Compared to Joe Biden, Donald Trump is a full-throated macho man – aggressive, determined, arrogant, and self-assured – but The Donald is a buffoon, a vaudevillian, and a showman more at home on a Las Vegas runway than Pennsylvania Avenue. His four years in the White House were a respite from the bloated sanctimony usually found there – pomp, ceremony, and hot air -but he is a one-and-done president. His Barnum & Bailey days are over, and his braggadocio, outlandishness, and side show antics things of the past.
Donald Trump was no strong man. He was a clown who happened to carry an important message, lost in the three ring circus of his presidency. In fact his act did serious damage to the conservative agenda, and those who now still support him do so because of his feisty, political incorrectness and his persistent attacks on the liberal establishment rather than for his core conservative values.
Joe Biden is the nadir of American presidential power – a weak, unsure, slow-witted, bumbling president led and kept in line by a claque of progressive shills who plan his days, write his speeches, and keep him on the message of radical social reform – the reversal of white influence, the glorification of the black man, the rise of the woman, the derogation of heterosexuality and the affirmation of gender fluidity, open borders, high taxes, unrestricted spending, and international complaisance and compromise.
Most Americans except those who have bought the progressive fantasy about the lurking Trump evil and the dire threat to American democracy have had enough of this soft and fuzzy presidency. They want a muscular democracy, one which is led by a strong man who makes no apologies for patriotism, the founding principles of the Republic, and an abiding, undiminished admiration for private enterprise and the individualism which has kept the country free, productive, and prosperous.
Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure. He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies.
Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance. He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.
There have been many successful armies in the world. Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle. They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world. At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen.
Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist and canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength. However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory. It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will.
Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy. Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.
William Tecumseh Sherman understood this lesson well and rode through South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union and fire the first shots against the North, intent on destroying every building, every crop, every monument, and every byway of the state to teach it an unforgettable lesson – the South will never rise again.
A century later Israeli Defense Forces followed the lessons of Sherman and Genghis Khan. Attacks on the State of Israel would be met not only with reprisal, but with the full might of its military power. It’s retaliation would be complete, disproportionate, and annihilating. The integrity and survival of the State of Israel would never, ever be compromised, and any action to assure its safety would be justified.
Benjamin Netanyahu has just been re-elected (11/22) to a leadership position in Israel largely because of his defiant stance against Palestinian terrorist aggression, adamant belief in the sanctity and permanence of the Jewish state, and refusal to compromise with the equally terrorist-minded Iranian mullahs.
Today’s political progressives choose to ignore Genghis Khan as an anomaly, a one-time phenomenon, a primitive throwback to the Stone Age. There are no lessons to be taken from him, they say, except for his irrelevance to our newly aware, profoundly moral, utopian age. Social progress will be assured through dialogue, diplomacy, and good will.
No amount of hopeful, wishful thinking, moral enterprise, or righteousness will purge, expunge, and relegate aggressive, territorial, self-motivated human energies. The only time in recorded human history that peace ruled the world was during the Pax Romana, a two hundred year period during which no serious armed threat was mounted against the Roman Empire.
Of course this empire, extending impressively from east to west, although only half the size of conquered Mongol territories, was secured through military victory. Compliance with Roman rule – the key to peace – was assured through brilliant civilian leadership, canny threat-and-reward diplomacy, and impressive administration and management.
For the rest of our 10,000 years, violence, brutality, conquest, and bloody empire have been the rule; and the acquisition, maintenance, and extension of power at all levels of human society is still our modus operandi.
To China, Russia, and all radical Muslim regimes, the United States is a leaderless, spineless, divided country which will never pose a threat to their ambitions. They see its obsessive focus on race, gender, ethnicity, identity, and inclusion as a hopelessly fantastical notion serving only to erode any sense of national ethos. There is no America, these critics say, only scattered thousands of special interests all vying for attention, legitimacy, and funding. Without any unifying principles around which the entire nation can assemble, America is a weak, failing country.
American conservatives in sharp contrast to Utopian progressives, accept human nature for what it is and do not shy away from its competitive aggressiveness which, they say, is the real engine of progress. Competitive free enterprise has created wealth, opportunity, and distinction not only in America but in China and India, two formerly impoverished nations which, once they had jettisoned old Soviet-style command economies quickly became world economic players.
This aggressive, territorial, self-interested human nature, conservatives say, will be the cause of future armed conflict between interest groups, regions, and nations; but that is as it has always been. Arming rather than disarming is the only reasonable, historical move in a hostile world. Wars will inevitably happen, and victory should always be the goal.
They are content with the legacy of Genghis Khan and have no issue with the Crusades, the Persian Empire, the Seleucids, or Gao. Europe, China, Japan, and India were at constant war for centuries, and while there were winners and losers, there was no moral consequence. History was simply reconfigured.
All of which is to explain conservatives’ bemusement at progressive utopianism, an ill-conceived, ahistorical, idealistic political philosophy. There is no doubt, these conservatives conclude, that the current reformist hysteria will die down, progressivism will go the way of socialism and communism, and America will return unabashedly and unashamedly to its historical legacy.
America has never been so ‘feminized’, as one political commentator noted; a country never so scornful of the characteristic maleness that relentlessly pushed the borders of the new republic westward, that opened new lands and new frontiers, engineered prosperity and strength.
Americans were unabashed fighters who saw the conquest of hostile tribes as peremptory – obstacles in the way of expansion and wealth. In this way they were no different from any European or Asian civilization where territorialism, expansionism, and acquisition were universal expressions of empire. Americans were not, as portrayed today, predatory racist animals; but simply following human nature and its instincts and following in the footsteps of history.
When Americans imagine the Oval Office, they imagine an empty chair – a vacancy, a wobbly, dependent President with no sense of sovereign leadership, neither America’s or that of its competitors. Presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia, let alone Netanyahu, Kim, the Saudi princes, or the powerful, determined, implacable Iranian clerics are, in Biden’s homey, accommodating view, only erratic leaders who will soon see the light. He forgets the lessons of Genghis Khan, Augustus Caesar, Mohammed, Xerxes, Darius the Great, and Henry II.
It will take time to shake the legacy of Joe Biden – too many of his acolytes will still be in power someplace after he is gone anxious to pursue his progressive agenda. Yet, change will come. America will return to its classic, defiant, independent roots, and no longer be considered a paper tiger, a country lost in silly, unimportant issues and unconscious of the threats around it.
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