GEORGIA: What to do now that we've revealed no trump?

Duly Noted: Slogans Distort Reality | The Brussels Journal

George Handlery's twelve comments in his "the week that was" are right on concerning the West's squeamish reaction to Russia's invasion of its sovereign neighbor Georgia ...

3. Discreetly, it is being suggested that counter-measures and reactions to Georgia are to be of a sort that will not anger Russia. Absurdly, this self-created inhibition implies that strong aggressors (real or alleged) should only be criticized with their consent.

Concurrently, this kind of squeamishness teaches the aggressor that he is to claim early, possibly before the fact, the status of the insulted party.

It creates a welcome opportunity to become confused in the case of those who do not like clear-cut cases if these result in tough going. Thereby the claimed victim status becomes protection against having to impose effective sanctions on the impostor.

[...]

5. Reacting to Russia’s handling of Georgia sheds light on another inhibition. Suggestively we are asked, “are we overreacting to the crisis?” The question is made to imply that the dangerous error of exaggeration is being committed.

No, in fact we are systematically under reacting. Here we should realize that it is exactly this manicured response that is the most dangerous one among our alternatives.

How come that the mistake which we love to make is our typical response? The case is similar to the abuse of cold medicine that combats symptoms. We search for palliatives to counter-act an event that is firmly embedded in an unfolding reality.

6. Moscow’s hegemonial action in Georgia sent a message. Indeed, the message was intended and calculated by Moscow. The question is what we will learn from the un-coded smoke signals we have seen rising.

This is classic championship chess only in the deadly game of geopolitical oneupmanship ... our opponent makes his move and slaps the switch on the game clock, only the West is not aware the clock is ticking. In this case Russia takes our non-response response as weakness and confusion.

Sadly, that is exactly what it is! The world's bleeding heart do-gooders have defeated us before we can even get our of the gate!

11. A crucial detail of the “Georgia business” tends to get lost in the selective reporting of the event.

Not accidentally, this writer is alert to the matter that is easily repressed by most of us. The reason has to do with the conditioning that [normal] backgrounds can give us.

A policy of systematic atrocities against conquered enemy populations is part of the way some countries fight their wars. Russia is one of them. Mass rape, looting, the destruction of property can uproot conquered populations that are located in disputed territory. Well-planned spontaneous indiscriminate violence, if applied with stern vigor, produces high returns. [HT: Pankukas] It might make the victims submissive, demoralized and ultimately acquiescent when the conqueror imposes his system upon them.

Woe to those whose courage fails them when a clear and present threat is pointed at their hearts!

Geopolitics, Georgia, Russia

TROOPS: Bring them home, now!

Pull Our Troops Out Now!!! | Nietzsche is Dead

HT: Pastor Boston

Let's be clear, there are many Americans who agree with the point of this post!

It's time to bring all the troops home. Sure, leave a base that will serve as an air bridge for points further east, but it's time to bring 'em home.

The war is over. Some danger may still loom, but major fighting is finished. Besides, we're spending billions per year keeping our forces over there. We've trained 'em and armed 'em. It's time their duplicitous government and weak, untested military sink or swim on their own and stop lounging under our security umbrella. Our rapid withdrawal will be just the wake up call they need to get serious and grow up.

Go there and find the quote above and read to the end ... perhaps you'll agree when you finish.

Europe, Military, War

QUESTIONS: A few must be asked and answered?

Duly Noted: The Old Russia Is Back | The Brussels Journal

So, tell me,

Where was the intel that Russia was about to invade a sovereign neighbor?

Where were British, NATO, and American spy agencies? (At Muslim sensitivity training seminars in the Barbados I suppose!)

What did China know and when did she know it?

What did A'ma-n-eeda-job know and when did he know it?

Where are the anti-American voices in the UN today? Huh?

Where are all the leftists anti-war protesters now ... has anyone seen Cindy or Murtha?

What are the goals of the reconstituted Soviets? (Clearly the two breakaways were not their strategic objectives?)

Cold War II, Georgia,
Russia, WWIII

GEORGIA: Our allies are watching!

Georgia’s Defeat and America’s Options | The Brussels Journal

The largest television audience ever may be focused on the 2008 Beijing Olympics at this time but the most important audience is focused on the West's response [HT: NER] to Russia's outrageous and taunting invasion of a sovereign neighbor.

Russia's intent is clear in the eyes of the world -- they want and are in the process of deposing a duly and democratically elected government ... all for military and idealogical reasons. [See here as well.]

Russia knows she will suffer no long term consequences from a world which tolerates totalitarianism, coddles petty fascists, and nods approvingly at inhumane behavior.

This reality, in light of the West's shallow response to the very real threat of soft-jihad [see here also] and America's involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan, gave Russia the stage it needed to do its dirty deed.

Much of the West's future will depend on what it does corporately from this point on. My personal concern (vis a vis my kids and their kids) is that there is no corporate West to respond at this time.

Georgia, Russia, War

GEORGIA: A place where the West's myopic self absorption will prove deadly!

GEORGIA: A place where the West's myopic self absorption will prove deadly!

Russia, Georgia, and the Western Alliance | Brussels Journal

I'm watching NBC's local Sunday Morning news program and I'm shocked by twenty minutes of national and international news without a mention of the war in eastern Europe (the Caucasus aka Georgia). [UPDATE: 40 MINUTES IN - it's mentioned]

We are on our way to church in a few minutes and don't have time to view other news; but if the world doesn't get it, at least a few people are laboring online to document the Russian aggression ...

Thus we see the war in the Caucasus evolve into a litmus test for the basic institutions of the West itself. If those institutions fail, especially in the eyes of its most vulnerable members, then the suffering in Georgia will, in the long run, be mere prelude. [The Brussels Journal]

I rarely use the old saw "I told you so" but this morning I am saying, "I'm telling you so!"

In 1936 the world ignored Hitler and the Axis powers; years later they asked each other, "Wasn't anyone watching? Didn't anyone notice what was going on?"

ALSO: Ralph Peters, NYPost [HT: Black Kettle]

Caucasus, Geopolitics,
Georgia, Russia, War

PROPHETIC VOICE: WW III is well under way; the mindless masses haven't noticed!

War in the Caucasus | Brussels Journal

France: Can a Wounded Nation Heal Itself? | Brussels Journal

War in Georgia: It’s the 3 a.m. Call in the White House | Brussels Journal

These three articles and recent geopolitical events made me realize - it may become necessary to admit that I'm an alarmist! Not yet but soon ... if I am wrong!

I believe the greatly maligned and feared Third World War has already begun; it will not be a conventional war but one of stealth, yet every bit as dangerous as a shooting war.

I believe it began during the infamous protest movements of the 60s [HT: Black Kettle] and the 70s; the failed presidency of Jimmie Carter only accelerated its arrival.

I believe the presidency of Ronald Reagan only served to delay the inevitable.

I believe those world leaders and geopolitical groups, that long to unseat Western Civilization from its global throne, have discovered our leaders are fools and dupes (also here, here, and here).

I believe the bravado behind Russia's revanchist invasion of Georgia to be clear evidence of Russia's opinion of Western leaders, especially American leaders.

I also believe the world's iconification of Jimmie Carter, Yaser Arafat, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama (also here) is evidence of this.

I believe our diplomatic failures (here and here also), since 9/11, reveal American and European leaders for what they are: duplicitous - absent vision and backbone, with a yellow stripe up their backs as wide as an Interstate; for the most part they are self-obsessed, greedy, historically out of touch with reality, and incapable of speaking truth!

I believe Muslims are right when they say Western leaders have no will for the long fight; the high price is no longer exacted from totalitarian states or their leaders.

I believe an omnipotent force, far outside any and all natural forces, is at work to orchestrate a global conflict that will make the first two World Wars look like a sandbox fight between two year-olds.

I believe the world is slouching towards Gomorrah faster than Robert Bork could have ever grasped.

I believe liberalism, that pernicious and omnipresent evil and constant antagonist for common sense, is nothing more than socialism in drag.

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

NormanThomas

HT: Brain Terminal

I believe there may be a supernatural power simultaneously weakening the EU and strengthening Muslim hegonomy in Europe.

I believe the real child molesters and pedophiles are here and here; and this only plays into the hands of sycophantish globalists who use these social issues to confuse and obfuscate.

I believe the erosion of common sense and free speech in the West, in parallel with the global ascendancy of hate crimes legislation and political correctness, is evidence of a worldview so pervasive, so dysfunctional, and so corrosive most elitists ridicule its existence.

I believe an incomplete and incorrect eschatology is responsible for much of the sin in and the impotence of the contemporary Judeo-Christian worldview.

I believe events are cascading so rapidly that there may be no time left to save our way of life and the liberties we so dearly cherish.

I believe we must wake up and smell the cordite.

Geopolitics, Third World War, WWIII

AMERICA: A nation built on an idea not a bloodline!

Braggistan in the America of the Imagination by Andrew Klavan, City Journal Summer 2008

Andrew Klavan has written an excellent piece on his recent experience at Braggistan, a training site at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The facilities and "Capstone exercises" are intended to prepare our men and women for duty in Afghanistan.

Keep in mind, for most of them, defending themselves and each other is a secondary assignment - reconstruction and building infrastructure is their primary assignment.

They’re being deployed in Afghanistan to try to help build a civil society there in the after-wreckage of the Taliban.

At any rate, Klavan is writing about a third assignment of our military - public relations. A task they are failing miserably at! Here, in his words, is the reason it is critical to our nation and the world ...

Now you may say that capturing the imagination isn’t the job of our fighting forces. But this is America, remember: we’re a country of the imagination, a living state of mind. We’re not connected to one another by bloodlines or any depth of native memory. We’re the descendants of an idea that every generation has to learn to hold in its collective consciousness. More than in any other country, it matters in America who we think we are and what we believe we’re doing.

Therein lies the dysfunction: those responsible for teaching the next generation this timeless truth have failed in their collective responsibility.

The author points out that while liberals and the entertainment industries are tearing our military and nation apart, with their anti-American propaganda, the military is missing a classic opportunity to tell the real story.

Our academies, the news media that train in the academies, and the entertainment industry that’s informed by the news media have become ... a sort of alternative state of the imagination, a kingdom of lies founded in the muck of hysterical guilt, historical distortion, and philosophical solipsism. In their fantastic and labyrinthine narrative, our fascist foes are Nemesis, the emanation of our own sins, and therefore our military can only be the mad or foolish servants of evil.

Go here and read the entire piece in context ... worth the trip.

America, Military,
Patriotism, WOT

WAR: It's not a good day for world peace!

When the leader of the greatest, most powerful, and most peaceful nation on earth has to submit to nursemaids to declare war he will no longer be that leader ... and the nation will not long be that nation!

Former secretaries of state James Baker III and Warren Christopher say the next time the president goes to war, Congress should be required to say whether it agrees.

I can't imagine a situation, now or in the future, where declaring war by consensus would be a good thing. The idiots we have on Capitol Hill can't agree on marriage, family, taxes, welfare, disaster relief, election reform, immigration, etc.; what makes Baker and Christopher think they could agree on war?

Geopolitics, President, War