Follow - Up on Berlin Wall Post

As I had not gotten around to writing The Friday, November 8 post on the Berlin Wall *(At bottom) and the reality that we face today until later in the evening, I grew sleepy and and consequently had to cut the post a bit short.

I am partial to employing anecdotal accounts, particularly in regards to individuals with whom I have  spoken through the years, as I strongly feel that we can glean more from the outlooks of others than we can merely by citing large-scale events. One can easily research voting patterns and such, but these are example of data that can - in my opinion, only be of real help when only when we view them through the filters of attitudes of members of society.

When a female Marine recruit is interviewed in a documentary on newer training programs from the later 90's (which did appear to be physically and psychologically rigorous) and takes that opportunity to assert that females can do the "job" (meaning soldiering in general) "in most cases better than males", we are faced with an increasingly accepted outlook that marginalizes the differences in physical strength, natural aggression and innate emotional abilities of males to thrive in warlike environments. When that account is brought up in a conversation with another male serviceman, and his response is "Well, that's her opinion.", we are faced with another facet of the appreciable changes in society; the obligation of individuals to make a reasonable effort to give an honest opinion is not even taken into consideration. Anyone can say what he or she wants with no fear of loss of credibility - which in turn means that no one really has any credibility.

A few years before I retired from law enforcement, an officer who was only just over four years younger than I was assigned to my section. As he had changed careers much later in life (prior to the downward spiral of our economy , he had a successful career in sales), he was much closer to me in age than other officers with two or less years of service. I was close to retirement, but he was just getting started.

We were also on opposite sides of the cultural and political spectrum. As I was a supervisor who took tremendous pride in avoiding anything that could be perceived as bullying or misusing my position, I ensured that it would be he who brought up topics for discussion and exercised great caution when these topics were addressed. Interestingly, this practice helped me to learn quite a bit and get a clear picture of the hyper-liberal mindset.

I had finished four years in the Marines by the time he had entered  high school. Little by little, I began to understand that he had very little knowledge of the threats that we had faced during the late 70's through the early to mid 80's. He also had only known the USSR and Warsaw Pact era as a period that was at its very end. With no knowledge of what life in the USSR was like, and soothed by a life as a teenager-young adult devoid of  any concerns of the spread of Marxism, he never felt the need to question much of anything. He would take it for granted that, as were are still told, that the Liberal Democracies "are there to help the people". In short, he was the perfect candidate for indoctrination be Trotskyite Leftist professors who could act as if the (in their words) "aberrations" of the failed Communist states were only blips on the radar and that Socialism was still a system that can work - and indeed that it needs to come into being in the West.

Note these were never his actual words. I was able to piece together his attitudes from the positions that he advocated on the topics that he brought up.

For him, the Western deconstructionist-tool Global Warming/Climate Change was as real as was the dark that comes with the sunset. The claims on the rates of warming presented in the movie An Inconvenient Truth were taken as facts without any concern that the makes of the film may be intentionally misleading the viewers, nor was there any suspicion that they had could have been in error.

When he recalled the 2004 Bush/Kerry presidential election (one that gave us no really good choice), he - in an effort to make a point, noted that the French and Italians both wanted Kerry to win. At this I dropped my guard and explained that the last thing that American should want for our society is to be more like those of France and Italy (I am of half-Italian ancestry, but... Berlesconi?). I added that their societies are collapsing and that this is due in a large part to a wholesale abandonment of their religion, culture, and sense of historical identity. To illustrate my point, I brought up my example of a man who has been in a coma for four years and wakes up on election day. Desperately wanting to vote, but unaware of the issues, he asks for English translations of the editorial sections of French and Italian newspapers. He reads those sections, notes who they want to be President of the US, and votes for the other guy - problem solved.

For the record, we in the US are at best only a half-step behind our elder cousins and are enthusiastically closing the gap.

He was staunchly against the second Iraq War ( as was I but for utterly different reasons), but his reasons for being so had nothing to do with concern for the destabilizing of the Islamic world, its natural consequence of the continuing rise of the surveillance state in the US, the military casualties that would be best avoided ( Of course Iraqis too were tragically killed but Saddam Hussein also was slaughtering them), or the immense monetary expense of conducting another war while Afghanistan was not even remotely close to being pacified (and it still is not). His entire problem seemed to be that it was an act of G.W. Bush, which for him made it wrong ipso facto.

The excising of American history in primary school was even more thorough for his time that it was for mine. I recall a day when he noted that G.W. Bush was elected President despite having failed in several business ventures. Not only was he fully ignorant that Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other key American leaders also perennial failures (as well as figures in worlds history) in business but were successful leaders or statesmen, he then went to the 2008 election and voted for B.H.Obama - a man with virtually no experience in anything whatsoever.

None of this is intended to be an indictment of the man; I find him to be likable and one of the few Liberals who truly thinks that he has the right ideals. What I see in him is far too many of the people who came of age in the years after my age group. They have no memory of Communism save the candy-coated version that was conveniently labeled as not actual Communism after all. They were subjected to mass- indoctrination while we basked in the glory of a post-USSR world. We ignored the attacks on "dead.white men". that began on the early 90's which left room for them to learn that the only culture to eliminate slavery should take the blame for slavery. They have never learned that the 'War on Poverty" has done nothing but make more people poor.

He and they who followed have very little understanding of Marxism and thus have no defense against the current  wave of Marxist thought that pervades the Western world.


*http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-berlin-wall-fell-but-marxism-as.html