Europe

In today’s world, it is easy to forget basic history. It sometimes seems to me that is, in part, the GOAL of much of our media, to surround us with so many unimportant details that we lose sight of the big picture. It is for precisely that reason that I consume very little media, spending perhaps 30 minutes daily reading news stories on the internet, and in general avoid editorials entirely. I prefer to form my own opinions.

It is worth noting, though, that much of the continent of Europe has seen autocratic regimes in power within the lifetime of many citizens. Spain and Portugal were ruled by dictators, if memory serves, until the mid-1970’s. Ireland and Greece fought civil wars in the 20th Century. Germany, of course, was ruled by the Third Reich (in their view, the first “scientific” one, since they were the first to grasp the essential importance of race and biology; this is one of many reasons we need to watch how the word “scientific” is used); as were most of the nations of Europe for some five years. Italy had Mussollini. Norway had its Quisling government. Austria wasn’t sad when Hitler came across the border. De Gaulle, as I understand it, may as well have been a dictator. Sweden, Britain and Switzerland are the only nations I can think of (perhaps Luxembourg and Lichtenstein and some other little nations excepted as well) that have not seen tyranny or civil war in some form in the last 75 years or so.

Further, as I understand the matter, there is NO nation that has a Bill of Rights like ours. There is no nation, as I understand it, that has a Freedom of Information Act. In Holland, Geert Wilders was charged with committing a crime for saying some very obvious, very common sense things about the unwillingness and seeming inability for most Islamic immigrants to join their larger social, political, and cultural order.

One final point: the next time you hear some call America “imperialist”, ask them: Compared to whom? In the approximate era when we were fighting our Civil War to preserve the Union and free the slaves, the British were carving out a hunk of Africa that they renamed Rhodesia after Cecil Rhodes. The Belgians were causing mass death. The French were colonizing North Africa, and southeast Asia.

And they were doing this for financial gain. That is what imperialism is. It makes little sense to invade another nation and give them money. You take their money. That’s how real imperialism works. You negotiate sweetheart deals or just take things by force.

What we do is spend American lives and money to help other nations form democratic systems which protect liberty. And for that, we often get spit on by many in the other nations, and by our own Left here, which is utterly lacking in the ability to differentiate cultures based on universal standards. They start from the idea that we are wrong, then infer any and all Others, no matter their behavior, must be right. This is the result of long-term conscious indoctrination, and avoidance of adult, responsible judgement.

As I get older, I have more fantasies of what gets called isolationism, but which is really just not going out and forcing stupid, fratricidal people stop killing each other. Say Hussein had gotten a nuke. We could nuke him. Figure out where he is, and take him out. Would significantly more people have died? That would depend on the details. It’s a guarantee less Americans would have died, though.

Sometimes I think we should cut our military in half, enact compulsory State militia (National Guard) service for all able bodied citizens, perfect our missile shield, no matter the cost, and just tell other nations that if they screw with us they will get nuked. Self evidently, we build a fence with the Mexican border, and put in place SERIOUS security. All the shores have good sensors. We build superior satellite telemetry, which we likely already have.

It should be said, too, that people obsess about defence contractors. The real money in war is loaning the money for it. Never forget this. And that applies to Wars on Poverty, too.