“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
“A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.”
“A nation that forgets its past has no future.”
For those who still remember and desire to do so, today we celebrate Presidents' Day, where we recall the greatest of our leaders, two of the largest who happen to have birthdays in the month of February (Lincoln's the 12th, Washington's the 22nd), thus the reason for its positioning on our calendar. In a time of decadence and degradation, let those of us who still hold fast to the importance of tradition remember these titans' legacies, so that we might share it with our next generations in the hope that it can, and will, lead to a new birth of freedom...
It is now fashionable to deride our presidents as part of the woke deconstruction and desecration of America. Two of America’s most noble presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, whom Presidents’ Day honors most especially, are routinely scrutinized by the vandals running through our country and institutions. Why?
The two most consequential presidents are the ones whom the woke despise most. Washington is the “Father” of the United States. But what America is he the father of? The America of liberty, the rule of law, and defender of freedom or the America of racism, white supremacy, and historical injustices? Likewise, Lincoln held the union together, is remembered as the Great Emancipator, and ensured that a united America would stride into the next century in which the United States would be the great bastion of freedom against the totalitarianisms of modernity. Or was he guilty of perpetuating the sins of the past as is now becoming trendy to assert?
The hatred of Washington is very straightforward. Humans live by stories. Because we live by stories, Washington is the central figure in whom two stories of America can be told: the America of liberty, justice, and the rule of law or the America of racism and injustice.
While it is fashionable to deride critics as rewriting history, the truer understanding is that critics want to tell another story because history is alive through the stories we tell. The 1619 Project and other woke ideologues want to tell a story in which the America of liberty, justice, and the rule of law is replaced by the America of slavery, injustice, and racism. Washington stands on this crossroad because he is the first president after the Constitution’s ratification -- Washington must either be understood as a champion of liberty and equality or a complicit (if not explicit) defender of oppression, injustice, and white supremacy. The woke choose the latter story.
Hating Lincoln has become a newer fad, but for reasons understandable once the woke ideology is understood. At its core, woke ideology hates everything to do with America -- the historical America and the America of today which is the product of that historical legacy. Furthermore, in its hatred of everything to do with America, it celebrates everything not American: the alien, the foreign, the other. Lincoln need not apply.
Lincoln, because he represents the historic America, because he advanced the cause of Manifest Destiny at the expense of indigenous tribes, and because he represents the supposed “white savior” complex, is also someone who needs to be destroyed. In fact, Democrats in D.C. and in other states have already removed statues of Lincoln and want to remove more statues of Lincoln. Lincoln, therefore, in the story the woke tell, represents the continuation of the system born from Washington, the Founding Fathers, and America’s colonial heritage which the woke proclaim is bad, bad, bad.
This story of America as an oppressor writ large is pernicious on many levels. First, it inculcates a spirit of desecration into the hearts and souls of the next generation. Nothing can be built on hatred; hatred only destroys. Second, this story destroys individuality and agency by flattening everyone to historic actions which we are but the outgrowth expression of. It is meant to destroy notions of individual liberty and freedom by saying we are guilty of past actions or victims of past actions. Third, it negates the heroic sacrifices Americans have made, from settlement to today, in the advancement of liberty and justice for all -- both in America and for the world.
Presidents’ Day matters because it is an opportunity for us to honor those presidents who helped create a country where a constitution of liberty and the human spirit of ingenuity and freedom could be harnessed, unleashed, and cultivated. If John Lennon wanted us to imagine a utopian world, let us imagine a world without the United States. Let us imagine a world where the United States didn’t exist or the union wasn’t preserved and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century couldn’t be challenged and defeated with the United States leading the crusade for liberty.
Americans need to reclaim the story of the United States as a country where the advancement of liberty, justice, and equality is part and parcel of our historical experience and mission. The United States has, and is, a country where a more perfect union is constantly becoming a truer reality. The United States has, and is, a country where the heart and soul of human liberty is nurtured and nourished. Washington and Lincoln stand as exemplars of inspiration in this regard, presidents who helped ensure this could become reality. We walk in their footsteps.
The attack on America’s presidents is an attack on the understanding we have of ourselves and what story guides our hearts and souls. Presidents’ Day is a reminder of what is good in America, the America of liberty that Washington so valiantly fought for and the America of liberty and equality that Lincoln so nobly stood for. That America would prove indispensable for the conflicts of the twentieth century where the human heart and soul was nearly destroyed by the totalitarian evils that so viciously and violently assailed the world.
We must ensure that America doesn’t slip into the totalitarian temptation. I mentioned that hatred cannot build but only destroy, since it lacks the nurturing spirit of love. The totalitarianisms that this noble nation helped to defeat in the past century were built on hatred -- hatred of Jews, hatred of capitalists, hatred of Christians, hatred of everyone not Aryan or communist. Washington and Lincoln stand to remind us of the power of patriotic love and duty, and how patriotic love and duty can, and will, lead to a new birth of freedom. In honoring them, we honor how patriotism nurtures the goodness in us that is called upon to make sacrifices for others.
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.
Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones, whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord. But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction, suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you. They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children! Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness.
These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved. For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”
...a lot there to consider for America and this wayward Western world.
O LORD God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do; Mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Monday marked the anniversary of President Ronald Wilson Reagan's birth. For some who are still coming around to Reagan, there's a great piece that reconciles some of the main conservative/libertarian concerns expressed over the years that I'd encourage readers to check out, regardless of whether you share them. However for us, the birthday of one of this site's favorite American presidents (in a presidential celebratory month already) has a lot to teach us about what we need most in our own troubled times: a love for America, a resolved leader to emulate that expression, another Ronald Reagan! The 99-year-old former Sec. of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, beautifully addressed such sentiment at the Reagan Library's celebration of the 40th President's 112th birthday (excerpts to be enjoyed alongside PJMedia's Gwendolyn Sims poignant commentary)...
Ronald Reagan was an extraordinary human being and a hugely successful American president. As we all know Ronald Reagan was a truthteller and for this, he received the appellation of being a great communicator but he rejected that title saying, “I wasn’t a great communicator but I communicated great things. And [they] didn’t spring fully from my brow. They came from the heart of a great nation.”
He was too modest about the first part, but he was right about the second.
Reagan crystallized much of what makes this nation great. And just as importantly, much of what makes this nation good. His core decency was irrepressible. His personality was so compelling that a deep trait of his character — compassion — went sometimes unnoticed.
On the day of the attempted assassination on him, the grievously wounded Ronald Reagan recalled the parable of the lost sheep that he, and I quote, “began to pray for the mixed up young man who had shot me and to hope that he will find his way back to the fold.”
I don’t know about you, but it was right about here as I listened to the alternately frail yet somehow incredibly strong nonagenarian Dr. Kissinger that I began to have bouts of nostalgia wash over me, nostalgia for a time when the grownups were in charge and leaders were leaders. Compassion, goodness, and decency are not exactly what comes to my mind with most of our leaders these days.
Ronald Reagan was a fierce cold warrior and an avid and insistent peacemaker at the same time. For him, America’s international strength was not a national vanity nor an end in itself; rather it was a necessary instrument to produce flexibility and compromise by America’s adversary.
His abiding vision had a moral and strategic clarity; he refused to accept the proposition that leaders had to choose between the two. He was convinced that there is nothing which adversaries admired so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than military weakness. But he also knew that a country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
After two years of Commander-in-Chief Weak Sauce and Chinese Balloon Week, it seems quaint to think our president could have “moral or strategic clarity” let alone be admired by our adversaries for strength — or anything really.
President Reagan was an inveterate jestor. It was his way of making it clear that he wasn’t taking himself too seriously and to keep his adversaries off balance. One story he loved involved an American debating with a Russian in which the American says, “In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office. I can hit the desk with my fist and say, ‘President Reagan, I don’t like the way you’re running this country.”‘ The Russian replied, “I can do the same thing. I can walk into the Kremlin. Go into [the] president’s office, pound the table, and say, ‘I don’t like the way President Reagan is running his country.'”
Another story he used to tell was [how] you can always tell the Communists from the anti-Communists. The Communists read Marx and Lenin. The anti-Communists understand it.”
During the Nixon presidency, I was the liaison of President Nixon to Governor Reagan. I had many occasions to exchange ideas. There was one occasion in which I told him in the 1973 war that we wanted to send planes to Israel and we were looking for a formula to do it without bringing on an even more united Arab attack. Reagan said maybe the way to do it is to say we will replace all the planes that the Egyptians and Syrians have said that they had shot down. This was an awe-inspiring number and met every requirement that we had for replacement — and it also wasn’t exactly accurate.
Remember when it was okay to laugh at ourselves? Remember when lessons could be taught gently but firmly and with humor? I do.
Remember when the Middle East wasn’t a powder keg — well okay, neither do I, but I do remember when that part of the world wouldn’t have even dare to dream of ambushing our soldiers, crossing our borders, or gleefully commandeering millions of dollars of our abandoned military equipment.
Reagan came to the presidency infused by his anti-Communist convictions. While in office, these never waivered but they were tempered by his enormous sense of responsibility for avoiding catastrophic war.
I had the privilege of some seventy conversations with him and many other occasions to see him in action in groups during his presidency. There were three convictions that never waivered: first, Reagan believed that America was most secure and prosperous if it was the leader in shaping a stable world; second, he believed that this stable world could not be based on American isolationism.
Reagan knew that America needed to be powerful in substance and in mind to protect world order — by force, if necessary. He never glorified strength in its own name. Rather, he sought it as a means to peace.
Thus, his favorite phrase was ‘peace through strength.’
There’s something to be said about being strong and truly believing in the principles that made America the most prosperous and free nation in all of history. Tuesday evening, President Biden will give his State of the Union speech and the thought of his expected obfuscations fill me with equal measures of queasiness and anger. How can this be where Reagan’s America ended up?
To this end, Reagan ordered an expansion of our nuclear capacity in the very early days of his presidency. He supplemented it with a program that was ridiculed when it was first put forward and which is now a standard part of our armory and that of our allies which was the Missile Defense Program. It is now one of the key elements. He always justified these efforts on the ground that [they] would lead to peace.
He was determined not to have a nuclear war.
He wanted to remove catastrophic weapons from the armories but he knew that it could never happen unless the United States possessed enough strength that it could overcome any military challenge. As a result of these efforts, in 1987, an entire category of nuclear weapons [was] removed from the armories. We, of course, were dealing with an adversary who was not always maintaining its commitments and so, this part of Reagan’s efforts, while substantial, has yet to be fulfilled.
He was in the strongest position of any American president that I have seen in action in his combination of commitment to defense and…to peace.
Unless we get a strong leader in the White House in 2024, I don’t see this situation improving. Do we really think China would’ve floated the Balloon Week challenge had President Trump been in the Oval Office? And let’s not forget, we have two more years of President Weak Sauce to survive go.
His willingness to face down challenges and his readiness to conduct negotiations on a human basis. At his first meeting with Gorbachev, he told Gorbachev a story about a 700 lb man who went on a diet and dieted himself down to 400 lbs. He could now walk from his bedroom to his living room. One of Gorbachev’s associates told me that the Russians went crazy trying to figure out what he was trying to tell them — what threat he was uttering in a polite manner. Finally, one of their intelligence people found that this was a story that Reagan had read in People magazine on the way to the meeting.
In a funny way, they found it very reassuring that in this conversation with this formidable American president was also talking to them on a human level.
Say what you want about President Trump, but the man could negotiate like no one since Reagan. And our adversaries feared and respected him.
On a more substantial side, when Reagan was recovering from the assassination attempt on him, he wrote a letter to Brezhnev who was then [the] Russian-Soviet leader in which he pointed out that the United States uniquely in the history of mankind was ready, had never used its power to impose its preferences on others; to the contrary, we used our power and wealth to rebuild the war-ravaged economies of the world — including the nations which had been our enemies. He said the same option existed for the Soviet Union.
As the American president, he would dedicate himself to bringing peace even while he was pushing the major rearmament of our military forces. He felt so strongly about it that he even offered to share our strategic defense capabilities if we could achieve a peaceful outcome with our enemies so that this kind of war could never happen. This attitude can be best demonstrated by his speeches about the Berlin Wall. In 1987, he made a speech at the Berlin Wall — I must say over the violent opposition of the State Department — in which he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Five months later he made another speech in which he said he was envisioning the day when he and Gorbachev would meet in Berlin [to] start taking down the wall brick by brick and that they would chair an effort to bring peace to the world. This even led to a joint statement by him and Gorbachev in which they said nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
Of course, Gorbachev did not stay in office to be able to carry out these visions. We have to remember who brought us to the point where we could have them and where we could be strong enough to implement them.
As a kid who grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation in the 1970s and ’80s, I for one was grateful for Reagan and Gorbachev’s efforts at de-escalation. Can our kids say the same about Biden & Co. today?
American leaders are often criticized as belligerent when they build defenses and weak when they practice conciliation. Reagan transcended this divide. Within ten months after he left office, the wall in Berlin came down much the same way as he had hoped — not with Russian cooperation — but through an accumulation of American willingness to stand for its principles.
President Reagan assumed office after a period of internal turmoil and international withdrawal; after years of protest over the Vietnam War; after the period of hostages in Iran; and [after] a period of domestic assassinations. He overcame these challenges with wisdom and serenity. He epitomized something that I wrote in a recent book that great leaders take their societies from where they are to where they have never been by their vision and imagination.
Today it’s Biden’s lack of vision and lack of wisdom that has led to turmoil and division.
Today we again suffer domestic division and international disorder about arguments about who we are and what we stand for. We find it difficult to muster the domestic cohesion necessary to face the challenges ahead of us.
In the Middle East, a hollowed theocracy is on the brink of developing the world’s most devastating weapons. In Asia, Chinese ambitions as the Middle Kingdom constitute a challenge to world order. Most recently, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine shows no signs of abating. And at the same time, the evolution of artificial intelligence is transforming human consciousness itself.
Each of these pressing developments requires a combination of strength and conciliation.
In a recent book, Ronald Reagan was described as the peacemaker. As president, he understood better than anyone how to integrate the elements of power and the elements of conciliation. As he said in his Challenger speech, ‘the future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave.’
The Left and Joe Biden wouldn’t know “conciliation” if their lives depended on it — even though they directly depend on it. While they understand “power,” they haven’t a clue about “conciliation.”
We need his civic face. ‘We are too great a nation,’ he reminded us, ‘to limit ourselves to small dreams.’
We need his vision. In his farewell address, he described ‘the city on the hill’ as he always said of our country as ‘a beacon — a magnet — for all who must have freedom; for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness toward home.’
It is in this spirit that I feel so honored to say these words about a remarkable president. To say at this point, what we most need is another Ronald Reagan.
Amen, Dr. Kissinger. We certainly do need someone with Reagan’s sensibilities, love of America, and who thoroughly understands peace comes through strength. I certainly have someone in mind and I hope he hears Dr. Kissinger’s call to action loudly and clearly.
