During his Dec. 7th speech aboard thr USS Yorktown memorial he singled out the reporter from NBC News who was covering the event, directly exposed her recent attempts to foist off lies as truth and then said to the crowd while pointing directly at her, "That's a third rate journalist right there!" The crowd went wild.
All thus brings us to the basis of, the bottom line if you will, of understanding the conflicts in the contemporary world. It doesn't matter if that conflict is between the social elites and the rest of us plebeians or between Islamic supremacists and Western culture, be it secular or religious. The dynamic is exactly the same.
Do we want to live in a society where the individual possess the free will to decide what is best for them and their famlies and where we must accept the consequences for our actions both good and bad or do we want to have a society where government and/or self-appointed elites, be they secular or religious, decide what they want and enforce their decisions through psychological manipulation, ie. propaganda and/or at the point of a gun?
In the first case as I pointed out above, the western social elites are seeing their ability to control the formation of public opinion slipping away from them and they are not happy about it. Anyone who thinks that they will just accept defeat and resign themselves from the conflict is naive, stupid or both. If history has one single lesson it is that power once attained is never freely surrendered. We have to be prepared to ask and answer the questions: What will the elites do, what are they prepared to do, to reassert their dominance over the political process and society at large? And, what are we willing to do or are prepared to do to stop them? Clearly up to now the primary direction the elites want us to move in, is to have us incrementally surrender more and more of our God given rights and freedoms in the name of some alleged security provided exclusively by government and its agencies.
At this point I would posit that governments, both national and local are failing miserably. Local police have concentrated on swelling their ranks with military vets whose sole policing experience at dealing with the public has been in conflict zones where they genuinely had to worry about if the next car they stop has a trunk full of explosives. Unfortunately that attitude dors not translate well in dealing with a large peaceable public. In our swstem of justice the adversarial conflict belongs in the courtroom not on the street. But as demonstrated by the police increasinly resorting to a wild west, shoot first and ask questions later attitude, this is not working out for the public in any positive manner.
Yes there is a growing problem, particularly in urban areas, with violence and drugs, but the proper responce is not to choke people to death for selling single cigarettes on the street corner when a block or two away someone is selling crack or meth unmolested. The correct responce is not to serve every drug warrant with SWAT teams and stun grenades like they are storming an insurgent stronghold in Iraq. For the police the adage of "To protect and serve" has devolved into "To patrol and control". Our society is not the better for it.
If the social elites are willing and prepared to condone such actions on a local level what would they resort to at a national level. Do we want, would we accept some sort of martial law? During an interview after his Dec. 7th announcement Trump quite understandably grew frustrated with the likes of Anderson Cooper and pointedly told him "Will you get it through your thick head that we are at war with these people!"
This brings us to the application of the aforementioned question in the second instance. We live in a pluralist society. That means that what the majority of people want and think does and should have legitimate sway of the direction of society in general. How much sway any want or opinion should have is what public debate is all about. We also beleive and our society was built upon the belief in free will.
Unfortunatly in any society in this world where Islam is the dominant force that belief does not exist in any meaningful way. The fact that there might exist a majority within those societies that wish nothing more than to go about their daily lives and live in peace is irrelevant. Increasingly it is the violent extremests who are the moving forces in the Islamic world, and they are more than willing to chop of the heads of any who oppose them, be they fellow Muslims or not.
Again in this instance the government has failed. For all their surveillance and scanning our emails and phone calls did not even put the two San Bernardino shooters on the NSA's radar. Ditto the Chattanooga recruiting center shooter or the Fort Hood shooter. The goverments attitude has become don't you dare arm yourself and shoot back but best you hunker down and wait for the government to come along and count the bodies.
For the West at this point it doesn't matter if you are a hard core atheist, a run of the mill protestant or Catholic or a devout evangelical, the belief in free will is and must be the glue that binds us together as a singular nation. If we abandon that belief we condemn ourselves and our posterity to a repressive regime imposed either internally or externally. It is a choice for the future we must make. It is not a choice we can afford to ignore. We were warned in the midst of the Nazi horror that "To not speak is to speak, to not act is to act." I would add that to not choose is to choose and its the wrong choice.
Your point about the lack of education in history is spot on! Its relevance in the formation of public policy is critical. Its absence can't help but lead to the creation of bad if not destructive policy.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Just discovered your blog. Great stuff.