A Hard Rain Is Going to Fall

[Geee]

National Review:

World events seem relatively calm, but repeated appeasement has built up pressure across the globe, and someone has to be there when crisis erupts.

This summer, President Obama was often golfing. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were promising to let the world be. The end of summer seemed sleepy, the world relatively calm.

The summer of 1914 in Europe also seemed quiet. But on July 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip with help from his accomplices, fellow Serbian separatists. That isolated act sparked World War I.

 

In the summer of 1939, most observers thought Adolf Hitler was finally through with his serial bullying. Appeasement supposedly had satiated his once enormous territorial appetites. But on September 1, Nazi Germany unexpectedly invaded Poland and touched off World War II, which consumed some 60 million lives.

 

Wars often seem to come out of nowhere, as unlikely events ignite long-simmering disputes into global conflagrations.

 

The instigators often are weaker attackers who foolishly assume that more powerful nations wish peace at any cost, and so will not react to opportunistic aggression.

 

Unfortunately, our late-summer calm of 2016 has masked a lot of festering tensions that are now coming to a head — largely due to disengagement by a supposedly tired United States.

 

In contrast, war, unlike individual states, does not sleep.

 

[Valin]

@Geee

America's Versailles Set
Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, September 21, 2016

During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—the Hameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.

The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?

The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.

(Snip)

There’s a key difference between today’s elites and those of the Ancien Régime—and it has nothing to do with money or privilege. Instead, Marie Antoinette’s bunch knew that their periodic stints as peasants were farcical, and, as a result, they did not take themselves too seriously. In contrast, our grim visitors to the American Hameau are a far angrier lot. They are convinced that a few cheap slurs or fuming public gestures will, for a moment or two, make them one with the people—unaware that they are as ridiculous as the French royals, but with far less Gallic style and panache.

[nickydog]

Two different, equally well-written VDH articles. One makes my heart pound in dread, and the other makes me angry, And there's nothing I can do about either one.

[Draggingtree]

September 24, 2016

Thread below the Gardening Thread: VDH on Today's Elites [KT] —Open Blogger

 

Serving your mid-day open thread needs

 

 

 

Why are we so angry at today's elites? Earlier in the month, Victor Davis Hanson chose four characteristics of today's elites that make us hot under the collar. This is the fourth:

. . . the people feel that elites do not follow the laws.

Do you agree with his assessment? Can you think of other worrisome characteristics of today's elites?

 

 

 

How are today's elites different from those of, say, 1896?

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/365729.php#365729