political commentary

Moving backward through history

Retroactively losing the Cold War

by T.J. Nelson

political commentary

T here are some nice things about living out in the country: you get lots of trees, lots of pretty snow in the winter, and lots of peace and quiet. But you also get lots of trees tipping over, lots of snow to shovel, and that awful dead silence.

You also get lots of crime. It's not like the old days: property crime is almost as bad out here as in the city. Two weeks ago somebody cut the padlocks on my shed and walked off with a bunch of noise-producing tools, making it all the more quiet. So instead of blogging I have to beef up security. (A win-win, a cynic might say.)

Presidential to-do list
Presidential to-do list

Military strategists always say a defender has a ten-to-one advantage, but I'm not sure that's still true. A defensive strategy is much more expensive than an offensive one. I discovered, for instance, that criminals can get through a closed garage door in ninety seconds unless you modify it. If your front door opens inward, they can kick it open. If it opens outward, they can tie a chain around your doorknob and yank your door open with their pickup truck.

Defending my little piece of civilization is a lot of work. Drilling 2⅛" holes in my steel doors to add more deadbolts. Putting expanded metal and Lexan in all the windows. Installing surveillance systems and laying landmines. Deciding where to deploy my ground-to-air missiles.

But always the goal is to move forward. You have to make sure not to weaken the existing defenses, which is why I left all that concertina wire up when I moved in. That's why I sympathize so much with Obama these days. How much harder it must be to move the country backward, systematically erasing the progress we've made in the past fifty years. He not only had to lose in Iraq, which was well on the way to peace and stability, he had to lose our ‘good war’ in Afghanistan as well. And now his toughest challenge yet: lose the Cold War.

What's that you say? The Cold War is over? Wars are never really over. The problems created by the way WWI was ended led to WWII. The problems created by the way WWII was ended led to the Cold War and, within a few decades, probably the European Civil War.

You gotta admire his determination. You have to admire a guy facing history head-on, even if he's facing the wrong way. The Left seems to be stuck on re-living past victories: losing Vietnam, losing the War on Poverty, and re-living the civil rights battles.

Communism may be in the trash bin next to Nazism, but the national interests of Russia and China are not much different today than during Brezhnev and Mao. If Russia invaded Afghanistan today, it would hardly be distinguishable, strategically or tactically, from their invasion in 1979. If anything, Russia has lost its empire and thus has more to gain and less to lose than before.

While the world stands in awe of the amazing Pizza Rat (which must be a good metaphor for something), our government is repeating history backwards. Next thing you know, we'll be fighting the American Civil War all over again. Slavery will be resurrected. We'll go back to being a colony of England. After that there's the Endarkenment and the Black Life, where millions of Europeans rise up out of the ground and start being invaded by Muslims.

Fukuyama was wrong. History hasn't stopped. It's started going backwards.

See also:


Related Articles

What if they gave a riot and nobody came?
When government tries to fix the root causes of social problems, it can only create resentment.

Irony Is Curved
Obama's strategy of 'overload and congestion' may be starting to work. But not in the way it was supposed to.


oct 02, 2015

On the Internet, no one can tell whether you're a dolphin or a porpoise

back

home