Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Before Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their party pit Americans against each other by cynically twisting the Islamic State’s Orlando victory into a so-called hate crime, and use it as a tool to negate the right to bear arms, Americans must recognize that it is the common policies and actions of the Obama/Clinton, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton administrations that motivated the killing or wounding of more than 100 of their fellow citizens in a Florida nightclub. Americans also must accept that there are many more such events to come. The reality is that the dead and wounded were killed by a team, Omar Siddique Mateen as the shooter, and Obama, Bush, and the Clintons as his indispensable facilitators. A more effective unit to kill Americans is hard to conceive.

Bill Clinton refused multiple opportunities to kill bin Laden in 1998-99, when al-Qaeda’s forces numbered in the hundreds; Bush’s unnecessary Iraq War opened a world of easy movement and abandoned arsenals for the Islamists, one that now stretches from Pakistan to the Atlantic Ocean; and Obama waged illegal and incompetently lead and executed interventionist wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, and is now reinforcing the unstoppable U.S.-led defeat in Afghanistan. It is worth noting, too, that the Obama/Clinton-led military intervention in Libya completed the disaster Bush began in Iraq by clearing most of North Africa for the Islamists, and giving them more arsenals and a base from which to undermine Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, and to expand southward into the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, most Republican leaders, and the media also have continued to mindlessly chant the absurdity that describes today’s Islam as a religion of peace; this when Muslims clearly believe that U.S.-led, Western military interventionism in the Islamic world is meant to destroy their faith and brethren. Obama and Mrs. Clinton also have deliberately dulled the citizenry’s perception of how much danger the republic faces from Islamists at home and abroad, and of how the Executive Branch, under both parties, is using this prolonged war to solidify one-man rule in America. Obama, Bush and Bill Clinton, moreover, have sent U.S. troops to die or be wounded in the tens of thousands in the necessary and unnecessary wars they started but never intended to win.

It is time for Americans to accept that, no matter what their presidents’ say, the republic’s war against the Islamists — now about 75 days short of entering its 20th year — is far more than a lethal nuisance. It has become an existential threat because of the incompetence, deceit, and hubris of three U.S. presidents and their advisers and senior generals, and because of the determination, faith, growing skills and numbers, and absolute ruthlessness of the Islamists, men who clearly know that wars are won by killing the enemy until he quits or ceases to exist.

America’s twenty-year war effort has succeeded only in helping to make the U.S. national debt all but impossible to repay; filling once empty acreage at Arlington Cemetery; creating a boom for prosthetic-device makers; arming U.S. presidents with a scare-mongering tool they have used to degrade the Constitution and Bill of Rights; and expanding a war that could and should have been won in Afghanistan into a world war, with fronts on every continent save South America and Antarctica. Needless to say, the United States, being bankrupt, militarily worn and undersized, increasingly chaotic and lawless at home, and led by a corrupt, womanish, and commonsense-free governing class, currently, and for the foreseeable future, is not a match for the Islamists on one continent, let alone five.

As the Orlando story unfolds, then, Americans must bury their dead and clearly understand — no matter how Obama lies to exploit the Florida dead for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and to neuter the 2nd Amendment — that the men in that nightclub did indeed die by an Islamist shooter’s bullets, but that he shot them for only two reasons: (a) the last three presidents have relentlessly intervened militarily, culturally, politically, and unnecessarily in the Islamic world, and by doing so have taught Muslims to hate America and motivated Islamists to attack the United States, rather than solely focus on their main Arab and Israeli foes, and (b) the last three presidents have refused to authorize the U.S. military to exterminate the Islamist enemy and its supporters, preferring injury and death for Americans over risking condemnation from the U.S. media, the Democratic Party’s base, and the effete, largely disarmed European nations and their thoroughly anti-American media.

These presidents have left Americans with only two choices, either end U.S. interventionism now or be ready — even in the dilapidated condition just noted — to wage a U.S.-casualty-filled world war, which, to be won, would require readopting a style of war-making that produces numbers of dead among the Islamists and their civilian supporters that the world has not seen since 1939-1945. And the time to make this choice is fast running out. U.S. presidents and generals have amateurishly played and lost at war for nearly twenty years. The Islamists, on the other hand, have tirelessly persevered, learned from mistakes, mastered the internet, expanded geographically, and become ever more militarily effective and bloodthirsty, notwithstanding their far greater human losses and far fewer material and financials resources. If Americans do not elect a president who puts America first, stops overseas intervention, and refrains from helping to kill Americans, the republic’s choice will come down to one, kill or be killed. In such a situation, the republic’s survival could well be a very long shot.

A good friend of mine, a retired Colonel, recently asked if I had noticed that each time Obama, Clinton, Biden, Warren, Sanders, or any other senior Democrat says “that’s not who we are,” it always is in an effort to stop or denigrate — probably on the orders of George Soros — something that would increase the republic’s social cohesion, reduce its debt, improve its security, and strengthen its independence and sovereignty.

Having thought about it, I think the Colonel is on to something; namely, that the word “we” in the phrase refers not to Americans but to the theory-addicted, profligate, Ivy League-educated, amoral, and pro-tyranny elite of the Democratic Party and its fellow cretins in the media and the academy. In fact, when these people use the phrase, what they really are saying is that “you Americans are not who we [your intellectual superiors and pro-tyranny rulers] are, and so we care not for what benefits the republic, but only for that which benefits our egos, political power, and personal fortunes. You Americans are here only to serve as guinea pigs upon whom we can experiment with our social engineering theories.” A few examples of the phrase in action follow.

• When anyone questions the wisdom of the diktats that have imposed the policies of diversity and multiculturalism, the response is that the questioner is a racist and “that’s not who were are.” This silences questions, and that silence allows the madness and illogic at the core of the policies — that is, dividing Americans endlessly and pitting them against each other makes the republic stronger — to proceed unopposed in executing the destruction of the republic for which they were devised.
• When a person asks why we are spending hundreds of millions of borrowed dollars to bring unwanted, unneeded, often anti-American, and not assimilable migrants to the United States, the asker is told he or she is a xenophobe, nativist, and anti-Muslim, and “that’s not who we are,” and so the migrants keep coming to build the unquestioning, unthinking, mostly non-white and non-English speaking, and block-voting peasant class that the Democrats require to finish installing their tyranny.
• When a man asks why American military veterans are being required to go without medical care for so long that some die, while billions of borrowed dollars are spent to give comfortable lives, the internet, and cellphones to illegal aliens, the response damns the questioner as racist, uncaring, and nationalistic, and “that’s not who we are,” and so veterans keep waiting and dying.
• When a woman or a man asks why it takes the so-called “right” to legally murder infants — and to sell their body parts — to make a woman equal to a man, the female questioner is blistered as unmodern, conservative, and submissive, the male as a cruel, domineering, and conservative misogynist, and “that’s not who we are,” and so the total of post-1973 abortions climbs past 60 million.
• When anyone asks why Obama, through executive orders, illegal wars, and using government agencies against political foes, and Clinton, through influence peddling, blithe and narcissistic treason, and lust to delete the 2nd Amendment, are treated as if they are above the law, the questioner is termed a racist, a misogynist, and a right-wing conspirator, and “that’s not who we are,” and so the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and equality before the law lay dying.
• When a woman asks why our sons and daughters are being sent to be killed or maimed in unnecessary wars the national government starts, others in which America is not at risk, to defend Arab and other anti-American tyrannies, and to defend nations whose existence are irrelevant to the republic’s security, she is scathingly denounced as an isolationist, an anti-Semite, and, again, a nationalist, and “that’s not who we are,” and so unnecessary and interventionist wars continue, and kids keep dying or hobbling through the rest of their lives for the ego and world-government ambitions of American fascists.

The foregoing are a paltry few of the many dozens of instances where Obama, Clinton, George Soros, and their Harvard-educated band of Brown Shirts in the party, media, and professoriate have sought to negate the power and effectiveness of the 1st Amendment without formally abrogating it. Right now they are winning. As always, the full and frequent employment of the freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion; a thoroughly well-armed citizenry, with increasingly itchy trigger fingers, and a bipartisan governing class confident they will shoot; and, especially, a fall 2016 presidential vote that decisively rejects the Obama-Clinton-Soros fascists and their plans to make Americans into obedient peasants and laboratory animals, are really the only ways to halt and reverse America’s now ongoing transformation from republic to Reich. Failure to do so this fall may well mean secession and/or civil war.

In the past weeks, Mr. Trump, you have had bit of tough luck. Some of the Republican establishment is warming to you, for example, and the Neocon/Israel First senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Corker have said you seem like a nice guy. On the positive side, though, you have pledged full protection of the indispensable 2nd Amendment and presented an excellent list of potential Supreme Court justices, men and women who would apply the Constitution as it was written, and would not legislate from the bench, invent endless numbers of new “rights,” facilitate the presidency’s steady growth toward being a tyrant’s post, or give legal preference to the every new crackpot minority that seems to cross the stage monthly.

But there seem to be several themes that recently have gone missing in your public talks and interviews. There are also a a few potentially disastrous straws in the wind.

In the missing-themes realm:

• Why are you not relentlessly driving home the truthful point that America is dead broke, that we cannot afford the entitlement programs we have at the moment, and that those we do have must be reduced in their beneficence or eliminated? If this ever-worsening debt problem is not credibly put on the road to resolution, the idea of an America-First government is a pipe dream and the republic will die.
• Why do you refrain from explaining to Americans that the United States cannot financially afford more of the unnecessary interventionist wars — fought for the lethal illusion that America can give democracy, liberty, and women’s rights to foreigners — that are always lost, deepen the debt, waste the lives of U.S. service personnel, and erode civil liberty? Just be frank with the citizenry, Mr. Trump. In 1940, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian (aka: Philip Kerr), reportedly told the U.S. media “Well, boys, Britain is broke; it’s your money we want [to help defeat Germany].” (1) You can paraphrase Lothian’s opening words and say to the electorate “America is broke,” and then emphasize that there is no one to help Americans except themselves.
• Why must you keep saying such mad Neocon mantras as “we are going to bomb the hell out of ISIS.” The United States, Russia, Syria, and dozens of other countries have long been doing precisely that and yet ISIS is today expanding on four continents. Air power provides the feeling, not the substance of success. You also would be smart to stop saying that Iraq, Jordan, the Kurds, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, and sundry other states are going to supply ground forces to complement Western air power and bring victory over ISIS. There are no ground forces coming from those countries to help the West impose its secular, and what Muslims widely perceive as an anti-Islam agenda on the Islamic world. Indeed, if the United States showed commonsense and disengaged from the war with Islam, you would see forces from those nations take the field alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda in a campaign to destroy Iran and, at least, the Shia populations in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. You should also say that it will be the policy of a neutral and non-interventionist United States to do or say nothing that would slow the start, limit the combatants, moderate the brutality, or shorten the duration of such a war.
• And while you are at it, why not tell the voters that there will not be a U.S.-led world war against ISIS and the other Islamists because that war properly belongs to the nations having genuine, life-and death national-security interests in it? Those nations are Israel, the European states, the Arab tyrannies, and Putin’s Russia, the last of which will pay a dear price in the Caucuses and Central Asia for launching a brutal Syrian military campaign it did not intend to win. It is their war to win, abandon, or lose; it is America’s to silently observe, while it works to exert control over its borders, limit immigration, and rebuild a military capable of enforcing U.S. neutrality and annihilating, without the encumbrance of whining allies, any entity that dares attack the republic.
• Why have you stopped explaining to voters the need for America to rid itself of a deadly and unneeded treaty commitment by withdrawing from NATO, an alliance that hangs around the republic’s neck and helps choke it to death? While you have gone quiet on the plague of NATO, John Kerry and his NATO counterparts have dispatched an interventionist “NATO Exploratory Mission” to Iraq (2) to get us more deeply involved in the last-gasp military affairs of a now disintegrating Iraqi government and the Shia-Sunni civil war that will follow its demise. The NATO military committee also has said the alliance’s force levels in Afghanistan will not be reduced, this after Britain began sending more troops to reinforce NATO’s defeat there in December, 2015, and as the U.S. military is now is sending ‘’hundreds” more troops to die in a war that was lost years ago. (3)
• Begin again, Mr. Trump, to explain to Americans why the republic must leave NATO — it is too expensive, negates U.S. sovereignty, and denies independence of action. It also would be well to explain to the citizenry why, when leaving NATO, it is appropriate to tell the Europeans that the United States will never get involved in the coming EU war with Islam, the one that will rage across the continent. That war will be entirely of Europe’s making own, the predictable result of the sublime lunacy of military interventionism in the Muslim world, of making Europe borderless, of installing diversity and multiculturalism as the pan-European state religion, of creating of an Islamic state in Kosovo and abetting the growth of Islamic states in Albania and Bosnia, and of following, like demented sheep, the Chancellor Merkel-led immigration disaster (AKA: ISIS invasion) that she and the EU elites have deliberately inflicted on their peoples.

In the realm of potentially disastrous, straws-in-the wind:

• Why are you meeting and/or chumming about with giants of the war-wanting Israel-First and Neocon movements, men like Lindsey Graham, Speaker Gingrich, Sheldon Adelson, and that engineer of our Vietnam catastrophe, Henry Kissinger. These men abhor the idea of America First. Their goal is to keep U.S. money and blood committed to defend Israel, confront Putin, and continue worldwide democracy-mongering, and that reality can only result, for the United States, in an endless, unnecessary, and losing war with Islam, the expansion of the Executive Branch’s tyrannical powers, a larger national debt, and more reductions in civil liberties. If you want to use Adelson’s money and then ignore him after the election, that’s fine. And if you want to kiss Kissinger’s ring to please the Republican foreign-policy elite you have pledged to destroy, that’s fine, too, so long as the kiss is based on the rule that “insincerity costs you nothing.” But woe betide you, Mr. Trump, if the hint of betraying the goal of America First you have left in peoples’ minds by dealing with these men is an augury of your true status as just one more establishment warmonger.
• Why did you say that Israel should build all the settlements it wants? From an America-First perspective, of course, there is no real problem in what you said, though it might better have been left unsaid. If your words mean there is no reason that Israel should refrain from doing whatever it thinks necessary for its defense, and that all nations have the right to defend themselves, well, that’s fine and irrefutably true. But no nation — Israel, the United States, or any other — has a “right to exist.” If your words mean that Israel should build settlements and that the United States always will militarily and financially defend both its right to do so and its right to exist, you have knowingly enslaved America First — as have many post-1945 presidents — to the disloyal Jewish-Americans who demand their countrymen pay and bleed to ensure their traitorous, Israel-First agenda. Why not offer some clarity on this point, Mr. Trump. Perhaps you could say saying something like, “Israel has every right to defend itself, as does Palestine, and we recognize the right of both to do so. Neither party nor their partisans, however, will be allowed to maneuver the United States into a position that would involve it in their endless religious war, one that is irrelevant to genuine U.S. national security interests.”

Overall, Mr. Trump, it is worth recognizing that while the media have said your candidacy is attracting support from “Americans angry with the national government,” the idea of “anger” may be inadequate to define the attitude of those supporting you. A recent comment sent to this blog suggested that a more precise term to define your supporters is “desperation,” and I think that is a valuable insight. While spurts of anger tend to come and go, the simmering anger — now decades old –that many Americans hold toward the national government is now progressing to a strong sense of desperation, one that sees the 2016 presidential election as likely the final chance to put the republic back on a steady economic, rule of law, and foreign policy track that ends the economic, cultural, faux-legal, racial, and interventionist carnage that has been deliberately inflicted on the republic by the theory-addled, Christianity-hating Democratic Party; the 90-percent or so of the media that thirsts to first lick the butt of and then praise any Democratic candidate; and, perhaps most enraging, their numerous, mush-mouthed abettors in the Republican Party — Romney, Paul Ryan, McCain, Chris Christie, Graham, Bush, Kasich, Bush, George Will, Bush, etc. — men who believe that a “good Democrat” like Hillary Clinton could be relied on to pursue the things they care most about, free trade deals that eliminate the middle class, and endless, unnecessary, and war-causing interventionism.

Citizens armed with this sense of desperation, it seems to me, are not hard to satisfy. There is, after all, little if anything that they want from their national government except to be left alone to pursue their livelihoods, keep more of their income, raise and educate their families, practice and pass on their faith, and love a country that is independent, sovereign, ruled by law, and always at peace unless it is attacked or imminently threatened. They want to govern themselves through the representatives they elect at the local and state levels; to protect what is unique about their region of America from the national government’s cruel process of cultural homogenization, especially that relentlessly imposed on the South; to prepare their children to be adults with an education controlled at the lowest possible level of government so they can influence its content; and to help shape their children’s spiritual life, conscience, and judgment with the faith and religious practices of their choice. In public, they want to celebrate their country’s history and honor those worth honoring on days set aside for, say, the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, not for a meaningless Presidents’ Day. In private, they want to mark their own region’s and families’ past by honoring those killed in combat in all of America’s wars, even if that means placing General Lee’s battle flag on the graves of Southern soldiers and Marines buried anywhere in the republic, this as an expression of love for the dead, respect for their steadfastness and bravery, affection for home and region, and as the most enduring symbol of the greatest American trait — the moral capacity to reconcile, forgive, reunite, and henceforth labor together for the sake of the commonweal.

None of this is much to ask, Mr. Trump, and all of it is encompassed in the phrase America First. If it begins to be clear that you do not intend to run a national government grounded on that principle, you are apt to see your support begin to whither and then flee. And that, Mr. Trump, is ultimately the great danger for the republic in the 2016 election, a danger which is now temporarily on hold, but only because of your public statements, promises, and apparent allegiance to the concept of America First. You, Mr. Trump, have a lot to lose not only for yourself, but for all Americans and their republic’s future.

Why? Because Americans with a sense of desperation are not going to give up and turn silent and submissive if you betray them. These citizens perceive, I think, that if this election cycle yields another iteration of the status quo, the chance of vote-driven improvement is over, and another tack must be devised. Indeed, this perception probably is the main motivation behind the enormous growth in gun purchases that has occurred since 2007. It has been far too easy for Democrats, Republicans, other elites, and the media to lie about this phenomenon by asserting that rising gun sales are soley due to a race-based fear and/or hatred of Obama, though that may have been a tiny part of the motivation.

The overriding reason that Americans bought those guns, however, is because they had found that almost nothing in America works, or can be made to work. People of all races who work have their pockets picked via excessive taxes meant to benefit those who do not and foreigners; wounded, maimed, and troubled service personnel die waiting for medical aid that never arrives; infrastructure collapses; deviants of every kind are awarded a status not unlike nobility, as well as legal preference above fellow citizens not lucky enough to be deviants; necessary and unnecessary wars are started, lost, and leave the enemy stronger; free speech is circumscribed at every opportunity, often by adding new categories to unconstitutional hate-speech laws; academic freedom and open debate are things of the past; authors are damned and books are removed from school libraries if they question the elite’s dogma on climate change, why Muslims hate us, abortion, diversity, multiculturalism, or bathroom usage; trade policy kills middle-class jobs and presidential candidates promise to use environmentalism to kill more; children are indoctrinated, not educated, in a system that is beyond their parents’ control but empties their wallets; and the national government works only to strengthen and broaden the tyrannical regime both parties have built and crave to make more powerful.

For many Americans, and especially your supporters, Mr. Trump, these issues must be addressed to their satisfaction or at least a credible effort to do so must be made. These citizens have worked to achieve their goals through decades of elections; they have been promised much in campaign seasons, but afterward are ignored and even treated as pariahs. The 2016 election is the last straw, and a victory for the status quo will render a new approach mandatory. Desperation and perhaps a touch of despair will lead these citizens to action. Added to that mix will be a measure of motivating fury after a year in which both party establishments, the media, and foreign leaders and journalists have loudly denigrated and ridiculed them as uneducated boobs, racists, trailer trash, clowns, misogynists, isolationists, dupes, thugs, and anti-Semites.

Words like these can be a last straw which brings on unwanted events, even something as terrible as civil war. “The heart of the matter,” said the brilliant Judah P. Benjamin, U.S. senator from Louisiana and later a Confederate cabinet secretary, “was not so much what the abolitionists and Republicans had done or might do to the South, as it was about the things they had said about the South — and the moral arrogance with which they said them.” (4) Whether similar words and the national government’s tyranny will do so in this era is unknown, Mr. Trump, but it would be worthwhile for you and the governing elite to dwell on that possibility, and then to reflect on Tom Paine’s timeless warning that people will not forever let themselves be “governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.” (5)

Endnotes

1. See, Robin Prior. When Britain Saved the West: The Story of 1940. New Haven; Yale University Press, 2015, p. 271.
2. Hurriyet Daily News (Istanbul), 21 May 2016
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/18/top-nato-commanders-signal-support-for-keeping-troops-in-afghanistan/; http://forces.tv/88552731; and http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/world/asia/us-troops-helmand-province-afghanistan.html
4. Senator Benjamin is quoted in, Don E. Fehrenbacher. Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism, 1860-1861. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1995, p. 31.
5. Thomas Paine. Rights of Man, II, 1792

One of the more daunting problems Trump would face in implementing a comprehensive America First orientation in the national government is the Department of Education. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents, the leaders and personnel of that department have, for more than thirty years, developed and provided anti-American curricula to the nation’s schools and have used their control of an enormous budget to force their acceptance and implementation. In particular, their target has been the alienation of young Americans from their own republic’s history, which, with a common language, a common faith, and allegiance to the rule of equality before the law are all Americans have ever had to hold themselves and their Union together. The Democrats and the media already have destroyed the first three unifying commonalities, and so the republic’s history is the final target in their quest to divide and conquer America’s diverse regions and populations, and then establish one-party, authoritarian rule in the United States. In this task, the Department of Education has the leading role.

The product being delivered by the Department of Education is just what the authoritarians want, but it cannot for a moment be deemed a truthful, fair-minded education in America’s history. The Department’s product is more accurately termed the deliberate distorting of US. history, which is applied in an indoctrination of America’s students that leaves them all but ignorant of U.S. history. It also leaves them deeply infused with a near-fanatic belief that the United States engages in evil whenever it puts America’s interests first and manifests a durable preference for the republic’s survival over extravagant and always wasted and war-causing funding for the welfare, Westernizing, and democratizing of poor, suffering, oppressed, diseased, or otherwise unfortunate foreigners — especially, as the saying goes, those “of color, which has come to mean anyone who is not English-speaking and white. At home it means, legal, financial, political, and media preference for any group — no matter how reprehensible, felonious, slothful, or deviant — that reliably votes for the Democrats.

In addition, the Department’s prescribed indoctrination demands the mandatory awarding of empathy, sympathy, and limited liability to foreign nations, organizations, and individuals that deliberately attack America, as in U.S. soldiers and Marines not being allowed to fire on the enemy before being fired on; the lack of retribution for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing responsibility for generating the Islamists’ war against the United States; official U.S. silence over Israel’s intentional aerial attack that wrecked the U.S. navy’s ship Liberty and killed or wounded many of its crew; and bipartisan acquiescence in the undeclared but vicious war the Mexican government is waging against the U.S. economy and America’s sovereignty, independence, language, and social cohesion.

For several generations of American students — from which have come most teachers at all levels of U.S. education — the idea of “America First” has been directly and intentionally defined by the Department of Education as American selfishness, racism, isolationism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and a mean-spirited lack of sensitivity to always-worthy foreigners. While examples of this Department of Education-inculcated, anti-America mindset are legion, several recent ones are worth noting.

Obama to Hiroshima

Barack Obama is a shining example of the kind of anti-American thinking that results from the Department of Education curricula, and the indoctrinated student’s application thereof in his professional life. Obama will go to Hiroshima and implicitly apologize for the United States having dropped an atomic bomb on the city in 1945. Now, a basic and truthful education would have informed Obama that Hiroshima suffered a relatively small number of people killed — about 150,000 — in comparison to: (a) the 6-to-10 million Asian civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army in China, the Philippines, Indo-China, and all the other places that army invaded and occupied (1); all of the U.S., British, Indian, Filipino, Australian, New Zealand, and Dutch POW’s who were murdered, tortured, starved, or otherwise afforded inhuman treatment in prisoner-of-war camps, on the Bataan Death March, or when forced into slave labor; and all of men from the militaries of America and its allies who were murdered, wounded, or maimed when captured in battles fought to win the war Japan started. Given this accurate context, the only thing any U.S. president should say if he visits Hiroshima is:

“I come here today to speak in tribute to the men and women who died at the dastardly hands of Japan at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines in December, 1941. And I can add that the only regret I have is that the United States did not have a 15 or 20 atomic bombs in 1942 so the U.S. Army Air Force could have lit up all the major cities in Japan’s home islands and thereby ended the inhuman and merciless war Japan’s emperor, generals, and admirals eagerly imposed on the United States and the world. As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I can only say — Japan had it coming.”

Harriet Tubman displaces Old Hickory

This is another piece of rank idiocy derived from the kind of U.S. history being taught at the direction of the Department of Education. Now, there is no doubt that Harriet Tubman was a courageous woman, one who risked her own life to assist Blacks trying to escape from slavery. All thanks and praise to her for that bravery, but her actions do not elevate her above the reality that she was at best a bit player in the rancorous and finally violent events that played out in the United States between 1845 and 1865. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, dominated his era as a recklessly brave, fierce, and often-wounded American soldier. He fought in the American revolution and the War of 1812; defeated the Creek Indians — Britain’s ally — in 1814; routed a British army at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815; erased the U.S. national debt during his presidency; and crushed the proponents of nullification who sought to break the Union in the early 1830s.(2) Even though Jackson owned slaves and forced Indian tribes to move westward, he remains, in this case, a giant who towers over a brave, decent, but marginally important woman in terms of historical importance and worth to America.

On this issue, a decent and truthful education, would have allowed any student to see that Old Hickory, not Ms. Tubman (a) merits the place of prominence on the $20 bill, and (b) that the popular acceptance of Obama’s vote-buying and pandering-to-Blacks-and-women decision to place Ms. Tubman on the bill can only be explained by the success of the Department of Education’s ongoing campaign to teach U.S. history in a manner meant to make ahistorical morons of students who will become voters. Such an education denies the students both the ability to assess America’s worth — as well as its faults — and an understanding of each citizen’s responsibility to defend republican government against its domestic foes. By manufacturing this kind of citizen-automaton, the Department of Education reduces the chance of the citizenry exercising its obligatory duty of popular and, if necessary, armed resistance to the tyranny that the Department and its masters in the Democratic Party and media are working to install in place of the republic.

There is only one Holocaust that matters!

In the United States, the Israel-First faction is led by disloyal Jewish-American citizens who have bribed, intimidated, and lied the United States into a so far endless war with Islam. One aspect of their ability to do this comes from the lock they have on the term “holocaust,” which, in their usage, refers only to Nazi Germany’s murder of 6 million European Jews. Let me say, that no one in his right mind would judge this historical fact as anything but an abomination. But because Israel-Firsters use “their” holocaust” and “their” Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, to endlessly fuel feelings of guilt among contemporary Americans — even though it was the U.S., Britain and its Dominions, and the Red Army that utterly destroyed Hitler’s regime and ended the Holocaust — and to then exploit that sense of guilt to pry ever-increasing amounts of U.S. taxpayer-funded economic and military aid for Israel, and, worse, to keep the United States locked in a largely unnecessary and clearly losing struggle with the Islamists.

Now, a decent and truthful education would inform students about holocausts — or genocides — and provide them the context with which to understand that while Germany’s attempt to annihilate European Jewry was murderous and monstrous, the Fuehrer was a piker in the overall story of 20th and 21st century holocausts. The military forces of Imperial Japan, as noted above, may have killed as many as 10 million Asian civilians; Lenin, Stalin, and their Soviet successors killed up to 60 million people (3); Mao and his successors killed at least 65 million people and, as they are still in power, that number is growing (4); and, since 1973, the American Medical Association and American women have murdered nearly 59 million unborn Americans (5), and may yet skip past Uncle Joe and even Chairman Mao as the leading holocaust/genocide producer of all time. Even Israel is in the big-time, mass-murder game, with media reporting that between 1.5 and 2 million unborn Israelis — a total reminiscent of Pol Pot or Rwanda’s machete wielders — have been murdered by Israeli doctors and Israeli women since the nation’s founding (6), and this in a country that appears doomed in terms of demography. (NB: Ironically, both Americans and Israelis followed the savvy Hitlerian model of passing laws and gaining judicial decisions that define as non-human, entities that irrefutably are human beings.) One doubts the Department of Education either issues curricula to teach American students about the wide variety of holocausts/genocides that have occurred and how common they have become, or gives them a scorecard listing how many human beings each of these depravities murdered. (NB: The bipartisan U.S. governing class, after all, runs the Department of Education and profits politically and financially from maintaining the idea that there has been only one real Holocaust. It will brook no change that introduces the truth. Have you ever, for example, heard any U.S. politician — or European or Israeli politician for that matter — call for Nuremberg-like trials for the legatees of Stalin and Mao?)

Such an accurate and truthful course of instruction would not be delivered to help students determine which atrocity was bad, less bad, small but bad, not so bad, or big and bad; the purveyors of all merit prolonged and harrowingly painful attention from a hard-eyed, everlastingly vengeful God. Rather, it would be meant to allow them, as voting adults, to ignore Israel-First’s guilt-inducing machinations and feel zero guilt about putting America First by reliably refusing to elect bribe-taking U.S. politicians who are eager to spend their taxes and soldier-children’s lives uselessly in fighting Israel’s or any other nation’s endless, bloody, bankrupting, and irrelevant-to-America wars.

All of America’s Founders, from the most known to the least, believed that the republic they created could survive only if its population was well educated, especially in history; consistently attentive to politics and the media, so as to see the approach of tyranny early on; and therefore equipped to identify tyranny if they saw it nearing and to use their right to destroy any U.S. government that became oppressive, arbitrary, lawless, and/or conspired against America with her enemies.

Today, the Department of Education stands as the national government’s main engine for deliberately mis-educating, deceiving, and confusing American students, thereby helping to create an electorate that cannot recognize, resent, and then destroy the tyranny that is steadily taking hold in their republic, especially under Obama, his party, and the media. The ability to make America First the core of an administration’s operations, therefore, depends, in part, on the quick and complete dismantling of the Department of Education, followed by the steady return of responsibility for educating America’s students in the republic’s history and all other subjects, including their duty to defend the republic against internal as well as external enemies, to the lowest possible level of local government and the wishes of their parents.

Endnotes

1. See https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM
2. See http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/andrew-jackson
3. See http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kill-1111789
4. See http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/02/the-legacy-of-mao-zedong-is-mass-murder
5. See http://www.lifenews.com/2016/01/14/58586256-abortions-in-america-since-roe-v-wade-in-1973/
6. See http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10913#.VzZGBeQe6uc and http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/23042/Default.aspx?article=related_stories

Now that Mr. Trump has vowed that the concept of “America First” will be at the core of his administration’s foreign and domestic policies, he should begin to tell Americans what he intends to do make that pledge a reality and why it needs to be done. He should do this before his enemies — and America’s — can turn the phrase against him. On MSNBC this week, for example, Mr. Chris Matthews asked if Trump “was trying to make us mad” by using the term “America First.” Mr. Matthews said that the term refers to Americans who wanted no war with Germany in 1939-1941; he did not mention Japan, probably because it would blur the damning parallel he intended to draw between Mr. Trump, the America First movement of 1939-1941 and the Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

Mr. Matthews, like all on the left, is a historical ignoramus. He demonstrates that status, in this case, by not knowing that the great majority of all Americans in 1939-1941 opposed getting into a European or Asian war that did not concern our vital national interests, and would not until Imperial Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on us later in December, 1941. After those events, most America First members fully supported both wars and participated in the war efforts to defend America.

Even Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh — whose reputation and historical importance were ruined, then, by Roosevelt and his coterie, the British, and the Jewish-American elite, and, now, by Israel First and those it intimidates and bribes — risked his life in the war as a test pilot for new US military aircraft, and as a volunteer guinea pig for testing new means of protecting pilots and aircrew from the debilitating impact of high-altitude flight. When Colonel Lindbergh finished those tasks, he flew at least 50 combat missions against the Japanese in the South Pacific and, in 1954, was promoted by President Eisenhower to the rank of Brigadier General in the US Air Force. Oh yes, it also is worth recalling that Colonel Lindbergh was a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Mr. Matthews, it seems, thinks there is no US history worth knowing until John Kennedy’s election.

Anyway, as a starter for describing what America First will mean if he is elected, I would suggest that Mr. Trump explain to the electorate what he intends to do to end the vicious and multi-decade economic attack on all US citizens that is depicted in the data produced by National Priorities Project. That information shows that US government’s Foreign Aid Program is giving $2.93 million per hour to foreigners, 24 hours per day, for the 366 days in this year. In addition, the Department of Defense, in 2016, will give to foreigners, in the form of Foreign Military Assistance, $1.42 million per hour, 24 hours per day, for the 366 days in this year.

When the math is done — at least as best as I can do it — these two programs together spend taxpayer money at the rate of $104,400,000 per day, which will come to a total of $38,210,400,000 for 2016. Both numbers are difficult to get your mind around, but, in more understandable terms, the median US household’s yearly income in 2014 was $53,657 — 2015 data comes this September. If that number is divided into 2016’s total for Foreign Aid and Foreign Military Assistance the result is that these giveaways to non-Americans will cost US taxpayers an amount equaling the entire income of more than 712,123 of America’s median-income households. That is, the national government, by giving more than $38 billion to foreigners in 2016, expends enough tax revenue to wipe out the annual income of more than 700,000 median-income American households. (1)

Now, this is madness, and also irrefutable evidence — given that $38 billion could certainly improve some aspect of American life or national security — that the bipartisan governing elite does not give a tinker’s damn about Americans. The US government exists to defend the republic and its genuine national interests, and to govern and tax its citizens in a manner that achieves that goal, does not block the private sector from creating economic prosperity and jobs, and allows citizens to maintain their liberties, improve their living standard through hard work, and keep as much of their money as possible.

The US government has absolutely no responsibility — and I suspect no valid constitutional sanction — to overtax Americans and then use part of that revenue to build dams, harbors, schools, roads, and airports for foreigners; to provide medical care for foreigners afflicted with diseases ranging from malaria to dengue fever to HIV; or to financially support and/or militarily defend tyrannies like Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, or theocratic states like Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states (NB: Given the 1st Amendment’s guarantees, it cannot be constitutional for any American to be taxed in order to pay for the support/protection of Judaism and Islam abroad); to fund foreign civil society, feminist, pro-democracy, human rights, LGBT, and pro-abortion organizations, or to give any US-citizen tax money at all to foreigners — except to serve US interests during a necessary and constitutionally declared US defensive war or for strictly limited periods after a natural disaster.

Among the things America First must mean, therefore, is that tax revenue now given by the national government to foreigners must be permanently redirected and spent henceforth at home to resolve some of the same problems for which it is given to foreigners. And once solutions to America’s genuine and often long-festering problems are applied and paid for, and the national debt is being reduced, the national government must cut the tax rate for both individuals and businesses.

For the US national government, the needs of foreigners and their nations and faiths must never come before those of Americans. Charity for foreigners is a decision that can only be made by each citizen, not for them in the form of a diktat from the national government. Those Americans who are concerned more about the welfare of foreign states and foreigners than that of their republic and fellow citizens are always free to send checks, gold, bitcoins, or diamonds to appropriate religious institutions, charities, foreign governments, and NGOs; to will their fortunes to any of those foreign entities; or to nobly and altruistically pick up stakes and move permanently to some exotic, poverty stricken foreign locale where the can labor or fight alongside all the foreigners they can get to know.

To be sure, U.S citizens and corporations contributing funds to help foreigners are engaged in admirable acts of admirable private consciences, though not nearly as admirable as helping their fellow citizens, and so their contributions for foreigners ought not to be tax deductible. But it is the sole responsibility of private American citizens, private-sector institutions, and, most especially, Christian churches to follow their consciences and — putting it bluntly — empty their own wallets and not the republic’s for the foreigners they deem more worthy of help than Americans.

Endnote

1. See here and here.

Trump’s 27 April 2016 speech on foreign policy is not perfect; indeed, parts of it merit strong criticism. But Trump has now said to the American people what no one, save Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, has been willing to say since 1945. That is, the U.S. government exists for only two reasons: (a) to pursue and defend the republic’s genuine national security interests and to wage war only as a last resort, and then slay without mercy those who dared attack them, and (b) to protect and advance the well-being, jobs, liberties, unity, and prosperity of American citizens. In short, Trump seems to believe — as did the Founders — that if the U.S. national government does not make the furtherance of America’s interests its first and absolute priority, it has, to paraphrase Mr. Jefferson, no possible reason to exist, and its citizens, in turn, have every possible justification, and the unavoidable moral and legal responsibility to themselves and their posterity, to ruthlessly destroy it and replace it with one that can be relied on to always act only on their behalf and in their interests.

Now, we can all sit back and calmly listen to the howling condescension, rabid charges of racism and xenophobia, and loud blubbering about “abandoning America’s democratic values” that will be directed at Trump by the Neoconservatives, the internationalists, the media, the Israel Firsters, the Saudi and other Arab tyrants, the effete and freeloading Europeans, the theory-palsied Ivy Leaguers, the felons and felons-to-be, like Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, and the endless procession of thieves and murderers who masquerade as African and other Third World presidents and prime ministers.

As Trump faces the storm being brewed by these dregs of America and the world, I hope he feels no obligation to respond to the violent and denigrating attacks of his critics. The main obligation Trump now has is the quite onerous one he voluntarily assumed. That is, to never stop talking to his fellow citizens about his determination to prove that the absolute responsibility of their national government is to their well-being and the republic’s survival, peace, and prosperity, and that the welfare, political systems, religions, wars, civil rights, sexual inclinations, attitudes toward women, defense, and survival of foreign states and peoples are none of America’s concern and will never elicit its intervention.

Trump obliquely quoted John Quincy Adams in his speech, but should have quoted him directly and at bit of length. On 4 July 1821, Adams said, in the same speech that Trump drew from, that those who challenge or damn the idea of what is now known as “America First” should always remember that

America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart … Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

This is the true meaning of “America First,” and it seems to be the meaning with which Mr. Trump intends to imbue the content of his foreign policy. I, for one, am eager for him succeed in this republic-preserving task. He will do so, however, only if he reeducates Americans about what and why the Founders intended the substance of U.S. foreign policy to be, and how well that policy of non-interventionism and neutrality served American interests for nearly a century and a half.

Mr. Trump, then, has a splendid if daunting opportunity to kindle the just barely burning flame of non-intervention and neutrality into a steady fire that will liberate America from its status as the world’s doormat; Americans from paying for the wars of others with their taxes and children’s lives; and the current citizenry and its posterity from the unnecessary interventionist wars that have made the office of the U.S. president into the home of spendthrift and civil liberty-negating tyrants.

Finally, God bless you, Mr. Buchanan and Dr. Paul, for making sure Mr. Trump had this opportunity, and God rest you, Colonel Lindbergh, for manfully opposing, at devastating personal cost, the same kinds of blackguard interventionists who are now attacking Mr. Trump’s foreign-policy stance.

Well, if collective punishment for Palestinians, and Muslims generally, is acceptable, why not for pro-Trump Americans?

America’s flagship voice of disloyalty, Israel-First, and Neoconservatism — Commentary Magazine — has unleashed one of its key staff Gauleiters, a man named Herr Garbriel Schoenfeld, to demand that all Americans supporting Donald Trump be held “accountable” for disagreeing with their Israel-First superiors.

Herr Schoenfeld characterizes Trump as “this creature from the cesspool” and Trump’s voters as losers who are “beleaguered economically” and have been left behind by “globalization” and “de-industrialization.” (NB: The only U.S. human cesspools I know are the three found in meetings of the writers, editors, publishers, and owners of Commentary, Weekly Standard, and the post-W.F. Buckley National Review. I strongly suspect Trump is not invited to those events, and so he could not have come from America’s only known human cesspools. Mr. Schoenfeld, of course, swims in that stinking pool among his fellow champions of the republic’s demise.)

This is just the start of Schoenfeld’s barely disguised wish — apparently shared by the editors, publishers, and owners at the New York Daily News, which printed his essay — to visit some kind of a holocaust on Americans holding views not approved by Israel-First. The following is from the Gauleiter’s diktat. It calls for the collective punishment of pro-Trump, legal, and loyal U.S. citizens — perhaps bulldozing their homes or smothering them with pillows, a la another nation’s security service? — who refuse to repent and intend to vote other than as demanded by Israel First.

Yet however much Trump voters have grievances, this does not absolve any one of them of personal responsibility for their political choice. We are not only speaking here of those who engage in violence or shout vicious chants at Trump rallies, or the innumerable others who spew anti-Semitic and racist bile across the Internet.

All Trump voters can and should be held to account for embracing a candidate whose character is so dubious, and whose plans for the country — among them, singling out a religious group for a ban on an entry to the United States — amount to an assault on the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.

Followers of notorious dictators of the past also no doubt had legitimate grievances, yet this hardly spares them from the condemnation history has rightly heaped on them.”

It is particularly rich to attack critics of Trump supporters as “condescending intellectual snots” — [Dennis] Saffran’s words — when Trump himself flagrantly treats his acolytes with condescension and contempt. He has exulted in their low attainments, declaring after his victory in one primary that “I love the poorly educated.” Remarking on his disciples’ mindless loyalty, he has said that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Ave. and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

As a practical matter, Republican political candidates may need to court Trump voters. As a moral matter, the rest of us should not close our eyes to the fact that those who pine for a strongman, and who would have us all follow Trump into the abyss, are in the best case willfully ignorant, and in the worst case knowingly endorsing a dangerous demagogue.

If you read this Goebbels-esque quote again slowly, you may hear a chorus quietly singing behind the Gauleiter as he writes the words and feels the pain caused by those who disagree with his genius, the whole story of which he surely must be jotting down in a diary likely to be entitled “My Struggle.” I could not tell if the words were being sung in German, English, or Hebrew, but the melodies seem to sound very much like “Die Wacht am Rhine” and “Das Panzerlied.” Which tune, do you suppose, would go better with the physical punishment Schoenfeld apparently wants inflicted on all “Trump voters [who] can and should be held to account”? (2) One wonders what Schoenfeld knows about the activities of his Neocon and Israel-First friends — perhaps on the Internet or at rallies? — that are meant to identify Trump voters. Whatever they are up to, Schoenfeld writes with certainty that the ballots of pro-Trump voters will not be secret, so they “can” be identified and “held to account.”

What the Gauleiter is suffering so much angst over is not, of course, Mr. Trump, but rather his and his kind’s growing awareness that Trump appeals to many Americans of all races who work for a living, raise families, pay for their kids’ schooling, are good, community-minded citizens, and who deeply resent that they are the half of Americans who pay income tax to support the idleness of the other half of their eternally freeloading fellow citizens. Herr Schoenfeld and his disloyal associates are even more alarmed to be learning that these same Americans hate having their exorbitant taxes, and often their soldier-children’s lives, given to worthless-to-America foreign entities — which also are often America’s enemies — including Israel, Saudi Arabia, other Arab tyrannies, any number of the thieving tyrants who govern in Africa, and the galaxy of tax-eating/wasting international organizations.

People like Schoenfeld, the Neocons, most senior Democrats and Republicans, and the Israel-Firsters have no patience with the temerity of those they snidely look down on as left-behind and under-educated Americans. How dare this ignorant American rabble, think Schoenfeld and his stern gang of fellow haters, challenge their au courant and Ivy League-educated betters?

Well, whether or not Schoenfeld and his gang like what they are hearing, the American citizens they hate are demanding that their voices and votes be heard and counted, and that their taxes be used not to support domestic slackers, illegal aliens, and war-causing foreigners, but to rebuild the republic’s infrastructure, feed the 25-percent of American kids who are hungry, find shelter for the homeless, control borders and end illegal immigration, and begin reducing the ever-growing national debt, much of which is the product of the bipartisan U.S. governing elite forever giving away their tax payments — and with them their kids’ future economic welfare and the nation’s security — to slackers at home and utterly expendable nations and organizations abroad.

Gauleiter Schoenfeld, et al. ought to listen intently to what Mr. Trump and his supporters are saying. And they should keep in mind that however much they dislike what they now hear, they will like much less what they will hear if they, the rest of the arrogant and corrupt governing elite, and the media block Mr. Trump from getting the nomination by procedural tricks, delegate stealing, the denial of citizen voting, election-night misinformation, media lies, or simple bribes. I would suggest that if Mr. Trump is defeated in that manner, the angry words Herr Schoenfeld and his fellow Brownshirts will hear are nearly certain to be accompanied by the lilting, but subtly ominous strains of “The Chambering of Rounds Concerto in F.U. Major.”

Endnotes

1. New York Daily News, 9 April 2016
2. My bolding and italics.

American should surely keep praising U.S. Marines and soldiers for defending the Republic, even if they are risking their lives in unnecessary wars their presidents never intend to win. It is, however, long past time to begin damning — and perhaps god-damning — almost every general officer who wears a uniform or pontificates as a retired military expert in the media. All media outlets have these retirees and they are all treated with effusive praise as if they were honest, able, and winning generals, like America’s great 18th- and 19th-century generals Washington, Greene, Jackson, Scott, Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Lee, Longstreet, and Johnston. All of these men obeyed civilian leaders who ordered them to win wars, and they fought to win and did whatever it took to do so. Most, too, had the honor and humanity to be either fair-minded and non-vindictive winners or gentlemanly and reconciliation-seeking losers.

In the 20th century, too — until 1945 — U.S. generals and admirals were ordered to secure victory over America’s enemy and did so no matter what price in blood and material destruction had to be inflicted on the enemy. For performing their duty, men like MacArthur, Eisenhower, Nimitz, Patton, Bradley, Marshall, and a small number of less well known but peerless Marine generals fully deserve the praise that has been given them by Americans.

The foregoing men merited — and still merit — genuine praise and respect from the citizenry for winning wars or doing their best to win. Americans, until 1945, actually knew there was a vast and plainly crucial difference between winning and losing, and they abhorred losing and losers.

Today, however, most U.S. general officers are complete strangers to victory, and so deserve exactly the kind of proforma, vomit-inducing adulation that is mindlessly mouthed by citizens, the media, and politicians in both parties. Why praise generals — like General Petraeus, for example — who silently do the bidding of cowardly presidents who do not intend to win the wars they start? These are generals who lead young men and women to their deaths or maiming knowing their lives are to be wasted in unconstitutional wars, started, therefore, by tyrants, and which are irrelevant to genuine U.S. national interests. The politicians know that the generals value their perks — while in service and afterward — more than anything else, and can be counted on to further betray their troops by saying lofty and patriotic words, and perhaps shed a tear, over the coffins of the dead. Their performance is meant to assure the media and grieving families that the lives of the dead were well spent and, by doing so, delay a bit longer the arrival of that happy day when the U.S. political elite will be made to pay a hopefully merciless and lethal piper for their unnecessary and illegal interventionist wars.

As for General Petraeus, he is now, after a period of exile, petitioning to rejoin the “death to the republic” crowd of elite, U.S.-citizen war lovers. His petition is found in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post of 15 April 2016, apparently to loudly broadcast that he can be relied on to endorse war-causing interventionism as the first and only U.S. foreign-policy option. In his essay, Petraeus urges all Americans to think about the U.S. war with Islam as one that the republic and its citizens are morally and patriotically obliged to fund and fight forever. The General regards himself as a man of “big ideas,” and in the essay lays out the following five for Americans to live by until they and their republic expire from an endless interventionist war against an Islamist enemy that is motivated to attack Americans by the U.S. government’s long record of relentless and war-causing intervention in the Muslim world.

Big Idea, No. 1: “Ungoverned spaces … stretching from West Africa through the Middle East and into Central Asia” are exploited by Islamists for sanctuary, establishing territorial control, and launching attacks.

Comment: No shit, Sherlock. And pray tell us, maestro, shall we invade, occupy, nation-build, annex, or offer statehood in all of those places?

Big Idea, No. 2: Islamist fighters will attack in regions far from where they live and/or are based.

Comment: See comment for Big Idea No. 1.

Big Idea, No. 3: If the United States does not lead the war on the mujahideen no one else will.

Comment: So what. Our republic is located in North America. It has at least three thousand miles of oceanic buffer on its east and west coasts. The Islamists have no navy and no air power. If the law was obeyed and our borders controlled, the only domestic threat the Islamists could pose to America would be all but eliminated. In addition, there are 27 supine, child-like, and American taxpayer-pampered European nations who are NATO members. If they do not want to pony up the men, money, and blood needed to defend themselves and the shreds and tatters of a civilization they have nearly destroyed, it is their decision. Let them grow up and make a decision. They can fight and defeat their enemies, or they can keep their money and multiculturalism and get sized-up for thobes, burqas, and sandals. The decision is up to them, and if they fight, so is the fight. Americans need do nothing but observe.

Big Idea, No. 4: (a) “Precision [air] strikes and special operations raids” will not win the war with Islam. (b) Others nations — that is, apparently, Sunni Arab States and NATO members — must provide the necessary conventional ground forces, but they will need “considerable help from the U.S.-led coalition” — which means, of course, the money and soldier-children of U.S. taxpayers.

Comment: For (a) see the comments above for Big Ideas, No. 1 and No. 2. For the absolutely certain results of (b) readers need only recall the enormous successes of the two U.S.-led and similarly constituted interventionist coalitions that General Petraeus commanded all the way to disaster, defeat, and deeper debt in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Big Idea, No. 5: Americans will have to support the war for “sustained periods”; the war will be an “ultramarathon,” and; the war will require the participation of the U.S. military and “other (U.S.G.) departments and agencies.” (NB: Presumably to assist U.S. interventionist, regime-changing, and nation-building operations.)

Comment: This could be stated more clearly. General Petraeus might have said: “We in the governing and interventionist elite are smarter than all other Americans. And though our 20-year war on Islam so far has been an utter failure, we will govern in a manner that forces the citizenry to adhere to our failed 20-year-old strategy and, as well, forces it to spend and bleed profusely for however long it takes for the mujahideen to win. Remember, war, wonderful, endless, always losing war, is the only option, so obey your betters, pay your taxes, and shut up.”

The General’s summation for Big Ideas 1-5: “The Long War is going to be an ultra-marathon, and it is time we recognized that. But we and our partners have the ability to respond in a thoughtful, prudent manner, informed by the big ideas that I have described. Nothing less will prove adequate.”

Comment: Did you get this stale, Republic-killing statement from the works of (a) George W. Bush; (b) Hillary Clinton; (c) Barack Obama; (d) Senators Graham and McCain; (e) Dick Cheney; or (f) one of the tens of thousands of other Neocons and Israel Firsters for whom it is a war-loving, Israel-protecting mantra? Personally, I tend to think it came from P.T. Barnum, as it does nothing more than describe each of the General’s fellow U.S. citizens as one of the suckers who Barnum said is born every minute.

Overall, General, your essay is not much to write home about; it might not even pass muster as a high-school thesis. Indeed, it is staggering to recognize that, with all your experience in this escalating religious war, you actually have said nothing in the essay that has not been chanted by interventionists and Neocons since bin Laden declared war in 1996. Apparently, you have not noticed that the big ideas you offer are old and discredited ones. All have been tried, none have worked. As a result, the U.S. military is exhausted and Obama-shrunk, and the enemy is more potent, skilled, and dispersed than ever.

Nor have you realized that while your ideas were being applied by the last three presidents, they have — because they keep America intervening in the Muslim world to protect Israel and Arab tyrannies — helped the Islamist forces grow from a few hundreds to many tens of thousands, and the latter are now governing territory and populations and not hiding in caves. Nonetheless, it just may be that your essay displays enough forelock-tugging obsequiousness to the interventionist elite to rehabilitate you and increase your earning potential among that sorry, amoral, arrogant, and republic-killing bunch. If they welcome you back, it would be quite an achievement, and it will only have cost you whatever remains of your reputation for honesty and integrity.

But if your petition does not pan out, General, consider going to the nearest grammar school, finding a blackboard, and writing what ought to be America’s 2nd Golden Rule four or five hundred times — “Only neutrality and non-intervention, and a strong military to facilitate them, can preserve the republic and its citizens’ liberties.” That statement is not original, but it would at long last put you in the company of an elite with which it is worth associating. You may have heard of it, General. That elite is usually termed the Founding Fathers.

Well, the usual gang of foreign policy geniuses is now on hand and hysterically warning of approaching doom. Max Boot, Andrea Mitchell, General Michael Hayden, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Steve Clemons, Jeffrey Goldberg, Lindsey Graham, John Podhoretz, Hillary Clinton, Christiane Amanpour, every Israel-First pundit (NB: Which is pretty much all of them), and dozens of other prominent and all-knowing figures have damned Donald Trump’s foreign policy ideas as a plan to destroy America by putting America’s interests first.

One’s initial reaction to such a unity of views among America’s lordly bipartisan class of foreign policy wise persons has to be that Mr. Trump is, joyously and loudly, that rarest of rarities in post-Reagan America, namely, a man who, with Dr. Paul and Senator Paul, cares about — yes, you guessed it — America first, last, and always.

Nothing else could be so upsetting to these pointy headed citizens of the world, nor more dangerous to their ability to pontificate worthless foreign-policy advice to a citizenry they consider an unintelligent rabble, while raking in millions of dollars by offering always predictable and always wrong advice to the national government. Indeed, the last time Americans saw such unity among these foreign policy wizards was in 2011, when they unanimously guaranteed that the Arab Spring would produce enduring democracy in the Arab world, as well as the quick end of al-Qaeda, other Islamist insurgent organizations, and Islamism generally.

Think, for a moment, about the disasters these arrogant mandarins of a nuanced, complex, and too-sophisticated-for-voters interventionist foreign policy have brought America in the last thirty years.

• Their advice has yielded one-man government in the United States, the repeated initiation of unnecessary wars, the losing of all necessary and unnecessary wars, and the willful shredding of the U.S. Constitution.
• Their sage advice has gotten thousands of U.S. Marines and soldiers killed and maimed for nothing; kept the United States mired in treaties and “arrangements” that commit American kids to fight and die for such eminently expendable places and organizations as Latvia, Thailand, Israel, Iraq, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, Albania, Turkey, the UN, NATO, and dozens of others; and ensured that Americans will pay dearly for the pleasure of having to defend the interests of those irrelevant places and organizations, even when not a single genuine U.S. interest is at stake.
• In free trade deals, their economic insights have been — with free trade’s lethal companions, foreign aid and unregulated immigration — the main source of the national government-caused income disparity in America; their free-trade fanaticism has cost working Americans many billions of dollars and millions of blue-collar jobs; they have destroyed the middle class and the manufacturing-based employment road that leads to the middle class; they have championed the building of roads, damns, irrigation systems, hydro-electric facilities, hospitals, airports, nation-wide telecommunications systems, and internet networks for foreigners while letting America’s infrastructure rot; and they have, with utterly cruel irony, urged the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to help secure the borders of foreign nations — Turkey and Tunisia most recently — while the U.S. border is wide open to recurring waves of the earth’s scum.

Imagine, then, the self-righteous gall of the above-noted group of always wrong foreign policy gurus to claim that Mr. Trump and the people who agree with him are a grave threat to U.S. survival. Why? Because they hold the always pertinent and always correct Lindberghian idea that America must come first, and, if it does not, the clearly incompetent and disloyal bipartisan governing elite and their advisers, men and women who aspire to world citizens (Soros-ians?) not Americans, must be sacked or in some other manner dispatched with haste to oblivion.

If you read the transcripts of Trump’s interviews with the New York Times and the Washington Post it seems clear that those who asked Trump questions could not grasp the fact that absolutely nothing is more important in a president than having a person who never, ever deviates from an America First foreign policy. America’s security, prosperity, and survival must be the national government’s first priority and nothing else — especially the interests of expendable foreign nations — should even come close to that priority.

The newspapers’ questioners of Trump seemed to think that free trade, NATO, stability in the Middle East, open borders, environmentalism, Israel, spreading democracy, and military and humanitarian interventions abroad are the carved-in-stone tenets of a new secular religion that is designed to replace the Christian faith that they, their employers, and the Democratic Party yearn to destroy. Trump could have been speaking with Churchillian eloquence — which he was not — and the interviewers would have remained where they were throughout the interviews, without a single contact point with either reality or the fairly uncomplicated requirements of an effective U.S. foreign policy.

In his foreign-policy interviews and other statements — even the nauseating, pro-forma boiler plate he fed to a huge crowd of disloyal, Trump-hating, and demanding-to-be-pandered-to AIPAC’ers — Trump, as is his wont, came back to first principles, namely:

• U.S. foreign policy must do only three things: (a) ensure the nation’s survival; (b) protect the Constitution and thereby liberty at home; and (c) take every possible opportunity to exploit the advantages provided by North America’s geographical remoteness and natural-resource wealth.
• America fights wars only to defend its own relatively few genuine national interests or to destroy imminent threats to the republic. It must never be in the business of fighting wars for nations, peoples, or groups that are irrelevant, trouble-making, and therefore dangerous to the protection or pursuit of genuine U.S. interests.
• There are very few reasons for America to go to war. If America must go to war, it goes to war to destroy its enemy as quickly and utterly as possible. The sole mercy in war is the speedy and catastrophic defeat of the enemy, his supporters and sympathizers, and his infrastructure.
• U.S. foreign policy and wars must never be based on abstract ideas, such as freedom, human rights, democracy and women’s rights. Wars fought for abstract ideas are the province of those who are the infamous forerunners of today’s Neoconservatives and Democrats, Robespierre, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
• U.S. foreign policy can only be successful if it is based on such tangible things as peace, equitable trading arrangements, freedom of the seas, and access to natural resources. The ability to successfully pursue these interests is dependent on ample financial resources and little debt; overwhelming and flexible military power — especially naval power — to defend the republic’s neutrality; consistent and manly national leadership built on the principle of America First; and the maximum possible degree of domestic social cohesion, effective internal security, and affection for the national government. (NB: Trump, in the recent interviews, clearly recognizes that at this time U.S. foreign policy cannot depend on any of these indispensable resources. His interviewers just as clearly did not understand their central relevance to an effective foreign policy.)

There are things in Trump’s foreign policy statements that are objectionable. The idea, for example, that the United States will keep bases overseas in NATO countries, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere if the host governments pay the costs. This, of course, does nothing more than keep the United States locked into participating in wars that others start or that are irrelevant to U.S. interests. Likewise, while the idea of withdrawing from NATO and letting the other alliance members do with it as they please is the correct stance for the United States, Trump’s undefined plan to replace NATO with “something new” is surely a path back to a “something” that will recommit America to automatic war for another country’s interests and reestablish American taxpayers and their children as those who will, respectively, pay and die endlessly to defend Europeans who find it too troublesome and expensive to defend themselves.

But Trump, in his foreign policy planning, is catching on to a basic and unchanging truth, which is that the most effective, least expensive, and most liberty-at-home conserving U.S. foreign policy is one that emphasizes international abstention far more often than overseas intervention. The Founders knew this, as did America’s only world-class diplomats — Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and George F. Kennan — and its finest aviator, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.

Trump also seems to know this truth, and if can he publicly articulate his position with greater clarity, precision, and frequency he will draw the clearest possible distinction between himself and the other presidential candidates, namely, Ted Cruz, that newly Bushified, war-loving lapdog of the corrupt Republican elite, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton — three people desperate to find wars for a bankrupt, militarily exhausted America to fight — and Senator Sanders, who forgets to tell the mobs of child-like millennials before which he preens that socialism always leads to economic disaster, domestic oppression, and war — foreign, civil, or both.

For once, then, foreign policy seems set to play a key role in a U.S. presidential election. Trump already has convinced much of the electorate — the part not seeking free stuff or to live off others’ labor and taxes — that he can undo Obama’s economic disaster. He also has a chance to speak to and win over voters to his positions on foreign policy, positions that would serve their economic and security interests, protect their liberties, and halt the infernal burden of having their taxes used to pay, not for deficit reduction or America’s many dire domestic needs, but to protect other peoples’ interests, fight other peoples’ wars, and line the pockets of corrupt Third World elites. Common sense — a synonym for America First — has a chance to win in this fall’s election, and, at the moment, Trump has cornered the market on common sense, hands down.

For twenty years now I have been arguing the obvious: namely, that as early as 1997, the Islamist problem was too big and too lethal for any U.S. intelligence service or law-enforcement agency to defeat. At that time, I suggested to my superiors at CIA that we either get permission to kill Osama bin Laden immediately — and thereby probably shatter or at least drastically weaken a still-developing al-Qaeda — or inform the president that he was facing a quickly growing Islamist enemy that would soon not only would require conventional forces to eradicate, but could not be defeated by any other force or combination of forces. I also said that to believe that the Islamist movement was either limited in its capacity to grow in numbers and spread geographically or was unrelated to the faith of Islam could not be substantiated by fact or logic, and that to tell the American people that was so would be a knowing, and its own right, a lethal lie. This, I hasten to add, took no brilliance to see. It was clear as day in 1997; it is — I think — just as clear today.

Let me say here very directly that whatever the Belgian police and intelligence services are doing in the aftermath of the attacks in Brussels, and whatever assistance is being rendered to them by the United States and their EU partners, will not have the slightest impact whatsoever on the security of Belgium, the EU, the United States, Canada — or farther afield — Australia or New Zealand. Now, the Belgian authorities may well apprehend, indict, try, and convict each and every one of the still living mujahideen who were involved in the Brussels operation. And good for them if they do. But it will do nothing to lessen the Islamists’ military capabilities, destroy their abundant, migrant-expanded networks in the West, or significantly attrit their manpower. Although Western governments have acted — and spoken — for the past twenty years as if killing or capturing the Islamists one at a time was emblematic of pushing the mujahideen ever closer to defeat, it never did and never will make any strategic difference. As I have said many times before, trying to destroy the Islamist movement by killing or incarcerating its members one by one — whether in 1997 or 2016 — would be the same as if the Americans, British, and Soviets had tried to annihilate the Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS and Hirohito’s Imperial Army and Navy by killing one of their personnel at a time. Only a madman — or a deliberate, dastardly lair — would tell the public that it could.

What the aftermath of the Brussels attack requires is popular recognition that the Belgian and Western intelligence and police services — no matter how successful they are — will have not the slightest impact on the strategic reality that the West, is now, and for at least a decade past, being beaten to death by the Islamists. They have defeated our armies in two wars, they have spread worldwide, they have — despite the lying if condescendingly soothing words of Obama, Biden, McCain, Cameron, Hollande, Clinton, Cruz, the treason that calls itself Neo-Conservative, etc. — very successfully changed the way we live, whether in regard to worrying about where children go for social events, where vacations should be taken, or the all too obvious reality that the civil liberties of Westerners are being incrementally abrogated by their rulers in the name of security; that is, by elected men and women who know that the West is bleeding to death at the hands of Islamist fighters and, even more, by their own voluntary pacts with the six horses of the West’s coming apocalypse: diversity, multiculturalism, political correctness, interventionism, irreligion, and open borders.

Since Brussels, Americans and Europeans have been buffeted by the media’s usual race to distract their audiences from the death sentence their leaders have signed for them. Reporters have been doing their usual breathless pieces on the tracking and capturing of the mujahideen involved in the attack, as if successful cops-and-robbers procedures have even the remotest chance of winning the West’s war with Islam. Expert guests have appeared declaring that almost all Muslims are peaceful followers of the religion of peace, and adding that anyone who questions this increasingly questionable position is a racist, a xenophobe, or an ignoramus. Assorted retired generals and admirals have crawled out of their corporate boardrooms and smugly asserted that if only we would deliver more airstrikes, arm more Kurds, train more of the famous moderate Islamist insurgents, or deploy more Special Forces the war would be won lickety split. And, as always, there has been the usual crowd of greedy academics who arrogantly guaranteed that, with their own great brains and a few hundred million dollars in taxpayer money, they would deradicalize the entire Muslim world and instruct them on how to interpret the Koran. If this sounds familiar, it is because the media have presented the same package of rank nonsense after nearly very post-9/11 Islamist attack.

Accompanying this parade of quackery was yet another iteration of the “Princess Diana Death Festival,” which — in the case of Islamist victories — is a slobberingly repulsive exercise of “showing” that you care when you really will never do anything to tell the truth or support a leader who tries to win the war. The steps in meeting this festival’s requirements include: reporters, experts, politicians, and generals thoroughly salting their statements with the terms “carnage,” “horrendous,” “cowardly attack,” “shocking tragedy,” and that all-time favorite “horrific;” well-scripted politicians calling for “more intelligence sharing,” a “cooperative anti-radicalism effort by the International Community,” and asserting that “this is not a war” and “most Muslims support the West;” candlelight vigils by the seemingly endless number of selfie-taking, drug-addled, and clearly brain-dead millennials; and the construction of soon-to-be garbage piles consisting of candles, flowers, hand-written messages, photographs, and a few people taking shifts to stand or kneel around this refuse and appear to be grieving mightily for people they did not know and only care about because their corpses allow for this mawkishly inane, media-covered ritual.

All of the foregoing is very civilized, moderate, and nauseating, and none of it is worth a horse’s ass. The Islamists started this war in 1996 and on Labor Day this year we will have just begun its third decade. Their motivation to start the war lay in three factors: (a) oppressive rule by Arab tyrants supported, protected, and kept in power by the United States and Europe; (b) repeated, U.S.-led Western military and economic interventions in the Muslim word; and (c) U.S., European, and — implicitly — Arab tyrant support, protection, and coddling of Israel. Today, the Islamists continue to be motivated by the same factors, as well as by the additional U.S.-EU political/social interventionism in the form of democracy mongering and attempts at feminization in the Muslim world that have flourished, deepened, and spread the war under Obama and Hillary Clinton. As a result of the West’s daft and self-defeating interventionist consistency, the Islamists continue to be motivated by the same factors and have continued expanding and winning the war they started. And with a touch of splendid tit-for-tat irony, they are seeing how the U.S. and the EU like military intervention, trying out their own hand at it in places like London, Madrid, Paris, Fort Hood, Washington, DC, San Bernardino, New York, and, now, Brussels.

Obviously, nothing the West has done against the Islamists has done more than deal them a few tactical defeats and provide us with a body count. Nothing currently being discussed by Western governments in public seems to hold a chance for any greater success, although they certainly will drive the West deeper into debt, further shred the social cohesion of its societies, kill many more of its civilians and soldier-children, and inevitably further constrict civil liberties and open the door wider to more tyrannical government.

The West’s lethal Islamist problem has been wrought by two factors. The first is the war the Islamist started and are waging and winning against the United States and Europe. The second is the multiple generations of clearly ill-educated theorists who have ruled the United States and Europe. These men and women have emasculated their societies, hollowed out their militaries by cutting funding, never pursuing victory, and making them a testing ground for institutionalizing sexual deviancy, and showing a vast preference for building authoritarian and so liberty-killing central governments rather than either halting their war-causing interventionism or killing the millions of Islamists and their supporters who need to be killed if they continue intervening.

For American and European citizens, then, it is increasingly difficult to identify the greater enemy, the Islamists who kill them or the self-centered, arrogant elite that rules them and allows the Islamists to kill them. How this predicament will resolve itself is hard to tell. For the most part — I have read — Europe’s citizens are unarmed and so it seems they will have to watch their societies, traditions, and history be consumed by a combination of the urban guerrilla war the Islamists have already started and the feckless policies of their unmanly governments which both fuel that war and lack the ruthlessness to win it. They will be unable to defend themselves by killing either enemy. In America, however, the 2nd Amendment — and the vastly better armed citizenry it has allowed to grow in response to Obama’s tyranny — still ensures that the citizenry can, if they so choose, defend themselves against the Islamists, the national government, or perhaps both.