Friday, September 2, 2016

Existential Threats

From Chronicles:
Ernest Hemingway reminded us of how nations escape quagmires of debt: "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."

"Debauching the currency," Lenin's depiction, is the way we will probably destroy the debt monster. Hemingway's second option, war, appears to be the preferred option of the war chiefs of the Beltway's think-tank archipelago, who see in any Putin move in the Baltic or Black Sea casus belli.

What our Cold War leaders kept ever in mind, and our War Party scribblers never learned, is the lesson British historian A. J. P. Taylor discovered from studying the Thirty Years War of 1914-1945:

"Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one."

Another existential threat, if Western man still sees himself as the custodian of the world's greatest civilization, and one yet worth preserving, is the Third-Worldization of the West. The threat emanates from two factors: The demographic death of the native-born of all Western nations by century's end, given their fertility rates, and the seemingly endless invasion of the West from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. (Read more.)
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