#116: America’s Copy-Cat Suicide

June 10, 2014

When I was a kid, admittedly a very long time ago, Democrats were regular guys, not crazies. Adlai Stevenson was a regular guy and Hubert Humphrey was the same. Sure, they wanted the federal government to do more stuff for the poor than Republicans wanted, but they didn’t want to gut the military and break the Constitution in order to do so.

In fact, it’s worth remembering that it was Wilson, a Democrat, who took the U.S. into WW I, it was Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, who took the U.S. into WW II, it was Harry Truman, a Democrat, who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and who involved the U.S. in the Korean War, it was Kennedy, a Democrat, who involved the U.S. in the Vietnam war (and almost precipitated a nuclear war with Russia!), it was Johnson, a Democrat, who escalated the Vietnam war.

It was Eisenhower, a Republican, who ended the Korean war (a couple of my keen-eyed readers spotted my earlier mistake calling Ike a Democrat). And it was the much hated and maligned Richard Nixon, a Republican whose sins can scarcely compare with those of Obama, who ended the Vietnam war.

So it can scarcely be said that the Democrats of old were “Social Democrats” of the modern European stamp. The current Euro Sozis (as the Social Democrats were called in contrast with the “Nazis”) have learned nothing from their own dismal history. The objective of the Sozis of the 1920s, particularly in the Weimar Republic, was to find a “third way” between totalitarian nationalism (the Nazis) and totalitarian internationalism (the Russian Communists); hence they were “Social (Socialist) Democrats.” We all know where that went. Their economy went down the tubes and their state went straight into the arms of Hitler and his boys, and into WW II. The Sozis did have help, but not enough and not help that all of the wanted. The Russians had huge economic problems of their own, the largest part of which were due to their taking their economic management lessons from Karl Marx, but they were willing to send infusions of their stolen funds into fraught regions like Germany in the hope of fomenting a world workers’ revolution. These infusions were too small and too late, and, in addition, at least some of the Sozis were squeamish about taking money from a dictatorship; they wanted to be a democratic socialism. In addition, the Sozis needed military manpower and they really couldn’t bring Russian troops in to help them combat their own nationalists. The bloodless German revolution of 1918 was successfully hijacked in 1933 when Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

The history of the 20th century is an object lesson in the danger of taking the old Arab proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” too far. We were allies during that war with Stalin and his criminals, a necessary but unfortunate partnership, but after the war was over, we gave them far too much. FDR should have listened to Churchill, but he didn’t. And the defeat of the Nazis in Europe essentially gave the descendants of the Weimar Sozis finally a free rein in Europe. The war had neutralized the Nazis, something they had been unable to do by themselves during the Weimar period. The Sozi intellectuals and scribblers then cleverly subsumed both Nazism and free enterprise conservatism under the same rubric, “the Right,” and managed to paint conservatism with a Nazi brush. In this way, the new Sozis prevented the development of a democratic free enterprise political force which would have created a countervailing balance of power. Furthermore, the U.S., following what it perceived to be its own interests, provided all the military cover that Western Europe could need, thus allowing Europe to redirect all of its resources to entitlements, rather than self-defence.

Any clear thinking European Sozi can see now that this was terrible mistake. Two things have happened to make it so. One: The democratic machinery of political power acquisition is driven by votes. In Europe this has led to a battle of entitlements between the competing parties, the electorate hollering in the streets like a Jacobin mob: Who’s gonna give us more!? Well, in the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, “Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.” And the Europeans did. In effect, they went bankrupt (with a very few exceptions, like the Germans, the Swedes, and the Norwegians). This was part one of the terrible European miscalculation.

Mistake number two was to not consider the possibility that the U.S., Daddy Warbucks to Europe’s Orphan Annie, might actually itself follow their lead into Social Democracy and itself slide into bankruptcy. And this brings me to point of this post.

Our current Democrats are no longer center-left, they have gone Far Left. They do want to reallocate military spending onto entitlements. Not only that, but like the Sozis of the 1920s, they are internationalist by conviction; thus, they want to extend those entitlements internationally, both by drowning the U.S. in a horde of third world immigrants and by way of international aid. This leads inexorably into bankruptcy, military weakness, and totalitarian takeover.

What they fail to understand is that Europe was only able to last politically and financially from 1945 to 2008 because it was politically and financially supported by an understanding Daddy Warbucks with money and a military. Had there been no Marshall Plan after the war, there would have been no swift recovery and had there not been U.S. troops stationed in strategic places, the Europeans would now be eating sour borscht with rotten potatoes and speaking pidgin Russian.

But the U.S. itself does not have a Daddy Warbucks to finance it and to protect it, and when the U.S. falls under the control of a Far Left government led by a sullen, resentful, anti-American Sozi, neither does Europe have financial and military protection. Europe declines and falls with American wealth and might.

Mystery thrillers often talk about “copy-cat” killers; here we need a similar notion, that of a copy-cat suicide. The bottom line is that under the current Far Left Sozi rule, the U.S. is doing a copy-cat suicide for which the template was drawn between 1918 and 1933.