While trying to keep up with the Jones family, the social
climber next door keeps motivating himself with the belief that the other man's
grass is always greener. If it so happens that he manages to get his lawn as green
as that of Jones, he discovers to his chagrin that the grass isn't really grass
but weed.
It can also happen that Jones will get wind of that reality,
and he too will be chagrined. But don't you believe he'll be chagrined because
he discovered he was surrounded by weed instead of green grass. No; he'll be
chagrined because the social climber next door will not envy him anymore. You
see, my friend, Jones is also a social climber who thought he had climbed to
the highest rung of the social ladder where everyone will envy him but no one
will challenge him. And yet, here he is, mired in the weed of the ladder's
lowest rung with no one to admire him or take the trouble to challenge him.
Well, my dear reader, I know you don't like the mixing of
metaphors, but I had to do this to explain what went through my mind when I
read the New York Times editorial which came under the title: “The East
Europeans Do an About-face,” published on March 7, 2017 in the Times. The green
grass they thought they had was something called Liberal Democracy. Many in the
world, especially Eastern Europe, envied them so much that people of their ilk
– George Soros, for example – thought they should share the system with those
people. To do that, they formed Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and
financed them to go “teach” the people behind the former iron curtain how to
implement a system that's governed by the rule of law, and how to live by those
rules.
That's when the people of East Europe
discovered that the grass isn't grass but weed. They also discovered that
Liberal Democracy isn't the practice of the rule of law, but the eternal
struggle to get around the law – something they do by hook or by crook,
whichever is more convenient at the time. More than that, the people of East Europe discovered that the system has become so corrupt;
it allows the crooks to gain the upper hand while turning the decent people
into suspects. The latter are accused of having a hidden agenda, and must prove
they are innocent. And when they do that, the crooks who should be considered
outlaws but are pampered instead, see the decent people as weak and deficient,
and see in this an opportunity to take advantage of them.
These realities led the good people of East
Europe to understand that the NGOs – whose founders may be as
clean as a whistle – are nonetheless filled by evil people whose obsession is
to turn their countries into the corrupt system of rule by outlaws to benefit
the outlaws. And the good people discovered how permanent that obsession is
when they realized that the NGOs were universally operated by a World Jewry
that's in the business of corrupting the entire world so as to better control
it.
It is not surprising, therefore, to see the editors of the
New York Times – who are honorary members of that same World Jewry – try to
advance a cockamamie interpretation of what motivates the East Europeans, and
what causes them to reject the work of the foreign-financed NGOs. Look how they
explain their idea:
“It is hard to grasp why people would turn against Western
organizations that promote open government. Yet, populist leaders and movements
are furiously turning against foreign-financed organizations. The vilification
of the NGOs is an extension of the malaise that fostered the nationalist sentiments
these leaders have exploited. This discontent was a product of the changes of
the 1990s, followed by disappointments with the slowness of improvements in
living standards, corruption and globalization. The flood of refugees
heightened a sense among many Central and Eastern Europeans that the Union was not helping them protect their national
identities, which they had fought so hard to maintain under Soviet rule”.
It is apparent that the editors blame the rejection of the
foreign NGOs on everything they could think of except the dirty work that the
NGOs were doing. And then, as expected, the editors shot themselves in the foot
with the suggestion that the Eastern and Central Europeans were strong enough
to protect and maintain their national identities under Soviet rule, but could
not do likewise against a handful of helpless refugees. Even stranger is the
claim that the Eastern and Central Europeans stood up to the Soviets alone, but
knuckled under when facing helpless refugees even when the European Union was
there to help them.