Despite loving Colbert, and appreciating all that he does, I do see a dark side to all this.
(Well, I would, wouldn’t I?)
OK. Put together this, with this:
America will never get over Vietnam. It’s doomed to fight wars in a cyclic fashion until some dreadful world crisis forces an extension of its periodicity to decisive victory. 9/11 wasn’t big enough for that. Fairly soon but with increasing speed the consequences of this catastrophic collapse will be felt and the pendulum will swing back, maybe in 2008, maybe in 2010 — but not all the way — and a new Rumsfeld will be found only to be trashed by a new Pelosi. Back and forth it will go. The next decade will be littered with the bones of millions of indigenes caught up in the betrayals of American domestic politics. Remember the words “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The man who said those words was dead within three years of uttering them, together with millions of Indochinese, many drowned in the South China Sea. The cycle will continue until some catastrophe breaks the cycle or breaks America.
and this, with explanation of the story here:.
Could it be that a lone survivor of the 20th Century’s death camps at Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen could have looked back upon the chances the allies had to squelch Hitler’s ambitions in 1935 or 1937 or 1938, before the Nazis had the strength to drag all of Europe into its nightmare darkness with them, and wished that France and England had showed more ruthlessness in the beginning, when the death toll would have been in the thousands rather than the tens of millions? Could the Time Traveler’s reading of Thucydides be based on witnessing even more pain and destruction than even our hypothetical survivor of the 20th Century’s death camps and dislocations?
In Kaplan’s Warrior Politics , it is not ruthlessness that is being sought after, but the pagan virtues of clear-seeing…of seeing that good and evil are usually false dichotomies and that continued passive tolerance of intolerance equals intolerance, if not actual self-defeat.
I say this even though I am convinced (having watched this, and linked it in to various other elements we should be aware of) that the specific ‘terrorist’ threat to the Western world is vastly overblown, and not much more than propaganda. However, what our wise leaders have conjured up is a malevolent genie – and this genie happens to have a weapon to hand that will destroy our way of life. It won’t destroy humanity, and it won’t destroy western civilisation, but it will cause havoc, and probably lead to the destruction of Islamic civilisation. Our endeavours should be focussed upon minimising the blowback.