By Wayne Allensworth
Judging by some of the rants I’ve seen on social media condemning arguments against further American involvement in the Middle East quagmire, one would have thought that the United States was an Axis power in WWII and can never atone for what happened to Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazis. So, off to war we must go, this time against Iran, perhaps.
For the record, America was an Allied power who sent her sons to fight the Germans. I lost my uncle in that war. Another was maimed, and a third was one of the American GIs who liberated surviving prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. I have my grandmother’s lapel button that reads “To Hell with Hitler!” Since the founding of the modern state of Israel, the United States has been more than merely a supportive friend. Washington has sent billions to Israel over the years, and on and on. Apart from diplomatic efforts to stop the killing, America should sit this one out. The Israelis can take care of themselves, and hopefully will not yield to the temptation to fight a ground campaign in Gaza that could lead to a wider war.
While I’m at it, it’s strange that we never hear rants from say, Americans of Central European descent, about the need for America to atone for making a deal with the mass murderer Stalin that turned over half of Europe to Communism. I’ll let historians sort out what happened, and how much influence Stalin’s agents had on the Roosevelt administration. I lament what happened but feel no special need in 2023 to fight Poland’s historic Russian enemy in Ukraine as an act of contrition. But Polish Americans do not have the levers of influence available to the pro-Israel lobbies here and are not seen as a victim group. Not even the burst of misplaced passion over the Russia-Ukraine war came close to the manic outburst over the current wave of violence in the Middle East.
I’m wondering when ordinary, unhyphenated, Americans who have no passionate foreign attachments will get a lobby of our own—it’s certainly not in the Congress in Washington. Or when the Israelis will come clean about what happened with the U.S.S. Liberty or their spying on the United States.
The feverish rage unleashed by the Hamas attack on Israel is something to behold. No, I’m not talking about the rage in Israel, which is readily understandable, or the explicable impotent rage of the Palestinians. I’m talking about something approaching mass hysteria here in the United States, and especially among Middle Americans, some of whom don’t even belong to Christian groups that treat Israel as a sacred cause. I’ve thought of the bellicose caterwauling as a sign of misplaced telescopic patriotism, the kind of passionate outburst Middle Americans aren’t allowed to express as they watch the ongoing degradation of their own country.
The Blob’s mass media machine is quite effective not only in hammering us about what we are supposed to think, but about what we are supposed to think about. And we are not supposed to think about things like the fact that life expectancy in the great global superpower has been dropping since the mid-2010s. A large part of that decline is attributable to “deaths of despair” among working class Americans, who have lost any chance to live what used to be called “the American dream.” Yet we are not encouraged to shed any tears for them. And when teen suicide is a problem, something has gone terribly wrong. Then there is the rather obvious hate campaign directed at white Americans, especially the dreaded “toxic masculinity” of white males. Marriage and children are not attractive options for people who don’t have a future, and marriage has collapsed.
I’ve already written about the celebration of sexual perversity, and the bizarre obsessions of the LGBTQ “community” and its backers, the denigration of our history, the destruction of our monuments, the deliberate demoralization of our people. Then there is the practical dissolution of our southern border, as waves of “migrants” come to displace us. We are not only not even trying to assimilate foreigners, but instead have fallen into a pit of reverse assimilation, celebrating foreign cultures while forgetting our own. We’ve experienced a spike in crime, and even tolerate it, which is not surprising. Revolutionaries have long cast criminals as victims of oppressive societies.
In this twisted Bedlam that we live in, it apparently needs to be explained that our present level of “diversity” is an invitation to further chaos and the end of any workable civic culture, something I’ve called “the end of politics.” The only real beneficiaries are the smug pod people who man the institutions of the Blob’s managerial regime, which can further expand its power over us to “solve” problems it has created.
Washington’s endless foreign adventuring benefits the Deep State so many Middle Americans deplore. It distracts us from the only war that really matters — the one being waged against us. Telescopic patriotism gives our people a great cause they can waste their energy on, energy they need to fight for the one cause no one else will take up: our own.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
