Time marches on, and history documents the journey. To the scale of history, those momentous moments that change history’s course come and go with great rapidity. Of course to we mere mortals the flow of time seems frequently slow, far away and uneventful. Yet even we mortals can perceive, when we are fully attuned, the presence of great and important moments in times long march. As American’s look back and remember the terrible events of September 11th, 2001, many will see that day as a course changing event in history. They will be wrong.
While America gazes back upon the warning sign that was “9-11-01” the message is missed - - “Crossroads approaching.” While the destruction on “9-11-01” was horrible to watch and tragic in its personal impact and aftermath, the events of that day only draw attention to the approaching moment of great historic change. For America the hindsight of history is not the luxury of the moment; the crossroads of history must be approached with a full-on honest appraisal of the gathering forces and with a foundation in great and transcending principles that are traditionally American.
We are surely approaching that moment, decisions are being made, and our course is being set. Are we making the right choices? Are we reading current events correctly? Will our decisions yield the results we desire as a nation?
Once upon a crossroads, Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler over the Czechoslovakian crisis with a joint declaration ensuring in his mind “peace for our time.” Winston Churchill, having lost the argument for a strong response to Hitler, stated in his memoirs “ No case of this kind can be judged apart from its circumstances. The facts may be unknown at the time, and estimates of them must be largely guesswork, colored by the general feelings and aims of whoever is trying to pronounce…There is however one helpful guide namely for a nation to keep its word…This guide is called Honour…” and the moment came “…when Honour pointed the path to duty.”
At another crossroads, “By September the Chinese had decided that they must intervene if the Americans were bent on the destruction of the North Korean government, and from Tokyo General MacArthur trumpeted that message…” “Message after message was sent to the West by Premier Zhou Enlai…All were ignored. And, not understanding Chinese concerns, the Americans forged on to what seemed to be an inevitable victory, blind to all in their scent of quick victory and the revamping of East Asia in the mold they wished to create…” On October 25th, 1950, MacArthur’s forces approached the Yalu River and were attacked; the forces they faced were Chinese. (Edwin Hoyt “The Day the Chinese Attacked”)
These two events, offered through the beauty of hindsight define moments in history that shaped our world and nation. In our current approach to the “crossroads” will we utilize any lessons learned or will history show us the better path not followed. Surely patience and peace do not ensure the absence of war, but neither will the sharp reliance on force always lead to the quick and easy victory.
Today it appears that our nation’s leaders grapple with these same two contrasting choices. Unfortunately the reality is that the choice has been made and, apart from the careful political maneuverings, war with Iraq is on the fast track. While conservative talking heads spin the war message the liberal media and talking heads spin the “cautionary” approach. The chilling message being drowned by all this maneuvering for power politics are the voices of conservatives raising the flag of caution about a full frontal pre-emptive war. The one inescapable conclusion is that this momentous decision has been made in a vacuum.
If there is one thing that history teaches time and again it is that the easy answer, the simple path, never is. The source of our nation’s troubles are far bigger than a single nation-state in the Middle East, and require an answer far too hard for our current crop of political elites to make. The solution requires a rejection of a newly attached parasitic philosophy and a debunking of our feel good consumer society.
What can we with a great degree of certainty expect to find at the crossroads ahead?
We can expect a realization that the weapon delivery system of this century will be the immigrant. And not just delivering the personally lethal weapons of the September 11th immigrant terrorist on those doomed flights, but lethal to the very values that make this nation the United States. Assimilation must be given time to work. Multiculturalism sounds piously good on paper, but in reality does not work when the flood of humanity overflows the dams of the American value system.
We can expect the realization that militant Islam is the danger we face and not a dictator that has only attacked two of his Muslim neighbors in the last twenty years. It is militant Islam that conceives of sending mere children to act as human minesweepers and to blow themselves apart running across mine fields as Iranian children did in the Iran-Iraq war. It is militant Islam that locks mere children inside a burning building because in their haste to flee to safety these girls forgot their veils. And it is militant Islam that organizes “schools” to teach hatred of the infidels. At the crossroads we will begin to see that militant Islam has taken the Muslim faith captive and must be removed root and branch.
We can expect the realization that Orwell was a genius foreseeing the evolving thought control of a philosophy we now laughingly call Political Correctness. But we will learn that it is not the government that first forces a thought control philosophy on the people, but that it is the philosophy itself that parasitically grows and gains control of the host government.
And we can expect to find that American lives and American interests are best preserved by our nation being in the world but not of the world. As President Ronald Reagan observed, America is at her best as a shining city set on a hill for the world to see and to emulate, and not by eviscerating her industries in a vain attempt to create a “global” American economy for the enrichment of the few on the sacrifice of the many.
At the crossroads we can expect to find all of these things and maybe more, but we need to find them by facing the future and meeting it with an open mind and a grasp of the truth. Otherwise we will find these things from the vantage point of the hindsight that history affords us, too late for so many.
At this writing with an attack on Iraq looming, multicultural “remembrances” of “9-11-01” filling the airwaves, and immigration so uncontrolled that the word itself has become a running joke…as we look behind us to the past and not with a full forward view for the future, as we enter the crossroads ahead expect a severe case of whiplash.
Glenn R. Jackson is Chairman of the American Reformation Project, former State Chairman for Buchanan Reform and former state Chairman of the Georgia Freedom Party. Glenn also served on the Executive Committee of the Reform Party USA. Glenn holds an MA in Philosophy from Georgia State University in Atlanta.
© Glenn R. Jackson