Posts Tagged → pacifism
Weakness in the West has consequences
Adolf Hitler rose to power in a sea of pacifism and “peace-ism,” that euphoric act of sacrifice that kills all the innocent people and empowers the evil ones.
Hitler knew the West was weak, and therefore ripe for consumption. Pacifism empowered Hitler. Weakness invited his genocidal attacks.
In beating Nazi Germany and then confronting their sister, the Soviet Union, at huge costs, the West found again its spirit of liberty and survival instincts. During that time the West experienced incredible material success and unimaginable increases in the quality of life.
But you know how over time material success breeds creature comforts and disinclinations to do anything that might upset the comfortable lifestyle emanating from material success. So pacifism and peace-ism have risen again, among European countries and many Americans, even as war is carried to our doorsteps.
Andrew Tahmooressi is a Marine Corps sargeant who took a wrong turn in the wild, unmarked American desert with his legal guns, and has been imprisoned by Mexico for months ever since. America has done zero to get him back, but the Obama administration has done everything possible to open the border to terrorists, children, criminals, and assorted other illegal burdens on two legs.
In Israel, three teenaged boys were abducted three weeks ago by Muslim supremacists, and then found today, dead, killed soon after they were taken. Half a dozen Israeli military and police officers have lost their jobs over the boys’ deaths, which were avoidable: One boy called the police and said they were being kidnapped. The policewoman called it a prank and did not act on it. Her Israeli military counterparts have been primed by overwhelming political correctness to look for Jewish kids with spray paint cans as their primary target, not murderous Arab terrorists, and they, too, ignored the phone call.
Europe is filled with Islamic institutions where hatred is preached and acted out every day, non-Muslims are gunned down in the streets, and the perpetrators and proponents are called “victims.”
The list goes on and on. The West is awash in enemies and insecurity, anarchy, but nothing is done.
Weakness breeds contempt and increased attempts to dethrone the boss. It is happening across Western Civilization: Our collective and individual weakness is being exploited by people who would take over our countries and change them into something else, something unrecognizable, something where liberty is unknown.
Will you choose to be weak? Or will you take action to preserve American liberties?
Simple formula about life on Earth escapes many people
After World War I, “the war to end all wars,” antipathy towards anything military related ran so deep in England and France, that both countries practically disarmed to both cut costs and to symbolize their break with “militarization.” America followed suit to some extent.
England’s Neville Chamberlain was famous for his “peace in our time” mis-statement, as he allowed the alligator of German aggression to eat more and more of Europe, in the hopes that eventually the alligator would become full and not go after England, too.
Obviously Chamberlain’s approach of appeasing evil tyrants Hitler and Stalin did nothing to stop them, and barely delayed their ambitions. England suffered terribly from German attacks, and only survived because America awakened from her slumber and engaged. Militarily. As in, sending troops, boats, bombs, bullets, planes, guns, and tanks to England to both defend England and to use England as a launching ground to take the fight back to Germany.
Winston Churchill holding the very American Thompson submachine gun is a famous icon of Western resolve to withstand tyranny.
Fast forward to Ukraine, now being invaded by a reinvigorated Russian empire…like the old evil Soviet empire. You know, the one that fell apart from sustained Western military, economic, and diplomatic pressure.
Now, where is that pressure? Obama is using appeasement and laughingly empty threats against a tyrannical, militaristic, imperialistic would-be emperor, Vlad Putin. It won’t work. All that appeasement does is make the inevitable military clash all the worse, because it gives the bad guys all the time they need to build up their military strength, while the good guys wring their hands, and dither.
Question here is, Do people learn from history, so that they can survive? Answer here is, No, not those people whose ideology or religion (sometimes it is impossible to tell the two apart) inclines them to ignore what is in front of their faces. To wit:
Yesterday I was in the Washington, DC, area for an event, and had plenty of opportunities to talk with long-time liberal politicians and activists gathered there. Yes, I was one of the few conservatives/ traditionalists present. So the liberals felt comfortable speaking from their hearts, and it was a fascinating experience. One man, Hal, presently on a large city council and deeply involved in Congressional oversight, asked me what my number one problem with Obama was, from a functional perspective, not values or ideological view. “A lack of accountability for Obama’s actions and misdeeds,” was my response.
Naturally, Hal asked me what those were, and I could not get past pointing out that ObamaCare has received thousands of politically -based waivers from the White House, not to mention the many delays in implementing it, so that the pain felt by Americans would not be translated into punishing Democrats at the polls. When I pointed out that none of these waivers or delays are permitted by the law, Hal simply and repeatedly said “Yes, but it is his signature effort, his defining law.”
As if that excuses unconstitutional actions by an out-of-control, out-of-bounds executive. But in Hal’s mind, it does excuse Obama. And I am positive Hal is representative of liberals everywhere: The ends justify the means. Because the ends are pure (they think), any means of achieving those ends is acceptable, including violating the Constitution. A young student named Ms. Korn, now being indoctrinated at Harvard, recently wrote an essay in the Harvard Crimson where she declared that the First Amendment rights of conservatives are getting in the way of her (and Obama’s) version of “justice,” and that in the name of achieving that justice, the First Amendment should be vacated. Ms. Korn is probably representative of her generation, having been indoctrinated by people like Hal.
And thus we see the deficiency of liberalism going inter-generational. Pragmatism is something used only if it advances the liberal agenda, not if it defends Americans or democracy. And seeing what is going on in Ukraine (and Syria, and Iran, and and and…), one must wonder what Obama’s agenda is? And do a majority of Americans care, even if the basic rules of successful life on this planet are violated?
Ukraine: Obama batting zero, his cheering section still loud
Math was not always my strongest interest (although I did self-learn calculus in graduate school), so disregard the headline here. Obama’s foreign policy is such a catastrophic failure that he is way in the negatives; he is not at zero. Being at Zero would actually be a success.
Here is a partial list of countries and peoples seeking freedom from tyranny who have had the rug of American promises pulled out from underneath them by Obama:
Poland (defensive missiles).
Georgia (South Ossetia, invaded by Russia).
Israel.
Iranian citizens.
Syrian citizens.
And now it’s Ukraine that has learned the hard lesson of Obama’s recklessness. Whatever promises were made to get Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, like protecting Ukraine from Russian imperialism, have been openly tossed out the window by an Obama administration bent on destroying America from within. Wrecking America’s international standing is one way to destroy America at home.
Allowing aggressive imperial powers like Russia, China, and Iran to willfully expand their spheres of influence and domination lets Obama off the “aggressor” hook. He can claim he’s no “warmonger.” But his inaction and failure to live up to his own red lines and promises of American protection have created a vacuum into which the aggressors, the real warmongers, have stepped.
Growing up in a pacifist household, I used to ask the hard questions that no one could answer, like Why should someone not actively oppose an Adolph Hitler and a Nazi Germany? Answers were hard to come by, because there are no substantive answers to these questions.
Pacifism is evil because it legitimizes evil. Pacifism equates doing nothing with active aggression, imperialism, domination, subjugation, tyranny and all the barbaric cruelty that goes along with them. By failing to act, by failing to confront evil in a meaningful way, pacifists lend credibility to the aggressors. If Russian imperialism in the form of subjugating Ukraine is not confronted and thwarted, then it must not be so bad. Such is the message from Obama and other pacifists, intended or unintended.
This unwillingness to act creates a vacuum, and this vacuum is seen correctly as weakness. It invites even more aggression. History is replete with examples, so an Obama would have to willfully ignore the obvious historical truth in order to do what he is doing (and not doing) now.
I know Obama has his cheering section. That is the greatest sadness of all, because those same people claim to be ethical, humane, loving. So strong is the messianic love for this charlatan among his believers, that they will forgive and forget his greatest deceptions, his greatest failures, the trail of destruction and misery in his wake. Other people, other families, then pay with their lives, at best to be the subjects of pity by groups like OxFam and Rotary, intent on picking up the few broken pieces later on.
For shame.
Thank you, Veterans!
Growing up with pacifist parents and a Quaker education led me to believe the American military was a source of bad things. (somehow the Russians and Chinese never got labeled that way, and the totalitarian Cuban regime deserved all our support)
In my late teens, early twenties I got to see what a load of nonsense that is. Truly treasonous stuff, this let’s-all-hate-the-military phony superiority thing. Easy to say when you’re living that comfy American lifestyle and no one is kicking in your door to force a new language on your family.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the brave veterans of all military service branches, who from near and far give us our daily freedoms, our incredible quality of life, our endless opportunity in the land of the free.
September 11th, A Day of Remembrance, Reflection & Resolve
September 11th, A Day of Remembrance, Reflection & Resolve
September 11, 2012
By Josh First
September 11th is an American day of national remembrance and reflection. We remember the attacks on our defenseless civilians by Muslim terrorists, who used our freedoms against us on this day.
We reflect on American heroism, an innate trait seen most graphically on Flight 93, now memorialized at the crash site in Somerset County, Pennsylvania (which I had the honor to help create, leading the first two years of real estate protection there with the National Park Service, Somerset County, the local townships, the Families of Flight 93, PBS Coals, CONSOL Energy, the Mellon Foundation, and others, not to mention the many supportive landowners).
Should the American character of inclusiveness be continued in a way that invites these kinds of attacks? An inclusiveness at any and all costs?
Based on his experience in both world wars, British leader Winston Churchill quipped after World War II that the Americans wouldn’t show up to a fight until it was almost too late to win it. Will our generation of Americans languish in our non-judgmentalism, uber-inclusiveness, and moral relativism until it is too late?
The “too late” will be when Iran obtains nuclear bombs, which is in the end-process of happening with an American and European acquiescence that is exactly how the West dealt with Hitler before 1940. Pacifists call this avoidable prelude to widespread death “peace,” but what do they call it after the bombs start going off? They call it someone else’s failure.
Many people believe that those Iranian bombs will be directed at Israel only, but Iran fears and hates America more than Israel. To Iran’s Muslim leaders and most of its citizens, America is the epicenter of everything they oppose. It’s a clash of civilizations that they intend to settle with nuclear bombs and that we currently intend to resolve through endless discussion.
America’s porous borders and inability to fight back against Islamic supremacism at home or abroad mean that at least one Iranian bomb will find its way into a large American city. The devastation and economic fallout will be unimaginable. What if two or three bombs are snuck in, and detonated? Is it “peace” to ignore these questions, and is it “warmongering” to ask them?
The oft-quoted historian George Santayana said “Those who forget history are destined to repeat it,” which in the context of September 11th means that Americans who are forgetting what happened that day, and why, will be surprised the next time we experience a huge domestic attack. The problem is that the next attack will be with a nuclear bomb, maybe several, America may not be able to recover from the damage, and we don’t have to be surprised; we can take steps to stop it from happening.
So on September 11th, the modern equivalent of remembering the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, let us not just recall the pain that we felt, but rather also resolve that it won’t happen again. Let us take the small and big steps necessary to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, the personal ones, the professional ones, and the political ones.
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