Remember Pearl Harbor.
Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin adage translated as, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war”.
If the mortgage bust, the ensuing financial crisis and the global recession has taught us anything, it should have taught us that this phrase has applicability across the spectrum.
If you wish for financial security, prepare for financial crisis.
If you wish for career stability, work as if your job could disappear tomorrow.
If you want a good job, prepare for jobs that society values.
If you want freedom, prepare for oppression.
If you want to determine your own future, prepare to resist servitude.
On this day, some 80 years ago, the Japanese navy ignited the war in the Pacific. Two days later, on December 9th, FDR declared war on the Axis powers and a nation of civilized people began the transformation from a peaceful, isolationist existence into a warrior nation.
America is undeniably the healthiest, most prosperous, most free and most socially mobile nation that has ever existed (and those things are distributed more widely than ever before) but I have to wonder if our very prosperity is our greatest enemy.
The problem with being civilized is that civilized people come to believe every other nation is just like them. Civilized people forget the natural state of the world is far more savage than they wish to contemplate.
Human nature is human nature.
There are always people out there who hate you, envy you, and want what you have or fear what you will do. That has never changed and despite all the Utopian schemes of history, it most likely will never change.
F. A. Hayek accurately noted "What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.”
I have come to believe there is a valid Malthusian perspective where truth and reason are concerned. It seems that while painful catastrophes like the Great Depression and WWII do cull the population, they also serve to cull from society the irrationality, unseriousness and triviality that are so celebrated in our intellectually lazy society today.
I have always proposed that post-modern thought, collectivism, and the idea of “social justice” are symptoms of the disease of progressivism and progressivism is the disease of prosperity, of generations never having to face the fires of Hades in a fight for survival. Like the foppish and frivolous people of the Roaring Twenties, the current blizzard of our precious, special snowflakes was created by such a historical period where hardship is defined as not having the latest iPhone or slow Internet.
Many times, I have noted that we would be where we are today was a historical inevitability.
Rather than avoiding conflict, the blizzard invites it.
No amount of revisionist history changes that fact.
Whistling past the graveyard does not eliminate a threat, it merely ignores it - temporarily - as it strengthens and builds. There are so many tinderboxes around the world just waiting for a spark - Ukraine and Taiwan are but two.
Like White Walkers of Game of Thrones fame, the forces wanting to burn it all down are always on the march. They hide in the blizzard – it is their natural element. Winter is always coming.
Steel cannot be forged without fire. Forests are not renewed without being razed by a similar conflagration. Unity cannot exist without common cause. The Greatest Generation would not exist without the Great Depression and WWII would not have been won without their qualities.
Remembering Pearl Harbor is more than remembering those who died that day, it is about remembering why it happened and what America did about it.
If you want peace, prepare for war.