Northern California is an interesting place. For most people, Cali is seen as LA, beaches, year-round warmth, wealthy Silicon Valley, and wine country. It’s also perceived as a hotbed for all flavors of progressivism that is then exported around the country. To others, it’s fires, filth, and desperate moral corruption. California is actually a lot more complicated. One example is that about two-thirds up the state, north of Sacramento, the people and politics may as well be from a different planet. Conservatism is alive and well there, populating a full spectrum of curious people and conservative beliefs – all the way to what some would regard as a ‘crank.’ Picture a hermit holding a sign. In my recent trip there, we passed a residence with a sloppily painted yard sign that mentioned ‘1938.’
I didn’t catch the sign’s full message, as we were making our way out of the remote small town, but I know enough history to know why that year was so important. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler, and afterwards, waiving the Munich Agreement, he pronounced that “we have peace for our time.” It was the year of Kristallnacht, the night of terror and destruction against the German Jews. It was the year Germany marched into Austria to rescue the ‘oppressed’ citizenry. It was the year Hitler plunged the entire world into hell and WWII – and set off a chain of events encompassing the Holocaust and tens of millions of deaths worldwide. That 1938.
What was the small-town crank trying to convey with his sign? I think I have an idea. While the world was being prepped for unthinkable suffering and loss, Western nations including the United States was engaged in a deep oblivion. Part of it was understandable, still smarting from the tragedy of WWI, it was all too easy to bury our heads in the sand, avoid, and deny. And deny we did, even while receiving direct and credible intelligence that Hitler was indeed the maniac that we now see him as today.
And here we are again. We have millions of data points, communications, and intelligence sources indicating that China is intent on world domination and, as per their own domestic practices, are willing to perform many of the same brutal crimes against their own citizenry that Hitler used against the Jews. Our own government, the Biden administration is essentially giving them the Neville Chamberlain treatment; mouthing the threat, afraid, compromising out of fear, showing [his] hand in peculiar deep weakness by declaring that we are our own worst enemy and that tending to the feelings of racial and cultural minorities are not just a priority but also a mission of our military. Just as bad are the majority of our large corporations that are weak, supine, on the dirty floor groveling for whatever last dollars can be found before China comes and wipes out business as they’ve known it. Nike and the NBA are of course notable examples here, but there are far more. Our media rush to kiss China’s ass in order to tend to their exclusive priority of boosting Democrat rule and covering up the manifest weakness of the Biden administration. Tens or hundreds of millions of our own people are consequently unaware, unprepared, distracted, or are even supportive of the notion of autocratic Chinese style authoritarianism. Oblivion, 1938.
Iran also gets a dishonorable mention in this context as well because the present and actual diplomatic status espoused by the Biden administration has a much closer literal resemblance to Chamberlain/Hitler status quo. Iran is ready to destroy Israel at its nearest convenience were it not for Israel’s remarkable determination to take care of the business that the Biden administration is presently in denial of. Biden approaches Iran, servile, groveling, begging for any diplomatic crumbs that they could spare. Iran openly mocks that weakness. 1938.
To virtually everyone, these ‘foreign’ matters are perceived as entirely abstract; parlor talk for elites, American University and Harvard grads. My case is that it’s not abstract. In the case of Iran, if Israel fails in its quest to hedge in Iran while we presently stand here with limp hands and quivering lips, the Middle East falls. That sets off a chain reaction where American prosperity and influence are cancelled for the foreseeable future.
In the case of China, they don’t have to send in a single troop to our shores to invade and subjugate us. They’ve already infiltrated our businesses, government, media, and universities. If we pass the laws they want us to have; redirect our military to navel-gazing incompetence; write our trade policies; overwhelm our commercial choices; and create constant, favorable public opinion of their government, culture, values, and priorities, then they can lead us the way a bull is easily led by a single ring through the nose. Once they hit that point – and that is much much closer now than most could ever imagine – then they will act with even greater impunity toward their neighbors: Taiwan, among others, and lastly, us.
Ultimately, they would control our freedoms, our associations, and our voices, and they would brutally punish any who dare speak or stand in their way, exactly as they now do with the recently appropriated Hong Kong. They could conceivably do all of this mimicking the way some parasitic life forms take over an insect host. The parasite first invades the mind of the host, then gets it to do its bidding, gradually consuming the insect from the inside out even while the host is still alive. Finally, the shell expires in death while the parasite has successfully propagated itself elsewhere.
A good argument could be made to state that we, and by that, I mean the leftist Democrat apparatus in the United States, have already adopted the CCP model for suppression of all opposition. China might actually admire us right now. Zuckerberg is setting up absolute thought policing on Facebook, the most ubiquitous social media outlet. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others are ‘cancelling’ all political dissent on their channels. The January 6 protestors are now being revealed to have been scammed in an FBI sting operation and subsequently treated every bit as bad as any Chinese political prisoner. Our own NSA openly spies on conservatives, such as Tucker Carlson.
A majority of todays’ Americans are as oblivious as Americans were in 1938. Maybe the tools are slightly different, but the outcomes are eerily close. I think I understand what the crank in Northern California was trying to say. He/she has vision that few other have.