Friends, this week's Newsmaker Show is a cavalcade of Yankeeisms, but we do make time to congratulate our neighbors to the north on "Canada Day". Way to go, Canada!
In historical terms, I discuss Canada's independence and its significance to the gradual devolution of the British Empire. Brian and I also cover Britain's surrender of Hong Kong to Red China in 1997; the Battle of El Alamein and the turning of the tide in WWII; the Battle of Gettysburg and whether the South could have won the Civil War (and whether Civil War II is around the corner); the Battle of San Juan Hill and the U.S. flirtation with imperialism; and more!
When the conversation turns to current events, Brian and I talk about the media narrative that Trump is so far behind in the polls that he can't possibly win (he can); the social media crackdown on "hate" and why conservatives may find themselves voiceless; and the state of the Supreme Court and why conservatives shouldn't despair just yet.
Check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTEYDnAyiH8&feature=youtu.be
Canada Day? That's all very nice. However, as I recall, Canada seems to be fairly far to The Left on a great many issues.
ReplyDeleteOh, for sure. Canada is more obsessively PC than we are. And for that Canadians deserve our pity -- not necessarily our scorn...
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Business Corporate America's cooperation with efforts to suppress conservative expression because it is "hate speech" has some very ominous implications. The usually very shrewd business world may well have decided that its all over for that traditional and conservative America which knows that "complete transformation" of our country is unnecessary and destructive. Those big business people are no fools and they always look out for #1. Too, many of them were ruined by their sojournes in the leftist captured American academy and actually think they are morally justified in selling the radical cool-aid. The tumbrels await them.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: The creation of a political monoculture is in my opinion certainly a salient goal of the American left. It would serve their essential totalitarianism in a thoroughly organic way. I expect to see its earliest open official advocacy in NY, where the histrionic and breathless introduction of decrees (oh excuse me, legislation) from the bottomless maw of Prince Cuomo, criminalizing any "expression which denigrates or minimizes any individual or group (aside from that 'vocal minahritty' which is not really New Yawk anyway)is completely predictable in the near future, especially if Biden/radical wins.
ReplyDeleteDR. Waddy: Newt Gingrich wrote a brilliant trilogy of plausible alternative history on how Gettysburg COULD have progressed given only a few very possible variences from history. If one knows your Civil War and Gettysburg history (and Newt assumes you do) you'll find very many perceptive touches in his account. For one thing, it contains the most realistic account of Civil War combat I've ever read, even in Shelby Foote's Shiloh.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Was Gettysburg decisive? Bruce Catton, the most beautifully lyric of Civil War historians I know of, yet maintained that the fall of 1862 witnessed the deciding Battles of Antietam and Perryville KY. He may have a point. Antietam, perhaps a draw but in widespread perception a Union victory (Lee's first MAJOR repulse) gave backing to the Emancipation Proclamation, which enabled those forces in Britain (and to the toadying Napoleon III) hostile to the support of a slave owning nation, and to Queen Victoria, the moral support they needed to deny the Confederacy their succor. Perryville? It denied the Ohio river to the Confederates and the Brits knew all about that; its why they fought the French and Indian war, which led to the American revolt.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: the war in the "west" almost from the start was a series of disasters for the South. And once its major progenitor, the brilliant Grant, was brought East, the Confederacy was toast.
ReplyDeleteCould some circumstances have altered this? I think so. As much as I respect and defer to Shelby Foote, I must respectfully diagree with his statement that the South had no chance. Suppose Grant had been four feet over and have caught the cannonball his aide caught in one of those western battles?
OK, someone would have taken over ,yes, maybe Thomas, maybe Hancock or Meade. But did any of them contain Grant's visceral determination and resolve? Maybe Hancock,probably not Thomas (a defensive genius)but certainly not Meade, a very creditable General but not a decisive leader.
Dr. Waddy: No! In my opinion, American victory in our Civil War was provided by the INDOMITABLE courage and devotion to the Union of the irreplacable Abraham Lincoln and his soul mate U.S. Grant.
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ReplyDeleteJack, you assume that the Union would inevitably be led by Lincoln during the Civil War...but what if it hadn't been? Ahhh. A very different conflict.
ReplyDeleteI too am very troubled by the growing boycott against FB. The idea that FB is a haven for right-wing "hate" is a joke in itself. The idea that FB is evenhanded and/or devoted to free speech is more than a stretch. Already FB is openly hostile to us, and so a crackdown on conservative speech would be chilling indeed -- we might never recover from it.
Dr. Waddy: re: the Civil War: Lincoln was a dark horse nominee. Of the more likely choices I think only Seward would have had the foresight and the fortitude to have preserved the Union.Had Lincoln not been empowered, would the South have seceded? Perhaps not in 1860;perhaps not ever. So, it all could have been very different.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Have been doing alot of reading about WW2 N. Africa. I didn't know why it was done. But here, I think, are some relevant factors: Many Brits, before the war, thought N.Africa would be the decisive theatre of a war with Nazi Germany, because of the Suez Canal and its perceived vitality in preserving their empire and after June 1941, of protecting Russia from a Nazi thrust from a Middle East which would surely have fallen by then. Also on their minds,probably, was access to Middle Eastern oil and that of the Caucasus for both them and the Nazis. A Nazi Egypt might well have forced Turkey into the Axis and would have afforded Italy much protection. The Nazis took the matter in hand because Italy could not stand up to the Brits, on land or sea. The U.S.,which put a very high priority on keeping the mercurial Stalin in the war, sought to that end to open a second front and knew a direct attack on Festung Europe was for the time impossible. Sicily and Italy? Couldn't be done with a Nazi N.Africa on the flank of a necessarily extended seaborne attack. The Allies had to have N.Africa as a staging area.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: But haven't the Dems indeed already advocated and enacted widespread defiance of Federal Law in their demonstrated and outspoken noncompliance with Immigration Law?
ReplyDeleteAh, but you forget, Jack -- laws which liberals don't like aren't laws at all, because they conflict with the Constitution (the version that exists only in progressives' heads). Duh!
ReplyDeleteNorth Africa COULD have been a much more important theater than it was. You're right -- the Axis could have obtained much advantage from control of the region, and then perhaps of the Middle East. The Axis fought in North Africa and the Mediterranean with a distinct lack of imagination that they duplicated in plenty of other theaters. Summer 1940 to summer 1941 was, in retrospect, a "lost year" for the Axis, when the deck could have been stacked decisively in their favor.
DR. Waddy: The Constitution? You mean the establishing document for Amerikkka, written and enforced by soon to be historically purged pariahs? Comrade Lenin did say "Let the capitalists hang themselves with their own rope" and we are well advised to use that 230 year condemned screed either in the breach, or disingenuously, to herd the useful idiots to their compounds(I mean you really don't think that we who have fought the fight for over fifty years would abide in our commonwealth such ridiculously easily flimflammed noodles do ya)? And then, to the cesspool it goes, with Christianity, putrescent notions of individual worth, freedom and free enterprise.
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ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: See what it published of my several paragraph comment?
ReplyDeleteI'll start again and if I have to publish it sentence by sentence I will.
Dr. Waddy: That period summer 1940 to summer 1941 fascinates me. What must it have been like to think the Nazis might actually win?
ReplyDeleteResistance to this fear was exemplified by Churchill and lived by those good old Brits during that period.
Dr. Waddy: In the U.S. we should hearken to that period to summon the resolution to face the existential we face in the foreseeable future. If our President wins, the left will launch a coordinated violent onslaught on all of our organs of order and democratic process. If pitiful Biden "wins" his assured, summary and fully motivated leftist successor will be blithe to "follow up" as do all warriors and adherents of "realpolitik". Just think, you of 1965, you of Dylan,of the "Eve of Destruction" and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh(and your enabled plastic bag smothering of dissidents, attended of course by the customary hideous prolix writhing and excretion over a time endurable to behold only by sociopaths) oh excuse me! Why your dream, those of the withered husk of you who have not grown up, is NIGH! Real America: face this threat and stand up to it at the ballot bo!
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Our country is directly confronted, from within, by a dedicated and coordinated force fully as sociopathic and murderous as that Britain faced from without in 1940 and 1941. The present American enemy cannot deny its 20th century inspiration and antecedent in the most murderous movements in human history: Marxism/ Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, Ethiopian mas murder. Pol Potism. They can be easily traced. Why they made the Nazis look like amateurs! Real America: THIS is who we face in Biden/radical in November.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Jack -- the Left re-imagines the (original) Constitution with consummate creativity, and yet they would surely jettison it if they had half the chance. Can you imagine the Marxists starting from scratch on a foundational document? Ick!
ReplyDeleteI would think most everyone in 1940-41 assumed the Nazis would win. It would have taken a very fertile imagination to conceive of a way that they could have been dislodged from Western and Central Europe. I doubt anyone would have believed the Red Army capable of such a feat, and if not them then who? Hitler and the Nazis would not have been the archetypes of evil that they are now, though. No Holocaust had materialized to discredit them, and so far their crimes seemed tame compared to Stalin's... Presumably this made accommodation with Hitler all the more attractive.
Jack, it's hard, I'm sure, for most people to imagine that authoritarianism, or even totalitarianism, could be imposed HERE, but we can't rule out the possibility. After all, Americans have already seen their freedoms wither, and they have accepted it with equanimity. We have also to consider that, if the Left wins in 2020 and begins the process of unwinding our democracy, the media will fail to perform its accustomed function of keeping the powers-that-be in check. The Fourth Estate has gone all-in on Trump hatred and "social justice". I honestly don't think we'll get an honest day's work out of most of these "journalists" ever again.
Dr. Waddy: A very perceptive observation: of the two subhuman autocracies perhaps Stalin's was more obvious. And it begs the question; peraps we should have stood by while one of the hell hounds destroyed the other and then dealt with the spawn! Was FDR moved by Commie VP Wallace?
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: At any rate, we did support the worst inhuman force in world history; Soviet Communism. We probably cannot have done worse. We realized that in very good time and bade the hellish Stalin "step off!" That is to our everlasting credit as are the American lives spent to defeat his worker ants. Hitler understandably appeared the consummate threat to humanity and any cooperation with him would have been unthinkable. I would say many, many millions in Eastern Europe,now free to LIVE, would belatedly agree.
ReplyDeleteIt was a Sophie's choice, Jack, and all we can say for sure is that, well, we made it, for better or worse, and the world had to deal with the consequences. Fortunately, we helped the world make the best of it.
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