**A Post By Patricia**

This article gives a entirely new perspective on “kicking the can down the road.” We have heard that mantra too many times with the entire gang in Washington. The latest unveiling of corruption is another warning – beware of history repeating itself.

Via Investors Business Daily, here’s a snippet of what Thomas Sowell writes, but do click through and read the whole thing:

A hundred years ago, anyone who might have predicted in 1913 the monumental, man-made catastrophes that would occur in the rest of the 20th century would have been considered warped, if not completely mentally deranged.

Who would have believed that the continent of Europe, which had not had a major war in nearly 100 years since Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, would set off two World Wars that were incomparably worse than any wars before, anywhere in the world?

Who would have believed that an authoritarian and militaristic regime in Germany, and a centuries-old despotic dynasty in Russia, would both be toppled — and later replaced by governments even worse, deliberately slaughtering their own people by the millions?

Even harder to believe would have been a prediction that totalitarian communism, having mismanaged some of the richest natural resources in the world in the Soviet Union, leaving its people with a standard of living far lower than that in Western Europe, would be seen as a model to follow by other nations.
These nations included China, where the rhetoric of Mao’s “great leap forward” masked the reality of people literally starving to death by the tens of millions. Meanwhile, Mao was greatly admired by many leading intellectuals around the world, including in Western democracies such as the United States.
What is the relevance of all this today? Few people think that we face dangers of comparable magnitudes. Even with a sluggish world economy, we are still far more prosperous than the people of a hundred years ago. And there has been no major war, anywhere in the world, since World War II.

Yet things looked pretty rosy back in 1913 as well. Europe had an even longer period without a major war than we have had. No one expected an isolated assassination in Sarajevo a year later to set off a chain reaction whose repercussions would reach around the world, with historic consequences…

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6 Comments | Leave a comment
  1. Dave says:

    Listen up boys and girls. America is giving birth to the third great wave of communist dictatorship. We had better take this seriously we all may yet take up arms to defend our freedom right here on ou own soil.

  2. Not to be a fly in the ointment or anything, but the word is spelled “eerie” according to my dictionary widget. (meaning strange, odd or disturbing which is just about right I would say) Otherwise a good post.

    • Maynard says:

      Fixed! (The “eerie” spelling is the only way I’ve ever seen it; however this online dictionary does acknowledge “eery” as a valid alternate spelling, and indeed that’s in the title of Sowell’s article.)

      Yes, and Sowell’s article is a must-read!

  3. Maynard says:

    Sowell gives particular focus to the issue of how to deal with Iran. It’s a life-or-death question, and I don’t have an easy answer. Bomb Iran now, and create a terrible economic/political/military/human mess that will be with us for years? Or hold off and hope to avert that mess, being aware that you might be steering into vastly worse national and global catastrophe?

    Obama is not unaware of the dangers; he understands that we have military enemies, and we have seen that he is not totally unwilling to invoke military force (such as drone attacks against Islamic militants and, yes, the take-down of bin Laden). I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Obama will end up ordering a bombing raid against Iran. By the way, to do this would be a political game-changer, in that the country would rally behind Obama, and the people that would object would be swept along because they’re Obama’s base and end up going along with whatever he does.

    Alternatively, Obama may wait for Israel to make the move, and then America will get swept into whatever happens. This would seem to be to our disadvantage, since we’d then be fighting on turf not of our choosing.

    I can’t be sanguine about this, but I think something will happen to initiate hostilities before nuclear bombs strike America.

    With respect to America’s existence, I still agree with Lincoln’s old analysis: We’ll only come to an end if we destroy ourselves. That’s my worse fear about Obama; that he’s the face of the dark side of the human psyche; a deranged avenging angel that must rise up and punish us for our own good. We’ll go down not because Iran bombed us but because we did ourselves in.

  4. strider says:

    (Eery is listed as a variant to eerie in Merriam-Webster.)

  5. sweetexp says:

    Patricia, this is a wonderful post that inspires the imagination! I really enjoyed reading the key points that you mentioned. Surely we are in some very choppy waters and as the old saying goes, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Again, thanks for the skilled post:)

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