Bruce Thornton, a professor of classics and humanities, joins us to discuss his book, “The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.”

His ultimate advice for the President?  Listen to what Islamists say, and believe they meant it.  We cannot bribe them–with education, money or democracy–because they will never trade spiritual things for physical things.  Ultimately, he argues that there will be no resolution outside of force.

Thornton also discusses the downfall of the democratic city-states of Ancient Greece, who, because of the “destructive pursuit of short term self-interest,” were unable to unify against a common threat.  Thornton argues that for a democracy to survive it must maintain civic virtue – character that is worthy of freedom.

The topic of appeasement draws some disturbing parallels between Chamberlain and Hitler and many of our modern politicians.  Pacifism and internationalism weren’t just popular movements in the 1930s and 1940s.  Remember, internationalism is defined as the idea that it is possible to create harmony of interest and solve all problems through diplomacy.   Sound familiar?

Watch the full episode here:

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While facing a probable political tsunami in the U.S. House of Representatives and a possible tidal wave in the U.S. Senate, Democrat incumbents in both houses of Congress find themselves hampered by their own voting records.

Democrat incumbents are unwilling to boast about their accomplishments to voters who are angry with the hodgepodge Obamacare, runaway government spending, deceptive tax proposals, unemployment hovering around ten percent, record home foreclosures, and a socialist agenda that shocks even big government European nations.

So what’s a liberal-left candidate to do since bashing George W. Bush doesn’t appear to bear fruit anymore? Denigrate and defame their Republican opponents with tired old cliches and images of Swastikas, German soldiers and goose-stepping jackboots, that’s what they do. It’s almost expected that Democrats will invoke the tired old — and grossly fraudulent — image of “Nazi = conservative Republican.”

So imagine the surprise when a liberal Democrat running for reelection in North Carolina uses a photo of World War II German soldiers in a campaign advertisement designed to highlight his support for members of the American military.

fix combat –

State Rep. Tim Spear (D-2nd Dist., North Carolina) is probably fuming with his campaign team for promoting his support for military service members using an image of World War II German soldiers.

The superimposed photo caption reads, “In combat, you always want another soldier covering your back.”

On the reverse side, the flier boasts that Spear supports measures aimed at assisting service men and women such as providing extended unemployment benefits for severely disabled veterans. It’s no surprise that once this campaign flier was released a firestorm of activity ensued.

In a statement issued by The Democratic Party of North Carolina, MSHC Partners, the firm allegedly responsible for the ad, said it took full responsibility for the mistake.

“We apologize to the brave men and women who nobly serve our country,” the statement said. “We would never mean to disrespect their service. This mistake was completely unintentional.”

Really? The stock image is found here and states “Re-enactors dressed as German soldiers advance towards the enemy. Taken at the War and Peace show 08.”

It’s hard to imagine that Spear and his campaign handlers didn’t request that all campaign material had to receive their approval. It’s hard to understand why a mailer hasn’t been sent out by the Democratic Party of North Carolina apologizing to the voters and Republican challenger Steinburg.

Spear is running for re-election against Republican Bob Steinburg in the 2nd District, which includes Dare County.

Former Clinton Secretary of Transportation & Energy Federico Peña was stumping for Rep. Betsy Markey in the Denver area.  As Ms. Markey looked on, Sec. Peña told the crowd:

You know we’ve seen in this country historically, when strange things happen because people get carried away with the media, and they get carried away with myths, and they get carried away with fear.  We saw what happened to Asian Americans in this country, very very long ago with the Asian exclusion laws, and everybody thought that was the right thing to do.  And then during WWII, we put Japanese Americans in camps all over the county, thought it was the right thing to do.  Everybody got carried away with the emotion of the day. We thought they were somehow, you know, terrorists… And we see this happen in other countries, I won’t give you the history.  And that’s happening in our country today.

Upon finishing his speech with the Obama campaign Spanish catch-phrase, Sí se puede, Peña embraces Candidate Markey, who is clearly unfazed by the former Clinton cabinet member’s patently offensive historical comparison.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, there have always been tensions within our vibrant democracy from divisions along obvious fault lines:  race, religion, class, geography, national origin and even age.  But what has, from the beginning, distinguished our collective ethnic citizenry and made America wonderfully unique among the nations of the world was that, unlike virtually all of the countries from which we came, once we attained citizenship we were accepted, truly accepted, as Americans.   We have overcome many crises because, with the obvious exception of the stain of slavery, our constitutional system of division of power between the states and the federal government and the separation of federal authority among these distinct branches of government, has depended on, indeed even demanded, political compromise to advance policies with any semblance of shared goals.  But over the last two decades the notion of shared goals and the ability to fashion compromises have all but disappeared, widening the fault lines and leaving the nation polarized and government often paralyzed.

There is irony in this increased polarization given our preoccupation, sometimes to the point of absurdity, with political correctness.  Either we have become unbelievably thin-skinned as a people or our preoccupation with political correctness has led to a process of balkanization as each ethnic group sees the “national pie” as a zero sum game:  “we win, you lose.” This comes at the expense of putting America first.  The price has been high.

When our president feels that apologies are necessary to improve our relationships with long- time allies and to reset our relationships with others, including those who have, for many years, been hostile to the United States; when an American ambassador, by his mere presence, implies an American apology for the awful devastation visited upon the victims at Hiroshima, without any acknowledgement by the Japanese government, after more than 60 years, that it was an imperialist Japanese government that was responsible for bringing war to the Pacific with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, we diminish the noble cause for which over one-half million Americans gave their lives. The Japanese are certainly entitled to convene in memory of those who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is their national day of remembrance. Our presence was neither called for nor appropriate. They and we have gotten past that dark and deadly time.  We are, today close allies and trade partners.  The last war-related joint ceremony in which we participated with the Japanese was in 1945 on the deck of the US Missouri in Tokyo Bay.   We should have left it there.

Now, in place of the heroes of that and other devastating wars, and the citizenry who lived during that era and its immediate aftermath, we have a whole new generation who are not only unaware of, but eschew the concept of American exceptionalism.  This leads to our inability to consider the need for national consensus and the concomitant politicization of almost every political subject.  Instead of invoking the memories of those past heroes, and warning Americans of new threats to our very national existence, our president steadfastly clings to the absurdity of banishing from his Administration’s vocabulary the reality of the greatest danger facing us:  fanatical Islamic terrorism.

The President who, using his bully pulpit to roll back executive compensation he considered excessive, or to squeeze funds from a company like BP beyond its legal responsibility, has nothing to say privately or publicly about an Islamic organization’s plans to, of all things, build an Islamic center very close to ground zero. Demonstrating a stone-dead tone deafness to how offensive such a structure is to the innocent people and their families who lost their lives and loved ones on 9/11 and a misguided need to show the world that we are an open and tolerant society, and abandoning any semblance of common sense, New York public officials have approved this tasteless project.

Instead of reminding the American people about the sheer decency and compassion of our own country and the sacrifices we have made for the good of the world, the president seems consumed by the need to convince the world that we are a good and decent people.  If the “rest of the world” doesn’t know that by now, his apologies for saving the European continent from despotism three times in the 20^th century are totally irrelevant and an insult to the memories of those who sacrificed, and precisely the wrong message to send to today’s generation who think freedom comes without cost.

Similarly, on substantive political issues, the current Administration has virtually ignored the value — indeed the imperative — of finding commonality of purpose, which, in a democracy, requires both compromise and consensus.  The Obama Administration, has confused a large Congressional majority for a license to cram down our collective throats, legislation that a substantial majority of the people do not want . . . and, when the White House can’t get its programs passed notwithstanding their bloated majorities, they have resorted to government by fiat, causing an unprecedented loss of respect for the federal government, and forcing individual states to attempt to enact their own policies on what are assuredly national issues.  This is a prescription for serious trouble and the further fraying of the ties that bind us as a people.

Item:  Senate Majority Leader Reid recently pulled from the floor the Cap and Tax legislation regulating carbon emissions.  He knew there was neither a majority nor even a semblance of consensus, for this bill, which would likely cause a major dislocation of the American economy.  So what did the Administration do?  It used the EPA to issue a finding that carbon emissions threaten human health, and thereby arrogated to an unelected administrative agency, a huge expansion of authority without the kind of democratic consensus necessary to support such a profound change to our economy.

Item:  The president and his acolytes in Congress used deception and political bribery to pass health care legislation, which a majority of the American people opposed, and which will bring about the most profound and expensive change to the delivery of health care in America since Medicare.  Moreover this massive piece of legislation is grounded in an unprecedented expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which is now being challenged in the courts by the attorneys general of 20 states.

Item:  Notwithstanding that BP might well have deserved it, the President, without even a scintilla of legal authority, strong-armed BP to create a $20 billion escrow fund, even though existing law (wrongly) sets a much lower liability limit. There is little doubt in our minds that BP would have, more than likely, agreed to such a request or that such an escrow requirement could have sailed through Congress, but the President made a show in his oval-office speech of demanding the $20 billion escrow fund hours before the meeting with BP.  We certainly have no tears to shed for BP, but nor do we have any cheers for this oval office theater.

Item:  In the bailout of General Motors, the Administration used raw federal power to subordinate the priority rights of bondholders (those who loaned money to GM) in order to give a huge equity stake to the United Auto Workers.  “Greedy bondholders” the president called them.  What this might portend for the capital markets and the trust they have in making investments in our economy is not yet known, but it is hard to distinguish this confiscatory action from those taken by the likes of the governments of Venezuela and Argentina.  We carry no brief to bail out creditors who made loans to a failing enterprise since that was the risk they voluntarily took, but those creditors were uniformly denied their priority rights in what amounted to a total corruption of the nation’s bankruptcy laws. Perhaps many feel that the ends justified the means, but we either are, or are not, a nation of laws.

To be sure, when the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, they did, essentially, nothing to promote compromise and consensus.

It is time to consider the obvious:  democratic government is more than mere number counting.  Often, when it involves transformative policies, it requires more than a simple majority, something more akin to a national consensus is called for.  This requires honest and open debate and the practice of persuasion, not legislative bullying, trickery, deceit and backroom deals.  A president needs to be in touch with the feelings of the people if he is to govern effectively.  He needs more than intelligence, charm and a gift of gab.  He needs to be intuitive, to have a fingertip feel for the sentiments of the body politic; kind of like political Braille.

We are witnessing a usurpation of power, an unlawful exercise of power, by the executive branch, of those powers clearly delegated by the Constitution to Congress or the states.  This, over time, can become the proverbial death of a thousand cuts to the Federalism created by the founders. How different in result is this from the heavy handed actions of the thugocracies we deplore when democratic values are sliced away like salami to the point where the will of the people is reduced to irrelevance.  As the November elections approach, early indications are that the American public is in revolt (thankfully peacefully) at the excessive intrusion by government in our lives. There is a fear that a Pied Piper is leading us into financial extremis, and a general, but ever-growing concern that the current Administration is abdicating its most important job, keeping us safe so they can “reset” relations with those who wish us ill. Tyranny or authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily have to arrive by violent Soviet-style revolution  or mimic Mubarak’s Egypt, Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela.  At the end of the day, if democracy is eroded away does it matter whether we lose it through a coup or the accumulation of self inflicted wounds?

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

Today’s leaders of the Democratic Party are not at all progressive.  In fact, their ideology is regressive – a throwback to an ideology popular in the 1920s and 30s and 40s.  Their vision is that people they consider the “ignorant many” should be governed by people who see themselves as the “enlightened few.”

At the core of this socialist outlook on life is what Friedrich Hayek called “the fatal conceit.”  That’s a person assuming that, if he were given unlimited power, then everything would be perfect.  He projects that government employees would act on his behalf.   He sees government employees as a proxy for his own egotistical fantasies.

A faceless bureaucracy is too impersonal, however, for some socialists, who prefer a proxy with a face.  These people prefer to focus their aspirations on a charismatic leader, who attracts hordes of followers, all dreaming that the great leader would, in fact, impose their own will on society, if only He were in charge of everything!

Relieved of the burden of having to think for themselves, these fanatics can easily find their political passions unrestrained by reason.  This fascist mentality can produce the thuggish brutality of a Benito Mussolini regime.

Nowadays, “fascism” is just an all-purpose insult.  Few of those who call people they don’t like “fascists” know what fascism is.  Fascism is an economic system.   The name comes from an ancient Roman symbol, the “fasces,” a bundle of sticks – referring to how all sectors of society would be tied together by the government.

Back in the day, many intellectuals and other so-called progressives hailed fascism as a “third way” between communism and capitalism.  Under fascism, private property does exist, but it is concentrated into big businesses, controlled by the government.  Workers are also concentrated, into huge unions, again, controlled by the government.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

“All within the state.  Nothing outside the state.  Nothing against the state.”

–  Benito Mussolini

Young people, students, union members, environmentalists, minorities, scientists, retirees, celebrities, and so on – under fascism, each sector of society is “a stick” – bundled and tied together and controlled by the government.  And, at the head of the fascist state is the Leader, who struts as if onstage and mesmerizes crowds with speeches, lots of speeches.

Benito Mussolini is best remembered for his egotistical speechifying, but his background should be just as well known.  His father was a socialist who named him after a Mexican revolutionary icon, Benito Juarez.  His two middle names honored a pair of Italian socialists.  Mussolini rose to prominence as editor of a socialist magazine.

At the head of a black-shirted goon squad, he strutted and preened and wooed and threatened his way to power.  But, once in office, Mussolini showed little interest in the actual governance of Italy, leaving most administrative responsibilities to others.

Benito Mussolini was a very lazy guy.  He spent most of his time focused on showmanship and self-glorification.  In World War II, for example, spies in Rome told an astonishing tale, that during one major military crisis, Italy’s Leader idled away the afternoon chatting with his chauffeur.  Basically, his message to government officials was: “Call me if you need me.”

The analysis of socialism in this essay is adapted from Back to Basics for the Republican Party, cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision.  See www.grandoldpartisan.com for more information.

It seems lost on the American President that he was not elected to create or perfect a world order, but to elevate the interests of the United States. He was not selected by a world assembly but by Americans, who extracted from him a sworn oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign or domestic. That same Constitution calls the president the Chief Executive of the Untied States. Imagine if the chief executive of Wal-Mart attended an economic forum and suggested a willingness to make his company less successful in the interest of promoting the perceived success of his competitors. It is unlikely that he would remain CEO for long…

The real show, however, came as the President of America positioned himself, at least temporarily, as President of the World. What did he do from this lofty position? Well, addressing a council whose purpose it is to maintain the security of the world, in an age in which jihadi terrorists are at open war with the west, democratic uprisings are being crushed, a resurgent Russia intimidates and openly invades its neighbors, North Korea threatens nuclear war, and Iran kills Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and threatens the extermination of Israel, Mr. Obama chose to launch an attack on — the existence of nuclear weapons. In short, the would-be king of all he surveys backed a resolution to end all actual security in the world.

Utopian dreams rarely have any connection to reality. The socialist ideal of transferring power and wealth from the few to the many is proven a delusion once one realizes that the method socialists use to accomplish this goal is powerful government, thus making the true reality of socialism the transfer of power and wealth from the few to the far fewer. It is the same with this pre-adolescent belief that a world without nuclear weapons would be a better or more peaceful one. In actuality, nuclear weapons have maintained the closest thing the world has ever known to global peace for over sixty years.

Imagine this world without nuclear weapons for a moment. The atomic bomb made it’s debut on the world stage in 1945. Had it not appeared, or even been delayed by one year, there would have been, according to the best estimates, 500,000 to a million more American dead in World War Two. Since large numbers rarely have meaning, the context to understand that number is that it is more than double, maybe quadruple the actual number of casualties America suffered. Similarly, there would have been perhaps as many as six-million Japanese deaths and the entire nation would have been obliterated by sky-darkening waves of B-29 attacks that incinerated every city on the islands.

Of course, that’s just Japan. With over twenty-million dead, a number that is genuinely uncomprehendible to the American mind since we have never lost more than two percent of that number of men in any war (perhaps a half again that if you count both sides of the civil war), the Soviet Union had a blood lust that was not easily satiated. To ensure they were never subjected to such destruction again, and to grow their brand of satellite socialism, they would likely have devoured all of Western Europe by the end of the 1940s. Despite what we might like to believe, it is unlikely that any force on Earth could have stopped them. Untold millions would have perished as the USSR marched west, and far more would have died in the purges and gulags and re-education camps that followed.

From there, the shape of the remainder of the history of the twentieth century bends beyond recognition. If the People’s Republic of China ever actually existed, you can be sure Taiwan would have been destroyed. It is unlikely an Israel would have ever come into being since the whole world would have been locked in an unwinnable war with the Soviets during that time, and the middle east would have become the scene of open confrontation between the two super powers for resources. Suffice to say that the relative peace and advancement of western society President Obama grew up in would simply not exist.

Does any of this mean that nuclear weapons are good? Of course not. Nuclear weapons are neither good or bad. They are simply things. Tools. They have no intrinsic moral quality, any more than the sword or the plowshare, both of which can be wielded to kill a man. Much of the reason we assume that there is something inherently evil about nuclear weapons is because the average American has no idea what they actually are, apart from what we have learned from Hollywood. Of course, in Hollywood, spaceships moving through a vacuum make loud noises, like passing airplanes… They aren’t known for their science. Hollywood has advanced so many untrue myths about nuclear weapons that we have come to look upon them as almost living things, bent on our destruction. That is simply not the case.

First, we have been told that nuclear war was the actual goal of the two super powers during the cold war. Of course, this is untrue. The one man in all of history that we know was willing to use the bomb in war, the only man who actually did, was Harry Truman. This same man rejected a war plan proposed by his leading general to use atomic weapons against our enemies in the Korean War only five years later. Nuclear weapons may have their place, but they are not to be used wantonly.

The second lie is that nuclear weapons release giant sums of radioactive fallout. To use even one of them would destroy the environment and give millions of people cancer. This is complete folly. For proof, one need only look to actual history. The most nuked spot on earth is, far and away, the desert of Nevada. The United States detonated over 1,021 individual nuclear devices in the Silver State in the second half of the twentieth century. Over a thousand. Sixty-five short miles away lives American’s playground city of Las Vegas. There are no three-eyed fish or giant city-eating lizards there, unless you’re into that sort of thing, in which case talk to the floor manager at Caesars… While it is true that nuclear weapons produce radioactive waste, it is only when they are detonated at ground level or below that those particles bind with the surrounding matter and create the kind of fallout we have all been raised to fear. In other words, deadly fallout is not a by-product of nuclear weapons themselves, but of certain uses of nuclear weapons (or certain types that are certainly not indicative of the whole). Nuclear weapons can be used just as surely without creating that sort of fallout, as was the case in Japan.

The third lie is that nuclear weapons are city killers. While it is true that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely destroyed, they were not really cities by our common definitions. Japan basically went from the feudal age, to the industrial revolution, to World War Two in the blink of an eye. These cities were constructed of wood that resembled paper. While nuclear weapons are indeed devastating, the average bomb in the US arsenal would only actually destroy a few square miles in a modern city. More, since the fifties, when so-called super-bombs were tested in the South Pacific, nuclear weapons have actually been getting smaller in physical size and in yield. They are getting weaker, not stronger. The reason is so that we won’t destroy cities. Modern nuclear weapons were actually designed to do the largest amount of damage to the smallest space possible, and our delivery systems have gotten so advanced that they can place these weapons within a few meters of the desired target. The point of the current crop of nuclear weapons is not to kill cities, but to kill hardened military targets in instantaneous strikes. Are they still horrifyingly powerful? Certainly, but their use would not look like a Terminator movie.

The last lie is that the bombs can somehow destroy all life on earth. At the peak, there were perhaps sixty-thousand nuclear weapons in existence. Now there are likely less than half of that number. America alone tested over a thousand of them on our own soil, sixty-five miles from one of our own cities. Sixty-thousand weapons could have done unthinkable damage to the cities of the world if so aimed, but it is inconceivable that they might have killed even a tenth of the world’s population. Again, horrifying in its own right, but hardly what people perceive.

With all of that said, a single nuclear weapon, or a series of them, used on hardened targets, or on the caves over Afghanistan, far from urban populations would be no more evil than the use of any other weapon. Still, we don’t use them for those purposes, even though it would likely save the lives of our soldiers, to avoid even the accusation of seeking to use them to dominate the world. What we do use them for is to prevent giant, industrialized, advanced societies from attacking one another and starting actual world wars. Throughout all of human history, excluding the sixty years since the nuclear bomb was created, the dominate powers of the world have always waged war on one another at the cost of countless lives and treasure. The two great wars of the twentieth century taught us that, because of advances in technology, those wars now had the power to destroy lives in the tens and possibly hundreds of millions, but that knowledge alone did nothing to alter the fundamentals of human nature, economies, tyrannies, or politics that caused wars. War is no longer sustainable, but it never-the-less still exists. The reason they are not fought between the large powers, the reason they cannot be, is that the nuclear weapon makes them unwinnable. For that reason, the major powers, America, Britain, France, Russia, and China do well to maintain their weapons. They do no harm, and yet they do great, great good. They have already saved perhaps hundreds of millions of lives, and even if one is one day used surreptitiously by a terrorist organization to kill tens of thousands of people, they still will have been a net gain to society of a thousand times that number of lives saved. Why then would the President of the United States, the country that has, armed with these devices, kept so great a peace for so long, seek to eliminate them? Does he believe the lie that disarmament of the great powers, who cannot afford to use the weapons because their own advanced societies could not withstand their use, would quail the ambitions of rouge states with nothing to lose? Or is it simply that his personal utopian dreams and astounding ego need the satisfaction of either uniting this world in his own skewed image, or destroying it because it is not worthy of his beautiful leadership? Either way, this CEO is destroying his company’s success, and the very real possibility exists that people are going to die trying to validate his false notions or faulty ego. Nothing less than the peace of the world is at stake.