Amerika

Debate continues over whether history repeats or simply plays out new versions of the same patterns, but these things mean basically the same thing: humans, when confronted with similar situations, make a number of known types of decisions, and those have somewhat predictable results.

Details vary between situations but not so much that the basic pattern differs materially. Instead, each historical iteration could be said to be a variation on the basic pattern, adding some things and taking some away, but leaving the essential structure intact.

Consider how Leftists regularly restructure America, and how they get the same results. Jimmy Carter promised to place principles above pragmatism, and consequently, embarked on an ideological crusade to make America nicer, more equal, and greener.

He also wanted to defang its military and security services, since the core of egalitarianism seems to be pacifism, or the idea that if we remove the power differential between parties, they will no longer have anything to fight about.

Naturally, that laid the foundation for future conflict:

President Carter’s new DCI, Admiral Stansfield Turner, brought the President’s moralistic sensibilities to Langley with him, and soon field case officers were tasked with transforming the often ugly business of espionage into a “morally uplifting experience” for both case officers and their foreign agents. The President thought that America had an “inordinate fear of Communism,” and his DCI agreed. Within a few years, Turner had dismantled many of the capabilities the CIA had built up over the decades, dismissing them as Cold War relics. By the time Iranian revolutionaries took sixty-six Americans hostage in Teheran in November 1979, there was precious little the CIA could do about it with the resources it had in place at the time. To add insult to injury, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was sacked and burned by a howling Pakistani crowd the same month. – The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB by Milt Bearden and James Risen

In the same way that Hilary had her Benghazi and Obama let the military go to seed, Biden has neutered it Carter-style by loading it up with ideological imperatives much as the Soviets did. Not only does history repeat, but Leftists put history into a loop whenever they gain power.

Future historians will reflect that Leftists are those who tell you that reality is not how it appears, but how you want it to be, and are basically sellers of the false hope that humanity can end conflict as a way of assuaging fear in their audience.

All of their thinking boils down to the idea of equality and pluralism as a way to step around conflict. Instead of accepting reality as it is, and trying to minimize negatives by moving toward goals in the opposite direction, Leftists insist that they can eliminate conflict, and, in theory, leave only safety.

However, this makes the mistake of assuming that bad is 180° reversed from good, when in fact good exists on a different axis — degree of organization, clarity, health, and sanity — from the moral binary of “good” and “evil,” which generally map to “safe” and “risk.”

We are heading into an age of human maturation when we stop looking for Utopia and start looking toward the complexity of actual reality with an eye for maximizing the good instead of crusading against conflict, find things worth striving for so that we can make the most of our amazing world.

Tags: CIA, espionage, jimmy carter, joe biden, soviet union