One Editorial Nailed Solution for Many Nations’ Problems

 

A Great Awakening or a Rude Awakening: What Will It Be? written by Michael Brown  echoed our feelings on numerous levels and nailed much of the problem we have mentioned for the United States, European countries, Russia and with some adjusting would serve well here in Israel as well. The article pointed out that seeking the solution to national problems through the political front alone was simple folly. The candidates for President in the United States was sufficient proof that politics alone was a futile direction as a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was simply a choice between two massively flawed individuals whose ideas of truth, honesty and dignified stature in leadership leave so much to be desired and make the fact that any political solution will never be inspirational to correct the path of the public as a whole. Michael Brown noted this dilemma and his solution was for the United States to, for lack of a better phrase, to have a collective ‘come to Jesus’ moment. When we have talked of such, we have noted a return to the basic Judeo-Christian ethics upon which Europe and the United States and the rest of the Eurocentric world was based on and served it so well against previous attempts to invade and destroy and take over their areas by Islam in the past twelve-hundred years, that’s around a millennia and one quarter, also known as a very long time. The Judeo-Christian ethos solidified around 1500 through 1700 with the protestant reformation, the turning point in the wars with Islam and leading to the more open society able to embrace science and the progress and political revolutions all this envisioned and eventually produced based on the remnants of the Roman and Byzantine Empires and their adoption of the Greek representative governance which eventually led to the rule by the will of the people. This works for as long as the people are of a religious and forward looking public ready to sacrifice for the good of the community and the future of the nation and its people. That was where the Judeo-Christian ethics paid the societies great dividends. One could predict the health of a community simply by attending the churches on Sunday, and the Synagogues in the Jewish neighborhoods every morning and evening, and if they were being attended by healthy crowds then the society was healthy and if there were a sparse and paltry attendance with empty pews or seats, then the community was on a descent into oblivion. Europe has been followed by the United States by a mere ten to twenty years but inexorably the Americans have been catching up and both societies are showing the signs of ill health and decay.

 

Protestant Reformation Timeline

 

Nobody wants to admit the problem and it can now be measured in the lack of babies in the nurseries of the hospitals, the closing of neighborhood schools due to lack of students and the dwindling reproductive rates where childbearing has dropped below, in some cases precipitously and perilously below, replacement levels demanding that immigrants be found to replace the lack of workers such that the society can afford to support their elderly and aging populations. The problem with this situation is that with time the new immigrants will become the majority of the work force and will resent their being taxed to support an aging population which is unlike them and to which they have no affinity or care. This will lead to a dangerous situation where simply ridding themselves of these old fossils will become an enticing idea and euthanizing these useless relics of the former glory will be the only solution that seems logical and these fossils will be too old, weak and few in number to prevent their slaughter. It may come quickly in a single night starting in one town and spreading across the continent with the blazing speed of an inferno and within a few weeks the problem of those who had become the other will be solved and the new majority will be rid of this burdensome and expensive problem and ready to enjoy their new found financial freedom. Imagine their joy having everything their way and the old once proud people vanquished more by their own hand and selfish “me thinking and lifestyle” than the actions of their final executioners.

 

Where in Europe and Russia things are approaching drastic and may become irreversible and the disastrous end will have become inevitable. Maybe the new peoples will be kind and simply place the “old ones” on reservations and treat them much as they had treated the civilization they replaced when conquering the New World. Perhaps the Native Americans will become an important part of the New America and that will be the perfect role reversal and payback almost in all of history. The United States would be more capable of turning everything around and their salvation would come from the most ignored and considered inconsequential of places politically, fly-over country. The middle of the nation where people, according to President Obama, “… they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” This quote is the perfect example of the problem with society which the political class represents and is indicative of the societies on the two coasts. It is the clinging to their religion and the Bible that just might start the revival necessary for the return to the next golden age in the United States and perhaps bring a reverse tide which might bring the restoration of Europe if it is already not too late for Europe. Britain might have saved themselves and might perhaps allow other nations to also find the path back to their roots and return to religion which is not anti-science as even Albert Einstein believed that there had to be a G0d because the universe was simply too complex but mathematically perfect to have come into existence purely through an accident. His was the G0d which was the harmony and reflection of the order of the universe as he explained once on April 24, 1929, Einstein cabled Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in German: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” The entity in such beliefs is often referred to as the “Spinoza’s God” named after the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Einstein is not the only science personage who believes strongly in God as many of the earliest theories of our Universe were first proposed by scientists who were also men of the cloth, some even worked from the observatory located within the complexes of Vatican City (see photo below). The Church has come a long way and no longer fights science as they did in the times of Galileo Galilei.

 

Vatican City Observatory

 

The truth which even science will not dispute is that as Europeans and, after them, Americans left their religions and began to live for the day and let tomorrow take care of itself are in many cases childless and their predominance in the populations of the Western World is leading to the death of these nations and their civilization. Islam is ready to take up any slack and turn Europe into a reflection of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and are already arriving with an advanced guard. The vast majority of the “Syrian refugees” are males between the ages of thirteen to eighteen up through forty or fifty. These could easily be classified as the age one could expect of a military expedition including privates, sergeants, captains all the way to generals. The strata of ages are even in close approximation to a military force and their actions depict a group intent on conquest over assimilation. The United States has a somewhat brighter picture as the most readily available immigrants are Mexicans and other Hispanics from Central and South America who are largely Christians. As long as the numbers of MENA refugees and illegal immigrants from MENA nations and keep the immigrants restrained to largely Christians, then the future may not be as drastic a change to the American societal influences while Europe has no real similar alternative unless they choose to import Christian immigrants from central and southern Africa and parts of Asia. This would require a definitive change from their current system where they are importing Muslims with little if any background checks of virtually any depth. Such is a recipe for disaster which has already been starting to crest and appear throughout Western Europe. Even Islamic strategic Imams have already claimed that this is a part of their plan for civilizational jihad and the destruction of the Western World through their own rules of freedoms using them to destroy the entire civil constructs and replacing Christianity as the main religion with Islam and then persecuting the remaining Christians and the secularists giving them the choice of adopt Islam or death. The plan is to gain sufficient numbers and then use the sword to conquer the West just as they have MENA and had conquered Spain and large swaths of Eastern Europe and the Balkans before being pushed back during World War I. That is correct, it was just about one hundred years ago when Islam was pushed from Eastern Europe and their Caliphate Empire, the Ottoman Empire, finally came crashing down at the same time the Austria-Hungarian Empire also collapsed and both were restructured and divided into individual countries by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. That is another clarification which needs correction; the Sykes–Picot Agreement altered the maps of Eastern Europe as well as areas of MENA as it forced the end of two empires, the Ottoman Empire and the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

 

What might be a good idea for the Western World would be to only accept as many Syrian and other MENA refugees in equal numbers as do Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The claim that Saudi Arabia does not have any accommodations for the refugees is the biggest lie. They have a set of air-conditioned tents with stoves and bathrooms and kitchens and bedding and living space for four to six people which are used to house adherents joining the Haj. As the Haj just ended these tents are still up and empty and could easily hold tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of refugees (see image below). The Saudis are refusing to take the refugees because these are not refugees but the first wave of an invasion and what good would it be to have Muslims invade Saudi Arabia as they are already Islamic. If there is to be an invasion then Europe must be the target, not Saudi Arabia. Western nations importing people who are neither secular nor Christian is opening their world to invasion and steady erosion leading eventually to the complete death of Western civilization.

 

 

There is one nation which has a civilization similar in many ways to the past Western World and their religious Judeo-Christian civilization and that is Israel. Israel has an open democratic parliamentary governance with freedom of religion, freedom of the media, freedom of speech (largely), as well as equality of women and men, no persecution of sexual deviants, freedom of sexual orientations, and most of the other freedoms and equalities as well as an independent judiciary and equality before the law. The difference is instead of a complete Judeo-Christian civilization it has a Judean civilization based on Torah as well as modern free democratic society. The main difference is that Israel is more Judeo than Christian and is moving further in that direction. Israeli population is currently heading in a number of desirable directions. The first and potentially most important is that the nation is becoming more religious. Another is the population is intermarrying which can only improve relations. There have been moves to change from having two separate Chief Rabbis to having a single Chief Rabbi for all Jews. Personally with an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic mother I am all in favor of the merging of the two main bodies of Judaism. This will also have another effect as the secular members of Israeli society marry more religious members they will more often become more religious themselves rather than tear the other from their faith. As Israel is a young nation it still had an old soul and many are simply giddy with having returned to our homeland after almost a two thousand year exile. Some will claim that we have not been exiled anywhere near that long as we do not look old enough to have been exiled for almost two thousand years. Perhaps it will help if we also inform that every Jew is to believe they were slaves in Egypt, were part of the Exodus from Egypt, received the Law, Torah, at Mount Sinai, witnessed the presence of Hashem on the mountain, and were with the Israelites on their entry into the Promised Lands and experienced every calamity and exhilaration the Jews the world over throughout history have experienced whether that be suffered or celebrated. We have said “Next year in Jerusalem,” at the end of every Seder and after numerous prayers and it has been a dream of generation after generation of Jews. We have been instructed to have lived with every exiled Jewish family as we are a family and all related in some way, some distant, others very much closer. This has steeled us and made the Jew one of more resilient of peoples of the world and this has made the return to Eretz Yisroel all the sweeter. With our religious strength growing, we are going in the opposite direction than the growing secular Western world, and this is to our credit and will serve us well with larger families and greater closeness to Hashem who in return provides miracles large and small for each and all of us at the same time. These miracles only strengthen our faith and begin a growth in faith for some who had none at first. We can tell you that if you wish to see the difference between those who are a part of a growing religious community and those who are forfeiting their faith. One can simply make a study of the religious Jews of Israel and compare their faith with that of the least religious, leftist, progressive, liberal Jews in the United States. One group is growing and the other is heading towards extinction. The loss of our brothers and sisters and the coming of more in the coming months saddens us here in Israel as they were so close to coming home where being Jewish is something so much easier to pursue than it is in the United States which leads to more observance and a closer society which assist one another instead of compete against one another. Israel will grow in strength and religious power as time proceeds and we need not fear as faith increases and Hashem becomes more with us. We will fear no evil even in the shadow of death for Thou art with me.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

When Our Traditions All Fall and Fail Us

 

Shared traditions and agreement on common goals are the glue which holds societies together. Without these familiar items as the glue there is no need to fear threats from without as the society eventually will tear itself apart from the inside. You want a current example of such a society all one need do is look to the Middle East and pick a nation which is crumbling and intertwined in a destructive civil conflict and you have your example. Syria is all too obvious as Bashir al-Assad had a view of his Alawite minority should be defended by the Druze militias acting as his personal army and all the aid he needed from Iran in arms and even soldiers as things began to go wrong. Bashir al-Assad’s father held the nation together with the glue of fear of his wrath while the son is nowhere near the fearsome leader imbuing strength and competence like his father and before one knew it he was challenged and failed. When an iron fist and the fear of it visiting your little corner of the world is all your nation has holding it together, then you better be ready to use it and use it without mercy or else you are doomed. Such nations are destined to fail from the outset as sooner or later one falls victim to the el-Duce syndrome where the people revolt against your leadership as soon as your power comes into question even if it was your alliance with one megalomaniac that collapses and the next thing you know you are strung up in the town square for a week or so. When the Soviet Union began its surprisingly rapid crumbling from the inside, a friend asked if this was real and if it was, what would be the sign to look for that would signal it was irreversible. As for if it was real, let us say I was as in shock as the next person. As for the sign signaling this truly was the end, that was the easy part so that is what I tackled using that to hedge my answer on belief. I simply told him that I would believe this was the end when Nicolae Ceaușescu fell in Rumania, and sure enough he was the last of the leaders to fall and he fell almost as hard as the European Axis leaders at the end of World War II. The other modern day examples of such failures are Saddam Hussein’s Iraq where the three main societies within have each gone their own way whether by choice, the Kurds in the north, by default, the Shia who hold the power of the governance now, and those who lost outright, the Sunni who are now caught between two enslavers, the Shia government of Iraq and the murderous hordes that are ISIS and they have nowhere to turn as neither the Kurds nor the Shia have any love left for them as they were seen as the cruel oppressors who benefitted from Saddam Hussein’s rule and are now collecting the payment for his sins. Libya is the final example where without a strong leader or the perception of such the entire society reverted back to tribal divisions and will remain each tribe to themselves against the other tribes forming and breaking alliances as it fits them without any possibility of reinstituting a central government which has reach more than twelve blocks in any direction from central Tripoli. There are even those who blame the collapse of the Roman Empire on their failure to incorporate Roman culture, rules and societal structures on those they had conquered at the fringes of their empire which eventually led to the downfall which is a concept with a share of its validity.

 

If such failure of the Roman Empire came from the fraying at its edges of the application of a singular set of societal norms, then we are today witnessing the death throes of the United States as their common heritage and societal norms are currently under assault in the courts where laws are being fortified in defiance of the traditional culture ripping things apart in such a manner as to make the separate, even disparate, parts of the society unglued from each other which may lead to the collapse of that society. The latest and possibly second most destructive tear just was handed down by the Supreme Court with their universal acceptance of same-sex marriage as the law of the land. The real culprit which will eventually topple the United States and potentially all of Western society is multiculturalism which stands that one must honor all others and their customs and no universal set of shared standards can be allowed to stand unassailable by the many and varied lesser cultures within the society. There was a time not that long ago where gun ownership was near universal in the United States and now in most of the major cities gun ownership is not only shunned but illegal which has led to rampant crime as now the criminals do not need a firearm to make them equal to any victim they choose as all they need is two other fellow miscreants to forcibly take anybody’s money by force of numbers, though there are those who prefer not sharing who simply use a weapon, not even necessarily a gun. Then there are those cultures which are forced into remission and made to hide their identity or to regress into enclaves where their numbers provide protection. The day is coming and coming rapidly to the United States shores and is awash over Europe which is pushing the Jews out of society despite the Jews having mostly adopted what was sold to them as the societal norms. The Jews have been consistently seen to be on the leading edge of every trend which came along and was considered enlightened. They were among those marching for civil rights for blacks in the fifties and sixties and have remained supporters of equality of the races through to the current times. They have been at the forefront of the march for gay acceptance and even same-sex marriage. Now that the Jews are the ones being shunned from the college campuses, and trust that which enthralls the masses in the colleges today will be the mainstays of the society ten to twenty years hence; there are already signs that there is sufficient an undercurrent in American subcultures which already hold anti-Semitic feelings which are now slowly emerging from what many would claim were the same centers from which Jew hatreds grew in Europe in the rise of the Nazis. One of the things people seem to forget was the rise of the Nazis had two epicenters and the college campuses were just as important if not more so than the reemergence amongst the rest of the areas blamed for this resurgence of Jew hatred as the ideological leaders more often came from the ivory halls of academia which was also one of the first places that the Jews were banned, from either attending or teaching in the universities. How much longer before such purges strike Western nations’ colleges and universities. It already happens on many campuses for a period every year during the heights of Israel Apartheid Week or during pro-Palestinian celebrations which have started to resemble the pogroms of Russia and the Inquisitions and other cleansings in Europe where the Jews were singled out for exclusion from the society often simply by their being expelled with only the possessions they had packed in a suitcase or two readied ahead of the pitchforks and angry mobs wielding them and other times by simply removing them permanently often burning them at the stake and other methods the crown would demand during their frenzied assault on the other, the Jew.

 

When that befalls western culture once again it will have started in the exact same place but with a slightly different target, the unfitness of the unborn. The undertaking has traditionally been referred to as Eugenics Movement. The idea of eugenics reaches back at least as far as Plato who called for the formation of a guardian race of selective breeding of those who were of superior mind and body, the mating of the cream of humanity to produce a master race. Sound familiar? Francis Galton, the half-cousin Charles Darwin, had taken his relative’s work on evolution and the survival of the fittest and applied it to be used within the human populations to breed the perfect human being and for the removal of those who were inferior. He coined the word Eugenics and eventually it became a course of study in the universities leading to a movement started around a core of its most ardent and adamant proponents and the rest is history. What is less well known is that the forefront of the Eugenics movement formed in the United States and its acceptance was so universal that it was from the United States that the most strident proponents of eugenics emerged. Such names at the front in founding the eugenics movement in their day and up to today are the poet Carl Sandburg, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the mother of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, the Perfect Human Society and an interesting proponent in current times, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel who was instrumental in the drafting of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Obamacare. People might be shocked to be informed that Planned Parenthood has not always been the equal provider of alternatives for those who either desire preventive methods to avoid pregnancies or alternatives to carrying, their terms to birth of the child, a fetal mass to its conclusive child bearing as it would cause the mother undue mental stresses and interfere directly with their pursuits in life, it originally was used to sterilize those seen as unfit to have children thus forcing a eugenics program which was, as it is today, centered in minority neighborhoods. Providing you desire to seek the reality that is Planned Parenthood all one need to do is to research Margaret Sanger and her relationship with what we would today refer to as black genocide, it is not a pretty picture. There comes now another eugenics styled movement and this time the target will be traditions, the very traditions which were the glue of Western culture and society for the last two millennia.

 

The scissors that cut the pages into confetti will be forged by multiculturalism where no culture is to be preferred because we are blinding ourselves to such observations and the axe which will sever the binding making the job of the scissors even easier will be the axe taken to the Judeo-Christian culture and in particular to cut the binding of that book which professes that there are such things as good and evil, there is such a concept as right and wrong, that a life lived with proper restraints is life to be pursued, the book that once graced nearly every house and every hotel room across the United States and now a book scorned as old, out of fashion and obsolete, but the Bible is that book which we could learn where our new follies will lead, they will lead to the same place they have always led, ruination and the destruction of all that made the Western World strong. Choosing to lose ourselves in a culture of any culture of the moment is the culture we desire to raise up, but we cannot raise up debauchery and the damnation of human life as equal to the pursuit of a good life spent rejoicing in the gift that life provides and not seeking some manner of faith which demands of us surrender or die, such is a choice without a choice. We need return to our former ideals which permit those whose cultures differ to continue such practice in their private times and spaces such as their homes and houses of worship, but also we demanded they accept our cultural rules when in public. The Western culture allowed for certain irregularities such as special religious clothing being worn in public and even providing areas for prayer permitting such did not interfere with the performance of one’s job and was committed off the clock and on the individual’s own time as the whole cannot be forced to pay them for their private time spent praying and not producing things of mutual gain as that is what working at a job is, producing things for mutual gains, a cooperative effort and a central pillar of our traditional society.

 

Schools were a place where we learned about our mutual culture and were able to master those basic tenets which supported the society, and where we learned how to think and not so much exactly what to think though guidelines were imposed and what was out of bounds was ingrained. We even learned to cooperate through sports where we also learned the easy joys of winning and even more importantly how to cope with losing and thus with failure. The best amongst us learned that failure was not the end but rather a stop where we reassessed our priorities and assumptions making changes where we found things in error or lacking altogether and then proceeded on towards our ultimate goal. Further we learned, were we that fortunate, lucky even, that failures come in the thousands and that success comes only to those willing to fail and fail repeatedly and learning from each failure where we diverted from our goals and how to get back on track. Are there ideas whose failure is guaranteed and where one can never fully achieve the goal? Yes. We can never make a machine which is 100% efficient as in all things there is that degree of wasted effort, effort which does not contribute to the completion and realization of the goal. In a machine that goal is the product such as a generator making electricity; we use water, steam, explosive fuels all to drive the generator to make electricity but there are losses to friction and pushing the generator against the resistive magnetic forces induced in the coils which does not directly produce the electricity but which must be overcome. The same is true in life. Sleep is something our bodies must submit to or we will eventually collapse and possibly die. Still, it is sometimes in our dreams that the spark bursts forth solving some vexing problem which assists the project to completion. Such is an exception and even that spark was not the only dream we enjoyed or endured, and there were the periods of sleep which were used as a dedicated means of repairing and preparing the body for the next day. Another item which obviously diverts us from achieving goals but may be necessary in order to reach our goals are the failures along the way. Lessor peoples will allow failures to prevent them from trying and just surrender to their failures. That is not an intricate part of our society until recently when we found ways of rewarding those who become mired in failure.

 

Another casualty in our modern society is the loosening of the moral structure. In the lives of the vast majority of the population, and to a limited extent to all of the population not restricted to an asylum (do we even have asylums any longer to care for the elderly and the comatose?) as we all wear clothing though some wear far less than others; we all eat and sleep as nature insists on these; and we all live and let live because if large segments of the society, and it need not be more than ten to twenty percent of a society, take to being belligerent and resorting to murdering those who they fear or refuse to submit; then the society will fracture and it will soon become a free-for-all with every faction against the rest; see Libya, Syria or Iraq for current examples. What many do not realize is this is rapidly becoming the definition of Western culture. The society of the Western World has become unmoored and without an anchor with which to tie off and provide immovability, permanence and the Western World has rapidly been cranking the centerboard retrieving it from below the boat allowing the winds to blow us as they may while our ability to steer the boat has failed without the centerboard. That centerboard was western Judeo-Christian ethics and the anchor was the ideal of hard work will produce and provide for one and one’s family and charity would take care of the few who for reasons often beyond their control are unable to find a place within our society. We did not used to change our society such that everybody’s quirks or the beliefs of those coming to our shores being used as a cudgel with which to beat and force us to alter our religious and social structures which we have held dear fashioning our societal norms around and have worked just fine for us and is tried and true. Therein lies the current problem, we in the West have doubted our own culture while allowing another culture whose adherents have little doubt that it is superior to all the Western World has ever known and that the Western World must be cowed and beaten into submission, and that is termed our surrendering to Allah. Do not mistake Allah for the same as G0d in our Judeo-Christian society as Hashem does not demand surrender but instead reason, trust and faith. The easiest manner to present a difference is to look at the lineage of belief. In Judeo-Christian ethics the line of faith flows through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while Islam and Allah follow the lineage of belief through Abraham, Ishmael and Mohammad. Perhaps this is as good a place to stop before I get into deeper troubles and this is way more sufficient amount to chew of for one day. With any luck I’ll get into this stranger side of my reasoning after a decent period of rest. Thank you all for reading this far and may your life be blessed only with those failings which aid you in your journeys and make you a stronger and better you, even if others spend some time confused at what you are trying to say, and boy have I spent time on that bus.

 

Beyond the Cusp