Acceleration

Over the weekend, Hamas stormed Israel and committed what can only be described as a series of atrocities. Thanks to the specter of Social Media, they gleefully posted a series of videos as the invasion commenced, so proud were they of the massacre.

These videos demonstrated a lack of humanity so profound, I’m at a loss to comprehend how someone becomes so twisted. A mostly naked woman with broken limbs in the back of a pickup, surrounded by men praising their God and spitting on her comatose and possibly dead body. A woman being marched into a vehicle, the crotch of her pants so blood-soaked that it’s clear what took place beforehand. Neighborhoods and streets full of dead bodies, burning vehicles and homes. Hostages tortured, bodies beheaded, an endless cavalcade of horrors.

News of a dance festival or rave attended by hundreds, gunned down en masse. Parents covering their children with their own bodies as human shields. Unconfirmed news reports of beheaded babies, something the mind struggles to believe, but a possibility given the naked savagery displayed by Hamas during their indiscriminate slaughter of innocents that day. All shared by Hamas themselves before their victims began posting their own videos when possible.

And in the aftermath, celebration. Not just from Hamas, but from those sympathetic to Palestine in general. In Canada, Australia, the US, the UK, everywhere there are demonstrations who shout a roar of “Allahu Akbar!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” They know Israel is between the river and sea; they wish it wasn’t. It is Palestine’s right, many say, to rebel against their “oppressors”. There are no innocent civilians to these monstrous malcontents, thus any and all abominations are justified. The “colonizer” deserves no quarter. Some of these gatherings even chanted “Gas the Jews” in a display of utter hypocrisy in a world where everyone right of Lenin is a Nazi, and Trump is worse than Hitler.

And so Israel has and will continue to respond. They vow to obliterate Hamas wherever it hides, at any cost. Civilians in Palestine have been advised to flee, but generally have nowhere to go. Nobody wants them, so odious their behavior. Not even Egypt at the Southern border will allow their entry. Israel will do what it can to prevent civilian casualties, but their patience has ended. Just as the world retaliated against Germany and sometimes people were caught in the crossfire, the war Hamas just started will be ended one way or another following untold destruction. Israel will not negotiate until Hamas is no more.

And much of this is the fault of the United States, because we can’t mind our own God Damn business. We need to have our fingers in every pie, stretch ourselves to every corner of the Earth, pour money into the coffers of every beggar, scoundrel, or cause until something snaps. Hamas claims they were funded by Iran, who we recently provided 6-billion in funds. Their weapons reportedly came from Afghanistan, part of the 80-billion cache of munitions we abandoned to the Taliban in our disastrously hasty withdrawal from the region.

All the while, our own borders are essentially nonexistent. A record 260,000 people swarmed through the Southern border last month. And that’s just the ones we know about. All of them unvetted. Many with an axe to grind and a disdain for our customs similar to how Hamas feels about Israel. From regions all over the world, not just South American countries. The chickens are coming home to roost, and we’re not even trying to stop them.

Western culture is on the precipice of destruction, and we don’t care. In fact, it seems as if our own citizens are pushing us toward the cliff ever faster. Students attending one of our most respected centers of education, Harvard, penned a letter blaming the attack on Israel. Our future generations have become self-hating caricatures, so steeped in opulence they don’t even recognize their own privilege. Supporting terrorists as “freedom fighters” from the comfort of an Ivy League university, equipped with the latest cellphone and a smug superiority complex. The reality is that these short-sighted men and women will eventually graduate and poison our institutions further, both in the public and private sector. They will be our lawyers, judges, teachers, and more.

And the crazy part is that this was all inevitable. Rome fell in much the same way, with barbarians at the gates and insane concessions granted if only to coast on momentum just a bit more. We’ve allowed our government to become too ponderously large. Even if our public servants fit the job description perfectly, and we somehow wielded a flawless voting system, decay is natural. All it takes is one self-interested candidate that slips through a crack, one corrupt manager hired who then expands the influence of their tiny fiefdom. Maybe it’s a guaranteed job to a regulator once they leave office, perhaps it’s wildly unrealistic and frequent “speaking fees” or other investments. Not everyone is scrupulous enough to resist.

So the branches of government are destined to fall into corruption. But it’s worse than that. In their rush to do as little work as humanly possible, Congress has delegated the onerous task of lawmaking to an endless sea of unelected agencies. The First Amendment begins with “Congress shall make no law…” and so they don’t. The FDA does. The SEC, DHS, FBI, NSA, EPA, ATF, DEA, FCC, FTC, and IRS do. Employees of these limitless agencies can outlast multiple administrations, suffer regulatory capture and corruption just as much as any other, and are not subject to the Will of the People.

When people talk about the “Deep State”, that’s what they mean. It’s all of the people in government with their own agendas, the supporting cast that like any cornered animal, will fight when threatened. So any administration which seeks to cut costs, or perhaps return the US to the spirit embodied in its constitution will be attacked. By the media. By courts. The unelected bureaucrats will call in favors, make threats or underhanded deals, and more, all to preserve their power. Even if they’re simply a misguided zealot with good intentions, the damage is done.

Writ large over the course of decades and even centuries, this rot has seeped into every facet of America. A fall is inevitable; a revolution is coming, and by the looks of things, it will unravel Western society itself. In an effort to denigrate the “other guys” as being racist, homophobic, white supremacist, and so on, the Left has abandoned the tenants of Liberalism itself. Free Speech is too dangerous, you see. Free association is a threat. Innocence must now be proven, rather than the inverse. All that is left is mob justice, and the animosity that drives it. Our esteemed leaders are so blind to the monster they’ve created, they won’t understand what happened even as it consumes them.

That’s why Israel matters. That’s why I’m writing about it, even after Ukraine and Russia have slugged it out for months on end. We’ve yoked the West to a kind of Original Sin from which there is no redemption. Through our own media, we’ve painted the West is nothing but a bunch of slavers, occupiers, colonizers, and worse. Is it any wonder then, that those who feel wronged now rise up? Come to kill us in our beds? Return the perceived slights from generations of “oppression” despite the world being more productive with less death from all causes than ever before? The world is no utopia, but life has certainly been worse.

Some call me a pessimist, but I’m more of a pragmatist. If someone tells me they hate me, for whatever reason, I believe them. Hamas absolutely loathes Israel and its people, and proved how far they’re willing to go to destroy it. A growing minority of the citizens of the US think all white people are racist, oppressive colonizers who deserve similar treatment. We’re all caught up in so much hyperbole there’s no escape anymore. Whatever comes will be because our media and various leaders stoked hate rather than unity, all in an effort to retain power.

I can only pray there’s still time for cooler heads to prevail. Otherwise, Israel will be just another spark for the conflagration of World War III and further civil strife. Enough history exists that we should know better, but sadly never seem to learn.