But I am a student of history, and history is something that Leftists abhor, unless it can be used as a tool to further their goals. Otherwise they have no use for it.
I have found myself occasionally thinking lately, that I wish I were ignorant. I wish that I did not know history. Because history is truth, and because history is cyclical.
I consider myself well read, and after all these years of my life without having ever read the Bible any more than a passage here or there, I find that I am compelled to read it.
How can I regard myself as well read if I have never read the Bible?
So, I am working my way through the Old Testament, and I have realized something that I knew all along, but that the Bible confirms for me, and that is: Human nature is largely unchanged.
Reading the Old Testament, Human Nature is much the same then as it is today. And that fills me both with a feeling of validation, yet also with a feeling of dread.
Because it confirms to me that history is cyclical. It does repeat. And the point of all this is, I fear that we are in a stage of repeating, and entering a terrible, terrible time. I feel it in my bones. I feel that the world is heading into a historic, dark, terrible time, and I cannot shake it.
I always viewed America as a bulwark, as an island. An idea that shone across the earth like the beam of a lighthouse, that there are rights granted by God, not men, and only God can take them away...not men. This country I love, this imperfect country, this nation and idea that has given me so much and allowed me to live my life in a prosperous and joyful way, I feel is being deliberately destroyed from both within and without.
There was a famous picture of Barack Obama walking across the tarmac with a copy of the book "A Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria:
This world, I fear, is going to find out soon what a world without America and what American stood for, is really like. And I feel that it is going to be a terrible, Hobbesian place, something humankind has never seen on this scale before, made worse as Winston Churchill put it in his famous speech, "more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science".
H.L. Mencken famously said about Democracy: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
I have lately felt that is far more applicable to adherents all over the world of Communist Chinese styled Socialism and Communism. Those who clamor for it may get it good and hard.
So, when I see these prisoners, these political prisoners, these prisoners being held against the principles of our Constitution in a gulag of American making, I am filled with dread. The corruption, lawlessness, and profligate excess of those we ostensibly elected to govern us, brings to mind the arc of history as outlined in Edward Gibbons' famous work " The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and we are on that arc.
Well.
That is tonight, in the dark of night, when spirits sometimes ebb the lowest.
Tomorrow the sun will rise, and I will feel there is still hope. But right now, seeing how we are creeping towards a world where the thumb of tyrannical governments pressing on their citizens will make the thumb of the Soviets and East Germans seem gentle and clumsy by comparison.
And I pray to God that I am wrong and alarmist. But in my heart, it doesn't feel that way.