By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I have a lot of takeaways from Artem’s article about short term solutions corrupting long term desirable outcomes, especially with my friend’s pet subject: climate change and the environment. I will get to a few of them in this blog and the others later on.
First, let’s take a snapshot or two of Donald Trump. But even before we talk about Trump, I would like to make a comment on history and the ignorance most people have of it. I am most definitely NOT referring to Artem here (he is better than that) but to most of the people I run into, even some of the bright ones. That is, they either don’t know history or they choose to deny it, taking refuge instead in falsifying their own and the collective memory. I can give you a great example.
Nowadays, if you say the name ‘Hitler’, everybody assumes their most correct posture, plants the most pious and sanctimonious expressions on their faces, and puts forth their opinion about what an evil guy he was. And they are right to do so. Absolutely on target. Hitler was a horrible guy in terms of his ‘contribution’ to history.
But here is where the big lie comes in. If you bother to study World News prior to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, you will find that many, many, many people who should have known better thought that Adolph was the flavor of the month. Well, just look at what he had done for Germany and how he had got his suffering nation back on its feet.
Do you think that Henry Ford was a great American? Of course you do. But read this:
“ In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the “Grand Cross of the German Eagle.” How do we make sense of this award? What does it mean?
The Germans honor Ford, we could say, for a couple reasons. For one thing, they’re very taken with the whole assembly line technological modernization. The Model T and Volkswagen are sort of similar cars….From the point of view of anti-Semitism, Hitler could look at Ford as somebody who was — let’s call him an age-mate. They were both in the 1920s beginning to write and disseminate information about what they both considered to be this great powerful threat, “the Jew.”
And Hitler was very much inspired by Ford’s writing. And the idea that this could happen in the United States, I think, was very important to Hitler as well… I think Hitler would have derived a degree of satisfaction to be able to point to Ford as, in a way, just as good an anti-Semite as he was.”
Doesn’t sound like much of a goddamned hero to me. Charles Lindbergh was another. He became the winner of the highest Nazi Auslander (foreigner) award. King Edward VIII of England, who abdicated in 1937: Hitler was his hero. If these motherfuckers were still alive, you wouldn’t get them to admit it now, would you?
There are similar conventional untruths about the history of slavery, both worldwide and in terms of the American experience. We won’t discuss them now, but read up on it, and you’ll see what I mean – unless, of course, you are in complete denial.
Other things have been predicted that never panned out. For one thing, when computers arrived on the scene, the smart boys, the big time experts, the know-alls, shook their heads solemnly and declared that they would never work on a large scale. Really?
I say all this (what does it have to do with Trump, you are asking?) in order to demonstrate two things that really are true: (1) most people know fuck-all about history and are not interested in finding out, so they form their own agenda based on hearsay, gossip, personal bias, wishful thinking, basic dishonesty, and now, the intrinsic lunacy and mean-spiritedness of a great deal of social media. In other words, with all this information available as never before, most people remain idiots. By choice, in most cases.
So now we have Trump, a populist leader in an increasingly populist world. His ‘liberal’ enemies – now wise to the ways of fascism that somehow they didn’t see in the Der Führer’s day (and still don’t when they wish to look the other way), pretend to see Hitler every time they look at Trump. And they wonder why 77,000,000 voted for him for a Second Term. (If he had been that bad the last time, wouldn’t they know better by now?)
Of course, Trump’s ‘critics’ leave out certain salient facts. Partly due to ignorance and largely due to malice. So let’s try a few facts. Prior to his decision to run for President back in 2016, Trump was known as a dynamic and charismatic businessman and husband of a succession of glamorous women. Nobody knew or cared what his political opinions were, and in actual fact Trump registered as a Democrat until about 1992-93. Before 2016, if anyone had asked about Trump, they’d probably say something about Atlantic Beach, Trump Towers or his tremendously popular TV show “The Apprentice”. He was a frequently invited guest on liberal TV shows. Beyond that nobody knew much, or cared. They cared more about Tom Crews and Kim Kardashian.
Nor did they care when he entered the primaries, and there is one reason for that: nobody took him seriously. I mean, he wasn’t a professional politician like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, was he? What was there to fear about this clown? So he won the nomination. NOW the Left started to get nervous, but it was still assumed that Hillary would win in a landslide. No talk of Russian collusion then, was there? Nice going, Donald, thanks for the memories; hope you enjoyed the ride.”
But Trump won. And it was at this point that all the hate from the Left started up. In American political history, there has Never been a president (and during his between-terms candidacy) as vilified by his enemies as Donald Trump. The wild paroxysms of grief and dismay from the Left are, in fact, comical. They act like the world will come to an end. Once again, with their Very Faulty Memories, they forget that Trump was President for four years (2016-2020) and the world did Not come to an end. They forget that, unlike with guys like Hitler and recent autocrats such as Putin, Xi, and Kim, Trump will be out of there in four more years. Hardly enough time for the world to end, don’t you think? If people don’t like Trump, they will have their chance in just a few years. That’s the American way.
In fact – aside from all the hysteria – Donald Trump is both the shaper and the product of history. For a long time now, Europe, the UK, the world Down Under, and the United States and Canada have allowed ‘progressive’ identity politics to control the media and the university campuses, so much so that people who disagree with their agenda are often afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Famous feminists such as Germaine Greer and the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling have been under attack simply for expressing their opinion that transgendering women and biological women are not the same. It is their OPINION. And they are not allowed to have their opinion without ridiculously being accused of ‘spewing hate’.
Unrestrained Immigration – and the easily foreseeable (but somehow unforeseen) problems now commonly recognized and associated with it – have produced a backlash on part of ordinary people who think that their culture is being ripped from them by foreigners who seem only on the ‘take and make’ while contributing zero and refusing to assimilate. For this, they are called ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’. (The Left are great at name calling.) And, of course, all this is further condemned by shrieks of ‘Nationalism’. ‘Tribalism’. “Partisanship’. And so on.
Ok, let’s allow that such immigration of masses of humanity from persecution and poverty in their own lands was, at the outset, noble and commendable. Isn’t that what advanced civilization is supposed to be about: good humanitarian stuff? I’m with that. I am even 100% in favor of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion.
The problem is that it has been ‘weaponized’ (a term the Left likes a lot). If you don’t accept the platform hook, line, and sinker, you are ‘cancelled’. Moreover, what I am NOT with is that when these laissez-faire immigration policies started inevitably to fail, the blame was shifted, not to the idiot politicians who brought it about without thinking it through properly, but on the resident population – the people (indeed some had been immigrants in the past) who called themselves with pride ‘British’, ‘French’, ‘German’ or whatever. Now THEY were the bad guys because they objected to what had clearly run aground and ‘spun’ out of control. Now they were ‘racist’ ‘xxxphobic’ and so on. And any European or American who spoke out against Islamic terrorism was called ‘Islamaphobic.’ It’s still like that now.
Case in point, and Artem will remember this well. Back in 2009 or 2010 (I can’t recall the year exactly), some female Islamic terrorists strapped bombs inside their clothing (full Islamic regalia) and blew up metro cars in two of the busiest stations (Lubyanka and Park Cultury) during the 8am rush hour. Innocent people died, naturally. For days, even weeks afterwards, whenever normal Russian citizens riding the trains saw Islamic women dressed exactly like the terrorists, they sometimes either insulted them or just said ““пиздец” and got off the train before the doors closed.
For this, the liberal media (admittedly a very skimpy crew in Russia) castigated the Russian citizens as ‘insensitive’ and ‘Islamophoic’. WRONG, I say. They just wanted to get to work or home to their families without getting their asses blown off. And they knew that the deadly ‘ass-blowers’ had been people who looked exactly like these ‘innocent’ victims of Russian prejudice now boarding the train. I personally had no problem understanding them. The fact that ‘most’ of such women were (and are) totally innocent is beside the point. I saw a HUMAN reaction. The Liberals saw only ideology.
So what we find now: in Italy, in France, in the UK, in the US – everywhere in the civilized world – are multitudes of people who have drifted (or turned sharply) to the Right. These people are NOT Nazis. But they are not allowed to hold their opinions; instead, they are crucified by the Left.
Enter Donald Trump and others like him. They have come forth and been welcomed by millions onto the World Stage for two reasons: (1) History has decided it needs them (for whatever reasons you wish to debate); (2) such people as Trump have a clear vision of what they want to do to fix the problems.
We will see what happens, but what has unfolded so far is this: The majority of citizens of the United States of America voted to reject a certain aggressive ideology in favor of moving in a different direction. Let’s give it some time before we draw conclusions. Clearly, Biden and Kamala were not up to the job.
The environmental catastrophe is Los Angeles? The environment that Artem so justifiably and admirably cares so much about? Trump’s fault? But who was in charge? Not Donald Trump. If Trump had been governor of the state, there would have been water for the fire hoses, I think we can agree on that. And next time there Will Be, if he has anything to do with it.
