Who said the World is Changing?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 3/5/22

            It’s 1939. After invading Poland on September 1, Hitler secures a Nazi victory within a month. Declaring war on Germany two days later, Britain and France would stand by for eight months before giving any substantial help to their European neighbor. It would be a full two years later before the United States came to Poland’s aid. Meanwhile, Hitler parades down the streets of Danzig celebrating his growing power.

            It’s 1954. World War II is only 9 years in the past. I’m 10 years old and my younger brother Carlton is 7, but Carlton is just as enrapt as I whenever our sister-in-law Antonia tells us about the evil Mussolini: “He no good. He the reason we must run for shelter from Amedicans and others who bombed Italy. My Pa-pa no like him. He glad that Italy finally turn against Germany.”

            It’s 2022. Men still love power, nations are still fighting each other, and America’s president wrongfully preaches that unity is the answer to everything. Thanks to Russia and debilitated Ukraine, we have been awakened from the assumption that ground wars are passé.  We’ve watched as, in a matter of days, political winds have blown our leaders from “Follow the science” to “You may now de-mask.” We’re told by educated people that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. With apologies to Thomas Paine, “These are the times that” … make us shake our heads in disbelief.

            The nation of Russia sits at the top of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. Racially, Russians are westerners. Philosophically/politically, they are not. Like the history of so many Asian nations, Russia’s history is tyrannical, autocratic, and unspeakably disregardful of individual rights. Russia’s history is sad. For the 304 years that the Romanov family ruled, right up to the 1917 Communist takeover, approximately 90% of the Russian people were peasants. Lenin and Stalin certainly did not improve upon the Romanovs. Remember, theirs was a union of “socialist” republics.

 When poet Rudyard Kipling, who loved his adopted land of India, wrote “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” he was faulted for guess what: racism. But Kipling was referring to the vast difference in how Easterners and Westerners think. Consider: did the United States lose the Vietnam War in part because Westerners are impatient and results-oriented while Easterners are more patient and willing to stick it out? Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

As Ronald Reagan reminded us often, freedom is always one generation away from extinction. One reason for this is that too many people like goodies and ease. An abundance of college professors has pulled our youths toward leftist politics that decries capitalism and hard work and preaches income equality, free education, and a wholesale remaking of the economy to fight climate change.

Of the starving French peasants who could not buy bread, Queen Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution reportedly said, “Let them eat cake.” John Kerry, just after Putin started targeting Ukrainian citizens, stated he hoped that “after this Ukrainian conflict,” Putin would turn to fighting climate change. The more things change … the more the world’s elites reveal their scorn for the masses.

The mind of the tyrant doesn’t seem to change either. Long is the list of tyrants who have affected humanity for the worse. If the dawn of a new age of tyranny is upon us, it could well be because we just didn’t care enough about history to read a simple 10^th grade world history textbook, or to take Western Civilization seriously in college, or to read an occasional newspaper. Freedom requires a little bit of knowledge.

The former KGB colonel Putin, tagged by some as a KGB “throat slitter,” is a brute and his attack on innocent Ukrainian civilians has been brutal. When, oh when, will we hear from NATO or the European Union? European unpredictability hasn’t changed either.

Tyranny isn’t always initiated by brutes like Putin. Sometimes it comes from the globalists among us whether they wear the suit of the corporate CEO, the jeans of the tech company head, the robe of the college president, or the condescending smirk of the Hollywood actor. All enemies of freedom of speech, these players are using the ploy of the Genesis serpent and the spider who said to the fly, “Come into my parlor.” It is these tyrants, not the Putin type, who without guns wish to “transform” America.

Either way, tyranny is tyranny. It hasn’t changed.

 

Roger Hines

3/2/22