All
situations must be taken into context by those who are honest, and also to those
who remove the context and remove any
claim regarding honesty and/or the pursuit of the truth. This act typically falls into one of two
categories (or both) the first being a lie-by-omission, and the other being a
lie by misdirection, though the use of these two tactics may be a distinction
without a difference, if you will. Another
tactic in use is the ‘Argumentum ad Hominem’, which, when translated
means, “An attack on the character/motive
of the opponent rather than the substance of the argument itself”.
Further,
Plato’s Republic is the foundational
writing on how a society can be organized and managed. For instance, in “Plato’s Republic”, the list
of possible systems pointing out the pros and cons of each system, the list is:
- Aristocracy.
- Timocracy,
- Oligarchy,
- Democracy.
- Tyranny, (the worst form of government)
Plato also put forward the
idea of the Philosopher King, who would be a man well trained in philosophy,
thus leading his society through reason and logic. Plato’s eventual conclusion was that
democracy was the best choice of government, as it spread the power around the
society, as a means of saving the people from all other forms of government.
The Romans took Plato’s ideas and took a stab
at democracy, and when the Roman society left their “Plato path”, there was
more actual stabbing being done. When Rome
moved away from being a Republic toward its Empire phase, the senate and
councils became the vestments for the timocracy and tyranny that had become
dominant. Rome
eventually ended up having more wars inside the borders than on them, which is a
death knell for any society; for a house divided cannot stand, and hence Rome fell.
The post-Roman era saw a redistribution of
power, and that power landed, as most things do, on the ground. We can see that throughout the cyclical
patterns of history, the pre-Roman tribalism returned and everything fell apart
for a while; that is until some men made order out of the chaos by drawing
their swords, thus making other men draw theirs’.
With the fall of Rome, the best aspects of mankind fell also,
and so things regressed: things such as art, music, architecture, and higher
levels of discourse. These things were
all on their “back foot” so to speak, as the majority of people were too busy
looking for food, or looking for more land upon which to grow more food. That time in European history was called the
“Dark Ages”. Some posit that during that
time period, there was a general cooling of Europe,
a climate change of sorts; thus
hindered food growth and when that cold spell of ~500 years went away, things
started growing again, and so life in general improved. Others think that it was due to the lack of
papyrus, which Islam had stopped shipping to Europe.
It took another five centuries for Europe to fully recover from the Dark Ages, and the Age
of Enlightenment (ca.1800+) got underway with thinkers such as Descartes (1596-1650)
and Leibniz (1646-1715) starting publishing.
Eventually, John Locke and David Hume came along and penned ideas that helped
build the foundation of the laws that were based on the back of the Magna Carta
Libertatum (1215) which was at the time basically a message of surrender from
King John "Lackland" Plantagenet of England toward reducing his power
and moving said power toward the Barons under his rule. Eventually, the power was pushed even closer
to the people, thus setting the stage for what we now call Parliament.
The first parliamentary meetings took place in
a green field (which is why, to this day, the seats are green) and when the
debates would become heated, the people who had swords would draw, and hence this
is why the table still separates the government from the opposition. By the way, the width of the table is just
over the length of a gentleman’s sword.
The Barons still had a say on the laws being passed, hence why the British
House of Lords is a thing, and why Canada has a Senate.
The next step in the West’s political march-forward
was the removal of the Timocracy, thus, men who didn’t own land got the vote. It must be noted that the women who owned land
in those times were able to vote in Great Britain. Of course, eventually the landless men got
the vote, and then some of the landless women also wanted to participate in
shaping society and so they too got the vote.
Another “item of interest”, so to speak, is that many women actually didn’t want the vote, seeing as the reason
given was that men could be pressed into military service, and so they had
‘skin in the game’, and yet women were allowed the vote, though without the
same risk.
This liberal line of thinking spread from Britain to the
rest of the Christian World and so began the ‘Age of Little Responsibility’ in
the West. Meanwhile, outside of the West
there were other forms of politics coming to fruition. Of course, many of these also had years, even
centuries, to develop and grow. One of
the more historically recent political movements, with an impressive longevity,
is Islam; and theocracies are even a worse form of tyranny, because the
responsibility is still being off-loaded again; only this time the
justifications are being laid at the feet of Allah/God.
While Islam started in Mecca,
it didn’t gain real traction until Mohammad and his followers were expelled and
he traveled to Medina
in 622 AD. Upon his arrival the Jewish
community of the time were basically subjugated and those Jews who could not
leave, or who would not convert to Islam, ended up dying or paying the jizya
tax. The jizya tax was historically
levied on non-Muslim subjects living in Muslim-ruled lands. Many Arabs joined the Islamic religion and so
it grew and those Arabs made little Arabs who grew taller, as it has worked for
many groups. The Islamic population grew
generation after generation until it could become a formidable fighting force
over the course of four hundred and fifty years taking over Christian country
after Christian county, until the Muslims invaded and took over what is now
Israel, Spain Austria and part of France; this of course caught the attention
of the Religious class in The West, kicking off the first Crusade in 1096 AD. Of course by the end of the Crusades, while we
were told Islam won, which didn’t really happen, seeing as post WWI in 1922 AD the
Ottoman Empire was smashed and Islamists had
to retreat out of most of the Christian lands that they had taken, starting
around 1300 AD.
The end of World War One (WWI) didn’t really solve anything – in fact,
the punitive actions at the end of WWI exasperated the situation, thus
triggering WWII (or WWI.I, as I see it).
In the aftermath of WWII, much of the world was basically back to the
same boundaries, with the exception of the Baltic States; what did change
though was the attitude of the general public in the West and beyond: “PEACE by
any means necessary”.
This so-called Peace-First-Principle, while
praiseworthy, failed because of the assumption by those who wanted to live in a
world of peace also assumed that everyone else did too; though there were some people
who did not want peace. In the West many
people have lost the will to protect personal spaces, while people in other countries
did not.
The real question to be asked is this: have
the Crusades truly ever ended or did the proverbial ‘can’ simply get kicked
down the road ad nauseam? As it has been tried to be explained in this
writing, the history of politics has no starting point, as each political act
is simply a deviation from the previous one.
And, as some people like to point out, history doesn’t repeat, it does though
seem to rhyme quite well.
As of late, the term ‘Colonization’ has become
a taboo word, resulting in a political push to ‘decolonize’ the West. And yet, it must be asked, how does one “decolonize”
England, Germany, Italy,
Spain, or even modern-day India? Truth be told, Spain, for example, has
already been decolonized, along with portions of France and the southern end of
Italy, as have Austria and Romania along with several other countries in that
region: thus begging the question, how many generations are required to make a
people indigenous, simply put, are the Italians indigenous and deserving of the
protection of UNDRIP?
Continuing on with the hanging question just
above, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sought a different solution
to the ‘who was here first’ question, by simply removing any and all historical
markers of previous cultures. Recently
in the West, this tactic has been replicated with the renaming of streets, the
taking down of statues, and the vilification of people previously thought of as
heroes. A few examples of people, who have
recently been vilified, if not out right defamed, are: Winston Churchill, Egerton
Ryerson, and Henry Dundas; the problem is that those people are being judged
out of context, coupled with a lack of knowledge on history.
Conversely, Margaret Sanger the creator of Planned
Parenthood is still being lauded as a hero.
Some people may judge that the name “Planned Parenthood” is an oxymoron
seeing as the majority of ‘patients’ entering any of the almost 600 clinics in
the United States are looking to be a non-parent, to the tune of around two
million visits a year. Responsibility for
a person’s choice and actions has once again been offloaded, at the expense of
another human being.
It has been said – ‘sometimes there is no
solution, only compromises.’ The
intended purpose of politics, within a democracy, is to navigate those choices
on the behalf of the people within the borders of their own nation state. It has also been said – ‘if you want to see
who rules you, just look to see who you’re not allowed to criticize.’ The intended rule of politics, within a
democracy, as it is that critique is required for only via debate, the crucible
for ideas, within which the best of ideas rise to the top. Conversely, within a tyranny, there are
solutions being made by people who can not be criticized; sadly for those who
live within a tyrannical state; those solutions typically suck (#NotAlways).
It has been said – ‘people vote with their feet first, and then their
wallet.’ The intended purpose of encouraging
immigration, on the part of the destination nation, is to bring in people who
will contribute towards that nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and resolve the
shortfalls found within the labour market.
It is the purpose of a non-tyrannical government to protect and support
the people within their nation, of course that is how it was, though not how
things are now.
Now things are seemingly focused on ‘give out
the cash’, which elicited the one and only answer based on human nature writ
large: ‘thank you and give me more’. It
must be remembered that once a ‘hand-up becomes a normalized hand-out’ then when
that is taken away, it will be seen as an oppressive act.
The moral of this story is –don’t
let people go beyond their means; that is, unless you want to control them.
