Foreign and Domestic

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… (From the Oath of Enlistment)

It honestly kind of slipped my mind at first, that Monday morning was the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the United States. It’s been 22 years since that horrible day. I had other stuff – purely personal concerns on my mind.

For one, every single thing that I had to say about 9-11, I said, wrote and posted ages ago … and why re-run, one more time? There’s just nothing more to say, any more than there would be anything more to say about the shock of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 – one more tedious rerun of a recollection of where I was, what I was doing. It’s been a lifetime, in a way – and for high-school and college graduates this year, it’s been all their lifetimes.

The other thing – a more recent tragic anniversary which looms closer in time is the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Abbey Gate suicide bombing there which killed more than a hundred civilians and thirteen American service personnel. Those deaths meant so little to President Biden that he kept looking at his watch during the ceremony at Andrews AFB when their coffins were unloaded. Those thirteen were the merely last American military lives frittered away in almost two decades of seemingly endless and pointless deployments to Afghanistan, culminated in a departure so botched that I’m still shocked that only a single commissioned officer resigned in protest. Sec Def Austin and General “Thoroughly Modern” Milley apparently feel no shame over bungling their responsibility to the Nation so horribly.

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Privileges

Well, I see from the linked story, that the educational geniuses in Fairfax County have trodden heavily on their essential nether parts, yet again, in their demented crusade to shove critical race theory, or whatever it is called this week to disguise the whole rotten concept, down the throats of hapless students of all colors on the Pantone scale. This time around, they tried to foist off the concept of military dependents being somehow uniquely privileged.

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9/11 + 20

Only a few years after 9/11, I visited an old industrial facility that had been restored to operating condition.  One of the machines there is an attrition mill, which consists of two steel disks, rotating at high speed in opposite directions and crushing the substance to be milled between them. It struck me then that America…indeed, western civilization as a whole…is caught in a gigantic attrition mill, with one rotating disk being the Islamic Terrorist enemy and the other disk representing certain tendencies within our own societies…most notably, the focus on group identities, the growing hostility toward free speech, and the sharp decline of civilizational-self confidence.  The combination of the upper and lower disks of the metaphorical Attrition Mill is far more dangerous than either by itself would be.

It is now increasingly clear how much the ‘woke’ American Left has in common, at a deep level, with movements such as the Taliban–the suppression of free expression, the insistence that all aspects of life be subjected to an over-arcing ideological or religious framework, the hostility toward history and historical objects (remember the Bamiyan Buddhas?).

I have seen numerous articles and blog posts from people who are generally Left or “liberal”, who now express concern about the excesses of the Left and who blame these excesses on a reaction to Trump.  This is nonsense.  For anyone who has been paying attention, the increasing irrationality, illiberalism (‘illiberalism’ in the older sense of the word ‘liberal’), and outright hysteria of the American Left has been clear for a long time before Trump ever came on the political scene.

Within days of the collapse of the Towers, the true face of the modern American Left made itself fully visible. “Progressive” demonstrators brought out the stilt-walkers, the Uncle Sam costumes, and the giant puppets of George Bush. They carried signs accusing America of planning “genocide” against the people of Afghanistan.  Professors and journalists preached about the sins of Western civilization, asserting that we had brought it all on ourselves. A well-known writer wrote of her unease when her daughter chose to buy and display an American flag. Some universities and K-12 schools banned the display of American flags in dormitories, claiming that such display was “provocative.”  There were preemptive scoldings of Americans for the ‘Islamophobia’ that we were expected to demonstrate toward Muslim neighbors.

Attitudes such as those outlined above are no longer a niche thing; they have gone pretty much completely mainstream.  And we have a President the bizarreness of whose thought processes are illuminated by his proposal, immediately after 9/11 to send a check for $200 million to Iran with no strings attached.

And, while in 2001 the only serious external threat we needed to be concerned about was Islamic terrorism, today we need as well to be concerned about the pressures from China.  And, here again, there are behavior patterns internal to America that mirror their reactions to the external threat from the terrorists…see for example my 2018 post, So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?    Just the other day, I saw a story about an American high school in Colorado which applied for some students to attend a meeting of a United Nations group (the Commission on the Status of Women).  The UN committee that accredits such groups emailed the school and said there was a problem: the school’s website used ‘incorrect’ terminology for Taiwan. The committee suggested modifying it to “Taiwan, Province of China.”  The school gave in to the request.

China has cited ‘improper’ Taiwan terminology to stall applications from at least six other groups, including the World Bicycle Industry Association and a French nature society called the Association of 3 Hedgehogs.  The tentacles of the Chinese regime now extent to all locations in the world and to activities of all kinds.  More here.

I can’t come up with a good visual metaphor for the three-way threat that now threatens  America’s continuance as a free and independent society, but that threat is very real.

There are a few signs of hope. As noted above, some publications that have been aligned with the Establishment Left are now starting to push back somewhat against aggressive ‘wokeism’.  The catastrophe of the Afghan withdrawal has educated some people, especially college-age people, about the fact that America is not the worst nation and the source of all evil in the world; that, indeed, hideous things can be perpetrated by people who are not Americans and also who are not considered White.  The supply-chain chaos of the past year and a half has educated many businesses about the dangers of excessive dependency on China.

And, somewhat remarkably, since 9/11 there have been no large-scale terrorist attacks remotely comparable to that one in scale.  Though how long this situation will persist, given the Taliban’s newly-established full control of Afghanistan, is an open question.

Things are not hopeless, but the hour is late and the situation is very serious.

 

Down the Drain

Twenty years it’s been, as of yesterday. Twenty years and Afghanistan is down the drain, the Taliban back in charge. At least a comprehensive malignant menace like Bin Laden is dead, with his corpse – supposedly – dropped into the deep ocean, although I suppose that his organization staggers on, zombie-like, and possibly subsidized by Pakistan’s secret service. The dust of the fallen towers is settled, and the American troops are home, more or less. Still under a cone of silence as far as the US media is concerned, as are tales of hairbreadth escapes by American citizens, employees, and American-employed Afghan nationals … perhaps they were all made to sign a binding non-disclosure-agreement, as a condition of getting on that big Freedom Bird. Or our national establishment media is doing their bidding, as obedient handmaidens of the Dem party, and doing their best to disappear this latest disaster. Well, good luck with that. There are too many of us out there, and we have a voice, for at least a little bit longer.

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Cone of Silence

It looks as if with the official departure of the US military from Kabul, a media cone of silence perpetuated by the National Establishment Media has descended over the whole ghastly mess, leaving a good many of us who have been following the chaotic and bloody disaster that it was with unanswered questions. Like – exactly how many Americans were left behind in Afghanistan? American citizens and employees of international and US-sponsored NGOs, or dual nationals home visiting relatives in the “Old Country” over the summer vay-cay? A couple of hundred? Or thousands? Independent military reporter Michael Yon and others across the indy blogosphere reported that American citizens – with their passports in hand – were turned away from entering the Kabul Airport by the US Army, and it is those people who are stranded in Afghanistan now. Well, maybe. Between the proverbial fog of war and the cone of silence – a great many questions remain.

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