Posted on 11/24/2016 4:06:17 AM PST by randita
The Arc of History Doesn’t Always Bend toward Justice
Liberals who act as if progress is inevitable are often sadly disappointed by how history actually goes.
By Michael Barone — November 24, 2016
History is on our side. That’s a claim Barack Obama has made frequently, in his two successful campaigns for president and during his nearly eight years in office. It’s a claim that looks a little shakier this Thanksgiving holiday than it did during the Halloween holiday three weeks ago.
Obama has frequently paraphrased a statement made by Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King, in turn, was paraphrasing the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker.
They turned out to be right about this — but not without doing a considerable amount of the bending themselves. Parker was one of the abolitionists who set America on the course of abolishing slavery. King did as much as anyone else to persuade Americans to end racial segregation.
But the arc didn’t travel in a straight line. The rights of the freed slaves were effectively abolished after the rejection of the Republicans’ Reconstruction policies. Most Americans were content to let the South enforce segregation for 80 years. Millions of people lived their whole lives under this system during those years.
Many around the world fared worse. Tens of millions died in World War I and World War II. Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong caused the deaths of tens of millions more.
Americans today, few of whom have a memory going back before 1945, take it for granted that Hitler and Nazism were defeated. Millennials, most of whom have no memory of 1989, take for granted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union. Most Americans don’t remember the late 1970s, when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping put China on the path of capitalist economic growth.
None of these things was inevitable. Consider the 22 months between August 23, 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, and June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Hitler, Stalin, and their allies in Italy and Japan swept over much of the landmass of Eurasia.
Only an isolated Britain stood in their way, while an isolationist America dreaded getting involved. It was the closest the world has come to the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984.
Two great leaders rose to the occasion. Winston Churchill insisted that Britain would never surrender, and Franklin Roosevelt provided American military aid to make sure it could fight on. On the deck of HMS Prince of Wales in a bay in Newfoundland in August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt proclaimed the Four Freedoms.
They had a sense of where they wanted history to head and how to move it in that direction. Not all the decisions they made were wise, and they often faced tragic choices. We take it for granted that the arc of history moved the right way, but it took some very heavy bending by two leaders and the millions they inspired.
Obama’s vision of the arc of history is more cramped and partisan. In his view, history is a story of progress toward an ever larger government at home and an ever more assertive America abroad. But history doesn’t always move that way. In the century before World War I, Britain led the world by reducing taxes and freeing up enterprise and trade. Government restrictions were discarded as vestiges of medieval tyranny.
That’s something like American voters’ response to Obamacare and other regulation-heavy Obama policies. Obama hoped Obamacare would lead to a government-run single-payer system and never communicated a sense of how much government would be too much. American voters responded that Obamacare was more than enough. It’s another example of history’s going back and forth on the size of government.
On foreign policy, Obama clearly thinks America has too often been on the wrong side of history, an oppressor more often than a liberator. Better to cede power to international organizations and to hold out to unfriendly powers an “open hand” rather than a “clenched fist.”
So far, that seems to have produced not affection but contempt. Vladimir Putin expands Russian power into Ukraine and Syria. China advances to dominate international sea lanes. The mullahs of Iran ramp up support of terrorism and do little to conceal their pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, the arc of history seems to be bending toward something other than justice. As Churchill and Roosevelt knew, history is contingent, and those who act as if progress is inevitable often prove to be sadly disappointed.
— Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. © 2016 Creators.com
Liberals who act as if progress is inevitable are often sadly disappointed by how history actually goes. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thank goodness for that.
And THEY are not “liberals.” You can cancel that delusion.
They are Utopian liberal fascists. Get with it:
Read it here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html
And what have they done to our world?
Hoodwinked America for starters:
[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3496141/posts]
The True Historical View on What Obama has Done to The World
It has been widely published that Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with Trump in New York, where the incoming president is working on setting up an administration after his surprise election victory last week “that has injected new uncertainty into old U.S. alliances.”
The spin now is that Trump himself has interjected uncertainties, the left attempting to whistle past its own graveyard of hastily buried corpses.
We need to understand exactly what is happening. This is big picture stuff. Very Important
It was Obama who introduced uncertainty into our traditional alliances, including Japan, not Trump.
In particular all of our allies watched in horror and disbelief when Obama abandoned US allies Libya and Egypt , using various ideological politically correct excuses of disagreement on the internal affairs of those nations.Libya was destroyed by NATO, a travesty.
Trump is repairing that damage and DE-emphasizing the Saudi role in Americas international affairs.The Sods have one last chore to do.Look after the refugees of the Levant.
Lets take a look at the general world view Lets help the MSM and others out, as the progressives attempt to obscure true history:
The EU bent over for Obama, the great Nobel Peace Prize recipient.Obama entered, drank their wine,ate their cheese, denigrated their anti-Muslim crackers,smelled their perfume,breached stuffy protocols, kissed male leaders on the lips, convinced the EU of his moral superiority as Americas first blackish president. They believed their own myth.Japan does not.Japan remembered the utopian fascism of Tojo while Europe all but forgot the utopian-ism of Hitler and Mussolini.
Obama then used Europe ( Nato Socialists) to create his Arab Spring, releasing millions of refugees from the Levant, Libya and Africa, all aimed at the heart of Russia,a US betrayal of its allies, Libya and Egypt, an exercise in modern demographic warfare via community organizing.Putin saw Obama coming and seized the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to prevent Muslim refugees from entering Russia, and aided Syria, and Iran...stopping Obama short for the embarrassing sophomore that he was.
The masses of refugees created by Obama and Clinton streamed into Western Europe, crossing the Mediterranean, sliding into Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and beyond. Brussels and the EU played their politically correct cards, accepting the demographic warfare fomented by Obama, who even now continues to hoodwink Europe and the EU, assuring them that their world will not fall apart as the Muslim hordes continue to descend on Germany. Europe is losing itself.
Trump is right, Brexit is right. Its a new world. And Shinzo Abe is right. Obama and his apologia to Islamic nations for Western civilization is now history; a gravidly obtuse and dirty history, obscene and unworthy of America. We will no longer tolerate it quietly.
And we all now see Obama defined as the Utopian liberal fascist that he is, who convinced Europe that he was not just another shuck and jive politician, once again Europe believed in a Utopia, just as they had accepted the Utopias of Hitler and Mussolini. Hoodwinked yet again by an American presidential psychopomp, whose similarities to his European predecessor utopians went completely unnoticed, even when they were complicit in the illegal destruction of Libya , and destroyed the 8th wonder of the world, The Great Man Made River, genocide caused by destroying the water supply of a whole people.You won’t read about that in any liberal progressive rag. The EU should be ashamed of itself.It certainly does not deserve to continue.
If the EU does not take the opportunity afforded by Trump to repudiate Obama, they will become Muslim nations, or become the conquered of Russia. The EU has only a short amount of time to realize its foolishness in the destruction of Libya at the hands of utopian liberal fascism, a whole nation destroyed by the very political correctness which now threatens the destruction of Europe as we know it.
Merkel must go. Lepin must win France. Its all about to begin: the battle for the heart and soul of Europe. Britain is safe,only for the moment.
Brussels is done, but Europe? We shall see.America will yet again attempt to rescue Europe from itself.But there is little enthusiasm for it after what Europe and Obama did to Libya, an act of infamy which will go down in history as one of the most heinous acts ever perpetrated on a third world nation of camel herders by the so called civilized nations of NATO. SHAME!
Obama is running around Europe like a one armed paper hanger as his international grift falls completely apart.Trump and his allies know perfectly well what to do next. The effects of Arab Spring on Europe must be stopped.No more demographic warfare will be allowed.The Saudis will pay for the relocation of the refugees created by Obama, or they will sit by and watch them die. This is the true Obama legacy.
Meanwhile Japan under Shinzo Abe gets it, Europe excluding Britain does not.
The Sheriff is back in town: The United States of America.
********************
A primer:
Barrack Obama: The Quintessential Fascist by Kyle Anne Shiver
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3496141/posts
Statistically, it favors the powerful and the violent.
I recall reading Libya was the ONLY country in the world “in the black” to the tune of something like $5Trillion. I wonder whatever became of that?
-—But the arc didn’t travel in a straight line-—
By definition, an arc is curved
Lots of words that seem to ramble
Well, the arc of history will one day be grasped end by end in the Hands of God and bent as needed. Justice WILL be done in the end but not by men.
Among NR's other present failings, ignorance of geopolitical realities ranks high on the list, as does forgetting recent history/
It is we who threatened Russian access to the Black Sea and to the Mediterranean by making a play for the Ukraine trying to bring it into NATO - the left pincer of the envelopment, while the right pincer of the move was our now failed middle east policy to reform the middle east. Stirring up trouble and creating chaos was about as bad for the Russians as us actually "winning" something - whatever that might have meant.
Of course the Russians were very nervous. They had every right to be. We tried to take out Assad. They made common cause, moved in, and pushed us out.
When the consolidate their position they will now be firmly ensconced in a base in the Eastern Med - Tartus - securing both the black sea and encircling Turkey.
This is the world the neo-cons invented and turned over to the man-child.
Putin doesn't just have contempt. He is rightfully pissed. And - no I am not a Putin lover. But I would like us to adopt a policy where our conflicts with Russia are minimal and resolvable through negotiation - not sitting on hair-trigger wondering when Putin is going to back us into showing who is boss by starting a nuclear war.
Many criminals never stop unless incarcerated or eliminated. Witness history. Witness current events.
UK, Japan, France, Portugal, Norway, and the Netherlands are natural allies. I would have said the same about the Philippines, but don't know what to make of that and our equivocation has probably put them in the position of equivocating with China.
China's extension of its reach is natural. Limiting it and protecting and assuring our allies is vital. We blew it when Bush and the neocons decided that we should try to be an Asian land-power and sort out the middle east. Not only did we fail, gloriously, but it has cost us dearly. We needed our Navy, but we seem to have forgotten it.
For later
Justice doesn’t mean justice anymore.
One of the sillier concepts Marx came up with is that history has its own momentum. That idea alone makes Marxism and all its derivatives religions with mankind occupying the role of Godhead. Religions, by the way, that in less than two centuries have murdered many millions more than all the others have over the past twenty.
I’ve seen estimates that Islam has over a quarter billion victims over the centuries. I don’t think the Marxists have accrued quite that number.
I agree wholeheartedly Andy. We need a strong Navy in the Pacific and the Atlantic. No more Asian adventurism by the Dems! Please!
More than you are wondering. Likely a sizable portion is now in Obama’s coffers in Spain.
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