Sunday, May 8, 2016

Between understanding and engineering History

What follows is a real-life example that constitutes an excellent lesson on how not to handle history.

It is also an example that shows why the Jews are incapable of understanding history. In brief, it is because they begin with “religious” beliefs to which they hang on like dogma. And they connect fictitious dots that flow out of prejudices they consider to be divine promises. They make decisions based on all that, and chart a course to engineer a desired (read promised) outcome.

What the Jews reject is the reality that this approach – perhaps minus the religious component – is the very foundation on which authoritarian rule is built. It is why dictators (individuals or mass movements) always learn the bitter lesson that they cannot engineer history. What happens to the Jews eventually is that they get surprised when they see that history is made of random events which may or may not converge at some point. If they do, unforeseen consequences make the unexpected happen. And this is why history can only be understood in hindsight when all is said and done.

That lesson comes to us courtesy of the editors of the New York Daily News who apparently discovered in the profile of Benjamin (Ben) Rhodes that was written by David Samuels of the New York Times, a number of reasons to attack their two favorite targets: Their own American President, Barack Obama, and Israel's nemesis in the Middle East, the nation of Iran.

The editors did so in a piece they wrote under the title: “Obama's Iran scam” and the subtitle: “The President hard sale of the nuclear deal with the mullahs has chock full of spin and half-truths,” published on May 7, 2016. They level these accusations because they say they found “plenty” of evidence to that effect in the Rhodes profile, which they characterize as being “extraordinarily revealing”.

Ben Rhodes is the deputy national security adviser that handled the liaison between the White House and the media during the time that the negotiations were ongoing between Iran and the P5+1 nations, which included the United States. What was revealed about Rhodes, say the editors of the Daily News, is that he knew something very serious about Barack Obama, and did not reveal it to the public till after the fact.

Are you ready for it, my friend? Here it is: Rhodes always understood that Obama wanted to “remake U.S. relations in the Mideast,” ever since the beginning of his presidency. And he was eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012 to reach this goal. Whoa! How very serious is that!

What the editors of the Daily News are furious about is that they believe Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes – working hand in hand with the Iranians – engineered this whole thing when in fact, it was no more than a classic example of how characters and events converge randomly to create a historical happening that nobody could have foreseen ahead of time. The astonishing part is that the editors of the tabloid exactly describe how history played itself out, and yet fail to see that it was fashioned by neither the hand of Obama nor that of Rhodes.

Look how elements of that deal had been in the making decades before it all came together. Here is the editors' own recitation of that history: (1) Iranian President Hassan Rouhani earned a PhD in Scotland long ago and then took office only in 2013. (2) Iranian Foreign Minister Mahammad Zarif was educated at American universities. (3) He cultivated a close relationship with America's Secretary of State, John Kerry.

Now, given that John Kerry turned pacifist – having fought in the very unpopular Vietnam War – and given that Barack Obama had an upbringing that made him a pacifist by nature, the two Americans “converged” in time and space with the two Iranians, Rouhani and Zarif, and worked with them to make the nuclear deal happen.

It was this convergence of characters and events which made it inevitable that the four should forge a deal which, by everyone's calculation, has avoided a war in the Middle East so terrible; it would have made previous wars in the region look like child play.

As to the role that Benjamin Rhodes played in this saga, he was only a messenger. He was the town crier whose job was to proclaim history's edicts to the media and the public, helping them understand what was happening. Don't shoot him; he has done nothing wrong.