I have read it. There is nothing new. Liberals have been in pre orgasmic delight about America’s demise for a long long time. Hasn’t happened. Never will.
Good article.
Consider John Dos Passos’s gloomy analysis of postwar Germany, which appeared in the January 7, 1946Life. The U.S. had just flattened Imperial Japan and plowed into the heart of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, yet Dos Passos could say “We’ve lost the peace. . . . Friend and foe alike look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American.”Screw Dos Passos. I hate that socialist bitch.
The one constant in America’s involvement with the world, even taking in the Revolution and the War of 1812, is that when it really counts, we can kick your ass. At no momment over its history has the U.S. been incapable of anihilating an opponent.
Now, attitude and will — that’s another matter. And that’s what this article is about.
The Chinese media, by contrast, is extremely self-congratulatory. I far prefer declinism to false pride.
This is a great post! I guess the humidity still works it’s wonders.
I see the next major phase in the political evolution of the United States as either the collapse of the Democrat party, or its schism into a more moderate Green party and a more radical party which claims the mantle of the Democrats.
The Greens have found some success in Europe by focusing on only environmental issues, and being flexible as far as the rest of policy issues go. They please their constituency with their neutrality. And over time it has pushed them to become more moderate and results oriented rather than Moonbat.
In turn, the Republicans strongly need to purge some of its liberal members, which might form a Centrist party with more moderate Democrats.
For an election or two there might be more than three major contenders for office, but it will probably settle down to three for a while.
Here's the link:
http://denbeste.nu/external/Mead01.html
Our glass is still half full
Awwwwww why try society is a bunch of losers.....
I think America is in decline and its decline is recent. An author who used to get a lot of discussion on this forum was John Taylor Gatto. He wrote a book available to read online which outlined the decline of our educational system. He made convincing arguments that the colonists were more literate than most people coming out of today’s educational system. He also made an argument using military testing of soldiers that did not complete high school in the 1940’s, and the argument was that they were also better educated than what we are turning out today. There is a thread today, that notes that Obama referred to the leader of Canada as the President of Canada. That phrase could never come off my tongue because it absolutely sounds wrong to my brain. This Republic prospered on a population that holds literacy and education in high regard. I question if that is true today.
I’ve said it several times on FR...every superpower in history, whether good or bad, has fallen—Rome, Britain, USSR...the US is next.
We’re in a state of moral decline, very similar to Rome in the days leading up to its fall. We’re already divided against each other, we’re not one nation. The cracks preceding the crash are forming.
I vividly recall wrapping my head around Paul Kennedy's thesis a couple of years after he published it: a U.S. in ineluctable decline due to imperial overstretch. Every couple of chapters I'd look up and another Soviet Bloc country had fallen, and I wondered if Kennedy were going mad to watch it.
I need not have worried - the strength of an attractive theory is such that it need not consider itself threatened by mere fact. That theory is still being argued seriously. To me it seems a pretty descriptive model but it failed utterly as a predictive one.
In simple point of fact there aren't really any particularly detailed historical parallels to our current time. This is, IMHO, a time of unprecedented circumstance through which we can only feel our way, the lamp of history not throwing enough light in front of us to keep our toes from the rocks. But you can forget about the imperial model. For all the rhetoric it's as dead as the Divine Right Of Kings, and it is sadly amusing to see the desperation to which the Left in particular clings to its antiquated dictates.
One manifestation of its failure is seen in the devastation to which major parts of Africa have been subjected in an attempt to bend those circumstances into pat Post-Colonialism. There was another pretty descriptive model - ask any committed Marxist, it's a work of art - that failed as a predictive model and hence cannot possibly succeed as a normative one, and in fact has proven a colossal failure. Yet its true believers cling to it like drowning men through the blood of Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Rwanda.
My principal argument is that the historical models have broken and our guidance now must season their lessons with the certainty that everything they imply simply isn't true. That does not mean we can ignore them, it means that our activities must as well be guided by principle and by common sense. What of the future? Well, draw whatever picture you care to imagine and strive for it with the knowledge that what really does happen will be something else. Two hundred years or more from now someone will construct a proper historical model of this mess.
He'll be wrong too.
...the topic is from 2007. Guess he changed his mind in a year...
The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been prevented
Daily Telegraph | January 15, 2005 | Niall Ferguson
Posted on 01/16/2006 9:28:48 AM PST by B.Bumbleberry
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1559001/posts
[snip] Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran’s nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America’s closest regional ally... the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran...So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country’s treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China’s veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals... Only one man might have stiffened President Bush’s resolve in the crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet he had been struck down by a stroke... This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran... The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq’s Shi’ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran. Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened. [end]