me of an old slogan, similar to the WIN thing:

Give a hoot; don't pollute!

I think some fella named Woodsy Owl came up with that one. He came along after Smoky the Bear had set the tone for environmental awareness.

I believe the Environmental movement should have stuck with that motto, instead of complicating the issues with all this "climate change" and "global warming" effluence. Effluence is, when you get right down to it, worse than affluence.

Affluence is kind of nice to have, and not as outdated as the climate change zealots would have us believe. The result of reasonable affluence is that folks will settle down somewhat instead of rampaging through the streets and looting the system.

While progressing through youth and middle age, my environmental zeal has toned down a bit; it took a back seat to establishing a homestead, a household and (dare I say it) a coital family. No ZPG for me and my fruitful wife.

Now I've written my way into a Saturday sunrise. Maybe it's time to hop on the Vespa and make a run to do some errands. On second thought, take the car, make a recycling run. If there's a way to avoid emitting carbon, I haven't figured it out yet, and I don't know if we ever will, especially with China and Kilauea doing their thing on the other side of the world.

my song about it: Deep Green

Glass half-Full

The Unfinished War

In one sense, all war is unfinished, because the political crimes that wage death between people groups inevitably come to the surface again. Like toxic waste, old atrocities bubble up from the depths of human strife to plague subsequent generations.

Now and then in history, a war will actually settle a divisive question. Our American Civil War established once and for all that American states of north and south would remain as one federation under a common flag, and that resolution has remained intact.

The First War was an unfinished war, because the issues that separated Germany from the rest of Europe resurfaced, zombie-like, about twenty years later as the the Second World War. Then the Second War resolved those divisive issues in a more effective way, and now Europe is reasonably, if not politically, united in peaceful coexistence.

Forty-nine years of my 63-year life have been spent in the twentieth century, which was a time period in which nations were generally at each others' throats over ideological differences. The basic conflict between freedom and slavery was continually re-inventing itself in various ideological costumes: libertarian vs. totalitarian, democracy vs. communism, communism vs. fascism, etc.

Now it seems the world reverts to religious identities to fortify the battlefields of the 21st century: Muslim vs. Jew, Muslim vs. Christian, etc. It's not really as simple as that, but you know what I'm talking about. The issue of whether the so-called Islamic State is actually representing Islam should be a serious point of debate among Muslims; but no matter how that identity pans out, the decapitative modus operandi of IS is undeniably a danger which is Islamic in its ethnic origin.

Furthermore, the ongoing contention between Israel and the Islamic states (with or without Caliphate) is, despite modern secularizing influences in both camps, a religious war the origin of which is shrouded in the dust of Levant history.

On a secondary level within nation-states, we see political divisions, which still revolve around ideological poles: left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, statist vs. libertarian, etc.

Within my country, USA, the time-honored catch-all labels "left" and "right" have lately morphed from "liberal" vs. "conservative" to "progressive" vs. "conservative." A subset of this ideological polarity is the "Occupy" crowd vs. the "Tea-Party."

"Tea Party" derives its philosophical roots from an emphasis on individual liberty. Its tactical roots are found in the Boston Tea Party of 240 years ago, which turns upon economic and tax disputes and government get out of the way attitude.

"Occupy Wall Street" and its progeny (Occupy Oakland, Occupy Vancouver, whatever) derives its precedents from the Civil Rights and Anti-war activisms of the 1960s, and before that the socialist ideal as developed through the French Revolution, Marx, the Russian Revolution, Alinsky etc.

David Horowitz, a (rare) seasoned veteran of both left and right activisms, has identified, in his autobiography Radical Son, this truth:

". . . conservatism was (is) an attitude about the lessons of the actual past. By contrast, the attention of progressives was (is) directed toward an imagined future."

During the Vietnam war, a time when I was entering draftable age, the "left" was dragging our American sins of racism and napalmic militarism out into the streets for all the world to see. They imagined a more perfect United States that would successfully rid itself of the hegemonic abuses of capitalistic neo-colonialist empire-building.

Eventually the student-led antiwar movement was able to convince us to withdraw from Vietnam. But the more perfect United States they were dreaming of did not emerge. We are now still the same good n' bad nation we were then, manifesting a tri-part government of checks and balances that can, every generation or two, arrest our reprobate tendencies.

The activist left of the 1960s, of which I was (like many others) a curious, though non-involved part, also imagined an idealized Vietnam. But it did not materialize after we pulled out.

After the beginning of U.S. withdrawal in 1973, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (in whom the American anti-war activists had placed their hope) was crushed by the North Vietnamese army. Oppressive reeducation camps were set up and filled with hundred of thousands of prisoners. Tens of thousands were executed without trials. The bloodbath spilled into Cambodia. Millions were killed by the Khmer Rouge.

The consequences of U.S. withdrawal were tragic. More people died in the first two years of communist peace than had been killed during the U.S. war effort.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982

So distressed were many Americans who had formerly worked to get us out of Vietnam, that a group of high-profile war-objectors published an ad in the Washington Post protesting the arrests of "thousands upon thousands of detainees", who suffered enforced reeducation with starvation, physical abuse and use of prisoners as mine-detectors.

http://keywiki.org/Joan_Baez#Open_Letter_to_the_Socialist_Republic_of_Vietnam

While some leftists were grief-stricken at the widespread abuses in postwar, communist Vietnam, many more activists were not appalled. They blamed the aftermath on us--the United States, who were fighting to protect the Vietnamese people from the oppression that followed when the North Vietnamese took over.

That was a long time ago. There's been a lot of water under the bridge in our river of time, since then.

Now it's Iraq.

We have an eerily parallel situation in Iraq, with the IS attacking from Syria to enforce an "Islamic" Caliphate, just as the North Viet Cong descended on the South in 1973-75 with cruel, murderous intent.

And once again, the leftists want to blame us because we sent our troops over there and knocked the dictator Saddam out of power and tried to help them establish a just government.

But history, and prudent policy, does not hinge upon what might have happened or not happened because of the military assistance that came from the people of the United States, provided to the people of Iraq.

To those who want to blame us for the IS insurgency now threatening Iraq, we must say: don't even think about it.

It's time to subdue the beast that videos decapitations. No one in their right mind wants that kind of vengeful retribution, masquerading as "justice", established in the world.



Smoke

Proxy War

Proxy War
In the world of the 1930's, two destructive European ideologies were accumulating an arsenal with which to obliterate each other.
Unlike today, when the world is polarizing along ancient religious divisions, the scenario of the '30s was moving Europe toward a death-struggle between two opposing Western economic ideologies--fascism and communism.
The rise of two masterminding evil geniuses--Hitler and Stalin-- enabled their respective war-making nation-empires to rise to their full militarily destructive capacities and impose widespread destruction upon the world. During that period, seventy or eighty years ago, the civil war in Spain became the puppetized proxy war. Militarizing fascist states--Germany and Italy--propped up Spanish insurgents led by General Franco, as he sought to run the Communist-leaning, Soviet-supported government of Spain out of Madrid and out of power.
Today, the hotspot is not Spain; it is Syria. The power-brokers are not the Allies and the Axis; they are the West vs. Islam.
The civil war in Syria, which is now spreading into Iraq, is becoming the proxy war for two opposing ancient strains of Islamic power--Sunni and Shia. Iraq is caught in the middle between Syria (mostly Sunni) against the Shia empire, Iran, on the other side.
This scenario is eerily similar to the European ideology-based polarization of eight decades ago. During the 1930's, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were caught in the middle between Hitler's bloodthirsty power-grab and Stalin's stealthy gulag death machine.
Today's version of human-powered depraved bellicosity is not exactly the same, of course, as what was taking shape in the '30's, but there are similarities. The student of history can dimly discern these similarities. In our war-bound world of today, Syria, Iraq and other Arab states are caught in the middle, as Spain, Czechoslovakia and Poland were in the former times.
ISIS radicals in Syria are the Islamic version of Franco's quasi-Catholic fascists in Spain in 1936-1939. They are hiding their heartlessly demonic destruction behind a facade of the indigenous religion.
Franco's insurgents were supplied by the emerging-under-VersaillesTreaty-radar Nazi-fascist German Luftwaffe, who shocked the world with their air-powered obliteration of the town of Guernica, Spain, April 26 1937.
Today, ISIS brutes are shocking the world with their brutality in western Iraq, as has happened in Mosul. Now the battle is getting more intense and bloodier between Sunni and Shia , as it was between Fascist and Communist in the late 1930s.
This showdown is one that the major powers, comfortable in their relative prosperity and peace, prefer to watch from a distance and get involved if it becomes absolutely necessary.
In Britain and France in the 1930's, capitalist power-brokers stealthily supported Hitler's camouflaged Nazi heathen militarism, because they saw it as a potential defense against Soviet Communism.
Little did they know what Adolf Hitler had in mind.
Is there an Islamic Feuhrer out there in the middle east somewhere now, waiting in the wings to make his big move?
In 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain went to Munich and made a deal with Hitler. He came back to England waving a piece of paper that he thought represented peace. But a few months later, Hitler, having stalled the Allies off long enough to build up his wehrmacht, jumped on Czechoslovakia and Poland like a pit bull on a squirrel. You know the rest.
The world got sucked into a terrible war; millions were killed. Because the Allies were worn out with it all by 1945, Stalin took the scraps in eastern Europe that Hitler had failed to hold and therefore left behind for his former ally. Stalin, the fox, outsmarted and outlasted his ally-nemesis, Hitler. Stalin could not have done it without our help. War makes strange bedfellows.
Nowadays, it looks as though the United States, weary of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, is willing to turn the defense of weak Iraq over to the Iranian ayatollahs, so that ISIS will not take all of Shia-dominated Iraq. Hitler didn't want the Czechs/socialists to have Sudetenland either.
Those Iranian Shia will be doing the dirty work in proxy war as Franco did for Hitler and Mussolini in 1936-39.
Is this something like turning the protection of the hen-house over to the fox?
We shall see.

Smoke

The one thing that stops politics

A politician was talking about the unfortunate condition of his government:

Since the economic had begun…

…growing numbers of Agrarians maintained that the state was ungovernable without their participation, and that their party was the only one capable of managing the state…In the summer of 1933, Beran himself was of the opinion that the rising root of aggravation was an exaggerated school education, and (that), for a child subjected to education, a country person 'began to stink of horse piss.'

'We have the most educated proletariat…the government has to perform miracles, so as to be able to maintain an army of tramps who mainly despise work…so that an unemployed worker would not have to leave town for the countryside and ask a farmer for a job.'

The state would never get out of its difficulties without reducing lavish unemployment benefits, 'this social monster which the socialists have created…'

The politician who presented this position was Rudolph Beran, a leader in the Agrarian party of Czechoslovakia during the 1930s. His assessment was supported largely by rural folks who populated a region known as Sudetenland. Many of the these Agrarians were ethnic Germans whose loyalties were gravitating, during the '30s, toward support for German occupation of their region of the Czech lands. The passage above was quoted from The Life of Edvard Benes, 1884-1948, by Zbynek Zemen with Antonin Klimek (Oxford, 1997)

However, after a while the extremist rhetoric didn't really produce much benefit to anyone. In 1939, all the polarizing politics that had been cranked out between fascist and communist extremes in eastern Europe went up in smoke, because Hitler's war blew all the manipulative politics to smithereens.

Europe in the 1930s was a festering boil of political infection and belligerence that eventually erupted as World War II. At the core of the contagion was a warm-up war of opposing ideologies: fascism and communism. Fascism was being force-fed by Germany and Italy. Communism was perpetrating through the nascent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, led by Russia.

Pretty much the whole developed world was suffering through an economic depression. The democratic nations, primarily France, Great Britain, and their smaller allies, were grasping at security straws. In their faltering attempts to preserve peace and what was left of prosperity, the liberal democracies were attempting to follow a political course between the two extremes of fascism and communism. This was no easy agenda, given the extremities with which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russia were polarizing their own internally bloody pathologies along with the other nations under their influence.

The most fervent expression of these death-wish ideologies was being hammered out in eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia and Poland, two regions or "nations" that had long been areas of exploitative manipulations between the larger powers, were destined to become the flash points of the world's next "great war"--the one that the last "great war" (1912-1918) had purported to avoid.

Czechoslovakia was a fledgling democratic republic during the '20s and '30s, having been established in the remnants of the Austria-Hungary empire that had dissipated after 1918 and the end of World War I. But this new Czech nation was a fragmented check-list of ethnic groups: Czechs, Sudetan Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, and a few others.

A multiplicity of political identities in 1930s Czechoslovakia generated a swirling frenzy of discontents. The most intense Czechoslovakian rivalries were in the western border districts, the Sudetenland, where a plurality of ethnic Germans held to Deutschland traditions and loyalties. This hotbed of opposing discontents is where World War II found its first militarized eruptions.

During 1938, Hitler's impudently pagan will-to-power intimidated British and French politicians into submissive strategies of appeasement. The Munich Pact conceded Sudetenland to the third reich, and assigned the Czechs to an impotent role as pawns in the game. Czech leaders had not even been consulted; nor were they present when the sellout deal with the devil was signed in Munich in September. The Nazi wehrmacht's ensuing occupation of Sudeten Czech lands set the terrible stage for Hitler's invasion of the Czech lands in March 1939.

But Czechoslovakia was just a wehrmacht warmup for the full-scale blitzkrieg of Poland that came in September of '39. That's when the Allies finally woke up to smell the smoke of hitlerian deception and destruction. Then they began to mobilize the Allied resistance that ultimately became successful by 1945. But World War II was no walk in the park.

A lot has changed in our world since then. Today our politics and war rationalizations display a few discernible parallels with those turbulent times past. Now the players on the stage are the same, but different. European ideological extremities have synthesized somewhat, a la Hegelian dialectics, morphing to "the West." Meanwhile in Eurasia the old kid on the world block--Islam--rises as a newly energized force-field. It will exert polarizing effects to religiously neuterize our old ideologies into kaffirific irrelevance. Could be a volatile situation, especially if you factor in the spark-breathing dragon in the far East.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress