George Washington, like Dwight David Eisenhower, walked out the door as a teacher and savant as well as a great Amerikan emperor. His valedictory speech as POTUS gave us a warning that I truly wish we would heed. Even in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century America, the smartest of our smart knew good and well that Globalism would hasten our downfall and assault the commonweal of our people.
32) It’ll help a lot if you can avoid permanent rivalries and permanent alliances. Just try to get along with everyone when you can. Otherwise, you’re a slave to your policy, which may take you somewhere bad when the situation changes. Constantly being enemies with a particular country makes you reactive, and can even lead you to war when you really don’t need to, it makes you a slave to them, anxious for any kind of feedback, good or ill. A nation under these influences may impel its government to war based on passion which good reason would reject. At times bullying, just because you can, leads you to lose peace, or even your liberty.
33) Likewise, a passionate alliance with another nation produces all kinds of problems. Sympathy for a favorite nation creates an illusion of common interests which may not actually exist and invite into one the enemies of the other. It leads to give special favors denied to other nations, which cause double injury. First, by parting with what ought to have been retained, and Second creating ill-will and resentment towards any nation where such gifts were withheld. Such alliances create an atmosphere to tempt ambitious, corrupt or deluded citizens to sacrifice the interests of their own country in the act of defecting to the other. Besides, out of a sense of obligation, you may cling to an ally long after the relationship has actually ended.
34) The idea of this kind of alliance should scare any real American because it lets foreign countries meddle with us….
I’ll take President Washington’s warning one step further. Even unconcious, non-hostile interaction and interconnection with foreign countries can lead us to great harm. The latest possible manifestation of this may well be China’s disaster involving the rapidly evolutionary coronavirus. I don’t believe the Chinese government had imminent plans to kill off Amerika. I don’t think this lack of malignant intent will permit any Amerikans that die from this pandemic to wake back up and start doing The Tennessee Waltz.
Everyone wanted to do business with China. Everyone wanted into their labor pool so they could kick the uppity locals off of their payrolls. Now they have at least the financial version of the current Sino-Plague.
Market Snapshot:
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How much better would people feel in Germany, Australia, Japan, Great Britian, pretty much the rest of The Euro Zone, and right here in Amerika, if we had all been out of range when China had to sneeze? If China were less connected to Modernity, shutting down Wuhan would contain the problem until it hideously burned itself out. But no, if you bring the cheap goods and higher profit margins out of China, you bring out the bad things as well. We have five confirmed cases now in The USSA. An estimated five million people have left the quarantine area within the two week contagious, asymptomatic period of time associated with this particular Chinese coronavirus. No accurate estimate exists as to what proportion of this population is currently on Amerikan soil.
The backstory involving Chinese researchers stealing variants of this pathogen from a Canadian Microbiology and Immunology Lab may or may not be true. Further paranoia stems from the fact that an advanced Chinese Immunology Lab is thirty-seven miles away from the current epicenter of the epidemic. The USSA is evacuating people from our consulate. Beijing has closed China’s regional borders. Hong Kong schools are closed and many have panicked. Stefan Molyneux calls this Communist China’s Chernobyl. Perhaps, should this become a multi-national mass casualty event, it may well become Globalism’s Chernobyl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zEIQuRg-m4
Yet, before we cheer for Accelerationism and get the SMOD fan-gear out of our closets, let’s look at a disease that really did wreck just about everything. The Plague of Justinian, more than any barbarian horde, stopped Belisarius and the armies of Justinian I dead in their tracks. It was the perfect storm of infectious diseases, but it required just about everything that could have gone wrong to go wrong.
Between 536-540 AD two major volcanic eruptions put enough dirt in the Stratosphere to prevent crops from growing in two separate periods of longer than one year. Populations were eating North Korean rations all over the world. The climate was perhaps two degrees Centigrade cooler than it should have been all over the world. Put that into effect this Winter, and Northern Alabama could have a one-to-three inch snow cover right about now, given the last ten days of weather. Shift your Latitude to Colorado or Northern Pennsylvania, and we could easily not be seeing the ground between mid-November and mid-March. Good luck with your typical agricultural schedule in the USSA.
In the end, under the worst set of pre-conditions possible, The Plague of Justinian “accomplished” the following.
Before the 6th century was over, it had killed somewhere around 25 million people, and nearly killed the emperor Justinian himself. Within decades, Rome and Persia were so plague-weakened that the armies of Islam, formed in one of the only parts of either empire to remain plague free, could conquer Mesopotamia, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and most of Asia Minor. So, while it would be wrong to say that we know that something as complex as the fall of the Roman Empire was caused by a flea, it is even more wrong to say that we know it wasn’t. Or, put another way, hard as it is to say precisely how the pandemic changed the course of history, it is just plain wrong to suggest that subsequent events would have been the same had it not appeared.
So absent an erupting super-volcano, out latest CoV will not cause all of humanity to be captured by secret Muslims. What it could do is tragically kill over a million people in nations all over the 1st World. It could effectively hammer the economy and production centers for months. Then, the survivors get well, bury their dead, and move on with their partially damaged lives. At this juncture we can hopefully give some old-fashioned American wisdom a second, more discerning look.
Do we really need to be as connected to the world and integrated into other cultures as we currently are? Are we getting things we need, or just shiny objects to jet fuel shirt-term gratification? Are the profit numbers from cheap labor worth the downsides of decreasing quality and security? If the proposed trail leading to Chinese spies looting data from a Canadian Lab and then weaponizing the virus at home is an accurate portrayal, then we get a scene similar to SPC Campion fleeing Ft. Detrick after the “Rome Falls” Virus broke contain in Stephen King’s The Stand. Why then are we oversharing with foreign powers capable of turning the common cold into a potential Plague of Justinian?
Run those questions through your mind and Trump’s America Firstism is more in line with our first president’s condign admonition than it is with the power-madness of a Big, Orange Gameshow Hitler. Avoiding entangling alliances not only keeps us out of war, but it can also control what we bring in. This, quite sadly, is something that our nation’s self-besotted, Globalist elite have not been pondering a whole lot for the last few decades. Maybe — cough, cough — this particular disaster will be the wake-up call that more closely correlates their operating assumptions to reality.
Tags: entangling alliances, george washington, Globalism, leftism