Can’t Count on Luck

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

WILLIAM KRISTOL

Feb 16, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 22

 

Every couple of generations, the West gets lucky. The civilizational collapse of the 1930s, in reaction to the Great War and then the Great Depression, could well have led to an unbelievably brutal world dominated for decades by tyrannical communism, barbaric National Socialism, and fanatical Japanese militarism. Winston Churchill wasn’t exaggerating in June 1940 when he said that if Britain, which then stood virtually alone, failed, “The whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

 

(Snip)

 

But as T. S. Eliot remarked, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” Everyone with eyes to see can see that the gained causes of 1945 and 1989 have been slipping away. At home, decadence is flourishing—if decadence can be said to flourish. Abroad, fanatical versions of both Sunni and Shia Islam are on the march, and garden variety authoritarianism—not less dangerous for being commonplace in world history—is thriving. Neither appears to be receding before or being tamed by the globalization of commerce and investment. It is true that none of today’s particular threats approaches the danger of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union—but the Roman Empire fell to barbarism and decadence, not to a great power or a formidable ideology. A world of chaos and brutality, of the proliferation of terror and weapons of mass destruction, seems a not-too-remote possibility for the not-too-distant future.

 

It’s one we’re certainly doing as much as possible to ignore, and as little as possible to prevent. Has there ever been a more striking display in our politics today of a fundamental lack of seriousness and deep failure of resolve?

 

The foreign policy elites are more exercised about a speech by the Israeli prime minister than by an Iranian nuclear bomb. Presidential candidates squabble over vaccines. Prominent journalists invent war stories. Political leaders focus on trivialities. Many conservatives show a remarkable ability to miss the forests—rebuilding our defenses, stopping Iran and ISIS, repealing and replacing Obamacare, and saving the Constitution—while obsessing over the trees—minor policy adjustments, conservative crotchets, and internecine squabbles.

 

(Snip)

[nickydog]

These are scary times.

[Valin]

These are scary times.

 

 

These are always scary times. Although these are a bit more scarier than others.