Ronald Reagan alerted Americans, most importantly, young people and university students to what he referred to as the “evil” Soviet Empire.
By the time that Reagan was elected President in 1981, the Soviet Union and its communist satellite states in Europe, and Cuba and Nicaragua in Latin America, had the support of entrenched American leftists and fellow travelers in the media and academia.
At the height of the Cold War, American students were subjected to a barrage of disinformation that has subsequently proven to be highly effective in disorienting and confusing people about the nature of socialism and communism. As expected, today the chickens have come home to roost.
The same intellectually dishonest media pundits and academics that supported communism during the Cold War are now supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is equally true of the people who run the Biden regime.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991, Western democracies have become brazenly illiberal. That is an ominous sign that Western democracies house many people who are intent on collapsing democracy from within.
Proper understanding of the latter is enough to tame our expectations about creating a better world and any prospects for lasting peace in our time. Respect and willingness to support democracy is fading quickly. Leftism believes that free will agency and responsibility, what sustains healthy cultures and democracy, are a threat to radical environmentalism.
We ought not to forget that radical environmentalism is the latest re-packaging of the secular religion that is Marxism.
Dumbing Down of Education: Indoctrination Breeds Illiberalism
Allan Bloom was professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Student became a bestseller in 1987.
In Closing of the American Mind, Blooms laments the sorry and dangerous state of American higher education, wherein the best cases, students receive banal training on how to become relativists; in the worst, they become committed culture war warriors who are intent on bringing down Western civilization out of spite and hatred, which they have garnered through indoctrination and training in Marxist ideology.
Bloom points out that the latter predicament destroys students’ chances to turn their gaze to greatness, instead of embracing base cultural mediocrity. The best way for governments to attain virtue is for its citizens to practice virtue. In the preface to his translation of Plato’s Republic, Bloom writes: “Regimes depend on men’s virtues, not on institutions; if the highest virtues are not present in the rulers, an inferior regime must be instituted.”
Contrast that stark sense of realism about the future health of Western democracies with Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, where the author argues that liberal democracy is the form of government that would end communism.
Following Bloom’s understanding of the wholesale destruction of American higher education, in addition to massive doses of indoctrination, Fukuyama’s idea that democracy has finally won the day as the logical alternative to totalitarianism, becomes glaringly difficult to swallow given its naivete.
One of the problems inherent in Fukuyama’s belief that democracy will rule once that communism is defeated is that democracy is a recent development in human history. Albeit democracy has been established and nourished through the best character traits of persons who practice good will. Lamentably this is not enough to safeguard democracy given the vast and perpetual disinformation campaigns that leftism employs against democracy from within. For this reason, democracy is always in peril of collapsing.
When rightfully understood, the corrosive mantras of relativism “don’t judge,” “all values are equal,” and justice that is allegedly brought about through coerced outcomes, not opportunity, talent, responsibility, etc., demonstrate that democracy is in constant threat of being vandalized from within.
Today, the barbarians are no longer at the gates fulminating to get in. Instead, they have installed themselves in the seat of government, the media, educational, cultural, and religious institutions in Western democracies.
The fact that Ukraine is a constitutional republic, and a sovereign nation has not deterred the illiberal Western media from blaming Western democracies for Russia’s invasion in 2022; a calculated and ruthless invasion that Russia has broadcast to the world for several months.
Some Reasons why Russia has Invaded Ukraine in 2022:
– A color revolution in the United States in 2020 cannot be sustained indefinitely, and will implode in the near future. Russia and China must seize the moment.
– As a result of the color revolution in the United States in 2020, America is suffering through an aggressively managed decline that aims to collapse the U.S. economy and Constitution.
– Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have created an axis of evil that Western democracies and NATO – the belligerents believe – cannot or is not willing to take on.
– Russia currently controls 39% of the energy supply of Europe.
– Russia currently supplies Germany with 57% of its oil and natural gas.
– The heads of the administrative state in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – with the notable exception of Hungary and Poland – have abandoned democracy in exchange for illiberalism.
– China’s upcoming invasion of Taiwan will result in China controlling 92% of computer chip (semiconductors) manufacturing. What will that stark statistic mean to the economies of Western democracies?
Ideologically speaking, Vladimir Putin, Western elites, and the totalitarians that run the communist Re-Set globalist administrative state are the same people. This is the same power structure that attacked the freedom-seeking trucker convey in Canada, and squashed the freedom demonstrations, Patria y Vida, in communist Cuba several months ago.
– Biden has suspended oil and natural gas production in the United States, and has been buying oil from Russia.
– Communism, leftism, illiberalism, corporate elitist opportunism, and social media have created an alliance to strip citizens of civil liberties and destroy free will agency.
– Balkanization of values and demonic cynicism are the rightful heirs of the spoils of the culture war in Western democracies.
Do we need to ask why Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022?
When the question is considered from the perspective of a totalitarian oligarch, If not now, then when?
The global elitists of western Europe and the United States in the promotion of the elimination of fossil fuels, the Great Reset, Build Back Better have given Russia the upper hand in energy, fertilizer and grains. We now face great peril if we further provoke the Russian Bear less we all freeze and starve to death. China, as you point out with the production of semiconductors, has the upper hand in the mining of raw materials and production of goods we deem essential to maintain our standard of living. Russia and China are playing western global elitists for useful idiots. Unless we wake up the Russians and Chinese will succeed in dominating the world and being communists and doing what communists do they will kill off the no longer useful idiots.