Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) was called a “father figure” by a sympathetic and friendly Liberty University vice president at the end of Sanders’s talk to a full and apparently appreciative audience at Liberty University, a Christian university in Virginia established in direct political and cultural opposition to the rise of the Sixties and political radicals like Sanders. It showed style and courage on Sanders’s part to make passage and indeed, on the part of Liberty University in having him speak there.
{mosads}Sanders and Liberty both understand that we still today live in a North/South historic paradigm. East/West may be rising ahead and a more uniform American globalist post-World War II hegemony may be fading, but beneath it all, we are still where we were 150 years ago in the post-Civil War period. Or perhaps we have returned to it. Indications are that we have, as America divides today in red and blue, and that for America the forging issues and forces ahead in this century will be internal rather than external. It would be nice to see former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (D), who, like Sanders, is running for president, speak at Liberty to contrast his Southern vision with their own. And of course, Donald Trump.
As that is where our century begins today, with Sanders and Trump. We see exactly the same thing in Europe with the return of the Labour Party to an older-line leftist somewhat like Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, who refuses to sing “God Save the Queen.” And in the rise of the hard right in France with Marine Le Pen and the National Front. It suggests the Shiva dance of “creation and destruction” has arrived: The dance in which the world rises again in new birth to follow in full blossom; new to the right and new to the left, an awakening that will be leaving all others behind and will be with us for a very long time.
And it is a very bad day for the old “restorationist” families who want to restore time past, as they are from another century, another millennium. Suddenly that which was as comfortable as an old couch seems somehow alien and ghostly, and the old families, Clinton and Bush in particular, seem like newly coined wax figures in Madame Tussauds down on the boardwalk.
In 2015, it is high time that the century has finally gotten under way. Everything will change now. I wrote earlier that Europe should get out of NATO and pay for their own defense — a perspective, shared by the way, by Trump — and that America should intentionally let go of Europe, citing Dwight Eisenhower, first commander of NATO, who said in 1951 that “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”
An apparently knowledgeable reader commented that we would never get rid of NATO: It is how we control Europe. Yes, with barely concealed subtity and soaring platitudes about “the West.” All along, the Europeans have quite liked it as they were free to flourish economically so long as America paid the bills for defense. And anyway, that was the price of conquest in the most terrible century of conflict the world has ever known — the very end of civilization, one commentator calls it. The EU would be the price they would pay, and it is a price they are paying today. Here in the year of the blood moons, I would predict the end of the EU and the rise again of Europe; Europe as it once was, a loose and motley collection of cultures in autonomous nation states, together; a place in nature; even at one time, a wise and holy place.
And Germany will lead as destiny brings it to leadership in the quiet path since Yalta. But that leader will not be the graceful and accommodating Chancellor Angela Merkel. She is a leader for times rapidly passing, as is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as is French President François Hollande. All of whom will find their place very soon now in Madame Tussauds palace of remembrances past, with Bill, Hillary, Jeb and George W.
In Israel, the new generation has already arrived, and the rising leaders’ names, like Ayelet Shaked, Naftali Bennett and Yehuda Glick, the American-born rabbi gunned down by an assassin for advocating the right for Jews (and everyone) to pray on Temple Mount, are mentioned here only with tremors, in fear and loathing. Because the mainstream American establishment, and to some good degree Israeli establishment consensus, is afraid to let go of the idea of American dominance. But it is now becoming a shadow; a hindrance to indigenous development and awakening.
America will not let go. Power never does, and those who seek state autonomy who have been under our wing via conquest or wish (and not a wish for Jefferson and Madison perhaps; not a wish for liberation — a wish instead as former Gov. Mike Huckabee suggests [R-Ark.], for cable TV) will have to take it. ‘Twas ever thus.
Crisis is the mother of the necessity of new awakenings and this crisis of refugees will do two things to Europe: reveal the tragic falsehood of Old Europe pretending to be like New America by adopting the EU, and force them now to abandon, lest they be destroyed.
A new leader will rise to that. Very probably in Germany.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.