Thursday, December 28, 2017

Clifford May reflects a now defunct mentality

If you are curious about why the Jews never made it as a normal nation, let alone an empire––with or without the help of others––Clifford D. May is providing the answer. He did not come out and said: That's us Jews, wart and all. Instead, he said: That's not what we are as Americans; it's what we must strive to become.

Clifford May wrote: “The dangerous world of Donald Trump,” an article that was published on December 26, 2017 in The Washington Times. He wants the readers to believe this is his interpretation of the Trump National Security Strategy speech. But any reader that has followed his writings for a time, will realize it is his Judaic view of the world; one that harks back to the Old Testament mentality of baby-killing predators.

To understand what is at play here, we need to begin with a fundamental axiom. It is that we are different from the animals because we possess the power to empathize whereas the animals don't. For example, a cat that is raising a litter will bite a mouse hard enough to impair it but not so hard as to disable it totally. The reason is that the mother wants the mouse to run so that the young cats chase after it and learn to hunt without the mouse outrunning them.

Whereas the cat does not show empathy for the pain or plight of the mouse, human beings empathize with the animals they kill for food. For this reason, the humans created protocols that avoid making the animals suffer when taken to the abattoir. Yes, there was a time when fox hunting was a sport enjoyed by royals, but the practice was deemed inhuman, and was terminated.

Because the majority of human beings are endowed with the power of empathy, the few who still go on a predatory hunt – such as the advocates of colonialism – find themselves compelled to invent reasons for doing so. At first, the colonial powers said that their true motivation was to civilize the savages so that they can manage their own natural wealth … that which is developed for them by the colonial powers.

When this excuse became stale, and everybody rejected it, the colonial powers came up with another excuse to maintain the armed occupation of the colonies. They said they were defending themselves against the “barbarians at the gate.” But when it was pointed out there were no gates and no barbarians standing anywhere, the predatory colonial powers argued that the best defense being a good offense, their attacks on those that mind their own business, were purely defensive moves.

And that's the kind of predator Clifford May wants America to strive becoming. The technique he used to convey his message was to ride on the coattail of President Trump's speech, and make it sound like the President's view of the world and his own view fully concur. The reality, however, is that the two views are as different from each other as the 21st century is removed from the 19th century.

The 19th century was that of gunboat diplomacy. Those that had the gun to kill with, and the boat to take them where they wanted to go, went looking for the places where they could kill the “barbarians” that stood in their way. They killed them, maimed them and looted their possessions.

The colonial powers legitimized that behavior and held those views till the end of the Second World War in the middle of the 20th century. That's when the movement to get rid of colonialism made a great deal of progress. By the time the 21st century rolled in, the phenomenon of globalized trade and commerce had taken form. It is that the colonial powers had discovered they can get wealthier by trading with wealthy jurisdictions than by looting the natural resources of others, manufacture them into useful products, but then find no one wealthy enough to buy these products.

Clifford May lives in the 19th century, believing that Donald Trump lives there too. Here is how May describes his philosophy: “Comforting as it might be to think we live in a global village, in reality we are surrounded by an encroaching global jungle where only the fittest survive.” But does Trump live there too?

Well, it is possible that Clifford May was deceived into believing that Trump did. This may have happened when – before getting elected – Donald Trump mused that he would go and take the Arabs' oil. If true, this would have been 19th century type of diplomacy. But Trump never mentioned the idea after his election. What he did instead, was to go to Arabia, and have a lovefest with his Arab and Muslim hosts.

From all the signs, it seems that Donald Trump is a quintessential 21st century businessman with a penchant for doing business anywhere in the world he detects auspicious conditions. He won’t go there riding a gunboat, however, regardless of what the others tell him, or what he says to them in response. That's because he is a builder with a passion to build, and not to destroy.

Clifford May and those like him––who are steeped in the brutal lessons of the Old Testament––are not reading Trump correctly. They believe he stands at the edge of a cliff, and they wait for the opportunity to push him down the abyss.

For some weird reason, they believe they will gain something when this happens. But then again, it is the kind of thing they believed for thirty-five centuries waiting for their empire to grow by itself from the ground.