President Nefasto! Has a ring to it as if something from a bad B movie about an evil president, doesn't it?
In my previous blog, the concept of “nefasto”, an Italian
word for evil, was introduced as the best word to describe what it meant functionally and morally to subvert, overthrow, or undermine America itself
as a functioning nation.
I chose this word as a result of my
familiarity with the Italian language, the result of a decade of living there,
the furthering of my interest with Roman and Church history, and because the word captures the essence of what had been achieved in the first "people's thing", the Roman republic, by describing its undoing.
Basically,
nefasto derives from what unbinds the
fas, the
binding of the
fasces, the bundles of sticks that represented the coming
together of the thirteen tribes of
Rome to replace the Etruscan kings they had overthrown. They are visible on Lincoln's throne in the image below.
Fas is the word that generated fasces, fascial (in anatomy),
fashion, fascinate. Yes, fascist also comes from this. Mussolini used this as part of his re-invention of international socialism, Marxist-Leninist style, to a national socialism. He tried to invoke Rome's origins to make his approach attractive to the average Italian who resisted socialism by giving the Italians a way to identify with it as a people.
To reiterate from the first blog, a nation-state needs to have three functions and an
animating principle driving those functions to keep itself in life.
The functions are: 1) control of its borders; 2) control of
its interior to have law-and-order; 3) a tax system that provides the money to
do all that based on a viable economy.
The animating principle, though, is the real telling element
of the nation-state: its identity.
Without a shared vision of what the nation-state is about,
there is no motivation to achieve this status.
All of Roman religious and spiritual culture answered that
question. That vision of what life was
about gave the Romans their dedication to the Great Mother Rome and its Stoicism allowed them to remain
stalwart in the face of what lesser groups would have reacted to with total
panic. Hannibal's invasion is the greatest example.
So, then, what about that title, there:
“President
Nefasto and "2016".
"2016" is the new documentary on President Obama by Dinesh D'Souza.
What can I say?
A shockingly good documentary that says a lot of things many of us have been saying about President Obama since he took office. In short, that Obama is on a mission to take down America, hamstring it, and that his relationship to his father is at the root of the whole thing.
“2016” begins with commentary on an event that appear to be of less
importance: i.e., sending the bust of Winston Churchill back to the UK. For me, it was a small thing
that sent up a big red flag.
It struck me as the political equivalent of the Taliban blowing up statues of the Buddha or
gang members in Los Angles crossing out the name of a rival gang member on the
list under the gang graffiti that declares that territory as theirs.
Surely, this is an exaggeration. I wish.
That rejection of Winston Churchill, one-time head of the British colonial office, was the essential statement of President Obama’s point of
view: the point of view of a hardened anti-colonialist. Any achievement of Churchill in WWII was more than negated by being part of the original colonial system.
There are different shades and degrees of anti-colonialism. D'Souza's own father and grandfather were anti-colonialists, but, not abandoned by them, D'Souza had the grace to come to a more objective view of the West, whites, and the US, in particular since his own identity as a male was secure and not involved.
Obama's anti-colonialism is of the Rev Wright-Bill Ayers-Frank Marshall Davis kind. His anti-colonialism is a negation of the animating principle of our "We, the People" constitutional republic itself. Wright's is of the "God damn America" kind, while Frank Marshall Davis, his mentor growing up, was a card-carrying communist, editor of a leading American communist paper, and on a list that, should the US had gone to war with Russia, called for his detainment by the FBI for the duration of the war.
We all remember Ayers if we are of a certain age. He planted bombs and was a member of the Weather Underground during the Vietnam era.
In effect, we are a lie for those three men and the others mentioned in the film. Our Founders' vision was false, a mask worn to promote neo-colonialism. Those men see no invention or hard work, no diligence, at the basis of our development and power. Just pure theft. And no essential vision of "All men are created equal" with a Bill of Rights to secure and to promote to the world.
No, no. Quite the opposite.
Obama has made it abundantly clear through his actions and policies that Obama is driven by his anti-colonialist
animus and wants to realize it by making America less powerful,
thus more equal, and less capable of projecting force, interfering much less with
the weaker nations of the world.
How to do that?
Simple. By interfering in
every legitimate and necessary expression of our
three preserving functions: from failing to safeguard our border, even our
embassies, to interfering with legitimate police and state function of
government internally. Then Obama undemines the economic system, which will eventually make the tax dollars we collect of much reduced worth, further undermining our capacity to keep our borders secure and preserve law-and-order.
Obama refuses to really enforce immigration laws. He works to block the
introduction of photo ID to assure the integrity of the vote, while opposing E-Verify
for hiring. He turns down energy from Canada and shuts down drilling in the Gulf, hamstringing our energy supply while aiding Brazil and others to drill. He debases our currency through huge deficits after having promised to halve the deficit, and fails
to keep goods dumped by nations that manipulate currencies from entering our markets.
All of that interferes with the express interests and will of "We, the People" whose representatives have made those laws. Our tax system will soon be collecting the most worthless dollar in our history as Obama chooses to continue creating huge deficits. In this, the Fed Reserve bank aids him. All of this, added in with his energy and trade policies, destroys the engine of wealth America has traditionally been.
Obama has also failed to grasp the reality of the threat to
the West posed by Jihadism, the militant wing of Islam’s thousand-year old
campaign to impose Islam on the rest of the world. His attempt to reset relations with the Muslim world was based on his anti-neocolonialism.
Essentially, our problems are just blow-back. His anti-colonialism assigns the basis of all present dysfunctional aspects of those nations to the West's instrusion into those nations. Use your Arabic name, your non-white heritage, he thought, and I could magically reset the whole relationship. Yes, He Could, even while using drones to kill Jihadists.
This kept Obama from realizing how dangerous Benghazi was after repeated warnings from the intelligence community and the ambassador himself. His exalted view of his own powers is the immediate cause of the denial, something he shares with people throughout his administration.
It's the same for not safeguarding our borders where human trafficking, drug smuggling goes on and Jihadists can enter. To boot, Obama ignores the effects of it all on the crime rates in Phoenix, Arizona among many other American cities of the South.
In the case of Arizona, Obama has gone out of his way to not only not guard, but to prevent Arizona from guarding itself. After all, didn't we clean up methaphetamine production in the US just so it could become another one of the "exports" helping Mexico bootstrap itself out of poverty?
What exactly would the aim of the policy be that left the border open after 9/11, while druglords, capitalizing on the access to the American market, destroy the very fabric of Mexican society, its honest citizens, its police, living in fear?
President Nefasto's policies have international consequences, and some of them, as in Mexico, are nefasto there as well.
There is, in essence, no functional aspect of America as a society and nation-state that Obama has not impeded and worked against. Americans have gone along with this because of the promise of a cleansing of racial guilt coming from a man with a middle-class persona and a winning smile. That we live in a time of spiritual crisis yet to be resolved also allows us to give the benefit of the doubt to the motivations of people we don't know very well. And, we certainly didn't know Obama.
We also have an uncertain loyalty to our own values, our own sense of the rational, the just and the good. That spiritual crisis' dysfunctional aspects are manifest in the general corruption of the intellectual classes, our educational institutions and, especially, the main stream media, all of whom acted in concert with Obama to get him elected.
Oh, by the way: Obama had to act the way he did.
In effect, by taking on the political theology of his father (as a way to absolve himself of the anger toward his father and general sense of unworthiness his father's abandonment of him created), everything evil that happens to us is the blow-back from something evil we have done. More on that later in the next blog.
Last point: The opposition party, the GOP, is also very much at fault.
George W Bush and GOP failed to safeguard our republic's borders, to supervise our trade deals to see we are not exploited, to reign in budget deficits, to properly supervise our banks, our Wall St firms. That laid the groundwork for Obama's ascendancy. There was no abiding sense that "We, the People" were protected by the supposed purveyors of traditional morality. We voted (not me) for Hope and Change.
W and the GOP actually practice internationalism, helping Wall St at the expense of Main St. More on that in the next blog.
In part III of this blog, we will get into the specifics of those policies, and we will look at some of the "mini-me" policies that the local politicians favor as well.
I will really get into what it means to have a "We, the People" society as opposed to mob-based pseudo-democracy.
