The biggest and most important events in history have a strange invisibility when they are happening, except, of course, to a few unheeded Laocoöns.
It’s hard to choose the worst from the list of crimes committed by American Conservatives against their own people, but I think that by far the most important is this one: Conservatives engineered and propelled the transfer of most of America’s wealth to the Communist Party (the one that really counts ― in Beijing).
This will prove, I think, to be the most important event of this era. Conservatives managed to transform the “fall” of Communism into its triumph. This does not come as a surprise to those few, like myself, who have always maintained that Marxism is an ultra-Conservative philosophy, and that the gangsters of the Communist Party of the PRC embody the Conservative wet-dream and utopia.
What can we expect from Democrats in Washington? Not much. Conservative orthodoxy is as firmly entrenched in that party as it is in the Republican. Witness Obama blatantly snubbing the Dalai Lama to please America’s new masters, and appearing in a rigged and censored “town meeting”, played by the rules of the the greatest mass-murderers and slave traders of history. What else can be expected? The Communist Party (seldom named, these days, for the word is taboo) owns America’s debts, and calls the tune. This was not Obama’s doing. From Nixon’s sniveling, envious, and craven crawling to Mao, to George Bush Sr. clinking champagne glasses with Deng after the slaughter at Tian’anmen, to the hordes of American corporate quislings eager to strip mine their own country and hand it to the Party, it has always been an agenda driven by Conservatism. But Obama will not buck the trend..
I am reminded of this as I read these words in a recently written history of the Persian Wars. (Tom Holland’s Persian Fire):
There sat Artaphernes, brother of the King of Kings, ruthless and shrewd. When the Athenian ambassadors had arrived at his court and begged him for an alliance against the Spartans, Artaphernes had graciously granted their request. Naturally, however, he had set conditions of his own: a gift of earth and water. The Athenian ambassadors, shrugging their shoulders, had accepted his terms. On their return to Athens, when they reported the news of the submissions they had made to Artaphernes, “they were severely censured” ― which no doubt enabled the democracy to feel good about itself. The Athenians, however, did not repudiate the alliance with Persia ― or their own submission. Better safe than sorry. Even after the great victories of 506 BC, who knew when Cleomines might be back? An insurance policy against the Spartans was no bad thing ― even if it had cost a symbolic humiliation. And what was a gift of earth and water? A gesture ― nothing more.
Or so, at any rate, it pleased the Athenians to assume.
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