Ten years ago the strong man leader of Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi, was murdered by a rebel group during the Libyan civil war while NATO forces bombed the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously boasted, “We came. We saw. He died.” His death is described by Wikipedia as ‘sodomized with a bayonet’ as if that sanitizes it somehow. A tactic that would impress both Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Ţepeş and the Marquis de Sade. It certainly impressed Hillary 'The Diplomat of Peace' Clinton.
It was around the same time that Madam Secretary of State revealed in an interview that the US Government had funded and trained Afghani Mujahadeen terrorists to kill Russians in the 1980’s. It’s still available for viewing on YouTube as if to say, “Ya. We did it. What are you going to do about it?” Those same terrorists, being radical Muslim extremists who do not represent the bulk of Islam, morphed into Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh, the Taliban, and a host of other unintended consequences of terror, I hope they were unintended, all over the middle east and Europe and from the Balkans to the Stans.
During the 1960’s and 70’s Afghanistan was a liberal, modern country where young men and women attended schools and universities, western culture and clothing styles were worn along side burkas, and the government was stable. Enough. Iran was the same way, too, or similar in the 1950’s until their Prime Minister decided to nationalize our oil reserves that were inconveniently under their soil and use the revenue to modernize and improve conditions for Iran’s civilian population. That’s when we took him out and replaced him with an Arabian Night’s medieval character in the form of the Shaw of Iran.
It was around this time I lost all respect for Hillary Clinton. Oh, I once had respect for her. Quite a bit. She distinguished herself as First Lady. She maintained her dignity while being married to Bill ‘Lolita-Express-Frequent-Flyer’ Clinton. When she became a senator for New York State, I at first thought she was doing a Bobby Kennedy by trying to ‘play politician’ and gain political cred (Cred. Not crud) on her way to the White House.
But she didn’t. She actually buckled down and served on committees as junior member, drafted useful legislature for the state, and kept her nose relatively clean, pointed steadfastly ahead, and pressed flat against the grindstone. Pretty honest, for a politician. Then she became Obama’s Secretary of State. “Hmm, let’s see what she does with her hands on the wheel of international diplomacy?” I thought. “We could use a liberal minded, not at all Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, or John Bolton grade war criminal neocon for a change…“
And then, “We came… We saw…” Oh. That’s when I realized that the democratic ‘liberal’ party had sold out to big money, big industry, and big war machine. We were just useful idiots who would keep thinking the Democratic party cared about us because to think any other thought was insufferable. Crap. Big crap.
It was good while it lasted.
A few years later in 2015 I was in Germany traveling around by Euro rail and staying in youth hostels. In one I met a student from Libya. He was on his way home from a university in Sweden. I asked him about his country. All we ever heard at home were the Max Headrooms of the newsroom saying, “Qaddafi’s dead. The war for democracy in Libya is over-Democracy won. Everything’s fine. Now think what we tell you think!”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said my new friend. Getting him wrong was the last thing on my agenda. “Qaddafi was a bad man. There’s no doubt about that. He was a dictator and did a lot of cruel things-that doesn’t change no matter what else he did. And he also did some great things for Libya that we can’t forget, either.”
He went on to tell me how under Qaddafi there was universal free health care, that when a Libyan couple got married the state gave them $50,000.00 to buy a house and start a family. Education was free through university. And he also had been negotiating with several north African states to create a free trade zone which would be organized around a gold backed African Dinar. North Africa would enjoy a fair and free trade association not dependent on International financiers and their usurious practices. Libya was the most prosperous country in North Africa under his rule. Now it was a war zone dominated by war lords vying for control of strategic property.
Qaddafi was a marked man, in other words. And Hillary Clinton hit that mark. Brutally, devastatingly, and with a childlike glee that was terrifying.
I’ve considered myself a liberal all my life. Going back to the 1960’s when I first gained awareness of the political world into which I had been born. I saw great liberal leaders assassinated. I witnessed President Johnson’s Great Society which was intended to lift up the minorities in our country, blacks in particular, and reverse the wrongs done during slavery, reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. It encompassed several large scale government programs, fully funded. We were going to make a difference.
What went wrong? Why were those things never accomplished? Corruption? Graft? Greed? Did the genuine civil rights leaders all get murdered with the rest of the good people? Did the remaining ones prefer crying poverty and victimization to lifting a finger in help for their own people? Is that what CRT is about? The minority who cried White Privilege?
I witnessed the space program. The World’s Fair: Peace through Understanding. The Viet Nam war and it’s visceral protests. The 1968 Democratic Convention riots. Haight Ashbury and hippies. Kent State. The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The bringing down of a president, Watergate, and the death of an American institution. Not just a president was disgraced, the office was as well. Jerald Ford couldn’t bring that back.
The liberal movement died in the 1970’s. Everybody was scrambling to recover from the psychedelic decade of Jimmy Hendrix, sit ins, social movements, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and Timothy Leary. Jerry Rubin became a stock broker. The Volkswagen van was put out to rust in the empty commune-nure fields.
By the 1980’s we were scrambling to recover from the devastation of the Carter inflation years and just starting to sense the upcoming exodus of blue collar jobs to third world sweatshops. In 1969 we bragged about going to college, buying our own house, and getting a job making-get this. Ten thousand dollars a year! By 1980 that was starvation wages. The mandatory two income family was born. Would you like fries with that?
The various incarnations of liberalism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Suffragettes, Temperance, Abolition, Woman’s Rights, Karry Nation and her axe, Minority rights, Gay rights, Anti-War, a string of sexual revolutions, labor movements, civil rights, the oddity called the middle-class, Suburbs, the GI Bill, improvements in health and technology, education and civic mindedness, an explosion of literature and poetry, art and music, space exploration, and a host of other improvements for the growing wedge of humanity between the very poor and the robber barons that had defined us for centuries; all these played out across our society.
Then it died.
We started seeing a slew of faux-brals with kooky names. Politically Correct reared its self-righteous head in the mid 80’s, pooled in the vacuum wake left by liberalism of the 1800’s and the 1900’s, and dared the rest of us to object. Then came Social Justice Workers. My, what a hive of busybodies those SJW’s were. Now, woke Karen’s and TINA’s spatter from the open manholes of the 2000’s with a new way to act like we are doing something grand when we are doing nothing good at all.
And at the pinnacle of human civilization and self-adulation: Virtue Signaling and Cancelling! It’s always the same. Before cancelling there was shunning. Before that blacklisting (McCarthy was good at that.) Before that you could be excluded from society. Given the cold shoulder by family and friends. Be put out from the congregation of the faithful. And back even further, excommunicated. It’s all the same. New virtue signaling wine in old wineskins. Every twenty years or so we all must create new names for things that people have been doing since the first political cartoon was drawn on a cave in Lascaux. That’s how we pretend we are somehow better than our ancestors, even if they are just the last generation. And outside the mouth of the cave a beggar speaks,
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?”
And just like that we become the hypocrites we once condemned.
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