American Hezbollah

 On this day:

1284
The legendary Pied Piper leads 130 children out of Hamelin, Germany
1409
Western Schism: The Roman Catholic church is led into a double schism as Petros Philargos is crowned Pope Alexander V after the Council of Pisa, joining Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope Benedict XII in Avignon.
1848
End of the June Days Uprising in Paris.
1917
The first U.S. troops arrive in France to fight alongside Britain and France against Germany in World War I.
1948
The Western allies begin an airlift to Berlin after the Soviet Union blockades West Berlin.
1948
William Shockley files the original patent for the grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
1996
Irish Journalist Veronica Guerin is shot in her car while in traffic in the outskirts of Dublin

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“Watch out for allies and creditors losing confidence, the loss of its reserve currency status, the selling of its debt assets, and the weakening of its currency, especially relative to gold.”--Dalio in an article comparing the US adventure in Hormuz to Britain's inflection moment in Suez.

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A rather startling assertion from Adam Tooze in his book, The Deluge. "Unless the political leaders of Europe could shake their populations out of their usual 'political thoughtlessness', Hitler warned in 1928, the 'threatened global hegemony of the North American continent' would reduce them all to the status of Switzerland or Holland." The other Axis powers felt the same. He writes, "the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action. ... Whatever comforting, domesticated fantasies their followers may have projected onto them, the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order."

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A British tabloid reports a man woke from a coma after a horrific car crash thinking he was Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey and speaking fluent French - despite only having a basic grasp from school. So French is pretty easy--maybe inside us all--and can sort of be released by a blow to the head.

***




American Hezbollah

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."--From Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address, delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1838, titled "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions". He was 28.

Wars in Europe are often distinguished by time, like decades or centuries. Someone casually questioning how the wars in history--countless and purposeless and unending--could possibly occur might well start here. Who wants this confrontation? Iran wants to obliterate Israel, and Israel does not want to be obliterated. Certainly, Israel's citizens don't want to be obliterated. But do Iran's citizens want to risk death to obliterate Israel?

This conflict has been simmering, with the occasional outbreak of murder, torture, and despair, for decades. This is beginning to look more and more like Iran has strapped on the traditional Middle East dress, the suicide vest. And Israel will not have some unresolved conflict with its sworn enemy. They will not take a standing eight count or stagger away, bloodied and damaged, having "learned their lesson". If they fail, they will take the entire Middle East with them to perdition.

Ahab to Ahab.

How could reasonable men reach this point? How could leaders of innocent civilians allow confrontations to progress to threaten themselves--even the whole world--with destruction?

The history of man has been a conflict between those who work and those who would rather steal from those who work than work themselves. Those who work gradually built up their defenses so that those who would not work would find stealing others' production too dangerous.

Enter ideology--philosophy, nationalism, and religion--that taught that stealing from others was just. And the death of others was deserved, even demanded, even inevitable, and that suicide was infinitely superior to certain mundane life situations. The tremendous advantages of the cohesion of family and community have become distorted and dangerous.

Madmen, ideologues, and morons will have their moment. And, despite Lincoln's confidence, even America may not be safe.