While I’m enjoying my Christmas books, it can be a little depressing when you realize that in our arrogant ignorance, America is simply repeating a number of well-known errors of the past. In the very first chapter of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I noticed the following gems:
“The Emperor, greatly moved by the signs of the displeasure of Heaven, issued an edict asking his ministers for an explanation of the calamaties and marvels. A certain Ts’ai Yung replied bluntly that showers of insects and changes of fowls’ sexes were brought about by feminine interference in State affairs.”
I think I’d prefer showers of insects to a growing Nanny state, declining real per capita income and eight hundred thousand children sacrificed annually to the sacred cause of women receiving pieces of paper declaring their competence in Political Geography, Sociology and/or Vagina Gazing. And better to learn that the chickens are changing sexes instead of those sad psychological wrecks who think to find happiness in the surgical denial of their chromosomal inheritance.
“Tho’ fierce as tigers soldiers be,
Battles are won by strategy.”
The Eastern sages have known for centuries a basic truth that continues to escape the war cheerleaders in the commentariat. America’s soldiers can win every single clash of arms and America not only can, but almost certainly will, lose this war because its martial strategy, to the extent that it even exists, is entirely incoherent.