RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.capitolhilloutsider.com/jihad-and-mental-immune-system/

It is safe to say that before the 9/11 attacks; most Americans did not have the slightest knowledge of Islam and why a group of Arabs murdered so many innocent people in the name of their God. Some 18 years has passed since that dreadful day.

I think many of the same people who had no way of knowing of Islamic ideology during the 9/11 tragedy, some eighteen years ago, are still in a state of denial and live in a Utopian world, an ideal world where everything is as good as it can possibly be for everyone. But when reality hits again, they don’t know where to run and hide. This unconscious denial of a thought or an emotion, is referred to by psychologists as “mental block.” A mental block runs through their entire system of belief. This philosophy is clearly demonstrated after numerous horrific terrorist attacks in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11.

Let’s not blame the people, but instead, briefly try to decipher this phenomenon of the human mind.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/04/america-v-russia-who-won-the-cold-war/

“President Obama, as Mark Steyn unkindly explained in After America (2011), was trapped in an “elderly arrested adolescence”, his narcissism and naivety passed off as “nobility of spirit”. President Trump, vainglorious and glib, may not have read Huntington, or even heard of him, and yet he instinctively understands how the world turns. ”

The end of the Cold War did not harbinger a golden age of peace, love and understanding between Washington and Moscow. There was talk, once upon a time, of the Russian Federation joining NATO, but it was never a serious option. NATO had been founded in 1949 to prevent Moscow annexing Western Europe. It exists today to prevent Moscow annexing Eastern Europe. We might spot a pattern here. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro are never again going to countenance Russia being in a position to offer them “fraternal assistance” (à la East Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968). For those nations, at least, the idea of Moscow assuming the role of key strategic power on NATO’s eastern flank must have sounded like the old Latin proverb Ovem lupo commitere—“To set a wolf to guard sheep”. None of this, however, is to suggest that configuring Russia as our implacable foe in any way serves the interests of the West.

Russia, even in its darkest moments during the 1990s, had little desire to be absorbed into an American-orchestrated New World Order. The West, then, did not lose Russia, because Russia has never been ours to squander. Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilisations?” thesis, which first appeared in a 1993 edition of Foreign Affairs, provides some of the reasons why. Huntington divided the world into nine major civilisational entities. He did not include Russia as part of “Western civilisation” but, rather, categorised it as a major part of “Orthodox civilisation”. Russia, despite its apparent similarities with the West, had been on a different civilisational journey—eschewing the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, parliamentary democracy, and so on—and had arrived at a very different destination. The end of the Soviet Union could never guarantee entirely harmonious relations between Russia and America, since each has its own geopolitical interests to pursue. George Kennan said something similar in his famous commentaries at the commencement of the Cold War: the demise of communist rule would not eliminate all civilisational frictions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/immigration-western-civilization-leftist-complaints/

T he harshest critics of the West in general and the United States in particular are the best arguments for it. Take the latest iconic critic, 29-year-old Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She has a predictable list of complaints against America, past and present.

Yet fortunately for her, her paternal grandparents and mother had experienced firsthand the antitheses of mainland America. And thus they were obsessed with what was right, not wrong, with the continental United States — and with getting there as quickly as possible. If they had once been critics of America, such animus was seemingly not great enough to prevent them moving to a place with a different language, ethnic majority, and traditions from those of their home, itself a territory of the U.S.

They apparently assumed that a free-market economy and transparent government gave them economic opportunities unknown in Puerto Rico, an otherwise naturally rich landscape. They wisely stayed in North America, apparently because they felt as supposed minorities that they would have far more cultural, social, political, and economic opportunities than they would as part of the majority in Puerto Rico. The fact that her father was a second-generation immigrant and architect, that AOC herself grew up in affluent Westchester County, that she received scholarships to attend pricey Boston University, and that she was elected to Congress bore out her parents’ correct assumptions of a meritocracy, not a caste state.