When I was 21 and in college I moved back home over the summer. I found some neighbors had acquired one of those little yappy dogs that had no understanding of property rights. This obnoxious little beast followed me to my door and stood there yapping, out of range of my foot. Rocks were satisfying but the dog was so stupid it had no memory. It never learned.
Complaining to the owners did no good. They were trouble-makers, anyway, and thought the whole thing was funny. I thought about rigging up a silencer for my little .22 semi-automatic pistol and sending the monster to Dog Hell, but then decided I should be able to outsmart a dog instead of killing it. What is a dog's IQ, anyway? About 5, maybe?
Fortunately, I had just read Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, a wonderful book about Mowat's life among artic wolves. He had the same problem I did. The wolves never harmed him, in fact completely ignored him, but they did not respect his property. They got inside his tent and looked for food, right behind his back. Once a wolf peed on his tent while he was in it.
Noticing the wolves marked their boundaries, Mowat tried the same thing. After drinking several pots of tea, he marked a line a few feet inside theirs, just to see what they would do. He wrote that the wolf came to his line, looked shocked, looked at Mowat, then marked his line farther back from Mowat's. After that, there was no problem with the wolves crossing into Mowat's territory.
Following Sun Tzu's advice, in The Art of War, to know your enemy (which allows you to outsmart and defeat him), I decided Mowat was doing a wise thing. So after drinking two beers and two glasses of water, I waited until about 11 pm, then marked a Line of Death from the street to the houses in back, right along my parents' property line. While whistling the whole time.
The dog never crossed the line. Instead, he sat on his side, giving me reproachful looks. He didn't even yap at me anymore. Problem solved.
This episode not only illustrates the importance of knowing your enemy, it also points out wisdom of Robert Frost's quote that "Good fences make good neighbors." It also shows the truth of that old saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I could have fought with that dog, its owners and the police all summer, but fortunately stumbled onto a simple prevention. Indeed, a cure.
These three truths are important because they apply to the universal fact that all empires fall. They fall from two things: overextension abroad and decay from within. Part of the decay from within is from letting barbarians into the country. This is what the Romans did, and what we're doing now. I still don't know if we'll end up like the English Empires or the Roman. Only time will tell.
Many Americans don't bother to know and understand their enemies; they don't understand that good fences make good neighbors, and they forget that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Simple, universally true rules, easily memorized and easily understood.
I define a barbarian as someone who does not understand the basic rules that are necessary for a society to survive and flourish: Do not murder. Do not steal. Keep your word. The fact so many in the Third World do not follow these rules is why the Third World is the Third World. They try to blame their poverty and lack of freedom on us. They should instead look in the mirror. I've met immigrants who don't even understand these rules. Talking to them is like my trying to talk to that dog. Huh? What?
For the first time in our history, the US is invading other countries while simultaneously letting our enemies from those countries immigrate here. Even an inept President like Jimmy Carter had the sense to deport Iranians when Iran took Americans hostage. But I have yet to see the deportation of the few million potential Fifth Columnists in the U.S.
It's been estimated there are between six and eight million illegal immigrants in the US. The INS esimates that about 150,000 of these illegals come from the Middle East--41,000 from Pakistan, 25,000 from Iran, 20,000 from Lebanon, 11,000 from Egypt, 3300 from Syria, 3000 from Sudan, and 1000 from Iraq. And in the six months following 9-11, the State Department issued almost 200,000 visas to Middle Easterners and southern Asians, areas known to be havens for al Qaeda.
The way things are looking, the U.S. is going to invade Iraq, followed by Iran, Syria, then Eqypt. If these invasions happen, these illegal immigrants are a national security threat. Even if the invasions don't happen, they are, as far as I'm concerned, a threat anyway.
If in some parallel universe somewhere, Mexico had invaded the US, and allowed hundreds of thousands of Americans to enter Mexico -- including me -- believe me, I'd be smiling. As would all of the rest of the Americans.
I blame most of these problems on the leftism that has infected America over the past few decades. People naturally form themselves into tribes. Tribes often fight each other. Leftists believe these tribes can get along under the guise of "multiculturalism." They're wrong. There is no country in the world where this has been shown to be true.
The main things that keep these tribes from fighting are the free market and political liberty. The main thing that will cause them to fight is politically-enforced "multiculturalism."
It's obvious that some of these immigrants hate America and everything this country stands for. All 19 of the hijackers who flew the planes into the WTC and the Pentagon did it from U.S. soil. They didn't fly the planes across the Atlantic from Saudi Arabia. If they hadn't been allowed in they could not have done what they did.
What gives the federal government the right to set immigration policy for the states? For counties, for cities, for neighborhoods? How can several hundred people in Washington DC decide what is right for everyone in the country? Answer: they don't have the right, and they can't.
Richard Maybury, writer, investment advisor and Vietnam helicopter pilot (his site here) has had an enormous influence on what I think.
Where English Common Law has not taken root it's not such a good place to live. Still, in these areas there is still some law, although it came from other countries than England. About two-thirds of the world he calls Chaostan, where there is essentially no law. They never developed the belief in law as something objective that can be discovered through the use of reason. What "law" there is is based only on political power. And as Mao Tse-Tung noticed, "All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." These lands can be ruled either by a tyranny or chaos. Nothing else.
This entire area, to quote historian Bernard Lewis, is involved in a "downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression," which is caused by their lack of understanding of Natural Law, political liberty and economic freedom.
As you can easily see, the coming World War III (the "Oil, Empire and Israel War") that Dubya and his foolish advisors are hell-bent on getting us into, is in Chaostan. And this is where all of our enemy immigrants are coming from. People who have little understanding of "Do not murder," "Do not steal," and "Keep your word."
Worse, they come from a religious tradition that condones suicide/mass murder, slavery, theft and rape against those who do not belong to it, and understands not reason but military force. Should we really be allowing these people into the U.S., most especially while we are at war with their countries? What sort of insanity is that?
I am not a believer at all in playing with tarbabies. And that is exactly what this coming war is going to be -- a tarbaby. I've met people who've told me, "Well, we'll just conquer them and impose democracy and capitalism on them, just they way we did Germany and Japan." To which I answer: "Germany and Japan were countries that had long histories of civilization. They just went temporarily insane. The countries you're talking about invading have never had anything approximating political liberty and economic liberty."
Sure, we can impose our values on them. We can slaughter nearly everyone, then we can start anew. That's what happened with the Great Flood and Noah's Ark. But we don't want to do that, and we're not going to.
What I did with that little heinous beast of a dog is what we should do with our enemies. I kicked him off of my property, as we should kick them off of ours. And I kept him off. When I decided he was my enemy, I realized I had to understand him to defeat him. Just as we need to understand our enemies to defeat them (I'll take Sun Tzu over Rush Limbaugh every time).
We need to win by outsmarting them. Sometimes, outsmarting an enemy is doing the opposite of what he expects. I'm still not sure why the planes were flown into the WTC. A symbolic victory? Americans have already forgotten about it. An attempt to destroy the economy? If they believed that, they're dumber than I thought. An attempt to drag the US into an endless guerilla war on the Asian landmass? A possibility.
The way to win is to withdraw from the coming WWIII. Kick out the Fifth Column, bring the Empire home, and at home increase political liberty and economic freedom. Shut down most of the federal government. Cut taxes by 90%. Get rid of all the job-destroying regulations. Then watch the explosion in high-paying jobs. Watch workers' incomes double. Drill for our own oil and build more nuclear power plants. Unleash the power of the free market and watch the advances in all sciences. We'll get stronger and they'll get even weaker, because they'll no longer be getting our oil money. Trade with them, but have no political connections with them. It's what George Washington counseled over 200 years ago. And he was smarter than all the neo-cons put together.
That's how we outsmart them and beat them. What can they do then? Not much.
I didn't need a pound of cure -- or a pound of war -- to beat some stupid dog. What I used, literally -- and what the US can use--was about an ounce of prevention.
No comments:
Post a Comment