Fundamental Concepts - Weakness Invites Aggression [Weirddave]

It's human nature to live in your own bubble. We have only experienced the world that we live in, so naturally many people assume that the world as it is is its default state. In order to move beyond this paradigm, one must first be introspective enough to recognize it, then take the time and effort to study history and culture to examine whether your norm is anything at all like the human norm through history. Often times this forces one to confront truths that may be, like life, nasty and brutish. For example, students are taught today that the shameful reality of slavery in America is somehow unique and uniquely horrible. It is only through further study that one discovers that slavery has been practiced in almost all human cultures for as long as human beings have been around. In fact, it was the hated Judeo-Christian civilization that recognized it for the evil that it is and fought to eliminate it. Slavery is still practiced today across much of the Arab world and in vast swaths of Africa. What little slavery remains in the West (sex slavery) is universally condemned and vigorously prosecuted. Recognizing that slavery is not a uniquely American phenomenon, and that there is still lots of it around can be a distressing challenge to a world view that has been unexamined. Acknowledging that the West is the only culture in the history of mankind that has for all practical purposes eradicated it can destroy that world view.

The same thing is true with peace. Almost everyone wants peace, the problem is that we've had peace in this country for so long that most people don't recognize it for the aberration that it is. Because of this, a curiously contradictory mindset holds sway over a large segment of the population, most of them on the left side of the political spectrum. It goes something like this: "Well, we want peace, so we'll just refuse to fight. If we refuse to fight, the other guy will have no reason to fight us." If you point out to them that the other guy just might not want peace, you'll get a predictable response: " Well, since peace is the default state of the world, if we can figure out what we did to make the other guy mad at us and desirous of war, and make it up to him, then he'll feel comfortable with allowing the default state to resume."

The problem is, of course, that peace isn't the default state of the world, war is. Human beings are predators, and we are genetically designed to be in competition with other human beings, either individually or in groups. If group A has something group B wants, the natural instinct of group B is to attack group A and take it. The only way that group A can prevent this from happening is to be stronger than group B. For centuries, the Mongol tribes roamed the countryside of Mongolia, squabbling with and fighting each other. The great neighboring dynasties, the Xia and Jin, had little to fear from the Mongols beyond nuisance raids, because they were stronger. Then Temujin united the tribes, assumed the title Genghis Khan, and swept both empires off the face of the earth. The empires had enjoyed peace for generations - because they were strong. When they ceased to be stronger than their foes, they soon ceased to be entirely.

So what? Primitives. Barbarians. Savages. We're different now. Civilized. Cultured. Superior.

I hate to break it to you, but we're not. 13th century man is behaviorally identical to modern man. 8 centuries is nowhere near long enough for that kind of evolutionary change in the human animal. People are...people. Always have been, always will be. The reason that we've enjoyed centuries of peace in America (even our wars haven't been fought here since the 1860s) is because we've been strong enough that nobody has had the ability to fight us over here, and we've had the ability to go fight them over there when we needed to. There is nothing about this situation that is written in stone. Our homeland is peaceful because we've had the military might necessary to make it impossible for foes to make it not peaceful.

But now, with so many believing that peace is the natural order of things, we are in grave danger of finding out that peace is not the natural order of things, it's a luxury, one that is paid for in blood and the willingness and ability to shed it. Our military is a shell of its former self, hollowed out to buy bread and circuses for the masses. Our diplomacy a joke, conducted insecurely and thus transparent to our foes. Our foreign policy is a hot mess of appeasement and apology. All of this makes us look weaker and weaker to the world, and so now they believe that they can take what they want from us because we can no longer defend it. Bill Clinton gave Ukraine a rock solid guarantee of protection in return for them giving up their nukes to ensure "peace". That's gone, along with half that country. Our strongest allies are realizing that they are on their own against genocidal aggressions and prepare to act alone or in concert with new allies. We issue ultimatums and draw red lines and the world laughs at us. This isn't peace, it's the prelude to destruction. Our destruction. Ronald Reagan had the right of it.

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.

Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the ultimatum. And what then -- when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this -- this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:53 AM

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