Are ya ready for an all-American Reichstag fire?

"History repeats itself!" is bunk. It's an aphorism loosely based on an aphorism commonly attributed to George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 

Strictly speaking, history cannot repeat itself exactly, because there can never be an exactly similar situation involving exactly the same people in exactly the same place. And even if that could be so, you can't predict that the same people would act/react in exactly the same way a second time. Human beings are, if nothing else, unpredictable. 

The most we can say, then, is that certain events occurring now, or which may occur in the future, put us in mind of events that have occurred before, and prompt us to speculate that the outcomes might be similar. That's all. 

So it is with the dire warnings with which the FBI, the Dumbocrats and the lickspittle controlled media are assaulting us every bloody minute, regarding the possibility of armed protests on the occasion of Sleepy Joe Biden's almost-secret inauguration on January 20th. 

White nationalists, Trump supporters and neo-Nazis [they tell us] are preparing for bloody insurrection, not just in Washington DC but in all 50 state capitals! 

 Here's a sample of the steaming load of bullshit being shovelled out by the likes of Business Insider: "Biden's inauguration rehearsal has been postponed because of security threats, report says". And how about this, from the TDS sufferers at Yahoo!: "'Cowboys for Trump' leader plans to bring guns to DC on the day of Biden's inauguration".

Scary, isn't it? Imagine that guy -- Couy Griffin, a New Mexico county commissioner and founder of Cowboys for Trump -- bringing "multiple guns" to Washington! He'll even have one on the front seat of his car [Yahoo! sez], while reminding us that DC law prohibits keeping a firearm in the passenger compartment of a vehicle and has tight restrictions on guns in the capital! The horror! The horror!

I have yet to hear weather-forecast-like phrases such as "the mother of all protests" or "rebelliomageddon", but clearly the lamestream media are whipping up hysteria! 

Why? I am reminded [Coming to the point at last! Ed.] of the Reichstag fire of 1933. For those who don't remember the history of Germany and WWII, the fire was an arson attack on the building housing the Reichstag, the German parliament, four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. 

The Nazis blamed the fire on Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, saying it was the work of Communist agitators. The government used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, and so it became pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

After searching the still-smoldering building, die Polizei arrested Mhr Van der Lubbe, who was found inside, along with four Communist leaders. Within hours, Chancellor Hitler urged President von Hindenburg to issue an "emergency decree" to suspend civil liberties and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communist Party of Germany. The Reichstag Fire Decree was passed the following day.

After the decree was issued, the government instituted mass arrests of Communists, including all of the Communist Party's parliamentary delegates. With their bitter rivals gone and their seats empty, the Nazi Party went from having a plurality to a majority, thus enabling Hitler to consolidate his power. 

Although the Nazis accused the Comintern (Communist International) of the act, many historians now believe, based on archival evidence, that the arson had been planned and ordered by the Nazis as a false flag operation, intended to make absolute their hold on power. Which it did.

Getting back to the events planned for next week, we have already seen evidence that some of the protesters urging the occupation of the Capitol building were actually Antifa and anarchists who had infiltrated the ranks of Trump supporters. There is also the suggestion that some law enforcement personnel didn't try very hard to stop the protesters from running amok. 

Could the events of January 6th be repeated two weeks later? Who knows? History doesn't repeat itself... does it?

Francis Fukuyama: unassimilated immigrants pose threat to liberalism

Meet Dr Francis Fukuyama, one of the world's most celebrated political scientists. He's the author of The Origins of Political Order, Political Order and Political Decay, and The End of History and the Last Man. In that now-famous work, he argued if you imagined history as the process by which liberal institutions -- representative government, free markets, and consumerist culture -- become universal, it might be possible to say that history had reached its goal.

Last summer, Dr Fukuyama, "postponed" the end of history, saying that liberalism was not triumphant after all, but threatened by the desire of identity groups for recognition. Click here to read all about his remarkable volte-face in "Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History" (New Yorker, 27/8/18). [How often is it that Walt recommends an article from the New Yorker?! Ed.]

Dr Fukuyama's name came up again today in an article by the Toronto Sun's Anthony Furey, who quotes liberally [Careful. Ed.] from "Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy", the essay the good doctor wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, which inspired the New Yorker article.

Since Mr Furey commends the article to Canuckistan's Minister of Refugees, Immigration and Citizenship -- Somali-born Muslim Ahmed Hussen -- I trust he (Mr Furey) won't mind if I repost the three quotes he selected, just in case Mr Hussen is a reader of WWW.

The real debate [Dr Fukuyama wrote] should...be about the best strategies for assimilating immigrants into a country’s creedal national identity. Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy diversity to any society; poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state and in some cases constitute security threats.

Assimilation into a dominant culture becomes much harder as the numbers of immigrants rise relative to the native population. As immigrant communities reach a certain scale, they tend to become self-sufficient and no longer need connections to groups outside themselves.

Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure.

As Mr Furey points out, "Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy", isn't entirely about integration, nor is it a "safe space for right-wing views", with its very critical takes on President Trump's policies. All the more reason why it should be read by Mr Hussen and all those liberals who think that "carefully controlled" immigration is the key to growing Western economies and that "diversity is our strength".

VIDEOS (2): How leftie political correctness ruined "Star Wars"

Dave Sussman and Bill Whittle discuss how Hollywood has rewritten crucial scenes in Star Wars to accommodate a new politically correct, inclusive, diverse, yada yada yada view of heroes and society, and how it enrages a large swath of millennials. Mr Whittle explains the "walk away" strategy, and how it can be used to weaken the Democratic Party and win the culture war.

Don't miss Bill's riff, around the 17 minute mark, on how Star Wars is (and was intended to be) a religion for a post-Christian world.



As someone who liked the first three Star Wars movies (Parts IV, V and VI), disliked the next three and was so put off by the trailers for those that followed that I didn't even see them, I give this two thumbs up.

Footnote (Footvideo?): Did Han Solo shoot first? Ed. found Bill Whittle's earlier (2012) video in which he discusses the issue. Here it is.



Now I understand -- thanks Bill! -- why there hasn't been a movie made in the last five years that I've found worth seeing. American movies stink! Hollywood stinks! Political correctness and leftist ideology stink! A pox on the lot of them!

Another footnote: If you enjoyed listening to Bill Whittle demolish Star Wars and American cinema, you'll surely get a chuckle out of "Story Time: Bill Reads a Hillary Clinton Children's Book!" Posted in February 2016, it wasn't the only reason why Hellery lost the election, but I'm sure it helped! LMAO!

Why America must (not?) save the world from ISIS

Not long after posting "US invasion of Syria begins; Walt predicts the outcome", I found on a shelf of my lower level library a dog-eared copy of The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America, by Arthur Herzog (Simon & Schuster, 1973). In the chapter headed "Historical Analogies", the author warns us to beware of dubious lessons supposedly learned from history which lead us -- our political and military leaders -- to make bad decisions for the present and future.

Historical analogies, Mr. Herzog writes, can be reduced to what Aristotle called "the fallacy of accident", which arises when you take an accidental property for an essential one. He gives the example of Vietnam, which General Matthew B. Ridgway thought was a second Korea. "And so did General Mark W. Clark, who learned from Korea, 'The sure way to maintain the peace is to be strong militarily and unafraid politically, and to let the enemy know that we will use that strength to maintain the security of the United States.'

"Eugene V. Rostow, of the Yale Law School, remembered the Soviet-Finnish conflict before World War II, and claimed that if the United States did not maintain its position of dominance in Southeast Asia it would be reduced to the status of Finland -- subject to Russian will.

"Secretary of State Dean Rusk continually compared Vietnam to Munich. An American withdrawal, he said, would lead to further aggression like Hitler's. Lyndon Johnson himself compared North Vietnam's actions to those of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and believed that the American Actions in Vietnam would be justified on the same grounds as our involvement in World War II."

Mr. Herzog was writing in 1973, before the Paranoid States of America lost the first war in its history. That's if you ignore the War of 1812 and the Korean War, both of which can be said with charity to have been fought to a draw. No such thing can be said about Vietnam. It was a stinging defeat for the USA, the soi-disant greatest military power in the world, inflicted by a smaller gang of ill-equipped but super-motivated Asian peasants.

Did the leaders of America learn anything from the egregious error that was Vietnam? Apparently not. Every president from Bush the Elder right down to POTUS has fallen into the same logical trap, drawing the wrong conclusion -- that the USA is responsible for the security and freedom of the whole world -- from the lessons of history. And so America is doomed to learn the same lessons once again.

Will America never learn? The persistence of bad foreign policy

Almost 237 years ago the United States of America started life through an armed rebellion against established authority -- the British monarchy -- which established a revolutionary new model of government "of the people, by the people and for the people". That remains a great and noble goal, and the fact that it has yet to be fully realized hasn't stopped US governments from trying to impose their model on the rest of the world.

Over the course of the last two centuries, successive administrations have adopted a policy of forcing other countries to adopt the US model, sometimes by persuasion and sometimes by conquest. Walt has a little list.

In 1812 the US Congress thought Canadians could hardly wait to join the new republic. Taking Canada from the British would be "merely a matter of marching", said Jefferson. Two years later, with the White House burned and the country nearly broke, Congress changed its mind.

The Mexican Invasion of the mid-19th century succeeded in annexing to the USA a large chunk of the southwest. For some reason, people from further south keep coming into "New Mexico" and neighbouring states, wanting to keep their language, customs and religion. Some folks, especially in Arizona, think it might be better to give the territory back to the Mexicans.

Then came the War Between the States, in which some states had the temerity to assert the right to leave the Union, a right which they thought had been guaranteed by the Constitution. They learned that once you're in the Hotel America, "you can check out, but you can never leave".

Having got that nasty business out of the way, and realizing that the Hispanics were a soft target, the USA embarked in 1898 on a truly imperial war against Spain. The net gain was a handful of tropical paradises (?) --- Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines -- but hey, America was now a colonial power, just like Britain! The economic and other benefits were, errr, dubious.

What about the World Wars, I hear you ask. [Yes, what about the World Wars? Ed.] Is Walt saying the USA should have stayed out of the War to End All Wars...and the second War to End All Wars? Didn't America save the world for democracy? Well... No matter how many John Wayne movies you watched, America didn't bail out the Allies singlehandedly. And if the USA had come into the wars at the beginning rather than during the second act, the other colonial powers might have been accomplished faster and at considerably less economic and human cost.

But, you might argue, that's precisely why the USA was so quick to jump into Korea. Sorry, wrong again. Omar Bradley called the Korean War "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy". One lesson that might have been learned (but wasn't) is that if you're going to fight, use both hands!

Douglas MacArthur wanted to cross the Yalu and invade Communist China, possibly dropping the Big One for a quick and decisive victory. But "wiser men" in the Truman administration wouldn't let him, for fear of provoking a war with the Soviet Union, for which China was merely a proxy.

Apparently they didn't consider the possibility that the USSR wasn't as strong as it appeared, and might well have been defeated, sparing the world the 40 years of cold war that followed the Korean truce. Even the willingness to call it a draw may now be regarded as a mistake, for the war, which technically never ended, threatens to go ballistic -- literally -- at any moment.

Which brings us to Vietnam, which Pentagon types will tell you is the first war the US ever lost. (This ignores the War of 1812, but Washington's memory is short.) In The Rise of the Chinese Republic (McGraw-Hill, 1989) American historian Edwin P. Hoyt says:

The Americans did not learn fast. It took them still another war in Asia [Vietnam] to learn that what American leaders had said many years ago was true. No statesman with a lick of sense will let the country get involved in a land war in Asia.

There was another lesson that the Americans May not even yet have learned: Anyone who interferes in an indigenous revolution anywhere is a fool, and such interference is bound to fail. In China and in Vietnam the Americans tried to interfere. These actions cost them billions of dollars and far too many lives, and ultimately the revolutions succeeded in the face of American interference.

Mr. Hoyt wrote that in 1989. Since then we've had the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan and (sort of) Libya. These theatres of war are all in Asia, although not the part Hoyt was thinking of. And they're all part of the Muslim world. Walt predicts that 100 years from now historians will lump them all together as "the Middle Eastern War" or "the Great War Against Islam". ("Crusades" has already been used.)

And still the USA cannot or will not learn. Now the Prez -- no Muslim he? -- is making noises (again) about taking action (nature unspecified) in Syria to overthrow a tyrannical dictator, make it safe for democracy, yada yada yada. Haven't we seen this movie before? (Canadians need not feel all smug and superior. "Call me Steve" Harper and his bumboy Baird are very vocal in their willingness to hold America's coat...at least until Uncle Sam's nose bleeds.)

Edwin Hoyt again:
The United States has run out of gas politically and philosophically. Any nation that converts from a dynamic economy to a service economy...finds that it loses that precious quality of initiative. The American government is still posturing itself in the world as the defender of the status quo. It is hard to consider a less dynamic and less appealing posture for a nation that once boasted of its revolutionary spirit.

Words of wisdom from Thomas Jefferson

About a year ago, on a visit to Washington DC, Walt spent some time in the Library of Congress. I wanted to see if their copy of the Gutenberg Bible was better than mine, and sure enough, it is. Mine has marginal notes in it, written by someone named Luther. But I digress...

Within the Library of Congress building is the library of Thomas Jefferson. Believe it or not, this collection -- now on permanent exhibition -- is only about a third of the 6487 volumes purchased from President Jefferson following the British burning of the Library of Congress in 1814. [Don't mention the War of 1812! Ed.] Over 4000 books and manuscripts were lost in a second fire in 1851.

Jefferson's library was always critically important to him. Books provided the little-travelled president with a broader knowledge of the contemporary and ancient worlds than most of his contemporaries enjoyed, despite broader personal experience.

Jefferson was a voracious reader, and developed a deep understanding of the nature of God and man, of God's laws and previous failed or flawed attempts by men to govern themselves. He himself wrote extensively on matters of history and politics. Agent 6 has sent along a few select quotes from one of America's greatest founding fathers.

• When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
• Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
• It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
• I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
• My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government
• No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
• The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
• The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
• To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Click here to read John Petrie's collection of Thomas Jefferson quotes on politics, government, philosophy, religion, and life in general -- "a voice from the past to lead us in the future".

War of 1812: film at 9!

Listen up, history buffs! PBS is airing a terrific new made-for-TV film on the War of 1812, tonight at 9 p.m. EDT.

Since the teaching of our own history is sadly neglected in American and Canadian schools these days, Walt will give you a quick recap. At the beginning of the second decade of the 19th century, the hated British (and others) were engaging Napoleon in Europe, and getting the worst of it. The Congress of the new(ish) United States of America reckoned that it would be a good time to finish what they started in 1776, and drive the British out of Canada. Doing so would only be "a matter of marching", it was said.

Well sir, American soldiers clashed with British, Canadian and Indian ["First Nations", surely! Ed.] forces to ultimately shape the geography and the identity of eastern North America as it is known today. In other words, the American invasion of Canada failed. Thus the War of 1812 became the first war the USA lost ["failed to win", surely! Ed.] until Vietnam.

Now PBS is attempting to do for the War of 1812 what Ken Burns' great series did for the Civil War. The lead station behind their new film, The War of 1812, which airs tonight is Buffalo's WNED-TV, which is only natural because the main part of the war was fought on the Niagara Frontier and Lakes Erie and Ontario.

Said Donald Boswell, WNED's president, "We have proudly recreated the War of 1812 for both nations. This timely examination of a shared history allows us to celebrate our past together, and renew the bond of our present and future as national neighbours." Rumours of Mr. Boswell's bid for the presidensity of the USA are unconfirmed as of this morning.

Historical figures depicted in the film include Tecumseh, William Henry Harrison and President James Madison, along with a Canadian icons such as General Sir Isaac Brock and, of course, Laura Secord.

The film also recounts dramatic human stories of ordinary citizens, the political alliances of the various Native American ["First Nations", surely! Ed.] nations and the African-American slaves who reached for their freedom by fighting for the British. [It's not Black History Month, but if there's a hotbed of political correctness in the USA, it's PBS! Ed.]

All kidding aside, it's an excellent piece of work. Back in July, Walt was privileged to see a segment of it, dealing with the assault on Fort Erie, and found it very well done, indeed.

The War of 1812 airs on PBS stations on Monday, October 10th -- that's tonight! -- at 9 p.m. EDT. Click here for more information and a video trailer.

Footnote: As far as anyone knows, Laura Secord never made a candy in her life. When an American company bought a small Canadian candy-making concern about a century later, they put Laura's name on the new outfit because it sounded good!

Another footnote: Click here to read "War of 1812 battles a nation's collective amnesia", good column by Konrad Yakabuski from today's Globe and Mail. Here's an excerpt:
Historians consider the war a “draw” because the Treaty of Ghent that ended it entrenched the status quo ante bellum. But the truth is, the Americans sought to engulf us; instead they bankrupted their own country (the United States defaulted on its debt) without gaining an inch of territory. That doesn’t sound like a draw.