Unless You Remember History, You Are Bound To Repeat It.

History: Not for the weak of heart

Posted on May 23, 2016 by USCCA

I haven’t completely lost faith, confidence and trust in our politicians, bureaucrats or the system that puts them in office, but it is slipping. Our problems are not just the wholesale pandering of our CEO, B. Hussein Obama, to the interests of the international Muslim and Mexican mafias. Not just the inability of the (calling like I see it) next CEO, Bill’s Girl Clinton, to shake her small town greed. Our problems begin just above the local level with bought-and-sold “leaders” who refuse to act in the interest of America and its citizens.

Bill’s Girl has acknowledged taking millions from New York financiers for “speaking fees.” She explained, through various logical contortions, that her voice helped heal wounds from the 9/11 (Muslim) attacks. All of which presumes that Bill’s Girl has an original thought, one that anyone in his or her right mind would pay to hear. The money is simply private graft, payments for favors when she becomes America’s next CEO. Why, taking millions from the firms who nearly destroyed America just eight years ago was really a humanitarian gesture!

This is the same Bill’s Girl whose husband, as CEO of America, abandoned the people of Somalia. Abandoned the people of Haiti. Abandoned the people of Rwanda. Abandoned Arkansas. Abandoned the principled citizens of America.

So where, you might ask, did CEO Bill intervene with power (other than the pants of girlfriends)? To save Bosnian Muslims from Serbian Christians.

At nearly the same time, Assistant CEO John Kerry (a Yaley who married Heinz ketchup) said the war in Syria was the worst human disaster since World War II, proving he knows nothing about history. Nothing about the million who died in Vietnam; the millions murdered in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Soviet Union; the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Mexico, Colombia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Brazil and Guatemala; the additional hundreds of thousands tortured to death in Nigeria, Liberia, Ethiopia and Somalia. It suggests that he cannot imagine what is actually happening in any Muslim nation not ruled by an iron fist with a great PR machine. That being a pampered, self-centered Yale snot (and liar about his Vietnam experience) just isn’t enough.

The above politicians have never quite grown into a sense of their place in history. Hence, they exaggerate their importance, the inevitability of their personal ideas, their righteous self-worth. And that’s why concealed carry is a good start… but is no longer enough.

Spanish writer and philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

History recommends that I have extra boxes of .40 S&W for my Walther PPS and history is why I have begun shopping for a rifle. When the ultimate riots come to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas and Minneapolis and spread outward in concentric circles into my neighborhood, I plan to be prepared. When the Muslim Mafia or Mexican drug gangs sneak through the alleyways, the .40 should be protection… if Bill’s Girl has not co-opted the police and National Guard into her crusade to ruin the American promise. But in the streets of my neighborhood, in the adjacent woods and fields, the rifle will be the more effective tool.

The ideal rifle might be a carbine chambered in .40 so that I need not carry two kinds of ammo. Kel-Tec’s SUB-2000, for example, is a compact 4-pound rifle chambered in either 9mm Luger or .40 S&W. I’ll have to experiment to see if it takes the Walther magazine (I’m thinking it doesn’t.), but it does take some Glock, S&W, Beretta, and SIG Sauer magazines. The SUB-2000 has a foldable 16-inch barrel, push-bolt safety and aperture sight adjustable for windage and elevation. And it’s only about $500, which is a lot of outreach — accuracy at 3-4 times that of a pistol — for a very reasonable price.

On the other hand, a rifle in popular .223 will give me much better down-the-avenue ballistics, greater striking power at distance, because I would rather take on kaffiyeh-wearing thugs at sniper range than the up close and personal distance of a .40 S&W cartridge.

Understand history or repeat it. Because I have a knowledge of history, I’m shopping for a rifle to support my concealed carry pistol. A rifle to reach out, perhaps in the same caliber, because it gives me greater accuracy within the distances I can reliably shoot in the neighborhood when the gang of turbaned Obama-Clinton thugs comes calling.

Our political elites preach that we, the common people, are clinging to God and guns for dear life. They call us, variously, racists, ignorant rednecks, reactionary hillbillies, right wing extremists and worse. They no longer represent us, although they continue to levy taxes. We have seen our government evolve into a macabre, threatening machine that mocks our values, our sense of a free and dynamic society, our vision of liberty. And that’s why I’m buying a rifle to support my handgun, because I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m a historian.

The Argument For The US Fighting In The Middle East. Do You Agree?

HOW DO YOU FIGHT A HUNDRED YEARS' WAR?

OCTOBER 13, 2014 · 12:00 AM

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Author(s):  Jonathan S. Tobin
Source:  Commentary.     Article date: October 6th, 2014

Most Americans are understandably reluctant to send troops back into Iraq let alone Syria. But, given the fact that, as Max Boot noted earlier today, bombing isn’t stopping the ISIS terrorists from making progress toward their initial goal of taking over either or both countries, more U.S. action is likely to follow. That has provoked the usual anti-war chorus on the left to proclaim that all American action is ultimately futile. But as worthless as many of those arguments may be, it is important to address the more substantive of these complaints head on and explain why it is that Americans are fated, like it or not, to be drawn into conflicts with radical Islamists now and in the years to come.

In Saturday’s Washington Post, historian and former soldier Andrew Bacevich wrote to say that it didn’t matter whether the battle with ISIS was won or not. By his count, the U.S. had invaded, occupied, or bombed 14 Islamic countries in the last 35 years and that this latest chapter of a long-running war wasn’t likely to end any more satisfactorily than any of the others. To summarize Bacevich’s thesis, he thinks each successive U.S. intervention has only made things worse than its predecessors and that the end result is as futile as American military efforts in Vietnam, a telling analogy as it betrays his frame of reference about these conflicts.

What does Bacevich advise to do instead of attacking ISIS? On that point, he’s a bit hazy other than to imply that staying out will be less messy than going in. Moreover, he believes that since the U.S. is no longer as dependent on Middle Eastern oil, there’s no real need to fuss about the future of the region, a point that also betrays his cynical and somewhat dated echo of the original discredited arguments about the reason the U.S. went into Iraq in 2003.

Bacevich, who lost a son in Iraq, has a right to feel bitter about that conflict but though George Will praised his piece yesterday on Fox News Sunday, his plea for isolationism offers us little that is useful in untangling the current conflict or about the options the U.S. currently faces in Iraq and Syria.

Let’s start by noting that Bacevich’s list of 14 Islamic countries attacked by the U.S. is more than a bit misleading. Including Kosovo, a conflict in which NATO mercilessly bombed the Serbian Christian enemies of Kosovo Muslims, in this roster of invasions is absurd. The whole point of that effort was to defend Muslims and to ultimately aid their creation of another Muslim state at the expense of their neighbors who had themselves misbehaved. But he’s right that Americans have gotten little satisfaction out of any of our encounters in the other 13 nations.

Yet his idea that the U.S. is only making the problem worse is looking at the problem from the wrong perspective.

Radical Islamists do use American actions as a recruiting tool, but to claim that their atrocities or campaigns are primarily a reaction to the West rather than something that reflects the desperate state of their own political culture is fundamentally mistaken. Conflicts with Iran or Libya didn’t create the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Rather the growth of these radical movements is a reflection of the dire state of the Islamic world as it attempts to confront modernity and instead seeks a solution in the old formula of jihad and world domination.

It is comforting to think that the West can simply ignore the war being waged on it by a host of ever-changing Islamist groups whose names change but whose methods are consistently barbarous and whose goals are uncompromising. But every time we do, whether in the ’90s when al-Qaeda’s rise was considered insignificant or during an Obama administration that pretended it could take credit for “ending” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or staying out Syria, we end up paying a price.

Bacevich is right to note that the conflict against ISIS won’t be easy. Nor will we be able to conclude it with victory parades the way Americans prefer to end wars. Instead, it will require a long-term commitment that recognizes that our foes view this as a hundred years’ war and not a neat little battle that can be quickly won and then forgotten.

The Islamists aren’t looking to behead Westerners, take over Arab countries, and then extend their terror to Americans and our allies because we stumbled into Iraq or bombed Libya in the distant past. Nor is it about our supposed sins in Iran in the 1950s or any other oft-repeated tale of Islamic woe. Rather, it is a function of a basic conflict between Islamist belief and the West and those Muslims who prefer peace and coexistence to Sharia law and endless war.

The call to retreat from the Middle East is advice that President Obama and the American people would do well to ignore. Sooner or later, if we stay out of the conflict with ISIS, that group or those that ultimately replace it will bring their war to America. Contrary to Bacevich and Will, our choice is not whether or not to fight Islamists but where we will fight them. It is simply common sense to do so on their home turf and at a point when Western military superiority can be brought to bear on the group and their allies before they become even more dangerous. The outcome of each battle in this new hundred years’ war won’t be satisfying, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary to fight. The enemy will make sure to remind us that giving up isn’t an option.