Monday, November 3, 2008

Obama, a pacifistic president?

Here it is the day before the election and I’m tired of reading about it or listening to the pundits. So for a change I opened one of the books I’ve resolved to read, Postwar, A History of Europe Since 1945, written by Tony Judt and published in 2005. But the first paragraph made me think of what our future might be if Obama is elected president – hopefully not, but the Liberal, pacifistic, appeasement approach, rather than military preparedness left all the European powers except Germany incapable of defending themselves very well. The modern liberal Obama philosophy is the same philosophy that led Europe to ineptly oppose Hitler during World war II. If we unilaterally decided we aren’t going to prepare for war, or at least not very well, or not very enthusiastically, then we could suffer Europe’s fate. I don’t think there is a Germany out there that could do that to us in the next few years, but there is always someone thinking about it. It is human nature. And when the next Hitler comes along any place in the world, then we don’t want an Obama as president, at least not in my opinion.

“Europe in the aftermath of the Second World war offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation. Photographs and documentary films of the time show pitiful streams of helpless civilians trekking through a blasted landscape of broken cities and barren fields. Orphaned children wander forlornly past groups of worn out women picking over heaps of masonry. Shaven-headed deportees and concentration camp inmates in striped pajamas stare listlessly at the camera, starving and diseased. Even the trams, propelled uncertainly along damaged tracks by intermittently available electric current, appear shall-shocked. Everyone and everything – with the notable exception of the well-fed Allied occup0ation forces – seems worn out, without resources, exhausted.” [Judt, op. cit., page 13]

I first learned from reading an earlier book of Judt’s that the French reproached America for “occupying” their land. They put us in the same category as the Nazis for a few years. It sounds here as though Judt is reproaching us as well. He along with other Europeans believe that we can’t really understand the European situation because we didn’t suffer as they did during World War II. They present it as though we missed out on this suffering and so lack understanding as a consequence. All that we recommend and believe is wrong because we haven’t lived through what they lived through.

My own opinion is to the contrary. It was their stupidity that led them into their WWII fiasco. They stupidly remained militarily inadequate in the face of the German military buildup. They did much as Europe is doing with Russia today, relying upon “diplomacy” and “hope.” They reproach us for our “cowboy militarism” which indicates that they haven’t learned the right lesson from World War II. The right lesson isn’t more and better disarmament. It is the opposite of that. It is military preparedness. Prepare your military such that it will discourage the casual aggressor. But if he still fancies his chances against you, then you will at least have the military with which to defend yourselves. You won’t need to engage in the abject surrender that several European nations did when Hitler came knocking. And this European philosophy is the same one that has influenced Obama. The Europeans love him for a reason. He is like them.

Fortunately we are still a difficult nation to get to. No one in the world has a military force that can be transported across either the Atlantic or the Pacific to take advantage of a pacifistic president. Anything else, like a hypothetical South American banding-together of several totalitarian Marxist nations under a charismatic leader to give the North Americans their comeuppance would take years and years.

I’ve debated enough knee-jerk Leftists to know how they would receive the above if they read it. They would accuse me of being paranoid. And yet they would be making this accusation from utter ignorance or a bizarre faith in some utterly impractical and unworkable ideal. History proved time and time again that only the prepared, only the militarily-ready survive in the long run. To neglect your armies in order to show how un-paranoid you are is foolish – demonstrably foolish.

Lawrence Helm

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