Sowell: Looking Back -- and Forward

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 a hundred 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.

I would love to see this man as president.

He's almost 83 years old. If he were elected in 2016, he would be 90 if he served a full term.

In his very interesting autobiography he describes how he grew up so long ago that the public schools in New York City were still good.

>>>American becomes a fascist nation de facto while remaining a liberal democracy de jure. And we launch a true Empire aimed at destroying Islam forever.<<<

Didn’t know there was a book about this, but I’ve been thinking this for a very long time, especially after hearing over and over that the American moment has come and gone.

My own take on it is that once the United States is out of the picture - let’s say from a nuclear attack - the rest of the world returns to the old ways of genocidal conflict and brutality. One of the reasons we’ve lost wars since WWII comes from the American idea of a “measured” response. I’d think that once we’re really attacked, we’ll return with the gloves coming off, and we take the step from republic to empire.

Strangely, I also think that once we do this, there is the possibility of several centuries of Pax Americana throughout the world, where we combine the urge to establish the Peace Corps with the warrior ethos of the Marines. I agree with the book that the left will not last very long in the early years of the empire, either. I get the idea that it could be like the Romans, with the chaos of the late Republic followed by Augustus, who said he was restoring the republic while establishing a dictatorship. Republican ideals remained in the provinces, though... I’d imagine the same sort of thing in my scenario.

I’ll have to check out this book. Thanks.

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